The French ‘’jouissance’’ means basically ‘’enjoyment’’, but it has a sexual connotation (i.e. ‘orgasm’) lacking in the English word ‘enjoyment’, and is therefore left untranslated in most English editions of Lacan.
It can also mean orgasm, and the cognate verb jouir is commonly used to mean 'to come'.
The use of the noun in English has been promoted by translations of Lacan and others, but it is commonly treated as a French word and italicized accordingly.
jouissance is always used in the singular and is always accompanied by the singular definite article.
This endeavor [of striving for happiness] has two sides... It aims, on the one hand, at an absence of pain and unpleasure, and, on the other, at the experiencing of strong feelings of pleasure... The task of avoiding suffering pushes that of obtaining pleasure into the background.[1]
The term was already present in Freud, but Lacan developed it as a concept.
Lacan argues that the two aspects of pleasure were irreconcilable.
For Barthes plaisir is, "a pleasure...linked to cultural enjoyment and identity, to the cultural enjoyment of identity, to a homogenising movement of the ego."[4]
As Richard Middleton (1990, p.261) puts it, "Plaisir results, then, from the operation of the structures of signification through which the subject knows himself or herself; jouissance fractures these structures."
Jouissance versus Pleasure
It evokes an eroticizes death drive and a degree of intensity which takes the subject ebyond the pleasure principle.
Pleasure is described as an obstacle to jouissance in that is always leads to a reduction in tension and to a return to homeostatis, or a dynamically stable state.
Jouissance in constrast takes the subject to that extreme point where the erotic borders upon death.
However, the result of transgressing the pleasure principle is not more pleasure, but pain, since there is only a certainamount of pleasure that the subject can bear.
Beyond this limit, pleasure becomes pain, and this ‘painful pleasure’ is what Lacan calls ‘’jouissance’’: ‘’’jouissance’’ is suffering.”[7]
The term ‘’jouissance thus nicely expresses the paradoxical satisfaction that the subject derives from his symptom, or, to put it another way, the suffering that he derives from his own satisfaction.
It is true that once we start down the path of jouissance, we do not know where it will lead: "It starts with a tickle and ends up bursting into flames" (Lacan, 1991, p. 83).
In order to differentiate between these two forms of jouissance, Lacan introduces different algebraic symbols for each; Jd designates phallic jouissance, whereas JA designates the ‘‘jouissance’’ of the Other.
"And if the social bond is established by renouncing the satisfaction of the drive, it is because this satisfaction implies the enjoyment — in the juridical sense of the term — of objects that could either belong to others or deprive them of their jouissance."
At the upper level of the graph, ‘‘jouissance’’ is indicated by signifying lack in the Other, S(A̷).
This is phallic jouissance, which is related to castration as lack.
Traditionally, the erectile organ, the phallus, represents the object of jouissance, not so much by itself, but rather as the missing portion of a desired image.
Phallic ‘‘jouissance’’ is inscribed in the diagram at the level of a vector that starts out from S(A̷), the Other's lack, and goes toward (S̷ ◇ D), the drive as articulated by the subject and the demand of the Other.
Thus ‘‘jouissance’’ is "of the Other" and at the same time operates on the level of the drive.
Recognizing the Other's lack produces a fantasy in the subject's unconscious.
In this fantasy, the object represents what the subject imagines that the Other is deprived of.
In everyday life, the mother, as primordial Other, is prohibited from making up for her lack with her child.
Thus the Other remains prohibited. In his diagram, Lacan located ‘‘jouissance’’ at the place of the barred Other, S(A̷) this is also where Lacan inscribed the superego that orders the subject to enjoy, "Jouis!"
To this command, the subject can only respond, "J'ouis!" ("I hear!"), for such ‘‘jouissance’’ is structurally prohibited. Lacan repeated that while the superego prohibits and punishes, it also requires that the subject experience jouissance.
For Lacan, the requirement to enjoy is directly related to a taboo.
But what is prohibited, what must remain unsatisfied, is only the subject's jouissance.
Giving the Other an experience of ‘‘jouissance’’ does not seem to be prohibited.
The Other is barred in the diagram only by being marked by the loss of object a.
Thus if a subject assumes the position of the Other's missing object and if this can make the Other whole, then "It would enjoy," as Lacan said (2002, p. 311).
He thus introduced a ‘‘jouissance’’ outside the phallic order, a mystic jouissance, which he defined as a nonphallic, feminine ‘‘jouissance’’ (1998).
