Jouissance

A Lacanian Concept

Néstor A. Braunstein, Silvia Rosman

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781438479040, 9781438479033
• eBook ISBN: 9781438479057
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Psychology

A comprehensive discussion of an important but elusive Lacanian concept within the field of psychoanalysis, as well as its relevance for philosophy, literature, gender, and queer studies.

Whether inscribed within the context of capitalist or neoliberal logic and its imperative to "enjoy," as a critique of all forms of heteronormativity, a liberating force in a positive reading of biopolitics, the point of inflection in the ethics of psychoanalysis, or articulated in the knot of the sinthome, the concept of jouissance is either the diagnosis, response, or solution for a wide range of contemporary discontents. Why does jouissance occupy such a central place in contemporary psychoanalytic discourse? What is jouissance the name for? Originally published in Spanish in 1990, later expanded and translated into French and Portuguese, with multiple reprints in all three languages, this book addresses both theoretical and clinical applications of jouissance through a comprehensive overview of key terms in Lacan's grammar. Néstor A. Braunstein also examines it in relation to central debates within the fields of psychoanalysis, philosophy, queer theory, and literary studies to further explore the implications of Lacan's concept for contemporary thought.

PART I

THEORY

Chapter 1

Jouissance

From Lacan to Freud

In the Beginning …

I am tempted to begin with a gnomic formula: Im Anfang war der Genuss (In the beginning was jouissance), which is clearly different from the beginning of the Gospel of St. John: Im Anfang war das Wort (In the beginning was the word), but it would be a false opposition. One cannot say which came first, whether jouissance or the word. They both delimit and overlap in a way that the experience of psychoanalysis shows to be inextricable. There is only jouissance for the being who speaks and because he speaks. As we will see, words make jouissance possible even as they restrict and denaturalize it. It is clear that the formula Im Anfang war der Genuss would have pleased the later Lacan, but for Goethe and his Faust it was impossible to imagine going from the word to force, to meaning, and finally to the act. In the beginning was the act, an act that is, by force, also the effect of the word and has a relation to jouissance.

An alternative is to look for a seemingly acceptable synonym that would render it ambiguous and write: Im Anfang war die Freude (In the beginning was joy), an aphorism that emphasizes the blessed and jubilant aspect of jouissance. But by doing so I would be confusing jouissance with its commonplace unspecified meaning, so different from the sense we give the central concept of jouissance in contemporary psychoanalysis. When it comes to psychoanalysis, another formula presents itself: Im Anfang war die Freud (In the beginning was Freud) and, once pronounced, we must look for the Genuss, the jouissance in Freud, for whom jouissance was never more than a common word in language, not a theoretical concept.

To be precise with the psychoanalytic sense of the term, it is convenient to differentiate jouissance from the common dictionary meaning that is only its shadow. But to differentiate them is no easy task; the two meanings imperceptibly pass from opposition to proximity. The common meaning makes jouissance and pleasure synonymous; the psychoanalytic meaning confronts them, making jouissance now an excess intolerable to pleasure, now a manifestation of the body closer to extreme tension, to pain and suffering. And one must choose: either the one or the other.

Yet here I am about to link together discourse and jouissance, an impossible task since jouissance, being of the body and in the body, is ineffable, while at the same time, only in speech can it be referred to and circumscribed. Jouissance slips away from discourse, but that ineffable object is the very substance that is spoken throughout an analysis. As I attempt to show, since its inception the real object in the discourse of psychoanalysis has been jouissance.

Jouissance in Spanish is an imperative, a command, or an injunction that cannot be confused with its more archaic predecessor in the language (gozo, joy). Due to its ineffability, it cannot be said in the present indicative of the first-person singular else it dissolves, like the unpronounceable name of God. Goce in Spanish, der Genuss in German, la jouissance in French. Never enjoyment. The translators into English delight in finding a more appropriate word. Keenly aware of the impossibility of naming it, as well as to the origin of the Lacanian concept, many psychoanalysts writing in English simply opt for the French term jouissance.

