The End of Dissatisfaction Quotes

“In valuing the image over the word, we fall victim to the image’s appearance of full revelation. Whereas the word prompts suspicion and questioning, the image produces belief and devotion. It is in this sense that Gilroy sees a latent fascism in the contemporary elevation of the image. The image today signifies the possibility of a completely successful process of manipulation.”
― Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment

“This belief in the truth of the image leaves us especially vulnerable to ideological coercion (which is not to say, of course, that the image cannot be subversive as well). The image, much more than the word, inspires trust, and this trust is precisely what ideology hopes to engender. This is why fascists rely so heavily on imagery. In fact, cultural theorist Paul Gilroy links the rise of the image to the rise of fascism in the mid-twentieth century.”
― Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment

“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”
― Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment

“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). 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.”
― Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment

“It is doubly difficult to break the hold of ideology over the cynic because the cynic believes that she/he has already broken its hold, so that there is nothing further to be known. In addition, the cynic, unlike the traditional naïve subject, derives not only identity from ideology, but also the enjoyment stemming from ideology’s obscene underside. When we simply obey the law, we feel certain about ourselves and our place in the social order. But when we obey while feeling that we are not, we obtain enjoyment in the act of obedience. This constitutes the great power of cynicism as an ideological formation: it provides for us the best of both worlds—obedience and transgression. Cynicism offers the subject a sense of radicality; the cynical subject feels as if she/he is heeding the imperative to enjoy. In this way, cynicism functions as a symptom of the society of enjoyment.”
― Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment

“Let us look at the example of racism to make this clear. The contemporary white cynic will readily admit that the American public ideology of a colorblind society serves to mask the continuing presence of racism. Despite claims that the society has become colorblind, the cynic recognizes that some whites still harbor prejudice toward African Americans and that this prejudice has an adverse effect on the life chances of African Americans (as evinced by the number of African American men in jail, the disparity in income between white and African American, etc.). This recognition, however, coexists in the thinking of the cynic with a seemingly contradictory idea—that African Americans have it easier than whites today, that society has entered an era of reverse discrimination. This is why so many whites feel a visceral objection to affirmative action: it provides even more privilege to a group that already has a privileged status, a privileged relationship to enjoyment. In the racist’s view, the African American enjoys more because she/he gets more for less, has to work less for more benefits (as the policy of affirmative action seems to attest to). How can we reconcile these two seemingly contradictory attitudes? The cynic’s ability to sustain both attitudes stems from the split between her/his relationship to public ideology and to the fantasmatic underside of power. She/he doubts the official proclamations of authority, which claim to have eradicated racism, but invests her/himself in the underside of that authority, which relies on a racist fear of the Other’s enjoyment in order to function. In sustaining the investment in the underlying racist fantasy, the cynic finds support for her/his being in the big Other. But the cynic’s suspicion of public ideology allows her/him to feel as if she/he is transgressing the norms of the big Other. Thus, the cynic is able to have it both ways, attaining the security that stems from obedience and the enjoyment that transgression produces, without having to risk actually losing the support of her/his identity within the big Other. The white cynic can both feel her/himself to be righteously antiracist in her/his ability to analyze the hidden racism in American society while at the same time feeling her/himself to be a victim of reverse discrimination. Suspicion of the public law and investment in its obscene underside offers such a subject the best of both worlds.”
― Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment

“Because of their rejection of the public law, cynical subjects feel as if they have no investment in the big Other, as if they have distanced themselves from its power, but this is belied by their investment in the fantasmatic underside of that law.”
― Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment

“The cynic rejects authority at the same time she/he devotes all of her/his energies to helping it along. The contemporary cynic’s rebellion is, in this way, not a brake upon the functioning of late capitalism, but its engine. The cynicism among subjects today thus indicates the extent to which the society of enjoyment leaves subjects bereft of the actual enjoyment that would break from the prevailing symbolic authority.”
― Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment

“In response to the command to enjoy, contemporary cynicism is an effort to gain distance from the functioning of power, to resist the hold that power has over us. Hence, the cynic turns inward and displays an indifference to external authorities, with the aim of self-sufficient independence. Symbolic authority—which would force the subject into a particular symbolic identity, an identity not freely chosen by the subject herself—is the
explicit enemy of cynicism. To acknowledge the power of symbolic authority over one’s own subjectivity would be, in the eyes of the cynic, to acknowledge one’s failure to enjoy fully, making such an acknowledgment unacceptable. In the effort to refuse the power of this authority, one must eschew all the trappings of conformity. This is why the great Cynical
philosopher Diogenes made a show of masturbating in public, a gesture that made clear to everyone that he had moved beyond the constraints of the symbolic law and that he would brook no barrier to his jouissance. Byfreely doing in public what others feared to do, Diogenes acted out his refusal to submit to the prohibition that others accepted. He attempted to demonstrate that the symbolic law had no absolute hold over him and that he had no investment in it. However, seeming to be beyond the symbolic law and actually being beyond it are two different—and, in fact, opposed—things, and this difference becomes especially important to recognize in the contemporary society of enjoyment. In the act of making a show of one’s indifference to the public law (in the manner of Diogenes and today’s cynical subject), one does not gain distance from that law, but unwittingly
reveals one’s investment in it. Such a show is done for the look of the symbolic authority. The cynic stages her/his act publicly in order that symbolic authority will see it. Because it is staged in this way, we know that the cynic’s act—such as the public masturbation of Diogenes—represents a case of acting-out, rather than an authentic act, an act that suspends the functioning of symbolic authority. Acting-out always occurs on a stage, while the authentic act and authentic enjoyment—the radical break from the constraints of symbolic authority—occur unstaged, without reference to the Other’s look. 9 In the History of Philosophy, Hegel makes clear the cynic’s investment in symbolic authority through his discussion of Plato’s interactions with Diogenes:

In Plato’s house [Diogenes] once walked on the beautiful carpets with muddy feet, saying, “I tread on the pride of Plato.” “Yes, but with another pride,” replied Plato, as pointedly. When Diogenes stood wet through with rain, and the bystanders pitied him, Plato said, “If you wish to compassionate him, just go away. His vanity is in showing himself off and exciting surprise; it is what made him act in this way, and the reason would not exist if he were left alone.


Though Diogenes attempts to act in a way that demonstrates his self-sufficiency, his distance from every external authority, what he attains, however, is far from self-sufficiency. As Plato’s ripostes demonstrate, everything that the cynic does to distance himself from symbolic authority plays directly into the hands of that authority. Here we see how cynicism functions symptomatically in the society of enjoyment, providing the illusion of enjoyment beyond social constraints while leaving these constraints completely intact.”
― Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment

“In the act of seeing through the symbolic fiction and thereby failing to recognize its efficacy, the cynic does not escape its influence. In fact, this influence is all the more powerful for its having become wholly inconspicuous, which is precisely what befalls the subject in the society of enjoyment.”
― Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment

“The cynic knows very well that the symbolic fiction is just a fiction and also “knows” that the imaginary field beneath this symbolic fiction is a reservoir of truth. For the cynic, the status of the imaginary does not come into question. This represents a radical change in the status of belief—this insistence upon the authority of one’s own eyes and the rejection of symbolic authority. In (Per)versions of Love and Hate, Renata Salecl explains this transition through a reference to Groucho Marx: “When Groucho Marx was caught in an obvious lie, his response was: ‘Whom do you believe—my words or your eyes?’ The belief in the big Other is the belief in words, even when they contradict one’s own eyes. What we have today is therefore precisely a mistrust in mere words (that is, in the symbolic fiction). People want to see what is behind the fiction.” This turn away from belief in the symbolic fiction and toward the image beneath it reaches its apotheosis in the postmodern cynic.”
― Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment

“In order to answer these questions, we must first examine more carefully the relationship between cynicism and knowledge. The cynic tells her/himself that she/he is not invested in the ruling ideology, that she/he sees through all of its strictures and manipulations. The symbolic order no longer represents, in the case of the cynic, a barrier to the Real; on the contrary, the cynic believes that she/he sees directly through the symbolic mediation of the Real into the Real itself.5 The knowledge of cynicism, however, is not what Lacan
calls “knowledge in the Real.” This is because, in pulling away the veil of the symbolic fiction, we do not find ourselves with an unmediated access to the Real. Instead, we encounter a specular image that we take for the Real. We believe, in other words, that what we see, beyond the constraints of the symbolic fiction, is the Real, that it is not an image. While we are skeptical about the symbolic fiction, we are not at all suspicious about what we see; we are wholly taken in by the image.”
― Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment

“For a determinateness, a limit, is determined as a limitation only in opposition to its other in general, that is, in opposition to that which is free from limitation; the other of a limitation is precisely the being beyond it.” One cannot recognize a limit and, at the same time, be bound by it, because the act of recognition itself implies that one has broken the hold that the limit had. The phenomenon of cynicism, however, calls this conception radically into question. Cynics recognize the functioning of ideology—they are not duped—and yet ideology still serves as a limit that they cannot transgress; ideology continues to control the behavior of cynics, despite this knowledge. For the cynical subject in the society of enjoyment, unlike for the subject in the society of prohibition, knowledge does not lead to freedom.”
― Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment

“Through an insistence on interpretation even at those times when interpretation seems impossible, we can recognize that this horrifying enjoyment we would reject is not simply the other’s enjoyment, but also our own. The very thing that attracts us to the other is its relationship to enjoyment. Enjoyment itself, of course, cannot be made meaningful; it cannot be interpreted. In this sense, the characters’ encounter with enjoyment in the novel is parallel
with the reader’s encounter with the violent event that opens the novel. Something in both encounters resists being made meaningful. But this does not sink the entire project of interpretation. Interpretation involves seeing the symbolic context within which enjoyment makes its appearance, seeing the meaning that surrounds it. In doing so, we see that the universal does persist, despite its seeming abeyance. To insist upon meaning is not to do unwarranted violence to the particular or to elide meaning’s inevitable failure but rather the
only possible way to preserve the singularity of the particular. It is only through interpretation that we come to realize our failure of knowledge and thus the Real dimension of the other that constitutes its singularity. Without the attempt to interpret, we remain confident that we know all there is to know. We rest secure in our cynicism.”
― Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment

“From the standpoint of the society of prohibition, enjoyment is embodied in the external Other—those we ostracize from the social order. Hence, though we feel anxiety about it, we know where enjoyment is located; it has a context in which it exists. When we encounter an outbreak of enjoyment, we can’t understand it, but we can interpret it, make clear its symbolic context. It seems to occur within a universal frame. However, in a society that commands, rather than prohibits, enjoyment, this context seems to evaporate. The imperative to enjoy has the effect of masking the presence of the universal, making it seem as if there is no longer a functioning universal. This is why interpretation is so difficult within the society of enjoyment. Enjoyment is no longer confined to an external position, but confronts us at every turn—within the social order rather than just outside it. In this way, the society of enjoyment produces paranoia: paranoia results from constant confrontations with the enjoying other and the belief that this other is enjoying in our stead. We receive an imperative to enjoy, but rather than feeling as if we are actually enjoying ourselves, we impute enjoyment to the other, a enjoyment that is “rightfully” ours. The problem is that this appearance of the other’s enjoyment does not simply appear in its “proper” context, as external to the social order, at a distance. Instead, it appears directly in front of us, exposing our failure to enjoy and flaunting its success. Because of the seeming proximity of this enjoyment, it is impossible to locate it in a proper symbolic context. This impossibility shapes our response: we can’t interpret the other’s enjoyment, so we feel as if we must destroy it. This is precisely the dynamic at work in the attack on the Convent that opens Paradise.”
― Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment

“Reducing the Real event to a meaning and refusing interpretation altogether, however, are not the only possibilities. There is a third way—that of situating the Real event within a symbolic context. This path allows us to attain comprehension without becoming comprehensive and thereby foreclosing the Real. According to this line of thought, the collision of the meteor with the earth would remain a nonsensical event, but we could nonetheless understand why this event seems to have such a powerful hold over us today. At the moment when the hegemony of late capitalism as a world system has become secure, the meteor serves to remind us that no social structure is immune to the return of the Real. In this sense, the meteor (as represented in the film) indicates the presence of a desire for something beyond late capitalism, a yearning for what cannot be reduced to a commodity. That a beyond to late capitalism can only be envisioned as a world-ending catastrophe indicates most vividly the degree of late capitalism’s hegemony today. The only way to escape the commodification of everything seems to be the destruction of everything. Such an interpretation of the potential meteor collision does not render the collision itself meaningful (or any less traumatic); instead, it discovers meaning around the collision, in the investment in and responses to the event. The difficulty of this kind of interpretation lies in the prevailing absence of any universalizing efforts today. In the absence of this universalizing, we gaze speechless upon every irruption of the Real, unable to embark upon the interpretation that the event demands.”
― Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment

“The salient feature of Paradise is that, as a reader, I experience events long before I can make sense of them.35 Events initially seem to exist outside of any frame of meaning, and it is only afterward that the frame through which the event is comprehensible becomes visible. The event itself initially appears as a violent irruption of the Real, occurring outside of any symbolic context. What Morrison is tapping into here is one of the key aspects of contemporary experience. Rather than experiencing the events in our lives as a part of a whole, within the context of the universal, we tend to experience events in isolation, as if each event exists in its own sphere, untouched by any other. The lack of an evident universal is what makes interpretation so difficult today. This appearance, however, is misleading, and it is through the act of interpretation that we can see the connection between events, the way in which they are all situated within a universality. On the level of its form, the novel illustrates both the illusion of nonuniversality and the hidden universality that makes interpretation possible.”
― Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment

“Baudrillard’s image of a mass resistance to meaning correctly apprehends the contemporary situation, but he wrongly sees it as resistance to power. To resist meaning, to refuse interpretation, is to succumb a priori to power, not to defy it, because meaning is the only way we have of grasping how it is that power functions, which is why Jameson champions cognitive mapping as a form of class consciousness. Thus, even Baudrillard’s analysis of resistance to meaning as a mode of resistance to power relies upon the very ability to interpret and make meaning that he ostensibly eschews. Without interpretation and meaning, we have no way to understand the social order, let alone a means of contesting its inequities. The difficulty that students have in interpretation is only an impoverishment of their ability to resist, not a sign of it.”
― Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment

“Whatever words we use to describe the particular that we are trying to describe will be universals—words that describe other particularities as well. Hence, we cannot speak that particular that we are trying to speak. As Hegel puts it, “the sensuous This that is meant cannot be reached by language, which belongs to consciousness, i.e., to that which is inherently universal.” Rather than speaking about particulars, we are always involved with the universal while we inhabit the world of language, the symbolic order. The point, then—and this is what the fundamentalist misses—is that we haven’t lost the universal, that the universal continues to persist despite the current difficulties we have in discerning it. Though our experience seems bereft of the universal, it is nonetheless there, providing the frame through which we encounter the particulars of our everyday lives. The key to interpretation today is the ability to grasp this silent functioning of the universal. We can continue to interpret—we can continue to move from the particular to the universal—because the universal persists. Interpretation becomes, however, more difficult and, at the same time, more exigent. In the face of the seeming absence of the universal, we must interpret all the more, because without interpretation our experience is simply a series of randomly arranged events, wholly without significance.”
― Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment

“Interpretation operates by relating the particular to the universal, by taking a seemingly isolated event and seeing its larger importance. The universal provides the framework of meaning through which the particular acquires whatever sense it will acquire. Without the possibility of a reference to the universal, particular events lose their connection to the whole and thus take on the appearance of contingency. We can see this phenomenon at its most
egregious in the contemporary attitude toward crime. People fear crime today in large part because it always threatens to take them by surprise. Rather than being the product of definite sociohistorical conditions, the criminal seems to emerge out of nowhere, strike, and then return to anonymity. As the victim (or potential victim) of the crime, I experience it as a wholly random act, disconnected with the functioning of the social order as a whole. What I experience most forcefully is the fact that the crime could have happened to anyone—that it could have happened to someone else just as easily as it happened to me. Certainly it is never anything that I did that triggered the crime—or at least such is my experience. Crimes appear, in other words, in almost every instance as particular acts without any link to the universal, without any connection to the social order in which they exist. One might
have a theory about crime—blaming it on “liberal judges,” for instance—but when crime actually strikes, it seems random and irreducibly singular. Hence, it becomes impossible to interpret crime, to grasp particular crimes within their universal significance. 9 But nonetheless crime does have a universal significance, and it does emerge from localizable conditions, despite its appearance of isolation and particularity. In fact, one could convincingly argue that crime should be easier to understand within the current context of global capitalism than ever before in human history, simply because never before have those who live in squalor been bombarded on a daily basis with nonstop images of opulence. Making connections like this is increasingly difficult today, however, because subjects increasingly view their experience as an isolated, essentially private experience.”
― Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment

“Without the universal, we lose the ability to interpret the events occurring in our everyday lives—we lose the ability to find meaning—because it is only the universal that makes interpretation possible.”
― Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment

“Art becomes an experience rather than a text that one interprets, and an experience resists universalization.”
― Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment

“In his account of postmodernity, Fredric Jameson describes the widespread failure of interpretation symptomatic of the society of enjoyment, a failure he links to the contemporary collapse of distance. This means, first of all, that we lack the ability not only to interpret events but even to locate ourselves in the world. According to Jameson, “this latest mutation in space—postmodern hyperspace—has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world.” Unable to discover how our spatial world is organized—to perform what Jameson calls cognitive mapping—we experience events as random and disconnected. Cognitive mapping relies on the universalizing, seeing the necessity at work within the seeming randomness of events. But the ability to universalize is precisely what the society of enjoyment militates against. As a result, interpretation appears only in disguised forms.

Jameson sees conspiracy theory as one of these forms. The conspiracy theorist attempts to interpret events, to plot their connection to the whole, and this act involves universalizing. Jameson says, “conspiracy theory (and its garish narrative manifestations) must be seen as a degraded attempt—through the figuration of advanced technology—to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system.” 2 Grasping the totality is impossible today because, paradoxically, global capitalism is authentically total: we can’t access the point beyond it that would allow us to see it as a totality. However, conspiracy theory makes an effort at universalizing, even if this effort involves a fallacious belief in its own transcendence. That is, the conspiracy theorist believes that she/he can attain the (impossible) perspective of an outsider, one looking at the contemporary world system from a point beyond it. But despite this fundamental error, the very prevalence of conspiracy theory indicates the extent to which the society of enjoyment resists the act of interpretation. Today, interpretation finds itself denigrated to such an extent that it appears only in the form of paranoia.”
― Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment

“A sense of immediacy prevails in the society of enjoyment to such an extent that events seem meaningless—as if they occur outside of any context that might allow us to decipher them. What is lacking is a sense of universality that would mediate particular events and render them comprehensible.”
― Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment

“This reduction of the Real to the imaginary and the symbolic makes it increasingly difficult to make sense of our experience. We can discover meaning only through reference to some foundational point at which the sliding of signification stops—a point where the Real seems to make itself felt within the symbolic order. Without a sense of this point of exception within our system of signification, we lose the ability to universalize, which is the key to discovering meaning. Thus, the society of enjoyment is a society in which one must labor to find meaning.”
― Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment

“The problem with the fundamentalist attempt to re-create a world of distance is that it itself emerges as a way of enjoying in the guise of its opposite. That is to say, contemporary fundamentalism is not so much an alternative to the command for enjoyment as an attempt to comply with it. The fundamentalist recognizes that the lack of enjoyment that plagues this society of enjoyment; he or she recognizes that the command to enjoy bars enjoyment much more effectively than the prohibition of enjoyment. Hence, one turns to fundamentalism in an effort to rediscover the enjoyment that the society of enjoyment commands and yet militates against. Fundamentalism is thus not the enemy of enjoyment but a desperate attempt to unleash it. This is why the stories about the September 11th suicide bombers’ activities the night before the attacks should not surprise us. If these fundamentalists indulged in the very
decadence of the society of enjoyment that they were going to attack the next day (drinking, going to strip clubs, etc.), this testifies to the kinship between fundamentalism and the society of enjoyment. Both are structured around maximizing one’s jouissance. In this sense, the fundamentalist alternative is no alternative at all. It evinces an underlying fealty to the society of enjoyment against which it supposedly constitutes itself.”
― Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment

“Though the society of enjoyment works to eliminate distance, it also spawns an opposite movement—an attempt to restore distance and transcendence. This accounts for the contemporary rise in fundamentalism, which emerges in response to the absence of distance. Fundamentalism seeks to restore the central role of prohibition in society and thereby restore a sense of distance and of a transcendent beyond. Both religious and nationalist versions of fundamentalism raise their central value (e.g., ethnic identity, religious practices) to a transcendent level: it cannot be captured through universal communication. In order to sustain this kind of elevation, fundamentalism attacks the nonstop motion such as we see in Angels in America. Nonstop motion has the effect of breaking down every barrier, and fundamentalism needs at least one barrier.”
― Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment

“America “is no country for the infirm” because infirmity indicates a failure of enjoyment. To be sick is thus to be guilty. The sick illustrate the persistence of dissatisfaction and distance within the society of enjoyment. In acknowledging the sick, one acknowledges lack as well. Hence, like Roy Cohn, we opt instead for nonstop motion, for trying to eliminate the distance that the sick would introduce into the contemporary world.”
― Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment

“Nonstop motion becomes our way of trying to assure ourselves that we are not lacking—that is, nonenjoying—subjects.”
― Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment

“Today, often when someone dies, we tend to look for the analogue to the fatal illness in their behavior: lung cancer results from smoking, heart disease from a lack of exercise, colon cancer from not eating enough fiber, etc. By linking death to a specific behavior, we deontologize it; we make it seem as if death is only one possibility for life, a possibility that we ourselves—or someone, someday—might manage to escape. The same thinking applies to aging as well: all the formulas for the conquest of aging (skin creme, the baldness
pill, plastic surgery, low fat diets) implicitly view aging itself as just one option among many. When we view death as a “case” or an “option,” we reject its necessity as a limit. Death no longer indicates a moment of transcendence that we must encounter. According to Baudrillard, “We are dealing with an attempt to construct an entirely positive world, a perfect world, expurgated of every illusion, of every sort of evil and negativity, exempt from death itself.”

In the society of enjoyment, death becomes an increasingly horrific—and at the same time, an increasingly hidden—event. Not only does death imply the cessation of one’s being, but it also indicates a failure of enjoyment. Death is above all a limit to one’s enjoyment: to accept one’s mortality means simultaneously to accept a limit on enjoyment. This is why it is not at all coincidental that with the turn from the prohibition of enjoyment to the command to enjoy we would see an increase in efforts to eliminate the necessity of death. Today, human cell researchers are working toward the day when death will exist only as an “accident,” through the modification of the way in which cells regulate their division and creating cells that can divide limitlessly. As Gregg Easterbrook points out, the introduction of such cells into the human body would not create eternal life, but it would make death something no longer
necessary: “Therapeutic use of ‘immortal’ cells would not confer unending life (even people who don’t age could die in accidents, by violence and so on) but might dramatically extend the life-span.” The point isn’t that death would be entirely eliminated, but that we might eliminate its necessary status as a barrier to or a limit on enjoyment.

This potential elimination of death as a necessary limit to enjoyment follows directly from the logic of the society of enjoyment. As long as death remains necessary, it stands, as Heidegger recognizes, as a fundamental barrier to the proliferation of enjoyment. If subjects know that they must die, they also know that they lack—and lack becomes intolerable in face of a command to enjoy oneself. But without the idea of a necessary death, every experience
of lack loses the quality of necessity. Subjects view lack not as something to be endured for the sake of a future enjoyment, but as an intolerable burden. In the society of enjoyment, subjects refuse to tolerate lack precisely because lack, like death, has now lost its veneer of necessity.”
― Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment