Secondary literature 2016

Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (alt. ed.)

Todd McGowan

by Todd McGowan (2016)

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Synopsis

Todd McGowan's Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (2016) argues that the dominant left critiques of capitalism — grounded in the language of injustice (Marx) and surplus repression (Marcuse/Foucault) — have systematically misidentified capitalism's power by focusing on what it withholds from subjects rather than what it delivers. McGowan's central intervention is to show, through a Lacanian psychoanalytic framework, that capitalism works precisely because it provides a specific, structurally reliable form of satisfaction: the repetitive, unconscious enjoyment that subjects derive from the failure to obtain the lost object. Drawing on Freud's post-1920 revision of psychoanalytic theory — the death drive, the repetition compulsion, and the constitutive role of loss — as well as Lacan's concepts of jouissance, objet petit a, the big Other, and surplus-jouissance, McGowan demonstrates that capitalist subjects are not duped into false consciousness but are genuinely satisfied by the very dissatisfaction capitalism manufactures. The book then maps this psychic logic onto a series of domains — public and private space, sacrifice, freedom and the big Other, the bad versus true infinite, labor and nonproductivity, love and romance, scarcity and abundance, and the sublime commodity — showing in each case how capitalism captures and exploits the subject's structural relation to loss. Against both conventional Marxist and liberal-reformist alternatives, McGowan proposes that genuine critique must abandon the promissory, futural logic it shares with capitalism — the fantasy of a future satisfaction that will finally arrive — and instead recognize that satisfaction is always already present in the encounter with the obstacle, a recognition he aligns with Hegel's concept of the true infinite and with a Lacanian traversal of fantasy. The book concludes that "enjoy, don't accumulate" is not a hedonist slogan but an ontological and political prescription: once subjects recognize that the loss is the satisfaction, capitalism loses its psychic grip.

Distinctive contribution

What distinguishes Capitalism and Desire in the Lacanian corpus is its sustained, chapter-by-chapter effort to show that jouissance — specifically surplus-jouissance, the enjoyment extracted from loss and self-sabotage — is not an epiphenomenon of capitalist ideology but its very engine. While Slavoj Žižek's work has long argued that ideology functions through enjoyment rather than despite it, McGowan's contribution is to make this argument programmatic and systematic across the full range of political-economic phenomena: the business cycle, the privatization of space, the labor theory of value, love and romance, the concept of the infinite, and the sublime. McGowan does not merely apply Lacanian concepts to capitalism; he argues that Lacanian theory is uniquely capable of explaining what no Marxist, behavioral-economic, or Frankfurt School analysis can — namely, why subjects actively invest in and reproduce a system that demonstrably fails to deliver what it promises, not because they are deceived but because the failure is the point. This makes the book a structural counterpart to standard ideology-critique: the problem is not that subjects do not know the truth but that the truth they do not recognize is that they are already satisfied.

A second distinctive contribution lies in McGowan's synthesis of Hegel and Lacan against Marx on the question of the limit and the infinite. By contrasting Hegel's "true infinite" (the self-limiting system that constitutes growth as possible through its internal obstacle) with the "bad infinite" of capitalist expansion (endless striving that never encounters a genuine limit), McGowan offers a Hegelian-Lacanian conception of communist or egalitarian society that is explicitly opposed to the Marxist fantasy of unlimited productivity. This is unusual in the Lacanian corpus: while many theorists deploy Hegel and Lacan together in the analysis of subjectivity or culture, McGowan pushes the conjunction into the domain of political economy, generating a critique that is at once psychoanalytic, dialectical, and immanent to capitalism's own logic rather than mounted from an imagined outside.

