Capitalism and Desire Quotes

“One thing that capitalism cannot function with is people that accept that failure is itself success. Because you have to be bent upon success in order to be a good capitalist subject. If you accept that 'I'm never going to get that object I desire,' then you are no longer seduced by accumulation or advertising.”
― Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

“In Being and Event and elsewhere throughout his philosophy, Alain Badiou grants love an evental status, locating it among what he calls the four truth procedures. This inclusion of love seems anomalous. In comparison with the other three truth procedures, love doesn’t fit in. When one reads Being and Event for the first time, one can’t help but feel that the conception of the love event represents a philosophical misstep on Badiou’s part, a case where he allowed his own private emotions to have an undue impact on his philosophy. Though Badiou may like the feeling of being in love, this hardly justifies its status as a truth procedure.
Unlike politics, art, and science, love seems to be an isolated phenomenon. A love event—the relationship of Jill and Dave, for instance—doesn’t have the same world-historical impact as the French Revolution or the invention of twelve-tone music (examples of the political and artistic event from Badiou). Even a love event that garners great attention, like the affair between Héloïse d’Argenteuil and Peter Abélard, fails to produces the type of substantive changes accomplished by the storming of the Bastille.
But Badiou classifies love alongside the other truth procedures for its disruptiveness of everyday life and—which is in some sense to say the same thing—for its ability to arouse the subject’s passion. Love may be an anomalous truth procedure, but perhaps this is because it is the paradigmatic truth procedure. Love’s disruption of our everyday life is much more palpable than that of politics, art, or science. The subject in love feels as if it can’t exist without the beloved, while even Galileo himself didn’t feel this strongly about the scientific event in which he participated. It is much easier to imagine subjects dying for the sake of love than for the sake of the twelve-tone system of modern music. This is because love has a disruptiveness that transcends the other truth procedures.
The cynical approach to love fails to register this disruptiveness. According to Badiou, the cynic contends that “love is only a variant of generalized hedonism,” and this cynicism enables one to avoid “every profound and authentic experience of otherness from which love is woven.” Dismissing the reality of love—seeing it as just a capitalist plot—is a way of avoiding the transformation that it demands, but it also leaves one’s existence bereft of significance. The passion that love arouses impels subjects to continue to go on.”
― Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

“When we talk about finding or having found our soul mate (if we do), we do not believe ourselves to be immersed in the capitalist economy. But this is an even more important terrain for capitalism than the convenience store where we buy a soda and candy bar or the stock exchange floor where companies are financed. The idea of the soul mate plays a crucial role in the promulgation of consumption. If I believe that a perfect commodity exists in the romantic field, this changes my relationship to all commodities. Commodities become more attractive insofar as each one stands in for the perfect partner. Though a hammer at the hardware store most likely cannot function as my soul mate, I will find more pleasure in purchasing it with the idea of an ideal commodity informing the purchase, and this is what the soul mate provides. That is to say, the idea of the soul mate underwrites all consumption within the capitalist universe.
The soul mate is the commodity in the form of the subject’s complement. This is why the idea of the soul mate has such importance for capitalism. The subject experiences itself as lacking whenever it desires, and no object can fill this lack. But the promise of the soul mate is the promise of completion, an object that would complement the lacking subject perfectly and thereby ameliorate its lack. No such complement exists outside of ideological fantasies, but capitalism requires subjects who invest themselves in such fantasies.”
― Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

“Not only does romance transform love into an investment, but it plays a crucial role in the development of capitalism by suggesting to consumers that they can find the perfect commodity, the commodity that will create wholeness for them. Every act of consumption has its basis in an attempt to access the lost object, to find the perfect commodity that would provide an ultimate and lasting satisfaction. Although this fantasy underlies every purchase of a commodity, with most commodities we see easily through the illusion. Very few buy a roll of toilet paper thinking that they’ve found their lost object once and for all. With a Twinkie, the fantasy becomes more tenable. But with a romantic object, one can fully invest oneself in the promise of the object. Romance immerses subjects in the capitalist fantasy of the perfectly satisfying commodity, and this commodity has a precise name—the soul mate.”
― Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