Goce and jouissance, from the Latin verb gaudere (to be glad, to rejoice) (sich freuen, Freude, Freud!) reveal some surprises when their definitions are broken down. According to the Dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy, these are:

Jouir (verb) 1. To have and possess some thing, such as dignity, primogeniture or income 2. To have pleasure, complacency and happiness of some thing 3. To know a woman carnally; 4. To feel pleasure, experience pleasant emotions.

It is interesting that the objective dimension of the first definition prevails over the subjective dimension of the second and fourth: jouissance is something one has rather than something one feels. The third definition is also surprising. By not excluding that “another” woman could carnally know “one,” the academician gives proof of an involuntary nonchalance. Given that women can only be treated one by one, his use of the indefinite article “a” is further proof of an embarrassment not exempt from a certain Lacanianism. A semantic sexism puts its unconfessed stamp on this definition: jouir, yes, in the carnal knowledge of a woman. It seems inconceivable that a man could be the object of jouir. As for women, it could only be the case of “knowing” another (woman). There is no reciprocity in jouissance. The psychoanalyst must reflect on the academic’s meaningful words here.

The Spanish gozar, which comes from the Latin gaudere, has an unrecognized legacy in the verb joder (to fuck), a term that had to wait until 1984 and the thirtieth edition of the Dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy to be given its due, although with an arbitrary etymology: from the Latin futuere (to fornicate), from which the French term foutre derives. The verb joder had to wait centuries to be included in the dictionary and could only do so preceded by an uncanny warning: “Sounds rude or nasty” (is there a relation here, even in contrast, with the Lacanian affirmation of psychoanalysis as an “ethics of saying well” [une étique du bien-dire]?). It is a verb that does not have much to complain of, since once admitted it erupts with four definitions linked to the Latin gaudere and its associated gozar and jouir. In brief, these four definitions are (1) to fornicate; (2) to bother, to hinder; (3) to ruin, to waste; (4) interjection that denotes surprise or incredulity.1

The semantic proximity between gozar and joder leads us to add the verb “to play,” especially when considering the phonological similarity in French between jouir and jouer (to play). However, our philological research indicates that words such as to play and jewel (joya, from the old French joie [joy]) are not derived from gaudere but from jocus (a joke), closer to the Freudian Witz. We can also consider that the Spanish jugar (to play) is linked to conjugar (to conjugate), the work done with a verb, but the conjugation is not play, but rather a subjugation, the subjection of the verb to the torment of a common yoke (the Latin jugum). To play and conjugate also refer to the study of the antithetical meaning of words, some primitive, others derivative: the paralinguistics that interested Freud (SE XI, 153–161). Such are the semantic and etymological differences needed to introduce the term jouissance that psychoanalysis infuses with another spirit and vigor.

In psychoanalysis, jouissance comes in through the door of conventional meaning. That is how it appears sometimes in Freud’s writings, as well as in Lacan’s early texts: synonymous of great joy, extreme pleasure, jubilation, ecstasy. It would be idle and pedestrian to trace all the instances when Freud uses the term Genuss, but it would do well to recall, independent of the terms used, when jouissance, the Lacanian one, is recognized by Freud in his clinical work. In this regard, one must mention the “voluptuous” expression Freud finds in the Rat Man, when the latter recalls the account of torture: an intense pleasure that reaches the height of an evocative horror previously unknown to the patient. Or the joy Freud perceives on his grandson’s face, when obstinately playing with an object, the famous spool, in the same way that the child is “played” by the alternate presence and absence of the mother: a game of the to and fro of being, affirmed when the child’s image appears and disappears from the frame of the mirror. Or the infinite voluptuous jouissance that President Schreber experiences before a mirror when he notices his slow transformation into a feminine body.

As could not be otherwise, the term jouissance also appears in Lacan in the conventional sense until a certain moment that can be pinpointed with chronological rigor. Prior to that point we find jouissance to be the equivalent of joy, the joy before the mirror when recognizing the unified image of the ego, the moi (aha Erlebnis). Later, jouissance arrives with the advent of the symbol (fort-da) that allows for a first level of autonomy in relation to life’s constraints. There are other references to jouissance in the first years of Lacan’s teaching, which centers primarily on desire: the relation of desire with the Other’s desire and the recognition of reciprocal, dialectical, intersubjective desires—a desire that has transcended the limits of necessity and can make itself known only by alienating itself in the signifier, in the Other, as the site of the code and the Law.

