Discussion Questions V: “Reality”, Fantasy and the Media

McGowan, Todd. The End of Dissatisfaction?: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment. State University of New York Press, 2004.

(Introduction and Chapter 1, pages 1-40)

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THE END
OF
D I S S AT I S F A C T I O N ?
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SUNY series in Psychoanalysis and Culture
Henry Sussman, editor
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THE END
OF
D I S S AT I S FAC T I O N ?
Jacques Lacan and the
Emerging Society of Enjoyment
T O D D M c G OWA N
S t at e U n i v e r s i t y o f N e w Yo r k P r e s s
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Published by
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McGowan, Todd.
The end of dissatisfaction? : Jacques Lacan and the emerging society of enjoyment / by
Todd McGowan.
p. cm. — (SUNY series in psychoanalysis and culture)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-7914-5967-5 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-7914-5968-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Psychoanalysis and culture. 2. Lacan, Jacques, 1901– I. Title. II. Series.
BF175.4.C84M4 2004
306.4’8—dc21
2003045839
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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For Paul Eisenstein,
the sine qua non
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Contents
Acknowledgments
ix
Introduction
Psychoanalysis after Marx
1
1.
From Prohibition to Enjoyment
11
2.
The Decline of Paternal Authority
41
3.
Embracing the Image
59
4.
Shrinking Distances
75
5.
Interpretation under Duress
95
6.
The Appeal of Cynicism
121
7.
The Politics of Apathy
137
8.
A Missing Public World
155
9.
Explosions of Incivilty, Aggressiveness, and Violence
177
Conclusion
From Imaginary Enjoyment to Its Real Counterpart
191
Notes
197
Index
233
vii
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Acknowledgments
An early version of a section of chapter 2, entitled “From Enjoyment to Aggressivity: The Emergence of the New Father in Contemporary American Society,”
appeared in the Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 3.1 (Spring
1998): 53–60. An early version of a section of chapter 7 appeared as “‘In That
Way He Lost Everything’: The Price of Satisfaction in E. L. Doctorow’s World’s
Fair” in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 42 (2001): 233–40 (reprinted
with permission of the Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation and published by Heldref Publications, 1319 18th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20036,
Copyright 2001). An early version of a section of chapter 8, entitled “The Phenomenology of City Life: The Reign of the Imaginary in Trigger Effect,”
appeared in The Spectator 18.1 (Fall/Winter 1997): 51–57. And revised portions
of an essay entitled “The Master Amid Rumors of His Demise: Politics in a
Time of ‘Satisfaction,’” published in the Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture
and Society 4.1 (Spring 1999): 72–80, appear throughout the book. Thanks to all
of these journals for permission to publish this material.
I would like to thank my graduate theory classes at Southwest Texas State
University for their insights into Lacan that made a direct impact on this
book. Thanks especially to Phil Foster for taking the knife to the project.
I am indebted to James Peltz at SUNY Press for being the kind of editor
that one dare not even hope for and for helping to create one of the few contemporary homes for psychoanalytic theory.
Thanks to Jean Wyatt for a reading that brought everything into focus
for me.
Thanks to Mike Ashooh and Quentin Martin for having the kindness to
be cruel and offering readings that forced me to change everything at the
moment I thought it was finished.
Finally, thanks to Walter Davis, Paul Eisenstein, and Hilary Neroni, the
three people who have informed every word of this project.
ix
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Introduction
Psychoanalysis after Marx
The salient feature of contemporary American society is the premium that it
places on enjoyment. Ours is what Michael Wolf calls an “entertainment
economy,” in which, as Neil Postman puts it, we risk “amusing ourselves to
death.” This enjoyment explosion seems to represent a marked change from
just forty years ago—as if we have entered into a new epoch of social relations.
This change inevitably gives rise to the question of the degree of its radicality: Is this “proliferation of enjoyment” an indication of a fundamental change
in the social order as such—or is it simply a part of the normal evolution of
capitalist society? Whereas most historians view the emergence of modernity
from traditional societies as the most dramatic rupture in the history of the
West, it is the contention of this project that the increasing proliferation of
inducements (and commandments) to enjoy represents a transformation in
the social order as drastic as the emergence of modernity. It marks a shift in
the very logic of social organization.
Though the Marxist view of history has largely fallen out of favor among
theorists and historians today, the importance that it places on the birth of
capitalism in human history continues to enjoy widespread acceptance. Marxism views the transition to a capitalist economy—the emergence of modernity—as the decisive transition in the history of the West. The shift from traditional society to capitalist society entails a massive rupture, evident in all
aspects of the social order. Most importantly, it appears as a revolution in the
relationship between the authority of the social order and money. As Marx
himself points out in the first volume of Capital, whereas ancient societies
1
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2
The End of Dissatisfaction?
“denounced money as subversive of the economic and moral order of things,”
modern society “greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of
the very principle of its own life.”1 Greed is not, of course, an invention of
modernity, but the onset of modernity allows for a change in its ethical status.
Only within the modern world would it be possible to proclaim, with Gordon
Gekko in Wall Street, that “greed is good”; to ancient societies, greed is always
sinful (that is to say, always dangerous to the stability of the social order). In
other words, the very thing that threatens to destroy ancient societies becomes
the very lifeblood of the modern one. Because it involves such a complete
upheaval, no other change in Western history, for the Marxist, approaches this
one in importance.2 This type of valuation of the historical shift to capitalism,
however, is not confined to doctrinaire Marxists. Even avowedly non-Marxist historians, though they might not emphasize the changing status of money,
nonetheless tend to see the onset of modernity—the nascent moments of capitalism—as a time of epochal change, as a shift from a static society to a progressive one.3 This is what leads Fredric Jameson to claim that “the emergence
of the modern world or capitalism, the miraculous birth of modernity or of a
secular market system, the end of ‘traditional’ society in all its forms [. . .]
remains for us (in the collective unconscious) the only true Event of history.”4
In whatever language we discuss the changes in society occasioned by modernity, few would dispute Jameson’s claim that it marks the historical shift in the
West, leaving, as it does, a gulf between the structure of traditional society (a
closed world) and modern capitalist society (an open universe).
I contend, however, that the importance of this shift is now being rivaled
by another kind of historical change. This is the transformation from a society
founded on the prohibition of enjoyment (and thus the dissatisfaction of its subjects) to a society that commands enjoyment or jouissance (in which there seems
to be no requisite dissatisfaction).5 Whereas formerly society has required subjects to renounce their private enjoyment in the name of social duty, today the
only duty seems to consist in enjoying oneself as much as possible. The fundamental social duty in contemporary American society lies in committing oneself to enjoyment. Advertisements, friends, movies, parents, television shows,
internet sites, and even authority figures all call on us to maximize our enjoyment. This marks a dramatic change in the way the social order is constituted:
rather than being tied together through a shared sacrifice, subjects exist side by
side in their isolated enclaves of enjoyment. Whereas Marxism has shed the
most light on the turn from traditional society to modernity, Marxism needs the
insights of psychoanalysis—and specifically the thought of Jacques Lacan—in
order to best illuminate this transformation from a society of prohibition to a
society of enjoyment. Though Lacan has no explicit theory of history, his
thought, because it privileges and explicates the subject’s relationship to enjoyment, paves the way for grasping the importance of this radical transformation.6
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Introduction
3
A society of prohibition requires all its members to sacrifice their individual, private ways of obtaining enjoyment for the sake of the social order as
a whole. That is to say, one receives an identity from society in exchange for
one’s immediate access to enjoyment, which one must give up. This is, traditionally, the way in which society as such functions. This type of society operates in the manner of a sports team: the team demands individual sacrifices in
order to ensure the team’s success. In order for the team to win, the individual must give up her or his dreams of wholly individual achievement and fit
her or his abilities into the structure of the team.7 In a society of commanded
enjoyment, this dynamic changes dramatically. Rather than demanding that
its members give up their individual enjoyment for the sake of the whole, the
society of enjoyment commands their enjoyment—private enjoyment
becomes of paramount importance—and the importance of the social order as
a whole seems to recede. Contemporary complaints about sports stars who are
more concerned about individual statistics and money than about their team’s
fortunes are indicative of this transformation. These sports stars are not simply anomalous narcissists. In the society of enjoyment, individual, private
accomplishments and rewards are more important than the success of the
team. In such a society, it is no longer requisite that subjects accept a constant
dissatisfaction as the price for existing within a social order. To return to the
example of the sports team, one can remain a member of the team without
having to subordinate one’s own individual agenda to the larger plans of the
team. Dissatisfaction now appears as something that one need not experience,
in contrast to life in the society of prohibition, where dissatisfaction inheres in
the very fabric of social existence itself.8 In the society of enjoyment, the private enjoyment that threatened the stability of the society of prohibition
becomes a stabilizing force and even acquires the status of a duty.
To stress the transition from the society of prohibition to the society of
enjoyment at the expense of the transition from feudalism to capitalism is
implicitly to challenge the Marxist prioritizing of economic relations in the
understanding of history (and historical change). According to the psychoanalytic understanding of history that I will take up, enjoyment and our relationship to it has primacy in determining historical movement. In the last
instance, we act as we do in order to sustain or advance our particular relationship to enjoyment, rather than on behalf of economic motivation. The
Marxist thesis that places economic motivation at the fore posits that we will
always act according to our interests: if revolution is in our interests, we will
revolt, and if the status quo is in our interests, we will fight to preserve it.
