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Secondary literature 2018

Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings: The Emotional Costs of Everyday Life

Mari Ruti

by Mari Ruti (2018)

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Synopsis

Mari Ruti's Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings: The Emotional Costs of Everyday Life (2018) argues that the "bad feelings" pervading contemporary American life—anxiety, depression, resentment, melancholia, frustration—are produced at the intersection of two distinct but interacting registers: an ontological register of lack constitutive of human subjectivity (following Lacan), and a socio-ideological register of biopolitical conditioning and cruel optimism (following Foucault and Berlant). Ruti's central analytical move is to refuse a purely sociological account of bad feelings while also refusing a purely existentialist one: neither neoliberal ideology alone nor the unavoidable structure of desire fully explains the emotional costs of everyday life. Moving through chapters on pragmatism, intimate rationalization, gender obsession, the reinvention of heteropatriarchy through pornification and postfeminism, the specificity of desire, and the contemporary "age of anxiety," the book deploys Lacanian psychoanalytic theory as a corrective to Foucauldian social determinism, arguing that desire's irreducible singularity and the universality of castration/lack constitute both the source of suffering and a limited but genuine site of ethical self-determination and resistance to capitalist normalization. Throughout, Ruti employs an "autotheory" mode—weaving personal autobiography from a traumatic Finnish childhood through immigration and analysis into the theoretical argument—to demonstrate that the distinction between socially avoidable and existentially ineradicable bad feelings is not merely abstract but lived. The book concludes that accepting lack-in-being, rather than seeking to overcome bad feelings through the performance principle or positive thinking, is both an honest account of human experience and a counter-political stance against consumer culture's colonization of desire.

Distinctive contribution

What distinguishes this book from others in the Lacanian corpus is its explicit and sustained attempt to synthesize Lacanian ontology with affect theory and cultural criticism at the level of the everyday, accessible to non-specialist readers. Where most Lacanian cultural theory (Žižek, McGowan, Zupančič) operates at a high level of abstraction or through sustained close readings of films and philosophical texts, Ruti anchors her theoretical claims in the granular texture of quotidian American life—gender stereotyping, marriage, pornography, street harassment, immigration bureaucracy, online dating, overeating—thereby demonstrating the practical stakes of the distinction between ontological lack and socially produced suffering. The book's methodological distinctiveness lies in its deployment of autotheory not as mere confession but as a structural argument: Ruti's own intergenerational trauma, her experience of Finnish poverty, American immigration, and psychoanalysis, function as case studies that ground claims about the difference between existential lack (unavoidable) and ideologically generated suffering (potentially resistible).

A second distinctive contribution is the book's triangulation of Foucault, Berlant, and Lacan to produce a theory of bad feelings that neither collapses into social constructionism nor retreats into apolitical existentialism. Ruti explicitly argues (Chapter 5) that Foucauldian social determinism—however powerful for diagnosing biopolitical conditioning—cannot account for the singularity of desire, its irrational fixations, and its ethical potential as a site of resistance to capitalist consumerism. Lacan's theory of the subject's constitutive lack-in-being, she contends, provides the conceptual resource missing from Foucault: a theory of interiority that is social in origin but irreducible to social management. This triangulation, combined with a substantive feminist critique of heteropatriarchy (chapters 3–4), makes the book unusual in the corpus as an attempt to render Lacanian theory politically serviceable for feminist and queer critique without reducing it to a mere instrument of social theory.

Main themes

  • Biopolitical conditioning and the pathologization of bad feelings under neoliberalism
  • Cruel optimism and the fantasy of the good life
  • Ontological lack-in-being versus socially produced suffering: a dual-register account
  • Heteropatriarchy as collective fantasy of phallic wholeness
  • The specificity of desire as ethical resistance to consumer capitalism
  • Postfeminist eroticization of subordination and pornification as ideological reinvention of heteropatriarchy
  • Anxiety as both existential given and surplus product of contemporary achievement culture
  • Autotheory and intergenerational trauma: the personal as theoretical
  • The limits of Foucauldian determinism and the case for Lacanian singularity
  • Performance principle, productivity culture, and writing as coping mechanism

Chapter outline

  • Introduction — p.ix-xlvii
  • 1: The Creed of Pragmatism — p.1-32
  • 2: The Rationalization of Intimacy — p.33-66
  • 3: The Obsessions of Gender — p.67-100
  • 4: The Reinvention of Heteropatriarchy — p.101-132
  • 5: The Specificity of Desire — p.133-166
  • 6: The Age of Anxiety — p.167-200
  • Conclusion — p.201-228

