The Crucifixion of Eros: An Interview with Matthew Clemente

Now more than ever the rashness of predicting the future is revealed in all its futility, but nonetheless I will make bold to say that the future of the philosophy of religion is in very good hands indeed with the young and newly minted scholar Matthew Clemente coming on board and making a splash with his new book, the fruit of his doctoral dissertation, which was just recently published: Eros Crucified: Death, Desire, and the Divine in Psychoanalysis and Philosophy of Religion  (Routledge, 2019), 202pp.

It is such a deeply fascinating book that I find myself almost ineluctably picking it up again and again to re-read parts of it, all the while plotting to find ways to use it in my courses.

Now, you might expect that with such a title and focus, this book would be catnip to me, a psychoanalyst manqué, and you would be right.

But in addition to the book's engagement with our father among the saints, Sigmund of Vienna, there are many other wide-ranging and often astonishing insights and claims, and then there is still more: the book's method, which is my second principal reason for delighting in it, recommending it, and wanting my students to read it. Here Clemente embodies, with almost effortless grace, the method of "despoiling the Egyptians," of discerning the spirits, of finding good wherever it may be found and engaging it directly.

This is a method I have had to spend no little time and energy trying to inculcate in my students in the past two years, many of whom seem increasingly to be not just uninterested in but hostile to learning from such as Nietzsche, Freud, Kierkegaard, Plato, Kristeva, Lacan, Levinas, and Žižek, inter alia, all of whom (and others) feature prominently as interlocutors in this book. Rather than retreat into some enclave of Catholic identity from which to hold oneself aloof from figures such as these (one of my students said to me this year that he refused to learn from "anybody who doesn't have 'St.' in front of their name"!), Clemente finds what is good, notes what is not, and moves on without rancor or defensiveness. It is very refreshing and encouraging to behold.

Following my usual practice, I e-mailed him some questions about the book, and here are his thoughts:

AD: Tell us about your background

MC: My friend and mentor, the philosopher Richard Kearney, is known for asking his students Paul Ricoeur’s famous introductory question: d'où parlez-vous? Where do you speak from? And of course, the answer always comes in the form of a story. Where do you speak from means tell us your story, tell us the story of your life. Well, my life as a philosopher began by mistake. I was not called to philosophy by an oracle. I fell into it like Adam into sin.

I am notoriously bad at keeping a schedule and have been my entire life. (I often joke that my wife is the single mother of four children, our three kids and me. I wouldn’t know where I was going or what day it was if not for her). The summer before my freshman year of college, I was scheduled to register for classes on a certain day at a certain time. Naturally, I forgot. And by the time I realized my mistake, all of the classes I had planned on taking were filled. Left with few options and feeling more than a little desperate, I decided to fulfill as many core requirements as I could. I ended up taking the last available seat in the last available Intro to Philosophy class. (I had never read a word of philosophy before then and didn’t expect to read much after the semester ended).

That class happened to be taught by a professor named John Manoussakis. I was there for his very first lecture at Holy Cross and his was the first college class I took. 12 years later, I completed my doctorate in philosophy and published my first book which focuses mainly on Manoussakis’s work.

I currently teach at Boston College and at Suffolk University, am the Associate Editor of the Journal of Continental Philosophy and Religion (Brill), and have been fortunate enough to study with and work alongside some of the best living Continental philosophers, Kearney and Manoussakis in particular.

AD: What led to the writing of Eros Crucified?

MC: The things that interest me are the things I don’t understand and will never understand. What to make of death. What to make of sex. What to make of great suffering and great beauty. How to reconcile these brute facts of human existence—my existence—with my own struggles over and longing for faith.

I think it would be a fair criticism of me and my work to say that I try to say too many things. When I was writing Eros Crucified, I was nagged by this persistent feeling, this little inner-voice that kept telling me “you’re doing too much.” But I’ve always been that way. I’ve always wanted to say everything, everything I ever thought, everything I ever felt, all I had to say. Eros Crucified is a first attempt at that. (God willing, there will be many more). It represents, for better or worse, the ideas and obsessions that have boggled my mind for the past half-decade and probably much, much longer.

AD: Your disclaimer at the outset outlines a bit of an analogy between a philosopher and a detective like Sherlock Holmes. Later on you quote Ricoeur ("controlled schizophrenia") on the problems of effecting too sharp a separation between philosophy and theology. Tell us a bit more about your own understanding of the relationship between philosophy and theology, and how you see a philosophical mind working.

MC: My book was born out of my dissertation. After my defense, the big take away I got from my readers was that at times it was unclear what position I was defending, which side of a question I was trying to argue for and which I was trying to upend. This, I realized, amounted to a difference in methodology.

For me, writing philosophy is not like writing a logical proof. A proof begins with a conclusion and builds an argument from which that conclusion necessarily follows. My writing was much more organic. At different points during the writing process I agreed with, or at least honestly entertained, every idea put forth. By the end, I don’t think I agreed with any of them. That is because philosophy begins with questions—or at least it ought to—and pursues answers, answers it will never find, only approach. The search is the thing. And who knows where the search will lead?

I love detective fiction and have been reading a lot of it lately. The detective is for me the ideal thinker. He is a questioner, a believer, an artist. In him, philosophy, theology, and poetry meet. As a philosopher, he knows that he knows not. He is late on the scene and so must question his way toward probable answers. He deals in probability, not certainty. Even when he solves a case, he never knows exactly what happened or why it happened. He was not there. He will never know. But he hopes to get nearer to the truth, closer to understanding, and he finds satisfaction in simply knowing what the truth is like—what might have happened, what probably happened, what is most likely to have happened.

Now although he is a skeptic and a questioner, the detective is not a doubter. Every detective is a theologian and indeed must be. By that I mean the detective is committed. He has his dogmas, his fundamental principles, which ground and orient his search. If he didn’t believe—believe to the core of him, in his very bones—he would never begin. There is such a thing as crime. There is such a thing as truth. The detective stands against one and on the side of the other. And while he may never know, still he believes there is something to know. He believes his search for truth will not be in vain. These are the premises from which his investigation begins, the foundation on which every investigation is built.

Yet in order to solve the case, the detective must do more than question and believe. He must create. He must paint a picture. Provide an image where no image exists.

Holmes and his descendants emphasize the role that reason plays in uncovering the truth. But the truth is that truth is never uncovered. It is recreated, reinvented, birthed into existence by the artists of existence, those who take the raw material of existence and make of it something that enables us to see and hear the world around us. Without inventiveness, without poetic imagination, no question would ever be answered, no problem ever solved. Experience is interpretation. Interpretation is construction. Construction is art. This fact goes unacknowledged by philosophers and detectives alike, but it is an essential aspect of how they—and we, all of us, who must create the world in order to live in it—engage with existence.