“Degrading oneself for the sake of the beloved reveals the disruptiveness of the love relation. The person in love agrees to sacrifice social identity for the sake of winning the other’s love. When in love, all other considerations disappear before the response of the beloved. This experience of a complete loss of one’s usual coordinates is at once the appeal and the trauma of love. Though we tend to think of love as a pleasant experience, it actually produces much more suffering than pleasure. We feel pleasure when our lives move along smoothly and with relative security, but love is always rocky and insecure. As we fall in love, we can never be sure if the other truly loves us in return, and we spend our time worrying about what the other is doing. This is why it is easy to picture the lover phoning a beloved an abundance of times when there is no answer. The lover experiences of the trauma of love with each unrequited phone call. Life no longer just goes on when we love. Instead, it bombards us with a series of traumatic jolts that preclude any peace of mind. Our very symbolic identity loses its stable coordinates.”
― Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

“change, those in love care much less about how others outside of the beloved see them. They are willing to act strangely in public or draw attention to themselves in embarrassing ways because the only recognition that counts is that bestowed by the beloved.”
― Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

“We know that someone is in love when the beloved’s most repellant qualities undergo a complete reversal of valence. A person’s unpleasant smell, slovenly attire, or obnoxious eating habits become appealing quirks rather than reasons for keeping a distance. The lover embraces the most unflattering characteristics of the beloved and treats them as sublime indexes of the beloved’s worth. The unpleasant odor resulting from a refusal to shower, for instance, would become an indication of the beloved object’s disdain for obsessive daily rituals with which others waste their time. There is no quality so universally negative that it could not undergo this transubstantiation in the act of love: fat can become cuddliness, emaciation can become fitness, bad attire can become idiosyncratic style, and so on. In contrast to desire, love depends on the embrace of what is undesirable in the object.”
― Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

“Love in an act of proximity. The lover refuses to remain at a safe distance and bombards the subject with its mode of satisfaction, a mode of satisfaction around which the subject must try to orient itself. This satisfaction is what we almost always recoil from, but in the act of love we embrace it. This is why lovers can accompany each other in the most private moments: they can tell each other their most revelatory dreams or allow the other into the bathroom with them. What would alienate or even repulse everyone else becomes integral to the love relation.”
― Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

“In Love in the Western World , Denis de Rougement was the first to theorize the distinction between love and romance. Though Rougement does not discuss romance explicitly as a commodity, his framing of this distinction already anticipates the association of romance with the logic of capitalism. For Rougement, we opt for romance over love in order to keep our desire alive. He notes, “unless the course of love is being hindered there is no ‘romance’; and it is romance that we revel in—that is to say, the self-consciousness, intensity, variations, and delays of passion.” Romance here is the obstruction of love, the delay in its realization. Romance, as Rougement sees it, allows us to continue to desire and to avoid the act of love. By transforming love into romance, capitalist society allows us to continue desiring. We can treat the love object like any other commodity and thereby escape its exceptional danger.
Though we tend to associate monogamy with the repressive demands of capitalist society, one is almost tempted to call monogamy an anticapitalist practice. In contrast, the subject who moves from object to object in romantic life follows the logic of accumulation. Even if this subject avoids the capitalist fantasy and doesn’t believe that any one object will have the final secret, it is often the equally compelling fantasy of quantity that drives this activity. One believes that accumulating a vast quantity of romantic objects will unlock the secret of the ultimate satisfaction, which is exactly the fantasy capitalism proffers. But love, in contrast to romance, doesn’t provide anything for the subject to accumulate. Instead of contributing to the subject’s wealth, it takes away from it.”
― Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

