Lacan and Žižek’s Concept of the Superego

Hi, readers, Michael Downs here. What follows is a long portion of my exegesis of Lacan and Žižek’s concept of the superego. I call my approach to unpacking fundamental concepts scroll theory because reading it comes to feel like reading an infinite scroll that contains nothing but clarifications of a concept and connections between it and other concepts. Some of the students at Theory Underground, where I am a teacher, will find this exegesis of the superego to be of relevance to their own studies, which is why I’m posting it. I wrote all this well over a year ago, but have never shared it because it will eventually be released in finished form in one of my upcoming books to be published by Theory Underground. I hope it’s of some help to anybody trying to get a better understanding of Lacanian/Žižekian theory. Enjoy! . . . or, on second thought, enjoy or don’t enjoy — the choice is yours.

What is the actual meaning of “Enjoy!”? As Lacan famously put it, “Nothing forces anyone to enjoy (jouir) except the superego. The superego is the imperative of jouissance — Enjoy!” (Seminar XX: On Feminine Sexuality, p. 3). Just try to go anywhere in the consumer society without being told to “Enjoy!” and you’ll soon recognize its omnipresence. You’d think that the primary job of every waiter, barista, bartender, salesclerk, and so on, is to hurl the superego’s injunction at us. The injunction to “Enjoy!” is inescapable for the consumer. So much so that if you decided to play a drinking game based on it, if you were to take a shot every time someone told you to “Enjoy!”, then you would quickly die of alcohol poisoning. This “Enjoy!” gives structure to our entire social world and all of our activities, social practices, spontaneous behaviors and automatic reactions are centered around the “Enjoy!” In Žižek’s words:

Today, however, we are bombarded from all sides by different versions of the injunction ‘Enjoy!’, from direct enjoyment in sexual performance to enjoyment in professional achievement or in spiritual awakening. Enjoyment today effectively functions as a strange ethical duty: individuals feel guilty not for violating moral inhibitions by way of engaging in illicit pleasures, but for not being able to enjoy.
(How to Read Lacan, p. 104)

Now, while it’s true that Freud originally discovered the superego and that Lacan was the one to connect it to the injunction to “Enjoy!”, I’d argue that the superego is really Žižek’s concept. Why? Because he’s the one who’s really fleshed out the concept and figured out the key role it plays in capitalist ideology. Alfie Bown really gets at the heart of Žižek’s concept of the superego:

Žižek’s work aimed to show how the Freudian idea of the superego as something that says ‘no,’ prohibiting you from accessing enjoyment (from the primary suckling on the mother’s teat right through to advanced cultural enjoyments you can access in adult life), was something of an over-simplification and misleadingly risked implying that our desires and enjoyments are natural impulses that are then regulated and prohibited by the social injunctions to ‘stop.’ The idea, as is so often the case the with Žižek’s work, comes directly from Jacques Lacan, who wrote that ‘nothing forces anyone to enjoy except the superego. The superego is the imperative of jouissance (pleasure) — Enjoy!’ Freud’s regulatory agency was not simply there to stop you enjoying, but rather demanded that you partake in enjoyment, at least of certain kinds. Yet, it was Žižek’s insistence on this point that showed how important it was to reverse the way we see the relationship between enjoyment and the superego. This was because the existing view risked naturalizing our desires and our relationships to the things we want or enjoy; it allowed us to think of desire as natural and society as the prohibiting force preventing us from having what we truly desire. Instead, Žižek showed that at least in our modern Western society almost the opposite is true, and that we should see the main command of the superego as the command to ‘enjoy.’
But this has itself been a misunderstood position. It needs to be stressed that the point is not so much that society tells us what to enjoy (though it does), but that it tells us to enjoy per se. This seems important given how often we are given an impression that it doesn’t matter what we enjoy, just that we do. Social media seems to make this ring truer than ever, with both Facebook and Instagram appearing not so much like a competition to be more ‘successful’ than our peers, as a recent edition of Grazia magazine (a complex form of enjoyment itself) reported, but a competition to be enjoying more, a battle to show that we are enjoying more things and enjoying them more often than anyone else on our newsfeed.
(Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism, pp. 5–6)

What type of Law does psychoanalysis concern itself with? The Law of superego. The superego is what happens to the Law whenever the public Law of order, decency and sacrifice of enjoyment breaks down or fails. Whenever the public Law finds itself in a crisis, it can only survive by way of the fundamental modes of enjoyment that underpin it. The public Law or the “Bright Law” with all its official mandates is always supplemented by what we can call a “Dark Law” (we can also call them “Day Law” and “Night Law”). What actually keeps the public Law working is that it has points of obscene transgression, lawlessness, etc., built into it at the structural level (Žižek refers to this as inherent transgression). Inherent transgression is literally a transgression written into the very structure of a social order, i.e., it is inherent to it. The racial violence against blacks in the old American South was a transgression (lynchings, rape, murder, beatings, etc.) of the official Law that it’s white subjects had to partake in in order to be full members of that society. It was a transgression that intrinsically (inherently) functioned to reproduce that social order. The secret truth of any functioning Law or social order is that it is internally sustained by some obscene and enjoyable transgression of it. It’s just that these points of jouissance must be kept in the dark. It’s only by way of an “illegal enjoyment” that the official legality of the Law can continue to function. The superego is the unconscious of the big Other itself. The superego is the big Other’s unconscious. Just as we Lacanians speak of a split subject, so, too, we should refer to a split Law. But what is the relation between the superego and the big Other? Bown helps us to see the difference:

The idea of the superego was discussed above and the big Other is a related but crucially different concept. Whilst the superego issues the command to enjoy, the big Other ensures that this enjoyment is seen and approved. The big Other is a god-like figure who appears to watch over us and has the power to ensure our conformation to the order of things. The big Other is of course completely imaginary and can only appear to exist if we act as if it is there, which we almost invariably do. In other words, we can only speak of ‘the system’ because we act as if it is there and obey it, so that to all intents and purposes, it really is there. . . .
The big Other appears to watch what we do, guaranteeing our conformation but also, and more importantly for the argument here, affirming our actions and identities, offering assurances that what we do is approved and legitimized. We seek affirmation more often from this big Other than we do from any concrete ‘other’ (an individual for example) who we know in our social lives. Social media would once more be a case in point, where it often matters less which ‘likes’ and ‘re-tweets’ we get or from whom we get them, and more that we do get them from somewhere. In some cases, what we send out to be seen by the other on social media may not be noticed, or even seen, by any individual (on Twitter especially) but we nonetheless feel it has been seen by the imaginary big Other and affirmed. We feel as though something has been publicly displayed and we imagine public approval.
(Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism, pp. 27–8)

What is the general relation between the big Other and the superego? When it comes to how the relation plays itself within capitalist society, things get a bit more complicated, since one can easily argue that the two support each other more under capitalism. Nevertheless, even if we do live in a capitalistic society of enjoyment, there is still a big Other that tells us what we can’t do. Yes, we are commanded to “Enjoy!”, but that doesn’t mean you can actually do whatever you want. Even in capitalist society, one is not permitted to enjoy kicking children whenever they’re annoying the shit out of you at the coffee shop (I literally have Judas Priest blaring at full volume in my ear buds and I can still hear that little fucker crying). Ok, ok, it doesn’t even have to be some absurdly extreme example like that one. Here’s a better illustration of the point: an adult who is talking overly loud in the coffee shop will immediately be met with a room full of disapproving stares, stares which unsubtly scream “Shut the fuck up!”, i.e., “One does not talk that loudly in the coffee shop”. In other words, the big Other qua social authority speaks through all of the annoyed little others. Prohibition, the “No!”, is still functioning all around us despite our other societal duty to “Enjoy!” ourselves. If you don’t believe that prohibition is still operative, then just go try to cut in line at the grocery store or try snatching someone’s smartphone out of their hands in order to make a call without asking their permission. You’ll quickly find out that the big Other is right there ready to say “No!” to you. Capitalist society doesn’t simply accept someone driving recklessly while drunk. ‘Oh, well, it’s fine that he’s doing 110 mph while intoxicated, since he’s really enjoying himself!” No! The cops are going to shut that shit down as fast as they can. Yes, there is a certain “decline of symbolic efficiency”, a weakening of prohibitory authority, but that doesn’t mean that the “No!” has been totally negated. Instead, the “No!” of the big Other has been made to support the “Enjoy!” of the superego. There’s still a whole network of prohibitions that organize our lives, but that network serves to facilitate our capitalistic and superegoic forms of enjoyment. It’s true that my primarily social duty is now to enjoy myself, to be happy and positive, to seek out my own individual fulfillment, instead of sacrificing my enjoyment for the collective good of society, but our social attempts to “Enjoy!” individually ourselves are collectively mediated by prohibitions. What the “Enjoy!” actually means is “Enjoy yourself in consumeristic ways that help reproduce capitalist society!” — this is how I fulfill my social duty to both the superego and the big Other.

One way the big Other differs from the superego is that the big Other is actually willing to instruct us in what one does, that is, it informs us about the proper ways to behave in certain contexts, at certain places, at certain times. It lets us know about how one behaves at a rock concert, how one behaves at work, how one behaves at church, how one behaves at a doctor’s office, etc. The big Other is constantly guiding us as we navigate society. “One does this and not that.” However, one of the issues is that there are lacks in the big Other, which simply means that there are gaps, empty spots, glitches, inconsistencies, and contradictions in the big Other. The big Other doesn’t always have the answers to our problems and it can’t always make sense of things. If you look closely, you’ll find that the big Other is filled with contradictions. It tells us to do this and to also do that, but this and that are actually often incompatible, that is, you can’t actually do both, since they’re mutually exclusive. We can, thus, find ourselves in situations were we feel totally abandoned by the big Other, situations where we are on our own like how Jesus was on the cross: “Father, Father, why hast thou forsaken me?” These moments wherein we confront the lack in the big Other are moments of subjective destitution. We realize that there is no ultimate support, no grounded ground, no absolute authority, and that we must anxiously decide and choose for ourselves. Subjective destitution occurs when we reach the point of the Real within the Symbolic.

All the same, despite its limitations, the big Other is there to teach us what one does and what one does not do, whereas the superego never really tells us anything meaningful or instructive. The big Other is a meaningful network that provides the subject with an intricate (though flawed and incomplete) mapping of how one behaves, of the social field’s dos and don’ts, whereas the superego sadistically gets off on withholding meaning and instruction from us. The superego is unwilling to elaborate on the meaning of the “Enjoy!” (which is why I am having to work so hard at fleshing out its various meanings). The big Other prides itself on being the locus of social meaning, but the superego enjoys torturing us with its meaninglessness. As Nick Castellucci pointed out to me, Nike’s famous slogan “Just do it!” is superegoic. As William Davies explained it: “‘Just do it’. ‘Enjoy more’. Slogans such as these, belonging to Nike and McDonald’s respectively, offer the ethical injunctions of the post-1960s neoliberal era. They are the last transcendent moral principles for a society which rejects moral authority. As Slavoj Žižek has argued, enjoyment has become an even greater duty than to obey the rules” (The Happiness Industry: How Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being, p. 177). But just do what? Nike, like the superego, does not bother to tell us.

All the superego really does is repetitively shout, “Get it right!”, “Get it right!, “Get it right, you pathetic piece of shit!”, “Get it fucking right!”, and the second you ask it, “Ok, but what does it actually mean to get it right?”, the superego viciously responds, “You don’t know what it means to get it right?!?!? I shouldn’t have to tell you that! You don’t fucking know?! You want fucking instructions from me?! You should already know how to get it right! You are fucking trash! You’re such a fucking failure! Loser! What the fucking fuck is wrong with you?! Don’t you know that asking me about what it means to get it right, what it means to enjoy, is already to fail, is already to not get it right, to not enjoy?! To ask for instructions on how to enjoy is already to not enjoy! To ask me how you yourself are supposed to enjoy is to already compromise your idiosyncratic enjoyment! I find you fucking guilty! Try again! Fail! Try again but harder! Fail! Try again but even harder this time! Fail! You just keep on getting more and more guilty in my eyes! Your failures to get it right, to enjoy, to be positive, just keep on piling up!” The superego doesn’t really tell us anything at all and that makes it a no-win situation. This is the double bind of the superego: if I guess and try to get it right, try to enjoy, on my own, I fail, but if I ask the superego how I should go about getting it right and enjoying, then I also fail. All the superego does is brow beat us with this impossible and meaningless demand to enjoy ourselves. The whole “substance” of the superego’s being is to relentlessly nag.

The situation is inverted when it comes to the big Other. One can reason with the big Other in some ways. Say, for example, you get a new job. If you go in there with a good attitude and behave politely, then the most of the time the higher-ups and your fellow co-workers, who are operating as embodiments of the big Other, will be more than happy to help you get familiarized with how things are done. If you say, “Hey, I’m embarrassed to ask, but I really don’t know what to do in this situation. Can you help me?”, then the figures of the big Other will normally be very patient and receptive to helping you get your bearings. Unlike the superego, the big Other says, “Well, of course, your new to this task. I’m happy to help you out. Here’s how it’s done.” But the superego would go, “Oh, fuck you! I don’t fucking care if it’s day one! Get it right the first time!” Actually, now that I think about it, one of the guys I work with at the warehouse, a guy I’ll call “Burger”, is very similar to the superego. Burger gets his enjoyment from telling new workers how shitty they build pallets (how they put various boxes of products, e.g., toilet paper, paper towels, trash bags, etc., on pallets). It takes a long time to master the art of Tetris-stacking product, but Burger acts like they should have it all figured out after a few days. “Bro, this pallet is fucking trash, bro! Redo it! You should have this mastered by now!” Hey, Burger, you do remember that that guy started two days ago, right? “I don’t fucking care, bro! He should have it fucking down by now!”

I also think that Lacanian theory has been held back when it comes to the concept of the superego due to how Lacanians simply say that “the superego commands enjoyment” and then move on to something else. Much more needs to be said about the “Enjoy!” and how it socially functions. First off, the average person doesn’t walk around with the Freudian-Lacanian distinction pleasure and enjoyment (jouissance) in their heads. What “Enjoy!” vaguely means when they hear it throughout their everyday experiences is something like “Have a positive and life-affirming experience!” But now we come to a crucial question, does the capitalistic big Other itself demand enjoyment? No, not directly. What the capitalist big Other, like all big Others, seeks to establish is a collective state of pleasure. The big Other is always trying to get us to behave in certain ways that make us amenable to each other and help bring about relative social cohesion. In pleasure, we are not overly excited and can, therefore, behave calmly and rationally, we can discourse and compromise, that is, we can be properly functioning social subjects. If you let the big Other guide your actions, then you’re going to act in ways that follow the norms and protocols — the big Other is the big Normie. However, if you let the superego totally motivate your actions, then you’d be a fucking lunatic — you would be kicking babies in coffee shops. But we don’t do that because the big Other is always also there guiding us, but we also do disobey the big Other at times due to the influence of the superego. Taken in abstraction, the big Other is all about getting the subject to compromise his or her enjoyment for the collective good, whereas the superego makes the subject feel guilty for such compromises and demands that the subject enjoys, and yet, most of the time, at least in capitalist society, there is actually an unspoken collusion between the big Other and the superego while also preserving the antagonism between themselves. McGowan is also great at describing the distinction between the big Other and the superego:

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.” 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 End of Dissatisfaction?: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment, p. 28)

The Law is embodied by the name-of-the-father, i.e., the name that represents the primal father. The name-of-the-father is the signifier that bears the castration of the primal father (father of obscene enjoyment). This is the primordial signifier because of how it indicates to you that you now lack the unrestrained enjoyment of the primal father, i.e., you are now castrated. It also indicates the death of the primal father himself — Law eventually got the best of him retroactively. The primal father had to die so that the Law (Symbolic order) could be born. The name-of-the-father means you are a lacking or barred subject, that is, the subject “deprived” of unrestrained enjoyment. It’s through this retroactive “evacuation” of jouissance that the Symbolic order (Law) is possible — social status and recognition are the subject’s compensations for the sacrifice of jouissance. But here’s the twist: the Law itself has its own type of jouissance attached to it. There is jouissance in the Law and not just outside of it. This is the surplus-jouissance Lacan and Žižek talk of. The “loss” of enjoyment makes possible a surplus of it. The Law’s jouissance is where we enter the domain of the superego. The superego is the internalization of the Law, that is, the becoming-Law of the subject and the becoming-subject of the Law. This is why Lacan stated, “For us the superego raises the question of what is the order of entrance, of introduction, of present instance, of the signifier, which is indispensable to the functioning of a human organism that has to come to terms not only with a natural environment but with a signifying universe” (Seminar III: The Psychoses, p. 190). OK, so, the name-of-the-father marks the absence or lack of the unrestrained enjoyment the primal father had, but the superego is the ghost of the primal father, i.e., the remnant of unrestrained jouissance that lives on with the Law itself. The superego is the obscene underside of the Law. The superego is the limit or breaking point of the society of prohibition. Superego injects jouissance into prohibition itself. The superego commands us to “Enjoy!” Remember, commandment is fundamentally linked to Law. The superego is the Law of jouissance. It is, then, no surprise that the society of enjoyment is structured around the superego.

But why does the public Law require a libidinal supplement from the superego? Because the public Law is itself lacking, that is, it is non-all. The public Law has inconsistencies and contradictions in it and is grounded by nothing but itself. In order to keep people invested in this groundless and inconsistent Law it must be given an anchoring in jouissance. Superegoic jouissance is the libidinal mechanism that serves in the reproduction of society. Enjoyment is what keeps us hooked on the Law. Perhaps you violate no laws but still maintain a cynical distance from the public Law. You might not fully identify with the Law (Ego-Ideal) at the egoic level of consciousness, but your unconscious (drive) is fully invested in it if its the source of your enjoyment. Jouissance is the bribe of the Law. If you truly want to be a member of a community, then you have to fully identify with its obscene jouissance (even if you also maintain a cynical distance towards its official rules). The split Law is “the splitting of the field of the Law into Law qua ‘Ego-Ideal’ — that is, a symbolic order which regulates social life and maintains social peace — and its obscene, superegoic inverse. . . . What ‘holds together’ a community most deeply is not so much identification with the Law that regulates the community’s ‘normal’ everyday circuit, but rather identification with a specific form of transgression of the Law, of the Law’s suspension (in psychoanalytic terms, with a specific form of enjoyment)” (The Metastases of Enjoyment, p. 55).

Superego is the point at which jouissance forces itself into ideology. Every social order is sustained by its superegoic jouissance, but must also never explicitly discuss it. It must be fetishistically disavowed in order to function, which means that a certain “censorship” is built into every ideological framework comprised of an “accessible part” (official Law) and a forbidden part (obscene superego). As Lacan explained:

The task of censorship is to deceive through lying, and it is not for nothing that Freud chose the term of censorship. Here we are dealing with an agency which splits the subject’s symbolic world, cuts it in two, into one accessible part, which is recognised, and one inaccessible, forbidden part. It is this idea that we rediscover, hardly transformed, with almost the same emphasis, in the register of the super-ego.
(Seminar I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, p. 195)

In a general fashion, the unconscious is, in the subject, a schism of the symbolic system, a limitation, an alienation induced by the symbolic system. The super-ego is an analogous schism, which is produced in the symbolic system integrated by the subject. This symbolic world is not limited to the subject, because it is realised in a language which is the common language, the universal symbolic system, in so far as it establishes its empire over a specific community to which the subject belongs. The super-ego is this schism as it occurs for the subject — but not only for him — in his relations with what we will call the law.
(Seminar I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, p. 196)

The Law is the coin whose two sides are public Law (Ego-Ideal, big Other) and superego (obscene supplement). The tension/collusion between the two sides is really a tension/collusion between idealogical meaning and ideological enjoyment: “symbolic Law guarantees meaning, whereas superego provides enjoyment which serves as the unacknowledged support of meaning” (The Metastases of Enjoyment, pp. 56–7). Žižek links superego and ideological enjoyment to ideological fantasy. It’s possible for a Law’s ideological meaning (official public Law) to be totally at odds with its type of ideological fantasy (enjoyment). His example is the “paradoxical” mash up of communism and fascism in Serbia and Russia. Both of them qua fields of ideological text have very different meanings and, in fact, they are mutually exclusive, but both share fantasies of nationalistic enjoyment). Communism’s idealogical meaning was always supportive of international liberation of the working class, but its ideological fantasy was often overly nationalistic. This type of discrepancy between ideological meaning and ideological jouissance can be seen in today’s ideological cynicism. Žižek writes, “there is also no incompatibility between the ‘postmodern’ cynical attitude of non­-identification, of distance towards every ideology, and the nationalist obsession with the ethnic Thing. The Thing is the substance of enjoyment: according to Lacan, the cynic is a person who believes only in enjoyment — and is not the clearest example of it precisely the cynic obsessed with the national Thing?” (The Metastases of Enjoyment, p. 57).

The problem is that the true feeling of guilt involved in ideological interpellation is a purely formal and “non-pathological” one. It’s not guilt over this or that specific action, but, instead, is simply guilt as such. Guilt-as-such, ‘abstract’ guilt or pure guilt weighs most heavily on people who do not have specific guilts on their conscience. Most people are not walking around with extreme guilt on their minds over particular actions. The individual hailed by a symbolic authority is one of guilt-as-such. How do we know? Because of his or her reaction to the hailing or interpellation. Even though the individual is not currently overwhelmed with guilt for committing a terrible act, the individual still recognizes that he is guilty-as-such and, thus, turns around and complies with the authority figure. The individual’s initial reaction to the hailing is split between declaration of innocence and admission of guilt. Here’s how Žižek explains the inconsistent mixture of ambivalent feelings: “(1) why me, what does the policeman want from me? I’m innocent, I was just minding my own business and strolling around . . . ; however, this perplexed protestation of innocence is always accompanied by (2) an indeterminate ­Kafkaesque feeling of ‘abstract’ guilt, a feeling that, in the eyes of Power, I am a priori terribly guilty of something, although it is not possible for me to know what precisely I am guilty of, and for that reason — since I don’t know what I am guilty of — I am even more guilty; or, more pointedly, it is in this very ignorance of mine that my true guilt consists” (The Metastases of Enjoyment, p. 60). Simply put, the less I know why I am guilty, the more guilty I become in the eyes of the Law.

Now, what, for Lacan, is guilt-as-such to be fundamentally linked to? Of course, the answer is the superego. Guilt-as-such and superego are elements of the Real that cannot be conceptually separated. Since we are structurally or ontologically incapable of perfect jouissance, we are structurally and ontologically guilty of failing to “Enjoy!”, i.e., we are always-already guilty in the eyes of the superego. As we’ll see, Žižek immediately goes on to make the connection between pure guilt and superego.

So we are again at the tension between the public Law and its obscene superego underside: the ideological recognition in the call of the Other is the act of identification, of identifying oneself as the subject of the public Law, of assuming one’s place in the symbolic order; whereas the abstract, indeterminate ‘guilt’ confronts the subject with an impene­trable call that precisely prevents identification, recognition of one’s symbolic mandate. The paradox here is that the obscene superego underside is, in one and the same gesture, the necessary support of the public symbolic Law and the traumatic vicious circle, the impasse that the subject endeavours to avoid by way of taking refuge in public Law — in order to assert itself, public Law has to resist its own foundation, to render it invisible.
(The Metastases of Enjoyment, p. 61)

McGowan is big on using Fichte’s concept of Anstoss. The term Anstoss essentially means that which is a condition of the possibility of x and also its intrinsic obstacle or its condition of impossibility (Žižek often refers to (im)possibility, which is similar to the symptom in all its extimacy). That’s what the superego’s under-Law is to the public Law: it both reproduces it and undermines it. The superego is the Anstoss of the public Law. The public Law needs the superego to generate all of the obscene enjoyment that keeps us hooked on the Law, but the Law must also make the “call” of the superego invisible because it is at odds with the official mandates of public Law.

Now, the question that must be asked is the following: what is the relation between Freud’s concept of the superego and that of Lacan’s? McGowan sorts this out in a passage I will quote at length:

The change in the master’s status makes itself felt through a corresponding change in the status of the superego, and this is a change that has distinct ramifications for political activity. One might understand this change in terms of the distinction between the way that Freud conceives the superego and the way that Lacan does. Though Lacan never claims to invent a new version of the superego and insists that he is merely elaborating on the Freudian concept, his account locates the emphasis differently from Freud’s. In the move from Freud’s theorization to Lacan’s, the underlying structure does not change, but its form of appearance does.
Freud understands the superego as an internalized representative of the law. He describes it as an extension of figures of parental authority and sees the subject’s relation to it in those terms. In The Ego and the Id he says: “As the child was once under a compulsion to obey its parents, so the ego submits to the categorical imperative of its super-ego.” The external authority of the law requires an internal supplement in order to function effectively, and the internal supplement ends up being a much more powerful agent of prohibition than the law itself because it is able to tap into the subject’s own drives. Freud describes a close bond existing between the superego and the id, and this bond energizes the superego in its assaults on the subject. The superego is not simply a neutral authority but a thoroughly libidinized one.
Freud’s vision of the superego emphasizes its role in prohibition. The superego restricts what the subject can think and do; it extends the power of mastery by placing an authority within the subject’s psyche that is more demanding than any external master. Rational fear of punishment, Freud recognizes, is not sufficient for engendering properly docile subjects. An irrational force for obedience must supplement this rational fear, and the superego embodies such a force.
In his account of the superego, Lacan picks up on Freud’s claim that the superego draws its energy from the reservoir of the id. The proximity of these two psychic registers in Freud’s schema leads Lacan to dissociate the superego from prohibition and to align it with an imperative to enjoy. In his Seminar XVIII Lacan claims: “The order of the superego . . . originates precisely . . . in this call for pure enjoyment, that is also to say for non-castration.” Even when the superego bombards the subject with imperatives that appear in the guise of prohibitions, Lacan insists that these imperatives actually command enjoyment.
The superego, as Lacan understands it, constantly reminds the subject of its failure to enjoy, and it promulgates an ideal of the ultimate enjoyment as a measuring stick against which the subject can contrast its own failures. No subject can obey the demands of the superego because the ideal it provides remains ever out of reach. The closer that the subject approaches to it through obedience, the faster it recedes. The superego enjoins an enjoyment that it never allows the subject to find.
In a sense, one might say that the superego only emerges as such with the rise of expert authority and the decline of the traditional master. No one theorized such an agency before Freud, and though this doesn’t necessarily mean that the superego didn’t exist before it was recognized, it does suggest that the superego didn’t really makes its presence felt as a distinct and powerful agency. Under the regime of the master, the idiotic and purely despotic dimension of the law manifests itself in the figure of the master. The master lays down the law that must be obeyed not because it is justified or practical but simply because the master says so, and the master’s authority derives from the nonsensical and completely random fact of birth or wealth.
This idiotic dimension of the law seems to disappear with the rise of expert authority. In every way, the expert’s status and dictates have a justification that the master’s don’t. Education and training qualify the expert for the status of authority, and the expert’s pronouncements never command obedience for its own sake. There is always a rational reason to obey: one should heed the expert’s rules concerning diet for the sake of one’s health; one should follow the expert’s advice on dating because it will enhance one’s romantic prospects; one should listen to the expert’s counsel on the environment in order to save the planet; and so on. The irrationality of the law — its ultimate basis in the command “Obey because I said so” — is the foundation of every law, and yet expert authority leaves no space for it.
The result of the evanescence of the idiotic dimension of the external law is its reemergence internally in the form of the superego. Under the regime of the expert, the idiocy of the law migrates to the superego, allowing the superego to exert a power that it never had under the rule of the master. Thus, the proper birth of the superego occurs with the rise of expert authority and the evacuation of the external law’s idiocy. Of course, precapitalist subjects experienced pangs of conscience and feelings of guilt, but they did not have to endure the insatiable and tyrannical demands of the fully developed superego, an agency that does not offer the subject any room to maneuver: the more one gives in to it, the more it demands. As the horror of external punishments abates — the practice of drawing and quartering criminals in public is no longer widespread, for instance — the internal horrors mount. This is a ramification of the rule of knowledge.
(Enjoying What We Don’t Have, pp. 182–4)

A big question concerns the source or formation of the superego. How the hell does the superego come to dwell within the psyche in the first? Lacan was right to say, “The forming of the superego is something strange indeed” (Seminar IV: The Object Relation, p. 381). Of course, the standard Freudian explanation of the emergence of the superego is the internalization of the father. In Lacan’s words, “For Freud told us that it is to the degree to which this object — the father, for example, in a first rough-and-ready schematization of the Oedipus complex — is internalized that it comes to constitute the superego” (Seminar VIII: Transference, p. 349). Lacan’s fullest description of this process is located in his second seminar:

Here we rediscover what I’ve already pointed out to you, namely that the unconscious is the discourse of the other. This discourse of the other is not the discourse of the abstract other, of the other in the dyad, of my correspondent, nor even of my slave, it is the discourse of the circuit in which I am integrated. I am one of its links. It is the discourse of my father for instance, in so far as my father made mistakes which I am absolutely condemned to reproduce — that’s what we call the super-ego. I am condemned to reproduce them because I am obliged to pick up again the discourse he bequeathed to me, not simply because I am his son, but because one can’t stop the chain of discourse, and it is precisely my duty to transmit it in its aberrant form to someone else. I have to put to someone else the problem of a situation of life or death in which the chances are that it is just as likely that he will falter, in such a way that this discourse produces a small circuit in which an entire family, an entire coterie, an entire camp, an entire nation or half of the world will be caught. The circular form of a speech which is just at the limit between sense and non-sense, which is problematic.
That’s what the need for repetition is, as we see it emerge beyond the pleasure principle. It vacillates beyond all the biological mechanisms of equilibration, of harmonisation and of agreement. It is only introduced by the register of language, by the function of the symbol, by the problematic of the question within the human order.
(Seminar II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, pp. 89–90)

The Freudian idea is that the superego is an interiorization or introjection of all of the father’s harsh judgments in a concentrated and distilled form. Lacan’s early version of the superego views the subject’s unconscious to be the discourse of the Other, that is, the subject’s unconscious is made out of the discourse of the father insofar as he is the embodiment or representative of social authority (the big Other) as such. The father’s discourse is comprised of all sorts of prohibitions, critiques, evaluations, judgments, orders, suggestions, etc., which shape for the subject what counts as his or her social duty, ideal identity, etc., but what also counts as transgressions and taboos.