AD: Your Preface immediately takes us to the problem at hand: the poisoning of eros by Christianity (at least according to Nietzsche). For many Catholics today, bombarded with banal slogans about a "theology of the body" for 30 years now, this might come as a startling claim. Tell us a bit more about what you mean, including your claim of "the grave danger of a spiritualized sexuality" (p.80).

One of the great things about teaching philosophy is being reminded every semester of where our ideas come from, where our understandings of ourselves, our world, our relation to the divine originate. So much of what we call “Christianity” predates Christ—or at least Christ as incarnated in Jesus, the man who drank wine and went to weddings, wore clothes and did all of the unnatural and ridiculous things we human beings do.

The notion of spiritual purity, for instance, is thoroughly Platonic. The idea of the immortal soul is not a Christian one. (Why care about the resurrection of the body if there is an immortal soul that goes to heaven or hell the moment one dies?). Nietzsche is not wrong to call Christianity “Platonism for the masses.” By and large, what we think of when we think of Christianity is merely a less sophisticated form of Platonic philosophy. But this is a great danger. Because if the incarnation stands in opposition to anything, it is the spiritualized view of the human person offered by Platonic philosophy.

Sex is one of the strange and unsettling things about human existence that gets reduced by philosophy. Plato, of course, diminishes it. How often does he put into the mouth of Socrates the notion that sex (and bodily pleasure of any kind) is beneath the philosopher, the spiritualist par excellence who strives only for “higher” intellectual pleasures?

But the same is true in reverse. To idealize sex, to see it as some pure and sacred event rather than recognizing it for what it is—both beautiful and disgusting, at once the pinnacle of our existence and the epitome of our degradation—is to deny the scandalous truth of the incarnation. It is to reject the belief that God became man. Fully man, utterly man, with all of the parts of a man—even the most intimate and the most profane. Christ was—to borrow another phrase from Nietzsche—human, all too human. We, unfortunately, are not.

AD: "Eros has become an idol." There are many ways that crucial claim of your book can be hijacked, it seems to me, but you're not interested in simplistic one-sided ranting against "too much sex on TV today" or anything like that. Rather, part of your project, it seems to me, is to maintain the tension Freud saw: "The highest and the lowest are always closest to each other in the sphere of sexuality," a claim you immediately set alongside St. Paul's letters and, later, Kearney's recognition that "pornography...is a twin of Puritanism." Unpack all of this and tell us about the tension you maintain in the grandeur and griminess of human sexual desire, the "baseness and beatitude" you speak of later (p.125).

One of the things that Christians, myself included, don’t spend enough time reflecting upon and thus fail to take as seriously as we should is that religion itself is the greatest form of idolatry, that belief is a temptation, that Christ reserves his harshest rebukes for those who believe most ardently. To believe in God is an easy thing. It costs little and provides a good deal of comfort. What could be better than believing that everything happens for a reason, that there is someone looking down on us from on high, some utterly perfect, utterly beneficent, utterly distant being who guarantees our security and yet remains immune to the illness of the world?

Human life, we all know but rarely admit, is messy and complicated and the best aspects of our existence are also the worst. Our cities are built on top of sewers. Our advances are bought with war and destruction. Art is born of suffering. Life springs forth from the bowels. Being honest about our situation is hard enough. We prefer to flatter ourselves with thoughts of the “inherent dignity” of man. Or, if we’re being reactionary, we take pleasure in emphasizing the ills of human existence to the exclusion of its beauty. Sometimes we even deny that beauty exists. This is our lot. These are the ways in which we conceive of ourselves. And then along comes this strange and startling god—a god who is fully human, more human than any of us—and he alone is honest. He alone shows us—not with words or dictates, but with his life, with how he lives and, even more so, how he dies—that each of us is infinitely beautiful, infinitely perverse.

If Eros has become for us an idol that is because we refuse to see our sexuality (and thus our humanity) as it is revealed to us in the person of Jesus Christ. We refuse to look at the one who has been humbled and exalted, humiliated and, in his very humiliation, lifted up. In denying him, we deny ourselves. We prefer the counterfeit to the real thing, the lie to the truth of who and what we are.

AD: As one who has recently written a lot about Freud, and is working on a book ("Theology After Freud") I was fascinated by your treatment of him, which seems to me so skillful and deft in many ways--finding what is good and useful, but not being afraid to criticize or go beyond him. You also note--as did Lacan and Manoussakis--that there is significant overlap between Freud and Augustine. Tell us a bit more about that.

Thank you for your kind words. One of the goals of my writing is to test everything and retain what’s good, as St. Paul put it. A close friend, William Hendel, recently suggested to me that this single line of Scripture sums up St. Thomas’s entire project. Thomas is motivated by a desire to see how many disparate things he can incorporate into a deeper, richer, more philosophically complex understanding of Catholicism. I don’t know that anyone would call me a Thomist, but in this sense at least I view myself as very much indebted to the Thomist tradition.

Chesterton once observed, “The strongest saints and the strongest sceptics alike take positive evil as the starting-point of their argument.” I would say that this is what any honest man must do. That the human heart is more perverse than anything—“beyond remedy,” the prophet Jeremiah insists—is one of the first discoveries made by any man who looks into himself. It should come as no surprise then to find so much overlap between Freud and Augustine, the psychoanalyst and the orthodox Christian. After all, both attempt to offer an image of the phenomena of life by plumbing the depths of the human soul, and their own individual souls most of all.

I have never really understood why so many Christians are reluctant to accept and adopt the best arguments from the best thinkers. Heinrich Heine—an underappreciated philosopher and great wit (his work is really just a pleasure to read)—notes that so-called pessimistic philosophers, those seen by many to be the enemies of faith, actually provide the faithful with a good deal of ammunition. Their bleak (and honest) assessments of the human condition, far from refuting the tenants of faith, lend support to dogmas like original sin. Heine, of course, was bemoaning this fact. But I accept his observation and will adopt it for my own purposes. Nietzsche, Freud, Sartre, Lacan—these are not our enemies. They are our great thinkers, our great sufferers. Their insights have been purchased at a price. The price of honesty, an honest assessment of themselves. I am ready to listen to anyone willing to look into the depths of his own heart. And I’m not surprised when he reports having seen nothing there but dark.

AD: In a time when--if they know anything--most people assume that Catholic Christianity is conservative, if not reactionary, when it comes to questions of sex, sexuality, and gender, you speak of "the radical reevaluation of gender relations introduced by the Christian understanding of sacramental sexuality" (p.118). Tell us a bit more of what you mean here.

Freud, in classifying libido as masculine, identifies the desire to use and objectify others for our own selfish purposes—sadism in his terminology, will to power in Nietzsche’s—as the defining characteristic of human sexuality and thus the defining characteristic of human beings. The violently obsessive nature of male desire seeks the subjugation and ultimately the destruction of that which it loves; “male love is murder,” to quote Žižek. That we desire, in a very literal sense, a love object and not another human being seems to me not only experientially verifiable, but also irrefutable.

To return to a point touched upon above: isn’t desire understood as such the glue that binds together the apparent opposition between pornography and puritanism? What is the attraction of the pornographic if not that it gives the viewer an object to vent his sexual desires upon in the place of a real human being? What does puritanism offer if not an idealized (that is, inhuman) image of purity that only an object could attain?. Interestingly, Freud posits that women too are defined by this destructive desire and that sadistic sexuality, far from being an exclusively male problem, is the rule. Yet how do we account for the existence of a love beyond exploitation, one that forgoes power, refuses to objectify, loosens its grasp? (Obviously, for Freud no such love exists).

It is no secret that Christianity has throughout its history neglected the feminine, feared it, suppressed it, relegated it to the realm of the irrational and untrue. But if we’re being honest, we must admit that the Christ we meet in the Gospels is not a particularly masculine figure. A savior who comes not in power but in weakness, who preaches mercy instead of justice, forgiveness in place of revenge, who measures his wealth not by how much he can possess but how much he can give away, who shows us how to inhabit our vulnerability and be honest about our frailty, whose love is abandonment—that is not a very manly savior.

What is fascinating is that thinkers such as Nietzsche and Lacan appreciate this “revaluation of values” while many of their Christian counterparts—who focus with an almost fetishistic fervor on the perfection, omnipotence, justice, and transcendence of the divine—fail to even recognize it. In Beyond Good and Evil, for instance, Nietzsche speaks of woman as “clairvoyant in the world of suffering” and then immediately links female love with the love of Christ. Lacan, writing in Seminar XX on the “something more” (en plus) of female jouissance, says that male mystics such as John of the Cross embody feminine desire and he links that mysterious jouissance with l’amour de Dieu.

There is no question, I think, that if human sexuality is to be saved—and by that I mean, if human beings are to be saved—it can only be by means of the crucifixion of Eros, the nailing to the cross of our lust for power and might.

AD: Your quoting Mannoussakis, "There is no other" (p.123) puts me immediately in mind of Winnicott's equally blunt aphorism, "there's no such thing as a baby." Unpack this a bit for us.

Your pairing of these assertions is, I think, instructive. The first gestures at what I was just saying in response to your last question. There is no other means that the other is for me merely an object, a tool that I use and abuse for my pleasure. There is no baby means that for the infant, there is no self or rather that the self is all other, lost in the oblivion of fusion (“oceanic oneness” in Freud’s language) with the mother. Both capture something true about the human condition which strives at all costs to eliminate otherness, either by reducing it to the subhuman (sadism) or subsuming it into the indifferentiation that makes one from two (fusion). Both, of course, are different instantiations of Thanatos, the death drive, the desire our own unmaking. Both refuse the salvation that comes from without, the grace that comes from the other.

AD: Sum up your hopes for the book, and who especially should read it.

Whenever I write, I write with a reader in mind. That reader is the person I am trying to persuade, the one for whom all of my arguments and hesitations, illustrations and tangents are intended. The worst writing is written for an audience that already agrees. I assume a suspicious reader. My reader is hostile.

My goal is not to win a convert but simply to get the reader to acknowledge that a person as reasonable as him or herself could hold the positions I put forward. My ideal reader for this book would be someone skeptical of faith—Catholic Christianity in particular—someone with an affinity for existential philosophy and Freudian psychoanalytic thought.

But books are made to be read and ideal readers—like all ideals—simply do not exist. As I have worked through your questions, I have been touched time and again by your charitable and attentive reading of my work. That there is someone willing to show my book such good will tells me that my highest hopes for this project have already been reached. An author cannot ask for more.

AD: Having finished this book, what projects are you at work on now?

My latest obsession has been Socrates’s assertion at the end of the Symposium that authors should be able to write both tragedies and comedies, the true tragic dramatist is also a comic poet. I see the seeds of work of literary theory developing along these lines but God only knows if and when it will be finished.

Why Do We Keep Making the Same Mistakes?

Who among us has not instantly and constantly recognized oneself in the famous Pauline "I-not-I" passage at the end of Romans 7? Here Paul reflects on his own constant and relentless tendency to see the good but not do it, and to see the evil but not avoid it. This plagues all of us as a result of the introduction of what we might call deathful sin into the world. As the apostle says:

It was sin, working death in me through what is good, in order that sin might be shown to be sin, and through the commandment might become sinful beyond measure. We know that the law is spiritual; but I am carnal, sold under sin. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand.

For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I of myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.

Here we see plainly evidence of what Freud would infamously call the "repetition compulsion" which is a central feature of the "death drive." Here we see, too, clear evidence of what Melanie Klein called "splitting" as parts of the mind war against the self and God. In all this, as in so many other instances (cf. Evagrius on the logismoi), Christianity anticipated what it would take modern psychology 1900 years to develop.

One person to grasp and admit this very readily is the late English analyst Nina Coltart, author of a book I read 25 years ago now, and return to more times than I can count: Slouching Toward Bethlehem. In her book, Coltart recognized that “We [analysts] deal with sin and its ramifying effects as surely as did a monk taking confession in his cell in the twelfth century; and we are the current representatives of a long tradition of those who worked for the cure of souls and who, in doing so, tried to bring not only insight but also transformation to the suffering sinner.” A little later in the book she also notes that “It may be a viable argument to say that Freud restored a sense of sin…and in so doing he rendered a service." (He did much more than that, as I have argued all over the place these last few years, not least in my new book Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power.)

In event, all that is prologue to a new, very short, but very powerful and useful little book that I recently received: Juan-David Nasio, Psychoanalysis and Repetition: Why Do We Keep Making the Same Mistakes? trans. David Pettigrew (SUNY Press, 2019), 98pp. For those who may be thrown off by the title, pay attention to the subtitle, which really says it all. Nasio's use of Freud and Lacan is very sparing, and as noted below his insights are very useful to Christians who feel caught in habitual sin (cf. Romans 7:13ff) and other repetitive habits destructive of ourselves, our human relationships, and our relationship with God.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

In Psychoanalysis and Repetition, Juan-David Nasio, one of the leading contemporary Lacanian psychoanalysts in France, argues that unconscious repetition represents the core of psychoanalysis as well as no less than the fundamental constitution of the human being. Through repetition, the unconscious memory of the past erupts, without our knowledge, in our choices and actions, to such an extent that, for Nasio, we are our past in action.

