And while I’m airing my Lacanian dirty laundry, let’s talk about jouissance. What, exactly, are we talking about when we talk about jouissance in Lacan? Lacan distinguishes between jouissance and pleasure. Despite the fact that jouissance translates as “enjoyment”, it appears that there’s very little about it that is pleasurable (this is one of my problems with Fink’s use of the term in his writings; he seems to assimilate it to pleasure, when it’s very different from pleasure). Pleasure, says Lacan, is a reduction of tension in the psychic system. For example, pleasure is the satisfaction I get when I eat a great meal when I’m very hungry. Jouissance, by contrast, is when you compulsively eat and eat and eat, despite the fact that your continued consumption causes you a great deal of pain and discomfort. You can’t stop yourself. Pleasure is sneezing after a build-up of your nose itching. Jouissance is cutting yourself with razor blades. Pleasure is making love. Jouissance is fucking fifteen or twenty times in a single day– or doing the masturbatory equivalent –even though it’s no longer pleasurable and has even become painful. Evoking Lacan’s example from Seminar 7, jouissance is going through the door to be with the forbidden woman even though you know you’ll be punished for all eternity for doing so (i.e., you destroy yourself).
The concept of jouissance is slippery. We’re told that jouissance is something that we lose when we enter the symbolic order and that we perpetually try to regain. However, given the examples above, it sounds like jouissance is a pretty horrible thing. Indeed, Lacan often talks about jouissance as something that’s traumatic, and speaks of desire as an attempt to defend against jouissance. These strike me as incompatible concepts. Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that pleasure is something that we lose when we enter the symbolic order and that jouissance is the repetitive trace of this traumatic loss that we can’t escape from in our lives (i.e., classical Epicureanism is impossible)? Rather than claiming that jouissance is something we try to regain— how could that be true if desire defends against it –it would be more accurate to say that jouissance is the repetition of a trauma that perpetually subverts pleasure and happiness and from which we cannot escape. Yet if we say this, then it seems as if we must substantially revise our understanding of fantasy– ($ <> a) –in Lacanian theory, as “a” is one of the symbols for jouissance and it would be strange to suggest that the subject wants to be unified with this traumatic excess. That would be exactly what the subject doesn’t want. Indeed, when the person enters the clinic their demand is often “How can I get rid of my jouissance?!?! Free me of my jouissance!” In other words, jouissance is that which derails and subverts our aims, plans, and pleasures, not something that we “enjoy”.
Then we have the whole problem of how to understand the different forms of jouissance. Lacan distinguishes between surplus-jouissance or the objet a, phallic jouissance or jφ, Other-jouissance or J(~A~), and “joui-sense”. How do we clinically identify these different sorts of jouissance?
* Surplus-jouissance or objet a, I think, is the easiest to understand. The objet a is the trace of a remainder or loss that takes place when we enter the symbolic order or are alienated in the signifier. Why does the signifier do this? Because, as Lacan said in his Rome Discourse, “the word kills the thing”. The world kills the thing because it introduces absence into the world. With the word, it is now possible to refer to things that are absent and that don’t even exist. Moreover, the word “freezes” the thing. As Hegel argued in the open of the Phenomenology when analyzing sense-certainty, words are always general universal terms, whereas things are singularities. As a consequence, there’s always a disadequation between word and thing. We want the word, as it were, but no thing is ever adequate to the generality of the word. As a consequence, every time we get the thing (not to be confused with what Lacan called The Thing), we’re disappointed. It’s not it. That experience of “it not being it” is what generates surplus-jouissance. We repeat because that gap between word and thing perpetually reappears. “One more time for the sake of it!” The surplus of surplus-jouissance is not a pleasure, but the perpetual reappearance of a traumatic lack arising from the gap between words and things. I hear a number of Lacanians say that objet a is the object of our desire, that it’s what we want. I think this is profoundly sloppy and not at all true. Objet a is what causes our desire, not the thing we say we want. It’s why we’re not simply creatures of need (beings that could be satisfied and where the pleasure principle would reign), but are desiring creatures. The objet a’s are never the objects we think we desire, but always function “behind our backs”, leading us to repeat.
