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(enjoy the hindrances), we capture the constitutive importance of the obstacle. Satisfaction exists in the obstacle that the object erects in the face of the subject’s efforts to obtain it rather than in the eradication of all obstacles.
Subjects who do not accept this fantasy are not continually seeking new objects of desire and thus are not good consumers or producers, and they inevitably put a wrench in the functioning of the capitalist system.
recognize the satisfaction embodied in the object’s failure to realize their desire.
When one recognizes that no object will provide the ultimate satisfaction, one can divest psychically from the capitalist system.
The logic of subjectivity is itself ultimately incompatible with capitalism and therefore provides the path to an alternative that envisions production and consumption in other ways.
Such dissatisfaction is what the subject that recognizes its constitutive loss avoids.
The capitalist subject can never experience a sense of belonging while remaining a capitalist subject.
True freedom is freedom in the face of the Other’s desire—or, more properly, freedom from the Other’s desire.
Freedom is an indifference toward the desire of the Other that the subject has when it finds itself fully immersed in its own satisfaction. The free subject ceases to concern itself with the question of the desire of the Other and pursues its own satisfaction regardless of its relationship to the Other.
The recognition that we are not really pursuing pleasure frees us from the chains of capitalism more completely than any other revolutionary gesture.
As capitalism has developed since Rousseau’s epoch, this tendency toward privatization has grown exponentially and today threatens the very existence of public space or of a commons.
We create private worlds through the act of exclusion:
The privatization of the commons also represents a retreat from subjectivity itself and from the way the subject satisfies itself.
we don’t use language as a vehicle for expressing private thoughts that exist prior to or outside of language.
rules make sense only as a public phenomenon.
Privacy promises security not just from physical threats but also from the threat of our own subjectivity, and the price of this security is the possibility of recognizing the source of our satisfaction.
The great deception of the capitalist system is that it convinces us that we are self-interested beings when we are in fact beings devoted to imperiling and even destroying our self-interest.
Twentieth-century subjects of capitalism don’t consume in order to work like their forebears, but rather work in order to consume.
“culture of narcissism,” a culture in which public life becomes anathema and “consumption promises to fill the aching void.”
The public world depends on subjects who recognize that their satisfaction depends on the encounter with the obstacle of otherness.
No amount of introspection can replace public interaction for the revelation of truth.
Satisfaction in the obstacle replaces an unending and dissatisfying pursuit.
But the capitalist subject remains blind to the constitutive role of the obstacle and thus remains resistant to venturing out into the public world where obstacles abound.
“Nothing proved easier to destroy than the privacy and private morality of people who thought of nothing but safeguarding their private lives.”
One cannot imagine the rise of totalitarianism without capitalism’s destruction of the public world.
When we recognize the necessity of the public trauma, we accede to our status as citoyens.
We make numerous decisions every day concerning what to do, where to go, and what to buy, but none of these decisions occurs outside the confines of the narrow limits of our given possibilities.
If I am to attain satisfaction, I must sacrifice my self-interest, and this is what subjects constantly do, even those who believe themselves to be fervently pursuing it. Though capitalism demands that subjects act out of their self-interest, it sustains itself through their self-sabotage.
The way of Christ
Capitalist production, in other words, cannot exist except against the background of the capitalist political decision that produces an unnatural (despite its appearance) economic system.
Capitalism employs sacrifice in the backroom.
The capitalist profits from a sacrifice and then hides this sacrifice.
working conditions are not anomalies of the capitalist system but rather its sacrificial blood and guts.
We take it as an article of faith that the sacrifices of the working class have lessened, but this faith requires an active ignorance of what is happening around the world today.
the sacrifice of workers’ lives—also provides the satisfaction that keeps the psychic investment in the capitalist system going.
The consumer’s ignorance is not just the result of a lack of desire to know but of a genuine passion for ignorance.
But when we buy useless or even self-destructive objects, like Oreos or wine, the purchase becomes an act of self-sacrifice in which we can take satisfaction.
It is the creative power of sacrifice that generates its appeal.
elaborate churches,
They sacrifice themselves in senseless activities to proclaim their disgust with utility and their adherence to something of value.
Instead of flying a plane into a building, all one need do to experience the most violent sacrifice is to buy a new iPhone.
Capitalist freedom is utterly false, which is why we cling to it so vehemently.
The market replaces God insofar as it tells us what we should desire.
Under capitalism we don’t have to decide wholly on our own; instead, the system, through its formulation of demand and its allocation of salaries, lets us know what business we should start and what work would be socially useful, and what is socially useful is what, according to von Mises and Hayek, we should choose.
Belief in God is so appealing because God provides respite from the confrontation with the nonexistence of the Other.
In the capitalist universe “freedom” saves us from freedom.
Advertising exists not simply—or even primarily—to sell products but to save subjects from their freedom.
The basis of neurosis is not just the repression of sexual desire and its replacement with a symptom but the belief in the substantial existence of the Other, the belief that a self-identical social authority can issue clear demands that solve the problems of subjectivity and freedom.
The student who challenges authority recognizes that social authority does not exist,
The mistake of the neurotic is the belief that the Other exists, that the Other has no unconscious, which leads the neurotic to cling to the Other’s demand rather than confront the abyss of its own subjectivity.
Capitalism necessarily produces neurosis.
