Beyond the Good: Interview with Todd McGowan (original) (raw)
Related papers
Lacan and Political Subjectivity: Fantasy and Enjoyment in Psychoanalysis and Political Theory
Subjectivity, 2008
In this paper we explore and exploit the theoretical, empirical, and critical potential of subjectivity in political theory and psychoanalysis, suggesting that a turn to fantasy and enjoyment can help sharpen what is at stake in appeals to this concept. We indicate – in the first part – the way fantasy has already been invoked in the literature to enhance our understanding of organizational practices, in order to show – in the second part – how a Lacanian approach to “the subject of enjoyment” can supplement such accounts. We focus on three key themes linked directly to the concept of subjectivity. The first theme concerns how to think the relationship between political and ethical subjectivity. The second revolves around how fantasy and enjoyment allow us to rethink the relationship between reason and affect. The final theme explores how a logic of fantasy allows us to explore what has been called “the problem of self-transgression”.
Don DeLillo's Underworld (1997) depicts contemporary American realities across a span from the 1950s to 1990s. The novel's narrative, however expansive and digressive, consistently develops around waste and trauma. This paper, in the light of Lacanian/Žižekian psychoanalytic theory, looks at waste/trauma not as a fully present object of the novel's representation but as an excess, a remainder of Cold-War politics and capitalist industrial-military modes of production, and more significantly, the object a that arouses the subject's fascination and fear at the same time. Such an understanding especially pertains to the novel's protagonist, Nick Shay. Further, the novel narrativizes the paranoid-conspiratorial belief that " everything is connected " and that there are always larger forces beyond the subject. This paper will also examine such an ideological contradiction and work out an ethics, both psychoanalytic and ecological, that departs from political and moral sentimentalism, from cynicism and apathy, and sees in waste something more than danger, threat, or even doom. This paper, then, aims at the possibility of working through ecological fantasy toward a psychoanalytic ethics of waste.
Cederstrom, C. and Hoedemaeker, C. (eds) (2010) Lacan and Organization, London: MayFly Books., 2010
As a site of wealth creation, work and the organization of work receive critical attention from many disciplines and from many traditions of thought. In this chapter I explore why one might want to supplement existing approaches to work and the organization of work - both psychoanalytic and non-psychoanalytic - with ideas drawn from the field of Lacanian psychoanalysis. I suggest that there are advantages to organizing this Lacanian intervention around the category of fantasy, but that there are also aspects of this approach that demand further development if we are to offer a convincing critical explanation of workplace phenomena.
This essay offers a critical study of contemporary culture of conspiracy. The whole essay starts with Freud's clinical, theoretical assessment and Lacan's later reconceptualization of Schreber's case of paranoia in order to examine the relevance or irrelevance of the category " paranoia " to contemporary cultural, political analyses, and how its analytical value of properly psychoanalytic origin has been distorted, undermined or redefined. Then, paranoid-cynical subjectivity is analyzed in light of Žižek's theory of ideological fantasy, which highlights how ideology grips the subject through the structuration of enjoyment and the split of belief and actions. Accordingly, whether paranoid cynicism transgresses or supports the dominant power system and status quo is brought into discussion. The final section of this essay, through interpreting films like The Truman Show and Fight Club, relates conspiracy and paranoid-cynical subjectivity to contemporary society of enjoyment and examines the difficulty, if not impossibility, of desiring, free choice and ethico-political agency under the impact of the pervasive superegoic commands to transgress and enjoy.