For being not whole, a woman "has a supplementary ‘‘jouissance’’ compared to what the phallic function designates by way of jouissance. . . . Y]ou need but go to Rome and see the statue by [Gianlorenzo] Bernini [the Ecstasy of St. Teresa] to immediately understand that she's coming. There's no doubt about it" (1998, pp. 73, 76).
But what did Lacan mean when he said that a woman, for being "not whole," was capable of a supplementary, nonphallic jouissance? With the "formulas of sexuation," he proposed dividing subjects not according to their biological sex, but according to their relation to the phallus.
On the masculine side would be those subjects who take object a as the cause of their desire and depend upon their phallic nature to attain it.
Subjects on the feminine side have one eye on the phallus and one eye on the ‘‘jouissance’’ of the Other, S(A̷).
The male or female mystic—a designation independent of biological sex—is situated on the feminine side. Supplementary jouissance, strictly speaking, is feminine.
But to attain it, the subject must stop looking both ways—toward phallic ‘‘jouissance’’ and ‘‘jouissance’’ of the Other—and become devoted only to the latter. Such an experience was attained by St. John of the Cross, for example, who was familiar with a mystical ‘‘jouissance’’ "outside sex," and thus beyond the mark of difference and beyond lack.
The moment of ecstasy arrives when the mystic, entirely desubjectified and merged with object a of the Other's desire, becomes one with the Other, who in turn no longer lacks.
The result is that to represent the Other's jouissance, "A" is rewritten as unbarred, S(A).
In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud referred to the "oceanic feeling" of being at one with the greater Whole.
Such is the feeling of mysticism, and also of trances and ecstasy.
Religion
Lacan's later comments on jouissance, and in aparticular his speculations as to the existence of a specifically femlae jouissance, are greatly influenced by Bataille's explorations of the relationship between eroticism , death and mysticism.
Significantly, both the first edition of Bataill'e sEroticism (1957) and the twntieth volume of Lacan's smeinar (1975) are illustrated with reproductions of Bernini's representation of St Teresa, which depicts the saint at the moment of his 'transverbation' or penetation by the word of God.
By way of commentary Lacan remarks: "She's coming, no doubt about it."
He goes on to speculate that St Teresa ies experiencing a female jouissance that goes beyond the phallus.
This, he argues, is a jouissance that women can experience without being bale to speak of it.
The argument overlooks that fac tthat the historical St Teresa has a great deal to say about her experience.
Whereas Freud discussed the dark relationship between mysticism and suffering with great hesitation, Lacan spoke of them more positively by remarking that on the cultural level, adoration of Christ suffering on the cross naturally sustains jouissance.
If certain mystics directly experience ‘‘jouissance’’ by looking at the Other's face—by looking at the face of God—others can attain it only by allowing the ever so broken body of Christ on Calvary to sustain it.
They partake of a vicarious ‘‘jouissance’’ from Christ's mutilated body offered up to God.
Commenting on Catholicism, Lacan wrote, "That doctrine speaks only of the incarnation of God in a body, and assumes that the passion suffered in that person constituted another person's jouissance" (1998, p. 113)
Moreover, he noted that love of one's neighbor seemed absurd to Freud.
Each time that this Christian ideal is stated, "we see evoked the presence of that fundamental evil which dwells within this neighbor. But if that is the case, then it also dwells within me. And what is more of a neighbor to me than this heart within which is that of my ‘‘jouissance’’ and which I don't dare go near?”[16]
Kid A In Alphabet Land Jumps Another Juicy 'Jaculator - That Jerk-Off, Jouissance!
You Displease Me, And You Think I Gain Pleasure From That! Heh! You Must Take Me For Some Masochistic Francophile! And You're The Substance I'm Paid With By My Lack Of Substance? You're Impossible! I'm Coming To Get You! - Fuck You, Jouissance!
Freud, Sigmund. (1920). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18: 1-64.
——. (1930). Civilization and its discontents. SE, 21: 57-145.
Lacan, Jacques. (1991). Le séminaire. Book 17: L'envers de la psychanalyse (1969-1970). Paris: Seuil.
——. (1992). The seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book 7: The ethics of psychoanalysis (1959-1960) (Dennis Porter, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton.
——. (1998). The seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book 20: On feminine sexuality: the limits of love and knowledge, encore (1972-1973) (Bruce Fink, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton.
——. (2002). The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious. In his Écrits: A selection (Bruce Fink, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1960.)