And essential dimension of the father’s discourse is its superegoic aspect. The child can detect in the father frustration, disappointment, and irritation, which are all directed at the child for failing to “Get it right!”, but in ways that provide the father with bursts of sadistic jouissance (from the child’s perspective, the father enjoys these violent acts of humiliation). The superego is a sadist. The superego is sadistic insofar as it tortures us in the name of the Law. This means that a certain sadism is at work in the Law (remember, Lacan linked Kant’s categorical imperative to Sade’s libertinism). We see this perverse logic at work in how the lynchings carried out by the Ku Klux Klan once organized the symbolic order of the American South. These sadistic outbursts of jouissance were the “dark matter”, the inherent transgression, in the Universe of the Southern States. As Bruce Fink describes the situation:

The severity of the superego — while often reduced to the internalized voice of conscience — is actually a vehicle for jouissance: the obsessive’s superego voices may command him to do certain things that are strangely exciting for him simply to think about. Indeed, Lacan formulates the essential imperative issued by the superego as “Jouis!” — a command directing the subject to enjoy, to obtain satisfaction. In the case of the Rat Man, for example, virtually every command the Rat Man tells Freud he hears consists of an order to do precisely what, at some level, he wants to do: be vindictive, aggressive, and so on. The superego commands us to satisfy our drives, oddly — and no doubt to some extent counterintuitively — commanding us to satisfy that sadistic Other within us, the superego. Obviously, we simultaneously satisfy “ourselves” in some sense, though certainly it is not at the level of the ego or self that we find it satisfying. When we obey such superego commands, it is as if we were obtaining jouissance for the Other, not for “ourselves.”
(A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique, p. 129)

The reason why the superego can easily override the moral conscience of individuals is because it has the Law on its side . . . or so it claims. The superego is able to be a vast amount of pressure on the subject because it speaks in the name of “morality”, “society”, “legislation”, “objective judgment”, etc. However, and this is a point that Todd McGowan is always quick to make, the superego really has nothing at all to do with ethics or morality proper. The superego is a perversion of the Law that occurs within the Law itself, but it’s also an internal perversion that supports and reproduces the Law. The superego is the unconscious of the Law itself. If the Law were to be personified and were to undergo psychoanalysis, the superego would be that excessive and symptomatic stain of jouissance that the Law cannot get rid of though it desires to free itself from it. As Žižek explains it, “the trouble with jouissance is not that it is unattainable, that it always eludes our grasp, but, rather, that one can never get rid of it, that its stain drags along for ever — therein resides the point of Lacan’s concept of surplus-enjoyment: the very renunciation of jouissance brings about a remainder/surplus of jouissance” (The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters, p. 93). This means that the superego isn’t really about instructing us in moral decision-making and it’s not about teaching us how to live virtuously, how to have caring and meaningful relationships with others, how to be be an upright and noble citizen, etc. Instead, it’s about pressuring us to transgress, to “sin”, in specific ways that secretly reproduce the social order. Oftentimes, people have major issues with their society’s forms of inherent transgression, which their actual moral consciences alert them to, but still continue to engage in these activities in order to preserve their membership in their social group. This is why the superego can override the conscience with relative ease. The really risk to one’s social status is not in transgressing but, rather, in the refusal to transgress in the ways that are inherent to society. The superego, thus, is fundamentally connected to the Law, but it is also something excessive that goes beyond meeting the basic requirements necessary for social reproduction. The superego actually demands what is unnecessary but this un-necessity ends up being a necessary excess. The superego must not be confused with the Law itself or with social necessity but also thought of in relation to them. Lacan says:

We will see that this genesis of the superego is not simply a psychogenesis and a sociogenesis. Indeed, it is impossible to articulate it by limiting oneself merely to the register of collective needs. Something is imposed there whose jurisdiction is to be distinguished from pure and simple social necessity — it is properly speaking something whose unique scope I am trying to make you appreciate here in terms of the relation to the signifier and to the law of discourse. We must maintain the autonomy of this term if we want to be able to locate our experience precisely or simply correctly.
(Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 6)

Now, one strategy adopted so as to psychically cope with the abusive superego is that of the obsessional neurotic. This strategy hinges on the distinction between the Other’s desire and the Other’s demand. The obsessional cannot bear the enigmatic desire of the Other, of not knowing for sure what the Other actually wants from him, so one way of shielding himself from the elusive desire of the Other is to take the Other’s articulated demand for the whole of the Other’s desire. We all know what it’s like to struggle with the inconsistency between the Other’s desire and demand. The people we care about are always telling us what they want, what they hope for, what they think will make them happy, and we often try to realize these demands or spoken wishes, but only to find that these things were not really what they wanted after all. We can detect in them their disappointment. In truth, people don’t really know what they truly desire, but they still make demands as if they do. Obsessionals attempt to block out the dimension of the Other’s unconscious desire by filling in the blank with the Other’s conscious demand, which leads to the oppressive torments of the superego. In Lacan’s words:

There is, as you know, something which as one might say the neurotic allows himself to be caught by from the start, it is this trap; and he will try to make what is the object of his desire pass into the demand, to obtain from the Other, not the satisfaction of his need, for which the demand is made, but the satisfaction of his desire, namely to have its object, namely precisely what cannot be demanded — and this is at the origin of what is called dependency in the relationships of the subject to the Other — just as he will try more paradoxically still to give satisfaction by conforming his desire to the demand of the Other; and there is no other meaning, of correctly articulated meaning I mean, to what is the discovery of analysis and of Freud, to the existence of the super-ego as such. There is no other correct definition, I mean no other one which allows us to escape from confusing slippages.
(Seminar IX: Identification, 14.3.62)

The obsessional comes to fully identify with superegoic demands in the hope that the perfect fulfillment of the demand will bring with it a respite from the superego. “If I can just get it right, then I’ll be relieved once and for all of this pressure.” All of the obsessive work will pay itself off in some libidinal holiday — a great vacation from the superego. But how does this actually turn out for the obsessional? Lacan tells us:

Observe the structure of our obsessionals. What does what one calls ‘an effect of the superego’ mean? It means that they inflict upon themselves all kinds of particularly hard, punishing tasks, that they succeed at them, moreover, and that they succeed at them all the more easily because it’s what they want to do — but there, they succeed very, very brilliantly, in the name of which they would have the right to a little holiday where you could do whatever you wanted, hence the well-known dialectic of work and holidays. For the obsessional, work is powerful, being done so as to free up the time for sailing, which will be holiday time — and the holidays habitually turn out to be more or less wasted. Why? Because what it was about was obtaining the Other’s permission. Now, the other — I’m speaking now of the actual other, the other that exists — has absolutely nothing to do with all this dialectic, for the simple reason that the real other is far too preoccupied with his own Other and has no reason to fulfil this mission of giving the obsessional’s exploit its little crown — namely, what would be precisely the realization of his desire, insofar as this desire has nothing to do with the terrain on which the subject has demonstrated all his abilities.
(Seminar V: Formations of the Unconscious, pp. 395–6)

The obsessional works and works and works to satisfy the superego’s demand in the hopes that it’ll result in the recognition and validation of the big Other. However, the dialectic of work and holidays is an ideological mechanism insofar as the holiday always turns out to be either more work or totally disappointing. Everybody I work with will attest to this truth. Christmas and Thanksgiving always end up being a huge pain in the ass. Yes, we get off work an extra day or two, but that time is spent doing the work of shopping, cooking, etc. In other words, the dialectic of work and holidays is really the dialectic of the work of production and the work of consumption. And, on the flipside, if you actually have nothing to do on those extra days off, then they totally fly by and you’re left feeling like you wasted them. Either way, of course, there is no holiday in any meaningful sense. In Baudrillardian terms, the holiday did not take place. And once the “holiday” is over it’s straight back to the grind of trying to fulfill the superego’s demand yet again. No matter if we end up working during the “holiday” or if we waste it by not making the most of it, the superego will be sure to pound it into our heads that we utterly failed to “Enjoy!” At that precise point, the superego will silently scream, “Back to work!” And so goes the failed loop of the obsessional’s attempt to make the superego happy by fulfilling its impossible demand.

Let’s return to the elementary dynamic between father and child. The father can lose his temper and unleash pent-up aggression, which the child is unable to process. And this true of the most patient and kindest of fathers. The child has a “sixth sense” when it comes to subtly discerning, or at least registering, the parent’s suppressed judgments. But Lacan views the father’s failures or mistakes, that is, his superegoic judgements, as a circuit. The point is that these judgements turn into an autonomous and self-perpetuating agency detached from the actual father. To say that the father’s discourse is a superegoic circuit is to say that it is a kind of repetitious and self-enclosed form of traumatic scrutiny that demands that you “Get it right!” without ever defining what that injunction actually mean. If the Symbolic order and the name/no-of-the-father is embodied in the paternal figure of the lawgiver, in the person (be they man or woman) who fulfills the function of installing the mediating “No!” in the world of the young subject, then there is another paternal figure oozing from every pore with obscene jouissance (think Baron Harkonnen in David Lynch’s Dune). This is the perverse superegoic father. The superegoic father is perverse precisely because the forms of obscene transgression he demands actually serve to prop up the the existing social order, that is, like the subject with the clinical structure of perversion, the paternal figure of the superego secretly functions to fill in the lack in the big Other by becoming its instrument. The inherent transgressions of the “Enjoy!” perversely support and reproduce the functioning of the “No!”, which is the hidden structure of the Law as such. Žižek explains:

The symbolic function of the father is to act as a no, as the agency of prohibition — that is to say, the “real” father ultimately simply gives body to this purely symbolic function, which is why Lacan plays with the homonymy between le Nom-du-Père (the Name-of-the-Father) and le Non-du-Père (the No-of-the-Father). And the void of this No, of course, solicits perversions (père-versions, as Lacan writes it: “versions of the father”), that is, perverse fantasies about what the person who is the bearer of this No “really wants”, about the obscene enjoyment that sustains this No.
Along the same lines, the true superego injunction is — in contrast to the Law’s precise prohibitions (“You shall not kill, steal. . .”) — just the truncated “You shall not!” — do what? This gap opens up the abyss of the superego: you yourself should know or guess what you should not do, so that you are put in an impossible position of always and a priori being under suspicion of violating some (unknown) prohibition. More precisely, the superego splits every determinate commandment into two complementary, albeit asymmetrical, parts — “You shall not kill!”, for instance, is split into the formal-indeterminate “You shall not!” and the obscene direct injunction “Kill!” The silent dialogue which sustains this operation is thus: “You shall not!” “I shall not — what? I have no idea what is being asked of me. Che vuoi?” “You shall not!” “This is driving me crazy, being under pressure to do something without knowing what, feeling guilty without knowing what for, so I’ll just explode, and start killing!” Killing is thus the desperate response to the impenetrable abstract superego prohibition.
(For They Know Not What They Do, pp. lxv-lxvi)

This distinction, this gap, between the Symbolic father of the signifier (figure of the big Other) and the Real father of jouissance (figure of the superego) is crucial to grasp in order to understand our relation to Law and authority figures. It must be said that the superegoic father is not always a gross and cruel figure, but often appears as a loving mentor, a big brother, a world-changing friend. In other words, the figure of superegoic authority oftentimes doesn’t come off as an authority figure at all, but, instead, as a faithful buddy who radically supports your dreams. Much of the time this is incarnated in our favorite teachers or professors. McKerracher nailed it when he said, “Cops serve the big Other, and teachers serve the superego” (Timenergy: Why You Have No Time or Energy, p. 115). And McGowan offers us a wonderful description of the father of enjoyment with his analysis the superegoic teacher in of Dead Poets Society. Let’s meet our new friend, our new authority — the supportive superego.

The contrast between the two fathers makes itself felt in Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society (1989). Though the film clearly sides with the newly emergent anal father of enjoyment, it depicts his emergence through a struggle with traditional paternal authority. The fact that Weir sets the film in the 1950s and at an exclusive all-boys boarding school highlights the conflict between the two fathers and has the added effect of placing the anal father in the position of the outsider. The filmic milieu offers the traditional father home-court advantage: this is a world in which traditional symbolic authority polices all enjoyment and demands its complete renunciation; symbolic authority’s overt presence here serves to make subjects quite aware of their castration. This authority manifests itself conspicuously in the mise-en-scène of the film’s opening. The film begins with a new school year at the prestigious Wellton Academy. We see the students dressed formally and speaking to both teachers and parents in a highly respectful manner. When, at the opening assembly, the headmaster asks the students to identify the school’s “four pillars,” the students all rise and recite them in unison. From these initial shots of the film, it quickly becomes apparent that symbolic authority rules Wellton efficiently and thoroughly.
Against this backdrop, the anal father emerges in the form of Mr. Keating (Robin Williams), a new English teacher. Unlike the other teachers and administrators at Wellton — and unlike the parents of the boys he teaches — Keating does not preach obedience but encourages his students to find their own path to enjoyment, to, as he puts it, “seize the day.” Reciting Thoreau and Whitman, Keating tells them that they must avoid conformity to demands of symbolic authority and instead enjoy themselves. Keating’s first class illustrates the difference between his authority and the headmaster’s authority depicted in the opening sequence. Whereas the headmaster ordered and expected disciplined behavior from the students, Keating shows them pictures of past students from the school who are now dead, and he encourages them to enjoy themselves before they too are “food for worms.”
(The End of Dissatisfaction?, pp. 47–8)

Robin Williams’ character Mr. Keating is the embodiment of the new father of enjoyment. He’s all about getting his students to challenge traditional Symbolic authority. He basically trolls the fuck out of traditional authority. Hollywood has long portrayed traditional father figures as cold and unloving monsters, e.g., Jon Vought in Varsity Blues.

The struggle that ensues for the hearts of the students is clearly no struggle at all; traditional symbolic authority has no chance against Keating’s call for enjoyment. In response to Keating’s command that they pursue enjoyment, some of the students come together to form the film’s titular group, a group that meets in a cave in the woods late at night, in defiance of school rules. This defiance, however, does not at first arouse the suspicion of the school authorities: because it takes place literally underground and under cover of darkness, none of the school authorities even notice it. Historically, traditional symbolic authority has always permitted such transgressions as long as the enjoyment in them remained hidden and underground. The conflict develops only at the point when the boys in the film bring their pursuit of enjoyment out into the open. When they unabashedly pursue enjoyment publicly, the figures of authority in the film respond with the full weight of the symbolic prohibition, demanding unequivocally that the enjoyment cease. This becomes most apparent in the case of Neil Perry (Robert Sean Leonard), the leader of the Dead Poets Society.
(The End of Dissatisfaction?, p. 48)

In this battle, the father of enjoyment lays waste to the father of prohibition. Traditional authority will tolerate acts of excessive enjoyment so long as they remain out of sight or so long as Symbolic authority is not forced to explicitly recognize and register these acts. However, the moment that these transgressive acts step out into the light of public space, the authority has to do battle with them.

Encouraged by Keating’s proclamations about the importance of finding one’s own individual enjoyment, Neil discovers that acting is his particular path, the way in which he enjoys. It is precisely this enjoyment, however, that Neil’s father prohibits, laying down the commandment that Neil give up this “acting nonsense.” As Alenka Zupančič concisely puts it, “Neil’s situation can be described as follows: he has his Thing — acting — but Father forbids it.” Neil’s father not only forbids this enjoyment, but he also demands that Neil take up a prescribed symbolic role: he tells Neil in no uncertain terms, “you’re going to go to Harvard, and you’re going to be a doctor.” Here, Neil’s father occupies the position of symbolic authority, and the commandment of this authority is unambiguous: sacrifice your enjoyment for the sake of symbolic recognition and identity. Neil feels the crushing power of this symbolic authority over him and the dissatisfaction that its prohibition occasions. (In fact, the prohibition of enjoyment even drives Neil to kill himself.) Faced with the clear functioning of symbolic authority, Neil has no respite from the experience of his castration — being barred from enjoyment — and its attendant dissatisfaction. These are the effects of the symbolic order that he — and other subjects in times of conspicuous symbolic authority — can’t help but feel.
(The End of Dissatisfaction?, p. 48)

It’s often the case that a young person is only able to find their preferred form of individual jouissance by being goaded by the new authority figure, by an embodiment of the superego. “Fight for your enjoyment — enjoy your passion!” The traditional father views our “passion”, our idiosyncratic enjoyment, as silly nonsense, but the new father insists that it is worth dying for — the only thing worth dying for in consumer society is the enjoyment that structures our pathological narcissism. Traditional authority symbolically castrates us, that is, bars our enjoyment, but now our duty is to fight for it until the end.

But Mr. Perry does not have the last word in Dead Poets Society. Even though Mr. Perry and the school authorities blame Mr. Keating for Neil’s suicide and even though they recognize the disruptive impact of Keating’s espousal of enjoyment, they are unable to extirpate his influence. At the end of the film, Wellton fires Keating for his role in the formation of the Dead Poets Society and in Neil’s death, but the film’s famous final scene makes clear that Keating has won the hearts of the students. In that scene, the school’s headmaster takes over the English class formerly taught by Keating, and he attempts to return the class to the rigid, authoritative structure that predominates at Wellton. But as he is leaving the campus, Keating interrupts the class to retrieve his personal belongings. After gathering his things together, Keating opens the door to leave, and one of the students, Todd Anderson (Ethan Hawke), stands on his desk (a gesture Keating had earlier championed) and proclaims, “Oh Captain, my Captain” (Whitman’s address to Lincoln, which Keating encouraged the students to apply to him). Many of the other students follow Anderson in his act, and they remain standing on their desks despite the headmaster’s repeated demands that they step down. The headmaster employs all of his symbolic authority on this occasion — even threatening expulsion — and it is still no match for Keating’s appeal. In this way, the film lays out the struggle between two competing modes of authority, and it leaves no doubt about the winning side. One of the reasons the anal father has prevailed over the traditional symbolic father is this personal appeal. Unlike the imposing symbolic father, the anal father, because he licenses our enjoyment rather than prohibiting it, seems much more approachable and kind.
(The End of Dissatisfaction?, pp. 48–9)

Traditional authority might have tried to suppress the anal father, but, ultimately, the latter has won the war. I think part of the reason for this is that the superegoic father seems to be or appears to be a figure of great freedom. He appears to be a liberating force, but, in truth, he has of way of making our situation worse or more complicated. Nevertheless, it’s much easier for the anal father to develop a devoted following than it is for the traditional father whom we tend to just hate. Once the superegoic father has opened the flood gates of jouissance, there’s really no going back.

Not only does the film depict the victory of the anal father over traditional symbolic authority, but it also reveals its investment in the anal father through the very way that it lays out the struggle. While the figures of traditional symbolic authority are clearly staking out an ideological position (championing the prohibition of enjoyment), Keating seems to be simply an innocent victim, guilty only of stimulating the boys to do what they wanted to do anyway. When the headmaster blames Keating for Neil’s death, we cannot but feel the injustice of this: obviously it is Mr. Perry’s prohibition of Neil’s enjoyment — not Keating’s encouragement of it — that resulted in Neil’s suicide, since the suicide occurs immediately after Mr. Perry punishes Neil for his disobedience in pursuit of his love for acting. Thus, Keating appears as an innocent victim, a scapegoat for Mr. Perry’s own guilt in the death of his son. And this is how the film reveals the depth of its attachment to the new brand of authority that Keating represents: Dead Poets Society is invested in Keating (as a representative anal father of enjoyment) to such an extent that it does not even depict his authority as authority. The film presents Keating as a benevolent teacher interested only in the welfare of his students, not as a rival authority to Mr. Perry or the headmaster. Precisely because he doesn’t appear in the guise of an alternate authority, Keating’s authority is all the more powerful — over both his students and over us as viewers of the film. It is nearly impossible to view the film without seeing Keating as the innocent victim of the cruelty of traditional symbolic authority. This situation alone indicates the degree of the film’s ideological commitment to Keating and what he represents.
(The End of Dissatisfaction?, pp. 49–50)

Another advantage the superegoic father has over the traditional one is that the former is able to occupy the position of the victim in a way the latter can never do. The traditional father victimizes the superegoic father but not vice versa (at least, not in a way that is immediately apparent). Simply put, the traditional father is the bad guy or the heavy and the new father is the good guy fighting for the freedom of his sons and daughters. All this just makes the power of the new father even more powerful. The new father enjoys a surplus of power that the traditional father lacked. The new authority doesn’t even seem like an authority and that is what gives him the surplus of power.

As Dead Poets Society demonstrates, the anal father himself always seems less than authoritative. Unlike traditional symbolic authority, the anal father appears in the guise of one of us; he’s on our side, not on the side of authority. But as one of us, he exerts his authority in ways that traditional symbolic authority could never imagine. We aren’t suspicious of an authority who doesn’t appear to be an authority. Hence, Mr. Perry and the headmaster can only look on in envy at the authority Keating wields. When they stand on their desks in the film’s final scene, the students express their willingness to bow down to the new authority and eschew the old, thereby clearly demonstrating the power of the new.
(The End of Dissatisfaction?, p. 50)

In Baudrillardian terms, the new superegoic authority is able to dissimulate his authority, but this just gives him more influence over us than the traditional father could ever hope to have. In other words, the unilaterality of power is increased in the new authority. We never feel the urge to symbolically challenge the new authority precisely because he never appears as an authority thanks to simulation. All of his demands for us to enjoy ourselves are signs (indicators) that he is not an authority figure. But the superego is not a hero. Despite how nice, caring and supportive this figure might appear, there is an ominous element operating at its heart. The superego is imposes an unethical morality: “whereas superego designates the very opposite of the hero, an unethical moral Law, a Law in which an obscene enjoyment sticks to obedience to the moral norms (say, a severe teacher who torments his pupils for the sake of their own good, and is not ready to acknowledge his own sadistic investment in is torment)” (The Metastases of Enjoyment, pp. 67).

The superego also plays an extremely important role in politics — especially that of populism. Populism is the art of channeling the superego at the political level. The Deleuzo-Guattarian philosopher Nick Land, who, like D&G, is also a strong critic of psychoanalysis (especially the Lacanian sort), offers us some very interesting connections between the superego, Nazism, morality and the father.

Trying not to be a Nazi approximates one to Nazism far more radically than any irresponsible impatience in destratification. Nazism might even be characterized as the pure politics of effort; the absolute dominion of the collective super-ego in its annihilating rigor. Nothing could be more politically disastrous than the launching of a moral case against Nazism: Nazism is morality itself, heir to Europe’s respectable history: that of witch-burnings, inquisitions, and pogroms. To want to be in the right is the common substratum of morality and genocidal reaction; the same desire for repression — organized in terms of the disapproving gaze of the father — that Anti-Oedipus analyzes with such power. Who could imagine Nazism without daddy? And who could imagine daddy being pre-figured in the energetic unconscious?
(Fanged Noumena, ‘Making it with Death’, pp. 285–6)

Let’s unpack Land’s train of thought. Why does trying hard not to be a Nazi make one get close to Nazism? Why does the stubborn resistance against being a Nazi push one in the direction of Nazism more than irresponsibly and impatiently breaking from one’s social stratum (identity)? Because Nazism at its core is a politics of effort, that is, a social protect radically determined by the superego and its insatiable moralism. The intensification of superegoic moralism produces a social force (party, people, institution) that is only to do the worst atrocities (e.g., the Holocaust) in the name of “morality”, of the “Good”. As Žižek himself put it, “the Evil attributed to the so-called ‘fundamentalist fanatics’, on the contrary, is Superego-Evil: Evil accomplished in the name of fanatical devotion to some ideological ideal” (The Metastases of Enjoyment, p. 70). Ok, so here’s Land’s main point. If Nazism is hyper moralism, then a politics based on an anti-Nazi moralism will itself come to act and behave just like Nazis (it’s no coincidence that Land is a critic of both fascism and Wokeism). For Land, Nazism is pure moralism and, therefore, the fullest embodiment of the West’s moralistic tradition. Let’s remember that witch-burnings, inquisitions, and pogroms, were are done in the name of the “Good”. And this is the point Lacan was making when he thought the following idea: “All acts of transgression, violence, brutality, etc., are permitted only if God exists”. Again, the point is that the most inhumane acts of violence are usually committed by people who believe that God is on their side, that they are acting on the basis of God’s will. The uncompromising and perverted belief that one is right, that one is simply the pure instrument of a Divine will, a perfectly Good will, is the quickest pathway to committing unspeakable acts. But what, for Land, organizes this perverse moralism? The desire for repression, that is, the investment in the approval and judgment of Daddy (Symbolic father). This is one thing that D&G set out to radically critique and undermine in Anti-Oedipus (a book that profoundly influenced Land). Land goes on to note that Nazism is unimaginable without a Daddy figure, e.g., Hitler, Mussolini, etc. The superegoic dictator is a ridiculously phallic figure of paternal enjoyment.

So, Land makes some great points that are actually compatible with Lacanian-Žižekian theory, but he goes wrong in two interconnected ways: (1) he fails to distinguish the big Other from the superego and (2) it also fails to make the related distinction between the Symbolic father of the signifier and the Real father of perverse enjoyment. Each terms in both distinctions have their own unique functions and, therefore, ought not to be conflated. The conflation of the big Other and the superego leads to a lot of confusion. The big Other instructs us, it lets us know about what the norms and values of our Symbolic order are, but it doesn’t bombard us with guilt. There is no hypermoralism in the big Other — the superego hoards all of that for itself. Due to implicitly identifying the big Other and the superego, D&G and Land fail to see how the Law, the prohibition, the signifier, can be a source of great relief and freedom for the subject. What if transgression is the oppressor and not prohibition? However, it requires Lacan and Žižek, not D&G, to see this clearly. But, yes, Daddy as Superego, the perverse father, is an extremely important political factor insofar as certain leaders come to embody it and use it to their own advantage. There is a definite collusion between the superego and the phallus at play in these situations. Todd McGowan was one of the first thinkers to spot the superegoic dimension of Donald Trump:

Let’s quickly look at the 2020 Presidential election in the United States. Donald Trump promised to sustain a nationalist and ethnocentric enjoyment that he successfully unleashed in his one term as president. He organized enjoyment through the slogan “Make America Great Again,” which allowed partisans to enjoy the excesses of the American nation, to bask in the nation’s worst transgressions without apology, and to believe in a de nite racial hierarchy. Trump licensed acting without regard for the limitations that govern the social order. As a Trump supporter, one could beat up protesters with impunity, identify with racist police violence, or wear a baseball hat that would offend polite liberal society. To identify with Trump was also to enjoy his transgressions — one could vicariously “grab them by the pussy,” swindle investors, hobnob with celebrities like Tom Brady, insult one’s enemies without repercussions, and even partake in incestuous comments about his daughter’s sex appeal. Trump’s own transgressions turned him into a source of enjoyment for his followers. The transgressions did not detract from his appeal but were utterly central to it, since they provided the avenue for Trump supporters to enjoy in ways that they otherwise couldn’t. His policies pushed this enjoyment even further.
(Enjoyment Right & Left, pp. 4–5)

In his essay on Trump being a figure of superego, Russ Sbriglia wrote the following:

I want to insist that, insofar as Trump’s discourse is one of unbridled enjoyment, a discourse saturated by that pleasure-beyond-the-pleasure-principle which psychoanalysis designates “jouissance,” it is a thoroughly superegoic discourse, a discourse of the superego at its purest. Much like the obscene, superegoic father figures found in many of David Lynch’s films (Baron Harkonnen in Dune, Frank Booth in Blue Velvet, Mr. Eddy in Lost Highway, etc.), Trump casts himself as “père de jouissance,” father of enjoyment. His supporters, by contrast, play the role of those who are unable to enjoy because they have had their enjoyment “stolen” by the Other. Indeed, Trump’s fascistic call to “Make America Great Again,” to “take our country back” from the various Others who are said to have stolen “our” enjoyment, is a textbook example of enjoyment as a political factor, as is the other Trump slogan that emerged following his loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election: “Stop the Steal.” One of the most notorious perpetrators of the “big lie,” Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, perfectly exemplified the dependence of Trump’s appeal on the fascistic logic of the “theft of enjoyment” when, in a number of press conferences and interviews in the weeks following the election, she repeatedly insisted that millions of votes were stolen from Trump via algorithms secretly installed in voting machines across the U.S. as part of an international communist plot involving Venezuela, Cuba, and China, engineered by Hugo Chávez (who died in 2013), George Soros (currently the antisemitic Right’s favorite figure of the “interloping Jew” who secretly controls/manipulates everything behind the scenes), and various other “others.” Moreover, the rally at which Trump spoke on the morning of January 6, and urged his supporters to “walk down to the Capitol” and “fight like hell” to “take back our country” was co-organized by a group named “Stop the Steal.” The carnivalesque storming of the Capitol that ensued later that afternoon (a carnivalism best encapsulated by the appearance of the man dubbed the “QAnon Shaman”) should thus be understood as a (white) nationalist “eruption of enjoyment into the social field” aimed at reclaiming the enjoyment purportedly stolen by the nation’s various others (both internal and external) and restoring “that elusive entity called ‘our way of life.’”
(‘Enjoy Your Trump! Or, How We Learned to Love the Id and Ignore the Superego’, Underground Theory, pp. 171–2)

The superegoic circuit is one made out of many variations on the same meaningless demand — all of which originates in the father’s discourse and the underlying jouissance that fuels. However, we now run into a problem. Psychoanalysis also conceptualizes the superego as maternal.

The notion of a neurosis without an Oedipus complex correlates with the totality of questions raised about what has been called the maternal superego. At the time at which the question of neurosis without an Oedipus complex was raised, Freud had already formulated that the superego was of paternal origin. And so the question arose — is the superego really uniquely of paternal origin? Is there not, in neurosis, behind the paternal superego, a much more demanding, more oppressive, more devastating and more insistent maternal superego?
(Seminar V: Formations of the Unconscious, p. 146)

So, is the superego paternal or maternal? Žižek has analyzed both the paternal superego and the maternal superego on a number of occasions, but he usually does so with them in isolation from each other. What is at stake in asserting that the superego is maternal instead of paternal? Why would a maternal superego be even worse, more “demanding”, “oppressive”, “devastating”, and “insistent”, than a paternal one? Because the “Get it right” or the “Enjoy!” is spoken from a different position of enunciation. It has everything to do with the basic relations children have with their parents. The mother is typically the child’s primary caregiver, which means that she is figure the child most fundamentally associates with the satisfaction of it needs and eventually as the source of its jouissance. The mother’s body and its partial objects (breasts, gaze, voice, etc.) will retroactively come to be the fragments of the maternal Thing (das Ding) once the child as undergone Symbolic castration. Now, the mother’s body was never really the site of perfect, uncastrated, transcendent, blissful, euphoric, sublime jouissance, but the pure loss of Symbolic castration retroactively constitutes it as the ghost of libidinal paradise. The point, however, is that the mother is unconsciously linked with ontological plentitude — a “plentitude” that was “lost” by the lawful mediation of the father’s “No!”, that is, his prohibition of the symbiosis of the mother-child dyad. It is the mother that is often the one who absolutely insists on her child’s happiness at all costs. The term “mama bear” usually refers to a superegoic mother who aggressively refuses to accept her child’s castration and violently defends the child’s preferred form of enjoyment.

I have an example of the maternal superego that comes straight from my own childhood. I grew up with a lot of Italian friends and they often invited me and my family over to their houses for dinner. Now, one thing that immediately stood out to me is how Italian mothers demand that you keep on eating more and more. Their superegoic imperative was “Have some more!” I always felt so obligated to keep eating, but, of course, I’d inevitably reach a breaking point. After three or four servings, I found myself having to really struggle to convince them that I had had quite enough. Just as I can never actually satisfy the demand of the superego, so, too, I could never eat enough for those Italian moms. The maternal superego is the one that demands for you to not simply be full, but, rather, to be too full or fuller than full. The maternal superego is the point at which loving concern turns a cruel solicitude.