* Phallic jouissance is one form of jouissance that I find deeply mysterious. This might be because I have trouble with the concept of the Phallus in Lacanian psychoanalysis in general (maybe this says something about my own subjective economy, who knows… If there’s one concept I hate more than any other in Lacanian psychoanalysis, it’s that of the phallus). I read “Signification of the Phallus” in Ecrits where Lacan teaches that the phallus is a signifier, the signifier of the Other’s desire, not the penis. “Yay!” I say to myself, “we’re beyond Freud’s talk about the penis! Wundabar!” Why does this make me so happy? Well because 1) I could never bring myself to believe that a contingent encounter such as a parent threatening to “cut it off” or an encounter with one’s sister who “doesn’t have it” could have such profound and widespread effects in producing the symptom, and because 2) I’ve never been able to figure out how this dialectic works in the case of girls, given the original point of identification for children of both sexes is the mother (and I just could never buy talk of “penis envy”). Theorizing the phallus as the signifier of the Other’s desire gets rid of those absurdities. For example, “novels” could be the signifier of the mOther’s desire insofar as she’s always reading– it could be the phallic signifier –and the subject’s psychic life could come to be organized around this signifier if they identify with it insofar as they grow up to write novels as a way of providing the Other with what it lacks. Of course, here we still have the problem as to why a subject comes to fall on the masculine or feminine side of the graph of sexuation. What developmental process takes place here? Unfortunately, again and again I find Lacanians treating the phallus as the penis, talking about the problem of the hysteric as one of “accepting the penis” (ie., being willing to be penetrated), and so on. Big sigh. Is this really believed? When we say all meaning is phallic, are we really saying that all meaning is ultimately grounded in the penis? Seriously? Really? That’s your theory of meaning?
At any rate, working on the premise that jouissance is not pleasurable, what would phallic jouissance be and how does it differ from surplus-jouissance? In the clinic, what instances of jouissance could we identify that lead us to say “this is an instance of phallic jouissance, not surplus-jouissance?” Why do we see surplus-jouissance appearing in the place where the three orders overlap, while we see phallic jouissance appear in the point of overlap between the symbolic and the real? I’ll hazard a guess: The Real, in Lacanese, is the impossible. The symbolic is the domain of the “hole” (for the reasons I outlined above pertaining to the manner in which the signifier introduces absence into the world). If it is true that all meaning is phallic, this would entail that meaning is the attempt to totalize the symbolic order riddled with contradictions and antagonisms (the real) in a single, coherent order. Phallic jouissance would be the perpetual attempt to pin everything down in a coherent order (like I’ve been trying to do in the last two posts!). Of course, the real always returns, so this project is never successful. We never get a Hegelian absolute. Yet Lacan also describes this sort of jouissance as “masturbatory”. What is the relation between the painful experience of the symbolic not being coherent and the pursuit of totalized and coherent meaning, and masturbation? Maybe we’re to interpret it as a sort of a riddle: Masturbation is “doing it without an Other, the pursuit of total meaning is an attempt to eradicate or erase the Other insofar as the Other is the enigma of opaque desire.” Think about having a conversation with Zizek. Zizek’s speech seems to be pervaded with phallic jouissance insofar as when you talk to him his rapid and non-stop speech is experienced as erasing you, of mortifying you in a body of interpretations, so as to erase the enigma (for him) of your opaque desire. He’s talking to you but really talking alone. You’re not there. The problem with this take on phallic jouissance is that the categories of totality and consistency belong not to the symbolic, but to the imaginary yet we don’t see phallic jouissance appear in a zone where the imaginary overlaps. Perhaps this is to say that it’s very exteriority to consistency is what generates the endless push to totality?
I’ll set aside the other two forms of jouissance for the moment (maybe that’s telling), as I am avoiding marking papers for my students (can’t you tell?). That too would be a form of jouissance. If I don’t get these papers graded, my students, who have already been quite delayed in learning their grades, will pull out the torches and tar and feather me. Perhaps my avoidance of marking has been a form of jouissance designed to get me beaten. Moreover, since I promised my students they would get my papers tomorrow, from the standpoint of the dynamics of jouissance I’ll get beaten anyway as my procrastination has ensured that I will either be up very late or will have to get up at an obnoxiously early time, therefore ensuring that I suffer. Such self-destructive patterns repeat fractally in a variety of forms throughout my entire life. So at the beginning of this post you might have thought that my desire was to get clear on the concept of jouissance, but perhaps that desire or wish is just an alibi to get myself beaten!
Larval Subjects . 
