While understanding the psychological structure of pleasure and desire might seem to be unrelated to understanding our current political crisis, Todd McGowan argues that the intrinsically excessive nature of what Lacan would call jouissance, what McGowan calls Enjoyment, is critically important to understand as we try to overcome the contradictions and conflicts that arise in a world that appears split between right and left.

The discursive analysis of ideology fails to capture the mode of enjoyment an ideology mobilizes. In his new path-breaking book, Todd McGowan elaborates on the formal structure of enjoyment which distinguishes the Left from the Right. The enjoyment mobilized by the Left is not sustained by envy and resentment. It leaves behind the motifs of the theft of enjoyment that permeates racism and sexism. Enjoyment Right and Left deserves to become an instant classic - it cuts into the very heart of what is wrong in today's fundamentalism and its apparent opposite, permissive liberalism. - Slavoj Zizek, author of Less Than Nothing