Chapter summaries

Introduction (p.ix-xlvii)

The Introduction establishes the book's central problematic through a series of rhetorical and autobiographical moves. Ruti opens with the cultural fetishization of the penis and Freud's concept of penis envy, rapidly translating both into Lacanian terms: the penis/phallus distinction, phallocentrism as a symptom of heteropatriarchy's flight from universal lack-in-being, and 'penis envy' as a logical response to a symbolic order that assigns wholeness to one sex. Ruti argues that heteropatriarchy is an elaborate collective fantasy that allows (some) men to disavow their constitutive vulnerability, while denying women the same defensive fiction—hence their greater susceptibility to 'bad feelings' such as depression and anxiety.

The Introduction also performs a methodological self-positioning. Ruti describes her 'crossover' style between academic and general audiences, her field (posthumanist theory as interdisciplinary blend of continental philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, cultural studies, affect theory, and feminist/queer theory), and her relationship of complicity with neoliberalism, which she distinguishes from her lack of complicity with heteropatriarchy. This ethical self-awareness is presented not as weakness but as intellectual honesty—a refusal to produce wholesale denunciation from a position of comfort. The Introduction also announces the book's key theoretical architecture: Lauren Berlant's concept of cruel optimism as the motor of bad feelings socially generated, and Lacan's ontological lack as the ground of bad feelings that are ineradicable, with the twin argument that Foucault and Lacan, contra common wisdom, are not identical thinkers but complementary ones whose differences illuminate each other.

Key concepts: Lack-in-being, Phallus, Castration, Cruel Optimism, Heteropatriarchy, Ideology Notable examples: Gender-disparaging slang ('Don't be a pussy', 'You throw like a girl'); Trump and fantasies of phallic omnipotence; Ruti's immigration from Finland to the United States

1: The Creed of Pragmatism (p.1-32)

Chapter 1 develops a Foucauldian-Berlantian diagnosis of contemporary neoliberal culture as a biopolitical apparatus that produces both the demand for good performance, high productivity, and relentless cheerfulness, and the 'bad feelings' that result from subjects' inevitable failure to meet these demands. Ruti deploys Foucault's concept of biopolitics to argue that neoliberal society constructs the individual as a homo economicus—a miniature economic enterprise—and organizes life (career goals, relational goals, even grief) around efficiency and productivity. Dominant 'happiness scripts' (drawn from Sara Ahmed) close off alternatives and cause subjects to pursue forms of life more or less automatically, even when those forms cause suffering.

A crucial move of the chapter is to connect this Foucauldian analysis to Berlant's cruel optimism: bad feelings are not merely the side effects of ideology but are actively produced by the gap between the promises of happiness scripts and the reality of lives that those scripts make structurally unrealizable. The pathologization of depression, prolonged grief, or any affect that impairs productivity is shown to be an ideological mechanism: from the viewpoint of the performance principle, the problem with depression is that it interrupts economic functionality. Ruti also introduces here—through personal narrative about growing up in wartime Finland and entering psychoanalysis—the distinction between existential/ontological bad feelings (rooted in Lacanian lack, unavoidable) and socially generated bad feelings (rooted in ideology and potentially resistible), a distinction that will structure the entire book. The chapter concludes that many coping mechanisms popularly pathologized as weaknesses (overeating, addiction, 'slow death' in Berlant's terms) are in fact micro-resistances to unbearable conditions.

Key concepts: Ideology, Cruel Optimism, Surplus Repression, Anxiety, Lack, Fantasy Notable examples: Berlant's 'slow death' and overeating; Nietzsche's amor fati; Ruti's psychoanalysis in Boston

2: The Rationalization of Intimacy (p.33-66)

Chapter 2 extends the biopolitical analysis into the intimate sphere, arguing that marriage functions as a node of ideological conditioning within consumer capitalism: it rationalizes intimacy by channeling it into pathways that are economically and politically productive. Drawing on Foucault's analysis of marriage as economic rationalization, Ruti argues that married people are presumed more productive workers (at least in the case of men), that children nurtured within marriage are trained in the performance principle, and that the conservative ideal of marital stability serves as the ideological foundation for a broader social order. The ideal of being a 'good mother' is identified as a major biopolitical instrument.

