Each day seems like a natural fact
— “Why Theory?”, Gang of Four

When the pandemic was at its height, a friend recommended Todd McGowan and Ryan Engley’s podcast Why Theory. I was quickly hooked by the lively conversation and incisive cultural and political analysis. Across the varied episodes, all steeped in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and Hegelian philosophy, a profound logic began to emerge, a logic of lack.  

On their podcast Todd and Ryan discussed the annual(ish) psychoanalytic conference, LACK (co-organised by Todd). Delayed over the pandemic, LACK resumed this April, and Effects co-editor Lakshmi Luthra, regular contributor Christopher Carlton and I made a pilgrimage to the University of Vermont in Burlington to attend this unusual gathering.

Shuffling between a few rooms in the unassuming Davis Centre of UVM, we heard fresh analyses of capitalism and alienation, new ways of thinking about racism and feminism, clinical papers on psychosis and perversion, alongside many counterintuitive interpretations of aesthetic phenomena, especially Hollywood films. In addition to the more conventional scholarly formats, a number of the presentations resembled poetic recitations, experimental video works or performance art. Despite the variety, LACK participants drew on a shared theoretical and political framework, allowing for sharp, spirited discussion across a range of topics and perspectives. We left convinced that vital thinking was being done at LACK.

Effects and LACK are kindred spirits: not only are our methods aligned—both aim to analyse structures through surface phenomena—but our forms are too. Effects masquerades as an academic journal, smuggling in experimental material under a formal veneer, likewise, LACK, while a genuine academic conference, dispenses with many of the usual formalities that create a sense of hierarchy among participants, making room for experimental contributions and unexpected encounters.

Following the conference we spoke with Todd McGowan, one of LACK’s founders and organisers (with Hilary Neroni, Henry Krips and Jennifer Friedlander) about the conference, the theories that undergird it and his own innovative work via Succession, Pretty Woman and Titanic. Todd McGowan is professor of English at the University of Vermont and is the author of numerous books that combine German Idealist philosophy and psychoanalytic theory with analyses of film and literature to tackle large philosophical, political and existential questions. His recent books include: The Racist Fantasy: Unconscious Roots of Hatred (Bloomsbury, 2022), Enjoyment Right & Left (Sublation, 2022) and Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution (Columbia, 2019).

—Christopher Page

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EFFECTS: We wanted to begin by saying what a generous and friendly conference this year’s LACK was, in form as well as content—there were no name tags, no hierarchy, everyone was very approachable—and especially when you reminded everyone that we are all alienated, lacking subjects whose symbolic identities are constructions, it made the conference very un-alienating, in the common usage of the term…

TODD: Good, let’s be clear about that!

EFFECTS: Yes, we’ll come back to alienation! So, LACK is not your average academic conference, how and when did it begin? 

TODD: Yeah so it began as a response to academic conferences. For one thing there weren’t papers that were interested in theory at a lot of the conferences we went to so we just wanted to have some place that was theoretical, especially psychoanalytic theory and German Idealism, that connection, and that was a part of what created it. But the four of us—Henry Kripps, Jennifer Friedlander, Hillary Neroni and myself—we were in a hotel room at another conference and we were like “this is terrible and there’s no one here to talk to and the leaders of the group made themselves the plenary speakers,” and we thought: let’s have a group where we never do that, where we are the lowest people there. And then we always hated the way that people wanted to make sure their book was at the book table—we wanted no book tables—and we also hated the way that at these big conferences everyone has a name-tag that has their affiliation beneath. So you see someone in the elevator and you look at their name-tag and you ask do I know the person? And if not—if it’s not Frederic Jameson or whoever—then I look at the school and then I decide whether to talk to them or not. We also hated the papers that drone on and on, so we put a tight 15 minute time-limit on the papers. And then we thought we don’t need a bio to introduce people, because that’s also a part of that whole thing. We wanted to make it a very non-academic kind of conference where it wasn’t about academic status but just about people conversing, confronting each other about ideas.

EFFECTS: You introduced the Lacanian “short session” into the conference?

TODD: Yeah, the people who were charing the sessions really only have one job—to be prickish! You don’t have to introduce the speakers, but you do have to cut them off! If you can’t get your idea across in 15 minutes, then you don’t have your idea, I think. 

EFFECTS: Why is it called LACK?