The paternal superego is different insofar as it mocks and humiliates the child for failing to live in accordance with the Law, but the maternal superego guilts the child for not enjoying, for failing to have it all. If the mother’s desire or the maternal Thing is what the child must repress, what it must exchange for the name-of-the-father (prohibition), then we could argue that the maternal superego is the return of the repressed. This all means that there is a difference between the paternal superego and the maternal superego, but does this mean that there are actually two separate superegos or merely two sides (faces, versions, modifications) of the same superego? What if the superego is both maternal and paternal? What if the superego is the voice of the “combined parent”? Lacan explores this possibility:

Whence the extraordinary ruminations that analysts come to concerning the “combined parent,” as they say. That means only one thing — constructing an A as receiver of jouissance, one generally called God, with whom it is worth the effort of playing double or quits with surplus value, that is, this functioning called the superego.
I am spoiling you today. I hadn’t produced this word before. I had my reasons. I had to get at least to the point I am at so that what I stated last year about Pascal’s wager could become operative.
Perhaps some of you will have guessed — the superego is exactly what I was beginning to spell out in telling you that life, this provisional life that is played out in favor of a chance of eternal life, is the a, but that it is only worth the effort if the A is not barred, in other words, if it is everything at once. However, just as the combined parent doesn’t exist, there is the father on one side and the mother on the other, so the subject also doesn’t exist, it is equally divided in two, as it is barred . . .
(Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, pp. 99–100)

Long story short, Lacan rejects the notion of a combined or synthesized superego (parent). But why? Because it would mean that there is an unbarred big Other, that is, a substantial and fully consistent Authority in whom there is no lack or contradiction. Lacan is presupposing that we are already familiar with his critique of Pascal’s wager that he presented a year prior in Seminar XVI. To summarize the critique, Pascal argued that one ought to live a Christian life, one that sacrifices one’s desires and enjoyments in this world, since, on the one hand, if Christianity is true, then you gain eternal life in heaven and escape damnation in hell, and on the other, if Christianity is not true, then you have still lived a life of service to others. For Pascal, either way you have lost nothing, i.e., you have nothing to lose by living a Christian life. However, Lacan passionately fights back against Pascal by arguing that there is something one can lose in this “nothing to lose”, but this something is itself a nothing, that is, another sort of nothing. What one loses in living a Christian life is the life of objet petit a (nothing). In other words, in surrendering yourself to Christianity, you are sacrificing a life devoted to your own desire and your jouissance. To be a Christian is to give ground relative to your desire (compromise your ownmost desire), which, therefore, means that Christianity is at odds with the ethics of psychoanalysis. You only get one chance to live a life of desire (objet petit a). If the subject’s desire is a lack and if objet petit a is a reification of that very lack, then following Pascal’s wager actually involves losing nothing itself (desire) . . . but it is the nothing at the very heart of subjectivity, of libidinal economy.

Ok, so the point Lacan is making in the quote above is that the superego can be viewed as both A and a, that is, as both big Other (father) and jouissance (mother). It’s also worth noting that God is often thought of in this same way insofar as he is the stern enforcer of the Law (Judge, Authority) but also as the sublime giver of transcendent happiness (jouissance, heaven, eternal life, libidinal utopia). But, for Lacan, unmediated jouissance in the Real is totally incompatible with the mediating signifiers of the Symbolic. In fact, unmediated and uncastrated jouissance is only a retroactive myth produced by the mediation of language. Nevertheless, at the level of abstract conceptualization, jouissance and the Law are opposed to each other even if, in truth, they are dialectically related. The Law (paternal “No!”) does require the sacrifice of unmediated jouissance (maternal Thing) even though it does not exist — either A or a. But the superegoic image of God is the image of a being that is “everything at once”, i.e., both A (father) and a (mother). As strange as it may sound, the superego’s injunction to “Enjoy!” actually means “Sacrifice your life of desire!” or “Hand over your singular pursuit of objet petit a!”. The superego insists that we bow to its commands instead of freely following our desire wherever it may take us. But the superego is not “everything at once”. It is not the all-knowing master of Law and of jouissance. Yes, the superego is both paternal and maternal, but there remains a cut between them, which makes it the möbius superego. But once this möbius strip emerges it has less and less to do with one’s actual parents and develops along its own autonomous circuit. The superego may originate in the little others, one’s Imaginary parents, but it soon takes on a life of its own in the big Other, right in the interstice of the Symbolic and Real. Though the actual parents’ discourse get the superego going, we can never reduce it to them, since it actually can be said to birth itself in a way, that is, at some point, it becomes its own autonomous agency (the superego both does originate and does not originate in the parents). Lacan warns us against overidentifying the superego with the actual parents:

You cannot tell us that the superego is the big bad wolf and rack your brain to see whether it is not in the identification that I have with some person that this severe superego is born. That is not how questions should be put. It is like the people who tell you that if so-and-so is religious, it is because his grandfather was. That is not enough for me, because even if you had a religious grandfather you may also perhaps see that it is stupidity, is that not so?
(Seminar XVI: From an Other to the other, 5.2.69)

But there is always an intrinsic and inextinguishable friction between the big Other and the superego. Whenever the big Other fails us (especially in the form of our actual fathers), whenever it is incapable of providing us with sound advice and helpful knowledge, the superego unleashes a fiery wrath on it. The superego not only guilt-trips the subject for failing to fully enjoy and also does the same to the big Other itself. This is why certain atheists often display a passionate hatred towards the God that does not exist. They hate God for failing to exist, i.e., for his lack of being (jouissance) — God’s own inability to enjoy and give enjoyment. The judgmental superego is the source of the resentful atheist’s relentless and vicious attacks on God (the ultimate big Other). Even if God is lacking, is a failed deity, the superegoic atheist’s surplus-enjoyment is unconsciously dependent of this God. As Lacan put it:

Isn’t it in connection with the experience of privation the small child undergoes — not because he is small but because he is human — in connection with what the child experiences as privation, that the mourning for the imaginary father is forged? — that is a mourning for someone who would really be someone. The perpetual reproach that is born at that moment, in a way that is more or less definitive and well-formed depending on the individual case, remains fundamental in the structure of the subject. It is this imaginary father and not the real one which is the basis of the providential image of God. And the function of the superego in the end, from its final point of view, is hatred for God, the reproach that God has handled things so badly.
(Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 308)

But while there is a division between the superego and God (big Other), there is another way that they become identified with one another (remember, they form a möbius strip). In his discussion of the main Freudian figures of the father/God, Žižek sees in Jehovah as the superegoic God par excellence. Jehovah is neither the primal father, i.e., “pre-symbolic obscene/non-castrated Father-Jouisseur”) nor is he the Law, i.e., “the (dead) father qua the bearer of symbolic authority (the Name-of-the-Father)”, that is, the two images of the father Freud presented in Totem and Taboo. To understand the superegoic dimension of the father, we must turn to Freud’s Moses and Monotheism with it’s distinction between “Egyptian Moses” (rational Symbolic authority) and “Semitic Moses” (Jehovah). Žižek fleshes out this line of thought:

Instead of the obscene primordial pre­-symbolic father returning after his murder in the guise of its Name, of symbolic authority, we now have the symbolic authority [logos] betrayed, killed by his followers/sons, and then returning in the guise of the jealous and unforgiving superego figure of God full of murderous rage. It is only here, after this second reversal of the Oedipal matrix, that we reach the well-known Pascalian distinction between the God of Philosophers (God qua the universal structure of logos, identified with the rational structure of the universe) and the God of Theologists (the God of love and hate, the inscrutable ‘dark God’ of capricious ‘irrational’ Predestination).
Again, the crucial point is that this God is not the same as the obscene primordial Father-Jouisseur: in contrast to the primordial father endowed with a knowledge of jouissance, the fundamental feature of this uncompro­mising God is that He says ‘No!’ to jouissance — this is a God possessed by ferocious ignorance (‘la féroce ignorance de Yahvé’), by an attitude of ‘I refuse to know, I do not want to hear, anything about your dirty and secret ways of jouissance’; a God who banishes the universe of traditional sexualized wisdom, a universe in which there is still a semblance of the ultimate harmony between the big Other (the symbolic order) and jouissance, the notion of macrocosm as regulated by some underlying sexual tension between male and female ‘principles’ (Yin and Yang, Light and Darkness, Earth and Heaven). This is the proto-existentialist God whose existence — to apply to Him anachronistically Sartre’s definition of man — does not simply coincide with His essence (as with the medieval God of St Thomas Aquinas), but precedes His essence; for that reason, He speaks in tautologies, not only concerning His own quidditas (‘I am what I am’) , but also and above all in what concerns logos, the reasons for what He is doing — or, more precisely, for His injunctions, for what He is asking us to do or prohibiting us to do: the inexorable insistence of His orders is ultimately grounded in an ‘It is so because I say it is so!’. In short, this God is the God of pure Will, of the capricious abyss that lies beyond any global rational order of logos, a God who does not have to account for anything He does.
(The Ticklish Subject, pp. 317–8)

Jehovah is thoroughly superegoic throughout the Bible. Freud quotes the words of his patient Judge Schreber, “God demands a constant state of enjoyment, such as would be in keeping with the Order of Things; and it is my duty to provide Him with this” (‘Psycho-analytic Notes on Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume 12, p. 34). Is this not exactly the relationship the Israel had with Jehovah? Whenever the Jews disobeyed God or simply caused to focus their attention on him entirely, he would unleash cruel forms of vengeance on them and their children. On the one hand, God is the rational and forgiving big Other, but, on the other, if you piss him off too much, then he’ll be sure to fuck up your great-great-grandchildren for it. “Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation” (Exodus 34:7). What Jehovah was essentially screaming at the Jews in his bloodthirsty rage was “Enjoy all of the fucking blessings I’ve bestowed upon thee! Thou shalt celebrate and affirm me and all that I’ve done for you as a nation every single second of your existence!” One of the cruelest instances of superegoic Jehovah is found in the Book of Lamentations, which contains the laments for Jerusalem’s destruction at the hands of Babylon. God has allowed Babylon to siege Jerusalem as punishment for the sins of Israel, for turning away from God’s ways. It got so bad that mothers were actually having to eat their own children in order to survive. The prophet Jeremiah writes, “Behold, O Lord, and consider to whom thou hast done this. Shall the women eat their fruit, and children of a span long?” (Lamentations 2:20). God doesn’t respond to this question, but his silence itself speaks: “Happy Mother’s Day, you disobedient cunts! Now cannibalize your own children! Eat ’em up! This is for your own good! This is righteous judgment! I love you! Repent! Get it right! Enjoy! Here’s a toothpick!” No matter if it’s a thunderous scream or a cold silence, God is a voice. And if that’s not an oppressive voice, then what is?

Now, it’s crucial to keep in mind that Jehovah is never anything more than a punishing and will-imposing voice. In the Bible, God simply decides to speak to certain individuals and assail them with commands and demands. Then, if they fail to live in accordance with his will, he acts out in violent rage and fucks their shit all up. The key point for us, however, is that God is only perceived via the auditory experience of the ears, i.e., the invocatory drive. Jehovah is a pure, free-floating voice . . . and so is the superego. Lacan said, “In calling to mind its obvious connection with this form of the object a that the voice is, I indicated that there cannot be any valid analytic conception of the superego that loses sight of the fact that, in its deepest phase, it is one of the forms of the object a” (Seminar X: Anxiety, p. 295). For Lacan, human beings have four drives (oral, scopic, invocatory, anal), which means that they have four original objects (breast, gaze, voice, feces) linked to the maternal Thing (das Ding), but symbolic castration forces the child to lose them, which, in turn, makes them into absent objects (objets petit a) of the drives. The voice is an objet petit a and the superego is a voice.

The superego, in its intimate imperative, is indeed “the voice of conscience,” that is, a voice first and foremost, a vocal one at that, and without any authority other than that of being a loud voice: the voice that at least one text in the Bible tells us was heard by the people parked around Mount Sinai. This artifice even suggests that its enun­ciation echoed back to them their own murmur, the Tables of the Law being nonetheless necessary in order for them to know what it enunciated.
(Écrits, ‘Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation’, pp. 572–3)

It is strictly impossible to conceive what the function of the Superego is if one does not understand — this is not everything but it is one of the mainsprings — the essential of what is involved in the function of the o-object realised by the voice qua support of signifying articulation, by the pure voice in so far as it is, yes or no, established in a perverse way or not at the locus of the Other.
(Seminar XVI: From an Other to the other, 26.3.69)

The odd thing about voice as an objet petit a is that it only truly voices itself as either a scream or as a silence. In fact, this is why Lacan, in Seminar XVI, refers to Edvard Munch’s famous painting The Scream. In the image, a very existential and anxious figure is letting out a scream, but, of course, it is a scream that is inaudible to the viewer. However, the strange effect of the painting is that the scream is louder in it silence than it would be if we actually heard it. And the objet petit a is just this — a reified nothing, a loud silence. The actual positivity of the literal voice gives body, gives ontological weight, to the silent and weightless body of the voice qua objet petit a. The voice of the literal parent, full of anger and frustration, gives body to the voice of the superego itself. This is why Lacan said, “the function of the voice always brings into discourse the subject’s weight, his real weight. A raised voice [La grosse voix], for example, must be included in the formation of the superego as an agency, in which it represents the agency of an Other manifesting himself as real” (Seminar VI: Desire and Its Interpretation, pp. 387). Bruce Fink further develops this insight:

The superego, as the internalization of the criticism we receive from our parents, is a repository not merely of the moral principles our parents hand down to us, but also of the kind of harshness we sense in their voices when they lecture, scold, and punish us. The superego can be ferocious in certain cases, obviously taking a good deal of pleasure in badgering, berating, and bludgeoning the ego, but the important point here is that it is impossible — except in philosophical treatises — to divorce the statement of a moral principle from the libido or jouissance attached to its enunciation; it is impossible to divorce a precept taught us by our parents (for example, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you”) from the tone of voice in which it was pronounced.
(A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique, pp. 188–9)

The superego is the crystallization and autonomization of the parents’ frustration. Every parent is a contradiction between “No!” and “Enjoy!” The parents’ frustration autonomizes itself into the superego. The basic message of this frustration is simply “Shut the fuck up and have fun, you little shit!” The child’s fussiness, misbehavior, crying, neediness, attention-seeking, etc., are all sources of annoyance and inconvenience for the parents, so the “Enjoy!” really means something like “Have positive experiences that break the rules and keep you entertained but do so in a way that gets it right, that doesn’t cause me any headaches.” The mixed-messaging of all parents is the prohibitory “No!” and the bolstering “Enjoy!” This is the inconsistency within the Other from which desire originates.

Let’s take a moment and look at Lacan’s famous graph of desire. But what is the graph of desire? It’s a graph that attempts to provide a visual aid to Lacan’s theory of the emergence of the subject’s desire, that is, how a human child gets made into a desiring subject. Lacan came up with what he called the “matheme”, which is essentially a type of mathematico-algebraic symbol. Lacan generated how own little matrix of mathemes, e.g., “d” stands for desire, “A” stands for the big Other (the French word for Other is Autre). Now, the graph appears to be extremely complicated, since it takes all of Lacan’s main concepts, the main factors of libidinal economy, and arranges them in a very condensed way. Here’s the final, definitive version of the Lacan’s graph, which is found in ‘The Subversion of the Subject of the Dialectic of Desire’ contained in Écrits:

If one looks closely at the graph, one essential element of libidinal economy seems to be missing. The superego is conspicuous in its absence. However, the superego is actually present in the graph. The superego is voice. But on what grounds do I identify the superego with the voice? On the basis of an earlier version of the graph from Seminar V (p. 313):

So, we can now easily see that what fall out of the A (Other/Autre) is the voice/superego. As we’ve already come to see, the superego emerges from the parent’s discourse focused on laying down the Law (rules, values, prohibitions, protocols, norms, etc.) The parent as lawgiver is an embodiment of the big Other, but the parent’s frustration primary expressed through the sound of their voice articulates another message, which is “Enjoy!”, that is, “Always be happy, always enjoy yourself, so you stop annoying me!” I we look again at the complete version of the graph, then we see that the trajectory of the signifier gets us to the voice. I interpret this to mean the the very signifiers (laws, prohibitions, mandates) spoken by the parents (big Other) produce the surplus element we’ll refer to as the superegoic voice. Here’s the big point: the prohibitory signifiers spoken by the figure of the big Other actually come to stand in a contradictory relation to the sound of that figure’s agitated voice. The signifiers say “No! Do not enjoy!” while the voice says, “Yes! Enjoy!”. The tension between the signifier and the voice actually marks a split or lack in the big Other and this is what forces the child to be confronted by the Other’s enigmatic desire.

Even when the Other explicitly and straightforwardly demands something from us, we still cannot be sure when it comes to the nature of the desire beyond the demand. There is often a discrepancy between the Other’s demand and the Other’s desire. Lacan and Žižek like to express this inconsistency with the Italian question Che vuoi?, which means “You are demanding this of me but what do you really want?” The reason why we can never have full certainty of the Other’s desire is precisely because the Other itself cannot have it. Why? Because the Other (another person) has an unconscious that constitutes desire in a way that is imperceptible to the conscious ego. The Other’s desire is never understood by the Other itself, therefore, it can never make an explicit demand that is necessarily a perfect expression of that desire.

I once heard the philosopher-theologian Peter Rollins give a wonderful example of this. Picture two parents telling their child that it’s never okay to resort to violence. Soon after, the child is thrown into a confrontation with a bully. The bullying is relentless and quickly turns physical. The child decides to fight back and punches the bully. Once back at home, the parents continue to emphasize that resorting to violence is bad, but, strangely, the child detects in the parents a certain happiness, a gleam in the eye. It’s very subtle but clear. They are delighted, though hesitantly so, that the child fought back. The child immediately registers the inconsistency between the parents’ demand and the parents’ desire. Let’s turn this around and say that the kid decides to strictly obey the parents’ demand and refuses to fight back. The child relays the story to the parents and they say that they’re proud of the self-restraint and pacifism accomplished, but this time the kid detects a resonating disappointment in them. They secretly desire that the child had punched back. Rollins has provided us with the perfect example of the contradiction between the signifier and the voice, between the big Other and the superego.

Superego is way to fill in the lack (inconsistency, groundlessness) in the Other. We are all familiar with the scenario wherein a child bombards a parent with a never-ending series of “But why?” questions. Every grounding or justification the parent provides is never sufficient and the kid just keeps questioning the parent (big Other). Eventually, the answers from the parent, the authority figure, bottom out and the parent gets frustrated and says something in the spirit of “It’s that way because I say fucking so! Now shut up and stop bothering me, you little shit! We’re done here!” The response basically is this: “You should figure it out! You should already know how everything works! You ought to be able to get it right!” The edification of the big Other turns into the hostility of the superego whenever the big Other is forced to attempt to explain its grounding. The superego’s attacks whenever the lack in the big Other is about to be broached. The big Other ultimately does not have all the answers, since it is a groundless ground, but this must not be encounter in order for its authoritative status to be maintained. By diverting and redirecting the attention from the parent back to the child, by making things about the subject’s own lack instead of the big Other’s, the superego serves in the ideological reproduction of the big Other’s authority. Children want grounded grounds, but parents can neither be nor provide them, so children must be guilted into ceasing to ask these questions. The superegoic voice says, “Shut the fuck up and enjoy! Don’t worry about this stuff! Never be a philosopher! “ Children are natural philosophers, that is, natural hysterics who earnestly question the “grounded” status of the big Other, which is why the superego must nip this spontaneous philosophizing tendency of children in the bud. In truth, the big Other does not exist, does not have all of the answers, does not have full access to the Truth, which is why the Socratic impulse to dialectically search for the Truth is such a threat to social authority. “Get the hemlock!”

If the superego demands for us to pursue enjoyment and not grounded grounds, then it’s because all of us questioning the big Other, our social order, would bring it to malfunction. This is why the superegoic enjoyment of inherent transgression can be said to be the glue of society. On the one hand, the positivity of this jouissance gives body, gives substance, to the big Other and, thereby, ideologically fills in its lack. On the other, it ideologically convinces us that the existing society is just fine because it leaves room for our “freedom” to enjoy. Now I’m not saying that there can’t be a superegoic gaze, hand gesture, body language, etc., but the superegoic “Enjoy!” is usually expressed through the tone of the voice. There is a privileged connection between voice and superego. But the voice here must be thought in McLuhanite terms as a medium. The specific medium of speech is the locus of the contradictory relationship between the big Other and the superego insofar as the tone of voice can contradict the word of voice (I mean by this simply the words spoken by the authority figure, i.e., the content of speech). This distinction is very similar to that of the subject of enunciation and the subject of the enunciated, but it also is not identical to it). Emmanuel Levinas referred to the difference between the saying and the said. If the actual prohibitions, instructions, and mandates, spoken in the name of the big Other is the said (word of voice), then the frustrated, irritated, annoyed tone in which they are superegoically expressed is the saying (tone of voice). We mainly hear the superego’s injunction through the very sound of the medium itself. Even if the specific words are good-natured and instructive when abstractly isolated from the voice (medium), the true message of the spoken content is located in the medium itself. If the medium is the message, then the superegoic form is the superegoic content of the big Other’s spoken content. Even if the literal message of the spoken content is “Do not enjoy!”, the true message articulated by the medium of the voice itself is “Enjoy!” — the superegoic voice says, “Stop bothering me with your bullshit! Go have fun and stay out of my hair! Do whatever the fuck you want so long as you do NOT cause my any hassles! Your Playstation beckons you, so go enjoy yourself!” This is why I kind of prefer to refer to the superego as the supervoice.

Lacan also elaborated on how the the parent’s actual voice and the words the parent speak support the silent-but-screaming voice of the superego (the voice qua objet petit a and signifiers are the building blocks of the superego).

The same mode of relations that exist between subjects is reproduced internally to the subject — and, as you well know, it can only be reproduced on the basis of a signifying organization. We are unable to think — even though we say it, and even though it may work when we do say it — that the superego is effectively something severe that spies on the ego and inflicts dreadful misery on it. It is not a person. It functions inside a subject in the way one subject acts towards another subject, and precisely in the sense that a relationship between subjects doesn’t necessarily imply the existence of a person — conditions introduced by the existence and functioning of signifiers as such are sufficient for the establishment of intersubjective relationships.
(Seminar V: Formations of the Unconscious, p. 273)

We must read this one closely, since it requires some subtle interpretation. The problem with this statement is that Lacan, at this point in his work, still uses and stands by the concept of intersubjectivity, which is a concept he would eventually reject and leave behind. What he came to see is that intersubjectivity turns out to be interegoism. “Intersubjectivity” is not actually about some Symbolic or Real zone of subjectivity shared by two speaking subjects, but, rather, is the dual relationship that exists between two egos. In other words, “intersubjectivity” is Imaginary and not Symbolic or Real. The signifiers that are introjected into the subject’s unconscious might be spoken by the little other (another person), but they are ultimately the property of the big Other. To work through one’s unconscious signifiers is not to trace them back to the intentions of the little other (Imaginary alter-ego), but, instead, to reckon with them in their place within the big Other (Symbolic authority). The meaning of signifiers is never reducible to the intended meaning of a concrete speaker, since the virtual-differential relations between signifiers always produce surplus-meaning.

Here’s the takeaway: when it comes to the quote under discussion, we do not want to throw out the baby (Symbolic introjection of signifiers) with the bath water (Imaginary “intersubjectivity”). The signifiers spoken by the little other take on a life of their own just as the superego does. In fact, the autonomization of superego piggybacks on the autonomization of the signifier. As Lacan, “introjection is always the introjection of the speech of the other” (Seminar I: Paper’s on Freud’s Technique, p. 83). This is the process of Symbolic identification (subject-to-Other relation) as opposed to Imaginary identification (ego-to-ego relation). What Lacan is describing in the quote is how the subject’s relation to a little other is always mediated by the big Other’s signifiers that have been spoken by the little other and which have been introjected into the subject. Because the signifier represents the subject for another signifier, that is, because these introjected signifiers spoken by the little other come to represent or stand in for the little other, the subject can still go on having a certain relation to the little other even after he or she has died. To push the insight even further, this is why we can have relationships with people we have never met (Malcolm X, Bob Dylan, Bruce Lee, Karl Marx) or even with characters of fiction (e.g., Yoda, Wonder Woman, Hamlet). This is how our introjected relation to the superego begins to take hold. But there is another mechanism that gives life to the superego, which is how its demand can become embodied in the little other.

You should understand that we indeed find the strongest effects of what is called the superego’s hyperseverity when the subject’s demand is introjected, passing as an articulated demand into he who is its recipient in such a way that this demand represents his own demand in an inverted form — for example, when a demand for love coming from the mother encounters in he who must respond to it his own demand for love addressed to his mother.
(Seminar VIII: Transference, p. 189)

The idea here is not that one’s own superegoic demand is given an illusory substantialization one that same demand is made by another concrete person. The encounter with the little other’s demand, which is also your demand, ontologically props up your demand and vice versa. To experience your demand in an externalized form adds weight and strength to it. The little other’s externalized articulation of your introjected superegoic demand serves to add more and more pressure on it. This strange sort of puppetry on the part of the superego, it’s “demonic” possession of little others, is important in the runaway guilt the superego keeps on loading on our shoulders. And this brings us to the relation between the superego and guilt. The superego is a positive feedback loop of exponential guilt and unbearable pressure. Superego is a guilt factory — productive of guilt for failing to enjoy. The oppressively moralistic superego punishes for actually being too moral, i.e., for not enjoying, for sacrificing enjoyment for the common good. This is why Mladen Dolar writes, “the voice of the superego is not the voice of reason but, rather, the voice of reason run amok, reason berserk. The superego is not the moral law, despite Freud’s declarations to the contrary, but a way of eluding it” (A Voice and Nothing More, p. 99).

Kafka’s short story ‘The Judgement’ serves as a great example of the devastating cruelty of the superego. To me, it’s seems as though Kafka had been reading Žižek’s various descriptions of the superego and thought to himself, “You know, I bet I could write a story that would perfectly illustrate the horror at the heart of this superegoic logic”. Out popped ‘The Judgment’.

Georg Bendemann, who lives in Prague, is a young merchant who recently became engaged to rich girl named Frieda. The story opens with Georg writing a letter to inform a friend living abroad about the engagement. His friend moved to Russia and started a business, but, unfortunately, the business is now failing. Because of this misfortune, Georg is conflicted about telling his friend about the upcoming marriage, but ultimately decides to invite him to the wedding, since he feels guilty for not having done so.

After finishing the letter, Georg, goes and checks on his father — a superegoic figure described as gigantic despite suffering from an illness. His father sits in a dark room with the window shut on a hot day (a nice way of representing the superego as the dark side of the Law as well as its suffocating “heat” or smoldering pressure). One pictures the father as an old, tall, heavyset man. One that has his “heavy dressing gown swung open”. All he has on besides the gown is his underwear. I can’t help but imagine the father as resembling an older version of Tony Soprano. The point, of course, of the gown being opened here is to suggest a certain vulgarity or obscenity operating in this figure of Law and judgment.

Anyway, Georg tells his father about the letter he just wrote, but the father actually begins ever so subtly to sit in judgment of Georg. He accuses Georg of not telling the whole truth about his friend in Russia; he suggests that Georg is not properly running the family business; the father even mentions in passing that the death of his wife (Georg’s mother) was harder on him than on Georg (suggesting that Georg did not love his mother enough); he goes on to even question the very existence of Georg’s friend. Georg responds lovingly by telling his father that he is still needed in the business, but also that he (Georg) is willing to shut it down if it’s too much a burden on his father’s health. Georg offers to move his father into well lit room with lots of fresh air and expresses his desire to get a good doctor to tend to his father. At this point, with a heartless gaze, the father menacingly exclaims, “You have no friend in St. Petersburg.” And, then, goes on to call Georg a liar. Georg attempts to reason with him, to help his father to remember his friend, all while helping him change his cloths and get into bed (importantly, Georg notices that his father’s underpants are dirty, i.e., shit-stained, which adds to his feeling of guilt). Now being tucked into bed, fully covered by blankets, the father begins repeatedly asking, “Am I well covered up now?” Georg affirms that he is . . . at which point, his father erupts in rage and stands up on the bed. The bombardment of guilt exponentially explodes from there. He screams out his final judgement (I’ve edited all of his judgments together):

No! . . . You wanted to cover me up, I know, my young sprig, but I’m far from being covered up yet. And even if this is the last strength I have, it’s enough for you, too much for you. Of course I know your friend. He would have been a son after my own heart. That’s why you’ve been playing him false all these years. Why else? Do you think I haven’t been sorry for him? And that’s why you had to lock yourself up in your office — the Chief is busy, mustn’t be disturbed — just so that you could write your lying little letters to Russia. But thank goodness a father doesn’t need to be taught how to see through his son. And now that you thought you’d got him down, so far down that you could set your bottom on him and sit on him and he wouldn’t move, then my fine son makes up his mind to get married! . . . But attend to me! . . . Because she lifted up her skirts . . . because she lifted her skirts like this, the nasty creature . . . because she lifted her skirts like this and this you made up to her, and in order to make free with her undisturbed you have disgraced your mother’s memory, betrayed your friend, and stuck your father into bed so that he can’t move. But he can move, or can’t he? . . . But your friend hasn’t been betrayed after all! . . . I’ve been representing him here on the spot. . . .
Yes, of course I’ve been playing a comedy! A comedy! That’s a good expression! What other comfort was left to a poor old widower? Tell me — and while you’re answering me be you still my living son — what else was left to me, in my back room, plagued by a disloyal staff, old to the marrow of my bones? And my son strutting through the world, finishing off deals that I had prepared for him, bursting with triumphant glee, and stalking away from his father with the closed face of a respectable businessman! Do you think I didn’t love you, I, from whom you are sprung? . . . Stay where you are, I don’t need you! You think you have strength enough to come over here and that you’re only hanging back of your own accord. Don’t be too sure! I am still much the stronger of us two. All by myself I might have had to give way, but your mother has given me so much of her strength that I’ve established a fine connection with your friend and I have your customers here in my pocket! . . . Just take your bride on your arm and try getting in my way! I’ll sweep her from your very side, you don’t know how! . . . How you amused me today, coming to ask me if you should tell your friend about your engagement. He knows it already, you stupid boy, he knows it all! I’ve been writing to him, for you forgot to take my writing things away from me. That’s why he hasn’t been here for years, he knows everything a hundred times better than you do yourself, in his left hand he crumples your letters unopened while in his right hand he holds up my letters to read through! . . . He knows everything a thousand times better! For years I’ve been waiting for you to come with some such question! Do you think I concern myself with anything else? Do you think I read my newspapers? . . .
How long a time you’ve taken to grow up! Your mother had to die, she couldn’t see the happy day, your friend is going to pieces in Russia, even three years ago he was yellow enough to be thrown away, and as for me, you see what condition I’m in. You have eyes in your head for that! . . . I suppose you wanted to say that sooner. But now it doesn’t matter. . . . So now you know what else there was in the world besides yourself, till now you’ve known only about yourself! An innocent child, yes, that you were, truly, but still more truly have you been a devilish human being! — And therefore take note: I sentence you now to death by drowning!
(The Complete Stories, pp. 84–7)

Georg is horrified by all this. So much so that he curled up in one of the corners of the room. Once his father sentences him to die by drowning, he immediately runs to a bridge and throw himself over falling to his death. It was a death by drowning — not on water but, instead, on superegoic guilt itself (the water actually saved Georg from what he was truly drowning on). However, what Georg ought to have done — instead of executing himself and obeying the superegoic judgment — was return the father’s own message back to him in inverted form. “Yes, father, all you said is true. I am guilty . . . and to that all I have to say is . . . you’re welcome. You have long enjoyed your seething resentment of me, your shit-stained underwear, your dark and sweaty room. You have judged me but I have judged the enjoyment within your judgement. You, too, have been found guilty. I will not drown myself, since you already have had your consolation prize. I owe you nothing because I have already given you so much unconscious enjoyment. I have been crucified for the sake of your libidinal economy. You are nothing without me — your disappointing boy, your precious obstacle, your fantasmatic scapegoat! I will now deprive you of myself. I will now depart from you forever. Goodbye, father. Oh, one last thing . . . Enjoy!”

One of Žižek’s best examples of superegoic guilt is that of Mrs. Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (an example Žižek discusses in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema). Psycho actually provides us with a perfect cinematic representation of Freud’s structural model of the psyche comprised of the id, the ego, and the superego, which is often represented via an iceberg diagram. The id is the totally unconscious, hidden, or submerged part of the iceberg, whereas the ego and the superego are both have unconscious, preconscious, and conscious aspects to them. Žižek uses the three levels (basement, first floor, second floor) of the Bates house to explain all this. Basement is id, first floor is ego, and second floor is superego. On the first floor, the level of ego, Norman behaves normally and rationally. On the second floor, the one that contains his mother’s bedroom, which is the position of the voice of the maternal superego, Norman is oppressively and mockingly bombarded by torturous demands and criticisms. Finally, the basement is the zone or reservoir of the id with all of its illicit drives. This is why the scene in which Norman carries his mother down to the basement makes so much psychoanalytic sense. The superego has an important connection to the id (drive, jouissance). The superego is fueled by the id. As Žižek says in his analysis of the scene, “Superego is not an ethical agency. Superego is an obscene agency bombarding us with impossible orders . . . laughing at us when, of course, we can never fulfil its demand. The more we obey it, the more it makes us guilty. There is always some aspect of an obscene madman in the agency of the superego.” The father in Kafka’s ‘The Judgment’ and Mrs. Bates in Hitchcock’s Psycho are, respectively, great examples of the paternal superego and the maternal superego that accurate one’s guilt.

And let us be very clear on the topic of guilt. We are ontologically guilty! We are guilty-as-such! Oddly enough, our ontological guilt paradoxically goes all the way back to our symbolic castration, that is, to our acceptance of the Law and of prohibition in the socialisation process. Our ontological guilt, which the superego takes aim at, is born from our “giving ground relative to our jouissance”, that is, in bowing the knee to the Law (prohibition, name-of-the-father). We are ontologically guilty, not for breaking the Law, but, instead, for obeying it. We broke the “Law” of jouissance in welcoming the Law of the “No!” into our lives. The superego is the monstrous byproduct of these two laws. Deleuze & Guattari said, “No superego, no guilt” (Anti-Oedipus, p. 143). The idea is that guilt is caused by the superego, i.e., humans aren’t actually guilty in their very being, but only become so through the illusory or epiphenomenal guilt inflicted on them by the superego’s excruciating judgments. If there was no superego (cause), then there would be no guilt (effect). But what if D&G get the order of the causality wrong? It’s not because there is a superego that we are guilty, but, rather, it is because we are guilty that there is a superego. However, to be even more precise, there is a way that D&G are correct (albeit one they themselves would reject). The subject’s ontological guilt is Real, but superego does, in fact, make us guilty within the Symbolic, but this guilt is retroactively caused and not linearly. It’s with the formation of the superego that the subject begins to be plagued by guilt, but it is guilt for an actual act, the Real act of sacrificing one’s jouissance, that already occurred. Symbolically speaking, the effect, (superego) travels back in time and becomes the cause of its own cause (ontological guilt in the Real).

The superego loves to tortures with our “life choices”, e.g., the superego commands us to enjoy our lives, but if you decide to quit your job because it makes you miserable and if this decision actually leads to economic precarity, if you cannot find a better job with better pay and if you come to regret quitting the first job that made you unhappy, then the superego turns right around and makes you feel like a loser because you are now worse off, that is, you are enjoying even less. This is an impossible superegoic double bind: if you stay at your shitty job, then you fail to enjoy, but if you quit and it goes wrong, then you also fail to properly enjoy yourself. Having the job makes you unhappy but not having the job makes you unhappy, which is just fuel for the perverse enjoyment of the superego itself. It cruelly tortures us with our life choices, but life choices are usually just shots in the dark, but it makes us feel responsible for their outcomes as if we should have had perfect clairvoyance while making our decisions. But we can perceive the necessary linearity of our choices in the future itself. Hindsight is 20/20 or, as Hegel put it, “The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the falling of dusk” (Philosophy of Right, p. 16), that is, the signifiance of a past choice is only understood in light of contingent retroactivity (what Lacan calls a “quilting point”). In truth, when it comes to life decisions, we do the best we can, but our best is never enough for the superego — “Enjoy!” means to do the impossible.

Bill Maher is very much a smarmy superego when it comes to the dietary habits of average Americans. He acts like working class Americans should just make healthier choices when it comes to the food they eat. I’ve heard him say all kinds of superegoic shit on this topic over the years. He’s said shit like “Instead of candy just have a banana instead. Bananas are cheap!” The real message is this: “I don’t give a fuck if you’re poor. Make healthy choices! But also remember to always enjoy! You’re supposed to eat healthy, but you’re also supposed to get enjoyment from eating! Eat for your pleasure and eat for your enjoyment! I know these two commands are contradictory, but, still, do them both anyway!” Oh, yeah? Hey, Bill Maher . . . fuck you, you superegoic cocksucker! Bill, I’ll eat a banana if you eat my banana! Here we have a rich Hollywood asshole telling those of us who work hard jobs for trash wages how we’re supposed to eat throughout our shitty days. There is total class privilege here. Maher is rich enough to get his jouissance from expensive prostitutes, personal chefs, traveling, boomer “comedy”, etc., but if us broke wage slaves get our jouissance from fast food, then we’re the root cause of America’s health crisis. Here’s an idea: instead of doing the bullshit ideology of personal responsibility, let’s just restructure the economy and the food industry while we’re at it. In truth, appeals to “personal responsibility” are really just superegoic sidesteps (they sidestep the responsibility of the structure itself). Superego Bill doesn’t grasp that for millions of Americans the choice to eat healthy is not a choice they truly have. Average Americans do not choose what they eat — what they eat choses them. Belonging to the upper class comes with a whole array of food options that we simply do not have access to. The economic, libidinal, temporal, and energetic, restraints working class Americans face make it virtually impossible for them to eat healthy on a regular basis. Oh, but that’s right. We’ll just eat bananas every goddamn day of our lives like the monkeys at the zoo. This gives new meaning to Peter Sloterdijk’s concept of the “human zoo”.

Lacan is very clear on how neurotics can feel guilty without any reference to the Law. The point is that the Law in all of its official capacity does not cause guilt in the subject. Instead, the superego retroactively gives the verdict on us — “thou art ontologically guilty”. Guilt originates in one’s relation to jouissance, in the choice to undergo repression (symbolic castration) and become a neurotic, and not in the Law itself, but the superego is the supplemental law of enjoyment that Symbolically registers and officially confirms the subject’s Real guilt after the fact. The neurotic subject can feel guilty over this or that misdeed because it is ontologically guilty. There is an ontological misdeed at the very heart of the split subject — the crime of becoming a subject of the Law. We are not ontologically guilty because we have transgressed the Law in some fundamental way, but, instead, because we have accepted the Law as the Law, because we have compromised ourselves and our jouissance in order to be ruled by the Law as such. In truth, the neurotic subject does not require the Law or even the superego to feel guilty, since neurotics are guilty in their own eyes. Ontological guilt is the result of a crime committed against oneself — the crime is not merely accepting and internalizing the social norms and behavioral protocols of the big Other, but the very willingness to assimilate language. If the word is the murder of the thing, then the welcoming of the word into oneself is suicide. What am I ontologically guilty of? Of being a speaking subject (parlêtre). The neurotic subject is guilty of being a lacking subject: “I myself have weighed myself in the balances of my ownmost conscience and have found myself guilty of sinning against myself.” Nevertheless, the ontological guilt of the subject is the playground of the superego.

The obscurities concerning the effects of the superego corresponding to the growth of our experience of this agency arise essentially from the absence of a fundamental distinction. We need to distinguish between guilt and the relationship to the law. There is a relationship between the subject and the law. As to guilt, it’s born without any kind of reference to this law. This is the fact that analytic experience has contributed.
The naive move in the dialectic of the relationship between sin and the law was expressed in the words of St Paul, that is, that it’s the law that makes the sin. From which it results, as in the sentence of old Karamazov on which I insisted at one time — ‘If God does not exist, everything is permitted’.
One of the strangest things there is, and it required analysis to bring it to us, is that there is no need of any kind of reference, either to God or to his law, for man to be literally swimming in guilt. Experience shows us. It even seems that one is able to formulate the contrary expression, namely that ‘if God is dead, nothing is permitted’. I have already spoken about this in its time.
How, then, do we formulate the appearance of guilt feelings in the life of the neurotic subject?
(Seminar V: Formations of the Unconscious, pp. 470)

The idea that “if God does not exist, everything is permitted” makes perfect sense to us. We all understand what’s going on here. If there is no God, no Law, no Authority, then we can do whatever we want, since there is no way to determine what is good and what is bad. But what the hell does Lacan mean when he says, “if God is dead, nothing is permitted”? This is how Lacan has decided to express the neurotic’s predicament in being ontologically guilty. The Law (God) says that this is good and that is bad. We only need to feel guilty sometimes, on those occasions that we have done something bad, since, for the Law, there are many types of good actions we do not have to feel guilty for performing. However, when the neurotic himself is his own judge, every single action is one to feel guilty about, since all of them were made possible by the primordial compromise, the fundamental act — that of choosing to accept symbolic castration. The logic of the neurotic is this: “every single one of my actions is guilty, since every one of them is made in the image and likeness of repression.” No matter if the neurotic’s acts are moral or immoral, the neurotic is still ontologically guilty either way. For the neurotic and his self-jurisprudence, “nothing is permitted” or “everything is forbidden”, since all of his actions are de facto guilty — guilty of being made in the shadow of repression, of the unconscious. Through undergoing repression and symbolic castration, the neurotic emerges as a split subject, split between conscious and unconscious. Perhaps this is the best way to define the guilt we’re discussing. Ontological guilt is the guilt the subject has for allowing itself to have an unconscious — the unconscious is the ontological stain on all of the neurotic’s actions. Whenever the neurotic judges himself as guilty, it is a ruling that occurs without reference to the Law (positive order of rules), which is why all actions are forbidden. But, according to Žižek, what is true of neurosis is also true of totalitarianism (both the neurotic subject and the totalitarian subject are guilty as such):

This is why we can define totalitarianism as a social order in which, even though there is no law (no explicitly established law that is universally valid), anything that one does can at any moment be seen as illegal, forbidden. Positive legislation does not exist (or, if it does exist, it is completely arbitrary and non-obligatory), but despite this, one can find oneself at any moment in the position of having broken an unknown or nonexistent Law. The paradox of the Interdiction that founds the social order is that the forbidden thing is already impossible. Totalitarianism inverts this paradox by placing its subjects in the no less paradoxical position of transgressors of a nonexistent law. Such a situation, in which a phantom law is constantly being transgressed, is a wonderful illustration of Dostoyevsky’s famous statement — Lacan’s version of which brings out its significance in its entirety: if God (positive law) does not exist, everything is forbidden.
(The Most Sublime Hysteric: Hegel with Lacan, p. 155)

And yet there is another side to this paradox of universalized prohibition, which Žižek will now explain to us:

How do we account for this paradox that the absence of Law universalizes Prohibition? There is only one possible explanation: enjoyment itself, which we experience as “transgression”, is in its innermost status something imposed, ordered — when we enjoy, we never do it “spontaneously”, we always follow a certain injunction. The psychoanalytic name for this obscene injunction, for this obscene call, “Enjoy!”, is superego. This paradox of the superego is staged in its pure form in Monty Python’s Meaning of Life, in the episode about sexual education: bored schoolboys yawn in the classroom, awaiting their teacher’s arrival; when one of them shouts “He is coming!”, all of a sudden they start to make a noise, shout and throw things at each other — the entire spectacle of wild uproar is here exclusively to impress the teacher’s gaze. After quietening them, the teacher begins to examine them on how to arouse the vagina; caught in their ignorance, the embarrassed pupils avoid his gaze and stammer half-articulated answers, while the teacher reprimands them severely for not practising the subject at home. With his wife’s assistance, he thereupon demonstrates to them the penetration of penis into vagina; bored by the subject, one of the schoolboys casts a furtive glance through the window, and the teacher asks him sarcastically: “Would you be kind enough to tell us what is so attractive out there in the courtyard?” Things are here brought to extreme: the reason this inverted presentation of the “normal”, everyday relationship between Law (authority) and pleasure produces such an uncanny effect is of course that it exhibits in broad daylight the usually concealed truth about the “normal” state of things where enjoyment is sustained by a severe superego imperative.
(For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, pp. 9–10)

Without the Law’s particular prohibitions (rules, values, determinations) we get the universalization of prohibition as such. And what is universally prohibited? Nothing other than jouissance itself. Now here’s the strange logic at play: on the one hand, the positive Law forbids jouissance, but also makes it possible through establishing the real possibility of the transgression of the positive Law. But if jouissance is enjoyment in transgression, then the absence of the positive Law means that jouissance itself is impossible, i.e., universally prohibited. In truth, our actual forms of jouissance and transgression are structured by the presence of the Law. The idea is that all of our actual jouissance is socially informed by the superego’s injunction. For the most part, we enjoy as the superego enjoys. What the example from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life shows us is how the teacher (superegoic social authority) organizes and structures the student’s enjoyment. We see in the boys how the duty to enjoy is forcefully imposed on all of us. Even if we ourselves don’t feel like enjoying, the superego insists that we do so, or, at the very least, pretend to enjoy (it will, however, make us feel guilty for merely pretending). The film uses the extreme and obscene example of a teacher fucking his wife in front of his students in order to make conspicuous how the usually inconspicuous relation between Law (superegoic authority) and jouissance actually functions.

Now, Lacan’s concept of ontological guilt, which is neurotic guilt, is psychoanalytic, but we find an existential concept of it in Heidegger’s Being and Time (see Chapter 2 of Division II and especially sections 56–58). I see a lot of conceptual compatibility between Lacan and Heidegger despite the fact that Lacan himself didn’t see it, since he said, “What does neurotic guilt consist in? It’s truly stupefying that no analyst, not even any phenomenologist, mentions this essential dimension, articulates it or makes a criterion of it” (Seminar V: Formations of the Unconscious, p. 472). It’s true that Heidegger was focused on existential guilt and not neurotic guilt, but Lacan should have recognized that Heidegger’s phenomenology of Dasein’s ontological guilt is actually a phenomenology of neurotic guilt, since Dasein is, proximally and for the most part, neurotic. Hysterics and obsessionals have existential struggles in ways that psychotics and perverts don’t. As opposed to the neurotic’s being-in-the-world, psychotics are being-out-the-world or being-out-the-world-in-the-world, whereas perverts are something like being-kind-of-in-the-world or being-half-in-the-world).

If read from a Lacanian perspective, I’d argue that Heidegger provides us with a robust account of ontologico-neurotic guilt despite the fact that symbolic castration, the name-of-the-father, desire, objet petit a, jouissance, etc., do not factor into it phenomenologically. Of course, the one non-phenomenon, the libidinal blind spot, that Heidegger’s existential phenomenology was unable to see was jouissance, but that’s to be expected, since jouissance is that which evades phenomenological description unless one already sees things through the concept of jouissance. Heidegger’s phenomenological maxim went like this, “Before words, before expressions, always the phenomena first, and then the concepts!” (History of the Concept of Time, p. 248). It was in holding tight to this principle that Heidegger remained blind to jouissance. When it comes to spotting the enjoyment of the drive — always the concept first. Nevertheless, Heidegger’s description of conscience and guilt is a psychoanalytic treasure trove.

Heidegger writes, “Dasein as such is guilty” (Being and Time, p. 331). But why is this the case? Dasein is ontologically guilty of not having made itself from scratch, built itself from the ground up. Put differently, Dasein exists, it projects itself onto future possibilities, on the basis of its past facticity, that is, the givens about itself, e.g., what language it speaks, who its parents are, what country it was born into, caught in the grip of das Man (the Lacanian big Other), etc. But what calls Dasein back to itself, back to its ownmost (authentic) possibilities is conscience: “The call of conscience has the character of an appeal to Dasein by calling it to its ownmost potentiality-for-Being-its-Self; and this is done by way of summoning it to its ownmost Being-guilty” (Being and Time, p. 314). Hubert Dreyfus’ clarity is of great assistance:

Existential guilt, which the call of conscience confirms, is, on the contrary, an empty formal indebtedness, covered up by the sense of one’s existentiell indebtedness to God, reason, or society. It is the condition of possibility for any ordinary sense of debt or responsibility. . . . Existential guilt reveals not inauthentic Dasein’s moral lapses, or its essential failure to choose; it reveals an essentially unsatisfactory structure definitive of even authentic Dasein. Even if Dasein has done nothing wrong there is something wrong with Dasein — its being is not under its own power. . . .
When I lucidly understand my existential guilt, I see that, even when my choice involves matters of life and death, I have to choose one alternative, and do so without justifying principles to fall back on. Rather, I must choose on the basis of taken-for-granted practices that I can never fully grasp, yet for whose consequences I am fully responsible.
To sum up: Dasein’s structural indebtedness to the culture for an understanding of itself that it can never clearly choose, yet out of which it must act and for which it is fully responsible, is existential guilt. The existential meaning of conscience is the call, not to do this or that, but to stop fleeing into the everyday world of moral righteousness or of moral relativism and to face up to Dasein’s basic guilt.
(Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I, pp. 306–8)

William Large offers further clarification on the phenomenon of existential guilt:

In Being guilty, I recognise my existence is always in debt. Not to this or that person or thing, or even God, but to Being itself. I am in debt to my Being, because my existence is thrown. I exist in a world which is not my own creation. What is possible for me is already given in advance, what Heidegger calls facticity. Ontologically speaking, therefore, Being guilty has no moral or theological meaning for Heidegger. It does not mean I owe something ontically, but my existence, as mine, owes something to the past. This does not mean I am determined by the past causally. History is not a collection of facts, but a future possibility which I can be. Being a student of philosophy is something given as a possibility through a tradition I have been born into, but it is up to me whether I choose it as future possibility. Such a choice is only authentic when I choose it on the basis of my own nullity. What guilt reveals to me is that at the heart of my existence there is nothing but possibility, which is covered over by my involvement and absorption in the everyday world.
(Heidegger’s Being and Time, pp. 114–5)

One of E. M. Cioran’s aphorisms perfectly captures this Heideggerian sense of ontological guilt or indebtedness to Being, to our social background familiarity: “Existing is plagiarism” (Drawn and Quartered, p. 74). But if desire is the desire of the Other, then we can just as easily say that desiring is plagiarism. The way Lacan chose to express desire’s own guilt to itself was like this: “Your desire is always cuckolded. Or, rather, it’s you who are cuckolded. You yourself are betrayed in that your desire has slept with signifiers” (Seminar V: Formations of the Unconscious, p. 134). Heidegger says that Dasein is indebted to its cultural thrownness (specific facticity) for its existence (possibilities) and Lacan would say that the subject owes its very desire to (1) the desire of the Other and (2) the Law (what brings desire into existence). Heidegger begins his analysis of guilt with what he calls the call of conscience. In his words, “One must keep in mind that when we designate the conscience as a “call”, this call is an appeal to the they-self in its Self; as such an appeal, it summons the Self to its potentiality-for-Being-its-Self, and thus calls Dasein forth to its possibilities” (Being and Time, p. 319). Conscience, for Heidegger, is a call issued from within Dasein itself that summons it away from the grip of das Man. In Lacanian terms, conscience is not the superego but, instead, the “voice” of the subject itself. In Lacanian terms, conscience is the voice of the ethics of desire, which no longer relies on the authorization or validation of the big Other. Desire that does not give ground relative to itself is resolute desire, but the true name of resolute desire is simply drive.

In his phenomenological descriptions of guilt, Heidegger even describes what he calls “public conscience”, which, of course, is what we call superego. Heidegger says that the call of public conscience is a “voice” — the voice of das Man. The public conscience (superego) is, for Heidegger, (1) insubstantial, that is, it is not rooted in God or any other alien being, that is, it is a “nobody”, (2) it is extimate, that is, it is Dasein but made Other to itself, (3) it takes on an objective presence precisely because it is subjective (in other words, the call of conscience is an objective status because it comes from itself but in a radically exterior form).

And yet, if the caller — who is ‘nobody’, when seen after the manner of the world — is interpreted as a power, this seems to be a dispassionate recognition of something that one can ‘come across Objectively’. When seen correctly, however, this interpretation is only a fleeing in the face of the conscience — a way for Dasein to escape by slinking away from that thin wall by which the “they” is separated, as it were, from the uncanniness of its Being. This interpretation of the conscience passes itself off as recognizing the call in the sense of a voice which is ‘universally’ binding, and which speaks in a way that is ‘not just subjective’. Furthermore, the ‘universal’ conscience becomes exalted to a ‘world-conscience’, which still has the phenomenal character of an ‘it’ and ‘nobody’, yet which speaks — there in the individual ‘subject’ — as this indefinite something.
This ‘public conscience’ — what else is it than the voice of the “they”? A ‘world-conscience’ is a dubious fabrication, and Dasein can come to this only because conscience, in its basis and its essence, is in each case mine — not only in the sense that in each case the appeal is to one’s ownmost potentiality-for-Being, but because the call comes from that entity which in each case I myself am.
With this Interpretation of the caller, which is purely in accord with the phenomenal character of the calling, the ‘power’ of conscience is not diminished and rendered ‘merely subjective’. On the contrary, only in this way do the inexorability and unequivocal character of the call become free. This Interpretation does justice to the ‘Objectivity’ of the appeal for the first time by leaving it its ‘subjectivity’, which of course denies the they-self its dominion.
(Being and Time, p. 323)

Heidegger makes a distinction between the call of conscience and the caller of conscience, which, in Lacanian terms, is the distinction between the enunciated and the enunciation (Levinas called this difference the one between the said and the saying). On one side, we have the call/enunciated/said and, on the other, we have the caller/enunciation/saying. For Heidegger, is there a difference between “public conscience” (das Man, superego) and “conscience proper” (Dasein, the subject)? Yes! There is! The Heideggerian point, however, is homologous to the Lacanian one. The reason why das Man can bombard Dasein with ontic-existentiell guilt issued from the public conscience is because Dasein itself has an ontologico-existential conscience of its own. The reason why the superego can assail the neurotic subject with the sadistic guilt that has its source in the injunction to “Enjoy!” is because the subject itself is guilty in its own eyes. The “Enjoy!” means “Guilty!” Why? Because if the superego has to command you to “Enjoy!”, then it means that you have already compromised your relation to jouissance, that is, you have already sacrificed your jouissance via symbolic castration. The call of desire gets objectified as the demand of the superego — the ethics of desire vs. the morality of the superego.

Lacan even argued that guilt emerges from the tension between desire and demand. This is especially true of the “prohibited demand”, which has no greater instance than the superego’s demand for the subject to “Enjoy!”, since what the fundamental prohibition prohibits is jouissance. To demand pure jouissance is to negate pure desire.

The sense of guilt appears in connection with approaching a demand experienced as forbidden because it kills desire, and this is precisely where it differs from diffuse anxiety, and you know to what extent that differs from the emergence of the sense of guilt.
Guilt is inscribed in the relationship between desire and demand. Everything that goes in the direction of a particular formulation of demand is accompanied by the disappearance of desire . . . the subject . . . can’t be in all of the places at the same time. That’s what guilt is. That’s where prohibition appears, but this time not insofar as it is formulated — insofar as the prohibited demand strikes desire down, makes it disappear, kills it.
(Seminar V: Formations of the Unconscious, p. 472)

Thus, the ethics of desire can be said to be a resolute embrace of desire as such and disregard of the superego’s torturously moralizing guilt trip. But, again, this is made possible by the call of conscience, by the voiceless voice. A voice that the subject both is and is not. Or, in Heideggerian terms, when it comes to the voice of conscience (not the voice of das Man, i.e., the “They-self”), Dasein is both the caller and the called but a minimal (irreducible) difference remains.

But is it at all necessary to keep raising explicitly the question of who does the calling? Is this not answered for Dasein just as unequivocally as the question of to whom the call makes its appeal? In conscience Dasein calls itself. This understanding of the caller may be more or less awake in the factical hearing of the call. Ontologically, however, it is not enough to answer that Dasein is at the same time both the caller and the one to whom the appeal is made. When Dasein is appealed to, is it not ‘there’ in a different way from that in which it does the calling? Shall we say that its ownmost potentiality-for-Being-its-Self functions as the caller?
Indeed the call is precisely something which we ourselves have neither planned nor prepared for nor voluntarily performed, nor have we ever done so. ‘It’ calls, against our expectations and even against our will. On the other hand, the call undoubtedly does not come from someone else who is with me in the world. The call comes from me and yet from beyond me.
(Being and Time, p. 320)

What Heidegger just described is the extimacy of the call of conscience. The concept of extimacy explains how the call can simultaneously be both objective and subjective. From the Lacanian perspective, the call issues forth from the very extimate split between the subject and objet petit a (in this case, objet a as voice-object, the object of the invocatory drive). Perhaps we can say that the caller is objet a, but only in light of the fact that objet a is extimately the barred subject, hence, the subject calls to itself in the form of conscience — the objet petit a as the caller that calls the subject to the ethics of desire. By accepting symbolic castration, the objet a is the “other side” of the neurotic subject that the subject let go of, handed over to the Law, which is precisely the source of its ontologico-neurotic guilt. Dasein’s constitutive extimacy is highlighted in the phenomenon of the alien voice of the utterless and indeterminate call of conscience. It’s important to read the following three paragraphs back to back in order to connect the conceptual dots:

We take calling as a mode of discourse. Discourse articulates intelligibility. Characterizing conscience as a call is not just giving a ‘picture’, like the Kantian representation of the conscience as a court of justice. Vocal utterance, however, is not essential for discourse, and therefore not for the call either; this must not be overlooked. Discourse is already presupposed in any expressing or ‘proclaiming’ [“Ausrufen”]. If the everyday interpretation knows a ‘voice’ of conscience, then one is not so much thinking of an utterance (for this is something which factically one never comes across); the ‘voice’ is taken rather as a giving-to-understand. In the tendency to disclosure which belongs to the call, lies the momentum of a push — of an abrupt arousal. The call is from afar unto afar. It reaches him who wants to be brought back.
(Being and Time, p. 316)

In its “who”, the caller is definable in a ‘worldly’ way by nothing at all. The caller is Dasein in its uncanniness: primordial, thrown Being-in-the-world as the “not-at-home” — the bare ‘that-it-is’ in the “nothing” of the world. The caller is unfamiliar to the everyday they-self; it is something like an alien voice. What could be more alien to the “they”, lost in the manifold ‘world’ of its concern, than the Self which has been individualized down to itself in uncanniness and been thrown into the “nothing”? ‘It’ calls, even though it gives the concernfully curious ear nothing to hear which might be passed along in further retelling and talked about in public. But what is Dasein even to report from the uncanniness of its thrown Being? What else remains for it than its own potentiality-for-Being as revealed in anxiety? How else is “it” to call than by summoning Dasein towards this potentiality-for-Being, which alone is the issue?
(Being and Time, pp. 321–2)

What does the conscience call to him to whom it appeals? Taken strictly, nothing. The call asserts nothing, gives no information about world-events, has nothing to tell. Least of all does it try to set going a ‘soliloquy’ in the Self to which it has appealed. ‘Nothing’ gets called to this Self, but it has been summoned [aufgerufen] to itself — that is, to its ownmost potentiality-for-Being.
(Being and Time, pp. 318)

The call is discursive which means that the call is intelligible. But what is made intelligible by the call? The call is like an actual utterance, some statement or series of statements another person might speak to you. Discourse, for Heidegger, is not a literally spoken statement, but, instead, the very meaningful context in which statement are made. Two strangers standing next to each other in an elevator might not speak to each other, but they are definitely discoursing. Silence itself is very meaningful in this discursive context. In a sense, the two strangers are speaking without actually speaking. The prolonged silence can be said to be an unspoken agreement to not bother each other with mindless chit-chat (idle talk). The call of conscience is silent but profoundly meaningful. It is a voiceless voice that comes from the outside-inside (extimate core) of Dasein itself. It speaks without speaking. But what does the call seek to communicate? What is its message? Oddly enough, the message isn’t really a message at all. Rather, the call is more of an indeterminate nudge in a certain direction (a trajectory that leads Dasein away from the strangle hold of das Man). This “momentum”, this “push”, goads Dasein back to itself, that is, to an encounter with its own existential remainder, with that excess of its ownmost possibilities, which awaits it outside of the parameters of the they-self. A specific demand is always a call to a particular positivity, a specific something. Conscience calls us to nothing.

But who is the caller? Nobody. No one. Nothing. If anything, the caller is Dasein’s own “nullity”, it’s own nothing. What the hell does this mean? Heidegger reserves the word “nullity” to designate two of Dasein’s ontologico-constitutive negativities or “nots”. Nothingness utterly saturates Dasein’s Being-in-the-world. Once again, I defer to the lucidity of William Large:

What is revealed in the ontological interpretation of Dasein is that at the basis of its existence there is nothing. Everything I interpret myself through, my attributes and occupations, for example, are inauthentic because they are not really me (it is this nothingness which anxiety reveals). They are not me, because anyone else could be them. Someone else could have brown hair and grey/blue eyes, someone else could be a philosophy teacher. The only possibility which is truly mine is my death. Not death as a fact, but as Being-towards-Death. In facing this possibility of my impossibility, I see, for the first time, that my existence stands on nothing. My attributes and occupations are merely moments within this nullity. I can be them in two ways: either inauthentically, thinking them as stable and as my real identity; or authentically, as choosing them within this nothingness. If what is at the heart of my Being is a nullity, the possibility of my impossibility, then in choosing to be, I also negate every other possibility. Nullity is what holds Dasein permanently open between possibility and actuality. The ultimate source of the nullity of Dasein is the ontological difference between Being and beings. Being, quite literally, is no-thing.
(Heidegger’s Being and Time, p. 117)

There is a nullity of thrownness and a nullity of projection. The nullity of thrownness refers to how Dasein’s thrownness (facticity) makes Dasein its own basis. Dasein exists as “Being-a-basis”. Now, this sounds like a positive determination, right? Dasein’s specific thrownness being what gives Dasein its concrete particularity. However, Heidegger sees a more primordial negativity operative within this thrownness. What Dasein’s facticity essentially means is that Dasein does can never (nullity of thrownness) build itself from the ground up. This is why Heidegger writes, “Being-the-basis is itself null” (Being and Time, p. 331). The fact that Dasein always-already has a determinate givenness about itself means that it is not possible to be a pure projection (in Sartrean terms, a pure transcendence). Dasein always comes with existential baggage and there is nothing (nullity of thrownness) that it can do about that. Nullity of thrownness: Dasein is NOT the creator of its own thrownness, but, rather, thrown into its thrownness/facticity.