Main themes

Capitalism's satisfaction through loss: the subject's enjoyment of dissatisfaction as the engine of accumulation
The failure of injustice-based and repression-based critiques of capitalism
The psychic function of the big Other and the fantasy of its desire in market behavior
Public space, privacy, and the constitutively public structure of subjectivity
Sacrifice, fetishistic disavowal, and the hidden labor at the heart of commodity value
The bad infinite versus the true infinite: Hegel's dialectic as counter to capitalist expansion
Means versus ends: nonproductivity, the strike, and immanent resistance
Love versus romance: capitalism's domestication of the traumatic encounter
Scarcity, abundance, and the psychic investment in lack
The sublime commodity: capitalism's transformation of the sacred into the fetishistic promise of future satisfaction

Chapter outline

Introduction: After Injustice and Repression
Chapter 1: The Subject of Desire and the Subject of Capitalism
Chapter 2: The Public Obsession with Privacy
Chapter 3: Capitalism as the Natural World
Chapter 4: The Enjoyment of Sacrifice
Chapter 5: Capitalism and the New Big Other
Chapter 6: The Bad Infinite and the True Infinite
Chapter 7: The Ends of Capitalism
Chapter 8: Love Against Romance
Chapter 9: Scarcity and Abundance
Chapter 10: The Market's Fetishistic Sublime
Conclusion: Enjoy, Don't Accumulate

Chapter summaries

Introduction: After Injustice and Repression

McGowan opens by surveying the two dominant strands of left critique: the Marxist critique of injustice (inequality, surplus value, exploitation) and the Freudian-Marcusean critique of surplus repression (the charge that capitalism demands unnecessary inhibition of desire). He shows that while these critiques differ markedly, they share a single structural flaw: both identify capitalism's problem as what it denies subjects, and both promise revolution as the delivery of something hitherto withheld — equality or liberated desire. Drawing on the later Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, McGowan argues that this framework misunderstands the nature of satisfaction. If the subject is constitutively attached to loss — if repetition compulsion reveals that satisfaction lies not in obtaining the object but in its endless re-losing — then a critique organized around deprivation misses the satisfaction capitalism actually provides.

The introduction's key move is to reframe the question: not 'what does capitalism take from us?' but 'what does capitalism give us, and why does this gift bind us to the system?' The answer is that capitalism exploits the structure of signification and the death drive to produce subjects who unconsciously enjoy the repetition of failure while consciously believing they are pursuing success. This reframing has profound implications for revolutionary politics: any critique that promises a better future remains caught in the promissory logic that is capitalism's ideological foundation. The alternative McGowan proposes — recognizing the satisfaction already present in loss — is not futural but immanent. The introduction thus sets up the book's central paradox: capitalism must be critiqued not because it fails to satisfy but precisely because it succeeds in providing a degraded, misrecognized, but real form of satisfaction.

Key concepts: Jouissance, Surplus-jouissance, Lost Object, Death Drive, Ideology, Repetition Notable examples: Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization; Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Chapter 1: The Subject of Desire and the Subject of Capitalism

The first chapter establishes the theoretical foundations by working through the Lacanian account of the subject, desire, and the lost object. McGowan begins from the Saussurean insight that language produces a divided world — the gap between signifier and signified is constitutive and irresolvable — and shows that this structural gap installs lack at the heart of subjectivity. The subject, formed through entry into the signifier, loses its most essential object at the very moment of its constitution; it 'loses the object into existence.' From this point on, satisfaction cannot be disentangled from loss: the subject repeats its constitutive failure not out of stupidity or stubbornness but because repetition is the only path available to satisfaction for speaking beings.

Capitalism's distinctive operation, McGowan argues, is to misrecognize this constitutive loss as contingent — as a problem that the right commodity might finally solve. By presenting each new commodity as the object that will definitively fill the void, capitalism harnesses the subject's structural dissatisfaction and converts it into productive consumption. The subject buys a new car not primarily because the old one is broken but because it hopes this object will be the one that delivers the elusive, ultimate satisfaction. The genius of capitalism lies in exploiting the fantasy of the 'desire of the Other' — the subject's assumption that there is a substantial Other who knows the secret of full satisfaction, and whose desire can be captured by the right purchase. Psychoanalysis, by contrast, reveals that 'the subject's satisfaction is located in how it desires and not what it obtains,' which is why the psychoanalytic cure involves recognizing the satisfaction already present in the obstacle rather than seeking to overcome it. The chapter thus draws a direct structural homology between the movement of signification (one signifier always leads to another) and the movement of capitalist consumption (one commodity always leads to another).

