The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment (Psychoanalysis and Culture) by Todd McGowan (PDF)

Description

Explains why the American cultural obsession with enjoying ourselves actually makes it more difficult to do so.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “This is a compelling and indeed paradigm-shifting book that successfully combines Lacanian theory with cultural criticism to provide an in-depth analysis of the effects of global capitalism on contemporary American subjects. It is essential reading for those interested in cultural studies, psychoanalysis, contemporary film criticism, and contemporary literature.” About the Author Todd McGowan is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Vermont and the author of The Feminine “No!”: Psychoanalysis and the New Canon, also published by SUNY Press.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Todd McGowan, using the psychoanalytic concepts of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, argues that civilization has entered a new epoch thanks to a radical shift in the relation between prohibition and enjoyment. In traditional societies, life was primarily organized around fundamental prohibitions, that is, restrictions placed on our enjoyment. However, in consumer society, we now find that our main duty is to enjoy ourselves. The psychoanalytic irony, of course, is that this commandment to enjoy actually makes enjoyment harder and harder to attain. This does not just have ramifications on a personal level, but effects the whole of politics, economics and culture. If we hope to understand our current world and if we hope to change it, then McGowan’s insights are essential to grasp. Thankfully, he writes with unbelievable lucidity that will wow anybody who has struggled with the terminological difficulties present in the works of Lacan and Žižek. I cannot recommend this book enough. The book might be all about dissatisfaction but it itself certainly satisfies.

⭐If anyone is searching for a reason why everyday society in the West, especially England and America, has become the way it has, this book espouses some pretty convincing hypotheses.I came across it in February (2010) when excerpts of it were quoted by a Greek Professor Yannis Stavrakakis in a lecture he gave at the London School of Economics entitled ‘Authority, Enjoyment and the Spirits of Capitalism’.Developing and discussing many ideas put forth by fifties thinker Jaques Lacan, McGowan is persuasive in his argument that in the absence of anything but an imperative to enjoy ourselves, modern society has nothing to cling onto except this and guards its potential for – but seldom fully experienced – promised enjoyment at a cost of aggressiveness to ‘others’ who appear to ‘threaten’ it, political apathy and loss of a sense of ‘meaning’/belonging to a society that feels like a cohesive unit.This is one of the most stimulating reads I’ve had in ages and I was regularly smiling and agreeing out loud with the vast majority of his conclusions. I honestly felt ‘enlightened’ by reading it and that I had been shown into a privileged chamber from where one could get a ‘true’ view of the world and western society, to see how the malaise has arisen and why it is endemic. I felt – and still feel – strangely freed having read it. And it is beautifully written, which helps.The author has bypassed issues of God – though these would I presume come under the term ‘symbolic father’ – and focusses on a selection of modern films and books to expound his theses.I would recommend this book to everybody with a life in the West stretching out in front of them. My only criticism would be that Mr McGowan’s solution to the problems he details is too short. I would have liked to have seen a more thorough examination of how a commitment to ‘partial enjoyment’ in the majority of subjects would work in practice and whether it would be enough to alleviate our society’s unquenched yearning for an un-commodified moral cohesiveness – the ‘symbolic authority’ that has faded away. His solution seems to remain a totally individualistic one, and almost Buddhist in conception, based on constant monitoring of one’s own attitude to not being totally fulfilled. I can’t help feeling that it is an unrealistic hope that such mental discipline will be taken up on the vast scale needed to improve societal relations. But perhaps he views it as the only way forward we are left with in the face of unbridled capitalism?That aside however, this to me is a genuinely ‘paradigm-shifting’ (to use a phrase on the back cover) piece of writing and fascinating from beginning to end.

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