March 28, 2013 at 12:02 am
It strikes me there’s a very basic/fundamental psychoanalytical notion encapsulated in ‘jouissance’. There is a “real” gap between what we want and what we desire. We think we know what we desire, that we really want it, but when we actually achieve it (or even get close) we discover that instead of bliss we find horror, fury. The disappointment involved in this “razor’s edge” of jouissance (close, but not too close; the cusp) would seem structurally similar to that of signification. The way in which the sign escapes-itself through “laceration”; the way the “ontological” essence of signification is fluid, subject to extreme variations and intensive interrupting reconfigurations. What is said loses its way, and the signified is pure fantasy. Language then involves this “impossible” coincidence of ex-timacy.
In this way it would seem to me with jouissance Lacan achieves a critical denunciation of the kind of pseudo-mystic linguistic positivism we might find, say, in Wittgenstein — denying or obfuscating the potentiality of a kernel of signification. In Wittgenstein it is probably most clearly presented as the beetle-box, where the ubiquity of the boxes and their opacity tend towards a kind of nullification of cancellation. I might submit that it’s possible that here is a kind of noological bad faith; priestly drive to make all expression guilty, equivalent, to drown the “cut” of the singularity (the productive, a-signifiying, “effective” core of language/the unconscious) in an undifferentiated equalization.
March 28, 2013 at 1:04 am
Joseph,
That’s the standard story about jouissance, but whenever I try to think it through systematically I keep coming back to this question of why Lacan would say that desire is a defense against jouissance. If desire wants jouissance (or thinks it does) as you suggest, it’s very difficult to understand this thesis. So I guess the question is, why is there a need to defend against jouissance at all? Why is the neurotic terrified of jouissance? Why is it experienced as so horrifying? I think Lacan doesn’t really begin to give us an answer until seminar 11. The subject experiences itself as fading or disappearing in jouissance. There’s a sort of night of the world that takes place in jouissance where the subject’s just not there anymore. You’ll hear a lot of hysterics talk about this in the bedroom and some will even cry during sex for this reason. This is what Lacan is talking about when he talks about “aphanisis”, I think. It’s a sort of absolute jouissance where there’s no longer any individuation.
Part of the problem is that jouissance means something different in the pre-seminar 9/10 works and the work after that. I don’t think surplus-jouissance or objet a, the account of repetition, and so on at all fit with the earlier models. It’s something different altogether that the analysand isn’t even aware of, much less wants. Likewise, it’s notable that the term “desire” almost entirely disappears from Lacan’s work by the time we get to seminar 11. Now it’s all drive and jouissance, not desire. In these later seminars, jouissance seems to become something painful, rather than the dream of total satisfaction that was there in the earlier work. This means also, I think, that we have to revise our understanding of fantasy and what the fantasy is all about. A lot of this, I think, mirrors Lacan’s experience in the clinic. In the earliest period he seems to believe that the big Other exists insofar as he thinks that the symptom can be completely resolved through interpretation. This is the period where’s he’s describing the symptom, not just the unconscious, as having the structure of a language. But like Freud, he probably encountered interminable analysis. This is where he begins to shift gear and attend to drive and jouissance (it’s also noteworthy that earlier he had understood drive as a sort of demand issuing from the Other ($D), whereas later he understands drive as an effect of the captations that produce the objet a’s; that is, as bodily). Anyway, I’m rambling.
This is really interesting:
Notice that in the mysticisms– whether Christian, Buddhist, or Wittgensteinian –we again and again encounter a prohibition against speaking. One must take vows of silence as the signifier dismembers the real. In other words, there’s a way in which the practice of the mystic ends in a sort of pseudo-aphasia or catatonia.
March 28, 2013 at 8:26 pm
[…] < https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2013/03/27/lets-talk-about-jouissance-baby/ […]
October 2, 2013 at 3:42 pm
Dear Larvalsubject,
I came across your blog yesterday after a lot of thinking (and evntually googling) about the relationship between the relationship between jouissance and desire. Having read a few books, some of them by Fink, I tend to think that many of Lacan’s concepts are presented somewhat seperately (no pun intended, or..) leaving it to the reader to find the red line (in this regards Zizek is often the master (no pun, I swear, or..) in making us connect the dots ourselves). However, I will attempt to stop circling and go right for the bull’s eye, oouuch!