While Nasio explains that repetition is both healthy and pathological, the book is primarily concerned with the repetition of unconscious trauma, as trauma engenders trauma, through unconscious fantasms that are expressed, in turn, as symptoms. Through vivid clinical examples, as well as trenchant theoretical explications involving repetition, Nasio illuminates a range of fundamental concepts in Freud and Lacan and offers a rethinking of the psychoanalytic tradition in the context of this theme. Nasio’s approach is richly interdisciplinary, incorporating passages from philosophers Descartes and Spinoza, for example, and from such literary figures as Pindar, Proust, and Verlaine. The interdisciplinary fabric of Nasio’s discourse conveys the crucial importance of the concept of repetition in psychoanalysis and in the human condition.

This book, of course, draws on what is arguably the most controversial work in a life and career marked by much of the same: Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where he postulated the existence of a repetition compulsion as part of the death drive. Until very recently, almost every analyst was at pains to pretend this theory did not exist. Even a noted sycophant like Ernest Jones severely downplayed the work in his three-volume hagiography of Freud's life.

More recently, however, and strikingly, the death drive has come in for a lot of renewed attention, much of it discussed on here in the past two years. For all the bogus controversy dredged up between Freud and Christians, this point seems to me to be the most obvious and easily accessible place for theology and Freud to begin a dialogue. Thus I think Christians should be the people most receptive to this theory, finding it most congenial to and so manifestly compatible with what we understand of original sin and its effects on us (cf. Romans 7:14ff.). More recently others have been coming to this conclusion, including Paul Axton.

I'm finding Nasio's text very valuable in revealing the nature of trauma and how it works on the memory. I'm also moved by the brief interview with which the book begins, in which Nasio explains how he practices as an analyst, a method and manner that strikes me as very kenotic.

He also has interesting insights into the problems of memory and forgetting, which I have often discussed on here in relation to Adam Phillips, inter alia. Thus Nasio can write that "There is more of the unconscious in a symptom than in the memory of an important family event" (5). That is a useful reminder that memories do not capture everything, and are often changed in their recalling, especially if more than one person recalls the memory. Thus he will write a little later on that "repetition is repetition of the Same...but--take note!--never identical to itself, always slightly modified each time is surges" (11). Because of this lack of total identity between recall, he can say--as many others have demonstrated--that "Memory is always capricious and unfaithful" (20).

Nasio's book is also a reminder that the same trauma can and does affect different people in different ways, and it profits nobody anything to downplay or outright deny some kind of traumatic suffering merely because one, apparently, managed to live through the same event and emerge relatively unscathed. He further notes that not everything we might later think traumatic existed clearly and unambiguously in those terms at the time. Instead, the messiness of memory can play a significant role here, especially repeated memories: "The 'return' of pathological repetition, the Same...that haunts the subject, is a blind and violent emotion experienced in childhood or puberty, during a half-real, half-imagined traumatic episode of a sexual, aggressive, or sad character" (24).

Even if traumatic memories may be half-real and half-imagined, sometimes people get involved, as Nasio says, in pathological repetition, which can be "not only painful in its manifestation but also compulsive in its eruption. Repetition is compulsive because it results form an irresistible double force of the unconscious fantasm: a push upward in order to externalize itself, and a push forward in order to begin again. Every compulsion bears this double movement upward and forward" (36). This is very much in keeping with how Freud and others more recently have seen this, perhaps especially Todd McGowan, whose hugely insightful book Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis I discussed in several installments.

We can never tire of reminding ourselves: the death drive is not nihilistic! It is teleological. Pathological repetition, that key hallmark of the drive, is teleological. The drive and its cycles of repetition, even--especially--retraumatizing repetition, all act purposefully. They seek something. They need something. They are striving after something that, however mistakenly, the mind thinks will be salutary and perhaps even healing. As Nasio puts it, trauma, strangely, exercises an "attraction" to "an exclusive and unhealthy model of satisfaction" (28). This teleological orientation is so strong in some that, as Nasio says, "trauma is paradoxically a drug, and the one who is traumatized is addicted to this drug. Trauma engenders trauma" (23).

The single greatest insight I found in this book was its clarification about the very nature and typology of trauma. We are mistaken if we think that trauma is a singular and enormous, overpowering event. It may be that for some people, but for others it may consist of a "series of regular micro traumas. Indeed a psychical trauma does not necessarily present itself as a sudden and violent breach [effraction]. Rather, it can occur progressively and subtly over the course of a sufficiently long duration. But whether the trauma is a brutal breach or a slow and insidious succession of micro traumas, it is always defined according to an essential formulation: too much excitement in a subject who is too weak to bear it" (32).

This of course immediately put me in mind of a series of reflections of Adam Phillips to which I have often returned in my mind over the past few years: on how we are often too much to bear for ourselves. Perhaps in a sense we are all "manic" and perhaps only God can contain us.

In sum, then, there is much in Juan-David Nasio, Psychoanalysis and Repetition: Why Do We Keep Making the Same Mistakes? to reflect on in these closing days of the civil year when many of us may do a kind of year-long examen of our life before turning to wonder whether the new year will bring us some welcome change and healing. The fact that we so often find ourselves repeating the very things that hurt and harm us rather than heal us cries out for deeper explanation, and Nasio has helped us in that regard.

Compulsive Repetition, Self-Destruction, and Death

It is curious that as we approach the centenary of the publication, in 1920, of Freud's most neglected and professionally disliked book, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, we are now seeing a renewed interest in its most controversial idea: the death drive. As I said on here only the other day, the sputtering bewilderment proffered by psychoanalysts and others in the face of this theory is itself bewildering to me for evidence of a human propensity towards self-destruction (and the unconscious pleasure, or at least purpose served by such destruction) seems constantly on offer. (Exhibit A might perhaps be the opioid epidemic we keep hearing about.) For Christians, as I shall contend later and elsewhere at greater length, there is an important soteriological dialogue opened by Freud's theory that has not, so far as I have been able to detect thus far, been taken up but should be.