Key concepts: Desire, Lost Object, Objet petit a, Jouissance, Signifier, Fantasy, The big Other Notable examples: Apple iPhone/iPad; Pepsi Clear; Hitchcock, Vertigo (footnote)

Chapter 2: The Public Obsession with Privacy

Chapter 2 shifts from the psychic structure of capitalist subjectivity to its social and spatial expression: the privatization of public life. McGowan argues that capitalism systematically promotes the illusion that the subject is fundamentally a private being whose public interactions are secondary extensions of private self-interest. This ideological reversal obscures the truth that subjectivity is constitutively public — formed through the desire of the Other, through language, and through the obstacle that the social world erects against the realization of desire. Without the public as the site of the obstacle, the subject cannot find satisfaction; it requires the friction of the social.

McGowan deploys Wittgenstein's private language argument to support this claim: language is irreducibly public, which means the speaking subject is public before it is private. Psychoanalysis, too, is a public practice in the relevant sense — the analysand speaks to a public, not a private, desire, and the analyst stands in for the desire of the Other. Capitalism's allergy to the public world is thus not incidental but structural: it forecloses the very terrain on which the subject discovers the obstacle as satisfaction. The chapter examines surveillance culture and privatization (gated communities, private roads, private prisons, the Obama stimulus's emphasis on private consumption over public investment) as symptoms of this dynamic. Paradoxically, surveillance reinforces capitalism's ideology of privacy by constantly reminding subjects that they have something to hide — a private essence to be protected — even as it monitors them. The genuine danger, McGowan insists, is not surveillance per se but the privatization of desire that makes surveillance ideologically effective.

Key concepts: Ideology, The big Other, Desire, Lack, Unconscious, Subject Notable examples: Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations; Obama 2009 stimulus package; Surveillance (NSA, London cameras); Occupy movement (briefly)

Chapter 3: Capitalism as the Natural World

Chapter 3 examines capitalism's ideological self-presentation as natural order rather than political decision. McGowan takes Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged as the purest expression of this naturalization: for Rand, capitalism is not a system but the way of the world, and capitalists are simply the producers enacting the natural logic of production. McGowan shows that this naturalization performs a double ideological function: it presents subjective desire (self-interest) as an objective given, and it conceals the political constitution of the economic field in the same way that the gaze conceals the subject's role in constituting the visual field.

The Lacanian gaze functions here as McGowan's central analytic tool. Just as the encounter with the gaze reveals that the apparently neutral visual field is constituted around the subject's desire, a capitalist crisis reveals that the apparently natural economic field is constituted around the subject's political activity. McGowan reads Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive (2011) as an illustration: the driver's extreme violence in the elevator scene exposes the desire that normally operates invisibly, transforming a scene of apparent normalcy into something uncanny and disturbing, just as the crisis exposes the subjective distortion that sustains capitalism's veneer of natural necessity. The 2008 financial crisis and the Occupy movement are analyzed as such a moment of exposure: the crisis revealed the political decisions (deregulation, state bailouts) that sustain the system's apparent self-evidence. McGowan also argues that Freud's insight — the goal of analysis is not happiness but 'transforming hysterical misery into common unhappiness' — demonstrates that a system structured around the pursuit of self-interest is fundamentally incompatible with the structure of subjectivity.

Key concepts: Ideology, Gaze, Objet petit a, Trauma, Fetishistic Disavowal, Subject Notable examples: Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged; Nicolas Winding Refn, Drive (2011); 2008 financial crisis / Occupy movement; Freud, Studies on Hysteria

Chapter 4: The Enjoyment of Sacrifice

Chapter 4 takes up the question of sacrifice, which capitalism's utilitarian self-image disavows but which, McGowan argues, remains the sine qua non of the system. Capitalism presents itself as the most efficient economic system because it eliminates unnecessary sacrifice — no more slaughtered virgins, no more wasted offerings — and replaces them with utility. Yet sacrifice is everywhere in capitalism: in the surplus value extracted from workers' labor time, in the 'creative destruction' theorized by Schumpeter, in the extreme conditions of mining in the Congo and factory work in China, in Keynes's advocacy of wasteful spending (war, pyramid-building) as the solution to crises of overproduction.

McGowan's key theoretical move is the concept of fetishistic disavowal: consumers enjoy the iPhone while disavowing the sacrifice of Congolese and Chinese workers that makes it possible. The disavowal is structural and necessary — if the hidden labor sacrifice became fully visible, the commodity would lose its sublimity and its hold on the subject. This chapter also engages Keynes extensively: Keynes's discovery that wasteful (non-useful) spending is economically superior to useful spending is read as an inadvertent confirmation of the Lacanian thesis that satisfaction is tied to the waste of jouissance rather than to utility. The terrorist, the fundamentalist, and the bungee-jumper are analyzed as reactive formations that arise when capitalism's hidden sacrificial logic becomes so thoroughly concealed that subjects seek out more visible, spectacular forms of sacrifice — thus paradoxically confirming capitalism's ideological claim that it has eliminated sacrifice.

Key concepts: Jouissance, Fetishistic Disavowal, Fetish, Surplus-jouissance, Sublimation, Sacrifice Notable examples: Apple / Congo mining / Foxconn; Joseph Schumpeter, creative destruction; Keynes, wasteful spending / pyramid-building; The Lorax (animated film); Terrorist violence as reactive formation

Chapter 5: Capitalism and the New Big Other

Chapter 5 examines capitalism's relationship to freedom and social authority through the lens of the big Other. McGowan begins with Kant's Critique of Practical Reason as the philosophically definitive articulation of modern freedom: the moral law is nothing but the subject's own self-division, not an external authority, and therefore constitutes subjects as radically free, without any Other to guide their desire. This radical freedom is traumatic — it confronts the subject with the nonexistence of the Other — and capitalism, McGowan argues, offers a refuge from this trauma by installing the market as a new big Other that directs desire and alleviates the burden of genuine choice.

Through detailed readings of von Mises and Hayek, McGowan demonstrates the paradox at the heart of neoliberal ideology: these supposedly freedom-loving theorists praise capitalism precisely for relieving subjects of the burden of deciding how to live, by letting the price system and salary differentials tell them what is socially useful. This is not freedom but a new form of neurosis — the neurotic's clinging to the Other's demand in the hope of capturing the Other's desire, which never aligns with what is demanded. The chapter also addresses Adam Smith's 'Das Adam Smith Problem' — the apparent contradiction between the compassion-based moral philosophy of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the self-interest-based economics of The Wealth of Nations — reading it as a symptom of capitalism's inability to acknowledge the public structure of subjectivity. Capitalism, McGowan concludes, killed the traditional God only to install the market as a functional substitute — a more diffuse but equally effective mechanism for telling subjects what to desire and thereby sparing them the trauma of the Other's nonexistence.

Key concepts: The big Other, Desire, Ideology, Neurosis, Fantasy, Subject, Master Signifier Notable examples: Kant, Critique of Practical Reason; Hayek, The Road to Serfdom; von Mises, Human Action; Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments; Lacan, Seminar XII

Chapter 6: The Bad Infinite and the True Infinite

Chapter 6 is the book's most explicitly Hegelian chapter and develops what McGowan considers the key conceptual lever for breaking capitalism's logic. He introduces Hegel's distinction between the 'bad infinite' — the spurious infinity of endless quantitative addition that never reaches a genuine limit, exemplified by capitalism's demand for constant growth — and the 'true infinite' — the self-limiting system that includes its own boundary as constitutive of its being, analogous to the Lacanian subject that satisfies itself through its encounter with the obstacle. Capitalism is structurally committed to the bad infinite: it requires the fantasy of endless expansion, treats every external limit as a temporary barrier to be overcome, and thereby forecloses the internal limit that would constitute genuine satisfaction.

