Jouissance

Illustration referencing jouissance (file name as used on this wiki).

Jouissance (French; from jouir, “to enjoy” or “to come”) is a key concept in Lacanian psychoanalysis designating a paradoxical mode of enjoyment that exceeds (and may violate) the pleasure principle. Unlike ordinary pleasure (French: plaisir), which is regulated by psychic “homeostasis” and tends toward tension-reduction, jouissance names an excessive satisfaction that may be experienced as painful, destabilizing, or traumatic—an enjoyment “beyond” pleasure that persists in repetition, symptom-formation, and the imperatives of superegoic demand.

Because jouissance carries French resonances that are difficult to capture in English—including legal and proprietary senses of “enjoyment” (the “enjoyment of a right”) as well as sexual connotations (jouir can mean orgasm)—many English-language Lacanian texts leave the term untranslated, using “enjoyment” only as an approximate gloss.

Translation and usage

In everyday French, jouissance can refer to enjoyment in multiple registers, including:

• legal enjoyment (e.g., “enjoyment of a right” or use of property), and
• sexual enjoyment, via the verb jouir (to enjoy; also slang for orgasm).

In Lacanian usage, the term is specialized: it indicates enjoyment that is not simply pleasurable but is bound to excess, transgression, and the limits imposed by language and law.

Jouissance and pleasure

Lacan’s most frequently cited contrast is between jouissance and plaisir (pleasure). Pleasure is governed by the pleasure principle, which limits excitation and organizes discharge so that the psyche does not become overwhelmed; Freud explicitly theorizes this regulatory function and later emphasizes clinical phenomena that appear to exceed it.

For Lacan, the pleasure principle thus functions as a limit on enjoyment—an internal law that keeps satisfaction within bearable bounds. Jouissance appears where that limit is approached or crossed: not “more pleasure,” but a satisfaction in excess that may flip into pain, compulsion, or suffering.

Freud and the “beyond” of pleasure

While the term jouissance is not Freud’s, Lacanian theory anchors it in Freud’s problem of what lies “beyond” the pleasure principle: repetitive patterns that return despite distress, including traumatic dreams, compulsions, and enactments in the analytic situation.

Freud’s drive theory also supplies a background for Lacanian discussions of enjoyment and repetition, including:

• the pleasure principle as a regulator of excitation,
• repetition compulsion as a clinical fact requiring explanation beyond pleasure,
• sexuality as a privileged domain of drive satisfaction and its vicissitudes (Freud’s early theory of sexuality).

In later Lacanian usage, jouissance is often used to name the stubborn satisfaction obtained in and through the symptom—precisely where the subject “gets something” from what also makes them suffer.

Lacan

Lacan develops jouissance across his teaching, moving from scattered uses to a structural concept tied to the signifier, the body, and the impasses of sexual relation.

Early appearances: labor and the Other

In early seminars, Lacan sometimes evokes jouissance in the context of the Hegelian master–slave dialectic: the slave’s labor produces goods for the master’s enjoyment, situating jouissance in relation to social bonds, recognition, and the economy of desire and work.

Ethics, the Real, and transgression (Seminar VII)

In Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–1960), Lacan makes enjoyment central to ethical questions about law, prohibition, and what is experienced as the “good” or “evil” of satisfaction. Jouissance is linked to transgression and to what is experienced as intimate yet alien (often discussed in Lacan as “extimate”).

A recurring Lacanian claim is that prohibition does not simply block a pre-existing attainable enjoyment; rather, prohibition and law structure desire and can sustain the fantasy that full enjoyment would be possible “if only it were not forbidden.” In this sense, desire and transgression are structurally entwined, and jouissance names the paradoxical satisfaction at stake in that entanglement.

The signifier, castration, and the “forbidden” of jouissance (Écrits)

In Lacan’s account of the subject as constituted in and by language, the signifier introduces a cut: entry into the Symbolic entails renunciation and loss, often articulated through the logic of castration. One influential formulation in Lacan’s Écrits links speaking itself to a limitation of enjoyment: for the speaking being, enjoyment is structurally constrained by the signifier and the law-like effects of language.

Within this framework, what the subject fantasizes as “full enjoyment of the Other” (or enjoyment guaranteed by the Other) is both prohibited and, more fundamentally, impossible as a complete relation—an impossibility Lacan will later formalize in his thesis that “there is no sexual relation.”

Drive, repetition, and the circuit of satisfaction (Seminar XI)

In Seminar XI (1964), Lacan rethinks drive as a circuit around a lost object, rather than a straightforward biological aim. The drive’s satisfaction is found in its repetitive loop—an account that becomes central to Lacanian understandings of enjoyment as a satisfaction “in the repeating itself,” not merely in achieving a goal.

Surplus-enjoyment (plus-de-jouir) and discourse (Seminar XVII)

Lacan introduces plus-de-jouir (“surplus-enjoyment”) in the context of his theory of the discourses—formalizations of social bond and the circulation of speech, knowledge, and enjoyment. Plus-de-jouir names the leftover or excess produced in and by the signifying economy (often linked to objet petit a as what “causes” desire and organizes a repetitive satisfaction).