The chapter also demonstrates how ideology materializes in objects and practices—professional clothing, makeup, sartorial performance of femininity—showing how the body itself becomes a site of ideological inscription, not merely a passive surface on which norms are written but an active vehicle through which subjects are unable to perform otherwise. The discussion of the author's own failed attempt to 'walk like a man' in a graduate seminar vividly illustrates how thoroughly normative femininity is somatically encoded.

Crucially, the chapter reads marriage as a paradigm case of cruel optimism: subjects stay invested in forms of intimate life that cause suffering because the form (the ideal of marriage) promises future fulfillment even as the content repeatedly disappoints. The chapter also addresses gay marriage, arguing that it risks reinforcing rather than subverting the biopolitical logic of marriage by privileging those who conform to dominant happiness scripts while further marginalizing queer alternatives.

Key concepts: Cruel Optimism, Ideology, Interpellation, Fantasy, Jouissance, Surplus Repression Notable examples: Foucault on marriage as economic rationalization; Sidesaddle and restrictive clothing as ideological objects; Gay marriage debate and queer kinship alternatives

3: The Obsessions of Gender (p.67-100)

Chapter 3 makes the case that gender stereotyping is not natural description but social ideology—specifically, an ideology that naturalizes the denigration of women by building a cultural edifice around phallocentrism. Ruti identifies three factions in American gender discourse (scientific-evolutionary, biblical, and critical/progressive) and aligns herself explicitly with the last. She argues that while racism is no longer officially condoned by American public institutions, sexism is—a distinction that reveals how thoroughly the naturalization of gender difference has been normalized. Comparing the treatment of black men and women by police and in the prison system with the casual acceptance of street harassment of women, the chapter maps the uneven and intersecting operations of racism and sexism.

The chapter then focuses on gender stereotyping as a form of what Ruti calls 'gender obsession disorder'—an excessive, culturally pathological insistence on maintaining legible sexual difference. Evolutionary psychology is subjected to sustained critique: its reductive biologism fails to account for the social determinants of gendered behavior (e.g., different styles of throwing a ball attributable to different sports practices, not physiology). More insidiously, the chapter argues that the ideology of masculine emotional incompetence—the 'boys will be boys' script—systematically shifts the emotional labor of relationships onto women, trapping straight women in cycles of exhausting relational labor.

The chapter ends by connecting gender stereotyping to cruel optimism: women who internalize normative femininity are sold a fantasy of romantic fulfillment through submission to gender codes, a fantasy that is structurally unlikely to deliver. Gender stereotyping functions not just as an epistemological error but as a material mechanism of heteropatriarchal reproduction.

Key concepts: Ideology, Phallus, Castration, Cruel Optimism, Interpellation, Subjectivity Notable examples: Transgender bathroom controversy of 2016; Pulse club massacre; Street harassment and the command to smile; Evolutionary psychology on promiscuity

4: The Reinvention of Heteropatriarchy (p.101-132)

Chapter 4 argues that contemporary postfeminist culture has mutated heteropatriarchy into a more insidious form by transforming female self-objectification into an ideology of empowerment. The chapter opens with a detailed analysis of the male gaze (drawing on Laura Mulvey) and the compulsive self-monitoring it produces in contemporary female subjectivity—a masochistic self-surveillance that erodes confidence at the very historical moment when women are told they have never been so free. Joan Riviere's concept of the 'masquerade of femininity' is deployed to argue that hyperbolic femininity functions as a collective apology for feminist gains, a strategic over-performance that neutralizes the perceived threat of female power.

The chapter then turns to the 'eroticization of objectification' in postfeminist culture, arguing that the conversion of female self-objectification into a signifier of empowerment represents an ideological co-optation of feminist vocabulary rather than a genuine expansion of female agency. The self-help and pop-feminist framing of 'sexy' as power forecloses structural critique and reproduces the virgin/whore split at a subtler level.

The most extended analysis in the chapter concerns online pornography as a biopolitical technology. Ruti argues that mainstream heteroporn has co-opted the language of sexual liberation to reinforce heteropatriarchal ideology, producing a consumer-capitalist mentality of sexual entitlement while systematically erasing women's subjectivity and desire. The specific predicament she identifies—straight women now 'competing' with pornographic images for their partners' attention, finding themselves 'pornified yet deprived of sex'—is presented as a new and undertheorized form of ideologically produced bad feeling. The chapter concludes that 'unqualified sex-positivity,' inherited from the feminist sex wars, has foreclosed critique of misogynistic heteroporn by labeling any objection anti-sex.