Questions about enjoyment are necessarily secondary to questions about survival. That is to say, for the Marxists, before considering the enjoyment I may
derive from my dinner, I will first ensure that I have a dinner to eat (whether
or not I will enjoy it).9
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4
The End of Dissatisfaction?
Though Marxism has certainly fallen on hard times today, this fundamental thesis of Marxism has not. Cuba Gooding’s mantra in the film Jerry
Maguire—“Show me the money!”—has become the automatic explanation of
all varieties of behavior. Why does Alex Rodriguez decide to play baseball for
the Texas Rangers? Why does Monica Lewinsky appear in an interview with
Barbara Walters to tell her story? If Alex Rodriguez mentions the passion for
the game he found in the Ranger franchise or Lewinsky mentions her need to
tell her side of things, we respond with a wink or a cynical aside. In the spirit
of Marx, we know that self-interest (i.e., money) is always the chief motivation. But if Marx errs, his error does not lie, as his critics often allege, in
underestimating “innate human selfishness.” Instead, his error—and, again, it
is the common error today—lies in the other direction, in underestimating the
capacity of subjects to act against their self-interest.
Psychoanalysis, however, calls into question the idea that we primarily act
on behalf of our own interest. It allows us to see another power operating
beneath the apparent predominance of self-interest. Of course, the commonsensical understanding of psychoanalysis is exactly the opposite of this, contending that psychoanalysis reduces everything to self-interest. This is often
the basis for the most scathing criticisms leveled at Freud himself and at psychoanalysis as a whole. For instance, John Farrell claims that under the spell
of psychoanalysis “every appearance of good must be exposed as unconscious
hypocrisy, every commitment to public interests and to social institutions
must be recognized for what it is—a disguise for narcissistic gratification or a
painful instinctual concession.”10 Farrell, like so many critics of psychoanalysis, sees Freud as a prophet of human selfishness. But this attack on psychoanalysis—perhaps the most popular of all attacks—completely misunderstands what is at stake in psychoanalytic interpretation. Rather than
uncovering narcissistic self-interest behind a benevolent act, Freud uncovers
the abandonment of self-interest that is at stake behind a seemingly self-interested act. In Seminar V, Lacan points out that Freud discovers the self-destructiveness of desire, that “what we find at the foundation of the analytic exploration of desire is masochism.”11 Anyone can point out why human subjects
act self-interestedly—and many thinkers before Freud (Hobbes, Machiavelli,
etc.) did so—but it is the province of psychoanalysis to explain why they are
able to act against their self-interest, to transcend their narcissism. Because of
this ability to act against our interest, Freud claims that “the normal man is
not only far more immoral than he believes but also far more moral than he
knows.”12 It is on this point that Freud directly questions Marx: for Marx,
there is only self-interest; for Freud, there is something more, and this something more is enjoyment—the jouissance factor.13
Ironically, it was Freud’s belief that human subjects were prone to act
against their self-interest that led him to doubt the possibility of a socialist
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Introduction
5
utopia. If we always acted in our self-interest, Marx would be right, and the
contradictions of capitalist society would lead to a socialist utopia. However,
our ability—and our tendency—to act against our self-interest makes such a
utopia inconceivable for Freud. As Joan Copjec notes, “The psychoanalytic
subject, in short, being subject to a principle beyond pleasure, is not driven to
seek his own good.”14 When Freud formulated the concept of the death drive in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he did so in order to account for the fact that we
often act in complete disregard of our self-interest and instead act out of a
compulsion that we do not understand. The concept of the death drive means
that we will sacrifice anything and everything (even life itself ) for our particular Thing—which is to say, for our enjoyment. Oftentimes this Thing is a
national Thing, the bond that constitutes national identity. Marxism has consistently underestimated the importance of the enjoyment of the national
Thing, but, as Slavoj Z+iz=ek points out, at no time as dramatically as at the
beginning of the First World War. The working class of Europe, wellinformed by the Communist International, seemed to know that the war
would not advance their interests, that it was an imperialist struggle. And yet,
when the moment of decision came, the working class in Europe supported
the war almost unanimously, much to the surprise of Lenin. Why? What did
Lenin fail to take into account? He failed to consider enjoyment—specifically
the degree to which the working class shared in nationalistic jouissance. What
drove them was not their self-interest—the war didn’t speak to interest—but
their relationship to enjoyment. This is one indication why it is through its
consideration of enjoyment that a psychoanalytic understanding of history can
supplement the Marxian version.15 Marxism allows us to understand the role
of economic and social contradictions in driving the movement of history, but
it often provides an inadequate explanation of the actual politics of historical
transformation—why change does or does not occur at a given time. It is on
this question that psychoanalysis proves indispensable.
Psychoanalysis allows us to rethink sociopolitical history around the question of enjoyment.16 This involves understanding the nature of the transition
from a society of prohibition to a society of enjoyment. Recognizing what is at
work in the society of enjoyment does not imply that the proper response is the
nostalgic one, the one so often proffered by conservative cultural critics. These
conservative critics call for a return to “family values,” to a world in which prohibition kept us safe from outbreaks of enjoyment. This desire for a return to
the past, however, is rarely genuine. Which is to say, such proclamations don’t
really want the return to the past that they claim to want. Instead, they want
the best of both worlds—the “benefits” of modernity (computers, cars, televisions) without their effects (isolation, enjoyment, narcissism)—and fail to grasp
the interdependence of the benefits and the effects. More importantly, however, what such a position fails to realize is that enjoyment is implicit not in the
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6
The End of Dissatisfaction?
content of, say, the internet (that is, in the pornography, etc., that appears
there), but in the very form that we experience it: hooked on to a computer, in
isolation from the rest of the world. It is not what one experiences in the modern world, but that one is experiencing it in the modern way which is decisive,
which produces the negative effects of modernity that the nostalgic position
hopes to avoid. This is why once we have the “benefits” of modernity, we also
have the painful drawbacks; one cannot have one without the other. Which
means that the “family values” response, unless it is combined with a radical
renunciation of all aspects of modern society, is not an authentic alternative. In
fact, its promise of the spoils of modernity without its requisite disruption of
tradition and traditional authority simply repeats the promise of fascism, which
insists that we can have all the advantages of modern industry and technology
without sacrificing our connection to “blood and soil.” Even when it avoids this
fascist contradiction and does actually involve a complete rejection of modernity, such a solution is still not viable. Any return to the past, to traditional values, will necessarily be mediated by the present.
The other alternative common today is the cynical embrace of the society of enjoyment—an attitude that proclaims that things simply are as they
are, that there is no changing the structure of the social order. The cynic
knows well enough the problems with the way things are but acts as if she/he
doesn’t know, conducting her/his daily life certain that the social order, despite
its problems, cannot be changed. This attitude resigns the subject to the private realm: for the cynic, change is possible on a personal level (i.e., I can
change my weight, my degree of happiness, my lover, etc.), so that’s where I
should keep my focus. As Paul Gilroy puts it, “A language of revolution may
persist, but these days it is more like to turn away from the complexities of
wholescale societal transformation and promote an ‘inward,’ New Age turn.”17
We can see evidence of the turn from wide-scale political activity to an
emphasis on personal transformation throughout contemporary popular culture, but perhaps nowhere as dramatically as in the case of the rock band U2.
Whereas in the 1980s they wrote songs with an overt political significance,
such as “Pride” and “Sunday Bloody Sunday” (both celebrations of the struggle for civil rights), in the 1990s such songs disappear completely from their
oeuvre, having been replaced with songs about personal struggle and romance,
such as “Mysterious Ways” and “One.” It is as if U2 felt disappointed with the
ineffectiveness of their larger political project and decided to turn to a more
promising avenue—the personal.18 What this increasingly widespread conclusion misses is the performative function of its own—seemingly descriptive—
statement about the impossibility of large-scale change. That is, the gesture of
confining oneself and one’s actions to the private realm is precisely what fuels
the predominance of the society of enjoyment, which makes large-scale
change seem impossible. In proclaiming the inevitability of this type of world,
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Introduction
7
we help to make it inevitable, to make the status quo all the more unassailable.
In this way, the strategy of cynical embrace of the society of enjoyment is
every bit as flawed as the nostalgic attempt to return to a previous epoch. Both
positions share a fundamental refusal to recognize their own complicity with
the society of enjoyment.
Despite their ultimate bankruptcy, nostalgia and cynicism predominate
today to the extent that there seems to be no other path open to us. The key
to discovering an alternate path does not, as we might believe, depend on our
ability to imagine a different future, but on our ability to properly recognize
the present. Thus, the chapters that follow will not try to imagine alternatives
to nostalgia and cynicism; instead, the focus will remain on inquiring into the
prevailing society of enjoyment. This is not because alternatives do not exist,
but because the wager of this book is fundamentally a Hegelian one—that
thought cannot arrive at future alternatives through bypassing the present. It
must instead recognize the future as having already arrived, inhering implicitly in the present. Our task, according to Hegel, is to reconcile thought to the
present, to grasp the rationality of the real. Any attempt to imagine an alternative—that is, any utopian speculations about a possible future—will necessarily express that alternative in terms of the present, thereby stripping it of its
alternative status a priori. Our efforts to find a political alternative to the society of commanded enjoyment—and to contemporary late capitalism—depend
on our ability to recognize our status within the society of enjoyment.
