Slavoj Žižek’s Political Jouissance is not a treatise that cordons enjoyment off from politics as an embarrassing excess to be evacuated in the name of sober normativity; rather, it stages the paradox that politics is already traversed by enjoyment at its very core, such that any attempt at a purely dispassionate civic rationality is itself a fantasy that erases the libidinal economies which propel belief, solidarity, resentment, cruelty, hope, and the quiet satisfactions of compliance.
Framed by an editorial project that explicitly couples psychoanalytic categories with materialist critique, the volume erects a conceptual theater in which jouissance—that refractory surplus that is neither simple pleasure nor mere pain—appears as a structural condition of ideological efficacy and political form. Its guiding wager is uncompromisingly Lacanian and dialectical at once: there is only the discourse of enjoyment in politics, and the very “surplus” that exceeds utilitarian aims is at once the glue and the solvent of social bonds.
To take politics at its word therefore requires attending to what it refuses to say, to the anxious satisfactions invested in denunciation and righteousness, to the lubricating rituals that make unbelieved beliefs function, and to the obscene supplement where law governs the very ways one is permitted to violate law. The book’s editors and contributors, drawing a through-line from Marx’s analysis of surplus-value to Lacan’s account of plus-de-jouir, press the point that ideology is not an optical illusion perched above economic reality; it is a set of practices, rituals, fantasies, and institutional machines where enjoyment is manufactured, circulated, and taxed as rigorously as capital.
The Preface goes straight for the nerve. It refuses the comfortable asymmetry that would assign enjoyment to the Other—the demagogue, the reactionary, the nationalist—and piety to our side. In a tone at once clinical and disquieting, it asks whether the combustion of public outrage since Brexit and Trump has not itself become an object of collective relish, a form of political self-constitution through shared hatred that relieves anxiety and impotence while demanding ever new targets. The point is neither to moralize nor to “depoliticize” indignation, but to treat its libidinal circuitry as a fact of political life: hatred is a way of binding; an embodied scapegoat is often easier to love-to-hate than a faceless structure; and, where no singular villain presents itself, activism falters for want of a personable object. The political question becomes psychoanalytic to the degree that analysis risks implicating the accuser in the economy of affects it denounces. The price of this risk is clarity: it is not simply that social movements carry affects; they also carry a certain satisfaction that has to be acknowledged if the very form of engagement is to be transformed rather than perpetually reenacted.
The Introduction sharpens the thesis and establishes both the method and the stakes. It registers the obvious—racism, sexism, and the invidious taxonomies of contemporary discourse are not reducible to “false consciousness”—but follows with the unfashionable: ideology captures subjects by mobilizing enjoyment. The operative question is no longer only what we believe, but how belief persists when no one “really believes,” and how social practices externalize belief in rituals and institutions such that the subject is relieved of the intolerable burden of believing “directly.” In a now classic inversion of Pascal, the work proposes that one kneels not to become a believer but to offload belief into action; a horse-shoe on the door is useful precisely because “it works even if one does not believe in it.” The point is not anecdotal. When public life is laminated by practices that encode belief regardless of subjective avowal, the subject supposed to believe is not necessarily the individual I; belief migrates, circulating between persons, rituals, and apparatuses, and it is this migration that grants ideological forms their curious durability.
From this angle, Political Jouissance tracks an itinerary that is rigorous without being doctrinaire. Ideology is treated materially—in Althusser’s sense of apparatuses, rituals, and practices that “give body” to an order of subjection—but the book pushes past apparatus theory to the more refractory register where unconscious presuppositions knit together the “non-ideological” practices of economy, law, and intimate life. The contributors map this third continent of ideology as the domain of “real abstraction,” where exchange-relations and quantifying categories are not merely imposed from above but tacitly habituated as the very grammar of social cognition. Here, fantasy is not a secondary decoration of reality; it is the scaffold that structures what counts as reality, suturing the unassimilable kernel—the traumatic Real of antagonism, exploitation, or dereliction—to an image that can be borne and a schedule of satisfactions that can be pursued. To say that enjoyment sustains ideology is to say that fantasy organizes the surplus that makes deprivation tolerable, obedience rewarding, and revolt addictive.