Phallic jouissance and “Other” jouissance (Seminar XX)

In Encore (1972–1973), Lacan distinguishes modalities of sexual enjoyment, linking them to his formulas of sexuation and the thesis “there is no sexual relation.”

Common Lacanian distinctions include:

• Phallic jouissance (often associated with the signifier and with enjoyment structured through the phallic function), and
• a supplementary or Other jouissance (frequently discussed as a jouissance “beyond” the phallic function, not fully capturable in signification).

These terms do not reduce to anatomical difference; rather, they designate different logical relations to the phallic function and to enjoyment as structured (or not-all structured) by language.

Lalangue and jouis-sens (later Lacan; Television)

In Lacan’s later work, enjoyment is increasingly tied to the materiality of language: the sound, equivocation, and bodily imprint of speech. Lacan plays on jouissance and jouis-sens (enjoyment-in-sense / enjoyment-of-meaning), emphasizing how the unconscious can be enjoyed through the very slippages and formations of signifiers, even when they generate suffering.

The term lalangue (Lacan’s spelling) designates language as lived in its idiosyncratic, affect-laden, and sonorous dimension (often linked to “mother tongue” and to the bodily impact of speech), foregrounding enjoyment as something that “sticks” to signifiers beyond communicative meaning.

Jouissance and the superego

Lacan frequently links enjoyment to the superego: rather than functioning only as prohibition, the superego can take the form of an obscene imperative—an injunction to enjoy—that both demands and forecloses satisfaction, producing guilt and repetitive suffering.

Jouissance and clinical structures (Lacanian clinic)

In Lacanian clinical theory, “structures” (e.g., neurosis, perversion, psychosis) can be described in terms of distinctive ways of situating the subject in relation to law, desire, and enjoyment.

• Neurosis: enjoyment is typically approached indirectly (via symptom and fantasy), with the subject often sustaining the belief that full enjoyment would be possible if not for an obstacle attributed to the Other; the symptom can function as a compromise that both produces and limits enjoyment.
• Perversion: enjoyment is theorized in relation to staging the law and positioning oneself as an instrument of the Other’s enjoyment (a clinical logic Lacan ties to the fetishistic scene and the management of castration).
• Psychosis: enjoyment may appear as less stabilized by symbolic mediation, with phenomena that can be described as invasive or unbounded enjoyment (for example, in Lacanian readings of Schreber).

(These are schematic Lacanian formulations; different psychoanalytic traditions conceptualize similar clinical phenomena using different theoretical vocabularies.)

In cultural and political theory (Žižek)

The Lacanian concept of jouissance has been influential beyond clinical psychoanalysis, especially in cultural theory and political critique. Slavoj Žižek uses “enjoyment” (jouissance) to analyze ideology as not merely a system of beliefs but an economy of satisfaction: social prohibitions and fantasies can generate a surplus enjoyment that binds subjects to practices and identities even when those practices are avowedly painful or “irrational.”

Critiques and debates

Within psychoanalysis, jouissance is variously praised for naming forms of satisfaction not reducible to conscious pleasure, and criticized for its technical opacity, translation difficulties, and the risk of reifying a complex clinical field into a single master-concept. Debates also concern whether the term describes a universal psychic mechanism, a specifically Lacanian construction, or a family of phenomena best approached through multiple metapsychologies.

See Also

Borromean knot Castration Death drive Drive

Desire Ethics Imaginary Law

Libido Mother Neurosis Objet petit a

Perversion Phallus Pleasure principle Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Superego There is no sexual relation Super-ego Symbolic

References

• Freud, S. (1951) [1905] 'The Three Essays on Sexuality'. S.E. 7: pp. 125-244. In: Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press.
• Freud, S. (1951) Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis. S.E. I0: pp. 153-319.
• Freud, S. (1951) [1920] Beyond the Pleasure Principle. S.E. I8: pp. 3-64.
• Lacan, J. (1970) 'Of structure as an inmixing of an otherness prerequisite to any subject whatever' in The Structuralist Jouissance 109 Controversy, Richard Macksay and Eugenio Donato (eds). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 194.
• Lacan, J. (1975) Seminar XX, Encore (1972-73). Text established by Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, p. 10. Now translated by Bruce Fink (1998) under the title of On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge I972-1973, Encore. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XX. New York: W.W. Norton, p. 3.
• Lacan, J. (1958) 'The youth of A. Gide', April, 1958; `The signification of the phallus', May, 1958; 'On the theory of symbolism in Ernest Jones', March, 1959, in Écrits. Paris: Seuil.
• Lacan, J. (1977) [1960]. 'The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious' in Écrits: A Selection (trans. A. Sheridan). New York: W.W. Norton.
• Lacan, J. (1990) Television. New York: W.W. Norton. (note 5), p. 325. Carmela Levy-Stokes