The fundamental thing to recognize about the society of enjoyment is
that in it the pursuit of enjoyment has misfired: the society of enjoyment has
not provided the enjoyment that it promises. It has, instead, made enjoyment
all the more inaccessible. The contemporary imperative to enjoy—the elevation of enjoyment to a social obligation—deprives enjoyment of its marginal
status vis-à-vis the social order, bringing it within confines of that order,
where we can experience it directly and fully. What the society of enjoyment
thus makes manifest is the impossibility of any direct experience of enjoyment: if we try to experience it directly, we necessarily miss it; enjoyment can
only be experienced indirectly, through the act of aiming at something else—
as a by-product. This is because the barrier to enjoyment is essential to the
experience of it. In fact, what we enjoy is the barrier itself. For instance, children’s enjoyment of Christmas morning derives from the barrier to enjoyment
represented by the wrapping paper over their gifts and the prohibition against
opening gifts prior to Christmas day. Without the wrapping paper—with
direct access to the gifts—Christmas would be just another day. When we
experience enjoyment directly, when we have gifts without wrapping paper
and on any (or every) day of the year, enjoyment (and the gift) loses its value,
a value produced by inaccessibility. Kierkegaard makes a similar observation
relative to religion when he insists that our relationship with the greatness of
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8
The End of Dissatisfaction?
God can never become a direct one but must occur through the mediation of
the lowly figure of Christ. He suggests that God sent Christ to us because he
understood the importance of what Kierkegaard calls “indirect communication.” If we were to see God as he really is rather than through the humiliated
image of Christ on the cross, God would be degraded in our eyes; we couldn’t properly see his greatness. The same is true for enjoyment: when we experience it directly, it loses all value and becomes commonplace, and as a result
we don’t actually experience it.19 Hence, the problem with the society of enjoyment is not that we suffer from too much enjoyment, but that we don’t have
enough. Far from finding new ways of restraining enjoyment, as many contemporary cultural critics suggest, we must find new ways of making it possible. This entails a move from inhabiting a society of commanded enjoyment
to engaging in a politics of enjoyment.
The key to such a move involves recognizing what is occurring in the
transition to a society of commanded enjoyment, a transition that the subsequent chapters will explore in the domain of contemporary American culture.
After laying out the distinction between the society of prohibition and the
society of enjoyment in the first chapter, I will explore the various characteristics of the society of enjoyment, the ramifications of the turn from the prohibition of enjoyment to the imperative to enjoy. My contention is that these
characteristics function as symptoms of the underlying transformation of the
social order. The symptoms include the decline of the traditional father (chapter 2), the proliferation of the image (chapter 3), the elimination of transcendence and distance (chapter 4), a loss of meaning (chapter 5), the development
of widespread cynicism (chapter 6), an increasing sense of political apathy and
the waning of desire (chapter 7), the disappearance of the public world (chapter 8), and a rise in incivility and aggressiveness (chapter 9). Cultural critics on
both the Right and the Left—both academic and popular—have attacked
each of these eight symptoms without, however, making explicit the link to
the underlying social transformation from a society of prohibition to a society
of enjoyment. Each chapter will take as its starting point one of these critiques
of contemporary culture from one or more cultural critics. In each case, these
critiques will serve as the basis for identifying a symptom of the transition to
a society of enjoyment. In an effort to illustrate the breadth of the turn to
enjoyment, these chapters will rely on all varieties of contemporary cultural
criticism: conservative, liberal, Marxist, and feminist; academic, popular, or an
amalgamation of the two. After beginning with this discussion of cultural criticism, the chapters will explore the symptoms of the society of commanded
enjoyment through a variety of cultural texts: Peter Wier’s film Dead Poets
Society in chapter 2, Don DeLillo’s novel Americana in chapter 3, Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America in chapter 4, Toni Morrison’s novel Paradise in
chapter 5, Wim Wenders’s film The End of Violence in chapter 6, E. L. Doc-
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Introduction
9
torow’s novel World’s Fair in chapter 7, David Koepp’s film Trigger Effect in
chapter 8, and Spike Lee’s film Summer of Sam in chapter 9. These texts
respond to the different symptoms of the turn to the command to enjoy and
often explicitly link them to this imperative. Each chapter moves from a cultural critic identifying the symptom to a cultural text responding to it. In this
way, the transformation from a society that prohibits enjoyment to one that
commands it will become visible in all its manifestations.
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Chapter One
From Prohibition to Enjoyment
PROHIBITION AS FOUNDATION
If today, in the midst of a full-fledged consumer culture, we are surrounded
everywhere by the demand that we maximize our enjoyment, this represents a
significant departure from the way in which society has traditionally been
organized. Prohibition has always functioned as the key to social organization
as such, demanding that subjects sacrifice enjoyment for the sake of work,
community, and progress. Hence, in order to grasp the significance of the
emergence of the society of commanded enjoyment, we must first explore the
role that prohibition has played in allowing society to function by investigating thematically the structure of the traditional society of prohibition. In
exploring the central role of prohibition in social organization, I will look to
three related lines of thought that together will help to shed light on the way
that it functions. By laying out these theoretical explanations of prohibition, I
hope to provide a foundation for understanding what has changed. The
importance of prohibition’s structuring role in society becomes evident in
Claude Lévi-Strauss’s discussions of incest, Freud’s speculations about the primal horde and the origins of society, and Lacan’s conception of the symbolic
order. Each of these three lines of inquiry emphasizes that prohibition is the
sine qua non of a coherent social order, though prohibition’s foundational status becomes most evident in the work of Lévi-Strauss.
In Elementary Structures of Kinship, Lévi-Strauss notices the presence of
prohibition—specifically the prohibition of incest—in every social order. He
11
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The End of Dissatisfaction?
claims that the prohibition of incest, though a thoroughly cultural phenomenon, has the universality of something natural. It appears across cultural barriers, as the necessary feature of culture itself. Though the definition of incest
is plastic, changing from society to society, there is no society, according to
Lévi-Strauss, that does not in some way prohibit it. In asserting the universality of the incest prohibition, Lévi-Strauss is really articulating something
even more fundamental about the structure of any social order: every social
order depends on a shared sacrifice, something that must be given up by those
who enter into it, a societal “entry fee.” As Lévi-Strauss himself puts it, “Considered in its purely formal aspect, the prohibition of incest is thus only the
group’s assertion that where relationships between the sexes are concerned, a
person can not do just what he pleases. The positive aspect of the prohibition is
to initiate organization.”1 The shared sacrifice embodied by the incest prohibition—and not some positive characteristic held in common among all the
members of a society—brings unity and coherence to a loosely organized
group. If a society were based on only a common positive characteristic (the
same language, for instance), this characteristic would not in any way act as a
control on people’s behavior. It would not stop them, as Lévi-Strauss puts it,
from doing just what they please, in the way that prohibition, and specifically
the incest prohibition, does.
The incest prohibition creates societal coherence through directing people’s interest away from what is closest to them (the family) and toward the
social organization itself. As a result, for instance, rather than continuing to
desire the mother, the subject must desire someone from another family, from
the social order at large. This directing of interest away from the family and
to the society at large is the most important function of the incest prohibition.
Without this redirection of interest, nothing would propel the child out of the
family, out of a concern for only her/his immediate environment. As psychoanalysis makes clear, there is no want of passion on the part of the child for
her/his fellow family members, no initial revulsion at the familial (or familiar)
love object.2 The incest prohibition, then, not only creates a desire for something beyond the immediate scope of the child, but it also produces a feeling
of disgust with the idea of taking someone immediately present (a family
member) as a love object. In this way, the prohibition opens us up to the social
world, freeing us from the narrow focus of our initial interest through a complete redirection of it.
This redirection of interest is not simply an even exchange, however. One
does not give up one equally enjoyable object (the family member) for another
(the member of society at large). Instead, one gives up enjoyment itself for a
socially directed or mediated pleasure that pales in comparison. The prohibition of incest is the prohibition of enjoyment. Incest is identical with enjoyment insofar as incest implies actually enjoying one’s love object itself rather
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From Prohibition to Enjoyment
13
than a fantasmatic replica. Incest would be the perfect sexual encounter—perfect enjoyment—because it would involve an impossible object, an object that
is completely forbidden. Though the social order always seems to hold out the
promise of its own compensatory enjoyment to its initiates, this is a promise
that it cannot but break. The social order can’t keep its promise of compensatory enjoyment—enjoyment that might come close to the enjoyment that
the incest prohibition bars—because such unrestrained enjoyment necessarily
threatens the self-perpetuation of the social order itself. Whereas the self-perpetuation of the social order depends on conservation of resources, calculation
of possibilities, and allowances for the future, enjoyment occurs without any
consideration of how it will be sustained, without any fear of using itself up.
Enjoyment also shatters barriers; it overcomes differences, distinctions, and
hierarchies (including those of social class). Most importantly, however, those
who are enjoying themselves are not, at the moment of enjoyment at least,
“productive members of society.”3 Freud’s description of a prototypical experience of enjoyment reveals just how enjoyment produces a subject unconcerned
with society and productivity. He points out that the “prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life” is the image of “a baby sinking back
satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful
smile.”4 This image of enjoyment suggests the extent to which enjoyment
stands as a barrier to good citizenship: while someone is enjoying, she/he is
not contributing to the good of the social order. Because of all these inherently
antisocial features, enjoyment represents a danger to the very logic upon
which every social order constitutes itself, and the social order must try to
ward off this danger.