Key concepts: Ideology, Jouissance, Phallus, Fetishistic Disavowal, Surplus Repression, Feminine Sexuality Notable examples: Laura Mulvey, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'; Joan Riviere's masquerade of femininity; Mainstream heteroporn as biopolitical technology; Paul Preciado, Testo Junkie

5: The Specificity of Desire (p.133-166)

Chapter 5 is the theoretical pivot of the book. Having established Foucault as the dominant framework for analyzing socially produced bad feelings, Ruti here explicitly turns to Lacan to supply what she finds missing in Foucault: a theory of desire's singularity that can account for both the suffering and the ethical potential of intimate life without reducing the subject to a mere effect of social conditioning. She distinguishes Lacan's concept of the desiring subject from Foucault's biopolitically constituted subject, arguing that Lacanian desire—arising from constitutive lack-in-being and structurally oriented toward an impossible self-completion—partially eludes symbolic management.

The chapter traces the phenomenology of desire's specificity: its irrational fixation on particular objects, its structural orientation toward loss and repetition, its capacity for melancholia when objects are irreplaceable. Freud's repetition compulsion and theory of melancholia are deployed to explain how desire becomes 'paralyzed' around lost objects, while Lacan's theory of ontological lack-in-being explains why certain people function as objet petit a—as fantasmatic placeholders for the lost object of primordial wholeness. Falling in love, on this account, is the (mis)recognition that a particular other holds the power to heal one's constitutive alienation—which is why it is simultaneously intoxicating and catastrophically vulnerable to loss.

The chapter's decisive political move comes in its final pages: desire's specificity—its irreducibility to generic biopolitical conditioning—gives it an ethical dimension. When we insist on the singularity of what we desire, we resist consumer capitalism's logic of disposability and the constant upgrading of objects. Ruti argues that this constitutes one of the few available sites of self-determination that escapes both biological determinism and Foucauldian social determinism, making psychoanalytic self-reflexivity a limited but genuine opening for agency.

Key concepts: Desire, Lack, Lost Object, Objet petit a, Repetition, Singularity Notable examples: Freud, 'Mourning and Melancholia'; Lacan on the objet petit a (Seminar XI); Roland Barthes on the captivating detail of the beloved; Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire

6: The Age of Anxiety (p.167-200)

Chapter 6 distinguishes two structurally different levels of anxiety—existential/foundational anxiety (linked to Lacanian lack, castration, and the constitutive condition of subjectivity) and circumstantial/surplus anxiety (produced by social conditions such as overwork, poverty, illness surveillance, sexism, and racism). The first level is aligned with the Western philosophical tradition of Heidegger, Sartre, and Kierkegaard, who connected anxiety to mortality, freedom, and self-reflexivity; Ruti argues this form of anxiety is not only unavoidable but potentially productive, being linked to creativity, self-determination, and singularity. The second level, produced by neoliberal culture's paradox of simultaneously generating and attempting to eliminate anxiety, is where the bulk of contemporary suffering is located.

The chapter then develops a sustained reading of Lacan's three anxiety-inducing faces of the other, drawn primarily from Seminar X: the other as castrator (who threatens to deepen one's lack), the other as praying mantis (who threatens to suffocate one by eliminating all lack through overproximity), and the other as enigmatic signifier (whose desires remain maddeningly unreadable). Ruti reads these three scenarios with characteristic wit—the vagina dentata fantasy, phallic detumescence as literal enactment of castration anxiety, potty training as the praying mantis in miniature—making Lacanian clinical concepts vivid through everyday examples.

The chapter also examines how interpersonal opacity—the opacity of the other's desire—is an existential given that can be weaponized by power asymmetries. Straight women, trained to decipher men's enigmatic signals and told by self-help culture that ambivalence can be overcome through sufficient effort, are identified as a structural example of how existential opacity becomes socially distributed suffering. The chapter argues against the postwar ethics of ambiguity (Adorno, Levinas, Derrida, Butler) that valorizes endless tolerance of the other's unreadability, suggesting that the demand for interpersonal clarity can be a distinctly Lacanian ethical act.