It is not that desire is denaturalized by alienation for having to express itself through language as demand; it is not that desire falls under the yoke of the signifier and the letter transforms or diverts it. No, it is that desire only becomes desire because it is mediated by the symbolic order that constitutes it as such. The signifier is that redemptive curse without which no subject, desire, or world would exist. That is the pivotal point of Lacan’s teaching for some time, at least until the end of the 1950s. The key concepts at that time were desire, alienation, and the signifier. His discourse revolves around the vicissitudes of desire: its refraction into an articulated demand, the desire for recognition and the recognition of desire, the access to reality that depends on the impositions made on the subject by the Other (the world, the symbolic order that produces imaginary effects, the regulation of the satisfaction of necessity, and the conformity to the conditions of that satisfaction). These are the inescapable consequences of conceiving analytic practice as a revolving wheel of words and recognizing the function of the word in the field of language.

Not a few of Lacan’s disciples and readers adhered to this less pathological than pathetic assessment of the concepts. There were not many, if any, who noticed the shake-up that took place on a day now long past when Lacan announced that the originality of the condition of man’s desire was implicated in a different dimension, in a pole opposite to desire, which is jouissance. Nothing was noticed immediately, but slowly it became evident that the new concept reconsidered the status of psychoanalysis and required a second return to Freud, beyond the dialectic of desire in the subversion of the subject, whether the subject of science or of philosophy.

Lacan’s surprising advance of jouissance to a central place in analytic reflection, contraposing it to the “other pole” that is desire was not arbitrary. For this reason, it is necessary that the concept of jouissance be doubly differentiated, on the one hand from desire, on the other from what appears as its synonym, pleasure. To define jouissance as a concept is to distinguish its diacritical, differential value and, in that double articulation, its difference from pleasure and desire.

Whence jouissance? Why does Lacan resort to the term jouissance and make it a central concept? He does not draw it from the dictionary, where it is confused with pleasure, nor does he find it in Freud’s works, where it is linked to joy and voluptuousness, even if masochistic. Jouissance reaches Lacan through an unexpected path: the law. Lacan draws from Hegel’s philosophy of right; it is there that genuss, jouissance appears as something “subjective,” “particular,” impossible to share, inaccessible to understanding, opposed to the desire that results from the reciprocal recognition of two consciousness and is “objective,” “universal,” subject to the law. The opposition between jouissance and desire, key to Lacan, has Hegelian roots. Lacan reads Freud with a knife sharpened on a Hegelian stone.

This point has not been made sufficiently, even when Lacan clarified it in the first few classes of Seminar XX. The conceptual borrowing from the theory of right (prohibitions) and the moral law (responsibilities) could be extensively developed with an abundance of quotes. I will simply refer the reader to Hegel’s Philosophical Propaedeutic of 1810 (PP, 36–39). It is when the dialectician takes sides against jouissance, which is “accidental,” and pronounces himself in favor of forgetting oneself in order to be guided to what is “essential” in human work: what refers to or interests mankind.

From this remote origin one can see that to consider jouissance as particular is already an ethical question. Psychoanalysis cannot be indifferent to the opposition that confronts the body of jouissance with desire, regulated by the signifier and the law. Philosophy and the law, in synthesis, the discourse of the master, privilege the dimension of desire. In the above-mentioned text, Hegel states: “If I say that a thing pleases me, or I appeal to my pleasure, I only express the relation of the thing to me and thereby ignore the relation I have to others as a rational being” (PP, 37). Jouissance in the discourse of the law refers to the notion of usufruct, the enjoyment of a thing inasmuch as it is an object of appropriation. Legal discourse conceals that appropriation is also an expropriation given that something is “mine” insofar as there are others for whom what is “mine” is alien. One can only legitimat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Translator’s Note
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Translating Jouissance
• Part I. Theory
• Part II. The Clinic
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover