Everything so far explains what people believe and what structures constrain them. It does not explain why people cling to beliefs and structures that plainly work against their own stated interests, or why factual correction so reliably fails to change anyone's mind. McGowan's second book The End of Dissatisfaction, argues that political theory has almost entirely ignored a term psychoanalysis puts at the center of the subject: enjoyment, which is not the same thing as pleasure and behaves according to an entirely different logic.

Freud's early theory of the pleasure principle, laid out plainly in the Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, treats pleasure as arising from the reduction of excitation rather than its buildup — the clearest case being orgasm, the culminating discharge that ends a rising tension. Pleasure, on this model, is necessarily brief, because it is a culmination rather than a state; a new car, a good meal, sexual release all deliver the same short-lived rush and then fade, requiring the whole cycle to start again. But by 1920, working out the implications of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud arrives at something the pleasure principle alone cannot explain: a death drive that thrives on obstacles rather than trying to eliminate them, that gets its satisfaction from disturbance rather than relief. Enjoyment, in McGowan's vocabulary, names this second thing: not the discharge at the end of a roller coaster's steep drop, but the slow climb beforehand that produces the anxious anticipation the drop only resolves. Enjoyment requires an object that stays lost or absent; the moment it becomes simply present and available, it stops functioning as a site of enjoyment and becomes merely useful. Misplaced car keys become, while they're missing, invested with a kind of significance they never had while sitting in your pocket — and the instant you find them, that significance evaporates. Because enjoyment depends on absence and obstruction in this way, it necessarily involves suffering, which is why a society organized around eliminating all suffering would, by the same stroke, eliminate the possibility of enjoyment along with it.

This distinction turns out to carry real political weight, because pleasure occurs entirely within the coordinates a social order authorizes — a raise, a purchase, a promotion, all fit comfortably inside what the system already sanctions — while enjoyment occurs precisely at the point where those coordinates break down, where the social order cannot account for what is happening and has no framework ready to validate it. As the psychoanalytic theorist Joan Copjec puts it "Jouissance(enjoyment) flourishes only there where it is not validated by the Other." Nobody's enjoyment is ever officially sanctioned by the systems that surround them; it always shows up at the point those systems fail to reach.

This is where McGowan locates the actual difference between Right and Left, and it is a structural claim rather than a claim about which side has better arguments. Right-wing enjoyment requires an enemy as a formal, non-negotiable feature, not an incidental one. A threat is what transforms an otherwise unremarkable identity into something worth defending and, in the process, worth enjoying — much the way installing a car alarm on a cheap, unremarkable car convinces the owner the car must be valuable after all, since apparently someone might bother to steal it. There is nothing intrinsically enjoyable about any particular national or ethnic identity on its own; the enjoyment shows up only once a threat marks that identity as endangered. This is why the American debate over Confederate monuments followed the pattern it did: nobody was flocking to admire the statues on ordinary afternoons, and the intensity of feeling around them only appeared once their removal was proposed, revealing that what people were actually defending was never really the statues but the specific enjoyment that only became visible once it seemed under threat. Right-wing movements are structurally dependent on the outsiders they vilify in a way none of their adherents can openly admit, since admitting it would mean admitting that their own enjoyment is parasitic on exactly the figure they claim to despise.

Left-wing or emancipatory enjoyment, on this account, does not require an enemy, because it identifies with the position of nonbelonging directly rather than displacing it onto a threatening outsider. The Danish response to the Nazi occupation is a classic example of this: rather than joining or passively permitting the deportation of Danish Jews, the Danish resistance moved to smuggle the overwhelming majority of them to safety in neutral Sweden, an act of collective identification the historian Hannah Arendt later called unique among all the countries of occupied or collaborating Europe. Because this form of enjoyment refuses to treat anyone as a permanent enemy, it stays open to conversion in a way right-wing enjoyment structurally cannot; a rightist movement built on excluding immigrants cannot invite immigrants in without dissolving its own reason for existing, but an emancipatory movement can and does welcome former opponents — part of why some individual police officers were able to kneel alongside protesters during the 2020 demonstrations that followed George Floyd's death without that gesture registering as a contradiction. This asymmetry gives the Right a genuine practical advantage, since locating an enemy is always easier than learning to recognize absence itself as a source of meaning, even though, on McGowan's account, it is emancipatory enjoyment that is actually universal, since nonbelonging is a position available to literally everyone, while right-wing belonging always secretly depends on someone being permanently excluded from it.

The contrast even shows up in the structure of jokes. A standard anticommunist joke — asking for the best way to kill communists, and answering "communism" — correctly identifies a real historical contradiction, but keeps the anticommunist telling the joke entirely free of contradiction themselves; the humor depends on one side of the exchange staying whole while the other side comes apart. Contrast this with an old joke about a monastery, where the monks, having lived together so long, tell jokes by number rather than in full, and a visitor who shouts out a made-up number gets the biggest laugh of the evening precisely because nobody has ever heard "that one" before — nobody in the room, including the monks who have lived there for decades, actually knows the joke everyone is laughing at. Everyone is included in the laughter, and no one belongs to the group that supposedly understands its source, because there is no such group. That empty, formally universal nonbelonging, rather than any specific shared content, is what emancipatory comedy and, by extension, emancipatory politics are actually structured around.