My speculative (idea and) understanding of the relationship between jouissance and desire would be that there is an inverse relationship if the subject has not yet fully separated from some significant other, exemplified by the mOther. That is, if the mOther is standing in for the Other, and the desire of the mOther is taken as the desire of the Other, then jouissance is simply the mechanism that provide the subject with some illusion of separateness. In this sense jouissance plays the role of a sacrifice, a sacrifice that is made by the subject in order to live for some other cause (the forbidden woman from Seminar VII for instance) than the mOther who is almost engulfing the subject, jouissance being the self-created residual withstanding total engulfment.
What would be required for a reduction in jouissance would then be an untangling of desire. This would allow for the subject to be the owner of his or her now separated desire, and thereby reduce jouissance as a necessary means of experiencing separateness. The untangling of desire would require the subject to see the mOther as castrated, as well as the subject seeing him/herself as castrated and perhaps eventually seeing the Other as castrated. The “seeing” is the important part in order to understand that lack of omnipotence in the mOther (leaving it as an open question whether it is desirable for the subject to discover the lack of omnipotence in the Other..) Ok, I turn things a bit upside down here, making jouissance into a defence against the mOther’s desire, however, considering how traumatic jouissance as a defence/separation-mechanism may become, the apparent way out would be to shake up desire, and sort out which parts of it belong to whom and reestablish desire in light of the Other instead of the mOther.
Also, I have seen the phallus described as a protection against the mOther’s desire. This raises the possibility of phallic jouissance being a means of separation in the case where the subject does not possess the phallus, the logic being here that the subject starts to pretend posessing (or being) the phallus precisely because he/she doesn’t have it. If the subject takes him or herself as the object of the mOther’s desire, making the mOther’s desire his or her own desire, then the person is still in a position where phallic jouissance is the means of separation instead of a separate desire and the pretension of having the phallus. Which in turn would make having the phallus into a question of having established desire in light of the Other and not of the mOther, such desire would be much more stable, unshakable, uncompromisable, in short.. phallic.
November 4, 2013 at 3:02 am
[…] disagreements with the author here. Following Lacan and the ‘fall from jouissance‘ (see here for the least technical explanation it’s possible to give on the subject, but be warned: […]
November 5, 2013 at 1:36 am
“The French feminist writer Hélène Cixous uses the term jouissance to describe a form of women’s pleasure or sexual rapture that combines mental, physical and spiritual aspects of female experience, bordering on mystical communion: “explosion, diffusion, effervescence, abundance…takes pleasure (jouit) in being limitless”. Cixous maintains that jouissance is the source of a woman’s creative power and that the suppression of jouissance prevents women from finding their own fully empowered voice. The concept of jouissance is explored by Cixous and other authors in their writings on Écriture féminine, a strain of feminist literary theory that originated in France in the early 1970s.”
Other feminists have argued that Freudian “hysteria” is jouissance distorted by patriarchal culture and say that jouissance is a transcendent state that represents freedom from oppressive linearities. In her introduction to Cixous’ The Newly Born Woman, literary critic Sandra Gilbert writes: “to escape hierarchical bonds and thereby come closer to what Cixous calls jouissance, which can be defined as a virtually metaphysical fulfillment of desire that goes far beyond [mere] satisfaction… [It is a] fusion of the erotic, the mystical, and the political.”
January 15, 2014 at 3:57 pm
Just came across this–nice to see that Joseph Weissman from the Fractal Ontology blog did, as well (which, if you’ve not read it, is both enlightening and infuriating. You can be a very hard man to follow, Jeremy).
Regarding desire as a “defense” against jouissance, the way I understand it is that desire accomplishes (or attempts to accomplish) this defense through filling out the constitutive lack in jouissance, masking through dissemination its Real-impossibility. Desire, in other words, is a function of the symbolic order and serves to maintain that order’s consistency by hiding the fundamental truth of jouissance: again, its Real-impossiblity. Jouissance is identified with the lowercase (objet petit) a because both appear as mere structural effects. The surplus generated by signification as such — the fact that there is always something in the signifier “more than itself” (i.e., the retroactivity of signification) — appears then as a sort of “floating” or “transcendental” or “master” signifier, what Lacan calls the signifier of Lack. The point to grasp here is that THERE IS NO CORRESPONDING SIGNIFIED FOR THE SIGNIFIER OF LACK — or, more precisely, the corresponding signified is the Real itself, the lowercase a, which is necessarily unsignifiable. Hence the formulation $a in which the barred subject (for whom there is a constitutive lack, an irreducible antagonism) is strictly correlative to the Real-impossible kernel forming the absent center of the signifying structure, the Other.