However, even though enjoyment represents a threat to the social order
and its stability, every social order must use enjoyment in order to perpetuate
itself. In fact, Lacan even goes so far as to say that the founding signifier of
the social order (what he calls “the One”)—and, by extension, the social order
itself—“far from arising out of the universe, arises out of enjoyment.”5 Consequently, despite the prohibition against enjoyment, enjoyment still makes
itself felt within society. Religions, for instance, often promise an afterlife of
unrestrained enjoyment in exchange for the sacrifice of enjoyment in the here
and now. But enjoyment appears within society in even more direct and
socially useful ways. Societies are able to perpetuate themselves because subjects derive enjoyment from its sacrifice, because the sacrifice of enjoyment
itself produces enjoyment. Social coherence depends on the enjoyment that
subjects derive from the sacrifice of their private enjoyment for the greater
good of the society. It is this type of enjoyment that sustains soldiers through
the horrors of war or workers through the drudgery of their labor. It is akin to
the enjoyment that people experience when identifying with the society as a
whole—such as when Americans enjoyed the gold medal of the 1980 U.S.
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The End of Dissatisfaction?
Olympic Hockey team. And finally, there is the enjoyment that derives from
those minor transgressions permitted by the social authority (drinking to
excess, playing the lottery, etc.). In all of these ways, the social order allows—
and relies on—some degree of enjoyment. However, in each case, the enjoyment remains constrained and confined within clear limitations. These are
moments of clearly demarcated and limited enjoyment, enjoyment that occurs
within socially defined limits. Despite the use the social order makes of enjoyment, unrestrained and uncontrolled enjoyment—which is to say, enjoyment
as such—still constitutes a mortal threat to that order, as the universality of
the incest prohibition makes clear. It is, as Lévi-Strauss says, the founding
moment of society, and it is so insofar as it marks the moment at which a society demands the renunciation of enjoyment.
Here we see the unequaled role that the prohibition of enjoyment plays
in the construction of a social order. It provides the foundation on which all
the structures of society necessarily rest. Prohibition performs this function
because it eliminates the threat that unrestrained enjoyment poses to society
as a whole. Without prohibition, enjoyment would constantly threaten the
stability and security of the social order. The antisocial danger represented by
enjoyment finds perhaps its most poetic expression in Jonathan Demme’s The
Silence of the Lambs (1991), in the figure of Hannibal Lecter. The film demonstrates, quite clearly, that Lecter derives his enjoyment from eating people: he
doesn’t eat people because he bears them ill-will, but simply because he enjoys
it. Rather than facilitating harmonious intersubjective contact, as the example
of Lecter indicates, enjoyment threatens the big Other, insofar as it disregards
the desire of the Other altogether.6 Though Lecter’s mode of procuring enjoyment is undoubtedly extreme, it is nonetheless exemplary, because all enjoyment involves seeing the Other as nothing more than a tool and not showing
“consideration” for the Other. As Serge André points out, to enjoy something
“is to be able to use it to the point of abusing it—the abuse being precisely that
which the law seeks to delimit.”7 In the act of barring this unrestrained enjoyment from the social order, prohibition produces habitable space in which we
can coexist without directly confronting the horror of the Other’s enjoyment,
which is why Lévi-Strauss sees prohibition at the root of everything social.
In Totem and Taboo, Freud illustrates in another way the foundational role
of prohibition in structuring the social order. He offers his own mythic account
of the origin of social organization, an account in which he envisions a group
not bound by the prohibition, a primal horde. In the horde, enjoyment is not
readily available to everyone. It is confined to the strongest, the primal Father,
who hoards all enjoyment (i.e., all women) for himself. This Father enjoys
without restraint, but only until such time as the sons, jealous of his enjoyment,
conspire to murder him. According to Freud, this murder of the primal Father
is the first social act, and the prohibition of incest—or, of enjoyment—follows
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From Prohibition to Enjoyment
15
directly on its heels. In establishing a social order in the wake of the primal
Father’s murder, the sons recognize that, if they are to live together in relative
peace, they must agree to a collective renunciation of enjoyment. Without this
collective renunciation, no one can have any feeling of security, because there is
nothing to mediate a life-and-death struggle for enjoyment. Force itself—and
force alone—prevails: the strongest can enjoy himself, and all the weaker ones
will not survive. The sons, however, had already opted out of this life-anddeath struggle at the moment they conspired to murder the primal Father. In
this first moment of collective action, the renunciation that would ultimately
become the incest prohibition has its genesis. After this point, the enjoyment
embodied by the primal Father becomes only a memory, the object of fantasy
for all those who have agreed to give it up. That is, the murder of the primal
Father has the effect of triggering fantasies about the enjoyment that he experienced prior to his death. These fantasies sustain those who have sacrificed
their own enjoyment in the collective renunciation that made the murder possible, and they provide the reassurance that, if enjoyment is inaccessible now, at
least it once was accessible for someone.
It is important to remember, however, that the prehistory of society that
Freud recounts in Totem and Taboo is a mythic reconstruction. Freud’s account
is necessarily mythic because once we have entered into the social order, the
origins of that order always become wholly obscured. This is why Lacan
points out in Seminar XVII that “no one has ever seen the least trace of the
father of the human horde.”8 It becomes impossible to look at the origins of
the social order—or prior to them—except through the reflection of that
order itself. Hence, when we look back, we don’t see “natural humanity” in its
pure form, unmediated by the social order, but the order’s own fundamental
ideological presuppositions.9 The onset of the social order constitutes an
absolute barrier and beyond it we see only our own reflection. That is to say,
any conception of the state of nature is a conception of our state of nature, the
state of nature belonging to our specific social order. Even the idea of primal
humanity engaged in a “life-and-death struggle” is itself but a reflection of a
prominent presupposition concerning what constitutes “human nature.” Prior
to the onset of the social order and the system of meaning that it constitutes,
there is no meaning and, therefore, no enjoyment that holds meaning in
abeyance. Before the social order, there are no distinctions at all—neither
enjoyment nor the lack of it. The introduction of the symbolic order effects a
radical change in our relationship to enjoyment.
At this point, we can see the importance of Lacan’s conception of the symbolic order, which lies in his grasp of the extent to which the symbolic order
and its prohibition of enjoyment actually introduces the possibility of enjoyment. In the act of prohibiting enjoyment, the symbolic order erects a barrier
relative to which enjoyment can constitute itself. It is this that Lacan grasps
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The End of Dissatisfaction?
when he rewrites Dostoyevsky’s “without God, everything is permitted” to
“without God, nothing is permitted.” That is, without God, without some Law
that demands renunciation, one cannot have any enjoyment. This is why the
introduction of the Law is an obscene act, an act producing the possibility of
the enjoyment it prohibits. Enjoyment requires the barrier to it that the Law
provides. This means that we must qualify the idea that entrance into society
requires the renunciation of enjoyment: one must indeed renounce one’s enjoyment, but this enjoyment is something that does not exist prior to its renunciation.10 In giving it up, in other words, we in effect retroactively create, through
our presupposing of it, an enjoyment that we never had. Here, we can again see
why incest is but another name for enjoyment: just as prehistorical enjoyment
does not exist, neither does incest prior to its prohibition. When one is free to
sleep with one’s mother, she’s not the mother, in the sense of being the privileged object of desire. It is only at the point at which the mother becomes offlimits that she takes on the role of “mother,” because it is the fact of being offlimits that elevates an object to being the privileged object of desire.
Though this prehistorical enjoyment did not exist, the idea of it nonetheless continues to have a power over the subjects of the social order. Having given
up a part of themselves—albeit a part that did not exist until they gave it up—
these subjects, insofar as they remain within the social order, are incomplete or
lacking. Bound by this lack, they imagine or fantasize an object that exists in the
gap left by their sacrifice. This object is what Lacan calls the objet petit a. The
objet a constitutes the subject as desiring; it provides the lure that acts as an
engine for the desire of the subject and also directs that desire in its circuit. In
fact, Lacan notes repeatedly that “the petit a is the cause of the subject.”11 It
causes the subject to emerge as a desiring subject, as the subject of desire. Desire
is, in this sense, part of what one gets in exchange for the sacrifice of one’s enjoyment. While this may seem, on the surface, to be a bargain for the subject (considering that she or he never had the enjoyment she or he gave up in the first
place), desire is inevitably a poor substitute for enjoyment. Enjoyment satisfies
the subject, but when a subject desires, she or he perpetually lacks her objet a and
hence remains perpetually dissatisfied.12 Desire lays down a path that has no exit
and leaves the subject, despite her/his constant longing for something more, a
prisoner of the social order that desire itself is a reaction against. The only end
of desire is more desire. We desire because we don’t find the sacrifice of our
enjoyment entirely satisfying, but desire, unfortunately, does nothing to overcome that dissatisfaction. In fact, desire is sustained dissatisfaction.13 This state
of sustained dissatisfaction is the normal state for subjects within a society of
prohibition. Prohibition produces dissatisfied, desiring subjects, subjects who
remain securely within the confines of the social order.
