Psychoanalysis and climate change
(Notes)
Can psychoanalysis teach us anything about our present predicament? Todd Mcgowan gives as usual an inspiring answer in his new book, Pure Excess. Mcgowan combines, as in previous books, Marxism with psychoanalysis, a combination that has a long tradition. Yet, Mcgowan gives it a new spin, and this is what makes his work relevant. One can view his work as a continuation of Slavoj Zizek’s work, perhaps less nuanced, but more clear in style and more structured. At times, however, it does feel like the brilliant argument is already developed in the introduction and then merely repeated with small changes in the subsequent chapters.
Mcgowan’s central focus is on the commodity form and its impact on what he calls “psychic investment”. The commodity form is what characterises capitalism as a system and it is what gives subjects a certain ‘psychic investment’ in excess. Already here we can see Mcgowan’s distinctive take: many marxist have focused on the commodity and the psyche, but the focus has always been on reification, hence to reduce excess. Mcgowan’s unique take is to say that the commodity form involves not so much sameness and reification as instead the promise of excess. This is what seperates his work from most of marxism of the 20th century, and links it with psychoanalysis.
The fascination with programs on nature often illustrate this. Nature is presented as a natural rhythm, regulation, like birds migrating, as a space without lack, where there’s no signifiers and hence no distortion. It provides us in other words with a mode of being where there are no imposed limits. Paradoxically, the nature programs themselves come to be a false exit of capitalism. Even when such programs are critical of environmental damage, for example, their basic message is: “stop polluting, so we can return to the cosmic order of the world!”. Hence, they are nearly always ideologically overdetermined since they promise a world without lack. The natural realm works here without excess, while accidents may happen, the lion’s cub may die, it is part of nature’s circle of life, not the distortion and alienation brought about by the signifier.
The commodity form promises a kind of excess without lack. To invest oneself in the commodity form, as all subjects of capitalism do, is to invest oneself in the promise of unbridled excess. The new car, for example, promises something beyond the ordinary, an enjoyment of excess. Once you get the car, it becomes merely another trivial object. Hence, you immediately start to look for a new car or upgrades. Someone who merely buys one car in their life or is only concerned with the practical utility of the car is a bad consumer. If people would simply care about the utility of objects, capitalism would never survive. It can only operate as long as people invest in the promise of the commodity’s promise of excess: the next car will be what makes me a being without lack!
In this, as Mcgowan points out capitalism changes what other societies have done. These societies are not without excess, but excess is confined to certain rituals, and subordinated to the perpetuation of that society. The point is to reproduce it. Certain festivals involve excess, but they are prescribed and they serve to maintain the status quo.
Mcgowan thus distinguishes between societies of reproduction and production:
“previous social forms — the Mayan Empire, ancient Chinese society, the Roman Republic, feudal Europe, even hunter-gatherer societies — devoted their primary energy to reproducing their formal structure. Reproduction acts as the overriding value within every social order, save the current one.” (4).
A society of reproduction subordinates excess, whereas society of production is invested in constant excess. This is the historical role of capitalism, the transition to former ways of organising. In other society the useless, or excessive is localised in certain rituals: “what was useless had a role, but it was confined primarilly to religious rituals or initiation rites. In other social structures, the useless excess was limited to a time specific time and place so as not to threaten the good of society.” (ibid.). In contrast, “capitalism places an absolute emphasis of the useless excess.” (ibid). This is why, as Mcgowan points out capitalism is constantly expanding, because it is invested not in the perpetuity and reproduction of society. There can be no status quo.
To be a a society of production means always to be, as Mcgowan nicely puts it, a society of “overproduction”. This also involves a certain paradox compared to former societies. Since its central motor is excess and profit, it is both more future-oriented (since it seeks overproduction) than any other society, and on the other less future-oriented in terms of that society’s survival. No one in capitalism thinks about the society’s survival. Mcgowan says precisely, that under “capitalism, social reproduction is a contingent phenomenon”. Even though capitalism “is more future oriented than any other social structure, it leaves no one in charge of making sure that the form of society itself will be around this future” (5).
Mcgowan points out that climate change cannot be thought outside this constellation. The focus on production over reproduction has reverberations that cannot be underestimated. This is what gives us problem with climate crisis: the commodity form (and not for example simply “human hybris” as many eco-critics have it). “The survival of the planet as a habitable place for humanity is not a concern for capitalist society. This society reproduces itself through the production of a surplus, which becomes the source of new value.” (5).