Whether one has to have a theory of the death drive to account for human self-destruction, and whether Freud's theory is the best one, are important questions to which I will return in a moment, aided by an important new book discussed below. But discussions of Freud's notion of a death drive, which were few and far between even while Freud was alive, are now taking off nearly 80 years after his death. Perhaps this is one more illustration of Adam Phillips' argument from some time ago that the best time to re-examine Freud is precisely now, when nobody thinks much of him anymore and there are fewer and fewer professional establishments rushing to "protect" him from being critically scrutinized, or rushing to enforce some orthodox line or other:

This is certainly a good time for psychoanalysis: because it is so widely discredited, because there is no prestige, or glamour, or money in it, only those who are really interested will go into it. And now that Freud’s words are so casually dismissed, a better, more eloquent case needs to be made for the value of his writing ("After Strachey," London Review of Books vol. 29 no. 19, 4 October 2007, p.36) 

So scrutiny is returning to several parts of Freud's project, but noticeably his late-period "cultural works." Thus, earlier this year, as I discussed here in some detail, there was Benjamin Fong's fascinating new book Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism.

And before him, in 2013, in one of the most richly provocative books I've read in a long time, there was Todd McGowan's Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis, which I discussed in detail in three parts. I think the book deserves a wide audience, especially among Christians concerned with what the various depredations of what is variously called consumerism, materialism, or, simply, capitalism.

In addition to Fong and McGowan, nobody has written as much about the death drive as Todd Dufresne, whom I have been reading profitably for some time now, and through whom I discovered the wonderful work of his Doktorvater, the late Paul Roazen.

Roazen's Meeting Freud's Family is a thoroughly charming book. His Freud and His Followers was a groundbreaking and controversial work which fills in very important gaps in the historiography. And I have found his Encountering Freud: The Politics and Histories of Psychoanalysis useful in surveying what religious and theological responses were made over the history of psychoanalysis to the 1990s.

Dufresne's work on the death drive is found first in his Tales from the Freudian Crypt: The Death Drive in Text and Context and then, more recently and succinctly, in his introductory essay to the Broadview translation of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 

To my enormous surprise and puzzlement, neither of these books shows up anywhere in the newest book devoted to the topic, Repetition, the Compulsion to Repeat, and the Death Drive: An Examination of Freud's Doctrines, co-authored by M.A. Holowchak (a philosopher) and Michael Lavin (a clinician) (Lexington Books, 2018, viii + 163pp.). It is a very useful, crisply written, and largely clearly argued work.

There are several virtues to this book, including its relative brevity, and the arrangement of each chapter, which aids in reading. More broadly the book will be useful if it is received as the history it is, tracing out the trajectories of the concepts of repetition, compulsive behavior and thinking, and the death drive across the Freudian canon. As such it goes back to 1895 and Studies in Hysteria, co-authored by Freud and Breur, and then forward past Beyond the Pleasure Principle to works in the last period of Freud's life, often referred to as his "cultural" or "meta-psychological" period. Along the way it also notes such "watershed" publications as Freud's 1914 paper, "Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through" as well as his essay on anxiety from 1932, by which point he seems to have moved from the very tentative and speculative writing of Beyond the Pleasure Principle 

Further virtues include the fact that this is neither an attack on Freud--though it advances important, serious, and considered criticisms of his theory--nor a glorification of him in aid of enforcing a certain orthodoxy. It agrees with Freud in places, argues with him in others, and gives evidence in still others for where Freud may have been wrong, or subsequent research does not bear out his often highly tentative and speculative claims in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. On the latter score, it notes problems with Freud's attempting to find phylogenetic evidence for a death drive and compulsive repetition. The question remains: can his theory be rescued if the evidence he claimed to find for it in the biological sciences does not exist, or can be explained by other theories? In answer to that question the authors diverge somewhat, and candidly acknowledge this in the conclusion. For my part, I see few problems in separating out and sustaining most of the theory from insufficient "natural" evidence, and again the authors seem--albeit somewhat uneasily--inclined to agree, especially in a clinical setting, noting that clinicians rarely take their theory pure and whole.

All that having been said, the drive to destroy, including the self, is often a repetitive one, and we are faced with the question of why that is when such a drive brings terrible anguish, suffering, and consequences to the self and to others. Part of the answer may lie in the fact that the drive for pleasure and the death drive are not always operating in mutual and exclusive opposition. As the authors admit flatly, "eros and the death drives do not function independently of each other" (85). In fact, one of Freud's key insights here and in other areas was the admixture of experiences and emotions. In this light, one can, as he himself wrote, find in destructive repetitions the "pleasure of mastery or revenge," including against childhood traumas, enemies, or frustrations.

Such an understanding also goes some way towards accounting for what is perhaps Freud's clearest clinical evidence for compulsive repetitions and self-destructive behaviors: the regularly observed fact that patients get bogged down in treatment, and come actively to undermine the very thing that may help them get better through attacks on the analyst and the "therapeutic alliance" between analyst and analysand (as Christopher Bollas calls it). In this regard, as D.W. Winnicott put it, attacks on a therapeutic analysis may be understood to reflect the fact that for many of us, "health is much more difficult to deal with than disease." In our perverse ways, we like being sick, we like being punished, and though we do not always admit this to ourselves consciously, our unconscious repetitions-in-action bear this out.

By chapter 6, it seems the authors' patience is wearing a wee bit thin, as they sum up the "view in the secondary literature...that the death drive creates more problems than it solves" (98). I think this overstates the case and the authors themselves have not provided absolutely conclusive evidence to support this judgment. Moreover, they fear that Freud's insistence on the death drive runs the "risk of throwing his metapsychology into a state of chaos" (108).

Here is precisely the point where an engagement with Todd Dufresne, mentioned above, would have been crucial. Dufresne's argument is that BTPP is a deliberate act of sabotage on Freud's part, undermining his theories of sexuality and much else. As Dufresne puts it, "metapsychology subverts psychoanalysis," whether "playfully or otherwise," inflicting from a position within the movement a "trauma" on psychoanalysis. Dufresne does not elaborate much on why he thinks Freud may have done this, but I would speculate--following Adam Phillips--that this may have been done precisely to keep the analytic movement from becoming a closed, rigid ideology with enforced orthodoxies and a putative epistemological omniscience.

Freud was certainly aware of the dangers in this direction (and had himself on occasion contributed to it), especially if analysis remained in the hands of psychiatrists or other medical doctors alone. He was forced to address this problem in 1926 in The Question of Lay Analysis, a work I would also see (as, again, Adam Phillips has) as pushing back against analysis becoming a closed system with a closed caste of expert "professionals," especially if those medical professionals were Americans, of whom he thought very little and whom he regarded with enormous skepticism. Such a resistance reflects Freud's own compulsive concerns in some ways, for he was clearly desperate for respect and acceptance for most of his life, but late in life seems to have come to regard such desires with disdain and begun to resist them and call for others to do likewise.

In the end, Holowchak and Lavin conclude there is not a lot that can be salvaged from Freud's death drive, but they do themselves a great service by noting that many other prominent analysts, including Klein, Lacan and Laplanche, disagree with them. Laplanche, it seems to me, takes the most sensible route forward by arguing that if the theory is stripped of biological concepts, if it is seen as exclusively human, and if it is seen as operating not independently but bound up with other drives and desires, it can be rescued.

What, in brief, should the Christian make of all this? Here is where more work needs to be done, but at the very least I think one can say that the destabilizing motives Dufresne detects in defending the death drive and Beyond the Pleasure Principle more generally are ones that Christians should welcome, finding in them analogues to the destabilizing forces of death, grief, and mourning. These forces--as I suggested earlier this month--should function for Christians as a reminder not to close our lives off in presumption of salvation whereby everything is known and everything is resolved, and all must have prizes. Here below we continue to sin, suffer, destroy, and die. Freud attempted to answer why that is, and Christianity does likewise. Between the two there is not nearly so much daylight as many assume--but that, perhaps, is for another day.

Capitalism and its Deceitful Pseudo-Eschatology

I previously discussed in detail an earlier book by Todd McGowan, Enjoying What We Don't Have, which is an extremely insightful and helpful book and has much of the same apophatic-ascetic wisdom of Adam Phillips, as I have been suggesting for some time. Both Phillips and McGowan have a great deal to offer Eastern and other Christians.

Now I have finally had a chance to read his more recent book, Capitalism and Desire: the Psychic Costs of Free Markets (Columbia University Press, 2016), 304pp.

I have been investing (!) this time in figures such as Phillips, Fong, and McGowan because of an inchoate but increasing sense that too much of Christianity, especially in North America, has been infiltrated and corrupted by market ideas and practices in ways most Christians are not consciously aware of. In some cases, of course, this is obvious--indeed, it is the most obvious feature of such blatant shysters as, say, Joel Osteen or Creflo Dollar.

But the real danger lies elsewhere. The real danger comes when capitalist influences on Christian belief and practice are unrecognized; worse still, when their recognition is resisted because it would upset too many apple carts, that is, profit margins and comfortable, quiet middle-class lives. The real danger is assuming that Christian desires are uninfluenced by capitalism, a point I learned from Alasdair MacIntyre, as I showed here.

Like MacIntyre, I do not have answers as to what we do with all this. If a man of his vast erudition and learning, with his reading in Marx and a thousand other sources ancient and modern, says we still have to figure out ways beyond advanced capitalism, then I can but nod my head in agreement and hope that he and others smarter than I will continue to push forward in search of a new pathway--which includes, just to be clear, in no way attempting to re-create the genocidal atrocities and daily brutalities of "Kruschev Enterprises Inc."

But in the meantime, my little piece of the puzzle came several years ago in teaching my class on Catholic social teaching and realizing that there was an increasing tendency to elide any differences between CST and advanced capitalism in this country, making it appear that the former could become a useful form of the latter. In this approach, something like, say, recycling or paying your employees a just wage was simply "good business sense." Do the right thing and rake in handsome profits! What's not to love about that?

And, indeed, if Christian virtue operated thus, we'd all be billionaires. But Christian and especially Catholic social teaching is much more radical than this, and many of its most outstanding models are incomprehensible in the categories of capitalism. There's no money to be made in tending dying lepers on obscure islands; no amount of "branding" can "monetize" ministry with gay male prostitutes on the streets of Chicago; nobody can read Dorothy Day (or her Canadian counterpart and contemporary Catherine Doherty) and think she was in favor of the militarism and capitalism of her day and ours--and what a pity that her Catholic Worker houses didn't enter into a partnership with Starbucks to help each other out since bad coffee was so often a lament in her diaries.

In this regard, we are witnessing the transformation of CST into Costco. Sure they have a reputation for good hours and wages, and lots of "hipsters" appear to work there, but they are still a capitalist corporation catering to an elite. There is more than a whiff of upper-class elitism among those Catholics who think there can be some kind of "seamless garment" between CST and American capitalism. It is precisely their failure (or unwillingness, whether conscious or not) to see the corruption of desires already within the Christian mind that alarms me. Hence I find McGowan--who is otherwise both uninformed about and unduly critical of much of what he takes to be Christianity--actually very helpful, not least when he delivers himself of reflections such as this: "under capitalism Christianity becomes a romance comedy that ends with the discovery of one's soul mate in Christ," the right spouse being, of course, just one more commodity to find and acquire via that legal contract we call marriage.

That line comes near the very end of McGowan's newest book. McGowan, who teaches at the University of Vermont, starts out by facing a question I have long considered: can a method pioneered in an individual-clinical setting be applied to a social-economic one? In Civilizations and its Discontents and other works of his last period (1921-39) Freud recognized the dangers of this, if not its impossibility. But still he pressed on and with good reason. And McGowan says that if we cannot psychoanalyze the underlying dynamics of capitalism, then we allow it to continue unchecked in its dubious claim that capitalism is merely an outgrowth of "human nature" and we thus have no space from and in which to analyze it.

He also commendably begins by facing the criticism, not unjustified, that in some hands psychoanalysis has functioned as a handmaid of capitalism--a point David Pavon-Cuellar also makes in his new book, which I began discussing here (and will soon return to), Marxism and Psychoanalysis: In or Against Psychology.

That, certainly, was one of the fears Freud had about psychoanalysis moving across the Atlantic to take up post-war primacy in America. And there is evidence that it did function this way once the American medical establishment took it up in a Cold War context in which it required everyone to be trained in medicine first--something Freud also strongly resisted in his last period with the curiously overlooked essay The Question of Lay Analysis.

So we must admit, as McGowan does, that the record of analytic thought cooperating with (and being co-opted by) capitalism is bound up with a record of it being a critic of capitalism also--a mixed legacy in other words. That is both true, and a quintessentially Freudian recognition for who among us can cast the stones of pure and unmixed motives?

Instead of focusing only on the social effects of capitalism, or its economic structures, we need to understand how it operates dynamically on the human mind. Though he appears not to have read MacIntyre, this is exactly the latter's point, as I showed last year, when he claims that capitalism “is not only a set of economic relationships. It is also a mode of presentation of those relationships that disguises and deceives.” McGowan quite agrees, as do I. It is especially the disguises that Catholic social teaching has not sufficiently recognized or begun to remove.

McGowan further agrees with MacIntyre that the question of surplus value is the key question we must face. And in facing it, he draws on Adorno, Foucault, and others, including early analytic "radicals" such as Wilhelm Reich and Otto Gross.

