By Todd McGowan
Despite growing titanic inequalities and propping up reactionary global regimes, capitalism has many passionate defenders―but no longer due to what it withholds from a few and offers to others. Capitalism dominates, Todd McGowan argues, since it mimics the constitution of our wish whereas hiding the trauma that the procedure inflicts upon it. humans from all backgrounds take pleasure in what capitalism presents, yet while are advised extra and higher is but to come back. Capitalism traps us via an incomplete delight that compels us after the hot, the higher, and the more.
Capitalism's parasitic dating to our wishes offers it the semblance of akin to our ordinary impulses, that is how capitalism's defenders symbolize it. via realizing this psychic method, McGowan hopes to divest us of our dependancy to capitalist enrichment and support us rediscover leisure as we really skilled it. through finding it within the current, McGowan frees us from our attachment to a greater destiny and the idea that capitalism is a necessary outgrowth of human nature. From this angle, our financial, social, and political worlds confide in actual political switch. Eloquent and enlivened through examples from movie, tv, customer tradition, and way of life, Capitalism and Desire brings a brand new, psychoanalytically grounded method of political and social theory.
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Extra info for Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets
Sample text
For the subject of the signifier, unlike for the human animal, an apple is never enough. Once the world of signification exists, the apple’s noncoincidence with itself becomes apparent, and the empirical apple ceases to prove satisfying. As an object of need, the apple is just an apple and can satisfy the need. But after the introduction of the signifier, the apple’s self-division enables it to signify something beyond itself. A supplement attaches itself to the apple in the form of the signifier, and this excess remains irreducible to the object.
The secret is in the promise. If one invests oneself in the promise of the future, through this gesture one accepts the basic rules of the capitalist game. The promise of the better future is the foundation of the capitalist structure, the basis for all three economic areas—production, distribution, and consumption. If we examine only the field of consumption, universal commodification seems to hold the key, whereas if we confine ourselves to the field of production, the imperative to accumulate appears foundational.
7 Contra Freud, Gross sees neurosis as the result not of the fundamental antagonisms of human sexuality but of the repressive force of the bourgeois family and the restrictions that it places on the free expression of sexuality. Gross conceives of free sexuality—the slogan of the 1960s—as the basic human desire. 8 In the years after Gross’s premature death at the age of forty-two in 1920, Wilhelm Reich took up the mantle of the revolutionary psychoanalyst. Like Gross, Reich links neurosis to social repressiveness, and, also like Gross, he believes that political revolution is inextricable from sexual revolution.