Breaking Desire with Todd McGowan

The thing that annoys me is actually very linked to what I love about a person.

When did the world become so safe? Between location monitors, surveillance devices, enclosed spaces, and the usual gambit of earth-shattering disasters, it has been increasingly difficult to be injured by the unknown for the unknown has been cancelled. In the safe isolation of our homes, surrounded by the smooth edges of the latest smartphones, it might seem as though nothing jagged, sharp, or otherwise dangerous pervades our worldview. As Byung-Chul Han suggests, we live in Jeff Koons’ world, where the only meaningful reaction we can elicit—to anything!—is a simple “Wow.” The smooth does not require any thinking, interpretation or reflection, remaining perpetually infantile, disarming, and interesting. Smoothness cannot shake, injure, or shock you. Debate and contradiction are erased in the totalizing nightmare of the present. But, as anyone currently alive can attest, that aesthetic of safety—akin to the theatrical performances of TSA officers—does not forestall real danger. Rather, the danger has gone underground, become assimilated into a larger ideological semblance of the social.

In this episode, Josh sits down with Ohio-native Todd McGowan, an interdisciplinary professor of English (by appointment) and Film Studies (by inclination) at the University of Vermont. For Todd, dissatisfaction and fracture are at the heart of Hegel’s (and our modern) conception of desire, universality, and thinking itself. While we often believe that we enact our desires, this is a fiction! Like the Freudian symptom, desires act as a self-perpetuating cycle, always preferable to have rather than to achieve. As soon as one desire is satiated, the floor drops out as we begin to desire another object in a positive feedback loop. Where do desires come from, and how can they end? Is desire necessarily a product of our capitalist moment? Can there be another way of existing where we are not tied to unfulfillable desires? Are the contradictions at the heart of desire really that debilitating?

At the heart of these questions is a concern for our collective imagination and the future. Is it possible to retrain our brains and re-orient our lives towards an aesthetic of dissatisfaction, one which expects nothing from the gimmick and actually—amazingly!—receives nothing.

If you have any night terrors, comments, anxiety-induced poetic outpourings, or ideas about the show, please reach out to us at insomniacleopard@gmail.com!

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Links to Todd’s fantastic books: Universality and Identity Politics, Emancipation After Hegel, Only a Joke Can Save Us, Capitalism and Desire, The Impossible David Lynch

Todd’s Ardent Fascination: Johann Gottleib Fichte’s Foundations of the Science of Knowledge

Todd’s YouTube channel

Other notable mentions (chronologically): Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre, Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, Walter Benjamin, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Paul Sartre (notes on Sartre's Nausea courtesy of Thomas Sheehan), Forrest Gump, Saving Private Ryan

The Benjamin quote Todd refers to: “The room we have now will be just the same in the world to come; where our child lies sleeping, it will sleep in the world to come. The clothes we are wearing we shall also wear in the next world. Everything will be the same as here—only a little bit different. Thus it is with imagination. It merely draws a veil over the distance. Everything remains just as it is, but the veil flutters and everything changes imperceptibly beneath it”