The second of Dasein’s nullities, that of projection, refers to how Dasein can never (nullity of projection) realize all of its possibilities. If I chose to have children, then I cannot realize the possible the version of myself that never had kids. If I chose to devote my life to being a philosopher, then I cannot actualize the possibility of being an astronaut. And if I manage to be both a philosopher and an astronaut, then I can’t also be a chef. And if somehow I do pull off being a philosopher, astronaut, and a chef, then I can’t also become a professional basketball player. No matter how many possibilities you end up actualizing, there will still be a virtually infinite multitude of unactualized possibilities. The point, for Heidegger, is that these two nullities (nots, nevers, ontologico-existential impossibilities, structural negativities) are at the very heart of Dasein’s existence. In other words, Dasein’s positive existence is grounded by and shot through with nothingness. Dasein is its extimate nothing. Nothing permeates existence. Dasein is guilty of not having freely designed itself from the bottom up. Nullity of projection: Dasein is NOT able to be all of its projections/possibilities because its unchosen thrownness makes that impossible.

At the ontological basis of itself, Dasein finds radical negativity. Dasein is this nothing. This means that Dasein, at its most fundamental, is not its particular features, qualitative characteristics, positive identifications, etc., but, instead, its non-identity with its positive determinations. This ontological “nullity” is the Lacanian negative subject, that is, the void of subjectivity that remains when one has lost one’s “what” (Imaginary-Symbolic coordinates).

Conscience summons Dasein’s Self from its lostness in the “they”. The Self to which the appeal is made remains indefinite and empty in its “what”. When Dasein interprets itself in terms of that with which it concerns itself, the call passes over what Dasein, proximally and for the most part, understands itself as. And yet the Self has been reached, unequivocally and unmistakably.
(Being and Time, p. 319)

The “Self” is the negative subject that lurks behind positive identity. What a resolute encounter with the call of conscience does is confront Dasein with its ontological negativity. So, the caller is Dasein’s own nullity. In Lacanian terms, the caller is the very split within the split subject. Heidegger himself phenomenologically run smack dab into the extimacy of Dasein in identifying the caller and the called. Here, Heidegger stumbled upon the split subject or the möbius strip of Dasein itself: “We must instead hold fast not only to the phenomenal finding that I receive the call as coming both from me and from beyond me” (Being and Time, p. 320). Dasein always already is a negative surplus of its ownmost possibilities which is irreducible to the they-self’s world of publicly sanctioned possibilities. Dasein is constituted by its Being-in-the-world but also has its constitution in Being-not-at-home-in-the-world. The split subject is split between being both native and alien. The call calls Dasein towards what Lacan refer to as “subjective destitution”, which, in part, involves the subject’s emptying out (In Christian terms, kenosis) of his or her Imaginary-Symbolic coordinates. As Mark Fisher put it, “Subjective destitution is not something that happens in any straightforward empirical sense; it is, rather, an Event precisely in the sense of being an incorporeal transformation, an ontological reframing to which you must assent” (k-punk, ‘Dis-identity Politics’, p. 169). The call summons Dasein to its uncanniness, to its non-identity or dis-identity with the “homely” public world of the they-self. But how does this connect up to Lacan’s ethics of desire?

Lacan’s ethics of desire or ethics of psychoanalysis is essentially a new form of ethics (one that is irreducible to virtue ethics, deontology, utilitarianism, etc.). Why? Because it establishes that there exists at the heart of the subject an ethics (guilt, conscience) of the evil. Marc De Kesel explains: “Where Lacanian psychoanalysis previously guaranteed desire a refuge when it extricated itself from moral guilt, in his seventh seminar he will conclude that we can also be guilty in the eyes of desire itself” (Eros and Ethics: Reading Jacques Lacan’s Seminar VII, p. 47). What could this possibly mean? Typically, ethical phenomena such as guilt and conscience are thought to be inextricably linked to the moral Law, to the Law of the Good. The Good, of course, is said to be the principles and values that produce social cohesion and neighborliness. The Good is, therefore, aligned to Freud’s pleasure/reality principle. In other words, the Good seeks to facilitate a functioning social order, which requires its subjects to compromise their idiosyncratic desires, their “asocial” forms of enjoyment, for the sake of social homeostasis, rational engagement, polite etiquette, etc. Simply put, the Good (pleasure) is diametrically opposed to Evil (jouissance). The caveat being that there are actually all kinds of social forms of jouissance, what Žižek calls “inherent transgression”, that secretly serve as the glue of society, but that’s not the point in this specific context. The point here is that the social Good of pleasure is at odds with the asocial Evil of jouissance. However, Lacan’s discovery is that the moral Law’s repression of jouissance gives rise to a counter ethics of desire, to a Law of desire itself.

We know better than those who went before how to recognize the nature of desire, which is at the heart of this experience, that a reconsideration of ethics is possible, that a form of ethical judgment is possible, of a kind that gives this question the force of a Last Judgment: Have you acted in conformity with the desire that is in you? . . . I propose then that, from an individual point of view, the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one’s desire.
(Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, pp. 314, 319)

On a side note, for anyone who is even slightly familiar with the English occultist Aleister Crowley, the Lacanian ethics of desire smacks of the fundamental maxim of Crowley’s religion of Thelema (this word means “will” or “desire”): “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law” (The Book of the Law, p. 9). This was Crowley’s Law of Thelema or Law of Desire. Is it any wonder why he was deemed “the wickedest man in the world”? But what’s so interesting about the connection between Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis and Crowley’s Law of Thelema is that both attribute a lawful status to one’s desire.

What Lacanian psychoanalysis finds is that people feel guilty for having compromised their desire, their enjoyment, for the sake of the Good. Put differently, people feel guilty for having failed to live by the Law of the Evil (jouissance). Insofar as desire is lack and insofar as lack is a nothing (nullity), that is, the absence of my “lost” jouissance, the ethics of desire (Evil Law) is a call from within the subject itself — not from the Good, the moral Law, the big Other, the superego, etc. And what is the name of the subject’s unconscious pursuit of jouissance? Nothing other than the “death drive”. So, as Kesel says, “the most fundamental drive behind our moral conscience is the death drive” (Eros and Ethics: Reading Jacques Lacan’s Seminar VII, p.). What the Lacanian analyst must primarily grapple with is the subject’s ethics of desire. To quote Kesel again:

The characteristic kind of guilt the psychoanalytic cure has to deal with, and which is the core of its ethical preoccupations, is a guilt with respect to desire itself. “Have I not ‘given ground relative to [my] desire?’ Have I not let my desire be restricted and tamed?” This is the only question of moral guilt that counts in the analytic cure . . . The deathly universe of guilt psychoanalysis hears about during the cure makes it conclude that we are not only guilty with respect to a moral law (the law of the super-ego), but that our guilt also refers to what lies beyond such a law, that is, to the feeling of not having satisfied our desire as such. Can this mean anything other than that we must henceforth always feel guilty?
(Eros and Ethics: Reading Jacques Lacan’s Seminar VII, p. 53)

Bruce Fink adds clarity to this logic of the ethics of psychoanalysis:

As Lacan says, “Whoever attempts to submit to the moral law sees the demands of his superego grow increasingly fastidious and cruel” (Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 176). In effect, the superego takes pleasure in berating the ego even when the ego is doing as much as possible to keep id impulses under control. A vicious cycle develops in which some of the id’s aggressive energy is satisfied by the superego’s attacks on the ego.
A person’s supposed desire to do good must then be viewed with a certain amount of suspicion: the person is often deriving at least one supplemental satisfaction from so-called “good works.” Let me provide an example from my clinical practice. One of my analysands had for several years viewed a certain man in his graduate program as a “pompous ass” and a “jerk,” and fantasized about saying it to his face. The occasion presented itself, the analysand thought about doing so, but then backed away. Later, feeling guilty even though he had not said anything, he told me that he backed away because it “wouldn’t have accomplished anything,” but also that he “felt good that he’d been able to control himself” — in other words, it allowed him the narcissistic satisfaction of feeling superior to the “jerk.” He nevertheless went on to say that he would “never forgive” himself for having missed the opportunity — in other words, he intended to take an ostensibly counterintuitive satisfaction in forever castigating himself for not having said anything. Such personal gains clearly call into question the value of the supposedly “morally superior” solution of backing away; and the guilt the analysand felt over this need not be seen as owing to his having had “evil thoughts” of telling the guy off, but rather to having given up on his own desire, having shied away from a long-awaited confrontation.
If there is an ethical injunction to be distilled here in the psychoanalytic context, it is: “Avoid guilt, for it leads to neurosis!” Do not act in accordance with what you believe to be the good of your fellow man or woman: act in accordance with your own desire. For your guilt disappears, not when your therapist hugs you and repeats over and over that “it’s not your fault” — this is what Robin Williams does with his “patient” in Good Will Hunting. As nice as that might feel momentarily, guilt only truly disappears through a kind of human action: through a lifelong approach to acting on the basis of your own desire.
(Against Understanding, Volume 2, p. 54)

What the call of desire makes the subject feel guilty for is failing to court the Evil, for compromising the death drive itself. Of, in the terms of the later Lacan, we might also say that the ethics of desire ultimately involves a call from the sinthome. For Lacan, there is a conscientious call of pure desire beyond the law and the superego just as, for Heidegger, there is a call of conscience beyond the public conscience of the they-self. And both of these calls are called on the basis of an ontological guilt and an ontological negativity (libidinal lack and existential nullity). If the subject is to hear the call of the ethics of desire, then it must listen beyond the superego’s “Enjoy!”. This amounts to saying that there are two types of “hearing” — an inauthentic and an authentic. Heidegger described this phenomenon of listening to the two opposed calls:

Losing itself in the publicness and the idle talk of the”they”, it fails to hear [überhört] its own Self in listening to the they-self. If Dasein is to be able to get brought back from this lostness of failing to hear itself, and if this is to be done through itself, then it must first be able to find itself — to find itself as something which has failed to hear itself, and which fails to hear in that it listens away to the “they”. This listening-away must get broken off; in other words, the possibility of another kind of hearing which will interrupt it, must be given by Dasein itself. The possibility of its thus getting broken off lies in its being appealed to without mediation. Dasein fails to hear itself, and listens away to the “they”; and this listening-away gets broken by the call if that call, in accordance with its character as such, arouses another kind of hearing, which, in relationship to the hearing that is lost, has a character in every way opposite. If in this lost hearing, one has been fascinated with the ‘hubbub’ of the manifold ambiguity which idle talk possesses in its everyday ‘newness’, then the call must do its calling without any hubbub and unambiguously, leaving no foothold for curiosity. That which, by calling in this manner, gives us to understand, is the conscience.
(Being and Time, pp. 315–6)

Listening to the call of conscience presents Dasein with the possibility of taking a resolute stance on its Being-guilty. Heidegger defines resoluteness as “authentic Being-one’s-Self” and as “authentic disclosedness”. This, however, does not de-world Dasein and leave it without any Imaginary-Symbolic coordinates whatsoever, but, rather, opens up the ability to be-in-the-world in a modified and authentic way, that is, a mode of Being-in-the-world no longer ruled entirely by the public conscience of das Man (superego).

Resoluteness, as authentic Being-one’s-Self, does not detach Dasein from its world, nor does it isolate it so that it becomes a free-floating “I”. And how should it, when resoluteness as authentic disclosedness, is authentically nothing else than Being-in-the-world? Resoluteness brings the Self right into its current concernful Being-alongside what is ready-to-hand, and pushes it into solicitous Being with Others.
(Being and Time, pp. 342–5)

Heidegger will go one to argue that the most resolute form of resoluteness is that of anticipatory resoluteness, since this the authentic mode of Dasein’s existential temporality. The German word Vorlaufen, translated as “anticipation”, literally means “running ahead”. In anticipatory resoluteness, Dasein is running ahead of itself with unwavering determination. But the type of anticipation Heidegger has in mind is the anticipation of death. Now, this is not the anticipation of the actual moment of one’s biological death (what Heidegger called “demise”), but, instead, the anticipation of the ever-present possibility of one’s death, that is, one’s Being-towards-death. If anticipatory resoluteness itself was to speak its true message, then it would say, “You can die at any moment, so stop bullshitting around and wasting your time on inauthentic, dispassionate trivialities. Get serious about your future and about what you really want to do with your being and time in the world before it’s too late!” This is the positive content of the call of conscience — the call calls Dasein towards its anticipatory resoluteness. Put in Lacanian terms, the “ethics” of anticipatory resoluteness is the existential version of the ethics of desire. How so? Because the ethics of psychoanalysis ultimately leads us to a resolute encounter with death, yet not so much with Being-towards-death but with death drive. Žižek unpacks this logic for us:

With regard to this relation between drive and desire, we could perhaps risk a small rectification of the Lacanian maxim of the psychoanalytic ethic “not to cede one’s desire”: is not desire as such already a certain yielding, a kind of compromise formation, a metonymic displacement, retreat, a defense against intractable drive? “To desire” means to give way on the drive — insofar as we follow Antigone and “do not give way on our desire,” do we not precisely step out of the domain of desire, do we not shift from the modality of desire into the modality of pure drive?
(Looking Awry, p. 172)

My Heideggerian detour is now over, but I want to tease out the meaning of the superego’s “Enjoy!” in even more detail. Early on, Lacan said, “The super-ego is a law deprived of meaning, but one which nevertheless only sustains itself by language” (Seminar I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, p. 3). His point is that the commands and judgments the superego relentlessly bombards us with are never elaborated on. The superego simply launches them at us with contextualizing or explaining them. When you think about, what the fuck does “Enjoy!” even mean? The superego never defines it for the subject. This vague demand is not like telling someone to turn the music down when you’re trying to sleep. Since “Enjoy!” can basically mean an infinite number of things, it is ipso facto meaningless. It’s not pure nonsense but, rather, an injunction that is impossible to interpret perfectly. The superego, insofar as it issues demands and injunctions, depends on language, but it is meaningless insofar as it never details them for us but repetitiously assails us with them. In Lacan’s words, “A discordant statement, unknown in law, a statement pushed into the foreground by a traumatic event, which reduces the law down to a point with an inadmissible, unintegrable character — this blind, repetitive agency is what we usually define in the term super-ego” (Seminar I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, p. 198). The superego speaks from the position of an authoritative teacher, it raises its “voice” in order to teach, but it never gets around to teaching us anything about the meaning of “Enjoy!”, which is what makes it a “demoniacal force” but one that possesses us through language and culture. Later on, Lacan would go on to say, “What is this demoniacal force which pushes forward to say something, in other words to teach, is what I have come to tell is that, the Superego. That is what Freud designated by the Superego which, of course, has nothing to do with any condition that could be designated as natural” (Seminar XXIV: The Unknown that Knows . . ., 8.2.77).

The superego is also meaningless because what it truly seeks is to torture us or, more accurately, how we indirectly torture ourselves: “the energy of the so-called superego derives from the aggression that the subject turns back upon himself” (Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 194). The Law (big Other, Ego-Ideal) instructs us on how to treat ourselves and others for the collective good, the Law seeks to lift us up in the hope that we will all develop a noble character, whereas superego seeks to pin us down in guilt for its own enjoyment. This is why Lacan said, “The super-ego is constraining and the ego-ideal exalting” (Seminar I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, p. 102). You cannot get to the bottom of why it browbeats you, since, from its perspective, the browbeating is not a means to an end, but, instead, an end in itself. In this way, the superego is a pure imperative — one that is tyrannical, censored, and maleficent. Lacan said:

The super-ego is an imperative. As is indicated by common sense and by the uses to which it is put, it is consonant with the register and the idea of the law, that is to say with the totality of the system of language, in so far it defines the situation of man as such, that is to say in so far as he is not just a biological individual. On the other hand, one should also emphasise, as a counter to this, its senseless, blind character, of pure imperativeness and simple tyranny. What path will allow us to bring these notions into a synthesis?
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 recognise [méconnaissance] the law. That is always the way we see the super-ego acting in the neurotic. Isn’t it because the morality of the neurotic is a senseless, destructive, purely oppressive, almost always anti-legal morality, that it became necessary to elaborate on the function of the super-ego in analysis?
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 experiences 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.
(Seminar I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, p. 102)

This brings with it the question of what we call the super-ego. I’m telling you about the interrupted discourse. Well, one of the most striking forms of interrupted discourse is the law in so far as it is not understood. By definition, no one is taken to be ignorant of the law, but it is never understood, for no one can grasp it in its entirety. The primitive who is caught up the laws of kinship, of alliance, of the exchange of women, never has, even if he is very learned, a complete vision of what it is this totality of the law that has a hold over him. Censorship is always related to whatever, in discourse, is linked to the law in so far as it is not understood. . . .
That is censorship in so far as there can never be any relation with the law in its entirety, since the law is never completely made one’s own. Censorship and super-ego are to be located in the same register as that of the law. It is the concrete discourse, not only in so far as it dominates man and makes all kinds of fulgurations appear, it doesn’t matter what, everything which happens, everything which constitutes discourse, but in so far as it gives man his own world, which we, more or less accurately, call cultural. It is in this dimension that censorship is located and you can see in what way it differs from resistance. Censorship is neither on the level of the subject, nor on that of the individual. but on the level of discourse, in so far as, as such, it constitutes, all by itself, a full universe, and at the same time there is something irreducibly discordant about it, in every one of its parts. It takes very little, very little at all, being locked up in the toilets, or having a father falsely accused of Lord knows what crime, for the law all of a sudden to appear to you in a lacerating form. That is what censorship is, and Freud never confuses Widerstand with censorship.
(Seminar II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, pp. 127, 130)

This superego is indeed something like the law, but it’s a law without dialectic, and it’s not for nothing that it is recognizable, more or less correctly, in the categorical imperative, with what I would call its maleficent neutrality — one author calls it the internal saboteur.
(Seminar III: The Psychoses, p. 276)

It’s important to stress that the superego may be the basis of moral conscience, that still, small voice in our heads that whispers to us what we ought to do, but it is far from reducible to it. If there is a conscience-based or duty-based morality, then there is also a superego-based “morality” that always threatens to destroy the Law in its upstandingness by pushing it to its limit, to its own intrinsic breaking point.

It is possible that the superego serves as a support for the moral conscience, but everyone knows that it has nothing to do with the moral conscience as far as its most obligatory demands are concerned. What the superego demands has nothing to do with that which we would be right in making the universal rule of our actions; such is the ABC of psychoanalytic truth.
(Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 308)

Freud brought to the question of the source of morality the invaluable significance implied in the phrase Civilization and Its Discontents or, in other words, the breakdown by means of which a certain psychic function, the superego, seems to find in itself its own exacerbation, as the result of a kind of malfunctioning of the brakes which should limit its proper authority.
(Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 143)

What exactly does the superego’s injunction really mean? The superego’s “Enjoy!” means “Have a positive experience!” While Lacan and Žižek claims that the “Enjoy!” is the commandment to have jouissance, I honestly think it’s an even more burdensome command, which is why I want to offer my own interpretation of the superego (an interpretation that I would argue simply more Lacanian and Žižekian than Lacan and Žižek’s own interpretations). “Enjoy!” is the harsh command to have both pleasure and jouissance. The truly traumatic message of the superego is an impossible demand: “Always be happy! Always have the perfect balance between jouissance and pleasure!” Libidinal economy is caught up in the dialectical friction between pleasure principle (lack of excitation, equilibrium) and death drive (excess of excitation, disequilibrium). We build up excitation (jouissance) just so we can release it (pleasure) just so we can build it back up again (jouissance) — Repeat! Repeat! Repeat! . . . Encore! Encore! Encore! In truth, pleasure and jouissance are always in a contradictory relationship, which is to say that any moment of a relative equilibrium between them, what we can call happiness, comes about by pure chance and is only a temporary anomaly of the libidinal economy. The pleasure principle is always pursuing equilibrium (lack of excitation) while the death drive is always in pursuit of disequilibrium (excess of excitation). The superego is ultimately demanding an impossible equilibrium (happiness) between the disequilibrium (dialectical contradiction) between equilibrium (pleasure) and disequilibrium (death drive) . . . and this is why we say that the superego is sadistic! “Enjoy!” means “Reside forever in the libidinal sweet spot!”, which is impossible to do. It’s important to keep Freud’s own words on happiness in mind here, since he thought that the best human beings could realistically hope for is “common unhappiness”.

We will therefore turn to the less ambitious question of what men themselves show by their behavior to be the purpose and intention of their lives. What do they demand of life and wish to achieve in it? The answer to this can hardly be in doubt. They strive for happiness; they want to become happy and to remain so. This endeavor has two sides, a positive and a negative aim. It aims, on the one hand, at an absence of pain and unpleasure, and, on the other, at the experiencing of strong feelings of pleasure. In its narrower sense the word ‘happiness’ only relates to the last. In conformity with this dichotomy in his aims, man’s activity develops in two directions, according as it seeks to realize — in the main, or even exclusively — the one or the other of these aims.
As we see, what decides the purpose of life is simply the program of the pleasure principle. This principle dominates the operation of the mental apparatus from the start. There can be no doubt about its efficacy, and yet its program is at loggerheads with the whole world, with the macrocosm as much as with the microcosm. There is no possibility at all of its being carried through; all the regulations of the universe run counter to it. One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be ‘happy’ is not included in the plan of ‘Creation.’ What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferable sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree, and it is from its nature only possible as an episodic phenomenon. When any situation that is desired by the pleasure principle is prolonged, it only produces a feeling of mild contentment. We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things. Thus our possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our constitution. Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience. We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful to us than any other. We tend to regard it as a kind of gratuitous addition, although it cannot be any less fatefully inevitable than the suffering which comes from elsewhere.
(Civilization and Its Discontents, pp. 25–6)

When I have promised my patients help or relief by means of a cathartic treatment, I have repeatedly had to listen to the following objection: ‘You yourself tell me that what I am suffering from is probably connected with my circumstances and fate. You can’t change anything about that. So how are you going to help me?’ And I have been able to answer: ‘I do not doubt that it would be easier for fate to take away your suffering than it would for me. But you will see for yourself that much has been gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness. Having restored your inner life, you will be better able to arm yourself against that unhappiness.’
(Studies in Hysteria, p. 305)

Happiness is always the result of luck and is always fleeting. Given the structure of our libidinal economies, happiness is not a permanent state we can attain once and for all. To command us to be happy all the time is extremely cruel and tortuous, which is precisely what the superego is. Zupančič explains well while being interviewed by Julie Reshe:

When happiness becomes a social imperative, this introduces a different dimension and dialectic into it: how are we to live up to this imperative, are we really as happy as we are supposed to be, how can we prove that we are happy? There seems to be this ideological equation that unhappy people are somehow flawed, that there is something pathological about them, that they are somehow bad, human failures. There is a strong additional guilt that comes with this ideology of positive feelings. And it kind of enslaves us, make us work harder and harder to prove our “happiness”.
This twisted logic comes with, to use the psychoanalytic term, the superego imperative to be happy, which usually consumes the one who tries to obey it. Even if and when you feel very happy, the superego tells you that this is perhaps not enough. You should feel happier, you have achieved this, but it is never enough. The harder you try, the more you are bound to fail. This constitutes a vicious circle of utter unhappiness and misery in the name of happiness. So there are a lot of dark facets to the idea of happiness and its social functioning. Freud suggests, for instance, that happiness can be perhaps understood as the program of what he called “the pleasure principle”. But he also soon discovered that this program seems to be programmed to fail. This does not mean that we are just unhappy and miserable most of the time, but that there is no pre-established formula that we could rely on. And that for happiness we also need luck, that is contingency.
To resume, the idea of happiness can be used in a very problematic way. I think back then I termed this imperative of happiness “biomorality”, because of the short circuit it established between feeling of happiness or unhappiness, and what you are in the moral sense; the idea that if you are not happy, something is morally wrong with you, or morally wrong with your very being.
(Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive, pp. 127–8)

The superego’s command is harsher than simply “Have jouissance all the time!” This command is oppressive enough on its own, but the superego makes it even harder on us by demanding us to “Have both jouissance and pleasure all the time!” “Enjoy!” means “Have it all and always get it right!”. Happiness would be to have both perfect pleasure and perfect enjoyment at the exact same time but also to have it last forever. The superego commands, “Stuff your fucking face with excessive amounts of junk food but also have six-pack abs and stay in great health!” This is the superego’s message: live a life of perfect pleasure and perfect jouissance at the exact same time even though pleasure and jouissance are at odds with each other. This is utterly oppressive and torturous! It’s not just that superego frustrates our enjoyment because it commands it, but because this commandment itself does not lead to pleasure (equilibrium). In other words, the injunction to “Enjoy!” forever destabilizes our libidinal economies. The superego keeps us in a constant state of unrest that keeps on getting exponentially worse because we are trying to do the impossible. “Enjoy!” means “Have a sexual relation!”, which is impossible. The superego commands us to enjoy but, then, humiliates us whenever we fail to do so. This can take the form of us failing to be the best versions of ourselves, i.e., the versions that are truly capable of enjoying themselves. The superego sadistically and viciously mocks us and bombards us with guilt for our inability to enjoy. If there is a “bad guy” in Lacanian psychoanalysis, then it is the superego. The superego is the authoritarianism of radical affirmation — the superego is the totalitarian pervert of the “YES!” Lacan wasn’t lying when he said, “The superego is a real meanie” (Seminar X: Anxiety, p. 105).

This is exactly the reason why Žižek associates the superego with totalitarianism. The idea is that the superego is the obscene underside of the Law that secretly functions as the very libidinal ground of the Law. Every lawful order is underpinned by some type of Evil enjoyment, but the agent that fully identifies him or herself with this lawful Evil is the totalitarian subject. What Kant missed in his naïve conceptualization of the Law (categorical imperative) was the grounding function of jouissance (Evil), i.e., that Law only laws — holds sway over the subject — on the basis of some perverted enjoyment.

The subject, in relation to Law, is split between its Symbolic mandate/identity (S1) and its Real remainder/subjectivity, but the Law itself is split between its official rules, mandates, values, etc., and its obscene superegoic supplement. Žižek explains this divide within the Law with a joke about cannibalism: “Another well-known joke illustrates this split perfectly: in response to the question of explorers researching cannibalism, the native answers: “No, there are no longer cannibals in our region. We ate the last one yesterday.” At the level of the subject of the enunciated, there are no more cannibals, whereas the subject of the enunciation is precisely this “we” who have eaten the last cannibal” (For They Know Not What They Do, p. 233). Clarification is required here. What’s the joke getting at? The point is simply this: the upholding of the official Law (“cannibalism is forbidden”) is always made possible by someone or some institution doing the “dirty work” (eating the last cannibal) that actually breaks the official Law while also securing its reproduction. The subject that violates the Law for the sake of the Law is the pervert.

The official Law says, “Cannibalism bad!”, but the perverted agent acting as the superegoic supplement says, “The official Law is good and weak, so I’ll do anything its takes — including cannibal — to strengthen the Law.” It’s in this precise sense that the pervert is always an ethical subject. “I will do whatever it takes to defend the Law . . . even if it means me eating you motherfuckers alive!” The cannibal joke gets at the split between enunciation and enunciated. The Symbolic position of “cannibal” has been negated while the Real act of eating other people has not. To broaden out the point, the idea is that the true servant of the Law (subject of enunciation) that violates the Law (subject of the enunciated: “thou shalt not eat other humans”) in order to sustain or prop up the Law. “I eat cannibals in order to establish anti-cannibalism as the Law.” The result of Kant’s prohibition against probing into the true origin of the Law is that the obscene agent, the subject of enunciation, gets obfuscated. Kant’s prohibition prevents us from seeing the function of the perverted agent-instrument of the Law. However, in making himself the pure instrument of the Law, the pervert performs an extreme objectification of himself. It making himself a pure object-instrument, the pervert relieves himself the burden of being a hysterical subject — a subject who confronts the big Other with its own lack. The pervert transposes, displaces, and projects, all his own lacks and contradictions onto the victim he tortures for the sake of jouissance of the Law (big Other). Variation on Dr. Johnson: “He who makes an object of himself its rid of the pain of being a subject.” The pervert is a becoming-object. Perversion is the Lacanian version of Sartrean bad faith.

But what if obscene enjoyment is at the heart of the inauguration of every new symbolization, at the beginning of every new social order? What if this is Symbolic glue of the emancipatory “never-before”? The song ‘Eating the Cannibals’ by the heavy metal supergroup Heaven & Hell (comprised of Black Sabbath and Ronnie James Dio) is very insightful here. I interpret the song to be about revenge and restructuration. In other words, the song is a revenge fantasy about eating those “cannibals” that eat us, i.e., the power elite consisting of capitalists, politicians, media commentators, etc. (libertarians could easily hear the song as an anti-Statist anthem, whereas a Marxist-Leninist can hear in it a violent anti-capitalism and a passionate call for a proletarian revolution, all while anarchists hear it as both). Marx described capital as a bloodsucker, a vampire, a werewolf, because of how it subsists off of the labor power (timenergy) of wage slaves. The capitalist as the embodiment of the logic of capital is a “cannibal” due to the consumption of “lifeblood” of the worker. The first verse of the song goes like this:

I’m sure you’ve never had this meal before
We’re still open, stay and have some more
It’s been raised upon your body and your soul
Total control
Plenty of seating
You know that you’re eating the cannibals

Let’s break these lyrics down. Dio is here addressing a fellow comrade, that is, someone on his side of the antagonism. To say that “you’ve never had this meal before” indicates that this involves a lot of libidinal anticipation. The desire for this meal has built up over time without ever getting to sample the actual jouissance. A great transgression is about to occur. The fact that this rebellious group is “still open” suggests that there’s a bunch of meals being served to a lot of starving people (the masses of the exploited). The injunction to “stay and have some more” is obviously an Evil invitation to excessively enjoy oneself in this collective transgression (though, I don’t take this demand to be superegoic, since it is not serving in the reproduction of society’s status quo — this is more the voice of the drive itself). The next line is crucial: “It’s been raised upon your body and your soul”. The it that has been raised on, been long feed, on you, on your lifeblood, is Capital, State, Power, etc. The it is the capitalists and the politicians that feasted on us (our time, energy, dreams, minds, bodies) since our births. The “total control”, in this revenge fantasy, has shifted from the power elites to the oppressed majority. To “eat the cannibals” means to “eat the rich”. But ‘Eating the Cannibals’ also gets at more than the sweet taste of the jouissance of revenge.

Taking ’til you’ve got no more to give
Building boxes where you used to live
The word out on the street is, “No delay”
Do it today
Come to the meeting
It’s true that we’re eating the cannibals
Eating the cannibals

Dio is still talking to his comrade. So, those in power keep on taking even beyond the point of you having anything left to give. The line about “building boxes where you used to live”, to me, brings to mind the image of a newly homeless people building little houses out of cardboard boxes next to the house they formerly lived in before the bank foreclosed on. The “no delay” and the “do it today” are basically calling for revolution now. But notice what comes next . . . “come to the meeting”. Dio is singing about a collective solidarity and not some individualistic action. The eating of the cannibals is something that a brand-new and universal “We the People” is doing. The new ones who are eating the cannibals are those for whom capitalistic interpellation has failed and revolutionary hystericization has occurred. The cannibals are perverts, but the eaters of cannibals are hysterics. Dio now switches to speaking directly to the power elite, the meaning of which is pretty self-explanatory:

Don’t close your eyes
We’ll come while you’re sleeping
You reached for the skies
Now we are calling it’s all falling down

The song concludes with these final lyrics:

Come on in, we love our clientele
You’re here to taste revenge and so you shall
It’s been raised upon your body and your bones
But now you’re not alone
Enough with the greeting
‘Cause soon you’ll be eating the cannibals
Eating the cannibals

The key line is “but now you’re not alone”. The idea is that this act of revolutionary violence is not simply destructive but, more importantly, creative. A new “people”, a unified community, as taken hold thanks to overthrowing those in people, thanks to an inaugural act of emancipatory jouissance, thanks to us “eating the cannibals”. The last words really drive home the Žižekian point about how Law actually functions. It’s not really about the “greeting”, that is, about the official mandates of the Law we all identify with, but, instead, about the “eating”, that obscene enjoyment that binds us all together. Simply put, the song is really about the inaugural act of jouissance that revolutionizes the Law.