Desire is consonant with the social order because of its reliance on
absence rather than presence. When I desire an object, its absence is often
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From Prohibition to Enjoyment
17
helpful in building up my desire: the longer the desired object remains away,
the stronger the hold of desire over me. All of our clichés about desire—like
“absence makes the heart grow fonder”—affirm this fundamental truth of
desire. By the same token, when the object becomes a constant presence, my
desire tends to wane. And if I gain too much proximity to the object of desire,
the object suddenly disappears or loses its desirability. This aspect of desire is
correlative to the functioning of the social order, which is itself a symbolic
entity. It allows subjects to relate to each other through the mediation of a
symbolic order, which means through absence rather than presence. The symbolic order is, as Lacan puts it, the absence of things, and this absence is crucial for the possibility of mediation, because it serves to eliminate rivalry. If
one subject doesn’t have a thing, at least another doesn’t have it either, which
provides some degree of consolation for lost enjoyment.14 This is why prohibition is so important for holding society together: if I see that no one else is
able to enjoy, I feel as if we are partners in loss rather than rivals in enjoyment.
The symbolic order is the basis for any social order because it provides a
layer of mediation connecting subjects together. Within it, no one has direct
access to enjoyment. As Lacan puts it, “jouissance is prohibited to whomever
speaks, as such—or, to put it differently, it can only be said between the lines
by whomever is a subject of the Law, since the Law is founded on that very
prohibition.”15 This shared sacrifice of enjoyment—embodied in the incest
prohibition—establishes the basis of the social bond. Because subjects experience themselves as lacking, as not fully enjoying themselves, they look to the
Other for what they are missing, for the piece that would allow for complete
enjoyment. It is subjects’ inability to enjoy completely—to have an experience
of total enjoyment—that directs them to the Other, that creates a desire for
what the social order seems to have hidden within its recesses. In contrast, the
enjoying subject does not look to the Other for what it lacks, but rather sustains an attitude of indifference toward the Other. As a result, enjoyment as
such is not conducive to social relations and the functioning of the symbolic
order. The symbolic order thrives on the deprivation of the subjects belonging
to it: it creates a bond of lack. In this way, prohibition works to create coherence within society. The prohibition of enjoyment holds the social order
together through the shared dissatisfaction it produces. This sense of shared
dissatisfaction is the salient feature of the society of prohibition, and it represents a direct point of contrast with the society of commanded enjoyment.
IMAGINARY INTERLUDES
In order to make clear the structure of the society of prohibition as it contrasts with that of the society of commanded enjoyment, it is not enough to
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The End of Dissatisfaction?
emphasize the bond created by the sacrifice of enjoyment. Though the society of prohibition functions primarily through the dissatisfaction of its subjects, it also must provide some way of alleviating the sense of lack without
endangering the social structure. Recognition of the social bond and of one’s
own lack allows one to relate in a mediated way to other subjects. It allows
one to view other subjects not just as rivals in struggle, but with some degree
of lateral identification. But this is clearly not adequate compensation for the
dissatisfaction that prohibition produces. Because recognizing one’s lack—
one’s failure to enjoy—is not pleasant, we often avoid doing so, preferring
instead to imagine that we haven’t made the initial sacrifice of enjoyment or
that we are able to overcome this sacrifice and enjoy within the social order.
For those who have acceded to life within the symbolic order, there remains
one easy avenue of procuring enjoyment: the imaginary. For Lacan, the imaginary is the domain of images, a register of experience that allows the subject
to visualize the enjoyment it lacks. Thus, grasping the importance of the
imaginary is vital for understanding what sustains the society of prohibition.
Because prohibition denies the subject the ultimate enjoyment, it
inevitably produces dissatisfaction and potential rebellion. The imaginary is
the repository for that potential rebellion insofar as it provides an illusory
enjoyment in the midst of its prohibition by the social order. One can imagine an enjoyment that the social order prohibits, and as a result, society’s confines do not seem absolute, even for those committed to remaining within
those confines.16 For example, the spouse devoted to the ideal of marital
fidelity can imagine the steamy affair that she/he would never accede to in
reality. This imagined affair—this event enacted on the imaginary level—
allows the subject to enjoy transgressing a prohibition without actually doing
so. The imaginary thus plays a crucial supplementary role in the society of
prohibition, offering an imaginary enjoyment for those who suffer from the
prohibition of enjoyment in the Real. Because of our ability to imagine an
enjoyment that the symbolic order prohibits, the imaginary offers us a separate register of experience, distinct from the symbolic order. In Lacan’s triadic
division of experience, the symbolic order constitutes our social reality, the
imaginary provides an avenue for the illusory transgression of that reality, and
the Real marks the point at which the symbolic order fails—the gap that
always haunts it. Though the imaginary assists prohibition by providing a safe
outlet for enjoyment, it also represents a danger to the society of prohibition.
The imaginary thus has an ambiguous status within the society of prohibition,
and we must examine both its role in supplementing the power of prohibition
and the threat that it poses.
Insofar as it offers us an image of enjoyment, the imaginary disguises our
status within the symbolic order (which requires a sacrifice of enjoyment).
Whereas in the symbolic we experience the power of the social order over us,
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From Prohibition to Enjoyment
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in the imaginary, which is the domain of the ego (our bodily image), we feel
isolated within the shell that the ego seems to provide. Within this imaginary
isolation, one seems not to have to sacrifice the object. One is able to enjoy it,
but with the restriction that one can only enjoy the image of the object, not the
object itself. The objet petit a, the object insofar as it offers enjoyment, is precisely what the subject misses in the image; this object is, according to Lacan,
“what is lacking, is non-specular, it is not graspable in the image.”17 Because
the image lacks the objet petit a, imaginary enjoyment is illusory. Only outside
the limits of both the symbolic and the imaginary—only in the Real—are we
actually able to enjoy because the Real does not require a sacrifice of enjoyment. The status of enjoyment, in fact, provides an easy way of grasping
Lacan’s symbolic-imaginary-Real triad: in the Real, we can enjoy; in the
imaginary, we imagine that we enjoy; and in the symbolic, the symbol enjoys
in our stead. Even though it only provides an imagined enjoyment, the imaginary nonetheless seems to provide enjoyment as such, while the symbolic
order only offers desire. This is why one cannot think the society of prohibition without the imaginary housing the image of the denied enjoyment. This
image is what allows subjects in the society of prohibition to sustain themselves in the midst of their dissatisfaction.
The imaginary, however, does not exist outside of or prior to the symbolic. It is the Real that marks the limit point—the failure—of the symbolic
order, not the imaginary. The imaginary is simply a perspective within the
symbolic, a way of seeing that fails to grasp its own symbolic determination.18
In other words, when I engage with images (the imaginary), the symbolic
order always determines the form of that engagement; the symbolic order
determines the place from which I see the image. In Seminar II, Lacan
explains this relationship:
The symbolic relation is constituted as early as possible, even prior to the
fixation of the self image of the subject, prior to the structuring image of
the ego, introducing the dimension of the subject into the world, a dimension capable of creating a reality other than that experienced as brute reality, as the encounter of two masses, the collision of two balls. The imaginary experience is inscribed in the register of the symbolic as early on as
you can think it.19
Here, Lacan minimizes the distinction between imaginary and symbolic,
claiming that the former necessarily takes place within the confines of the latter. This means that imaginary experience never actually breaks from the structure of the symbolic order. Our imaginary enjoyment remains a confined and
policed enjoyment, an enjoyment relatively amenable to symbolic authority.
But within the society of prohibition the imaginary is also a site of potential disruption. Subjects immersed in the imaginary remain within the confines
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The End of Dissatisfaction?
of the symbolic order, but they do not recognize these confines. As a result,
despite this inscription of the imaginary within the symbolic, our experience
within the imaginary seems as if it occurs before or outside of the intervention
of the symbol. This is why our first experiences, though the symbolic order provides the context for them, are imaginary ones.20 Prior to the act of grasping
their integration into the world of the symbol and thus their “humanization,”
subjects constitute themselves on the level of the imaginary, and on this level,
they are able to enjoy—which is to say, they are able to see themselves as whole,
not as lacking. In the mirror stage, the prototypical imaginary experience, the
child looks in the mirror and sees her/his body as a coherent whole over which
she/he has mastery. Though this sense of wholeness and mastery is illusory or
imaginary, it nonetheless obscures the child’s lack and hence disguises subjection to the symbolic order. In the imaginary, the subject seems isolated and
independent of the symbolic order—self-sufficient.
It is for this reason that imaginary experience represents a danger to the
social order even though it is integral to it and remains firmly within it: subjects lodged in the imaginary believe themselves to be independent and fail to
see their symbolic bond with other subjects. Thus, they see other subjects
purely as rivals, rather than as partners in sacrifice. The lack of distance in the
imaginary further exacerbates this sense of rivalry. Images, unlike symbolic
structures, seem directly present to us. As Richard Boothby notes,
The difference between the imaginary and symbolic functions aligns itself
with a distinction between the perceptual and nonperceptual. Unlike the
imaginary, which distinguishes figure and ground within a perceptual field,
the symbolic is always conditioned by its relation to a network of signifiers
that is not and in fact cannot be made an object of perception. We perceive
speech and writing but not the symbol system that makes them possible.21
We can readily grasp the image in a way that we are constitutively unable to
grasp the symbolic function. As a result, enjoyment permeates the imaginary
realm because here there is no distance between the subject and the image.
This lack of distance—or lack of mediation that the symbol would provide—means that from the perspective of the imaginary, every relationship is
necessarily a violent relationship, a life and death struggle for enjoyment: in
the imaginary, there is no possibility for compromise or sharing because of the
nature of imaginary enjoyment itself. Here, enjoyment has an either/or quality to it: either I am enjoying or you are—not both of us and not “first I’ll enjoy
a little and then you can.” It is in such either/or terms that Lacan always
describes life in the imaginary order. Here, without language, one cannot
come to any agreement or compromise. On the level of the imaginary, in other
words, there is no such thing as peaceful coexistence, no possibility for a pact
governing the rationing of enjoyment. In Seminar I, Lacan argues that “Each
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From Prohibition to Enjoyment
21
time the subject apprehends himself as form and as ego [i.e., on an imaginary
level . . .], his desire is projected outside. From whence arises the impossibility of all human co-existence.”22 This dimension of the imaginary—the hostility that it produces toward the Other—proves a barrier to the functioning
of the society of prohibition.