TODD: We were initially searching around for a Lacan acronym, and we couldn’t think of one, so then we thought why don’t we just call it LACK and just not have it stand for anything? And then one person said that people will think it stands for something, but we insisted that it not stand for anything, that’ll be the point. So the point is it’s lacking a signified—it’s a signifier that doesn’t have a signified—so the very lacking of the term actually formally indicates the content. As you said, we’re all lacking subjects and we’re not a certain symbolic identity and that’s really important to all of us, and we think that’s evoked by the term lack. And I also think that you can only come together around a bond that is lacking, that there is no positive bond that holds the group together. That’s why there’s always a sense that this might be the last time that we’ll have the conference! I said that at the end, I was like “well, maybe this is it” and I had so many people come up to me and say that this can’t be it. I cannot psychically host it next time, it’s a lot of logistics. But there have been others who have stepped up and offered to host it next, so that’s good.

EFFECTS: If people would usually think of words like ‘abundance’ and ‘plenitude’ as emancipatory, why is it emancipatory to think of ourselves as fundamentally lacking?

TODD: It’s a great question because in a way it separates (and of course I think these two things are distinct) the capitalist project and the Marxist one from what I would call the Hegelian or psychoanalytic one. Certain Marxist friends of mine would say that I am characterising them wrongly, but I think Marxism does dream of a world of plenitude, a world where production is unleashed from its furls under capitalism, and I think capitalism also dreams of producing abundance through competition. But the idea of psychoanalysis is that we can only have excess through lack, that those two things are necessarily tied together. So it’s not necessarily that we don’t have excesses and we can’t have plenitude, but that plenitude always comes with lack attached to it—there’s no way to get to it without lack. And it’s not just that we go through this passage of lack and we arrive at plenitude—which is perhaps a standard narrative of history—but instead that every moment of excess and every moment of plenitude is necessarily tied to a grasp of one’s lack. I wrote a whole book on comedy in which that’s the theory [Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy, Northwestern, 2017], that when lack and excess come together that’s funny. 

A quick example: if you think about anything that seems sacred and transcendent, there’s always a sacrifice associated with it, and if we don’t feel like there’s some sacrifice then we don’t feel like we’ve really gotten something excessive. And if you think about it in those terms you see why lack is so vital to being excessive. Because I think excess is really important, it gives us reasons to live—sexual excesses, culinary, aesthetic. Think about the way artistic practice is tied to such incredible discipline in order to create something that’s excessive and enjoyable for the spectator. 

EFFECTS: Psychoanalytic theory, and particularly the idea of the unconscious, has added such a powerful dimension to the analysis and critique of politics. Many of the papers at LACK seemed to be driving ultimately towards political questions, and seemed to go beyond critique, perhaps even helping us prepare for the calamities to come. Do you think there is something like a shared politics emerging from LACK? 

TODD: Yes for sure, I think, though there are different versions of it, there is a shared political position that most of the people who come to LACK take up. And I think you hit it right on, that most people in this organisation and affiliated with it are against the pure politics of resistance—critique, critique, critique—but instead want to think about how to construct something. Which has always been a dicey thing for psychoanalysis, because if your focus is on the unconscious, then how do you… because the unconscious is disruptive. But it’s also the site of our fecundity, and I would even say it’s the site of our freedom. Tapping into how the unconscious works, most of us at LACK think that is the path to understanding new political possibilities that otherwise would be obfuscated. You’re limited if you’re thinking only in terms of consciousness, and most political actors do—except some of the right wing, who are great at making unconscious appeals, whether they know it or not, to racism etc.

EFFECTS: In many of your books, such as Emancipation After Hegel (Columbia, 2019) and Universality and Identity Politics (Columbia, 2020), you champion a universalist politics. Even though you distinguish between the logics of left- and right-wing politics in books such as Enjoyment Right & Left (Sublation, 2022) you never distinguish between people. Does psychoanalysis help us to perceive a fundamental form of the psyche upon which a universalist politics could be built? 

TODD: Yes I think that’s absolutely right. I do often talk in terms of right and left, but I am a universalist, so I think that in a certain way everyone is on the left but people mistakenly think they are on the right! Psychoanalysis, precisely because of its understanding of the unconscious shows us the universality of alienation. Hegel was the first thinker of this, but psychoanalysis theorises it in terms of the unconscious. I think that really gives us a way of seeing our universal connection with other people without the imposition of cultural ideals on others and that being our sameness. For psychoanalysis I don’t even have my own culture—I don’t even have my own identity, it’s the thing most alien to me. I’m sitting here talking to you and you have a better sense of my symbolic identity than I do! That’s the fundamental idea of psychoanalysis, that your unconscious is out there, it’s not some private thing within you. That’s why I think it’s a universalist project, because it connects people on that fundamental level. 