This fundamental connection between Law and jouissance is what makes Sade the truth of Kant. We must think Kant with Sade insofar as the Law is secretly supported by some obscene jouissance (for the big Other) brought about by the superegoic agent-instrument, i.e., the pervert (executor) who punishes the other-subject (victim). As Lacan put it, “the sadist himself occupies the place of the object, but without knowing it, to the benefit of another, for whose jouissance he exercises his action as sadistic pervert” (Seminar XI, p. 185). The pervert is a purely ethical subject, that is, the pervert is not in it for simple hedonistic pleasure, but, instead, for the sake of the Law (to bring the Law into being). In other words, the main motive of the sadist is not his own enjoyment, but, rather, the pressure to supplement the paternal function (to bring the Law into existence in order for it to fully bring about the pervert’s symbolic castration via separation). The pervert-sadist makes himself the object of the Will of the big Other, which the sadistic activity seeks to prop up. If you want to understand perversion in the Lacanian sense, then go watch Weekend at Bernie’s (they literally prop up the dead and impotent big Other in order to enable things to go on Symbolically functioning). According to Žižek, the totalitarian (Stalinist) Party is one of the greatest example of the Sadean pervert, of the sadistic object-instrument of the Law, that we have to consider.

And that is why Sade is to be taken as the truth of Kant: this object whose experience is avoided by Kant emerges in Sade’s work, in the guise of the executioner, the agent who practises his “sadistic” activity on the victim. The Sadeian executioner has nothing whatsoever to do with pleasure: his activity is stricto sensu ethical, beyond any “pathological” motive, he only fulfils his duty — witness the lack of wit in Sade’s work. The executioner works for the enjoyment of the Other, not for his own: he becomes a sole instrument of the Other’s Will. And in so-called “totalitarianism”, this illegal agent-instrument of the law, the Sadeian executioner, appears as such in the shape of the Party, agent-instrument of historical Will. That is the meaning of Stalin’s famous proposition: “we Communists are people of a special mould. We are made of special stuff.” This “special stuff” (the “right stuff”, one could say) is precisely the incarnation, the apparition of the objet petit a.
Here, one should go back to the Lacanian determination of the structure of perversion as “an inverted effect of the fantasy. It is the subject who determines himself as object, in his encounter with the division of subjectivity.” The Lacanian formula for fantasy is written as $ ◊ a: the crossed-out subject, divided in its encounter with the object-cause of his desire. The sadist pervert inverts this structure, which gives a ◊ $: by means of occupying himself the place of the object — of making himself the agent-executor of the Other’s Will — he avoids the division constitutive of the subject and transposes his division upon his other — like the Stalinist, for example, confronted with the hysterical split petty-bourgeois “traitor” who did not want to give up his subjectivity completely and continued to “desire in vain”. In the same passage Lacan goes back to his “Kant avec Sade” in order to recall that the sadist occupies the place of the object “to the benefit of another, for whose jouissance he exercises his action as sadistic pervert”.
The Other of Stalinism, the “inevitable necessity of laws of historical development” for which the Stalinist executor practises his act, could then be conceived as a new version of the “Supreme Being of Evilness”, this Sadeian figure of the Other. It is this radical objectivization-instrumentalization of his own subjective position which confers upon the Stalinist, beyond the deceptive appearance of a cynical detachment, his unshakable conviction of only being the instrument of historical necessity. By making himself the transparent instrument of the Other’s (History’s) Will, the Stalinist avoids his constitutive division, for which he pays through the total alienation of his enjoyment: if the advent of the bourgeois subject is defined by his right to free enjoyment, the “totalitarian” subject shows this freedom be that of the Other, of the “Supreme Being of Evilness” with reference to which his own will is totally instrumentalized.
(For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, pp. 234–5)

The Stalinist big Other (“inevitable necessity of laws of historical development”) is a new version of the “Supreme Being of Evilness” and its greatest servant is the superegoic pervert (Sadean figure of Pure Evil). Beware of anyone who makes himself into a pure instrument of the Law — that is the position wherein Evil lurks. The Stalinist-totalitarian reduction is to reduce the subject of enunciation (Real subject) to the subject of the enunciated (Symbolic S1). But this reduction also means that the pervert’s jouissance is reduced to the jouissance of the big Other. The pervert’s jouissance is alienated in the big Other. While the consumer-capitalist (liberal) subject is defined by the pursuit of his own jouissance, the totalitarian-Stalinist subject is defined by the pursuit of the Other’s jouissance.

The totalitarian pervert is merely the instrument of the big Other, which, in Stalinism is a bureaucratic body of knowledge (“dialectical materialism”), which positions the subject within Lacan’s university discourse, wherein the active agent is S2 (knowledge). The pervert-totalitarian subject is not like the traditional figure of the Master. The Master’s authority is rooted in an S1, which is to say the privileging of a certain value, principle, etc., on the basis of nothing but a violent and groundless assertion of will. The S1 is without a signified in the sense that it relies on no justification outside of itself. Meaning is generated through signifiers deferring to and differing from one another, but the Master Signifier, at the structural level, avoids this dialectical interplay. In being “tautological”, the Master Signifier does not refer to another signifier (one functioning as its justifying principle). The Master and his S1 says, “I run this shit because I run this shit”. Enlightenment logic rejects this type of groundless authority. Authority now must be grounded in some objective criteria and not “irrationally” in the strongest of wills. If the Master is a phallic super-subject, then the totalitarian Leader is the instrumentalized object, but this object (a) is the pure embodiment of an objective knowledge (S2). Precisely because the Leader is not asserting his own subjective will, but, rather, the objective will of the big Other (God, History, Truth, Justice, etc.), he is all the more oppressive. The Leader takes “responsibility” for fulling the will of the big Other, which is a sneaking way of not truly taking responsibility. The Leader, unlike the Master, justifies himself by appealing to the Law. “I myself didn’t want to kill all those people, but it was my responsibility, my duty, to do so. The formula of the totalitarian subject is S2/a that is, objective knowledge over the a, i.e., the big Other’s will, “under which the obscene object-agent of a superegotistical Will hides”.

One could then conceptualize the difference between the classical Master and the “totalitarian” Leader as that between S1 (the unary Master-Signifier) and the object. The authority of the classical Master is that of a certain S1, signifier-without-signified, auto-referential signifier which embodies the performative function of the word. The Enlightenment wants to do without this instance of “irrational” authority; thereupon, the Master reappears in the guise of the “totalitarian” Leader: excluded as S1, he takes the shape of an object which embodies S2, the chain of knowledge (the “objective knowledge of he laws of history”, for example), assuming the “responsibility” of carrying out the historical necessity in its cannibalistic cruelty. The formula, the matheme, of the “totalitarian subject” would thus be S2/a — the semblance of a neutral “objective” knowledge, under which the obscene object-agent of a superegotistical Will hides.
The decisive point here is not to confuse the “irrational” authority of traditional Master with that of the modern “totalitarian” regime: the former is based on the gap of S1 in relation to S2, whereas “totalitarianism” makes resort to a bureaucratic “knowledge” (S2) which lacks support in a Master-Signifier (S1) that would “quilt” its field. This difference comes out when one considers the justification of obedience: the “totalitarian” Leader demands submission in the name of his alleged “effective” capacities (his wisdom, his courage, his adherence to the Cause, and so on); if, on the other hand, one says “I obey the king because he is wise and just”, one already commits a crime of lèse-majesté — the only appropriate justification for it is the tautology “I obey the king because he is King”.
(For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, pp. 235–6)

The key is not to mistake the traditional authority (S1) for totalitarian authority (S2). Slavoj would come to explain this difference between Hitler (fascist Master) and Stalin (communist Leader) while being applauded. Hitler (and Mussolini) simply soaks up the applause, while Stalin (and Mao) also applaud. The fact that the bureaucratic knowledge of S2 lacks an S1 means that there is no final authority to hold accountable (think Kafka stories). Totalitarian-bureaucratic logic: “The buck stops nowhere!” Also, the S2 Leader tries to justify his power via his effective characteristics, e.g., honest, smart, etc. However, we only truly accept an authority because they are the authority. We must oppose postmodern-totalitarian authority to premodern-traditional authority.

The logic of “totalitarian” bureaucracy is, on the other hand, its exact opposite — namely: when, under what conditions, does state bureaucracy become “totalitarian”? Not where S1, the point of “irrational” authority, exerts a pressure “too strong”, “excessive”, on the bureaucratic savoir(-faire), but, on the contrary, where this unary point which “quilts” the field of knowledge (S2) is wanting. In other words: when the bureaucratic knowledge loses its support in the Master-Signifier (S1) and is “left to itself”, it “runs amok” and assumes the features of “mischievous neutrality” proper to superego. The theoretical point not to be missed here is that the apparently self-evident affinity between Master-Signifier (S1) and superego is misleading: the status of superego is that of a chain of knowledge (S2) and not that of a unary point of symbolic authority (S1).
(For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, p. 236)

Totalitarian authority comes into being, not where S1 becomes too intense, but, rather, where it is missing. The traditional Master and his S1 is anything but neutral or disinterested, whereas totalitarian authority works in this precise (superegoic) way. We must refrain from linking S1 to the superego. The superego’s oppressive authority is in a sprawling chain of knowledge (in consumer society, we are always searching through “objective” fields of knowledge on how to “Enjoy!”, e.g., the discourses of health, medicine, self-help, therapy, pop psychology, etc.).

The example which comes to mind immediately is (again) the discourse of the Stalinist bureaucracy — a discourse of knowledge if there is one: its position of enunciation, the place from which it claims to speak, is clearly that of pure, non-subjectivized knowledge (the infamous “objective knowledge of the laws of historical progress”). This position of neutral, “objective” knowledge — that is to say: of a knowledge not subjectivized by means of the intervention of some “quilting point”, some Master-Signifier — is in itself mischievous, enjoying the subject’s failure to live up to its impossible demands, impregnated by obscenity — in short: superegotistical. Lacan insists on the link between the superego and the so-called “sentiment of reality” — what we accept as “reality” is always sustained by a superego imperative: “When the sentiment of unreality bears on something, it is never on the side of the superego. It is always the ego that gets lost.” Does he not indicate thereby an answer to the question: Where do the confessions come from in the Stalinist trials? Since there was no “reality” for the accused outside the superego of the Party, outside its mischievous imperative, the only alternative to it being the abyss of the real, the confession demanded by the Party was indeed the only way for the accused to avoid the “loss of reality”.
(For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, pp. 236–7)

Stalinism is the great example of superegoic knowledge. “Reality” (and the objective knowledge of it) is always sustained by some superegoic imperative. The sense of unreality comes not from the superego. The confessions (though lacking true reality) of the show trials issue forth from the “reality” of the Party (the only reality there was for those people). But if the superego’s “Enjoy!” is meaningless, then why does Žižek link it to a body of knowledge (S2)? It seems like we’ve ran straight into a contradiction, but I believe this is only an apparent one. Let’s reflect on the connection between the superego and knowledge for a brief moment. The trick to squaring this circle is found in Žižek’s following statement: “Lacan’s fundamental thesis is that superego in its most fundamental dimension is an injunction to enjoyment: the various forms of superego commands are nothing but variations on the same motif: “Enjoy!”” (For They Know Not What They Do, p. 237). Superegoic knowledge is really a patchwork of superficial “wisdom”, that is, a sprawling network of the same injunction is articulated repetitiously but in differentiated forms. Simply put, there are millions of ways to say “Enjoy!” within language, but “wisdom”, with all of its profound-sounding tautologies, is especially suited to be the bearer of this injunction. According to Žižek, when we defer to deep tautologies such as “life is life,” “everything that is born has to die,” or “it is what it is”, etc. we are merely masking “our basic perplexity as a supposedly profound wisdom”. Žižek goes on to explain these wisdom and proverbs:

We use such phrases when we do not know what to say, but want nonetheless to sound wise. The platitudinous nature of such wisdom reveals itself in the opportunism of proverbs: whatever happens, you can accompany it with an appropriate proverb. If someone takes a big risk and succeeds, you can say, “Only those who take great risks achieve something great!”; if he fails, you can say, “You cannot piss against the wind!” or “The higher they fly, the harder they fall!” and, again, it will seem profound. Another proof of the vacuity of such proverbial wisdom is that no matter how you turn it around the result will always sound wise. ‘Don’t get caught up in the vanity of earthly life and its pleasures, think about eternity as the only true life!” sounds deep, but then so does “Don’t try to grasp the rainbow of eternity, enjoy your terrestrial life, it is the only life you have!” But what about “A wise man does not oppose eternity to terrestrial life, he is able to see the ray of eternity shining through in our ordinary lives!”? Or, again, “A wise man accepts the gap that separates our terrestrial life from eternity, he knows that we mortals cannot bring the two together — only god can do it!”?
(Violence, p. 64)

Elsewhere, Žižek has pointed out how the Book of Job contains a great example of this so-called “wisdom”. Job suffers many tragedies after which his three “friends” show up to edify him with their “wisdom”, which really turns out to be nothing more than torturous rhetoric. They attempt to explain the nature of God’s justice and the reason why Job is suffering so horribly, that is, they argue that God is perfectly just and doesn’t allow bad things to happen to good people, which means that Job must have terribly sinned against God, but when God himself finally arrives on the scene he basically tells them to shut the fuck up and instructs Job not to listen to a word they say. Thus, both Žižek and God warn us against listening to “wise” men. And what does Žižek advice us to do when we find ourselves in the presence of a figure of wisdom like Master Yoda? Žižek says, “you stomp him with your boots!” Nevertheless, the superego instantiates the “Enjoy!” as a body of “knowledge” strung together by wise sayings. Many of these come off as goodhearted advice dripping in warm sentimentality. The monstrous superego’s favorite painter is Thomas Kinkade and its favorite TV station is the Hallmark Channel. The superego often ideologically obfuscates its injunction by diluting it in the form of inspirational memes. Here’s some of the inspirational “wisdom” expressed in memes I’ve had the misfortune of encountering on social media:

“Life’s too short to be anything but happy.”

“One small positive thought in the morning can change your whole day.”

“Always believe that something wonderful is about to happen.”

“Let whatever you do today be enough.”

“Don’t let anything dull your sparkle.”

“Only have people in your life that always make you smile.”

“There is always something to be thankful for.”

“All you need is love and good coffee.”

“You can always find a million reasons to love life and be happy.”

“Always find time for the things that make you feel happy to be alive.”

“If you have the power to make someone smile, do it.”

“I’m all about good vibes, big goals, amazing experiences and more happiness.”

“A negative mind will never give you a positive life.”

“The problem is not the problem. The problem is your attitude about the problem.”

Lurking behind the seemingly harmless facade of inspirational memes is the diabolical superego. Notice how none of them address the material conditions in which people actually exist. There’s no mention of wage labor, structural exploitation, lack of money, lack of time and energy, etc. Alright, kids, let’s fucking do this — it’s time to break out the They Live glasses and rip apart this superegoic ideological bullshit. I want to briefly reflect on four of these little wisdoms:

“Life’s too short to be anything but happy.” First off, happiness is rarely attained and that temporary attainment is very fleeting. Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis, with its concept of the death drive, has revealed prolonged happiness to be nothing more than the production of fantasy. If Happiness with a capital “H” is impossible, then it would be torturous to make it the main goal of human existence, which is precisely what the superego does. The superego’s “Enjoy!” means “Happiness is impossible, therefore, I command you to be perfectly happy!” Kant said, “Ought implies can”, but the sadistic Superego says, “Ought implies can’t”. To be happy all the time is really to not be alive at all. Pure happiness is anti-life. Sorry, but happiness is a terrible ideal to measure life by — this is the true nihilism. It’s very easy to argue that one has never truly lived without having ever had your heart broken, without confronting the darkest dimensions of the world, without tarrying with the negative in all its myriad forms. The ideology at work in this statement is this: it attempts to keep us focused on the futural specter of an impossible happiness keeps us from reckoning with our actual material conditions in the here and now. What we have is a modern and personalized version of the classic two-world ideology that Marx and Nietzsche critiqued — the only difference is that this fantasy of Happiness locates the attainment of it in our immanent reality (capitalist society) as opposed to a transcendent one (Heaven, the Afterlife, etc.). The pursuit of happiness is one of the opiums of the people. Fuck the ideal of the happy life if it blinds us to life itself. I curse this little chunk of life “wisdom” in the name of life itself.

“All you need is love and good coffee.” Well, I certainly appreciate both love and good coffee, but that’s not the issue here. The problem, of course, is that these two things are not “all you need”. As a matter of fact, in the capitalist world we live in, one needs money in order to have love and good coffee. The Beatles said, “All you need is love” . . . The Beatles fucking lied to us — fucking hippies. Whenever some “enlightened” sage tells me that I don’t need money in order to happy, I can’t help but to think of the words of Zagreus (words written by Albert Camus):

What I’m sure of . . . is that you can’t be happy without money. That’s all. I don’t like superficiality and I don’t like romanticism. I like to be conscious. And what I’ve noticed is that there’s a kind of spiritual snobbism in certain ‘superior beings’ who think that money isn’t necessary for happiness. Which is stupid, which is false, and to a certain degree cowardly. . . . For a man who is well born, being happy is never complicated. It’s enough to take up the general fate, only not with the will for renunciation like so many fake great men, but with the will for happiness.
(A Happy Death, p. 43)

To live anything like a remotely decent life in capitalist society requires a robust amount of money. Stick the ideology of spiritual awakening right up your superegoic ass! If “happiness” is not money-dependent, then I’m sure that Musk, Zuckerberg, and Gates, will be all too enthusiastic to redistribute their fortunes and go work in a warehouse making $18 per hour for all their back-breaking toil. Welcome to the happy life, guys!

“Always find time for the things that make you feel happy to be alive.” Now the superego is telling us to alway find time to do the things that make us happy? Fuck off! Wage labor is eats our time and energy alive. It’s impossibility to “find time” when the work week is structured in such a way as to make that task impossible. Find what amount of happy time during my shitty day? Three fucking milliseconds worth? The last piece of “wisdom” essentially claimed that we don’t need money in order to be happy, but now this one is telling us to always find time for happiness. Notice how the economic factor is totally left out of this equation. This brings us to what you, Dave McKerracher, call “timenergy”:

We are all deprived of timenergy: Our society revolves around the commodification, or exchange, of “labor power,” which is what timenergy becomes in capitalism. Timenergy is existentially prior to the economic divorce and separation of time from energy. Timenergy is not just time or energy, but comes before the compartmentalization of either. Timenergy is energy plus time with the potential to repeatedly sacrifice towards building sustained symbolic and material value for oneself and potential communities of recognition and care.
Put under the sign of the law of value, timenergy is structurally suppressed, retooled, and co-opted in its most basic sense: That which had previously been timenergy is now labor power, a commodity, something that must be exercised towards economic ends. In place of the various symbolic and material modes of coexistence or domination previously experienced by humans who did not count their every minute in the day, subjectivities formed within capitalism learn early on to measure their worlds in terms of universal exchangeability.
(Waypoint, pp. 235–6)

Camus nicely supplements McKerracher:

Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience. And in almost every case, we use up our lives making money, when we should be using our money to gain time. That’s the only problem that’s ever interested me. . . . To have money is to have time. That’s my main point. Time can be bought. Everything can be bought. To be or to become rich is to have time to be happy, if you deserve it.
(A Happy Death, p. 43)

A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end.
(The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 103)

So, in truth, I need money in order to have timenergy and I need my timenergy in order to be happy in any sense of the term, but I can only get money by sacrificing my timenergy, which, in turn, means sacrificing my happiness. The superego, once again, is bombarding us with an impossible injunction: “Always have timenergy and happiness without money being a issue at all!” In other words, do not complain about one’s material conditions, one’s economic facticity, and, instead, always find time to “Enjoy!” no matter what. Pure torture in the guise of uplifting wisdom.

“The problem is not the problem. The problem is your attitude about the problem.” This one might just be the most ideological of them all. What it’s truly saying is that “the structural problem isn’t the real problem — the real problem is you.” Instead of the structural contradictions operative within capitalism being the source of your main problems, the true problem is your piss-poor attitude, your failure to take personal responsibility, your sense of entitlement, your laziness, etc. Superegoic “wisdom” says, “Always work hard within this free society but also make sure to enjoy every minute of it — and if you’re not enjoying yourself, then it’s all your fault, you ungrateful fucking failure!” Let me say what needs to be said: the problem is the problem. The true issue is the structural problem that is killing us all.

The problem is the superego constantly assailing us with impossible demands we can never achieve. No where is this more obvious in the demand to find the perfect balance. We are split subjects torn between pleasure and enjoyment — we are destined to be out of balance. The demand to find the perfect balance is the demand for us to take on a new and different ontological constitution. Here’s yet another piece of superegoic wisdom I had the severe displeasure of coming across on the internet:

“Balance is the key in everything you do. Dance all night long and practice yoga the next day. Drink wine but don’t forget your green juice. Eat chocolate when your heart wants it and kale salad when your body needs it. Wear high heels on Saturday and work barefoot on Sunday. Live high and low. Move and stay still. Embrace all sides of who you are. Be brave, bold, spontaneous and loud and let that complement your abilities to find silence, patience, modesty and peace. Aim for balance. Make your own rules and follow your own path and don’t let anybody tell you how to live according to theirs.”

Hey, superego, I have a better idea: why don’t you balance deez nuts in your mouth? And no form of this demand is more offensive, more cruel, more depraved, than the one that demands us to have the perfect work/life balance. To quote the words of a friend who shall remain nameless: “The work/life balance is bullshit! There should be no balance. Life is way more important than work. If you are working nearly as much as you are living, then you are fucked.” Work is anti-life. Life is anti-work. To live a “life” imprisoned in wage slavery is to live no life at all. In order to truly live, we must be freed from work once and for all. But these superego injunctions, these little “wisdoms”, are everywhere. Hell, we even find this type of impossible demand on bags of candy. For example, the company Wiley Wallaby includes a superegoic message on the back of its bags of licorice:

“Wiley Wallaby Gourmet Blasted Berry Licorice is so soft and chewy, so bursting with terrific taste, you need look no further for the satisfaction you crave. We packed it so full of fresh fruit flavor, there as less room left for the things you could do without. Less sugar, fat free and absolutely no dairy or high fructose corn syrup makes Wiley Wallaby the candy your conscience feels better about, too. Win-win-win!”

Duane Rousselle has argued that America qua Symbolic order has built within itself discursive-fragmentary mechanisms which serve to prevent or immediately “remedy” subjective destitution and he calls these little ideological mechanisms “American wisdom”. Whenever the American consumer gets too close to the traumatic Real, these tidbits of “wisdom” are right there to guide the subject back to the comfort and reassurance of American ideology. The big Other cannot provide the big Answer, but the superego can compensate for this lack by assailing the subject with a multitude of little “answers”.

American wisdom is a fragmented structure of discourse which currently prevails within American society. On social media, printed on bubble gum wrappings, on the sleeves of coffee cups, and so on, there are symbolic inscriptions which are meant to retroactively alleviate the real trauma of subjective destitution. Lacanian clinicians have also noted that this is the discursive structure of addictions. Addiction is not only epidemic within America, but it is probably what is most American about America. Within America, the universal prohibition of the father has been replaced with the particular affirmative declarations of the maternal superegoic voice.
(Jacques Lacan and American Sociology: Be Wary of the Image, p. 23)

Žižek, following Rousselle, explains superegoic wisdom or the “fine art of non-thinking” like this:

However, the true enemy of the present book is not new realist visions but what one is tempted to call the fine art of non-thinking, an art which more and more pervades our public space: wisdom instead of thinking proper — wisdom in the guise of one-liners intended to fascinate us with their fake “depth.” They no longer function as articulated propositions but more like images providing instant spiritual satisfaction; Duane Rousselle provided some elements of this depressing picture:
(1) Word Art is popular and seems to be the new kitsch. I checked and it is increasing in sales volume at high end and low end (walmart) shops. The word art always comes as a piece of wisdom: “Enjoy what you have,” “sometimes in life, family is all that you need,” and so on.
(2) McDonald’s restaurants now plaster their walls with these little pieces of wisdom. One of the most frequented chains in Toronto has on the second floor an entire wall dedicated to “sometimes in life,” and so on.
(3) In the United States it is popular to curate large collections of quotations on social media walls (Facebook, Instagram, etc). What is most interesting is that Facebook has even made it, in the last few years, so that a user can write something using symbolic inscriptions and it will automatically convert it into a rectangular image. This rendering of the symbolic as image is what is most essential about this ideology.
(4) Entire cases of books are dedicated at popular book franchises to “poetry.” Inside are “life lessons” or wisdoms. One such popular author is named Rupi Kaur. Each page is a life lesson and in the background there is an image that conveys the message. These books are extremely popular and on the best sellers list. I could go on — these are all examples, I think, of the triumph of the image over the symbolic hole.
Therein resides the ideological function of Word Art wisdoms: while Word Art presents itself as a safe haven, a retreat from the madness of capitalist hyper-activity, in reality it makes us the best participants in the game — we are taught to maintain the inner peace of not-thinking. The task of thinking is not to simply fill in this symbolic hole but to keep it open and render it operative in all its unsettling force, whatever the risks of this operation.
(Sex and the Failed Absolute, pp. 13–4)

What Rousselle and Žižek have in mind is the imagification of “wise” words, that is, the becoming-image of the signifier. Let’s get clearer on what these two are describing. Actually, they’re referring to something we are all too familiar with. By and large, signifiers have an imagistic component, for example, the signifier “image” is itself an image in the strict sense. What I mean is this signifier has perceptual features that our eyes see. We can perceive each letter on its own but also as a part of the whole and the whole itself is also perceivable. But this imagistic content is not exactly what Rousselle and Žižek are highlighting for us. What they’re pointing out is those “paintings” you can get at stores like Bed Bath & Beyond with the words “Live, Laugh, Love” on them. The backgrounds range from blurry swirls of warm colors to golden beams of sunlight. This is the same aesthetic found in the inspirational memes that saturate social media.

But what’s the point in turning the signifiers that comprise the superego’s adages into artsy and cutesy images? What precisely is the ideological function of Word Art? It has everything to do with Lacan’s register of the Imaginary, which is comprised of both perceptual and fantasmatic images. According to Lacan, the Imaginary order is what provides the subject with an imaginary sense of wholeness via the image. Human beings identify themselves with all kinds of images, e.g., posters of famous rappers or Instagram photos of beautiful models, but the primary image we identify with is that of our mirror image. The problem, of course, is that the subject is not its mirror image, but still comes to make an elementary identification with it via misrecognition (méconnaissance). This primary image is the bedroom of the subject’s ego. The subject knows all too well,that it is lacking, that it is missing something essential to its being, that it is profoundly incomplete, but the image appears to be so full, so complete. This is why Lacan says, “The ego is structured exactly like a symptom. At the heart of the subject, it is only a privileged symptom, the human symptom par excellence, the mental illness of man” (Seminar I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, p.16). In other words, the ego is a strategy devised by the subject in order to cope with the trauma of its ontological incompleteness. The ego is the purest ideology of the subject.