Picking up on themes from his earlier book, McGowan notes that capitalism "has the effect of sustaining subjects in a constant state of desire. As subjects of capitalism, we are constantly on the edge of having our desire realized, but never reach the point of realization. This has the effect of producing a satisfaction that we don't recognize as such" (11). It is this lack of recognition of how capitalism operates on us that must be brought to light.

It operates, in part, on faith, on trust, and on promises: I invest on faith and while trusting that the promise of this stock increasing in value will in fact come true. And the biggest promise capitalism advances is what I would call (and McGowan does not) eschatological: of a better, more "prosperous" future where all shall be well: "to take solace in the promise of tomorrow is to accept the sense of dissatisfaction that capitalism sells more vehemently than it sells any commodity" (13).

McGowan says his book cannot entirely escape the idea of a better future--else why bother analyzing, let alone criticizing, capitalism? But the future as he sees it is not one so radically better than the present as to constitute some kind of break from it or some kind of entry into an entirely new world. Rather, the future is but a continuation of the present but without the false promise of finally fulfilling hitherto thwarted desire.

McGowan notes once again the crucial role of Freud's death drive in all this. For capitalism presupposes that individuals operate much as Freud theorized in what was and remains perhaps his most controversial book that revised so much of the analytic edifice up to that point. (Most analysts ignored or scorned it. Even the authorized biographer Ernest Jones--who can scarcely let Freud sneeze without spending twenty intimate pages on all the implications, meanings, and reactions to it--is clearly holding his nose when discussing Beyond the Pleasure Principle.) McGowan goes on to claim without hesitation that this book of Freud's, especially in its claim that "the pleasure principle seems actually to serve the death instinct"--offers "the most thoroughgoing critique of capitalism that anyone has ever written" (50).

And that is perhaps why so many have been so opposed to this book, starting with that second generation of analysts in America who so desperately wanted acceptance and recognition by the medical and other establishments. The price of such things was to ignore and disdain Freud's death drive as being very bad for business.

And yet it must be said that the idea that some unconscious force motivates people to undermine themselves, destroying themselves and their loved one--whether via opioids, adultery, or a thousand other actions--seems patently obvious in nearly every human life. To alter Chesterton's famous aphorism, the presence of the death drive is the one demonstrably verifiable Freudian dogma. The death drive is an attempt to answer the same question as that answered by the Christian doctrine of original sin: why do we not only harm others, but most often ourselves? Why do we repeat self-destructive patterns that "kill" so much of what we love?

Far from writing off such behavior as absurd, the analytic tradition says, as McGowan certainly did in his earlier book, that the repetition of seemingly self-destructive behaviors exists, has meaning, contains an internal logic: the death drive both has aim, and aims at something rather than nothing; its nihilism is merely one more disguise we have to ignore, one more trap laid for the analyst to get lost in a useless detour of apparent meaninglessness. The repetitions of the death drive very much have meaning, and our refusal to see what they are condemns us to never be free of them. As Freud, in discussing why patients actively undermine a therapeutic analysis and refuse to get better, noted, a "negative therapeutic reaction" exists for a reason, or several reasons, not the least of which is that patients find satisfaction in their suffering. (For those inclined to dismiss this as crazy-talk from a now long-dead and discredited "Godless Jew," I ask them to explain, inter alia, the half-billion dollar Fifty Shades of Grey industry.)

Capitalism is no different. It operates by undermining desires and their satisfaction, promising, perpetually promising, that soon and very soon they will be satisfied. This repetition of promised satisfaction which is never totally fulfilled is a very big part, perhaps the biggest part, of its success. As McGowan puts it at the end of his introduction, "capitalist subjects cling tightly to their dissatisfaction, and this dissatisfaction is the main thing holding them to capitalism" (18).

What is to be done? McGowan telegraphs that the book will proceed along similar lines to his earlier work, arguing that we need to learn (as Phillips argues, and the Christian tradition going back to at least Evagrius before them did and does) how to bear our dissatisfactions without seeking their resolution, and to learn to experience the sublime here, now, today, without promise of a better but illusory future. Thus the task remains--as he puts it later in the book--to turn the French slogan of 1968 on its head: rather than jouir sans entraves (enjoyment without obstacles or hindrances) it should be jouir les entraves (enjoy the hindrances). Only in this way do we break the power of the endless repetition of promised but unfulfilled desire.

In his first chapter, McGowan notes that one must distinguish between culture and capitalism, the latter promising but never giving the same sense of identity and belonging that the former sometimes proffers and secures. Indeed, capitalism exists in part to undermine any sense of belonging--until and unless one has attained some commodity which will then induct one into a club of, e.g., car-owners, sports fans, married people, etc. One is promised belonging but the price is accumulation, which never ends. Thus one never fully or finally attains the promised belonging. Here again I would argue--though McGowan does not--just how much capitalism is first and foremost a disguised eschatology, a point (to my surprise) that seems to have been little developed in modern theology. Perhaps I shall have to write something along these lines. (Matthew Shaidle's new book, which I have just learned of, seems to discuss these themes a little bit.)

In capitalist systems, much of their power comes from this satisfaction-dissatisfaction dynamic propelling one forward. The commodity never satisfies, but I rarely realize that. Rarer still do I get to see that the object or commodity is not what I want anyway at an unconscious level. I want unconsciously--the level on which capitalism is most insidious and most effective--the sense of dissatisfaction, of the quest, of the ongoing search. That is what gives me satisfaction of a sort; that is what propels me forward; that is what capitalism cultivates for its own survival.

By contrast, bad consumers are those who resist this search for that new thing, or that upgraded model, that will promise me satisfaction. Quiet subverters of capitalism, McGowan says, are those who are happy with the outdated VCR, or the flip phone that does not text, or the car with the big dent in the hood. Resisting the allures of new commodities and perpetual accumulation are not just acts of Christian asceticism, but blows against the system.

Chapter II looks at the creation of privacy as capitalism advances, arguing that the latter depends on the former. The effects of this are twofold: as we move away from the public commons into our private spheres, we must of course each have our own lawnmower, car, tractor, etc. But we also thereby retreat from politics as well. As he puts it, capitalism has an "allergy to the public world [which] inspires a thoroughgoing retreat from this world" (57). Here McGowan draws on Rousseau's distinction between un homme (private) and un citoyen (public). Rousseau saw this as a problem, but McGowan says he could not see how much it would be a problem in the late 20th century--the person to see that more clearly would be Hannah Arendt in her The Human Condition.


Such retreats from the commonwealth are manifested in the rise of private prisons and gated communities, and the calls for "austerity" in public finances. In this discussion McGowan also draws on Habermas, especially his The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.