The volume’s overall architecture—its passage from the crisis-forms of neoliberalism to psychoanalytic interrogations “inside and outside” politics—corresponds to a philosophical movement internal to its thesis. First, the “political crisis in neoliberalism” is registered not as a mere deficit of representation but as a reconfiguration of the subject: the entrepreneur of the self who finances life as a speculative bet, amortizes risk as identity, and is thus recruited to enjoy indebtedness as the very mark of agency. It is not that doctrinal neoliberalism deceives; rather, interpellation orders subjects to enjoy competition as meaning and debt as destiny, while the empirical result—depression, isolation, the slow violence of austerity—becomes the obverse face of a prescriptive fantasy that keeps the machine running. To analyze this is to link a Foucauldian account of subjectivation with an Althusserian one of apparatuses, and then to supplement both with a Žižekian insistence on the unconscious supports by which “entrepreneurial” identities gain their cathexis.
Second, the interrogation of jouissance refuses to remain “in theory.” It follows enjoyment as it is wired into concrete political forms: conspiracist paranoias whose coherence is less cognitive than affective; necropolitical regimes in which social death is administered as a sober necessity yet governed by a sadistic micro-pleasure; algorithmic joy circuits in which surveillance becomes a participatory game whose repetitions promise mastery while producing dependency; and the hyper-sacralization of monarchical signifiers that affixes a smile to the very experience of subjection.1 What renders these forms philosophically legible is not thematic similarity but the structural work of enjoyment in each: libidinal investments bind subjects to fantasy-images that justify violence, rationalize renunciation, and transmute anxiety into the comfort of ritualized hatred. The book thereby illuminates why the pathologies of the present cannot be met by a thin moralism of “facts” against “fakes”: when enjoyment is at stake, data themselves are put to the service of a surreptitious satisfaction, and the “truth” that refutes a claim leaves intact the libidinal pay-off of holding it.
If the first movement diagnoses the economies of enjoyment under late capitalism, the second investigates how psychoanalysis itself must be re-posed once its object is explicitly political. The question is not reducible to drive against law. It is whether a politics that does not acknowledge its enjoyment becomes captive to the very antagonisms it professes to overcome. Here the volume experiments with two opposed temptations. One is the ethical purge: extirpate enjoyment from politics in the name of rational clarity. The other is the ecstatic politics of pure transgression. Both are refused. The psychoanalytic alternative is drier and more difficult: to assume the drive’s insistence without enthroning it, to redirect the rituals where enjoyment is compelled to circulate, and to invent forms of solidarity that neither imagine purity nor fetishize scandal. In that sense, the clinical questions posed to psychoanalysis—the status of the death drive, the impasses of “perversion,” the plasticity of fantasy—are political questions precisely to the extent that politics must decide what to do with that enjoyment it cannot not want.
It is crucial that the book does not idealize analytic discourse as a metalanguage standing outside ideology. On the contrary, it foregrounds how psychoanalysis can collude with the pleasure of denunciation no less than any other discourse. The Preface’s reflection on the “collective enthusiasm of our hatreds” is not an aside; it is a methodological injunction. One cannot analyze “Trump” or “Brexit” while secretly enjoying the righteousness of contempt without thereby becoming an example of what one claims to explain. The analytic position is thus not a moral posture but a discipline of desaturation, a refusal to misrecognize the satisfactions of hatred as self-evident virtue. The same holds for ecological politics: the book diagnoses a certain lethargy born of the absence of an embodied villain, a difficulty in organizing enjoyment around a faceless catastrophe that cannot be personified. The task is not to invent villains but to rethink the libidinal organization of engagement, to find forms of action where satisfaction is uncoupled from scapegoating and reattached to collective transformation.
The editor’s framing thereby returns us to a properly Hegelian problem. If enjoyment in politics is at once a negative power (it corrodes civility, fuels cruelty, absolutizes identities) and a positive condition (it binds, motivates, sustains), then the “sublation” of enjoyment—neither its disavowal nor its enthronement—must be conceived as a risky movement through which negation fails in the right way. In one of the volume’s programmatic gestures, surplus-enjoyment is read as a parallax structure of lack and excess that can be tracked across both repression and its transgressions: the very scene that forbids enjoyment produces a remainder that can be enjoyed, and the very subversive scene that promises liberation may enslave by demanding more enjoyment than any subject can bear. The political corollary is stringent. Projects that moralize enjoyment as “bad” reproduce it in the shadows; projects that sacralize enjoyment as emancipation revert into superegos that command the impossible. Between these failures, the work of the book is to shape practices that neither pretend to purity nor capitulate to cynicism.
A signature strength of Political Jouissance is the clarity with which it renders ideology’s “material existence” without abandoning the symbolic’s autonomous efficacy. The text returns to Althusser’s thesis that ideology lives in rituals, apparatuses, and acts, but then turns the screw: there is also a materiality of the signifier irreducible to institutions, a “machine” of the big Other whose presence-by-absence can be more terrifying than force displayed. The doctrinal state need not make a show of its tanks if everyone knows that tanks can appear; the father’s “omnipotence” is sustained as long as it remains potential; the mercy that cancels the debt can function as a stronger superego than punishment, precisely because its gift binds forever. These reflections are not theatrical ornaments. They index a transformation in the very regime of rule today, where the obscene underside that every order needs has migrated into public daylight—an age of obscene Masters in which the humiliation that once eroded authority is now the badge of its enjoyment. The liberal lament about a “post-truth” era misses this structural novelty: what has changed is not simply truth’s prestige, but the overt libidinal coding of authority as enjoyment without shame.
Within this shift, the book’s Marxian strand is equally adamant that capital’s subject is “us.” The argument is not naïvely voluntarist—nor is it cynically structuralist. Rather, it insists that capital usurps the place of the subject by way of an objective fantasy that renders totality self-generating and subjects epiphenomenal; to interrupt that fantasy is to return agency to the agents, not as sovereign masters but as those whose practices produce the abstraction that then dominates them. Here psychoanalysis clarifies why the most effective “fake” is factually true: a partial truth that sutures enjoyment can be more ideological than a bald lie, because it gratifies a fantasy that shields one from the trauma of antagonism. What makes a conspiratorial narrative seductive is not its epistemic content but its precise ability to organize enjoyment in the face of a reality that cannot be borne as such. The critique of ideology therefore cannot be a pedagogy of facts alone; it must be a counter-engineering of fantasy and a redistribution of satisfactions.
The intellectual horizon of the book is correspondingly wide. It allows Hegel’s logic of negativity to illuminate Lacan’s economies of the drive; it lets Foucault’s analyses of subjectivation cross with Althusser’s apparatuses; and it returns to Marx not only for concepts but for a method: begin from the surplus that objectifies the relation, then track how the relation engenders a surplus that insists beyond utility. It is no accident that the contributors repeatedly draw the analogy between surplus-value and surplus-enjoyment: both name a circular causality where subtraction produces excess, and both oblige us to think political transformation as a re-wiring of circuits rather than a simple change of content. To speak of a “joy circuit” in the age of surveillance is not metaphor but diagnosis: repetition is not opposed to enjoyment; repetition is the very way enjoyment is sustained. The wager, then, is practical: whether one can invent rituals in which satisfaction is no longer tethered to scapegoats, in which fidelity is not the guarantee of a Master’s mercy, in which acting “as if” one believed does not relieve one of the responsibility to decide what to believe.