McGowan surveys all the apparent alternatives — behavioral economics, happiness economics, environmentalism, moral limits on markets (Michael Sandel) — and shows that each remains within the logic of the bad infinite, because each posits an external limit for capitalism to transcend rather than reconceiving the limit as internal and constitutive. The chapter also reads capitalism's relationship to death as symptomatic: by structuring existence around the bad infinite's ideal of constant growth, capitalism transforms death from an internal limit (the true infinite's constitutive finitude) into an external catastrophe, provoking massive expenditure on anti-aging products and medical life extension. The genuinely alternative logic would be that of the true infinite — a Hegelian communism or egalitarian society that nurtures its own obstacle as the condition of its possibility — which McGowan explicitly contrasts with Marx's vision of unlimited post-revolutionary productivity.

Key concepts: Dialectics, Infinite, Jouissance, Lack, Fantasy, Ideology, Repetition Notable examples: Hayek, The Road to Serfdom; Hegel, Science of Logic; Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit; Behavioral economics / happiness economics (Bruno Frey); Sandel's moral limits on markets; Disaster films: Earthquake (1974), The Towering Inferno (1974)

Chapter 7: The Ends of Capitalism

Chapter 7 examines capitalism's relationship to productivity, means, and ends. McGowan argues that capitalism is structured teleologically around the final cause — the end (profit) that gives its productive means their value and significance. This structure systematically denigrates labor, the means of production, which has value only insofar as it produces profit; any interruption of the means-to-end relation (the strike, nonproductivity, impotentiality) is experienced as a threat. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben's theorization of potentiality as the capacity to sustain one's own impotentiality — one's relation to one's own incapacity — McGowan reads the strike as capitalism's most significant internal vulnerability: it presents means subtracted from their end, insisting on the value of the means as such.

The chapter's central political claim is that capitalism's dependency on means opens a space for genuine resistance: by insisting on the priority of the means over the end, by treating all productivity as if it might remain nonproductive, subjects can undermine the teleological logic that sustains capitalist production. McGowan illustrates this with García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, where four years of incessant rain makes it impossible for the banana company to resume productive activity — a figure for the radical suspension of the means-ends relation. However, the chapter also recognizes the difficulty: capitalism is extraordinarily adept at absorbing impotentiality and converting it into new sources of surplus value (sexual liberation became a new market; the counterculture became a new commodity form). The key is not simply refusing productivity but insisting on the means for its own sake — a gesture that remains always potentially revolutionary without guarantee.

Key concepts: Jouissance, Surplus-jouissance, Sublimation, Desire, Lack, Repetition Notable examples: Charlie Chaplin, Modern Times (1936); Giorgio Agamben on potentiality; Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude; Hannah Arendt on labor/work/action; Sexual liberation as capitalism's new market (Behind the Green Door, 1972)

Chapter 8: Love Against Romance

Chapter 8 analyzes love as the site where capitalism's ideological operation is most fully exposed and most fully completed. McGowan begins with the dating service as a synecdoche for capitalism's treatment of love: by requiring clients to list desirable qualities and specify the characteristics they seek in a partner, the dating service transforms both the self and the love object into commodities, reducing the traumatic, unforeseen disruption of love to a rational investment calculation. Love in capitalism becomes 'romance' — a domesticated, safe version of love's disruptiveness — just as capitalism gives subjects the sublime without the terrifying figure, and freedom without the trauma of the Other's nonexistence.

Drawing on Plato's Symposium, McGowan argues that love is constitutively characterized by asymmetry and disruption: it is never reducible to harmony or complementarity. Love occurs in the gap, the cut (Zeus's cut in Aristophanes' myth), and it satisfies through dissymmetry rather than completion. Capitalism converts this disruptiveness into romance — the fantasy of the soul mate who will finally complete the subject — and thereby makes love safe for accumulation. The chapter includes extended readings of Pretty Woman and Notting Hill as films that both capitulate to and resist this romanticization: both films must include fragments of authentic love's disruptiveness to remain watchable, but both also subordinate this disruptiveness to the logic of romantic investment. McGowan also draws on Alain Badiou's theory of love as a truth procedure, endorsing Badiou's sense of love's evental status while arguing that Badiou's insight requires the Lacanian account of how love disrupts the subject's relation to its lost object.

