#todd mcgowan

[nousrose]

Everywhere we look something induces us to escape our alienation. We hear that we should search for a soul mate, do yoga, practice meditation, find the perfect job, relax with friends, or spend more time with our family. This omnipresent encouragement to discover a way out of alienation speaks to the danger that we assume it represents. According to our usual way of thinking, the alienated subject poses a threat to itself, to other people, and to society. Those suffering from alienation might kill themselves, hurt others, or violate the norms of human interaction. But alienation is not unbearable in itself. It is unbearable when one believes in the possibility of an unalienated state, in a past or a future free from the burden of it. The lure of overcoming alienation entraps subjects in the pursuit of a false possibility that deforms their perspective on existence. Existence becomes the struggle to transcend the obstacles standing in the way of achieving happiness. Unhappiness becomes a state to flee rather than the normal state of existence. Burdened by the image of an unalienated future, one finds oneself fleeing from existence itself. In such a position, there is no possibility for finding satisfaction in the everyday variegations of one’s life. People don’t become dangerous because of their alienation but because of their belief that they should be self-identical and are failing to achieve this aim. The danger consists in trying to overcome alienation, not in alienation itself.

Embracing Alienation

Todd McGowan

[1000rh]

All creation depends on alienation, which is a process that uproots us from our place and from the given properties of our existence. As it dislocates us, alienation frees us from our situation. Even though all people are born into a specific social situation in which powerful forces act on them, they are not reducible to the place where they emerge or to these determinative forces, no matter how powerful they may be. As a result of the primary alienation in language, an internal distance forms that allows people to relate to themselves as if to another entity, at the same time as it distances them from others who surround them. We are alienated both from ourselves and from others. No matter what we do, we will never overcome this alienation. It is the basic fact of our existence.

– Todd McGowan, Embracing Alienation: Why We Shouldn't Try to Find Ourselves (2024)

[loneberry]

“To belong is synonymous with banality.” —Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet “I could have had a father, a mother, brothers, sisters, an astrological sign, a life line on my palm, an Ayurvedic type, a blood type, a religion, opinions, I could have had a favorite color, I could have had a lucky charm, a talisman, icons, idols, I could have had wounds, longings, complaints, regrets, I could have said I’m from a generation, a country, a city, an era, a class, I could have laid claim to a gender or a sexuality, I could have sought a way to define myself, I could have believed in identity, or gone in search of my own, I could have been a victim or a culprit, I could have said J’accuse or Mea culpa, I could have looked for my roots, a reason, a why, I could have believed in genealogy, in sociology, in DNA, gone looking into the rabbis, the noblemen, the Basques, the ministers, or the junkies, I could have believed in all of that…” —Constance Debré, Name  “Origins should always be betrayed. To accept them is to compromise; give in that very first time and all the other times are made possible. It’s the primal act of complicity, of cowardliness, the first humiliation too. Whereas refusing origins is the first interruption; it then becomes possible to go on refusing.” —Constance Debré, Name “There is no belonging that doesn’t exclude someone.”  —Todd McGowan, Why Theory episode on The Public

I used to read narcissistically. I wanted to see myself in what I read. I wanted to find my tribe, my niche identity group. I had an anguished relationship to my mongrel identity, feeling neither authentically Chinese, American, and god knows, definitely not Italian. But something happened maybe 9 years ago—I became completely at peace with my non-belonging, or what Lacanians would call my constitutive lack/alienation. I shed the defensive part of my personality and grew curious about the world. Now difference interests me much more than sameness. I'm not tormented by the question of home, I don't waste energy on feeling out of place in the academy, out of place everywhere. I used to feel like I was chafing against every context I was in. Now I'm just interested... I can get interested in almost anything—the history of Portugal, the arcane technicalities of finance, Persian poetry, bone collector caterpillars, Soviet cinema, whatever. Once I let go of the aspiration for belonging I could relate to the world more freely, for something's relevance to me personally no longer mattered.

[altrbody]

"A subject is not the symbolic identity that corresponds to it. To understand how alienation operates, it helps to start with this basic disjunction between subjectivity and identity. Identity consists of the various social positions that one occupies: job, familial status, religious affiliation, political preference, ethnicity, and so on. No matter how much I see myself as any or all of these identities, I am never fully identical with them. This failure is subjectivity. No matter how I might mold them to fit myself, none of these identities can fully coincide with my subjectivity.

At the same time, symbolic identity, despite being unavoidable, is a flight from subjectivity. We seek respite from the problem of subjectivity in the promised security of our symbolic identity. The necessary failure of identity to provide this security doesn’t lessen our proclivity to seek it out continually for what it promises. Our political being depends on the relationship that we adopt to our symbolic identity.

Sinking into a symbolic identity, in contrast, allows one to avoid confronting political questions as political. These questions appear to have ready-made answers from the perspective of a symbolic identity. In this sense, symbolic identity is always an avoidance of the problem of emancipation. This is a point that Alenka Zupančič stresses in What IS Sex? According to Zupančič, “(emancipatory) politics begins with ‘loss of identity,’ and there is nothing deplorable in this loss.”4 Identity enacts a depoliticization of the subject. All identity is conformist.

