On the Paradigms of Jouissance

[Music] I'll just say a couple things just to start out with. So, I um, I, I heard this, I heard the six paradigms of jouissance when it was first given, and Malaya makes a little reference to this talk that he gave in Los Angeles. And it's called something else; it's called something about subjectivity, but it basically was: so the first half was about the history of how subjectivity was conceptualized in France in the beginning of the 20th century, and then he launched into the six paradigms of jouissance. And this was a conference of, it was a, it was a fledgling organization called the American Lacanian Link, and it never, it died. The people in charge of it were in conflict with each other, so it died out before it, it even started. That just had this one meeting, and uh, and, and his talk was: so he talked for three hours, and he only got to the fifth paradigm, and he's like, "I'm gonna stop there." And then you'd think like people were like, "Oh, thank god," it's so, but I have to say there was a collective groan, and people audibly shout out, "No, keep going!" And he did, but he didn't keep going. So, so it was a, I think a, this is a testament to how impressive it was that uh, he spoke for three hours, and people were upset that he stopped. I'm not going to speak for that long; I'm gonna speak for much shorter, more like 30 minutes at the max.

And, and uh, I would also say that uh, my spouse and I, Hillary and Rooney, were friends with Slavoj Žižek, and Žižek had arranged for Malaya to come over. And they're now not as close as they were then, but uh, Malaya wanted to, had mentioned to Slavoj that he wanted to go to Disneyland, and Slavoj says to us, he's like, "Can you, do you think you guys have a car, you know the area, could you take Malaya to Disneyland?" So we're like—because you'll have to miss the day of the conference—we're like, "Okay, no problem." So we were getting ready to do it, and then, and then for some reason he just bagged out; he didn't feel, he wasn't feeling well after that talk. I think he wasn't feeling that well. So, so it didn't happen, but I was very sad because I thought that would be pretty fun to have taken Malaya to Disneyland.

So um, I'm going to talk primarily about the second, third, and fourth paradigms, and uh, [Music] and then, and then kind of maybe the rest will, will, or the later two will, will uh, come in a little bit maybe, but uh, I'm just going to focus on those and, and a line of development that I see occurring, and then maybe after we can talk about how that relates to the other three, and, and uh, you know, the importance of it. So, I, I, I see that uh, one of the things that happens in the trajectory of Lacan's thought is that the position that uh, I'm gonna say I know a lot of people object to this, but I'm going to use "jouissance" and "enjoyment" as pure synonyms. So, like there's this guy, Nestor Braunstein, there's, who absolutely refuses it; there's other people that refuse it, but I, I'm not one of these. I think translations of "fétiche," I don't, I don't care about it. So, I'm gonna just, so I apologize if you care about it, I apologize for that. So uh, the position that enjoyment occupies relative to symbolic order, I think undergoes a pretty dramatic change as Lacan's thought unfolds, especially between the mid-1950s and the early, or from the beginning really, and then the early mid-mid-1960s. So the development, I think, I think corresponds to an increasing political radicality that Lacan himself never mentions or theorizes, but I don't think it's a coincidence that those of us who uh, are interested in the political nature of psychoanalysis and of Lacan's thought are tend to glom on to what uh, Malaya calls the fourth paradigm of uh, so I think it's not, I don't think that's a coincidence. I think there's this movement to an increasing radicality that reaches its apex, I want to say political radicality reaches this apex in the, in the fourth paradigm.

So, so early on in this what Malaya calls the second paradigm, Lacan identifies the phallus as the signifier of jouissance, right, and the phallus itself doesn't enjoy, but it's the signifier of a lost enjoyment within the symbolic structure. So if this, if the, if the word is the murder of the thing, if the symbol is the absence of the object, the, the symbol is also the absence of enjoyment, but the, the phallus symbolizes that lost enjoyment. So as a result, I think enjoyment gets associated early on with the symbolic father who has the phallus, and I think this association actually follows directly from Freud, who those of you Freudian, or Fred—Freud—know this, that he's very insistent that there's only one libido, and that the libido is inherently masculine. So this is just a, this is, I could have cited a million spots where he says this, but this is from *Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality*: he says, "Libido is invariably and necessarily of a masculine nature, whether it occurs in men or in women, and irrespective of whether the object is a man or a woman." So libido is masculine, Freud thinks, because it's active. Later he'll complicate this: active as masculine, passive as feminine, but he still, he still will keep to this idea that libido is masculine. So feminine sexuality represents a mystery for Freud, the famous "Was will das Weib?" right? What does the woman want, uh, because it brings satisfaction while at the same time partaking of the inherently male form of libido. And this is why, according to Freud, the girl has a more tenuous, treacherous path through Oedipus and castration complexes. So as Freud sees it, things remain, things are a little less straightforward for femininity because of this masculine form of libido, right. And so this association of jouissance, enjoyment, with the phallus, so the phallic structure of enjoyment becomes clear, I think, in most uh, sexist jokes that find comedy in masculine sexuality and that occur without a concern for feminine enjoyment. So I'm going to tell—when this is not my sexism, just to be clear, this is just an example of this kind of joke. So, and I think it's a pretty good illustration; I think it's kind of funny, uh, it's not horribly sexist um. So the joke about is about a father and son cannibal who go out hunting for the family, and the father and the son look around, they're looking for, for someone to eat for dinner, and they, they see a skinny man walking by. The son's ready to pounce on him. The father holds him back; he's like, "Okay, there's not enough meat on his bones for us to have a good meal; let's let him go by." So the son acquiesces; he's like, "Okay." And then they see an overweight man walking past. The son's like, "Okay, he's got enough meat on the bones; let's, let's get him." Again, the father holds him back; he's like, "He's like, no, no, no, all that fat will clog our arteries; we need to be patient; we'll get a better meal." So another few minutes go by, and finally a really attractive, very fit woman walks past, and now the son says, "We should kill her because she's perfect size." "No," the father responds, "Let's take her home and then eat your mother," okay.