This is what makes it so hard to act against the facts of climate change. To expect we would change means overlooking the hold the commodity form, and the focus on production has for us, the way we are psychically invested in it. But it does not mean that the fault is human hybris, but it has to do with a specific historical transition. The Capitalocene (although he doesn’t use that word). The psychic investment in pure excess. Climate change could not have happened in any other system, because the commodity form is what necessitates constant overproduction. It cannot be stopped within the logic of that system.
Many strands of eco-criticism frame the climate crisis around a return to “the good,” typically understood in terms of moral duty, human well-being, or planetary health. Deep ecology (Arne Næss) emphasizes the intrinsic value of all life and calls for a radical reduction of human impact to restore natural balance, while environmental ethics (Aldo Leopold, Holmes Rolston III) argue for a “land ethic” rooted in the good of the biotic community. The “planetary boundaries” framework (Johan Rockström et al.) similarly promotes sustainability as a measurable return to safe, life-sustaining conditions. Eco-justice and climate justice approaches (Naomi Klein, Vandana Shiva) tie environmental collapse to social inequality, calling for a just, equitable, and sustainable future centered on care and community. The degrowth movement (Giorgos Kallis, Jason Hickel) critiques capitalism and advocates for scaling down consumption to achieve ecological and social balance, redefining prosperity in terms of sufficiency and well-being. Even ecomodernist perspectives (such as those promoted by the Breakthrough Institute) endorse technological progress as a means of decoupling human development from ecological degradation, preserving the ideal of planetary and human flourishing. Despite their political differences, these paradigms tend to preserve a teleology of the good — whether moral, ecological, or social — which, from a psychoanalytic or Marxist perspective like McGowan’s, risks misrecognizing the structural role of enjoyment related to excess. Rather than confronting how enjoyment operates through excess and lack, such approaches often assume it can be morally redirected or harmonized with the good. It becomes an ethics in lines with Aristoteles.
One of Mcgowan’s strongest point is to combat all the contemporary ‘reigns’ on climate change and capitalism through an appeal to the ‘good’ (rather than excess): “If it’s not growing, capitalist society is dying.” The problem is that they capitalism engenders mass egotism (as critics sometimes claim). “Nor is it that this society privileges the good of humanity over other species or even the entire planet. The destruction of the earth continuess apace because the capitalist society doesn’t consider the good at all” (7)
Many climate change critics misunderstands this. They think we need a return to the good, a return to balance, degrowth economy and you name it: “displacing humanity’s good for the sake of the planet”. We should step back, reflect, and put the planet’s good over our own (even for own sake). But this misrecognizes what capitalism is. “capitalist society is in the process of making the planet unfit for human life not because people privilege their own good but because capitalism marginalizes the good entirely for the sake of production of useless excess. This useless excess emerges precisely through the sacrifice of the good.” (7). Capitalism is not concerned with any ‘good’ at all, but rather with the production of an excess. This is why we need to change the coordinates of how to ensure planetary survival.
The commodity form promises an excess, a surplus, without a barrier to it. But what is the relationship to the good then. The problem with the good, and the ‘return to balance’, is that it overlooks the way enjoyment functions. Capitalism society revolves around maximum of profit. “Not to maximise what one has somply doesn’t make sense.” There is no internal brake or limit to capitalism (the barriers are always seen as external ones).
Capitalism cannot avow a limit that is internal because it runs against the promise of unbridled excess. “The limit is antithetical to capitalism because to avow the necessity of a limit is to avow that something must always be lacking. An internally limited existence is a lacking one, an existence without the possibility of attaining pure excess”. Capitalism is invested and is only working insofar as people believe in the fantasy of limitless excess. In contrast to other society’s where excess is marginalized, in capitalism it becomes ubiquitous: “capitalist society brings a a useless excess into every corner of its functioning because this useless excess is what keeps the economy running. (…) The useless excess becomes the source of all value and the center of everyone’s attention.” (11).
This means we have to look at the psychoanalytic discovery of what satisfaction is, a discovery that runs against common sense. This discovery is also what capitalism misrecognizes, but also presupposes. “The logic of the commodity form has a deleterious effect on the ability to recognize how we satisfy ourselves. Under the reign of of this logic, satisfaction becomes the ability to have more and do more.” (12). But the problem is that we do not satisfy ourselves with obtaining an object, but with its absence: “The structure of satisfaction depends on what is absent.” We become engaged “in a satisfying way when we work to accomplish something, when we struggle to realize what isn’t immediately doable. No one would enjoy a game that they won instantly every time they played”. (12).