The philosophical tone of the collection remains disenchanted without being resigned. It does not promise a heroic cure for jouissance. It offers instead a repertoire of conceptual instruments for reading how enjoyment is distributed and for experimenting with its redistribution. Consider the political implications of “belief without believers,” so central to the volume’s opening claims. It is precisely because belief can function socially without subjective conviction that one must parse the rituals that make institutions stick, the gestures that allow a subject to externalize conviction into form, the scripts by which communities can act a belief they are relieved of holding. It follows that a progressive politics has no monopoly on such techniques: fascism is efficient precisely because it channels enjoyment with incomparable skill. The ethical imperative, if one can use that term in a psychoanalytic register, is to assume responsibility for one’s satisfactions without elevating them into principles; to recognize complicity without fetishizing guilt; to construct practices whose libidinal returns are attached to emancipation rather than to domination.
This is why the book is not content to diagnose neoliberal melancholia, algorithmic obsession, or conspiratorial ecstasy from afar. It also risks the analysis of its “own side,” including the libidinal economies of critique itself. Academic denunciation can be exhilarating. Moral clarity is intoxicating. The volume’s most quietly radical gesture may be its bid to disenchant those pleasures, not to make thought austere but to make action possible. If hatred gives us ourselves—as the Preface mordantly suggests—then the labor is to find other ways to have a self than through the ecstasies of contempt. If environmentalism stumbles without a villain, then the organizing problem is not only logistical but libidinal: how to craft collective projects whose satisfactions do not depend on an enemy’s embodiment. If citizenship is frayed by the brazen shame of obscene authority, then repairing it means inventing forms of authority whose enjoyment is bound to care rather than cruelty.
The book’s editorial character is not incidental to its argument. That an array of scenes—neoliberal finance as a pedagogy of debt, the intimate politics of outrage, national theologies that sanctify obedience, media ecologies that gamify surveillance, philosophical re-readings of ethics and death drive—can be read under a single rubric is itself a claim about jouissance’s generality. Yet the collection refuses unity where it would be violent: it allows theoretical frictions, plural disciplines, and stylistic divergences. What is constant is the methodological conviction that enjoyment is not an epiphenomenon of power but one of its conditions; and that psychoanalytic categories are not allegories for politics but instruments for analyzing its material forms. The result is not a synthesis but a conceptual field in which politics is approached as something one does with enjoyment, and where the task is to render that doing less cruel, less compulsive, and more conducive to emancipation.
To read Political Jouissance as a “book description,” then, is to abide by its own procedural ethos: not to list theses or rehearse summaries, but to linger on the structural intuitions that animate it. It is a description of politics as an economy of surplus that cannot be reduced to interests or truths, and a description of critique as an operation that must count the satisfactions it delivers to its practitioners. It is also a description of our present as a time when the obscene supplement is no longer supplementary, when authority enjoys in public, and when the desire for a purely rational public sphere is both understandable and insufficient. If there is a Hegelian moral, it is that the labor of the negative must include the labor upon enjoyment: a politics that neither represses jouissance nor worships it, but learns to conduct it through institutions, practices, and fantasies that make freedom livable.
The editorial credits, institutional scaffolding, and publication context matter here, because they name the space of responsibility in which such a project can take shape. This is an edited volume whose contributors speak across psychoanalysis, philosophy, media studies, and political theory, first published in 2024 and housed under Bloomsbury’s academic imprint. Its table of contents, biographical notes, and introductory frame are not paratexts in the trivial sense; they are themselves rituals by which a collective addresses an object that no single voice can dominate. That institutional form—an apparatus that makes a discourse possible—mirrors the theoretical insistence that ideology has a material existence in apparatuses and that enjoyment courses through them. The medium, here, is not the mere carrier of the message; it is one of the book’s arguments, enacted.
What remains for the reader after this dense encounter is not a doctrine but a set of displacements. One will be slower to take comfort in outrage, more attentive to the satisfactions that indignation delivers, and more exacting in the design of collective forms that shift enjoyment away from cruelty and toward durable solidarity. One will also be less tempted by the moralism that treats jouissance as the enemy of politics, and more willing to accept that it is politics’ condition. That acceptance is anything but quietist. It demands invention, patience, and an unlikely asceticism: not the renunciation of pleasure, but the refusal to let the wrong pleasures govern our politics.
Simon Gros 
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