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Todd McGowan University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, USA, 2013, pp., 364, $45.00 paper, ISBN 13: 978-0-8032-4511-2
The genius of Todd McGowan’s new book, Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis, is its astute simplicity. Very few are able to relate the complicated concepts of Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalysis without obfuscating their meaning; McGowan is not only able to do this, but accomplishes it with examples from Hamlet to The Da Vinci Code. Positing the Freudian death drive as the structural alternative to a traditional political program, McGowan offers a take on psychoanalytic politics that stands as a clear voice amidst the diverse Lacanian field. While previous cultural theorists such as Theodor Adorno read Freud for his work on the pleasure principle and sexual liberation, today’s Lacanian left focuses instead on Freud’s radicalization of the death drive and rejects the idea of reform within the existing system. The crucial difference here is that the psychoanalytic project does not aim to “change the world”, and that the usefulness of this project comes from its very lack of political dogmatism. If, in the clinical setting, the psychoanalytic cure does not aim to radically change the life of the subject but simply make her realize that “she is that”, then one could say that this particular politics is more a recognition of how society is constituted than a transformation of society itself. The fundamental aspect of this constitution is, of course, antagonism. While previous models of psychoanalytic politics maintained that society could eliminate this fundamental antagonism within the social order, the political project founded on the death drive finds this to be impossible.
The death drive, in McGowan’s words, arises from “a death that occurs within life”, rather than the death that occurs at the end of life (p. 35). It is an impulse to return to a traumatic loss of an object that creates the desiring subject. As subjects, we