SYMBOLIC RESPITE
Even though the society of prohibition relies on the imaginary to offset the
dissatisfaction it produces in subjects, it nonetheless aims at policing both
Real and imaginary enjoyment. As we will see later, this is one of the crucial
differences between the society of prohibition and the society of commanded
enjoyment. Whereas the society of enjoyment actively promotes imaginary
enjoyment, the society of prohibition restrains it. Prohibition doesn’t do this
in order to eliminate enjoyment. Instead, the function of the symbolic order is
the leveling out of enjoyment. As Lacan puts it, “That is clearly the essence of
the law—to divide up, distribute, or reattribute everything that counts as
jouissance.”23 The law prohibits enjoyment in effort to extend the life of enjoyment; it is the symbolic order that makes possible a sense of permanence,
which is why subjects are willing to accept the prohibition of enjoyment that
the symbolic order demands. However, enjoyment—and this is part of what
puts it at odds with the social order—occurs without any reference to perpetuating itself. It is purely momentary, and when one enjoys, one does so lost in
the moment, without any thoughts of the future or of future possibilities for
enjoyment. Once one begins to calculate about enjoyment, to attempt to
divide it up and ration it, one has already left enjoyment behind. Speech
attempts to conserve enjoyment for tomorrow, to arrest enjoyment’s own
inherent self-wastefulness. We can see this most clearly in the case of the
obsessional who continues to talk in order to preserve the enjoyment that he
fears will be “used up” when the talking ends. In addition to conserving enjoyment, the obsessional’s talking also has the effect—as does speech in general—of holding off enjoyment. He talks so that there will be no opening for
a sudden outbreak of enjoyment.
The initial importance of words lies not in conversation, but in conservation. By replacing the object itself with a symbol, speech extends our ability to
enjoy the object, allowing us to enjoy the object not simply in the immediacy
of its presence, but in its absence. The symbol allows our experience—our
enjoyment—of the object to endure, even after the object has disappeared.
Without the symbol, all of the subject’s relationships—and every object—can
only appear as evanescent. The symbol allows the object to endure over time;
it arrests the temporality of the object as it catches the object within a symbolic
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The End of Dissatisfaction?
web. It gives the object an identity, making it identical with itself, which is the
key to perpetuating it. At the same time—because it gives the object subsistence over time—the word allows for a mutuality in relation to the object that
remains impossible on the purely imaginary level; the word indicates the existence of a pact, an agreement between subjects. It is on the basis of the recognition of this pact, implicit in every symbol, that a life-and-death struggle is
avoided. The symbolic order, which has its basis in prohibition, constitutes a
pact of mutuality, which is why prohibition has such importance for any social
organization. The social pact attempts to safeguard enjoyment, to ensure that
no one will enjoy extravagantly.
From the moment that the symbol arrives, it changes everything in
human relations and makes human coexistence possible. The symbol provides
the possibility of coexistence because it transforms the subjects it interpellates
at the same time that it mediates the relationship between them. In Seminar
I, Lacan claims, “the symbol introduces a third party, an element of mediation,
which brings the two actors into each other’s presence, leads them on to
another plane, and changes them” (155). That is to say, the symbolic order
adds a distance between subject and object and between subject and subject,
eliminating the direct relationship between them that we find in the imaginary. Though we tend to think that we need intimacy or proximity for harmonious intersubjective relations, proximity actually represents a barrier to
such relations. This is why, in conversations, we take pains to avoid invading
the “personal space” of our interlocutors. We feel uncomfortable, unable to
speak, with someone in close proximity directly in front of us. When we are
too close, confronted directly with the presence of an other in her/his enjoyment, the enjoyment is suffocating. The symbolic order and the prohibition
that constitutes it provide distance from enjoyment, a distance in which it is
possible to relate to the other. In the distance that it provides, we can see the
importance of prohibition in producing a social order in which subjects can
interact smoothly.
One needs some degree of distance, however small, to separate oneself
from the Real dimension of the other. The distance created by the symbol,
however, has nothing to do with actual distance. The symbolic dimension of
human existence allows me to be in the midst of a huge crowd and still feel
properly distanced from everyone. Because the symbol has the effect of eliminating enjoyment and carving out a neutral space in which subjects can interact, I do not experience the other’s enjoyment encroaching on me, as I would
if I didn’t have an experience of the symbolic pact governing the interaction.
Insofar as it eliminates or muffles enjoyment, the symbolic order creates distance. But as the power of the symbolic order in our experience breaks
down—as the society of prohibition transforms into the society of enjoyment—this proper distance begins to evaporate. Rather than being able to feel
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From Prohibition to Enjoyment
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comfortably alone in a crowd, we feel surrounded and trapped, even with only
a few people around. This creates a feeling of claustrophobia, and we seek
actual distance from the other in an effort to compensate for this failure of
symbolic distance. That is to say, the very desire for more elbow room stems
from an inadequate symbolic experience. We think, for instance, that by moving farther and farther from the city we can finally reproduce the distance that
the symbolic order provided. Flight to the suburbs has its origin in the turn to
a society of enjoyment, a society in which we no longer feel the effects of symbolic mediation. But no distance out on Long Island is ever enough—not
because we always encounter other people fleeing along with us, but because
no amount of actual distance can provide the breathing space that the tiniest
amount of symbolic distance can. The attempted compensation always fails.24
We can see a precursor of this kind of compensation in Henry David
Thoreau. Though Walden is ostensibly about the importance of self-isolation,
Thoreau does give some consideration to intersubjectivity and to the need for
distance in making that intersubjectivity possible. Thoreau accurately recognizes that intersubjective intimacy is only possible on the basis of distance:
when we are too close, the Real presence of the other has a suffocating effect.
When we are confronted with presence in this way, we are flooded with
enjoyment, threatened with being swallowed up in it. This onslaught of
enjoyment is not at all conducive to intersubjectivity, as Thoreau himself
points out. We need distance for a conversation with the other to actually
take place. However, Thoreau can conceive of distance only as actual physical distance, not as the product of the symbol. Hence, he finds that he can’t
really converse with another person in his small cabin because the lack of distance is stifling. True intersubjective communication, for Thoreau, requires
speaking to his interlocutor across the diameter of Walden Pond. In this
image of intersubjectivity, Thoreau attempts to conceive of Walden Pond
itself as a kind of pseudo-symbolic order that works to provide distance and
mediate the relationship between two subjects. The problem here is that
physical distance—even the distance across Walden Pond—is never enough.
It can’t provide the respite from the other’s presence that the symbol can,
though we remain convinced—today even more so than in Thoreau’s age—
that it can. Thus, we try to move farther and farther apart in an effort to gain
the respite from the other’s enjoyment that only the experience of the symbolic structure could actually provide.25
Actual physical distance fails because the Real, unlike the symbolic order,
gives us nowhere to hide. As Lacan claims in Seminar II, “only in the dimension of truth [opened up by the symbol] can something be hidden. In the real,
the very idea of a hidden place is insane—however deep into the bowels of the
earth someone may go bearing something, it isn’t hidden there, since if he
went there, so can you” (201–22). Lacan’s point here is that the symbol creates
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The End of Dissatisfaction?
the possibility of a secret, of something hidden, which is impossible in the
Real itself. The symbolic structure—the order of the signifier—begins with
the act of concealment, and this concealment remains essential to its very
logic. In Seminar V, Lacan uses the example of Robinson Crusoe’s encounter
with Friday to elucidate this dimension of the signifier. He says, “Friday’s
footprint that Robinson discovers in the course of his walk on the island is not
a signifier. On the other hand, if we suppose that he, Robinson, for some reason or other, erases this mark, there clearly is introduced the dimension of the
signifier.”26 We introduce the signifier and the symbolic order when we conceal something, and this concealment has clear benefits for the subject.
Life in the symbolic order requires a sacrifice of enjoyment, but in return
the symbolic provides a place of respite from the other—a kind of hiding place
for the subject. Only the symbolic order allows us to hide, and it does this by
replacing the object with a symbol, a symbol whose presence indicates the
absence of the object. The symbol introduces absence itself as a presence, proclaiming, in effect, that this word (which is here) conveys this thing (which is
not here). And insofar as it does this, it allows us to hide even when we are in
the midst of the public eye. With the advent of the symbol, we can put on a
public persona that holds something private in reserve, hidden beneath the
symbol. In this way, the symbolic order opens us a private space, a respite from
its own intrusive operations.27 In the symbolic order, one can, for instance,
shave one’s head in order to disguise baldness; in other words, even when a
subject tells the truth using a symbol, the very use of a symbol suggests that
something is concealed, thereby, in effect, hiding the truth that the subject has
candidly admitted to. But just as it creates a hiding place where none was
before, the introduction of the symbolic order also changes our relationship to
objects and to enjoyment.
ABUNDANT RECOMPENSE
In describing the society of prohibition and contrasting it with the society of
commanded enjoyment, we must pay attention to the transformation that
prohibition effects as it constitutes the symbolic order. In order to safeguard
the social order from enjoyment, prohibition replaces our direct relationship
to objects with a symbolic relationship. Hence, after the onset of the symbolic
order, the importance of objects declines while that of symbols increases.
