Jouissance
Jouissance is a French term which translated means "enjoyment" and is contrasted with plaisir. In every sense of the word it is whatever "gets you off". Something that gives the subject a way out of its normative subjectivity through transcendent bliss whether that bliss or orgasmic rapture be found in texts, films, works of art or sexual spheres; excess as opposed to utility. It is a popular term in postmodernism and queer theory used by Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Judith Butler, and others. Leo Bersani considers jouissance as intrinsically self-shattering, disruptive of a 'coherent self'.
For Barthes (1977, p.9) plaisir is, "a pleasure...linked to cultural enjoyment and identity, to the cultural enjoyment of identity, to a homogenising movement of the ego." 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."
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.
Lacan develops an opposition between ‘’jouissance’’ and pleasure. The pleasure principle functions as a limit to enjoyment; it is a law which commands the subject to ‘enjoy as little as possible.’
At the same time, the subject constantly attempts to transgress the prohibitions imposed on his enjoyment, to go ‘beyond the pleasure principle.’
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.”[1]
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.
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.”[2] 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.
The death drive is the name given to that constant desire in the subject to break through the pleasure principle towards the Thign 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.
There are strong affinities between Lacan’sconcept of jouissance and Freud’s concept of the Libido.
In keeping with Freud’s assertiont hat there is only one libido, which is masculine, Lacan states that jouissance is essentially phallic; “Jouissance, isnofar as it is sexual, is phallic, which means that it does not relate to the Other as such.”[4]
However in 1973 Lacan admits that there is a specificially feminine jouissance, a ‘supplementary jouissance’, which is beyond the pahllus’. A jouissance of the Other.[5] This feminine jouissance is ineffable.
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.
Kid A In Alphabet Land
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!
