Jouissance

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Jacques Lacan

Translation

The term signifies the ecstatic or orgasmic enjoyment - and exquisite pain - of something or someone. In French, jouissance includes the enjoyment of rights and property, but also the slang verb, jouir, to come, and so is related to the pleasure of the sexual act.

Pleasure

Lacan makes an important distinction between jouissance and plaisir (pleasure). Pleasure obeys the law of homeostasis that Freud evokes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, whereby, through discharge, the psyche seeks the lowest possible level of tension. The pleasure principle thus functions as a limit imposed on enjoyment; it commands the subject to "enjoy as little as possible." Jouissance transgresses this law and, in that respect, it is beyond the pleasure principle.

Symbolic Prohibition

The prohibition of jouissance (the pleasure principle) is inherent in the symbolic structure of language, which is why "jouissance is forbidden to him who speaks, as such."[1] The subject's entry into the symbolic is conditional upon a certain initial renunciation of jouissance in the castration complex, when the subject gives up his attempts to be the imaginary phallus for the mother.

The symbolic prohibition of enjoyment in the Oedipus complex (the incest taboo) is thus, paradoxically, the prohibition of something which is already impossible; its function is therefore to sustain the neurotic illusion that enjoyment would be attainable if it were not forbidden. The very prohibition creates the desire to transgress it, and jouissance is therefore fundamentally transgressive.[2]

Death Drive

The death drive is the name given to that constant desire in the subject to break through the pleasure principle towards the Thing and a certain excess jouissance; thus jouissance is "the path towards death."[3] Insofar as the drives are attempts to break through the pleasure principle in search of jouissance, every drive is a death drive.

Phallic and Feminine

Lacan states that "jouissance, insofar as it is sexual, is phallic, which means that it does not relate to the Other as such."[4] However, he argues that there is a specifically feminine jouissance, a "supplementary jouissance"[5] which is "beyond the phallus,"[6] a jouissance of the Other. In order to differentiate between these two forms of jouissance, Lacan introduces different algebraic symbols for each; designates phallic jouissance, whereas JA designates the jouissance of the Other.


See Also

References