What we do with the symbol of the object becomes far more important than
what we do with the object itself—or the former comes to determine the latter. As Lacan says in his first seminar, what we do with the symbol “elephant”
ends up determining what will happen to real elephants. In the same way, my
name—and what people think of it—becomes far more important to me than
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From Prohibition to Enjoyment
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my being—and what is done to it. I would rather endure physical injury than
have someone slander my “good name.” I would, for instance, rather be an
immobile Christopher Reeve while having his respected name than a healthy
O. J. Simpson, whose name has become infamous. The ruin of Simpson’s
name has made his life far more unbearable than Reeve’s physical disability
has made his. This kind of valuation results from the shift in importance that
the symbolic order effects—its instituting the symbol as the indicator of value.
Through just this process—and as a part of this transformation—symbolic
recognition comes to substitute for enjoyment. Recognition allows us to enjoy
in a socially mediated way: we enjoy the recognition that the symbolic order
confers on us. Though we can’t attain unlimited enjoyment within the symbolic order, we can obtain recognition, and this substitution helps to facilitate
coexistence. Unlike unlimited enjoyment, recognition concerns itself with the
Other and doesn’t exclude the possibility of mutuality. Recognition is socially
acceptable enjoyment—conserved enjoyment, or enjoyment in its conservative
form—precisely because it involves enjoying one’s symbolic status or allowing
the symbol to enjoy in one’s stead.
With the onset of the symbol—the inception of the prohibition of enjoyment—recognition gains a paramount importance. Once this occurs, all of the
things for which people strive are important not for the immediate enjoyment
that they might provide, but for recognition that they can confer upon those
who have obtained them. Money is perhaps archetypal in this sense. Its value
doesn’t lie so much in the enjoyment that it can purchase as in symbolic recognition it produces. This is why the very wealthy are eager to give some of their
money away—to forsake any enjoyment of it—in exchange for having their
names associated with what they have funded. As a character in E. L. Doctorow’s novel Loon Lake puts it, “wealth is accumulated so that it can be given
away thus bringing honor to the giver.”28 Money buys a place of public prominence for one’s name. The great advantage of being wealthy involves garnering the recognition that someone with less money can’t come by. Being
wealthy means, ipso facto, that the Other recognizes me and my importance.
In American society, cars have historically functioned in precisely the same
way. A nice car implies a certain status, that one has obtained a certain degree
of recognition within the social order. The things that one does with one’s
car—such as having it washed and waxed—suggest that the car’s primary
importance rests upon the recognition it can provide rather than in enjoyment. One purchases a luxury car not simply to enjoy the luxury it provides
but to be recognized as one who can afford such luxury. Owning a luxury car
enables a subject to enjoy the recognition that accompanies this ownership
rather than to enjoy directly. This distinction is entirely a product of the functioning of the symbolic order. The predominance of recognition over enjoyment within the symbolic order is evinced not only—or even primarily—in
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The End of Dissatisfaction?
money and consumer culture, but also in every decision to take up a public
position within a society: to run for public office, to go to war, or even to
become a television celebrity. In all of these efforts to gain recognition, there
is the implicit assumption that I will recognize the Other who recognizes
me—a potential mutuality. The society of prohibition depends on and constantly reinforces this sense of mutuality through its stress on recognition.
When I seek recognition, I invest myself in what the Other thinks of me,
rather than cutting myself off from the Other or trying to destroy the Other.
I fantasize about how the Other sees me; I set up the Other as my ego ideal,
the point from which I want to be seen. Every seeking after recognition tacitly recognizes the other as well, as Lacan’s example in Seminar III makes
clear: “In saying to someone, You are my woman, you are implicitly saying to
her, I am your man, but you are saying to her first, You are my woman, that is,
you are establishing her in the position of being recognized by you, by means
of which she will be able to recognize you.”29 In other words, the effort to gain
recognition acknowledges my own dependence on the Other insofar as it is
always the Other that does the recognizing. This is what the master discovers,
much to his chagrin, in Hegel’s master/slave dialectic. By enslaving the slave
and establishing himself in the position of the one recognized, the master
assumes that she/he thereby frees her/himself from a position of dependence
on the other (the slave in this case). However, as Hegel points out, the master
soon discovers that the exact opposite is true. As a master, she/he is totally
dependent on the slave, because the slave provides the recognition that makes
her/him a master; the slave authorizes the master’s mastery.30 Similarly, the
recognition that the wealthy person achieves places her/him in a position of
dependence, as far as recognition is concerned, on the poor, or at least on the
not-so-wealthy. This kind of dialectical reversal illustrates that recognition, in
contrast to enjoyment, is necessarily intersubjective. Like the shared sacrifice
of enjoyment, the valuing of recognition in the society of prohibition works to
create a social bond among subjects within this society.
The onset of the symbolic order and the recognition it makes possible
comes, however, with a rather steep price. It has the effect of alienating the
subject from her/himself, introducing negativity and even death. The symbol
brings death and alienation into the world because it brings absence—or,
more properly, presence in absence. Because the symbol allows us to experience the presence of absence, it allows us also to become conscious of death
without actually dying. The symbol thus makes it possible for us to obtain a
kind of being-towards-death.31 Though the symbol enslaves the subject to
death—what Hegel calls the absolute master—at the same time it makes
coexistence possible. Hence, it is only on the basis of our relationship to death
that we can have a relationship with each other. Without suffering the loss
associated with death and its anticipation, we can’t relate to the other through
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From Prohibition to Enjoyment
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the mediation of the symbol—which is to say, we can’t relate to each other at
all, except in the form of a violent collision.
In addition to enslaving the subject to death, the introduction of the symbolic order also submits the subject to the sway of what Lacan calls the big
Other. The big Other—not one specific other but the generalized and anonymous Other that represents the interests of the social order as a whole—is the
source of recognition. When we act in order to obtain recognition, we have
the big Other in mind. The ultimate foundation for the big Other is the Law,
insofar as all recognition occurs with reference to the Law, and the Law
returns us to the prohibition of enjoyment, the point at which we began. The
Law of any social order commands a sacrifice of enjoyment, as we have seen,
and one gains recognition to the extent that one obeys this Law. Hence, those
who receive the most recognition within the social order have made the greatest sacrifice of enjoyment, having traded enjoyment for recognition. In this
sense, recognition signifies repression: the more recognition one receives, the
more one has given up to repression. We can see a perfect example in the case
of Bill Clinton—not, however, as one might expect, in his relationship with
Monica Lewinsky, but rather in his relationship with McDonald’s hamburgers. As a look at the early years of his presidency reveals, Clinton derives great
enjoyment from McDonald’s hamburgers. His visits to the fast-food restaurant were famous. However, these visits also had the effect of detracting from
his role as a symbolic authority. A president, in order to receive the recognition that his symbolic position commands, must sacrifice such displays of
enjoyment, which Clinton did as his time in office progressed. Perhaps Clinton continued to enjoy his favorite food in private; nonetheless, this still represented a repression: he could no longer freely have a McDonald’s hamburger
whenever the urge came over him. As Clinton shows us, social recognition
comes with a heavy price—the sacrifice of an enjoyment that one can experience without consideration of the consequences.32
In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud illustrates this relationship in reference to the trajectory of jokes across class boundaries. Among
the lower classes (those who do not receive a great deal of recognition in the
social order), the true sexual or smutty nature of jokes can be openly revealed.
One can tell a dirty joke in the most direct fashion. As one rises in class status, however, the joke, in order to remain acceptable (and funny!), must
undergo more and more deformation and repression, so that its original sexual dimension appears only obliquely or indirectly. In both cases, we enjoy the
same thing, but in the latter our path to enjoyment must be more circuitous.
As Freud points out, “When we laugh at a refined obscene joke, we are laughing at the same thing that makes a peasant laugh at a coarse piece of smut. In
both cases the pleasure springs from the same source. We, however, could
never bring ourselves to laugh at the coarse smut; we should feel ashamed or
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The End of Dissatisfaction?
it would seem to us disgusting. We can only laugh when a joke has come to
our help.”33 Because the upper classes receive more social recognition than the
lower classes, they have made more of a sacrifice of enjoyment, and hence cannot publicly experience the joke in its original, smutty form. Respectability—
what one does to obtain recognition—involves forgoing enjoyment and living
according to the dictates of the Law that commands its sacrifice.
This Law is embodied in the Name of the Father, the name that symbolizes, in Freud’s myth, the murdered primal Father. “The Name of the
Father,” according to Lacan, “founds the fact that there is law [. . .] It is, in the
interior of the Other, an essential signifier.”34 This name—or primordial signifier—indicates the absence of the unrestrained enjoyment of the primal
Father, and it serves to bar anyone entering the symbolic order from enjoyment. On the basis of this evacuation of enjoyment, the symbolic order constitutes itself and thus demands that subjects seek recognition through the
Law in lieu of enjoyment outside of it. The Law itself, however, is not entirely
free from enjoyment. Enjoyment lives on in the Law in the form of the superego, which is, of course, the Law insofar as the subject has internalized it.