Key concepts: Desire, Lost Object, Fantasy, Jouissance, Objet petit a, Sublimation Notable examples: Plato, Symposium; Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall, 1990); Notting Hill (Roger Michell, 1999); Alain Badiou on love as truth procedure; Dating services as commodity form of love

Chapter 9: Scarcity and Abundance

Chapter 9 interrogates capitalism's foundational assumption of natural scarcity and argues that this assumption is ideological rather than ontological. McGowan shows that capitalism requires both the premise of natural scarcity and the fantasy of future abundance: subjects endure present scarcity because they believe that capitalism will eventually deliver abundance, but it is actually the struggle with scarcity — not the future abundance — that provides unconscious satisfaction. This is why utopian projects that promise immediate abundance (Fourier, Owen) consistently fail: they destroy the fantasy structure that makes the struggle satisfying, leaving subjects with nothing to do but create new forms of scarcity and rivalry.

The chapter argues that capitalist subjects unconsciously sabotage abundance to sustain scarcity, and that this dynamic explains both the persistence of capitalism in the face of its obvious capacity to provide basic necessities for all (restaurants throw away food rather than donate it; abundance erodes commodity value) and the failure of socialist revolutions (the proletariat was ultimately unwilling to give up the satisfactions of scarcity). McGowan reads Leninist revolutionary politics as structurally superior to utopian socialism precisely because it incorporated scarcity — the struggle of the present — into its fantasy scenario rather than offering direct access to abundance. The conclusion is that a genuinely emancipatory politics must begin not from the promise of abundance but from a transformed relationship to loss: recognizing that lack and excess are not opposed but correlative (the subject's lack is coextensive with its excessive jouissance), and that abundance is available only through, not in spite of, the encounter with loss.

Key concepts: Jouissance, Fantasy, Lack, Lost Object, Ideology, Surplus-jouissance Notable examples: Deirdre McCloskey on scarcity and virtue; Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg on struggle vs. abundance; Fourier and Owen as failed utopians; Samuel Beckett, Endgame (briefly); Ernest Hemingway novels as figures of scarcity-satisfaction

Chapter 10: The Market's Fetishistic Sublime

Chapter 10 synthesizes the book's argument through the concept of the sublime commodity. McGowan argues that capitalism does not eliminate sublimity — the experience of transcendence, of something that exceeds ordinary utility — but transforms and relocates it. Where traditional societies placed sublimity in gods, kings, and priests, capitalism places it in the commodity itself: the commodity acquires a quasi-theological character, promising a transcendence that is always futural and therefore always intact. The new car is sublime on the lot; it desublimes the moment it is purchased and driven off. This futurity of the commodity's sublimity is captured by marginal utility theory's focus on anticipated rather than realized satisfaction.

McGowan reads this as capitalism's transformation of the Kantian sublime into a fetishistic, immanent one: the commodity promises the infinite from within the finite, creating a secular form of the sacred. He then argues — following Hegel against Kant — that genuine emancipation from this structure requires recognizing the sublime as already accomplished rather than deferred: the failure of the commodity's promise is not the absence of the sublime but its truth. To be Hegelian rather than Kantian about the sublime is to stop waiting for the commodity to deliver what it promises and to recognize that what it promises — the encounter with genuine transcendence — is already available in the immanent structure of ordinary experience. The chapter also examines orientalism (Said) as an extension of commodity fetishism onto cultural otherness, and reads Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation as a case study in capitalism's management of the exotic sublime.