Key concepts: Anxiety, Castration, Jouissance, Objet petit a, Lack, Signifier Notable examples: Lacan on phallic detumescence (Seminar X); Vagina dentata trope; Potty training as praying mantis scenario; False positives on mammograms as anxiety technology

Conclusion (p.201-228)

The Conclusion synthesizes the book's two registers of bad feelings and resists the temptation to resolve their tension. Ruti argues that while social critics are right to condemn biopolitically produced suffering, the discourse of critical theory risks converging with the very pragmatism it critiques when it implies that bad feelings are entirely a consequence of social manipulation—and therefore entirely eliminable in a better society. A Lacanian acceptance of constitutive lack-in-being is presented not as quietism but as an honest account of human existence that refuses both the neoliberal happiness script and the critical-theoretical fantasy of a fully emancipated future.

The chapter turns to a sustained reading of Nietzsche's concept of forgetting—from 'On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life'—as a rival model to Freudian working-through for managing traumatic memory. Drawing on Alenka Zupančič, Ruti argues that Nietzsche's valorization of forgetting is not a denial of suffering but a refusal to let suffering constitute one's identity—a position she finds unexpectedly compatible with the aim of psychoanalytic 'talking cure,' both of which seek to externalize rather than eliminate trauma. The Conclusion also addresses melancholia: whether it is politically poignant faithfulness to what has been lost, a breeding ground for passivity, or a foundation of creativity—and reflects autobiographically on writing as a coping mechanism that enacts the logic of Nietzschean forgetting while remaining a form of the performance principle.

The final pages acknowledge the tension between ideological critique and personal complicity, between the Lacanian acceptance of lack and the persistence of fantasies of an unlived life. Ruti frames these unresolved tensions not as failures of argument but as honest acknowledgments of the difficulty of living in a way that is simultaneously critically aware and genuinely livable.

Key concepts: Lack, Sublimation, Trauma, Melancholia, Surplus Repression, Ideology Notable examples: Nietzsche, 'On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life'; Alenka Zupančič on Nietzsche's forgetting; Marcuse on creative labor and the performance principle; Kristeva on melancholia and creativity

Main interlocutors

  • Laurent Berlant, Cruel Optimism
  • Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
  • Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics
  • Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
  • Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
  • Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia
  • Jacques Lacan, Seminar X
  • Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI
  • Jacques Lacan, Écrits
  • Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life
  • Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization
  • Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
  • Paul Preciado, Testo Junkie
  • Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness
  • Eve Sedgwick
  • Alenka Zupančič
  • Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology
  • Julia Kristeva
  • Jean-Paul Sartre
  • Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment

Position in the corpus

Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings occupies an unusual position in the Lacanian secondary corpus: it is one of the few works that deploys Lacanian concepts (lack-in-being, castration, objet petit a, the three faces of the other from Seminar X) in a sustained, accessible, and explicitly feminist register while simultaneously engaging affect theory (Berlant, Ahmed) and Foucauldian biopolitics. It shares significant ground with Todd McGowan's Capitalism and Desire (frequently cited here) in arguing that Lacanian desire provides resources for critiquing capitalist consumerism that Foucauldian analysis cannot supply; and with Ruti's own earlier and more academic work (Reinventing the Soul, The Ethics of Opting Out) that has long sought to synthesize psychoanalytic and posthumanist theory. However, its crossover register, autotheoretical method, and topical focus on everyday feminist concerns—marriage, pornography, gender stereotyping, street harassment—distinguish it from the more philosophically abstract Lacanian cultural criticism typical of the Žižek-McGowan-Zupančič cluster. Readers approaching from cultural studies or feminist theory who find the primary Lacanian texts forbidding will find this an unusually accessible bridge text.\n\nReaders would profit from reading Berlant's Cruel Optimism and Foucault's Birth of Biopolitics as prerequisites for the cultural-critical chapters, and McGowan's Capitalism and Desire or Žižek's The Sublime Object of Ideology as companions for the Lacanian theoretical chapters. For those interested in pursuing the clinical dimension of anxiety and desire that Ruti treats diagnostically, Lacan's Seminar X (Anxiety) is the primary text to follow up with. The book is best approached after Ruti's more academic The Ethics of Opting Out (2017) and A World of Fragile Things (2010) if full theoretical grounding is desired, but it also stands effectively alone as an entry point.

Canonical concepts deployed