The Real subject is defined through its desire, its lack, its constitutive negativity, but it finds illusory comfort from this in the “fullness” of image (“fullness” goes in scare quotes here because the image itself is never really complete and all one needs to do to understand this point is get familiarized with Husserl’s concept of the adumbration or Sartre’s concept of transphenomenality). Nevertheless, the Imaginary is capable of pulling off the feeling of plentiful wholeness, dense positivity, full substantiality, and this is what the superego is utilizing in turning signifiers into images. The toxic positivity of superegoic Word Art dripping with all its mawkish “wisdom” ideologically plugs up the holes in the big Other by functioning as its own makeshift little “egos”. The imagistic positivity of Word Art gives body, gives fullness, provides substance for, to the superego’s wise words, that is, it bestows to them a sense of deep truth connected to the vibrancy of nature, of color, of sensation. So, for one, Word Art affirms the ego of the lacking subject and, for two, it generates an “ego” for the lacking big Other. The takeaway is that superegoic wisdom a doubled sense of wholeness brimming with positivity. It’s doubled insofar has it ideologically obfuscates the lacks of both the subject and the big Other, which, given the mechanism of imagistic mirroring (seeing yourself in the other and vice versa), what we are left with is that I am complete in my society and my society is complete in me. Superegoic Word Art whispers, “Nothing structural needs to be changed in the relation between yourself and society. Be thankful. You live in the best of all possible worlds, since it is only in this world (capitalism) that you can be complete, that you can realize all of your dreams.” Pure ideology! The superego is a fast talker for good reason. If we stop and critique its wisdom, then it all falls apart. Rousselle explains:

American wisdom does not challenge the ego. It does not disrupt the sense of self. Instead it desires to construct for itself a stable sense of self. . . . American wisdom retroactively affirms the particular circumstance of the subject, in image form. And it provides its solution always faster and faster. American wisdom keeps moving, faster and faster. And sometimes it burns itself out.
(Jacques Lacan and American Sociology: Be Wary of the Image, p. 29)

For Rousselle, a great example of American wisdom, of a comforting life lesson, ideologically obfuscating the Real (“fundamental traumatic questions concerning sexuality and death”) is found in the TV show Grey’s Anatomy:

These are the questions that are rendered most palpable and witnessed as entirely unavoidable within Grey’s Anatomy. Each episode reaches a fever pitch at the precise moment that a fundamental question concerning sexuality or mortality becomes no longer containable within the medical pretence. This is most often indicated by an intensification in background music. Consequently, the medical pretence momentarily dissolves as the music comes to an abrupt and dramatic halt. It is at this crucial moment that the subject of the film traumatically, though fleetingly, encounters truth: the subject is revealed in his or her destitution, incapable of finding a solution to the problem. Suddenly, a calm reassuring female voice speaks from somewhere outside of the frame — as if from another scene — to provide us all with an essential life lesson.
We should pay close attention to these little life lessons because they reveal to us something essential about life in America. Each lesson functions as a little piece of wisdom meant to retroactively offer a remedy, however provisional, for subjective destitution. We are treated to such life lessons as: “sometimes the expected simply pales in comparison to the unexpected,” “sometimes it is good to be scared, it means you still have something to lose,” “sometimes the future changes quickly and completely and we’re left with only the choice of what to do next,” and so on. These life lessons introduce the triumph of the imaginary against the trauma of the real. Within the shit-storm of the plot, there is, finally, some calm, quiet, reassurance.
(Jacques Lacan and American Sociology: Be Wary of the Image, p. 24)

On top of serving as an illuminating example, I also like this for indirectly linking the superego to health — health in its myriad designations and associations, e.g., physical and mental health, medicine, therapy, physical fitness, exercise, dieting, nutrition, lifestyle choices, wellness, etc. Wage labor amounts to unhappiness and unhealthiness, but the superego’s injunction demands that we be happy and healthy despite our mental and physical dilapidation. Sure, there’s plenty of jouissance to be had in eating junk food and being lazy, but don’t invoke personal responsibility when the very structure of wage labor makes it nearly impossible to eat right and exercise on a regular basis. We have neither the time nor the energy (the timenergy) to prepare meals, go to the gym, get eight hours of sleep everyday. What fucking world does the superego live in? And we’re supposed to have all this discipline that keeps us aligned to the pleasure principle while also being goaded to enjoy yourselves, to give into death drive. And this is the toxic positivity that poisons our lives thanks to the superego. “Watch what you eat but also supersize it!” “Go workout but also be a couch potato!” “Go to bed early but also stay up late!” “Take time to develop your spiritual side but also ruthlessly pursue material wealth!” These are all particular modifications of the exact same injunction to “Enjoy!” that produce exponential, runaway guilt for failing to get it right. It’s impossible too live up to the superego’s impossible ideal of perfect happiness (pleasure, jouissance, health, fitness, excess, well-being, self-creation, self-destruction, excitation, homeostasis, tranquility, enthusiasm, stimulation, peace, etc.). But all of this attention on our inner lives, on our libidinal economies, on our desires and emotions, is ideological because of how it keeps us from a focused examination of the other world, that is, of the structure of capitalism itself. This is also why William Davis encourages us to get to “diverting our critical attention outward upon the world, and not inward upon our feelings, brains or behaviour” (The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being, p. 11). Davis continues:

It is often said that depression is ‘anger turned inwards’. In many ways, happiness science is ‘critique turned inwards’, despite all of the appeals by positive psychologists to ‘notice’ the world around us. The relentless fascination with quantities of subjective feeling can only possibly divert critical attention away from broader political and economic problems. Rather than seek to alter our feelings, now would be a good time to take what we’ve turned inwards, and attempt to direct it back out again. One way to start would be by turning a skeptical eye upon the history of happiness measurement itself.
(The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being, p. 11)

And here’s the big twist, our dutiful pursuit of happiness is the source of our neurotic unhappiness. This superegoic guilt, this never-ending assault of contradictory moralism, is the root cause of so much of our mental and emotional suffering. The superego itself is unhealthy for us. At the superego, we all want to shout the words of Hamilton at the end of Fast Times at Ridgemont High . . . “Get off my case, motherfucker!” Seriously, you want to violently scream at it. “Get the fuck from ‘round me, cuz!” The superego is the burdensome presence of unrelenting and pressurized jouissance. As Rousselle writes, “We can say that jouissance is therefore the source of a certain toxic positivity. There is a positivity to jouissance because at its root it refuses to be relinquished, negated” (Post-anarchism & Psychoanalysis, p. 67). Jouissance as such can be characterized as toxic positivity, but the superego is the most toxic of all toxic positivities. And, oddly enough, depression is caused but a toxic surplus instead of a traumatic absence. Rousselle explains:

Russell Grigg made a clear point about depressive melancholia many years ago. He said that depression for Lacan is ultimately not marked by loss, as in “the loss of the object,” which would make it a variation on the logic of mourning. Rather, depressive melancholia is marked by the “unbearable proximity of the object.” In other words, it is an inability to effect a separation from the fawning of one’s jouissance, since that would imply the courage (and it could even be a political courage) to offer oneself up to the negativity of the signifier. That makes depression one of the penultimate experiences of toxic positivity. Yes, this is my point: depression is toxic positivity made clear. It’s not exactly something you would be capable of convincing the depressed one, since you cannot, under any circumstance, convince the depressed one that she is suffering from too much happiness or positivity. Yet, frequently that’s exactly what occurs in depression. You’ll even notice that the depressed one has built up an entire life to convince themselves that the world is the place of the positive, all the more to avoid the negativity of that world.
(Post-anarchism & Psychoanalysis, pp. 150–1)

Byung-Chul Han sees our depression and “burnout” in a way very similar to Rousselle:

Every age has its signature afflictions. Thus, a bacterial age existed; at the latest, it ended with the discovery of antibiotics. Despite widespread fear of an influenza epidemic, we are not living in a viral age. Thanks to immunological technology, we have already left it behind. From a pathological standpoint, the incipient twenty-first century is determined neither by bacteria nor by viruses, but by neurons. Neurological illnesses such as depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), borderline personality disorder (BPD), and burnout syndrome mark the landscape of pathology at the beginning of the twenty-first century. They are not infections, but infarctions; they do not follow from the negativity of what is immunologically foreign, but from an excess of positivity. Therefore, they elude all technologies and techniques that seek to combat what is alien. . . .
Because Otherness is disappearing, we live in a time that is poor in negativity. And so, the neuronal illnesses of the twenty-first century follow a dialectic: not the dialectic of negativity, but that of positivity. They are pathological conditions deriving from an excess of positivity. . . .
Neuronal violence does not proceed from system-foreign negativity. Instead, it is systemic — that is, system-immanent — violence. Depression, ADHD, and burnout syndrome point to excess positivity. Burnout syndrome occurs when the ego overheats, which follows from too much of the Same. The hyper in hyperactivity is not an immunological category. It represents the massification of the positive.
(The Burnout Society, pp. 1, 4, 7)

Han is getting what Rousselle and Mark Murphy have now started referring to as saturation and as the flood, which is also what McGowan is now calling “pure excess”. According to Han, our current libidinal default setting is one of being neuronally fried. We sizzle in the smoldering heat of toxic positivity. If viruses or infections were threatening agents that hailed from the outside, from a foreign negativity, from a dangerous Other, then neurons or infarctions are like a swarm of superegoic straight from the inside of our daily lives, from accelerated positivity, from vexing Sameness. In other words, neuronal positivity is the cyberpositive violence suffered by the central nervous system at the hands of capitalist realism and its regime of obligated enjoyment, superegoic enthusiasm, information overload, digital overstimulation, exponential guilt, blitzed sensorium, energy depletion, and libido crash. Whitney Goodman nicely describes the dynamics of toxic positivity at work in our everyday interactions:

Imagine that you just lost your job. You’re in full panic mode. Your mind is racing, and you have no idea what you’re going to do next.
You decide to share this with a friend. They glance your way and smile. It looks like they are keying up to tell you something big. Could this be the validation you need right now? Maybe they know of a great job opportunity? You watch them fidget as they pull from the depths of their inner wisdom and say, “At least you have all this time off now! It could be so much worse. Think about how much you’re going to learn from this.”
Toxic positivity has officially entered the building.
You freeze and think, Are they even listening to me? Am I seriously supposed to be grateful that I just lost my job?
You’re not sure where to go from here. You don’t feel grateful, so how in the world are you supposed to respond? You were already stressed out, and now this conversation leaves you feeling totally misunderstood. So, you put aside your feelings and say, “Yeah, thanks.”
Now you’re not only jobless, but you also feel distant from your friend and ashamed that you can’t just look on the bright side.
(Toxic Positivity: Keeping it Real in a World Obsessed with Being Happy, pp. 9–10)

She, then, goes on to bullet point some of fundamental functions of toxic positivity:

Positivity becomes toxic when used:
• in conversations where someone is looking for support, validation, or compassion and instead is met with a platitude.
• to shame people into feeling like they’re not doing enough, working hard enough, or that their difficult emotions are invalid.
• to shame ourselves for not being happy enough or positive enough.
• to deny our reality.
• to gaslight or silence someone who has legitimate concerns or questions.
• to tell people everything bad in their life is their fault.

At its core, toxic positivity is both well-intentioned and dismissive. We often use it to:
• end the conversation.
• tell someone why they shouldn’t be feeling what they’re feeling.
• convince people they can be happy all the time (if they try hard enough).
• always appear positive and carefree.
• deny or avoid our current situation.
• avoid taking responsibility.
• attempt to make people feel better.
(Toxic Positivity: Keeping it Real in a World Obsessed with Being Happy, pp. 16–7)

It’s worth noting that it’s not only people who use these toxipositive stratagems — the virtual superego itself often employs these same tactics whenever it’s torturing us. On a quick side note, I always find the forging of neologisms to be incredibly helpful in fusing concepts together in my mind, so that’s why I’ve decided to coin the term toxipositivity. And I want to link a potent example of toxipositivity to this very neologism. We find the perfect example to glue to the signifier “toxipositivity” in Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. Ehrenreich was met with a deluge of toxipositivity after she learned that she had cancer. Instead of her disease being a tragedy, a life destroying negativity, Ehrenreich was superegoically implored to see the “bright side of cancer”. As she puts it, “The cheerfulness of breast cancer culture goes beyond mere absence of anger to what looks, all too often, like a positive embrace of the disease” (Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, p. 27). From the toxipositive point of view, cancer is a great opportunity for “personal growth”. This gives all new meaning to “Enjoy your symptom!” This twisted logic can even lead people to view cancer as a gift from God, which one is divinely obligated to affirm.

In the most extreme characterization, breast cancer is not a problem at all, not even an annoyance — it is a “gift,” deserving of the most heartfelt gratitude. One survivor turned author credits it with revelatory powers, writing in her book The Gift of Cancer: A Call to Awakening that “cancer is your ticket to your real life. Cancer is your passport to the life you were truly meant to live.” And if that is not enough to make you want to go out and get an injection of live cancer cells, she insists, “Cancer will lead you to God. Let me say that again. Cancer is your connection to the Divine.
(Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, p. 29)

This logic is nothing new, however. Certain Christians have long espoused this view in one way or another. The hybridization of Christianity and self-help reached its zenith with Norman Vincent Peale’s international bestseller The Power of Positive Thinking (1952), which lead to the popularization of the concept of positive thinking. Peale was a Protestant clergyman who thought that a positive attitude and faith in God were all it took to overcome life’s worst obstacles. If one has faith in God and believes that he only wants good things for you, then the next step is to think that the negative aspects of your life are simply a matter of perspective. One could even read this position into the words of Saint Paul, “All things work together for good to them love God” (Romans 8:28). Peale writes, “we manufacture our unhappiness by thinking unhappy thoughts, by the attitude which we habitually take” (The Power of Positive Thinking, p. 59). Again, the ideological function at play here is that personal responsibility. If you’re unhappy, it’s not due to your material conditions, to the fact that you lack timenergy, to structural dynamics, but, rather, because you keep manufacturing your own unhappiness by thinking unhappy thoughts, because you allow yourself to succumb to negative thinking and a bad attitude. “Your unhappiness to 100% your fault because you keep on failing to get it right!” Who knew that all I need in order to fix my material conditions is a good ol’ attitude adjustment. Quick! Somebody call John Cena! Ok, now back to Ehrenreich. Let’s look at the responses she got to posting something negative, something “angry”, about having breast cancer on a breast cancer message board:

As an experiment, I posted a statement on the Komen.org message board, under the subject line “Angry,” briefly listing my complaints about the debilitating effects of chemotherapy, recalcitrant insurance companies, environmental carcinogens, and, most daringly, “sappy pink ribbons.” I received a few words of encouragement in my fight with the insurance company, which had taken the position that my biopsy was a kind of optional indulgence, but mostly a chorus of rebukes. “Suzy” wrote to tell me, “I really dislike saying you have a bad attitude towards all of this, but you do, and it’s not going to help you in the least.” “Mary” was a bit more tolerant, writing, “Barb, at this time in your life, it’s so important to put all your energies toward a peaceful, if not happy, existence. Cancer is a rotten thing to have happen and there are no answers for any of us as to why. But to live your life, whether you have one more year or 51, in anger and bitterness is such a waste. . . . I hope you can find some peace. You deserve it. We all do. God bless you and keep you in His loving care. Your sister, Mary.” “Kitty,” however, thought I’d gone around the bend: “You need to run, not walk, to some counseling. . . . Please, get yourself some help and I ask everyone on this site to pray for you so you can enjoy life to the fullest.”
(Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, p. 32 )

It turns out that if you get cancer and actually die from it, then it’s all your fault for not being positive enough, not having a good enough attitude. This is the superego at its cruelest. What Ehrenreich actually needed was to fucking vent, to blow off some steam, over her life getting all fucked up by having cancer. She need a friend to let her authentically grieve and curse her situation without wearing an obligatory smile. And what did she get for speaking her heart? Isolation. In this case, the true meaning of “I’m sending thoughts and prayers” is you’re on your own.

The TV show Euphoria contains a fantastic depiction of the self-help superego dispersed all across social media assailing us with its toxipositivity. In Season 2, Episode 2, the episode called ‘Out of Touch’, we find Kat, an overweight and insecure teenage girl living a secret life as an online dominatrix, laying in bed depressed about herself. Dani Di Placido, in a episode recap written for Forbes, nicely illustrates the scene of Kat “struggling with self-loathing, only to be inundated by an army of Instagram and TikTok influencers, who demand nothing less than unadulterated self-love, flaunting their perfect figures and faces, blaming Kat’s insecurity on the white-hetero-cis-patriarchy and verbally assaulting her with hollow platitudes. The scene viscerally captures the feeling of being bullied into confidence by annoying internet personalities”. This is pure self-help superego, pure self-affirmative toxipositivity. Every single time Kat points out one of her flaws (negativities), one of the avatars of the superego appears and corrects her by insisting that she affirm herself. As the Instagram models and TikTok influencers get more and more amped up they begin to swarm poor Kat while emphatically shouting in unison “Love yourself! Love yourself! Love yourself!” All Kat wants is her the flood of superegoic toxipositivity to stop — the calm of negativity.

I’ll give you another example of superegoic positivity at work in everyday life. Do any of you have friends who are musicians that always want to play their new music for you in order to get your “honest” reaction? Of course, there’s no right answer except a positive one. Musicians are superegoic when it comes to their music — there is only one correct answer and you better get it right!

If you actually tell your musician friends that you dislike their songs, then chances are that those friendships won’t last much longer. There’s a real art to giving an “honest” response here. You have to finesse your opinion of the music in such a way as to be overwhelming positive but not in a way that is transparently fake. In truth, the whole process is a fucking chore. Now, I have two close friends that I love and I have a genuine interest in their work. I always like to see how they’re developing as artists. However, with them, I can tell them when I not all that into a song they made, since we have true symbolic bond. If I give a critique of their music, they know that I’m speaking from position of enduring support. However, this is not what’s going on when most people ask you to listen to their music. The vast majority of the time the “Will you please give me your honest opinion on my music?” actually means “Tell me how great my shit is! Enjoy, motherfucker! Be super-positive!” Listen to your shitty music and act like it’s awesome? I would prefer not to.

This abrasive form of toxic positivity brought on by the superego’s morality of “happiness” finds its clinical instantiation of what is called therapism. Here’s how Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel define the term:

These would-be healers of our purported woes dogmatically believe and promote the doctrine we call “therapism.” Therapism valorizes openness, emotional self-absorption and the sharing of feelings. It encompasses several additional assumptions: that vulnerability, rather than strength, characterizes the American psyche; and that a diffident, anguished, and emotionally apprehensive public requires a vast array of therapists, self-esteem educators, grief counselors, workshoppers, healers, and traumatologists to lead it through the trials of everyday life. Children, more than any group, are targeted for therapeutic improvement. We roundly reject these assumptions. . . . Therapism tends to regard people as essentially weak, dependent, and never altogether responsible for what they do. . . . We also reject therapism’s central doctrine that uninhibited emotional openness is essential to mental health. On the contrary, recent findings suggest that reticence and suppression of feelings, far from compromising one’s psychological well-being, can be healthy and adaptive. For many temperaments, an excessive focus on introspection and self-disclosure is depressing. Victims of loss and tragedy differ widely in their reactions: some benefit from therapeutic intervention; most do not and should not be coerced by mental health professionals into emotionally correct responses. Trauma and grief counselors have erred massively in this direction.
(One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture is Eroding Self-Reliance, pp. 5, 6, 7)

Andrew Flores also provides a very helpful definition of “therapism” as it relates to capitalism:

What is Therapism? Why should we use this term and not just therapy? As noted above, therapy is a medical practice rooted in the research and study of psychology, and for the majority of modalities it operates and diagnoses via the DSM-5. No matter the particular modality of therapy, such as CBT/DBT, Existential Therapy, Transference Focused Therapy, Psychodynamic Therapy, EDMR, etc., they are all quilted by therapism. Therapism is a genus of ideology within capitalism that operates under the presupposition of transforming a mentally wounded individual into someone who is whole and self-regulating. This definition is a general one, but let it be our starting point of inquiry into the various degrees in which therapism operates and obfuscates the overall social consciousness that is ultimately the effects of Capital. Here we have the emphasis of the “individual” one who is unique, but due to circumstances, trauma, or lack of fulfillment becomes mentally ill or wounded.
(‘Therapism, Psychoanalysis, and Ideology’, Underground Theory, p. 184)

What we find with therapism or therapy culture is a hyper-focus on emotions. Emotions have been elevated to the Absolute. This means that we have an ethical obligation to be mindful of emotions — both those of others and of ourselves. Frank Furedi describes the situation like this:

A closer inspection of therapeutic culture indicates that it speaks not so much about emotion as about the problem of emotional deficit. The concern with people’s self-esteem is with its low level. Low self-esteem is invariably interpreted and understood as an invisible disease that undermines people’s ability to control their lives. The belief that individuals and society suffer from an emotional deficit informs discussions of the subject of emotional intelligence and emotional literacy. The conviction that people cannot emotionally cope with a growing range of encounters, experiences and relationships informs the way that therapeutic culture makes sense of the human condition.
The perception of emotional deficit is underwritten by an intense sense of emotional vulnerability. As a result, society is in the process of drawing up a radically new definition of what constitutes the human condition. Many experiences that have hitherto been interpreted as a normal part of life have been redefined as damaging to people’s emotions. People, particularly children, are said to be prone to a bewildering variety of conditions and psychological illnesses, such as depression or stress-related diseases. Invariably, the public is told that more and more people are afflicted with these emotional injuries.
(Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age, p. 4–5)

Therapism or therapy culture facilitates the toxic positivity of the inner life. All this shit amounts to is plumbing the “depths” of one’s emotions and ego identifications. But what Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis shows is the total therapeutic bankruptcy of this approach — an approach termed ego psychology. From the psychoanalytic perspective, emotions and egos are actually psychical decoys, that is, they obfuscate the true dynamics of the unconscious, which involves signifiers, fantasies, desires, and drives. The psychoanalytic cure, in one way or another, involves reckoning with, working through, or even reconfiguring one or more of these unconscious mechanisms, but that means therapism is anti-therapy insofar as it blocks access to the Freudian-Lacanian unconsious. Put differently, therapism is primarily stationed within the Imaginary order, therefore, the Symbolic and the Real remain eclipsed within the confines of the therapismistic “clinic”. Here, “do the work” really means “work very hard at doing nothing at all” — pure superego. Ego psychology is one of the most cruel forms of torture performed by the superego.

All of this brings to mind the Netflix film Stutz. The film is all about the relationship between Hollywood movie star Jonah Hill and his therapist Phil Stutz. Jonah claims that the therapeutic tools developed by Stutz have had a very positive effect on his life, so, basically, the film functions a tribute to Stutz (in truth, is one long commercial for Stutz’s tools). Anyway, Stutz’s version of therapism focuses on cultivating one’s “life force”, which is comprised of (1) one’s relation to oneself, (2) one’s relations to others, and (3) one’s relation to one’s own body. Here’s my problem with all this: who the fuck has timenergy to do all of this extra-labor? It takes time to work on yourself, your body, and your relationships with others. And where’s the relation to society itself? To the overarching structure of your world? Stutz says it’s important to increase your life-force and become passionate about living, but there are two huge elephants in the room that he conveniently leaves out of it — timenergy and money. Therapists always bracket out the economic dimension of our lives — this is what I like to call the therapeutical epoché. Therapy is built on the liberal concept of the individual (pure competitor without a rigged playing field). But what if you are suffering from capitalism itself? What if the source of your depression is wage slavery itself? What if it stems from burnout, hustle culture, capitalist temporality, the grind, or just trying to pay your fucking bills? Oh, so on top of wage labor, they are also supposed to do all this self-care labor? Fuck off!

Therapists act as though their patients live in an economic void, that they have no economic facticity. It’s like how in sitcoms characters never seem to struggle financially. And if they do, the problem is resolved by the end of the episode. My biggest problem with therapy is the economic problem! I am a card-carrying Marxist here. What about one’s structural, economic facticity? This is the question Žižek posed to Peterson in their debate. “Begin with yourself! Set your house in order! Clean your room!” But what if your life is in disorder precisely because of how society itself is structured? Are we really going to tell North Koreans that the way to fix their lives is by taking more personal responsibility? What a fucking joke! Oh, right, all the North Koreans need to do to fix their lives is go outside and “touch grass”. No, they are suffering because of their authoritarian symbolic order. What if the order itself is oppressive? Just as Americans and most people are suffering due to wage labor, to their exploitative economic circumstances. And we can agree that we need both: more personal responsibility and more social restructuration. However, I don’t need to readjust my subjective relation towards wage labor! No! I need wage labor itself to change (to die). If all therapy is for is to make us better suited to be wage slaves, then therapy is the new opium of the people. It’s no coincidence that people talk about therapy as if it were religion.

Perhaps the best aspect of The Matrix Resurrections is its ideological critique of therapism. The film makes it quite clear that it views therapy culture as the most current form of the Matrix’s pervasive system of control over the subject. It turns out that after the events of The Matrix Revolutions, the machines decided to bring both Neo and Trinity back to life and to trapped them yet again within the Matrix. Why? Well, because it discovered that the two of them generate a huge amount of energy when kept in close proximity to one another (just as capitalism vampirically lives off the life blood, the labor power, the timenergy, of structurally exploited workers). Anyway, the plot of the fourth installment in the franchise is focused on Neo once again getting freed from the Matrix. However, this time around, he’s not suffering from the ennui that comes from working a lifeless office job, but, instead, lives the life of a successful video game programmer who created the classic game series called The Matrix. In order to prevent Neo from truly remembering his past life, the Matrix decided to gaslight Neo by turning the events of the first three films into his own creative fiction. Because all of the past events are elements of the video game, it makes perfect sense why he’d faintly remember them. But this leads him to have moments of insanity wherein he simply cannot determine what’s real from what’s fiction. In these moments, the reality principle truly implodes for him, that is, the distinction between reality and representation collapses into a traumatic blur (if there was ever a truly Baudrillardian scenario presented in one of The Matrix films, then it is this situation in particular).

However, in an interesting twist, these are the precise moments wherein the possibility of Neo being liberated from the maze of illusions becomes possible. In order to prevent this from happening, the Analyst, the program who designed the seventh iteration of the Matrix, pretends to be Neo’s therapist in order to restore his lost sense of reality, which is enabled by forcing Neo to constantly be swallowing blue pills (“reality” pills). In other words, the Matrix controls Neo by convincing him that he suffers from psychotic delusions. Neo’s “therapy” functions to keep him believing that he’s living in the real world, i.e., that he is the problem, that his mind is his own worst enemy, and not the world itself. Just to state the obvious point, this is precisely how capitalism ideologically weaponizes therapism against workers who are ultimately suffering from capitalism (the Matrix) itself. Therapismistic capital says, “the real issue has its roots on the inside and not the outside”. I, however, respond with a modification of the famous maxim of Fox Mulder in The X-Files: the problem is out there!

Therapism is just superegoic wisdom with clinical certification and expert professionalism. When I was searching for books on Amazon the other day, I came across one titled Gaslighting & Narcissistic Abuse Recovery. It got me thinking about how untherapeutic therapy culture really is. Where’s the real therapy book we need? Let’s have a book called Ideology & Capitalistic Abuse Recovery. But that’s not going to happen. Why? For the very reason Lacan himself pointed out, “All modern psychology is constructed to explain how a human being can behave in the capitalist structure” (Seminar XII: Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis, 9/6/1965, p. 300). The idea is that capitalist society generates its own ideological model of psychology for its own self-serving ends, which, again, is the shift the blame for society’s ills from itself to the individuals who fail to thrive in this economic system. What capitalism needed was a discourser that “explains” why and how individuals ought to adapt themselves to capitalism (and not capitalism to them). Toxipositivity has become a powerful psychological tool of capitalism. In Goodman’s words, “Toxic positivity . . . places all the responsibility on the individual instead of on the systems and institutions that make positive thinking an impossible solution” (Toxic Positivity: Keeping it Real in a World Obsessed with Being Happy, p. 25). We can view the current clinical antagonism like this: the Lacanian psychoanalyst or agent of negativity is attempting to help evacuate the flood of jouissance while the superegoic therapismist or agent of toxipositivity strives to aid in its exponential growth so as the ideologically reinforce capitalism: superegoic therapismist vs. Lacanian psychoanalyst — jouissance vs. the signifier. And this brings us to Rousselle’s discussion of the function of the Lacanian psychoanalyst.

It is why today’s psychoanalyst functions as a toxicologist just as much as a hole puncher, (rather than, say, a surgeon). The jouissance at stake in experiences of depression aims toward continuity with the Other such that the Other must speak the same theory, language, wear the same colors, and so on. When the Other refuses this continuity or consistency, you are shocked! At this point, you will witness the abandonment of the Other’s negativity. It means that the psychoanalyst aims at traumatization, which is a very delicate “politics” of the clinic. One must discover the means through which this traumatization might occur, because without it there can be no subject of politics. Make no mistake: the trauma will constantly provoke the traumatized, with or without the analyst.

In the end, we could say that the depressed person interprets the negativity of the world as a faux-plus. For this person, the world is actually profoundly negative and threatening. But a false optimism is projected into the world in order to justify one’s retreat. She retreats from the Other in order to institute her positive world against which she positions herself as the true negative. The psychoanalyst must learn to recognize that she is not at all this true negative that she presents as herself: she is faux-neg. It is why we can claim that some depressed people actually suffer from stubborn happiness: the subject is happy. Lacan put it like that when he spoke about what might exist regarding the subject of the drive.
(Post-anarchism & Psychoanalysis, pp. 151–2)

Rousselle goes on the further explain the faux-neg or false negatives:

Anyway, I am led to develop some new vocabulary for myself to get a sense of this end that has already happened. I would say that our situation is really worse today. There are new challenges that we face. For example, there is the production of false negatives, faux-negs, that postpone the traumatic encounter with the signifier. The signifier would have negativized the stubborn jouissance, introducing a hole into the void. I cannot therefore claim that I am interested so much in “constitutive negativity,” because what troubles me is “constitutive positivity”: this “something” of jouissance that remains resolutely positive in the symptom.
Consequently, I would say that we are not at all in a negative period of history. The crises in international politics, wars, ecological or environmental disasters, pandemics, financial and inflation crises, and so on, . . . all of this indicates to me that we are in a deeply positive moment. It is in this sense that I speak of toxic positivity, and I have the audacity to suggest that our depressing time is one of the production of false negatives. Depression is perhaps ultimately a deeply positive experience. Today’s wars indicate an incredulity toward the signifier, peace treaties, trade agreements, peace talks, and so on.
(Post-anarchism & Psychoanalysis, pp. 226–7)

Now, I’m not sure if Rousselle would fully agree with my interpretation of his concept of the faux-neg, but, for me, it seems as though he’s getting at the simulation of negativity. In other words, I spot a certain Baudrillardian dimension to it. My idea is that the capitalism generates its own third-order simulacra of negativity, which ultimately function to convince us that we have tapped into the negative when, in fact, we remain drowning in the saturating flood of toxipositivity. The third-order simulation is that which “masks the absence of a profound reality . . . it plays at being an appearance — it is of the order of sorcery” (Simulacra and Simulation, p. 6). The faux-neg masks the absence of the profound reality of negativity itself (relief from toxipositive saturation of jouissance). What the sign (simulation) of negativity prevent is an genuine encounter with the signifier (traumatization) of negativity. The proper function of the signifier, not the sign, is to evacuate, empty, clear out, etc., jouissance from the subject. The faux-neg merely simulates the voidification of jouissance.

Oddly enough, I have always found pessimism as a bastion of relieving negativity. Now, first things first, there’s undoubtably a way that pessimism can take a sharp turn straight into edgelord jouissance, but I hold that this a strategy of the faux-neg. In other words, the edgelord uses pessimism against pessimism, that is, edgelord pessimism is a simulatory shield against a traumatic encounter with the radical negativity operative in pessimism proper. If superegoic capitalism is a cybernetic factory of toxipositivity, then pessimism is a dialectical sewer system or waste (jouissance) management apparatus. What if in the libidinal dynamics of capitalist society actually align pessimism with the pleasure principle? What if pessimism is a pressure relief valve for our unbearable toxipositivity? What if pessimism is actually a way of combating the superego’s toxic positivity? What if pessimism is the road towards the saving grace of negativity? It can be so libidinally alleviating to declare, “Fuck the pursuit of happiness! Fuck my entire existence! I wish I had never been born!” If such positions are resolutely held by the subject, then, to borrow D&G’s term, a line of flight is opened up — a vector of escape from the suffocatingly brutal presence of the superego’s toxipositivity. The superego, like the big Other, does not exist. Pessimism is an insurrectionary negativity that enables a anti-superegoic re-subjectification to occur: “I am not obligated to be thankful for my existence or for my enjoyment — I have no duty to enjoy myself.” Demanding people to absolutely affirm their existence, to gleefully celebrate their being, to be enthusiastically grateful for being born, is the elementary form of the sadistic superego. Natalism is the fundamental morality of the superego, so it should comes as no surprise that Yahweh, Mr. Superego himself, commanded Adam and Eve to “Be fruitful, and multiply” (Genesis 1:28). Antinatalism, on the other hand, is the superego’s kryptonite. Whenever the superego attempts to pick up a copy of Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy against the Human Race, its knees always buckle. In a sweaty world that is constantly being suffocated by the hands of the smothering superego, Ligotti is libidinal fresh air:

There will come a day for each of us — and then for all of us­ — when the future will be done with. Until then, humanity will acclimate itself to every new horror that comes knocking, as it has done from the very beginning. It will go on and on until it stops. And the horror will go on, with generations falling into the future like so many bodies into open graves. The horror handed down to us will be handed down to others like a scan­dalous heirloom. Being alive: decades of waking up on time, then trudging through another round of moods, sensations, thoughts, cravings — the complete gamut of agitations — and fi­nally flopping into bed to sweat in the pitch of dead sleep or simmer in the phantasmagorias that molest our dreaming minds. Why do so many of us bargain for a life sentence over the end of a rope or the muzzle of a gun? Do we not deserve to die? But we are not obsessed by such questions. To ask them is not in our interest, nor to answer them with hand on heart. In such spirit might we not bring to an end the conspiracy against the human race? This would seem to be the right course: the death of tragedy in the arms of nonexistence. Overpopulated worlds of the unborn would not have to suffer for our undoing what we have done so that we might go on as we have all these years. That said, nothing we know would have us take that step. What could be more unthinkable? We are only human beings. Ask anybody.
(The Conspiracy against the Human Race, pp. 227–8)

But what about the phenomenon called doomerism? Is not doomerism simply our contemporary form of pessimism? The “doomer” is a NPC meme for online pessimistic types, so doomerism is pessimism, right? At this point, I feel inclined to make a distinction between the doomer and the pessimist based on their respective relations to the superego. Pessimism is not doomerism. The pessimist occupies a subjective position that has actually encountered the lack of enjoyment in the superego itself, the groundlessness of the “Enjoy!”, and, thereby, gained a relative freedom from the duty to “Enjoy!”, whereas the doomer suffers due to remaining interpellated by the superego while hopelessly knowing that it is not economically, existentially, and libidinally possible to live a life of enjoyment — “I can’t “Enjoy!”, therefore, I want to die”. If doomerism is the black pill, then pessimism is the grey pill. If the black pill is a despairing and hopeless surrender to superego’s torturous injunctions, then the grey pill is a pleasurable relief from superegoic toxipositivity. Pessimism is anti-superegoism. The distinction between pessimism and doomerism is that the doomer feels like trash and wants to die because of the superego. The superegoic repression of negativity brings about a return of the repressed in the form of doomeristic pessimism. The superego says, “Enjoy yourself or kill yourself!” If you are not enjoying yourself, then you are trash in the eyes of the superego. Pessimism, on the other hand, has no investment in the superegoic injunction — “I am free to not enjoy. I have no duty to maximize my enjoyment”. Pessimism realizes that there is no big Enjoyer and that it’s totally fine to not always enjoy oneself. I am never going to achieve perfect happiness and that is perfectly ok. Pessimism accepts that life will be filled with more suffering and dissatisfaction than it will be filled with happiness and satisfaction. If you happen to enjoy, then cool. If you do not enjoy, then that’s cool, too. The problem is when enjoyment becomes a duty, an obligation, a direct goal. Falling asleep is never more difficult than when you lie down in bed and tell consciously ourself that you have to fall asleep very soon. The imposition of the duty to sleep is surest way to get yourself a sleepless night. Let me put it to you like this: I see the antagonism between pessimism and doomerism as rooted in the more fundamental antagonism between drive and superego.

