Enjoyment Right & Left by Todd McGowan

Author:Todd McGowan [McGowan, Todd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sublation Press
Published: 2022-09-22T14:36:28+00:00

9.

Breaking

the Law

Enjoyment transcends the confines of the social order, but it doesn’t transgress the law that constitutes this order. Since enjoyment occurs through excess, it seems to make sense that one could find enjoyment only in exceeding the restrictions of the law, in going beyond what the social order prohibits. Transgression appears as the path to emancipation, which is why so many leftists invest themselves in adopting various forms of transgression for the sake of transgression. To violate the restrictions that the law imposes is certainly to achieve a certain form of excess—an excess relative to the law. But this excess is not the site of radical enjoyment. In the act of going beyond the limit of the law, one often remains within socially determined possibilities. The limits of the law are not the limits of the social situation.84

One of the most grievous errors that undermines the emancipatory project is mistaking transgression for transcendence when interpreting enjoyment. There is nothing inherently radical or emancipatory about transgression. Although people tend to think of famous transgressors in history as paragons of radicality, transgression most often has a conservative function. Rather than exposing the contradiction in the ruling order, transgression typically establishes a clear opposition between the social order and the criminal violating its edicts. Through transgression, emancipatory contradiction becomes conservative opposition between the friends of the social order and its enemies who transgress its edicts. To laud transgression instead of insisting on transcendence as the emancipatory form of enjoyment is to fall for the lure of the criminal.

The criminal’s seduction of the Left begins in earnest with Romanticism. Although it takes different forms, the primary strain of Romanticism transforms the criminal or villain into the hero of its political philosophy. The criminal asserts the right of the individual against the dictates of the social order and refuses to compromise a particular form of subjectivity with these dictates. The defiance of the criminal represents the assertion of the individual’s value in the face of social conformity. This defiance animates the Romantic project. This is apparent in the celebration of the radicality of Satan in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Anyone who reads Paradise Lost will find Satan’s defiance compelling. He is the one character in the epic poem who exhibits courage, who acts regardless of the personal consequences, in contrast with the calculated behavior of God and Christ.85 But the seductiveness of Satan doesn’t just lead Adam and Eve astray. It also lures Romantic poets to the celebration of transgression as a radical act.

For someone like William Blake, Satan’s refusal to heed God’s law renders him more attractive than Christ. He sees Milton’s poem as an inadvertent tribute to Satan, a tribute that violated Milton’s own conscious intentions. In his poem “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” Blake famously writes, “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.

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