EFFECTS: In your recent book Enjoyment Right & Left you ground your universalism in what you call ‘non-belonging’. It would be fair to say that mainstream emancipatory watchwords would, today, be words like ‘abundance’, ‘wholeness’, ‘community’, ‘belonging’, whereas your emancipatory watchwords are almost the opposite, words like ‘lack’, ‘alienation’, ‘non-belonging’. How do these seemingly negative ideas (and ‘negative’ is another word that has a positive valence in your way of thinking) help us develop a more robust emancipatory politics? 

TODD: I was just thinking how in universities the word ‘inclusion’ is such a big thing, how we must help everybody feel ‘included’, and the whole premise of our conference is to help everyone feel not included! Here’s the problem with it: I don’t think any inclusionary project can be emancipatory because the only way you have inclusion is by having other people excluded. It doesn’t matter who it is. This dream of universal inclusion will always be a dream because there are always going to be people who are not on board with the program—structurally, necessarily. That’s why I think it’s only the project of universal non-belonging that actually is universal, because it taps into the alienation of everybody from themselves. Non-belonging doesn’t need to exclude anyone, because everyone is excluded from it already. Someone said to me “wait, but you need an enemy, someone who belongs” but no because the position of belonging is itself structurally empty, no one really belongs, even the person who seems most on the inside doesn’t belong. 

I’m watching Succession, I think it’s pretty good, it’s about people who are really on the inside. And all of them feel totally alienated, like they’re not on the inside, even the main guy in charge. I think it does a nice job of showing how no matter how far you get in, you always feel like you’re out. There’s no way of overcoming alienation. 

EFFECTS: Does Succession show that those most on the inside can have the most pathological relationship to their non-belonging? 

TODD: Right, because they are so desperate, because they see non-belonging as such a stain, they’ll do anything to belong. I was watching with my spouse Hillary [Neroni] and I said “do you think people would go that far to conform to the wishes of their boss?” And she said “you have no idea.” It’s interesting how people will debase themselves to get inside, when they think there is an inside to get to. I would associate conformity with this ‘inside’, which is oppressive. Conformity is not the mass movement against capitalism, it is oppressive. 

EFFECTS: Freud’s late, still controversial and misunderstood idea of the death drive is coming up in theory a lot at the moment, but largely to describe capitalism and its infinite, suicidal rapaciousness. It seems like some of the speakers at LACK and yourself see it in a more productive light. Could you talk to that? 

TODD: Anna Kornbluh’s opening talk at LACK was really a critique of this association of capitalism and the death drive. For most of us at LACK the death drive, even though it sounds terrible, is the source of all of our productivity. It’s self-destructive and yet emancipatory. If you think about it, it’s the way that you take aim at and destroy what’s in your own self interest. Which is also how you free yourself from the chains of the social order. Certain aspects of the social order get you hooked by saying “hey, this is in your self-interest to do this”, but if you’re willing to sacrifice your self-interest then you have an immense freedom to act totally otherwise. That’s why for a lot of us the death drive is aligned with freedom precisely because it frees you from all the inducements of the good that society gives you. Capitalist society especially is constantly telling you that you need to act in your self-interest, but there’s this other drive, Freud thinks—the death drive—that allows you to satisfy yourself at odds with your self-interest. I think there are also ways that capitalism uses that self-destructiveness but in large part I think it is an anti-capitalist drive.

EFFECTS: Its interesting to think about the death drive in relation to Succession. You talked about how the characters in that show debase themselves. Is it how you destroy yourself that matters? 

TODD: I’m so glad you said that because the psychoanalytic concept of superego and death drive are nicely aligned. Superego is the way in which you destroy yourself for the social command. Whereas death drive is the way you destroy yourself for yourself. When you allow the death drive to be put under the umbrella of the superego you put it in service of the social authority. That’s what happens on Succession all the time. That’s why the characters are able to do anything, because they are so driven by this superegoic pressure, which itself stems from their own death drive. You can think about superego as this taking over of the power of death drive for the sake of the symbolic social authority. 

