Todd McGowan is professor of film studies at the University of Vermont. His Columbia University Press books include The Impossible David Lynch (2007), Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution (2019), and Universality and Identity Politics (2020).
Capitalism and Desire turns around the predominant leftist whining
about the devastating psychic consequences of global capitalism,
about how it undermines elementary structures of psychic stability
which enable individuals to lead a meaningful life. The focus of
Todd McGowan's effort is, rather, the enigma of the success of
capitalist ideology: how was it possible for such a destabilizing
life practice to fully capture the libidinal lives of billions, how
was it possible that continuous crises and states of exception only
strengthened its hold? In short, how is it possible that capitalism
again and again imposes itself as the cure for the crisis it brings
about? In answering these difficult questions, McGowan has produced
a classic.
*Slavoj Žižek*
McGowan's argument is positively brilliant—almost every page brings
a startling insight and every chapter compels an exciting
reorientation of thought. Because of its paradigm-shifting
originality, Capitalism and Desire places McGowan among the most
prominent critical thinkers of his generation and competes
admirably even with the very best work of the generation before
him.
*Mari Ruti, author of The Call of Character: Living a Life Worth
Living*
With Capitalism and Desire, McGowan provides an admirably
accessible and intellectually sophisticated analysis of the real
connections between capitalism and psychoanalysis. This is a
wonderful book demonstrating immense intellectual vitality—it is
simply impossible to ignore.
*Fabio Vighi, author of Critical Theory and the Crisis of
Contemporary Capitalism*
How many syntheses of Marx and Freud have been forged in an attempt
to ground a critique of capitalism—only in the end to fail? After
tallying their individual failures, this smart book goes on to
confront their underlying problem: a botched reading of Freud.
Relying on Lacan's radical re-excavation of Freud, McGowan offers
brand-new ideas about the subject's ensnarement in the "freedoms"
of capitalism and the possibilities of resistance to them.
*Joan Copjec, author of Read My Desire: Lacan Against the
Historicists*
The immense satisfaction of McGowan's latest and most ambitious
book is achieved, appropriately enough, by putting capitalism to
the test of a suitably profound (and paradoxical) conception of
satisfaction. Astonishingly far-ranging in its references yet
written in perfectly limpid prose, Capitalism and Desire sets a new
high-water mark in contemporary social and political philosophy. A
dazzling work of theory.
*Richard Boothby, author of Sex on the Couch: What Freud Still
Has To Teach Us About Sex and Gender*
McGowan's book is a reader-friendly and therapeutic dissection of
capitalism's success. His examples are readily comprehensible and
he avoids heavy academic language.
*Scottish Left Review*
Although there has been, in some circles, a dismissal of Lacan and
psychoanalysis more generally, McGowan’s impressive application of
the seemingly intractable Lacanian subject to the conditions of
late capitalism enables those who might otherwise be disinterested
in psychoanalysis to see its unique and important contribution.
*Symposium*
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