Don’t compromise your desire! The perm sublimates the alt “into restorationist practices that strengthen the hold of capitalism.” Different social realities are possible, but only via refusing the enjoyment attached to the aff’s hope for capitalist redemption.

Requisite to the process of both facing our existential fear and mourning for loss of attachment to the status quo, consequently, may be abandoning all hope for redemption within the bounds of a capitalist political economy. In The Courage of Hopelessness, Žižek (2017) draws on the example of a smoker who promises to quit in the future to illustrate the problem of a politics based in hope. As he explains this dilemma, “My awareness that I can stop smoking any time I want guarantees that I will never actually do it—the possibility of stopping smoking is what blocks the actual change; it allows me to accept our continuous smoking without bad conscience, so that the end of smoking is constantly present as the very source of its continuation” (Žižek 2017: ix). It is this promise of future change, in other words, that allows one to disavow one’s inability to actually change in the present. In a similar way, neoliberal conservation can be seen to offer hope for capitalism’s eventual transformation into a sustainable form, allowing us to continue to engage in (inevitably) unsustainable capitalist practices in the (continually extended) here and now by reassuring ourselves that these will be compensated for in a “net zero” future. As with Žižek’s smoker, then, in neoliberal conservation “the possibility of change is evoked to guarantee that it will not be acted upon” (2017: x).

In addressing this dilemma, Žižek contends, “It is only when we despair and don’t know any more what to do that change can be enacted—we have to go through this zero point of hopelessness” (2017: x). Hence, he concludes that “true courage is to admit that the light at the end of the tunnel is probably the headlight of another train approaching us from the opposite direction” (Žižek 2017: xi–xii). The train in this case, I have argued, is neoliberal capitalism; hence, escape from the tunnel is only attainable by traversing the neoliberal fantasy entirely in pursuit of a wholly different social reality.

Cultivating Post-Capitalist Desire

More than a lack of practicable alternatives, the preceding discussion suggests, it may be a largely unconscious attachment to the contemporary capitalist order that helps to hold it in place (McGowan 2017). This raises the sobering prospect that many of us may not be nearly as willing to make the dramatic changes we know are necessary to develop a just and sustainable world as we would like to believe. From the psychoanalytic perspective advanced in this book, achieving effective change therefore requires generating the desire for pursuit of a new situation sufficient to motivate subjects to face the painful emotions and undergo the process of mourning necessary to break attachment to present circumstances and the cycle of drive it precipitates. This is the strategy Lacan captured in his famous maxim, “Don’t compromise your desire!” (see de Vries 2007). As Rustin phrases this dilemma, “Moving out of the paranoid-schizoid into more depressive ways of thinking and feeling can be found too painful to endure, if there are no internalized good objects to sustain a belief in the existence of good objects outside the self ” (2013: 175).

Several commentators contend that many members of the political left have indeed largely compromised their desire for radical progressive change over the past several decades (Brown 1999; Dean 2012; Fisher 2012). Thus, Dean suggests that a prominent strain of leftist thought

has given way on the desire for communism, betrayed its historical commitment to the proletariat, and sublimated revolutionary energies into restorationist practices that strengthen the hold of capitalism. This Left has replaced commitments to the emancipatory, egalitarian struggles of working people against capitalism—commitments that were never fully orthodox, but always ruptured, conflicted, and contested—with incessant activity (like the mania Freud associates with melancholia) and so now satisfies itself with criticism and interpretation, small projects and local actions, particular issues and legislative victories, art, technology, procedures, and process. . . . For such a Left, enjoyment comes from its withdrawal from responsibility, its sublimation of goals and responsibilities into the branching, fragmented practices of micropolitics, self-care, and issue awareness. (Dean 2012: 173–174)