A late Christmas post, stuck on the Julian calendar etc.
Envy is a problem for left politics, and not just because someone on the WSJ editorial page or whatever thinks that it’s the only possible motive for a redistributive policy platform. The intellectual debate about this in a sense doesn’t matter, because a lot of people who ought to be a natural constituency for socialism now instinctively feel that it’s a politics of envy. Since envy is per se a confession of inferiority, and since these people are as obsessed with honor as any medieval viscount, there’s an almost insurmountable psychological barrier between them and a politics that would improve their lives.
Is that because the idea’s been drummed into their heads for so long it seems natural? Or because their own politics is entirely invidious? The truth is probably somewhere in between: they believe it when they hear that envy is what drives calls for redistribution because it makes sense to them to think of political objectives in that way.
Whatever the particular bases of this delusion, it’s widespread enough to cause real problems for a left politics that also wants to be a mass politics. And certainly also it might, in some cases, turn out to be true. This is something we need to worry about subjectively, too: how can we hate the rich (as is absolutely proper) without involving, as fantastmatic supports for our hatred, the objects that the rich own and notionally enjoy (which means envying the rich and thus positioning ourselves as losers in advance)?
On the level of political, the answer is clear. We’re interested in changing systems: the things those systems misdistribute, and which need to get redistributed in order to change the system, are only secondary. Psychologically, though, that answer doesn’t satisfy. Anger makes revolutions, and no one’s ever been angry at a system, not really.
For us as subjects to steer clear of envy means getting into the old-fashioned (and unfashionable) field of ethics. Ethics, as Aristotle recognized, isn’t always about wanting the right thing. Good and bad people alike, for instance, want to be healthy and wealthy, so that fact that you want health or wealth says nothing about your character. What’s important is rather the way (or the why) in which you desire: what do you want health or wealth for, with what fantasmatic image in mind do you desire them? Only the good is an end in itself; everything else falls under this pros ti modulation. It would be possible, then, to desire a state of affairs in which the goods of the rich had been redistributed under a number of different descriptions. One could desire it as a way of injuring the rich and stealing their happiness – the invidious position. Or one could desire it as forming part of or a stepping stone on the way to “the good,” whatever that is.
In Aristotle, the distinction between those two descriptions blurs a little because of the identity he sets between pleasure and happiness. The pleasure one receives from bringing down others may be a real component of happiness: the good may contain envy, provided that that envy is (successfully) acted-upon. Lacan usefully supplements this argument by suggesting that envy can never be successfully acted-upon: the pleasure we think we’re stealing from someone else, the enjoyment we think they have, turns out to be no such thing once we get our hands on it.
For Lacan, the question is a broader one of goods versus The Good. Particular goods exist in a field of hostile neighborliness, of mimetic desire in which we covet what our neighbor has because our desiring it proves that we, too, are people. The alternative is to desire straightforwardly The Good, which is the “thing” that would actually give us jouissance. On Lacan’s analysis, however, we can’t actually desire The Good (because the “thing” is that which, for us, escapes symbolization) and, if we did manage to find it, the experience of real jouissance would probably destroy us anyway. So we’re thrown back into envy as the only possible form of ethics.
What we can do – perhaps the only escape from this Lacanian conundrum – is try to guess at the true desire of the other and enjoy at second-hand the jouissance that constitutes The Good. We do this all the time in two fields – sex and gift-giving, Merry Christmas – which are the major ethical occasions of modern American life outside of politics. Not coincidentally, these are also relations in which envy has no authentic place.
In both situations, we occupy the position of the “wild analyst” whose aim is to make the patient enjoy by any means necessary. Sometimes this means (on our part) cruelty or even sadism. But what we want, for sure, is not any good in particular; we want The Good, if not for ourselves then of one of the infitine alter egos out of which a polity gets made. Could a polity actually survive the achievement of that aim? If not, then polity itself has to be understood as a fantasmatic support that keeps us (invidiously) chasing after goods rather than achieving The Good. Probably, the state needs to wither away.
The point of my saying all this is to suggest that an envy-free and appropriately socialist hatred of the rich would also be a kind of love, one that aimed at obliterating the obstacles – their possessions – that block the rich and the rest of us from our jouissance. For the left, the best really is the enemy of the good.