Drive vs. Superego! The drive is the fuel of the superego. How, though? While the superego syphons off a portion of death drive it also demands that the negativity of the drive be jammed up, stifled, malfunctioned. If death drive is the curving of the pleasure principle, then the superego is the curving of the curve. The superego is the derailment of a derailment. The superego demands that we go beyond the pleasure principle, but it curves this beyond back into the pleasure principle. This is the whole inherent transgression thing. “Have jouissance but in a way that reproduces society!” The enjoyment of inherent transgression fuels social reproduction instead of social destruction. If we all kicked into our death drives in the purest sense, then society would collapse. Total destruction of symbolic identity. Superego wants to bend drive into its service and in the service of social reproduction. The superegoic maneuver is to bend, realign, redirect, rechannel, siphon the death drive qua what lies beyond the pleasure principle back within Symbolic parameters. Now, if you are able to integrate what lies “beyond” into the workings of our everyday lives, then you just pulled off a great ideological victory, since people will walk around with a sense of being free. If we are convinced on some level and in some way that we have enjoyment, that we aren’t repressed, then we will take ourselves to be living lives of freedom. Superegoic enjoyment is ideological because it makes unfreedom seem like freedom. It’s an ideological enjoyment precisely because it keeps us locked into the very system that exploits us. The power of the superego is that it does activate drive, but in an ideological way. How to tell whether one’s jouissance is superegoic or that of the death drive? Is one’s Symbolic identity still standing at the end of it? For the members of the old American South, the superegoic enjoyment and transgression involved in racist violence only served to cement their social identity. Death drive, on the other hand, always seeks to leave one’s Symbolic identity in rubble. Zupančič writes:

The drive does not want (us) to enjoy. The superego wants (us) to enjoy. The superego (and its culture) reduces the drive to the issue of satisfaction (enjoyment), making us hostages to its vicissitudes, and actively blocking access to the negativity that drives it. In other words — and this is crucial — satisfaction (for the sake of satisfaction) is not the goal of the drive, but its means. This is what is profoundly disturbing about the “death drive”: not that it wants only to enjoy, even if it kills us, but that it wants only to repeat this negativity, the gap in the order of being, even if this means to enjoy. Enjoyment is the means, whereas the “aim” is the repetition of the lack of being in the very midst of being. . . .
(What Is Sex?, p. 104)

And no one is currently more focused on the radical negativity of the drive and its relation to pessimism than is Julie Reshe:

By adopting the concept of the death drive, Freud recognised the tendency to self-destruction as constitutive for human beings. The death drive works towards dissolution and destruction. It functions as parasitic repetition when we compulsively repeat what destroys us without regard for self-preservation. The death drive, as a defining drive, embodies a self-defeating structure. There is something at the core of us that is incurably self-destructive.
This sounds paradoxical in relation to Freud’s early framework of thinking when he essentially reduced his comprehension of human beings to the drive towards pleasure and, in effect, towards life itself. The human of the death drive acts regardless of the aim of self-preservation; this is the human “beyond the pleasure principle.” While the pleasure principle is aimed at homeostasis and preservation of life, the death drive blatantly goes against this aim. The human being of the late Freud is not subject to treatment since she is, in fact, terminally and incurably ill. Moreover, she is nothing but the breakdown of herself, which reflects the world as a breakdown.
(Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive, p. 9)

Reshe, however, goes on to fully identify the drive with pure negativity, whereas Lacan himself saw a back-and-forth within the drive between negative (destruction) and positive (creation).

The drive as such, insofar, as it is then a destruction drive, has to be beyond the instinct to return to the state of equilibrium of the inanimate sphere. What can it be if it is not a direct will to destruction, if I may put it like that by way of illustration?
Don’t put the emphasis on the term “will” here. Whatever interest may have been aroused in Freud by an echo in Schopenhauer, it has nothing to do with the idea of a fundamental Wille. And it is only to make you sense the difference of register relative to the instinct to return to equilibrium that I am using the word in this way here. Will to destruction. Will to make a fresh start. Will for an Other-thing, given that everything can be challenged from the perspective of the function of the signifier.
If everything that is immanent or implicit in the chain of natural events may be considered as subject to the so-called death drive, it is only because there is a signifying chain. Freud’s thought in this matter requires that what is involved be articulated as a destruction drive, given that it challenges everything that exists. But it is also a will to create from zero, a will to begin again.
(Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 212)

Lacan is basically arguing that creative destruction is at the heart of the circuit of the drive, which homologously links it the circuit of capital insofar as both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as well as Joseph Schumpeter understood that creative destruction structures the capitalist mode of production.

Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put on its trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois society. In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.
(The Communist Manifesto, pp. 225–6)

Capitalism . . . is by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is but never can be stationary. . . . The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates. . . . The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in.
(Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, pp. 82–3)

Creative destruction is operative both in libidinal economy and political economy. The words of Werner Sombart, from his Krieg und Kapitalismus (War and Capitalism), nicely capture the dynamic of creative destruction at work in the drive and in capital: “from destruction a new spirit of creation arises”. For Lacan, the drive gets its actual, partial enjoyment from undermining both Symbolic identity and the pursuit of desire. Death drive tears down one’s positive coordinates but only to do it all over again. This means that drive exists in a dialectico-antagonistic relation to identity and desire, but one that also presupposes them. Drive is a Real negativity that feasts on Imaginary-Symbolic positivity. However, this destruction generates its own surplus-positivity — surplus-jouissance. Reshe, however, seeks to reconceptualize the drive as pure negativity. Reshe takes up the concept of the death drive and through it posits a negative psychoanalysis, that is, a radically pessimistic type of psychoanalysis that sees no way of making things better for human beings, of alleviating our problems. In other words, Reshe’s negative psychoanalysis is a cureless psychoanalysis. Let’s read Reshe’s description of her “negative practice” in full:

My personal favourite dead-on-arrival project is the practice of negative psychoanalysis or just some sort of negative practice. This would have been a practice that would remain true to the negative insight. It would not refute its negativity and would itself remain negative. It wouldn’t act like conventional psychoanalysis, which, in practice, runs counter to the negative insight. It would commence outside of the positive framework. Unlike conventional psychoanalysis, it would not attempt to rehabilitate itself in its intention to help and to heal but would remain on the other side in relation to it. Negative psychoanalysis won’t cover up its inner rupture. This is sacred inner psychoanalysis. Unlike profane psychoanalysis, it won’t betray its inner lack by disguising it with a promise of offering improvement and salvation.
The negative practice would not be aimed at salvation from suffering or other forms of salvation. It would not give diagnoses — they are given with the aim of curing and limiting suffering. It would not teach how to live or preach anything else. It would not assign explanations and provide expert interpretations and generally would not have the format of an expert consultation where one person or group of people act as guides to others. This constitutes a hierarchical structure between people and maintains the illusion of knowledge and the hope of salvation. In case of a negative practice, no one would enrich themselves by pretending to be expertise and exploiting the suffering and hopes for the salvation of others. No one will gain knowledge and salvation in exchange for their efforts and money. The only thing that will be exchanged is nothing. In this negative space, there would be no gain for anyone. No one would benefit from participating in it.
Such a negative practice would be kept in a mode of the negative where we do not save each other — because this would imply lying and pretending since no one could be saved. This won’t be a space where we do something positive with each other as we usually aim to, but something negative. This does not imply causing yourself and others more pain than they already experience. Deliberately harming others and other forms of antisocial behaviour is an attempt to limit, control, and externalise one’s pain. Self-harm and suicide are also a form of limitation and control over unlimited inner pain.
It would not be a practice of individual consultation but rather various negatively informed social practices that would include different forms of interaction. Perhaps this would be one of the forms of human practices, along with existing ones like, for example, romantic love, friendship, professional and creative cooperation, expert advice, teaching, and parenting. Or it would be added in some form to all these practices. All those forms of social practices are already ultimately meaningless but, with varying degrees, retain the illusion of meaning. The negative practice would be just more sincerely meaningless.
The only injunction for this form of practice would be not to be faithful to your anxious heart and the anxious hearts of others. It would be a space in sociality where we could open our black hearts to each other and endure each other’s anxious hearts.
A space where you are not demanded or expected to enjoy, a space where you can share grief and confess your inner deadness and turmoil, not in order to be saved and relieved, but for no reason at all. Not for the purpose of salvation, consolation, cure, or improvement. The space of negative psychoanalysis is a space deprived of purpose and meaning. It is a space where you can genuinely be yourself, that is, the absence of yourself, and also genuinely be with others by being deprived of them.
The phrase ‘negative practice’ is self-contradictory. Each part of it cancels the other. It contains together the practical dimension and its abolition and impossibility. If it can exist, it can only exist as rejecting itself, as something absurd, as its own failure. In this, it is very similar to what we call life.
Such psychoanalysis would rather be a parody of psychoanalysis. This means that it would sincerely be itself. It would genuinely coincide with its rupture from itself, but also with the rupture that constitutes the subject and the social bond.
Negative practice would not run away into the positive illusions courageously facing the negative core of our existence, where we are all hopelessly connected and just as hopelessly disconnected — in our rupture between proximity and distance from each other. Such a practice would be the guardian of negativity. It would be a sacred negative temple — to nothing and nobody. We would practice absurd devotion to the absence of ourselves and the meaninglessness of our existence. We would collectively mourn and collectively laugh at how pathetic and messed up we are.
(Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive, pp. 136–8)

Now, since I am a pessimist at my philosophical default setting, I feel a special type of kinship with Reshe, but while I share in the spirit of Reshe’s pessimism, I have my own psychoanalytic concerns when it comes to its letter. Let’s briefly run through them. The idea of a negative clinic certainly has its appeal, but the sharp distinction between a negative practice and positive practice is too dualist for me, which causes it to miss the dialectico-extimate relation between lack and surplus, between negativity and positivity. Where there’s lack, there’s always a counter excess. Where’s there’s desire, there’s always jouissance. The dualism of negative and positive is like that of utilitarianism’s dualism of pain and pleasure — the great breakthrough of the Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle is that there is a third thing — masochistic pleasure-in-pain, i.e., jouissance. Pessimism, optimism, hedonism, utilitarianism, etc., have all traditionally only thought in terms of the distinction between pleasure and pain. It wasn’t until Freud discovered the death drive that this third thing called jouissance was made possible to understand. The Freudian-Lacanian response to these various schools of philosophy is that none of them are capable of understanding human beings and/or ethics if they do not factor in the concept of jouissance. The dualist binaries of positive and negative, pleasure and pain, good and bad, etc., obfuscate the strange third thing that actually make human beings tick.

Reshe says of negative psychoanalysis, “No one would benefit from participating in it.” But what if it turns out that the subject is saved in some way through radical negativity? If negative psychoanalysis inadvertently helps bring about a positive change in the subject’s life, then this negative practice itself will be retroactively made into a positive one. If a certain cure comes to the subject by way of radical negativity, then this salvation will function as a quilting point that travels back in time and reconstitutes negative psychoanalysis as a practice of positivity. Even if your conscious egoic aim is to indulge yourself in pure negativity, your unconscious can always have its own creative-destructive plans for it.

Also, this space of “pure” negativity might not seek to facilitate self-harm or the harm of others, but it very well could. You never know what’s going to happen when two people start communicating openly and honestly with each other — especially about their radical negativity. We do not have full control over a discourse. The big Other is the big Third not is reducible to either the subject or the little other. And, yes, this negative discourse could very easily amplify violent, murderous, suicidal impulses just as much as it could help to cathartically alleviate them. It would always be a roll of the dice.

Now, speaking as a pessimist, here’s my biggest worry concerning negative psychoanalysis: Reshe says that there is one guiding injunction at work in negative psychoanalysis — the injunction to be purely negativity. But the huge issue here is that radical negativity easily twists into superegoic toxipositivity. This is a negative inversion of the superego. If our pessimistic negativity is never negative enough, then this builds up inside of us a superegoic pressure to be more negative, which is, in this specific case, a mere inversion of the “Enjoy!” “Thou shalt not be positive at all!” generates its own inverted form of superegoic toxipositivity. Attempting to be perfectly and absolutely negative is an impossible exercise which only functions to produce of superegoic surplus-enjoyment. The injunction to be purely negative is the perfect instance of the becoming-superego of pessimism itself, that is, it neutralizes the cathartic, libidinal power of the pessimistic position of enunciation (I’m basically attempting an act of Lacanian communication with Reshe, that is, I’m trying to return her own message to her in inverted form, i.e., the hidden or inverted meaning of “Pure negativity!” is “Enjoy!”). A proper pessimistic psychoanalysis would not impose the inverted superego injunction of “Pure negativity!” The only way to actually be negative is to be in a discursive space organized around the following principle: “You are free to either enjoy or not enjoy — the choice is yours.” It is in this space and this space alone that you are truly free to be negative and pessimistic, since neither the positive superego nor the negative superego holds no sway here.

The superego demands that the subject overcome his or her castration (lack). The superego is the “correlate of castration”. Here’s the where we get to the contradiction of the Law. The big Other says, “No!”, but the superego says, “Yes!” In other words, the big Other castrates the subject, but the superego demands that the subject overcome its castration. To paraphrase Lacan: The order of the superego originates precisely in this call for pure enjoyment, that is also to say for non-castration.

What is the essence of the superego? It is on this that I can finish by putting something into the hollow of your hand, that you can try to manipulate for yourselves, what is the general order of the superego? Precisely, it originates from this more than mythical original father, from this summons as such to pure enjoyment, namely, also to non-castration. And what does this father say in effect, at the dissolution of the Oedipus complex? He says what the superego says. What the superego says — it is not for nothing that I have never really tackled it yet — what the superego says is: “Enjoy!”
Such is the order, the impossible to satisfy order, and as such it is at the origin of everything that is elaborated there, however paradoxical that may appear to you, in terms of moral conscience. To really sense the operation of the definition, you will have to read in Ecclesiastes, under the title: ‘Enjoy as long as you can, enjoy’, says the enigmatic author of this astonishing text, ‘Enjoy with the wife you love.’ This indeed is the height of paradox, because it is precisely loving her that creates the obstacle.
(Seminar XVIII: On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance, 16.6.71)

So, again, Reshe’s inverted version of the superego would say, “You must not lack any negativity! To have any traces of positivity is to be a failure. To be positive at all is to be incomplete and you must not be incomplete! Do the impossible and be pure negativity, non-castrated negativity! Get it right! Be perfectly negative! In other words . . . Enjoy!” And this is torture, since, ontologically speaking, where there is a subject of lack there is also a subject of excess. The Lacanian subject is a Möbius strip of extimately twisting lack into excess and excess into lack. Therefore, the injunction “Pure negativity!” is the impossible demand for the subject to have a totally different ontology. This is superegoic pessimism, that is, the pessimism that turns pessimism into a discourse of toxipositivity. This is the neutralization of pessimism. We cannot allow the superego to rob us of pessimism, since true pessimism is a crucifix in the eyes of the vampiric superego.

To me, standard Lacanian psychoanalysis is already aligned to pessimism proper. The Lacanian perspective emphasizes that desire can never be truly satisfied once and for all. In other words, human beings are destined to live lives of dissatisfaction, since our constitutive lack, our ontological incompleteness, can never be overcome. The “object” that causes us to desire is the objet petit a, but the objet petit a is nothing more than the reification of the subject’s own lack. The objet petit a is unconsciously taken to be that lost fragment of the subject’s being, that is, it is the little surplus-object, the sublime remainder, of the subject, which, if “reattained”, will bring with it full and immediate access to pure, concentrated jouissance. The problem, of course, is that this “lost object” was never something the subject ever actually possessed in the first place. When symbolic castration occurs, when the child is brought to accept the Law and its prohibitions, it is as if the child sacrificed something, a fundamental portion of itself, on the alter of the Law, when, in truth, the child gave up nothing, but it is this nothing that turns right around and retroactively becomes the objet petit a — a Möbius “object” whose two contradictory and extimate “sides” are excess and lack. The “nonorientable” status of the objet petit a, of the object-cause of desire, is what makes its ontological status one of impossible virtuality. The objet petit a is impossible because it is taken to be the container of an uncastrated, presymbolic, pure, immediate, whole, perfect, type of jouissance, which is to say, a fantasmatic type of jouissance. The objet petit a is an impossible object because it is simply the fantasmatically constituted image of impossible jouissance. And the objet petit a is virtual because it is merely the stuff of fantasy. The object-cause of desire is ontologically impossible and virtual precisely because it only exists, only takes on a positive reality, in the medium of fantasy. The objet petit a can never be attained because there is no possible way to pull it out of its fantasmatic virtuality into concrete actuality. Sooner or later, any concrete object that is presumed to be the bearer of objet petit a will always be reveal to be an imposter. Therefore, desire can never be satisfied and lack can never be filled. This is the tragedy of the Lacanian subject of desire.

This is a pessimistic concept of desire, but the subject’s true neurotic suffering comes from failing to traverse the fantasy, from fleeing from reckoning with the fact that desire is unsatisfiable. The Other’s desire cannot be made whole nor can the subject’s — we are all born from negativity, from lack. Yet, on the flip side, the actual jouissance we have, the partial jouissance we get from our drives, is gained through undermining desire’s pursuit of the objet petit a. Drive gets its partial jouissance from how it gets desire to miss the object or, put differently, drive’s enjoyment is generated through the repetitious failures that keep it circling the object (objet petit a). Our true enjoyment, our actual excess, is located in those ways we self-sabotage our desire. We actually enjoy by way of unconsciously preventing ourselves from getting what we fantasmatically enjoy. This is the dialectical struggle between drive and desire. But our neurotic (pathological) suffering increases the more we try to overcome our lack. If standard Lacanian psychoanalysis can be said to have a “cure”, then one big contender is this: Lacanian psychoanalysis seeks to aid the subject in coming to reckon with the nature of desire, fantasy, drive, symptom, the big Other, the superego, etc. But reckoning with drive is especially essential here. To traverse the fantasy is to move from the whole-virtual jouissance of fantasy/desire to the partial-actual jouissance of the drive. With all that being said, the cure or the end of analysis will always be highly idiosyncratic just as is every analysis. The things I said above are really just orienting and guiding abstractions (like the clinical structures), but every analysand’s unconscious is a singularity, which means that every cure must also be singular.This process is never fully negative or positive, but always opens up space for the negativity of the subject to breathe. This is where negativity can flow without being transformed into a toxinegative inversion of the superego’s “Enjoy!” — negativity can only tarry with itself in a space freed up for both negativity and positivity.

One crucial way of tarrying with the negative is found in the idea of suicide. Pessimism proper has a key relation to the idea of suicide. Camus famously said, ‎”There is but one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy” (The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 1). However, we must distinguish between the act of suicide and the idea of suicide. What if the idea of killing oneself is actually a mechanism that enables one to go on living? Nietzsche certainly knew about the comforting power of the idea of suicide: “The thought of suicide is a powerful comfort: it helps one through many a dreadful night” (Beyond Good and Evil, p. 91). And Cioran, one of the greatest pessimistic thinkers, echoed Nietzsche’s words: “I live only because it is in my power to die when I choose to: without the idea of suicide, I’d have killed myself right away.”

(All Gall Is Divided, p. 69). But how, for Nietzsche, does the will to power relate to the thought of suicide? Because the thought of suicide gives us the power to not kill ourselves; it gives us power over the suffering we are facing. The reasoning works like this: “Life seems to be nothing but agony, so I should just kill myself and be done with it, but do I really have to kill myself right now? No! I have the freedom to kill myself whenever I like, which means I can put it off one more day.” In an ironic twist, it’s the thought of suicide that gives us to power to go on living.

In an interview with Katie Forster for The Guardian titled ‘We are all basically evil, egotistical, disgusting’, Žižek provided us with a perfect example of the comforting power of the thought of suicide in action. He says about himself, “Writing saved my life. Years ago, because of some private love troubles, I was in a suicidal mood for a couple of weeks. I told myself: ‘I could kill myself, but I have a text to finish. First I will finish it, then I will kill myself.’ Then there was another text, and so on and so on, and here I still am.” Žižek used the thought of suicide in collaboration with his life (his passion for writing books, his will to power) to continue living until he was no longer suicidal. The idea of suicide kept him alive by giving him power over his pain, since it enabled him to know that he could put an end to the pain whenever he felt like it. A society that seeks to foreclose the idea of suicide, to prohibit all contemplation of suicide, is a society that does not appreciate the quality of life. Tarrying with the suicidal negative can dialectically pivot one right into an existential affirmation. This is the elementary dialectic of suicidal ideation. The superego, however, will entertain none of this, since the thought of suicide is that thought of absolute non-enjoyment, of the total renunciation of the superego’s jouissance injunction.

While I appreciate Nietzsche’s understanding of the anti-superegoic power of the idea of suicide, I’m afraid that his famous existential thought experiment, the one with the evil demon who brings the subject the idea of eternal recurrence, contains a superegoic component. What if Nietzsche’s evil demon is an incarnation of the superego? Nietzsche wrote:

The greatest weight. — What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence — even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!”
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?
(The Gay Science, pp. 273–4)

While seeming to be merely goading the subject to live in such a way as to create a life worthy of eternal recurrence, what the thought experiment does, or, at least, can all too easily do, is put an infinite pressure on the subject to “Get it right!”, but I life lived under this cosmic superegoic pressure is itself not a life one could enthusiastically will to live an infinite amount of times. The good life is not one superegoically fixated on achieving the perfect life (a life one would desire to live “innumerable times more”). Nietzsche’s demon is the superego. There is nothing more tyrannically superegoic than demanding that someone absolutely affirm their existence. And why do I have to either affirm or negate my existence as a whole? Why can’t this be done at the level of parts? Is there a part-whole fallacy at play here? Also, this thought experiment produces exponential guilt. The more you think about it, the guiltier you feel for constantly failing to produce the “eternal life” (the life you’d will to live again and again forever). Nietzsche thought a lot about guilt, but didn’t see that his demon’s thought experiment is a guilt factory. There is a secret “ascetic ideal” at work in this superegoic thought experiment and what makes it worse is that Nietzsche himself was well aware of the ascetic ideal. Zupančič clarifies that relation between ascetic ideal and the superego:

What Nietzsche analyzes under the name of “ascetic ideal” corresponds, almost point by point, to what Freud calls the superego, the law of an insatiable passion. The more we obey it, the more we sacrifice to it — the more it wants, and the more it gains in strength and severity. We are dealing with the same image of vampirism that is also present in Nietzsche: the (superego) law literally feeds on the drives, devouring their “blood,” and ultimately becoming the only real locus of enjoyment. It could be said that the superego itself comes to be “structured like a drive.” It is common knowledge that Freud posits a kind of temporal paradox at the very core of the superego and the moral conscience linked to it: the renouncement of the drives creates conscience, and conscience demands the renouncement of the drives. In this way, the very form of renouncing becomes a form of enjoyment, a mode of its organization. This is especially blatant in obsessional neurosis, in which Freud recognizes the paradigm of “religious” thinking.
(The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two, pp. 50–1)

And how does Nietzsche’s existential thought experiment relate to his beloved concept of amor fati? Amor fati simply means the love of fate, that is, a resolute and appreciative affirmation of everything about one’s entire life. Here are his own words on the matter:

I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.
(The Gay Science, Section 276, p. 223)

My formula for human greatness is amor fati: that you do not want anything to be different, not forwards, not backwards, not for all eternity. Not just to tolerate necessity, still less to conceal it — all idealism is hypocrisy towards necessity — , but to love it . . .
(Ecce Homo, ‘Why I Am So Clever’, Section 10, p. 99)

Nietzsche found existential relief from intense regret in amor fati, he found pleasure in it, but that does not mean that it cannot easily slide into superegoic guilt. Amor fati can mean “Enjoy your pain and suffering!” or, in other words, absolutely embrace all of the ups and downs of your life without complaining about anything. However, both the thought experiment of eternal recurrence and the concept of amor fati do not take timenergy into account. Even if he was often ill, Nietzsche got to sit around and ponder these matters, whereas the wage slaves of his time did not have the luxury to fight for a life they could lovingly affirm the eternal recurrence of. In other words, Nietzsche failed to properly consider the structural dynamics within which different people of different classes are thrown into at birth and how these dynamics would effect a person’s ability to actually make amor fati their motto. Telling people who have had their timenergy stolen from them their whole lives to still and passionately affirm those “lives” is sadistic. Hi, Nietzsche, I’m Jack . . . and my wasted life is nothing other than this “life” I have “lived” without timenergy. I will never love such a fate! Amor fati can be seen as the modified version of the principle “moral” of the superego, i.e., the injunction to “Enjoy!”, to be perfectly happy. Look, Nietzsche, I don’t need a life I can eternally affirm — I just need one in which I don’t immediately want to die the moment I open my eyes each morning I have to go to work. You want me to affirm my existence? Fine. Let’s start with a world without wage labor and with lots of timenergy. I bet you would love for me to affirm my little shitty life. You want all the timenergy, all the otium, all the scholé, for yourself, right? Fuck you, fuck your thought experiment, fuck amor fati, and fuck your superegoic toxipositivity! You go and waste your life away working in a warehouse and, then, come talk to me. Timenergy is the condition of the Übermensch, but all we have down here in the hell of wage slavery is the Über-Ich, and you are its great ideological servant. Man, I’m done with this clown — he’s soft. Fuck it, I’ll let Daniel Tutt finish you off (see How to Read Like a Parasite: Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche).

All of this gets me thinking about why I dislike multiverse plots, that is, stories centered around all of the infinitely different versions of ourselves spread all cross the universes that make up reality. The multiverse story is more and more becoming a dominant subgenre of Sci-Fi thanks to the role it played in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Now, there are films that employ the multiverse trope that are still good films, e.g., Everything Everywhere All at Once, but the quality of the multiverse film is not what I’m concerned with here. Instead, I’m concerned with the concept of the multiverse itself. The multiverse trope is superegoic. How so? As ideological as the statement “You can be anything you want to be when you grow up!” actually is, the Army’s slogan “Be all you can be!” is even worse and this slogan is a modified version of the “Enjoy!” of the superego.

Here’s the issue: multiverse stories give body to the superego’s toxipositive injunction “Be all you can be!”, i.e., “Actualize all of your potentials!” The “Enjoy!”, if interpreted from an existentialist perspective, means “Leave no untapped potential unactualized” or “Actualize every possible version of yourself!” And, of course, the glaring problem with this injunction is that it’s absolutely fucking impossible . . . except in the multiverse. The multiverse is the superverse. The multiverse story serves to make the subject feel guilty about not being all it can be, since it is impossible to actualize the infinity of your possibilities. Even if there is a multiverse with all of my multi-selves, each one of them would be guilty of having failed to actualize certain possibilities and, more importantly, none of them would be able to claim that they have truly “regained” the objet petit a, that is, none of them of come to possess absolutely perfect enjoyment, true ontological completeness, which means that they are all guilty. What the multiverse stories fails to see that a passionate life, a life committed to a specific determine existence, involves the very sacrifice of all of the other possible versions of oneself. To live the life of philosopher is to not live the life of a chef, painter, farmer, etc. This is the elementary dialectics of existence.

What sets in motion the dialectical process is that no moment within the Whole can ever fully realize itself, that is, every moment has a surplus-negativity (excess of unrealization — unactualized potential) to it. The struggle or split within a thing (moment) is between its realization (positivity) and unrealization (negativity). This means that the One, for Hegel, contains reservoirs of nothingness (unrealized potential). This means that Hegel’s system is never positively closed, since it is also haunted by “oceans” of untapped potential (negativity).

The picture of the Hegelian system as a closed whole which assigns its proper place to every partial moment is therefore deeply misleading. Every partial moment is, so to speak, “truncated from within”, it cannot ever fully become “itself”, it cannot ever reach “its own place”, it is marked with an inherent impediment, and it is this impediment which “sets in motion” the dialectical development. The “One” of Hegel’s “monism” is thus not the One of an Identity encompassing all differences, but rather a paradoxical “One” of radical negativity which forever blocks the fulfilment of any positive Identity. The Hegelian “cunning of Reason” is to be conceived Precisely against the background of this impossible accordance of the abject with its Notion; we do not destroy an object by mangling it from outside but, quite on the contrary, by allowing it freely to evolve its potential and thus to arrive at its Truth.
(For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, pp. 68–9)

The actualization of one virtual potential does negate other ones, that is, it makes those potentials become non-potentials by making their actualization impossible — they are forever foreclosed from actualization. This is the ontological nullity par excellence. I cannot go back an actualize a difference version of my 24 year old self. To reckon with this basic ontological truth is to undermine the superego’s morality. To embrace the negativity that ontologically structures existence is to discredit the imperative to achieve the pure (toxic) positivity the superego assails us with. To take it a step further, the embrace of negativity can even support the ethics of euthanasia. What if a life ought not to continue? What is the continuance of that life is nothing but the positivity of surplus-suffering? If the superego is anti-euthanasia, then Dr. Kevorkian was a great anti-superegoic figure. “You are free to no longer enjoy your life.”

About Author

Michael Downs is a working class intellectual based in Raytown, Missouri. Mikey teaches Žižek, Land, Baudrillard, general philosophy at Theory Underground. Downs has studied the history of philosophy, as well as continental theory independently for over 20 years. Michael is the creator of a popular online blog, The Dangerous Maybe. There he has written articles on topics such as Lacan’s concepts of the phallus and objet petit a as well as ‘An American Translation of Bourdieu’s Forms of Capital’, and many more. These are shared amongst academics, graduate students, and independent working class intellectuals across the world. Mikey used to have his time and energy, but he now is forced to work in a warehouse to support himself and his mom. When not working he spends additional hours each day writing at a coffee shop, working on new blog posts, manuscripts, and books. You can support the #FreeMikey movement my becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack, at his Patreon, or, to get more involved, Mikey gives a monthly seminar at Theory Underground that you can subscribe to here. Doing so unlocks access to Mikey’s past courses at TU, which include Introduction to Žižek, Introduction to Nick Land, Žižek’s For They Know Not What They Do, as well as upcoming courses such as Introduction to Baudrillard and Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology. All of these ways of supporting and getting involved work to free up Michael’s time and energy so that he may continue to produce important contributions to the theory, philosophy, and psychoanalysis communities.