Vote negative to psychically divest from the 1AC’s fantasy. Reorienting desire around our essential lack opens space for post-capitalist futures.

Yet mobilizing post-fantasmatic, post-capitalist enjoyment in support of the commons may also require developing a different relationship with one’s own desire and the subjectivity underpinning it. A Lacanian perspective, after all, understands the human subject as fundamentally constituted by an essential “lack.” This is due to the fact that one’s very self-consciousness is the product of a perception of separation between one’s self and the surrounding environment. This self-perception, however, can only ever encompass a fraction of one’s actual being, hence there remains an inevitable disjuncture between what one is and how one perceives oneself to be. As Dolar describes this dynamic, “there is a part of the individual that cannot successfully pass into the subject, an element of ‘pre-ideological’ and ‘presubjective’ materia prima that comes to haunt subjectivity once it is constituted as such” (1993: 75, emphasis in original). It is this essential lack that stimulates subjects’ desire for objects believed capable of resolving it and thereby conferring a sense of wholeness imagined to have been experienced prior to self-awareness and separation. This renders the subject essentially an infinite void that can never be filled, but which it nevertheless strives to fill through pursuit of objects attached to fantasies that it imagines able to confer the desired completeness. And it is this same lack, of course, that capitalism is able to harness so effectively in “sustaining subjects in a constant state of desire” (McGowan 2017: 11) in order to stimulate the ever-increasing production and consumption requisite to capital accumulation. This stimulation reaches its epitome with the neoliberal “achievement-subject” described by Han (2017), bent on perpetual advancement and optimization. In this way, Lacan suggested, stimulation of “surplus enjoyment” and appropriation of “surplus value” go hand in hand (see Žižek 1989).

This understanding of the subject means that one can never be wholly satisfied through attainment of any particular object (or anything else), but only through acknowledgment, paradoxically, that total satisfaction is unattainable and hence that partial satisfaction of an infinite longing is the best one can ever hope to achieve. After all, for Lacanians, the supposed state of primordial wholeness (Jouissance) that subjects seek to recapture via pursuit of jouissance is itself considered illusory, yet another “fantasmatic construction” sustaining the misperception that “there was once a time or space before lack” (McMillan 2008: 22). This is because attaining such a state would require erasure of the very self-awareness through which it is perceived.

Thus, McGowan (2017: 13) contends, “No revolution can transform dissatisfaction into satisfaction, but this is how revolution has been conceived throughout the entirety of the capitalist epoch.” In his analysis, this is indeed one of the main reasons why revolutions so commonly fail to achieve their envisioned ends. Consequently, McGowan asserts that pursuit of post-capitalism entails accepting that “there is no deeper or more authentic satisfaction that will overcome the antagonisms of society or the failures of subjectivity, despite what anti-capitalist revolutionaries have traditionally promised” (2017: 14).

This resonates with Kallis’s (2019a: 6) contention that pursuit of degrowth entails voluntary “establishment of self-imposed and deliberately chosen limits” to growth rather than assuming that such limits will be determined by the biophysical environment, as theorists since Malthus have characteristically done. Echoing Lacan, Kallis asserts that humans are characterized by infinite wants that will inevitably exceed available resources no matter how plentiful; hence, sustainability requires placing self-imposed limits on these wants to remain within boundaries that are socially rather than naturally defined. He therefore concludes, paradoxically, that “it is only when we begin to accept the world as abundant that we can contemplate limiting our wants and delimiting a safe space for our freedom” (Kallis 2019a: 6).

Yet the opposite goal—eliminating desire altogether—is equally untenable given that desire is a function of the subject’s basic constitution. Achieving post-fantasmatic enjoyment, therefore, would entail accepting the impossibility of either achieving or escaping the inevitable allure of jouissance. In this way, an ephemeral oceanic feeling can still be pursued and enjoyed via collective engagement without one becoming overly attached to this experience or falling prey to the illusion that it could ever be achieved indefinitely or become entirely satisfying.

This, in turn, would allow for a certain distancing from the capitalist imperative to futilely endeavor to fill the infinite void through ever-increasing consumption and accumulation. As McGowan phrases it, “When one recognizes that no object will provide the ultimate satisfaction, one can divest psychically from the capitalist system” (2017: 40). Instead, one can pursue a different social order aimed, as the organizers of a recent climate change rally phrased it, at “Producing Less & Enjoying It More” (Gateway Greens 2008).