EFFECTS: Some people would decry that there has been such a polarisation of politics over the past ten years, and the abandonment of a discourse based on facts for one based on the transmission of feelings. But your recent writing, and many of the speakers at LACK, would imply that politics really is about feelings and should be fought on that terrain. So is the polarisation of the political field, if not good then perhaps necessary to open the space for a more psychoanalytic thinking about politics? 

TODD: Yeah I like that. Obviously I’m not for it per se, but perhaps it clarifies something, that it makes something evident that was all the time operative. Because when people are talking about ‘facts’ they’re never really talking about facts, they are talking about something else. Why are they talking about these facts and not these other facts? What’s obfuscated behind the choice of facts is that they are conducive to a certain kind of enjoyment, and the other facts aren’t. So the more that we can get that confrontation of the form of enjoyment to the fore, I think that’s probably good. (Of course the world might be destroyed in the meantime…!) The fear of people who lament this is that if politics is emotional, then the right will win. But my feeling is, if it’s emotional in the right way, and understood as emotional on both sides, then the emancipatory position will win out. I understand why people think that, but I think that’s because the left has tied itself to what you called the ‘discourse of facts’ and being allergic to the notion of emotion or enjoyment playing a role. 

EFFECTS: Which makes it clear what is so urgent in your work in analysing mainstream films and drawing out what is emancipatory and radical within them. You even see the radicality in films that others would dismiss out of hand, like Titanic for example. In Enjoyment Right & Left you lay out the differing logics of right- and left-wing enjoyment. Is there a concomitant logic of radical versus conservative films? 

TODD: Yeah I think there is, and it has to do with belonging and non-belonging. Does the film allow us to enjoy non-belonging or does it insist upon some ultimate belonging? What I like about Titanic is that the moments of enjoyment in it are all moments of universal non-belonging. You’re absolutely right to say that there is something crucial in saying that the reason we enjoy films is not because there is some ideological thing in the end where the couple comes together—although in Titanic they don’t come together!—but, no, because there are these other moments where that gets resisted and there is something else at work, and it's really important to look for that. To look for the moment where—we were talking about death drive—enjoyment through self-destruction becomes one of the ways in which the film works in the spectator. It's hard to think of a film that doesn’t in some way do that. Part of it is turning your attention away from the end, the way the romantic couple is produced let’s say. 

Let’s think of a terrible romantic comedy: Pretty Woman. It’s terrible, it’s very ideological, the ending is all about the accumulation of capital, it’s terrible…But in order for it to be enjoyable there have to be all these misfires along the way in their relationship. So if you look at it and say ‘wait a minute, what I liked about Pretty Woman wasn’t this ending with her getting all the money, no, instead it was all these misfires where they didn’t see eye to eye, things didn’t work out.’ So even the crappiest film can be understood in that way. Okay there are truly great films, obviously—Citizen Kane is all misfire. I just saw Dungeons and Dragons, it was pretty crappy, but even then there are moments of failure within the film, and if you can see that that is where your enjoyment lies, then I think you find something emancipatory even in the most ideological film. 

EFFECTS: So the Hollywood ending is the betrayal of emancipation in films? 

TODD: It’s one of the main betrayals. I think betrayals happen at different times. It could be a formal movement, a shot-reverse-shot instead of a single shot that helps to make you feel comfortable as a spectator but also serves to obfuscate what you are actually enjoying in the film. 

EFFECTS: It seems that what is emerging from our conversation is that our relationship to lack is fundamental. If we misrecognise our relationship to lack we can become desperate consumers, conservatives, even racists,1 while if we understand our lack correctly, we can be emancipated, and aesthetics, films, can help us do that. 

TODD: Absolutely right, if we think our lack can be overcome, then we’re going to consume like crazy, succumb to conservatism…I think it's the fault line about how we comport ourselves in the world. 

EFFECTS: What have you been thinking about since LACK? 

TODD: The thing that is keeping me up is that I’m half way through writing a book on the death drive. I really want to write my version of what death drive is. Everybody talks about it but I want to go through what has been said and then say what I think. 

EFFECTS: We look forward to that greatly. Was there anything in any of the papers given at the conference that has been on your mind? 

TODD: Sheldon George’s concluding talk on racism. He connected racism to Lacan’s Logical Time essay. I thought it was just incredible. We talk about it on our podcast Why Theory, we go through it pretty substantially, if people want to hear about it. 

EFFECTS: Thank you so much, Todd.