Envy, or How to Lose Something

“The real hole of privation is this thing that does not exist.” — Jacques Lacan

“Surely one of Freud’s most admirable working principles, implicit in his practice, is this: nothing is beneath our notice. Psychoanalysis is constituted by a refusal to say ahead of time that anything we do is insignificant, unworthy of contemplation.” —Jonathan Lear

“The memory without memory of a mark returns everywhere …” –Jacques Derrida

Envy is a bad feeling, especially when your envy is directed at someone or something that you used to have, but have lost. I could make a list of people that I envy — people who do can things that I used to be able to do, or do in an un-problematic way. Things like walking in the dark, standing on tip toes, walking backwards, doing jumping jacks, standing up from a chair … pooping.

I am aware that these lost objects or capacities might be idealized. Yes, my poops were much more satisfying 6 months or a year ago, but, I always have to ask myself, were they really that good? (Yes, I am sure of it.) There are lots of questions here, like “What, after all, is a poop?” (it’s not just the poop (or is it), but is it something more than the satisfaction that it brings?) “What is the scale of its goodness?” “Are all lost capacities idealized? If so, then how do we talk about genuine loss of function?” It strikes me that this recognition — that lost objects or capacities are idealized — might leave the person who knows this but experiences them in the uncomfortable position of being in disavowal: I know, of course, but all the same. It’s at least part fiction (or nostalgia), but it’s also real.

I think of envy as a bad feeling because bad feelings are feelings that aren’t validated or likely to result in warm fuzzies or transcendental moments of victory — they aren’t sexy in the contemporary emotional repertoire — like sadness, or anger, or righteousness are. There is maybe a tinge of shame in them, because the admiration implied in envy is double-edged, and it can get a little weird. I can’t remember the last time it was okay for me to tell a friend — or, weirder, a non-friend, an acquaintance — that I really admire their pooping. Or their standing on tip-toes. Or their jumping jacks. But, for my own, I know that there is at least wee bit of judgement, as in, this is a normal poop, while this is certainly not up to standard.

It’s easy to imagine the idealization in ability-envy as teetering over into something more sinister or obsessional. That is the logic that some recent discussions of envy that rely on the work of Melanie Klein, whose “Envy and Gratitude” (1957) remains a touchstone for such thinking. (I pass over for the time being the idea of penis envy, which enjoys an entirely deserved bad reputation.) Teresa Brennan, in her fantastic book The Transmission of Affect shows that Melanie Klein’s take on envy linked it to aggression and sadism. The process of envy, by this telling, involves at first recognizing the envied object — for example, for Klein, the breast– as a of source of goodness. but then rejecting it as a source of persecution. In fact, as Sianne Ngai points out, for Klein, it Is because the object is idealized that it can become a source of persecution. (There should be a long footnote here about my indebtedness to Ngai, whose notion of envy as an ugly feeling overlaps a lot with this idea of an envy as a bad feeling. The ugly feeling, however, is grounded in aesthetic concerns like Aristotelian catharsis whereas I mean bad feeling to gesture more toward social abjection.) As if the perfect poop — somebody else’s perfect poop — were the source of self-hatred. By that logic, the envied object has to be destroyed, or at least beat up a little. Klein:

“I have often described the sadistic attacks on the mother’s breast as determined by destructive impulses. Here I wish to add that envy gives particular impetus to these attacks. This means that when I wrote about the greedy scooping out of the breast and … putting bad excrements into the mother, this adumbrated what I later came to recognize as the envious spoiling of the object.”

It is infrequent that persons with disabilities confess to envying able-bodied persons, and I get it: valuing normative bodies from this vantage point risks re-inforcing all the ways that the environments we traverse everyday (built, legal, cultural, etc.) over-look other bodily experiences. However, part of the edge of envy in this case is that it’s my own body that is the location of this feeling. That is, yes, I do envy people who can move more-or-less unproblematically through the world, but they are really screens for my old body, the one I remember walking, jumping, and swimming with. But even that nostalgia runs up against this little bit of ambivalence: my old body is the one that is disintegrating before my eyes. It’s not that I want to do harm to that body because it’s too good, but that its genetic archive already has a fever.

I could go on. I want to talk more about the travails of identification, which, according to an old but overlooked argument, happens prior to the articulation of elements of Freudian metapsychology — desire, love, superego. That is, even before “I want” there is “I am,” and simultaneously, “I am not.”