Such retreats are not, contrary to some images, what psychoanalysis aids and abets. McGowan notes that psychoanalysis requires that one enter into the "public" in order to have a conversation with one's analyst, thereby "publicizing" what one would usually prefer to keep private. Though he claims to have attempted it with himself, Freud does not recommend self-analysis (Lacan would later call that Freud's "original sin") and thus psychoanalysis cannot be seen as purely private.

The chief result of psychoanalysis that it offers patients in a capitalist society is that "the satisfaction of desiring derives from the obstacle rather than overcoming it" (63). In other words, each time we obtain what we think is the desired object, we quickly find it dissatisfying; it has not lived up to not just its hype, but also our own unconscious sense of desire. Capitalism depends on this to be so. As he nicely puts it later in the book, "though capitalism demands that subjects act out of their self-interest, it sustains itself through their self-sabotage" (73).

The problem here is thus with our own inability to realize that we do not desire what we think we desire, and do not find satisfaction because we have not realized that the ostensible obstacles to our desire are the very thing that would satisfy us if we could but recognize this. What I take McGowan to be saying here is that psychoanalysis breaks the cycle of repetition of false promises of satisfaction, which satisfaction is always said to be enjoyed in private. Rather, McGowan argues, we need to learn that satisfaction takes place in public and together right now, rather than in some ever-receding future promise. As Alexander Schmemann might have put it, private joy is impossible. And as Schmemann might also have said--and the Christian ascetical tradition before him certainly has said--the refusal to lust after objects is a refusal ultimately of illusion and idolatry.

McGowan's third chapter has yet more strong echos of MacIntyre in arguing that capitalism succeeds in part by its disguises, by its charade of seeming to come from nowhere and to have no history but simply to constitute the only available-believable of our world without every drawing attention to itself in those terms. Capitalism thus disguises from us that its purported offer to us of "choices" (where and how to work, what to eat, how big a house to buy) are not naturally occurring. Rather all such choices take place within a very narrowly defined set of possibilities. To put it in a MacIntyrean vein, there are three such choices on offer in today's politics: conservative capitalists, liberal capitalists, and radical capitalists. There is no possibility of putting capitalism itself to the question in any serious way.

Sacrifice and its persistence are the themes of the fourth chapter, which puts me in mind of Terry Eagleton's recent book on that theme, discussed here. McGowan notes that in some ways capitalism lives without ritual sacrifices, at least of, say, vestal virgins. But it does demand periodic sacrifices, as seen, e.g., under the guise of "creative destruction." Or consider the titans of industry subject to regular fawning profiles in which they are portrayed as sacrificing their time (and families) to work 90+ hours a week while inventing some new widget or putting their company in the top ten most profitable corporations in the world.

McGowan rightly says that capitalism secularizes sacrifice--no longer is it a turtledove or a fatted calf--and privatizes it, denying to it ritual's socially cohesive power. Now it is the individual CEO, or worse, the worker who gets up at 3am, hidden in the dark, to start his shift at the factory, sacrificing sleep, breakfast with his family, and much else. In this light, sacrifice is actually demanded by capitalism's logic because no satisfaction is possible without loss--the loss that motivates us unconsciously to search perpetually for some new object to supposedly satisfy us. Loss is thus a phantom that haunts our unconscious minds, and capitalism pretends to offer rest and relief to this perpetually restless and searching spook.

McGowan uses an arresting example when he notes that most capitalists would prefer to sell, and most consumers to purchase, Cheetos over bananas for the former involves much more sacrifice--worthless sacrifice--and complicated processes (which involve more people making profits) than the latter. Growing bananas would be rather simple and straightforward, but this, we think, is unsatisfactory. Better to spend millions researching how to keep taste buds in perpetual unslaked longing for the salt and fat of a Cheeto (which, admittedly, I love but refuse to buy because I will eat an entire bag in one sitting).

Chapter V is McGowan at his most theological: "A God We Can Believe In." While stipulating at the outset the tiresome old canard that the rejection of God has created a world of freedom, McGowan does not proceed to do what most others who claim this do: celebrate the absence of God. For he knows that the human psyche cannot abide a void like that--as Freud did too, which is why he has no false hopes that if everyone followed his counsel in Future of an Illusion and rejected God as neurotic paternal projection and illusion then the world would be free. On the contrary: such a rejection creates an opening which others rush in to fill. And here McGowan is right: "capitalism...erects a new form of divinity, one even more tyrannical than the old form" (114).

But the old God was superior insofar as one never had to guess where one stood: he declared he was a jealous God. The market makes no such open declarations, leaving one perpetually uncertain of where one stands. And in fact, of course, the market is jealous--and capricious, and mendacious: its promise of being a free market is always insistently stated thus because it is as Freud might say, an obvious overcompensation (to put it mildly) to hide and distort the truth. This new god of the market turns out to be intolerable and intolerant, leaving McGowan to end his chapter with this rather bald-faced claim: "the fundamental catastrophe of modernity is the disappearance of God as a substantial Other" (135).

This is a catastrophe because--as he will go on to show in chapters six through nine--the disappearance of God opens up an endlessly infinite and pseudo-transcendent space ("the sublime") for capitalism perpetually to expand and try to fill with stuff, giving us what--quoting Agamben--McGowan refers to as means without end, "end" understood here not just as "endless" but also in the sense of purpose or goal; or what MacIntyre recognized as the abandonment of teleology (first principles) in modern philosophy.

Quo vadis? What next? Like any good psychoanalyst, McGowan's conclusion is its shortest and does not get into highly detailed prescriptions. Instead he begins from the striking premise that "the critique of capitalism must begin out of our satisfaction with capitalism and not our dissatisfaction with it" (239). This is precisely an anti-capitalist move for, as we saw earlier, capitalism does not want, and cannot long survive, our being satisfied with anything. Constant modes of production, and product improvement, must fuel constant economic "growth," all of it driven, of course, by a never-ending sense of dissatisfaction. For one can never have enough.

But this endless quest for more than enough hides not only the accumulative impulse of capitalism, but also its unwillingness to acknowledge what McGowan calls "traumatic loss" and to mourn it. That which is lost to us, what is the lost object of our unanalyzed desires, motivates us to accumulate more, all the while ignoring the fact that the lost object will never satisfy.  Thus we must realize that "only the turn from the logic of accumulation to the logic of satisfaction--with an acceptance of the lost status of the object--can move us beyond the crisis of capitalism" (242). To go beyond capitalism, McGowan recognizes, is of course a political act; but before we can act politically towards such change, we must first think differently, and here, once more, is where Freud is invaluable, showing us that "until we accept that the satisfaction of loss is our driving motive, we will remain the hostages of an economy of enrichment" (244).