#surplus enjoyment

[zzzaaafffaaarrr]

[grandpasessions]

When today’s post-Marxists write treatises where they ponder endlessly on what to do, on who might be the agent of radical change, their desperate doubt and search effectively bears witness to the waning of their desire to really embark on a radical change: they don’t really desire change, they rather enjoy the endless self-critical pondering which, as they know well, will not lead to any clear result.

Surplus Enjoyment S. Zizek

[monasticcellphone]

I don’t mean to imply that since no political decision or project can ever be fully justified by or grounded in what precedes it (or in its circumstances) we might as well stop complaining about it and pointing at dirty conditions behind it. Or that it doesn’t really matter what we do (politically), since whatever we do, this gap will always be there and all political decision will ultimately always be decisions of Power. On the contrary, it is precisely because of this that it matters very much what we do.

Alenko Zupancic, “When Surplus Enjoyment Meets Surplus Value” in Reflections on Seminar XVII, 177. (emphasis my own)

[monasticcellphone]

Repetition bears a certain relationship to what is the limit of this knowledge, and which we call jouissance.

Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis

[alwynlau]

"The greatest threat to pleasure is not a scarcity that prevents full access to it, but the excess of pleasure itself."

Žižek