“will respond by reciprocating this desire. The difference between romance and love is that the former never leaves the terrain of desire. The subject seeking romance sees in the other the possibility of the realization of its desire and thereby reduces the love object to an object of desire. This is why romance inevitably produces disappointment.
Love, though it disturbs the subject, does not disappoint. In love, one can find satisfaction with the love object. But love also removes the subject from the terrain of desire. Though love necessarily begins with desire, it doesn’t end there. When one falls in love, one falls for the other’s way of enjoying itself, for the other’s satisfaction with its own form of failure, its satisfaction with the absence of the object that would realize desire. Love targets the point at which the subject exceeds itself and is not self-identical. According to Joan Copjec, “when one loves something, one loves something in it that is more than itself, its nonidentity to itself.” 5 We seek love to escape the constraints of our symbolic identity and to enjoy our nonidentity. In the act of love, one abandons oneself.
When one falls in love, one loses all sense of oneself and one’s symbolic coordinates. Love is never a good investment for the subject, and this separates it definitively from romance. This is why capitalism necessitates the transformation of love into romance. This transformation allows us to love on the cheap. Many theorists of love, like Jacques Lacan and Alain Badiou, have remarked on love’s inherent disruptiveness. But this is apparent as early as Plato’s approach to the question of love.”
― Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

“The distinction between love and romance is essential for an analysis of the psychic appeal of capitalism. Romance domesticates the trauma of love, but it doesn’t eliminate it altogether. Capitalism gives love such a central place in its workings and encourages subjects to devote so much of their time to it because the trauma of the love encounter enlivens them and keeps them going. Without the traumatic satisfaction that love provides, life often ceases to seem worth living. While it relies on love, capitalism must contain its fundamental disruptiveness and mitigate its trauma so that the capitalist system can continue to function. This is what the transformation from love to romance aims at accomplishing. Though love isn’t a capitalist plot, romance is. Romance enables us to touch love’s disruptiveness while avoiding its full traumatic ramifications.”
― Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

“Love depends on the embrace of what is undesirable in the Other.”
― Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

“What's great about love is we don't know how the other is going to respond to our openness. When love is turned into a commodity, that aspect is totally lost.”
― Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

“The social authority undergoes a radical diminution in its capacity to grant recognition when someone is in love. This transformation grants enormous power to the beloved and, at the same time, lessens the power of the social order over the subject.”
― Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

“Romance under capitalism is a form of investment, and even a risky investment, as romance sometimes is, remains within the calculus of risk and loss. Love transcends any calculus and forces the subject to abandon its identity entirely, not simply stake its reputation or its fortune.”
― Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

“subjects to continue to go on.
Capitalist society’s packaging of love as romance aims at eliminating the disruptiveness of love while sustaining its passion. This is an impossible task, and the love of the capitalist subject is always a diminished love insofar as it’s safer.”
― Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

“Romance, in contrast to love, doesn’t allow the subject to confront the beloved object as such. Once the beloved object has the status of a commodity that the subject can acquire, it paradoxically ceases to be attainable. Like every other commodity, the romantic object promises what it doesn’t deliver. Even if one goes to the dating service with an exhaustive list of one’s preferences, the commodity one obtains will inevitably be disappointing. In this precise sense, there is no difference between a romantic partner and a vacuum cleaner.”
― Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

“object at the exact moment it achieved total success. Love always leaves the subject with a sense of its failure or incompletion, but this incompletion must be experienced as the indication of love’s authenticity rather than its absence.”
― Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

“Love emerges out of a disruption, and it lives on through dissymmetry.”
― Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

“Love that one can purchase is no longer love, however. It is romance. Though capitalism appears to rely heavily on love, it necessitates a transformation from love to romance. This is capitalism’s ideological operation in the domain of love. By transforming transforming love into romance and thus into a commodity, capitalism provides respite from the trauma of love. Capitalist society loves to talk about love, but even as it does so, it remakes love, which involves an object that we can’t have, into romance, which involves an object that we can.”
― Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

“Love seems like a capitalist plot.”
― Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

“Love is the most radical experience we can have as subjects.”
― Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets