Todd McGowan - Enjoyment Right & Left

The discursive analysis of ideology fails to capture the mode of enjoyment an ideology mobilizes. In his new path-breaking book, Todd McGowan elaborates on the formal structure of enjoyment which distinguishes the Left from the Right. The enjoyment mobilized by the Left is not sustained by envy and resentment, it leaves behind the motifs of the theft of enjoyment that permeates racism and sexism. Enjoyment Right & Left deserves to become an instant classic it cuts into the very heart of what is wrong in todays fundamentalism and its apparent opposite, permissive liberalism.

Slavoj iek

Author of Less Than Nothing

McGowans game-changing book compellingly answers one of the most vexing questions of our time: why do our best-intentioned leftist political projects continually fail? Against the contemporary progressive zeitgeist of championing the particular over the universal and insisting on inclusivity over nonbelonging, McGowan shows that emancipatory politics requires that we commit ourselves to accept our universal nonbelonging. Through his characteristically novel analyses of wide-ranging cultural and political phenomenaincluding the Black Lives Matter movement, sports fandom, the Christmas movie genre, the Haitian Revolution, and falling in loveMcGowan obliges us to recognize that a truly egalitarian society is not possible without radical enjoyment.

Jennifer Friedlander

Author of Real Deceptions

Forget political opinions, to say nothing of considered opinions. In what deserves to be a game-changer, Todd McGowan convincingly shows how political postures are founded on forms of enjoyment, unconscious gratifications paradoxically closer to suffering than to pleasure, closer to sacrifice than to satisfaction. A real adventure of insight.

Richard Boothby

Author of Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred

McGowans readabilityis traceable to his ability to relate abstruse ideas to aspects of everyday life and common experiences. His style of writing when offering explanations for difficult terms and ideas results in an admirable lucidity.

Sean Sheehan

Reviewing Emancipation After Hegel in Marx and Philosophy

Enjoyment Right & Left

First Published by Sublation Media 2022

Copyright 2022 Todd McGowan

All Rights Reserved

Commissioned and Edited by Douglas Lain

Copy Editor Konrad Jandavs

A Sublation Press Book

Published by Sublation Media LLC

Distributed by Itasca Books

www.sublationmedia.com

Print ISBN: 979-8-9867884-0-1

eBook ISBN: 979-8-9867884-1-8

Edited and typeset by Polifolia in East Germany

Printed in the United States of America

For Jennifer Friedlander and Henry Krips

Thanks for really lacking

Contents

Acknowledgments

I appreciate Douglas Lain having confidence in this book and encouraging me to publish it with Sublation Press.

My parents, Sandi and Bob McGowan, taught me the power of an unrelenting fundamentalist enjoyment throughout my early childhood. It was real horrorshow. But at the same time, they were unconsciously zealous devotees of German Idealism, which opened up a different path, one that I ended up choosing.

Thanks to Wyk McGowan for remaining friends with the three.

Jane and Del Neroni somehow came up with Hilary, without whom I would exist in total barrenness. Thus, I owe more to them than to anyone.

Thanks to my twin sons, Dashiell and Theo Neroni, who demonstrated to me the appeal of enjoying through ones enemy. Unfortunately, that enemy was typically me.

Certain people have made the University of Vermont more enjoyable for me than it is for most: Sarah Alexander, Andrew Barnaby, Emily Bernard, Bill Falls, John Waldron, and Hyon Joo Yoo.

Bea Bookchin is, for me, the absolute embodiment of leftist enjoyment. She manages to win friends and influence people even among her most entrenched political adversaries. She has never had an enemy, despite the best efforts of her allies.

LACK has been central to my experiences of excess. Thanks especially to Anna Kornbluh and Russel Sbriglia for reminding me that it can be enjoyable to read a novel every once in a while, as long as its not written in the first person.

I appreciate the support of Clint Burnham, Joan Copjec, Matthew Flisfeder, Sheldon George, Scott Krzych, Don Kunze, Juan Pablo Lucchelli, Hugh Manon, Quentin Martin, Jonathan Mulrooney, Carol Owens, Kenneth Reinhard, Frances Restuccia, Molly Rothenberg, Stephanie Swales, Louis-Paul Willis, Jean Wyatt, and Cindy Zeiher. Its best not to have friends, but second best to have friends such as these.

Thanks to Sheila Kunkle for pointing out how the turn to the superego infects contemporary leftism. Her own resistance to superegoic pressure makes her the perfect friend of the idand thus the perfect comrade.

Ryan Engley has talked through the problem of political enjoyment with me more than anyone else. But after all, he convinced me that sports provide a far more compelling terrain in which to invest ourselves psychically.

Slavoj iek has provided too much help. I appreciate that he always acted as if it wasnt a burden at all.

Walter Davis has rightly pushed my thinking at every turn to get beyond invoking enjoyment as an abstract category. As will quickly become evident, I continued to do it anyway just to annoy him.

Thanks to Jennifer Friedlander and Henry Krips for centering our friendship around existential despair. They are the ideal partners for founding an academic organization because they view all academic organizations with the proper amount of disdain. We share an abhorrence for the three Bs.

Im not sure where Mari Ruti came from, but I am thankful for her absolute singularity of being. I feel as if her character calls me out with a summons of love to reinvent my soul. But I cant seem to be able to respond other than by opting out to try to preserve my immortal within.

I have a debt of gratitude for the friendship and intercessions of Richard Boothby, who knows that he knows nothing, unlike most of us, which is why my sons continually find him so much more interesting than me.

Thanks to Daniel Cho, whose reading of this book allowed certain ideas to quietly disappear from it. I feel badly for continuing to exploit his kind willingness to read through my books, but not badly enough to stop.

I appreciate Hilary Neroni having fewer critical comments on this book than others I have written. I thought this was a great sign until I realized that this book is simply much shorter than the others.

Thanks to Walter Davis, Paul Eisenstein, and Hilary Neroni, who remind me that we can make a heaven of hell and not just a hell of heaven.

The

Outsiders

Political struggles take place to determine what form of enjoyment will predominate. And yet, neither political activists nor theorists tend to talk about enjoyment. It initially seems distant from politics, but when we recognize whats at stake in enjoyment, its importance for understanding politics will hopefully become clear. Enjoyment is not just pleasure but the experience that goes beyond pleasurean experience of excess. There is always too much enjoyment, never just enough. We enjoy when we unconsciously disturb our usual routines, throw ourselves off course, or cause too much trouble for ourselves. Such acts dont make sense according to conscious calculation. The inexplicability of enjoyment renders it a difficult political tool, which is why almost all political thinking has simply ignored it.