Key concepts: Sublime, Fetish, Fetishistic Disavowal, Jouissance, Sublimation, Objet petit a, Point de capiton Notable examples: Marx on commodity fetishism (Capital); Hegel's critique of Kantian Sollen; Carl Menger on commodity vs. consumption good; Edward Said, Orientalism; Sofia Coppola, Lost in Translation; Deirdre McCloskey, The Bourgeois Virtues

Conclusion: Enjoy, Don't Accumulate

The conclusion draws together the book's strands under a single prescriptive formula. McGowan argues that the challenge to capitalism cannot succeed by doubling down on dissatisfaction — showing subjects how deprived they are — because this reproduces the promissory logic of capitalism itself. Instead, subjects must be brought to recognize that satisfaction is already present in the encounter with loss, that the commodity's failure to deliver the ultimate satisfaction is not a temporary disappointment but the very form of enjoyment that capitalism exploits. A quotation from the second volume of Capital is given special weight: Marx writes that 'capitalism is already essentially abolished once we assume that it is enjoyment that is the driving motive and not enrichment itself.' McGowan reads this as Marx's most profound and most neglected insight — anticipating Freud's post-1920 turn — and as the key to a post-capitalist subjectivity. The task is not to build a new system from scratch but to recognize the alternative already latent within capitalism's own logic: the satisfaction of means over ends, of loss over accumulation, of the obstacle as the object.

Key concepts: Jouissance, Desire, Lost Object, Fantasy, Ideology, Repetition Notable examples: Marx, Capital vol. 2 on enjoyment vs. enrichment

Main interlocutors

Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XII (Problèmes cruciaux pour la psychanalyse)
Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis)
Jacques Lacan, Seminar VI
Karl Marx, Capital
Karl Marx, Grundrisse
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
Hegel, Science of Logic
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization
Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
Plato, Symposium
Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory
Giorgio Agamben, Means Without Ends
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus
Alain Badiou, Being and Event
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money
Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real

Position in the corpus

Capitalism and Desire occupies a distinctive position at the intersection of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, Marxist political economy, and Hegelian dialectics. Its closest neighbor in the corpus is Slavoj Žižek's extensive body of work — particularly The Sublime Object of Ideology, The Plague of Fantasies, and The Ticklish Subject — which similarly argues that ideology functions through jouissance and that the subject's investment in the system cannot be explained by false consciousness alone. McGowan both extends and sharpens Žižek's framework by making the argument specifically about capitalism as an economic system (rather than ideology in general) and by giving Hegel's distinction between bad and true infinites a more central structural role than Žižek typically does. McGowan's work also shares significant ground with Yannis Stavrakakis's Capitalism and the Fantasies of Democracy and with the broader project of Lacanian political theory, but McGowan is more explicitly focused on the psychic mechanisms of accumulation, consumption, and crisis than on democratic theory. Readers coming from the Frankfurt School tradition (Adorno, Marcuse, Fromm) will find McGowan's book a sustained critique of that tradition's residual investment in the repression model, while those coming from Foucauldian biopolitics will find a challenge to the power/bodies framework as an adequate account of capitalism's hold over subjects.\n\nFor readers new to the Lacanian corpus, Capitalism and Desire works best after acquiring some grounding in basic Lacanian concepts — the trilogy of desire/demand/jouissance, objet petit a, the big Other — through an introductory text like McGowan's own The Real Gaze or Bruce Fink's The Lacanian Subject. It can profitably be read alongside Žižek's The Sublime Object of Ideology (for the general framework of ideological enjoyment) and Todd McGowan's earlier The End of Dissatisfaction? (for the cinematic dimensions of jouissance). For more advanced readers, it pairs productively with Alenka Zupančič's The Odd One In and What Is Sex? (for the Lacanian account of the death drive and repetition as they bear on the subject's relation to the social), with Samo Tomšič's The Capitalist Unconscious (a more formally Marxist-Lacanian treatment of surplus-jouissance and value), and with Adrian Johnston's work on Freudo-Lacanian drive theory. Hegel scholars will find the chapters on the bad/true infinite and on communism's internal logic unusually rigorous as political philosophy.