When it adopts — or attempts to adopt — an identity, the subject always conforms because the forces of social authority establish every symbolic identity, even those that feel the most transgressive to those occupying them."

--Todd Mcgowan, Embracing Alienation: Why We Shouldnt Try to Find Ourselves

[blackcoffeestudies]

On the inspiring side, let us brietly return to Alain Badious account of love as the kind of transformative "event" that changes the basic coordinates of our being, making it impossible for us to go on living as we hitherto have. Love as a life-altering event of this kind is the very antithesis of narcissism, for it forces us to reorganize our entire existence so as to accommodate the arrival of the loved one; it asks us to surrender the modes of the life that we have devised…From this moment on, the enigma of the other will excite us, incite us, arouse us, and sometimes even drive us crazy.

This is why Todd McGowan argues that love is rarely "a good investment." It doesn't necessarily yield a profit of calm contentment, nor does it grant us the wholeness that we're looking for. It's much more likely to derail us. If our romantic culture tries to tame love, to render it safe and convenient, the event of love can be tremendously unsafe and inconvenient in the sense that it interrupts the usual flow of life and not always in a manageable way; the event of love can be as traumatizing as it is uplifting.

The event of love, as Badiou theorizes it, doesn't allow us to invest in the fantasy that the other will complete our being Indeed, because it forces us to view the other as a subject in her own right (rather than as an object designed solely for the purpose of making us whole)…

This means that we have to come to terms with the process of loving a flawed person. This may explain why the event of love may not always be brought about by a person who on a superficial level meets the socially accredited attributes of desirability-such as physical attractiveness or professional success— but by a person who touches some deeper chord in us.

For the event of love to be ignited, we must encounter a person who meets the idiosyncratic contours of our desire without allowing us to fall into the narcissistic pattern I sketched above.

He or she does not serve as a mirror as much as he or she interrupts our complacency, infusing our being with new energy in ways that can be both vitalizing and disconcerting. Instead of the serene surface of a pleasing mirror, such a person offers us the turbulence of feeling fully alive (sometimes too much so, agonizingly so).

Mari Ruti, Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings (153-154)

[improvisedliturgy]

Poetry leaves no barrier between the subject and its artistic manifestation. The result is not, as one might expect, that poetry perfectly expresses subjectivity or that poetry is subjectivity. Instead, poetry enables us to recognize that the subject’s alienation from itself is not the product of the artistic form it employs. The subject is divided from itself even in the form in which it is completely at home. Even in language without any material substrate, the subject remains alien to itself in the artwork. […] Poetry…reveals that contradiction as such is impossible to overcome.

Todd McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution

[grandpasessions]

The absence of civility in the society of enjoyment indicates the extent to which the subject in this society remains lacking. That is to say, the contemporary subject becomes uncivil because she/he continues to be haunted by her/his own lack of enjoyment. If we were really enjoying ourselves today, we would not develop aggressiveness in response to the other’s enjoyment and believe that this enjoyment is rightfully ours. Instead, content with our own enjoyment, we would adopt an attitude of indifference toward that of the other. When I am really enjoying, I do not envy the enjoyment of the other, as the uncivil and aggressive subject in the society of enjoyment does.

Incivility and aggressiveness are symptomatic of the society of enjoyment because its subjects are constitutively unable to enjoy themselves and yet constantly feel as if enjoyment is their right. Many social commentators have recently tackled the subject of rising incivility and aggressiveness, but none has linked this phenomenon to the disappearance of prohibition as directly as popular cultural critic Stephen Carter. Carter, best known for The Culture of Disbelief, sees incivility as the product of our refusal of individual sacrifice for the sake of the society as a whole—that is, to translate it into our terms, as the result of a turn away from the prohibition of enjoyment. In his treatise Civility, he claims, “Civility is possible only if members of a community bind themselves to obey a set of rules of behavior not because the law requires it but because they understand the virtue of sacrificing their own desires—their own freedom to choose—for the good of the larger community of which they are a part.”

As subjects refuse this sacrifice— or the social order no longer explicitly demands it—civility increasingly transforms into incivility. We become reluctant to set aside our own enjoyment and instead insist on it. This affects the way that we drive, walk, shop, talk, and generally interact with other subjects.

The End of Dissatisfaction Todd McGowan

[yayfeminism]

The capitalist economy enters into crisis not through scarcity but through overproduction, the production of an excess of commodities with a paucity of consumers for these commodities. Recessions and depressions are the result of too many goods, not too few. What is telling is not only the form of the capitalist crisis but the measures taken to ameliorate it. All attempts to create a stable system reveal its unnatural and unharmonious status. For instance, the Keynesian solution of excessive state spending shows that capitalism doesn’t properly function as a natural order. The immiseration that capitalism causes is not the result of its inability to produce enough commodities for consumers to buy but the by-product of the excess it produces. Even on the most commonsensical level, the fact that an excess of production leads to a crisis can only seem bizarre.

Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets" by "Todd McGowan