Many of Mcgowan’s examples are from sports. We can think of a game that is enjoyable precisely because victory is not secure. A fan supports a team only because they do not win all the time. Even if they consciously hope for victory in every game, what they enjoy is the tight game, the struggle and the opposition. As soon as the team wins the championship, the fan starts worrying about next season and possible obstacles. This shows that while the fan consciously gets pleasure in victory, it is the struggle that provides enjoyment. If the team simply wins the fan needs to even invent certain possible struggles in order to enjoy the team’s efforts. This structure is a trivial example of how psychoanalysis discovers enjoyment to work. Every patient consciously wants to get rid of their symptoms, and this would bring pleasure. But they would lose the enjoyment, which is what really gets them up in the morning, what constitutes their raison d’être. This is also why the aforementioned nature programs would not work as a practical guide. If we were really to simply have everything we want, to be part of natural rhythm, we would need to make an intervention to be make sure something was missing, failing. Only in this way can we continue to enjoy. To put it shortly: in psychoanalysis we discover that patients do not want their own good, or their well-being. They unconsciously want to enjoy. And secondly, this is actually not a bad thing, since it is only enjoyment that can cause a challenge to the status quo.
We enjoy the game as long as the victory is not present. When we win the game we take pleasure in it (not the more intense enjoyment). If we enjoy playing chess it is because it is a game that we can never “master”, where there is always an structural absence. This common example can illustrate the counter-intuitive logic of satisfaction that psychoanalysis is the first to discover and conceptualise: “It is only the lack of mastery in the game that makes the game satisfying, which is why more people play chess than tic-tac-toe. No matter one’s skill level, chess reminds one constantly that one fails as a subject. Even Grandmasters don’t have complete mastery when it comes to playing chess. There’s always something missing in one’s game that enables one to enjoy continuing to play by giving one something to work one. The chess champion who could not lose would quickly lose interest in being a chess champion anymore. Our ability to enjoy anything depends on what we don’t have, not what we do.” (13). While this example is simple it is absolutely fundamental to understand the structure in it, a structure that is so counterintuitive that it undermines everything that came before (and after) psychoanalysis. We enjoy what we don’t have, not what we have.
We cannot recognize, usually, that this is the structure. We think enjoyment will be obtained when we master the game, not when we are still working on it. But it is the same as using cheat codes in a computer game. This gives a brief pleasure (not enjoyment), in overcoming all obstacles easily and defeating all opponents without a sweat. But it also becomes boring quickly. Pleasure evaporates quickly. “When one thinks about it, the image of pure excess is an image of total boredom.” (13). The problem is that capitalism and the commodity makes us misrecognize this structure of satisfaction: “capitalism holds out the promise of having it all, of enjoying without missing anything.” (13). But why is it like this? As Mcgowan explains satisfaction emerges out of a loss of an object, an object “beyond the realm of all objects that merely exist. In order to become subjects, in order to operate with any kind of signification, we need to enact a prior loss, a divide between ‘me’ and the ‘outside’ world. This psychic cut is necessary to become a subject to begin with.
Loss produces a satisfying absence, something that one can desire without the possibility of accessing. The sublimity of the object that stems from sacrifice is the source of the object’s value for us.” Since we find satisfaction through lack it is only the object that is lost that can take on sublime value. “We find satisfaction through lack, not through overcoming of it. While we can take pleasure in available objects, it is only in so far as we lack that we can partake of the object’s sublimity.” (14). In this sense we can differentiate between pleasure, which we obtain by having the object. This is brief, only in the moment of acquiring it, like winning the chess-game or making a succesful move on the board. The sublime object is on the contrary what we enjoy, the one we can never have, like perfect mastery. If we could master the game perfectly it would cease to have the status of sublime value for us.
Mcgowan traces the historical transition from precapitalist societies to the present one in terms of sublimity. “Modernity is not a historical or geographical phenomenon, not located in Europe or in the sixteenth century. It is a way of figuring how excess comes down to the level of ordinary people. It is a democratising of excess that makes evident the connection between excess and lack.” The potential herein is that sublime value, the excess, is available potentially to everyone, that it is no longer fixed to certain prescribed rituals for example. “it implies that the sublime is open to everyone, not just those on top of the social hierarchy.” Mcgowan sees this especially in modernist art forms, but always in forms of selfimposed limit: “though an act of limiting myself, I create my own form of excess. By devoting myself to one thing and cutting off others, I give that thing sublime that it otherwise wouldn’t have. Everyone can do this.