Whereas the Law proper—as the Name of the Father—marks the absence or
death of the primal Father and his horrific enjoyment, the superego, the internal representative of the Law, is the remnant of this Father that continues to
make its presence felt. Overflowing with the primal Father’s enjoyment, the
superego, as the underside of the Law, makes evident the obscenity in the Law
itself. The obscene superego represents the limit of the society of prohibition;
it is the point at which enjoyment infects the prohibition itself. Thus, it should
not be at all surprising that it is around the figure of the superego that we can
witness the emergence of the society of enjoyment.
THE WILL TO ENJOY
Understanding the role of the superego is one of the keys to analyzing the
emergence of the society of enjoyment because the presence of the superego
indicates that enjoyment continues to persist in the symbolic order despite the
Law’s ban on it. However, when we think of Freud’s account of the superego,
this association of the superego with obscene enjoyment appears counterintuitive. As Freud describes it, the superego is the agency of morality rather than
enjoyment, the agency that restricts the amoral id. Thus, it seems to police—
and not embody—enjoyment. Nonetheless, in The Ego and the Id, Freud
makes clear the association of the superego with obscene enjoyment, as he
notes that “the super-ego is always close to the id and can act as its representative vis-a-vis the ego. It reaches deep down into the id and for that reason
is farther from consciousness than the ego is.”35 The superego receives its
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From Prohibition to Enjoyment
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energy from the id, the seat of the subject’s enjoyment, and this provides the
superego with its ability to be excessively cruel. Freud adds that this connection between the superego and the id allows the former to be “super-moral and
then become as cruel as only the id can be.”36 The obscene dimension of the
superego manifests itself in the very form that the superego takes—that is, as
a relentless injunction that never leaves the subject alone.
The superego always takes the form of an unconditional injunction, and
this form completely betrays the enjoyment-free, neutral guise of the Law
itself. If the superego had the neutrality of the public Law, it would not endlessly probe every dark corner of the psyche, seeking out the presence of interdicted enjoyment. Despite its moral appearance, the superego, even as Freud
conceives it, is an obscene agency. As a pure injunction, the superego is the
form of the Law without any content. It thus embodies the cruelest and most
destructive aspects of the Law, the violence of its founding gesture. Even
though the Law itself adopts a guise of neutrality, it has a pathological, violent genesis. As Walter Benjamin notes, “at the moment of instatement [the
Law] does not dismiss violence; rather, at this very moment of lawmaking, it
specifically establishes as law not an end unalloyed by violence but one necessarily and intimately bound to it.”37 This link between the Law and violence
lives on in the incessant demands that the superego makes on the subject,
demands that center around enjoyment.
As we have seen, before the advent of the Law, there is neither enjoyment
nor the lack of it. Hence, the introduction of the Law creates the possibility
of enjoyment. The Law as such emerges out of a desire for enjoyment, not out
of a desire for restraint. But even this very opposition is false. The desire to
restrain enjoyment is fundamentally akin to the desire to enjoy. One always
derives enjoyment from the act of restraint, as a brief glance at any fundamentalist minister will confirm. In this sense, there is no Law that simply
restrains enjoyment. The Law cannot escape the enjoyment that drives it—the
enjoyment manifested in the form of the legal imperative—and this aspect of
the Law is located in the superego. The superego is the repository for all of
the violence and obscenity implicit in the founding gesture of the Law.
As a result, the superego has an ambiguous relation to the Law proper: on
the one hand, it supports the Law and encourages obedience, and on the
other, it fosters enjoyment, which threatens to undermine the Law. As Lacan
says in Seminar I, “The super-ego has a relation to the law, and is at the same
time a senseless law, going so far as to become a failure to recognize law”
(102). The “senselessness” of the superego stems from the enjoyment that it
embodies, and this senseless dimension of the Law, while being crucial to the
Law sustaining itself, also threatens the destruction of the Law, insofar as the
Law is a law of sense that works to make things meaningful. Lacan makes
clear the contrast between superego and Law:
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The End of Dissatisfaction?
The super-ego is at one and the same time the law and its destruction. As
such, it is speech itself, the commandment of law, in so far as nothing more
than its root remains. The law is entirely reduced to something, which cannot even be expressed, like the You must, which is speech deprived of all its
meaning. It is in this sense that the super-ego ends up by being identified
with only what is most devastating, most fascinating, in the primitive experience of the subject. It ends up being identified with what I call the ferocious
figure, with the figures which we can link to primitive traumas the child has
suffered, whatever these are. (102, Lacan’s emphasis)
Whereas the Law provides all sorts of meaningful reasons to obey, the superego commands obedience for its own sake, and it is in this pure commandment that the residual enjoyment of the primal Father makes itself felt.
Because the superego is a locus of both Law and enjoyment—two kinds
of experience seemingly at odds with each other—we have the ability to enjoy
our obedience. It is in this sense that fascism represents the culmination of the
logic of the superego. Fascism is not simply a case of mass obedience; on the
contrary, its strength resides in its ability to allow those who are doing their
duty to—at the same time—enjoy, imagining themselves as the height of
transgression. Fascism brings together perfectly the feeling of doing one’s duty
and the feeling of transgressing moral norms (i.e., enjoying). The increasing
predominance of the superego—and its correlate, the emergence of the command to enjoy—produces the terrain on which fascism grows. In fact, the historical burgeoning of fascism and fascistic ideology is unthinkable outside of
this emerging reign of the superego.
Thus, we can see that the relationship between the Law and the superego
is not only dialectical, but also historical. That is to say, over the course of the
twentieth century, the power of the superego has arisen as the power of the
public Law has lessened. In one sense, the rise of the superego is the fulfillment of the Law, but in another, it represents the seeming destruction of the
Law, the end of its prohibition on enjoyment. Unlike the public Law, which
prohibits enjoyment, the superego commands it. According to Lacan, “Nothing forces anyone to enjoy except the superego. The superego is the imperative of jouissance—Enjoy!”38 The rise of the superego and its demand for
enjoyment is correlative to the transformation from a society of prohibition to
a society of enjoyment.
This transformation, though not tied to the onset of capitalism, is not
entirely alien to capitalism’s development. Capitalism, in its latest manifestations, has played a crucial role in working to de-emphasize prohibition or Law
in the social order. The “commodification of everyday life”—the sine qua non
of late capitalism—has the effect of, at once, undermining figures of authority and stressing the importance of enjoying oneself. With the proliferation of
advertisements (all promising immediate and incredible enjoyment) into even
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From Prohibition to Enjoyment
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public schools and public buses, one cannot exist for long in late capitalist
society without being confronted by signs of or inducements to great enjoyment. We must “Have a Coke and a smile.” Here, indications of enjoyment
are everywhere. But this, of course, has not always been the case.
In its initial manifestation, with the ideology of the “work ethic” and an
emphasis on the value of delayed gratification, capitalism sustained and necessitated its own form of prohibition and dissatisfaction. As Max Weber puts it
in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, early capitalist ideology
made clear that “not leisure and enjoyment, but only activity serves to increase
the glory of God, according to the definite manifestations of His will.”39 Liberal or competitive capitalism—the first stage of capitalist development—
demanded the renunciation of enjoyment in order that the work requisite for
the functioning of the system would be done. The ideal of the work ethic
served as the predominant ideological means through which liberal capitalism
perpetuated the renunciation it required. Without the ideal of the work ethic
and the renunciation of enjoyment it effected, the very emergence of capitalism would have scarcely been possible. This means that early capitalism—the
incipience of modernity—thwarted enjoyment to the same extent that traditional societies did. Hence, in one sense, the break that Marxism celebrates
between traditional societies and capitalist society was not initially all that
radical. Though capitalist society unleashed the productive forces of society in
a hitherto unimagined way, it nonetheless continued an explicit prohibition on
enjoyment in order to maximize productivity.
Around 1900, however, the structure of capitalism underwent a profound
change, as has been chronicled by Marxists from Lenin and Bukharin to Ernest
Mandel and Fredric Jameson. At this time, monopoly capitalism emerges, and
with the development of this new mode of capitalism, a vast increase in consumption becomes necessary to solve (temporarily) capitalism’s contradictions.40
As Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy point out, “The stimulation of demand [. . .]
becomes to an ever greater degree the leitmotif of business and government policies under monopoly capitalism.”41 Consumer culture emerges with monopoly
capitalism in order to provide the demand that the mode of production requires.
At this moment in the history of capitalism, the ideological demands of liberal
capitalism—the constraints imposed by the idea of the work ethic—become
onerous and restrictive. Capitalist ideology itself begins to become a barrier to the
full development of the capitalist mode of production in the epoch of monopoly
capitalism. In response, ideology undergoes the initial steps toward a transformation, a transformation that would result, finally, in an ideology no longer
explicitly prohibiting enjoyment but instead beginning to command it, which is
an ideology associated with the superego rather than with the public Law.
In a work of fiction from 1900, we can see an outline of this ideological
shift. Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie depicts the emergence of the duty to
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The End of Dissatisfaction?
enjoy in American society. He does this through the changing fortunes of the
novel’s two main characters—the demise of George Hurstwood and the rise
of Carrie Meeber. When he first appears in the novel, Hurstwood is living a
successful if ordinary life within capitalist society. He works as the manager of
a prominent Chicago bar, a position that provides both financial reward and
social recognition. In exchange for this position within society, however,
Hurstwood has sacrificed his enjoyment. He lives monotonously with a wife
that he no longer loves, and he longs for the enjoyment that Carrie seems to
offer when she enters his life. Even though he desires Carrie, Hurstwood
remains in the world of prohibited enjoyment as long as he doesn’t act on this
desire. But when he runs away…