Todd McGowan

Um, yeah.

You know, I, I found myself thinking about a quote that I, I'm not sure if I'm attributing it to Todd McGowan or if I've heard Todd McGowan, uh, of the White Theory podcast just say something to this effect at some point and it's a quote from someone else.

But, uh, it's a, it's about kind of like this idea of, like, jouissance which is, uh, in Lacanian psychoanalysis, like excess pleasure.

So like the things that kinda go beyond the pure pleasure of just, like, the thing itself.

Libidinally.

So the, the best libidinal critiques of capitalism coming from someone like Todd McGowan and Capitalism and Desire is, you know, you can look at it economically, you can look at it philosophically, all those things.

But it's interesting also to analyze capitalism as a libidinal structure.

And the whole point, and Marx talks about this, is that you couldn't really be a capitalist in feudalism because you couldn't make enough stuff, right? So Marx famously says that, that, uh, he, he famously has this little, um, formula, which is CMC, and C stands for commodity, M for money, C for commodity.

So there's this psychoanalytic insight into this kind of utopian, harmonious idea of subjectivity, which is very essential.

And I think Todd McGowan is one of our best political thinkers at extending this psychoanalytic insight into political and social domains where the whole conception of utopia has to be rethought.

Now, the four elements are good.

So there is the source, this kind of pulsional.

[laughs]

... theory to try to explain what I'm trying to get at here with a cross comparison between these two sequences is, uh, Todd McGowan's The Real Gaze is this kind of psychoanalytically informed reading of, of cinema spectatorship.

We don't have to get into the psychoanalysis, but one of the key kind of insights he says that I think is so true is that cinema's gaze can do one of two things.

It can either show us not enough, or it can show us too much.