Get Psychotic's guide to memes’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Modernity reveals that there is nothing excessive on its own, no excess that doesn’t involve a corresponding lack.” (ibid.). The point of Mcgowan’s intervention is very much to trace this kind of excess linked to lack as modernity’s promise and to free the alliance between modernity and the commodity form, as though the modern and commodity is the same thing. If we make this conceptual move of blending them together, the only exit of the commodity form becomes pre-capitalist hierarchies. “capitalism betrays the modern opening.” Especially aesthetic practices are important here, since they work with formal requirements, but which are self-imposed. Hence Mcgowan gives a new spin to the idea of the subject as a “work of art” (Michel Foucault), since each subject can impose the precise limits that makes some activity or object sublime for it.
Mcgowan tries to argue for an egalitarian system, where lack is recognizes as structral operator the excess. But this means that unbridled excess is a fantasy. What it does not mean is that we then have to return to a psychic investment in the good (which overlooks how enjoyment function): “as long as we think of excess as the ability to act without constraints, the overcoming of all limits, we will remain the prisoners of the commodity form.” (15). Modernity allows us to see how lack and excess are correlatives, and not opposites, but all of capitalism’s ideology works to render this insight, the psychoanalytical insight, inaccessible.
Marx is here not radical enough. Marx does recognize the transition from a society of reproduction to production and the way the commodity form comes to dominate and quench modernity’s promise. In the first volume of Capital Marx writes: “Ancient society…denounced [money} as tending to destroy the economic and the social the moral order. Modern society, which already in its infancy had pulled Pluto by the hairs of his head from the bowels of the earth, greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of its innermost principle of life.” (after Mcgowan, 17). So, what traditional societies sees as dangerous and destructive, modern societies take as their principle of growth. But this is also where we have to move beyond Marx’s insights.
Because it involves the structure of enjoyment, not just money. Marx could not see this because it is only with psychoanalysis that it becomes conceptualised. It is the shift from the good to enjoyment. “Traditional societies of whatever stripe are organized around what they take as the good.” The good is not one fixed thing, but a variable, but its structure is the same. “Now, the good changes depending on social structure. Some societies locate it in devotion to a deity, others find it in the pleasure of social elites, still others see it in an ethical standard, and even some discover the good in a utilitarian principle or distributing the greatest possible happiness among everyone. The society’s good could even be survival itself — or the despotiv leader’s increase of territory to control.” (17). In each case the point is however that the society is legitimized through a pursuit of a good. It corresponds to that society’s reproduction as well. “Capitalism makes a revolutionary change in human history. Instead of orienting the society and the subjects in it toward the good, the enjoyment of useless excess becomes the organising principle.” (18).
There is nothing moralistic about this. In traditional socities the useless excess is a danger, and is marginalized. In capitalism it becomes the principle, the pursuit. This is also where pleasure gives way to enjoyment. Enjoyment also had a role in precapitalist societies, but as marginalized (in rituals, for examples). One obtains pleasure when obtaining an object, but enjoyment in the production of excess (of the object that is not there). “There is pleasure in the act of obtaining. But pleasure is always fleeting and disappears as one grows accustomed to having the object.
The enjoyment of the excess, on the other hand, is sustainable. It occurs not through acquiring the object but through its absence.” (19). This is also why Kant refers to the transcendental affect as pain (not pleasure). Only a pain can last, not a pleasure which is brief. This is what Kant both sees and does not see with his moral law. Moral law humbles the finite subject, but we can only be reminded of our finitude, and the sublime moral law through a “humbling” experience, hence through pain. What Kant does not see is that he introduces thereby a notion of satisfaction, or enjoyment, that is no longer within the pleasure principle:
— which occurs contrary to our inclinations — is itself a feeling. Consequently, we can see a priori that the moral law, as a determining ground of the will, by infringing upon all our inclinations, must produce a feeling that can be called pain. And here we have the first, perhaps also the only case, in which we were able to determine a priori from concepts the relation of a cognition (in this case, of pure practical reason) to the feeling of pleasure or displeasure.”
However, the subject necessarily misrecognizes this structure (as also Kant does moving too quickly to the moral law as a ‘fact of reason’). It consciously pursues pleasure, but on the way there obtains enjoyment. The chess player pursues the pleasure of a victory, but the enjoyment is obtained on the way there. This misrecognition is however necessary to an extent. If the chess player ‘knows’ that the enjoyment is only as long as the game last, and therefore decides to keep the game going (and not pursue victory) he also loses the enjoyment of the game itself. By pursuing pleasure enjoyment is “smuggled” in. The modern regime of excess does not replace the good, but changes our relationship towards it. It doesn’t eliminate the good as a category. But we can only enjoy what goes beyond the good.
That is also a psychoanalytical discovery. The enjoyment always involves a sacrifice of the good or the well-being. “If we need three sets of clothes to wear, excessiveness lies in having twenty. Or when I stay home from work and play video games all day, I enjoy because I am acting against my own good and not working to sustain my life as it is. This is also what gives the thrill to using illicit drugs, skydiving, motorcycle riding, and engaging in unprotected, anonymous sex. In each case, I put my own well-fare at stake, which opens the door to being excessive.” (20). So the good still plays a function, as precisely what defines the opposite of the excessive. The excessive, even though it becomes the fuel of modern societies, can only be defined as excessive in relation to the sacrifice of the good. The good can of course vary, as what counts as good. “Excessiveness is wasteful and transcends the necessary by going beyond what is required for mere reproduction, survival, and even pleasure. Every society produces this wasteful excess (and even survives on the basis of it), but it is only capitalist society that makes this excess its foundational principle.” (ibid.). This is how transcendence works. Transcendence it at work in enjoyment, through the excess, and not simply in some supranatural being.
This is also why we are “unnatural” animals, because we are moved by excess, not with natural need or the good, as other animals are. Kant also sees this in his anthropology, where he says the moral law does not work directly on inclinations (as in other animals guided by instinct), but precisely to gentrify, reign in, the “unnatural” impulses in man (such as freedom). Hence we never ‘fit’ in the social systems like other animals do.
It is thus not capitalism that invents excess (it is already there as part of the signifying structure), but capitalism ‘exploits’ this excess in a particular way and presents the fantasm of excess without limits as the pursuit of its efforts. “Capitalism’s orientation toward a better future is really an orientation towards a pure excess without any admixture of lack.” (20). Capitalist society still produces goods, but these goods are rather a byproduct. It is waste that is the purpose of production. “Obviously, there are some commodities that just do the job, like the basic heater that warms our rooms or the no frills old car that some people drive. But such objects are not the driving force of capitalist society.” These objects are on the fringes of capitalist universe, and they are by no means predominant, and the people that use them are rarely important in this society. It is “excess that goes beyond the necessary” that “keeps people in capitalist society going” (21).
Take the example of Amazon. Amazon is succesful, not because it provides necessary objects, but because it produces a waste of useless, excessive ones. Other stores, just prodiving what people need “could not survive in the face of a megastore that overwhelmed people with its excesses. It is only by producing waste that one can reproduce oneself as a capitalist”. (ibid). This is because we do not enjoy what we need. Only what is beyond our needs (our good, our well-being) is enjoyable.
This is also what Marx discovers with his analysis of surplus-value. But Marx, coming before Freud cannot conceptualise the enjoyment that enables this structure, that is why capitalism continues to function (which is not because of ‘false consciousness’, but rather because of the structure of enjoyment qua excessiveness). “Capitalism reveals that the excess does have priority relative to questions of utility because it gives us a reason to live. This is not an ideological deception”.
That is to say, only in so far we enjoy, like the chess player that still has something to work on, can he mobilises the will to go on living. To perfect every move, to have nothing more to work on would equal complete boredom, and he would have nothing to motivate him, nothing to live for, nothing to enjoy. The problem is that when we try to conquer excess with a return to good, we cannot avoid the traditional hierarchies. “Excess depends on no longer being confined to doing what is socially necessary. This is why we cannot lament the turn to an open pursuit of excess without implicitly longing for the hierarchy that rules in premodernity.” As long as society aims at the good, whatever this good might be, it will confine excess to the ruling class or attempt to eliminate it. “This is why the equality of excess only becomes conceivable in capitalist modernity as excess overflows the traditional rituals and floods the entire social order.” (23).
The problem is in a way, that capitalism does not allow for the recognition of how lack is necessary for excess. The chess-player must be lacking in order to enjoy the game. There is no unbridled excess. To overcome lack, would mean to miss excess itself (enjoyment). Capitalism of course works by seperating lack and excess in terms of surplus-value: “Even though capitalism tells us that the commodity generates its own excess, we should not be too credulous. Without the sacrifice of surplus labor, without the loss that occurs in work, there would be no excess to enjoy in the commodity. At the same time, without the consumer’s sacrifice of money, the commodity would likewise be unenjoyable. The excess we enjoy is inseperable from what we lack.” (23). If we do not pay a lot of money for a car, we cannot enjoy it. We think about the lack, the sacrifice of money that goes into it, and this gives it, for a time, a sublime value, a surplus.
Capitalism uses lack to provide excess, but it doesn’t allow subjects to recognize this correlation, but instead presents excess as the overcoming of lack. “It is this refusal to link excess to lack that drives the production of so much waste in capitalist society” (23). This is also why as soon as the commodity is obtained, it only gives a small pleasure, and then no longer comes off as sublime (as the new car, the new shoes). It is also this structure that leads one to buy a new commodity. So capitalism promises excess without lack, but at the same time relies on lack in order to make the system go on, in order to generate the pursuit of ever new commodities. “Insisting on pure excess leads to inequality because it forces someone to silently sacrifice so that others can believe in the accessibility of pure excess.”
This is why there is no egalitarian principle in capitalism, the fantasy of pure excess, means that some will try to have this excess at the expense of others. Even in such an example as the sale this is at work. It promises that we can have the excess cheaper than others (not the normal price). The other consumers, paying full price, thereby occupy the position of lack, whereas I, going for the sale, can get excess without this limitation (the sale promises).
We can talk about the enjoyment and transcendence through sacrifice of the good, that I already touched on. Mcgowan writes: “Because it goes beyond the realm of the good, enjoyment depends on what one gives up. Although enjoyment is excessive, it requires sacrifice. One enjoys through the sacrifice of the good because this act creates something desirable. We give something up in order to assert the value of the object we desire. though this sacrifice, a sublime object, an object that exceeds all empirical (or good) objects, emerges. It is only through lack that we can enjoy beyond mere pleasure. What we lack is the way that we can access the beyond.” (24). There is in a way no transcendence in positive reality. Among empirical objects, they are simply there, but none of them have value, properly speaking.
We need to sacrifice an object, in order to create a beyond, in order to create transcendence. To create a sublime object, something we can enjoy, we have to enact a sacrifice. Something must be missing. We must produce loss, in order to have something transcendent to desire. We desire the object that is missing, and we enjoy the perpetual pursuit for it.
For the chess-player the victory takes on the position of the “missing” object, and he enjoys struggling for it. If victory was easy it would not be missing object. He can make the object more difficult (more missing) if he makes a plan to play with new strategy than the one he is comfortable with. This would also enhance enjoyment. In this way he sacrifices the good. But this sacrifice enables the sublime, the transcendent.
The transcendent object does not exist for (other) animals. Only for the animals that use signifiers like us. Only in this way can we enjoy. “There is no optimum point of enjoyment. But the result of the demand for more is itself enjoyment”. This is the way we can understand “encore”. It is a more that it is not at the end up of the process, but inherent in the process itself, it is a more not of quantity. “The capitalist demand for too much leaves the subject with a belief that it never has enough, but it is precisely this not enough that the capitalist subject enjoys.” The capitalist subject thereby misrecognizes there its enjoyment lies. It gets enjoyment, but it cannot see that this enjoyment comes from “not enough”, what what it does not have (yet), or what it has in the form of not-yet and not in the objects it has. “The disguise that capitalism creates obscures the enjoyment of lack through its promise of more.” (28).
This is also why capitalism thrives on instability. There is no “just the right amount” in capitalism. But there can also never be a balance, also outside of capitalism, as long as we are subjects of the signifier. This is why all kinds of eco-critical ‘return to balance’ will always go wrong, they misrecognize, like capitalism, what enjoyment is. Only psychoanalysis conceptualises that. This is why a marxism without psychoanalysis will end up in reintroducing the good, and hence the premodern hierarchies. The point is to free modernity from capitalism: “modernity frees us to enjoy what we lack rather than pursue the good.” (28–29)
Bibliography
McGowan, Todd. 2024. Pure Excess: Capitalism and the Commodity. New York: Columbia University Press.