So uh, again, I think this is funny because uh, again, sorry for the sexism, but uh, the point of this joke is that there's no space for the woman's enjoyment, right? That all, like, libido is all jouissance, is focused on the phallus; all humor is focused on the phallus. I have an anti-phallus joke coming up later, so it's not just that uh. So in the early seminars, Lacan's great innovation, I think, is to distinguish between the symbolic phallus, the phallus as a signifier, and the real phallus. And, and if you know Seminar Six, *Desire and its Interpretations*, or if you just know his reading of Hamlet, this is one of the things that Hamlet struggles with; this is one of the sources of Hamlet's neurosis, is that he can't distinguish the symbolic king from the real king, and so his, his, his mother's desire for the real king, the real king is, is a real, is a problem for Hamlet. So the phallus doesn't actually enjoy, but it's the signifier of this missing jouissance, right. So this distinction between real phallus and the signifier seemed at the time, for, for many people, a very important feminist gesture. So there's clear implications, I think, that the privilege that the phallus has is has nothing natural about it at all, and so that's why feminists initially, even some feminists that I think they shouldn't have felt this way, but thought were suspicious of Freud were much more uh, accepting of Lacan because they thought that he made this distinction between actual penis, real penis, a real phallus and symbolic phallus as phallus-signifier, and that's the key thing. This is what Jacqueline Rose says in her, this is a landmark book called *Sexuality in the Field of Vision*: she says, "The importance of the phallus is that its status and the development of human sexuality is something uh, which nature cannot account for." So the fact that it's symbolic, not natural, is crucial, right. So by insisting on this absolute difference between phallus as signifier and the male sexual organ, Lacan makes, if he wasn't trying to, makes an important feminist gesture uh, that subsequent feminist thinkers that are interested, invest in psychoanalysis take up.

But all the same, I think uh, it's important that the signifier of jouissance is at the center of the symbolic structure, which is false. So although subjects occupying the position of symbolic authority are just tools of the phallus—I think this is an also important idea—they're tools of the phallus that they bear rather than being directly identified with it, jouissance is nonetheless located at the site of the phallic signifier, the heart of symbolic order. So within this early—and again, this is the second paradigm of jouissance—within this early conceptualization of jouissance, social authority is where jouissance is located, or at least the signification of it is located. So here, I think we could say Lacan's implicitly following Freud's theorization that all libido is masculine, implicitly, not explicitly. So even though he's making this distinction between symbolic and real phallus, he's not, he's not really departing from that idea of libido as is masculine. So when composing Seminar Seven, *On the Ethics of Psychoanalysis*, Lacan—and this is what Malaya will call the third paradigm of jouissance—Lacan makes, I think, a really important move away from the phallus and away from the phallus as the site of jouissance. So it shouldn't be surprising, I think, that in this seminar his example for this form of enjoyment is, is not a man, it's not Hamlet, it's a woman, right. So enjoyment is not located at the site of social authority or with the phallic signifier, but instead in the void of the thing. So there's a, all of a sudden there's a radicality in Lacan's mind attached to enjoyment outside of the symbolic structure that's not necessarily evident in the earlier first two paradigms. So even though enjoyment remains off limits for speaking beings, it becomes possible to access it through an act that defies the figure of phallic authority. So it's really important, I think. So all of a sudden Lacan starts to think, well, this jouissance is starting to become more accessible as it becomes more radical. So I think that's a really important idea that he's developing. So access to the enjoyment of the thing occurs through transgression; that's just full stop. I think that's this idea, and Jacqueline Miller points out that this conception of jouissance articulated in Seminar 7 portrays—this is a quote from the *Paradigms* essay—"transgression as the only way to access it." I think he's absolutely right about that in terms of how Seminar 7 conceptualizes things. One thing is interesting, just as a side note, whereas the other paradigms take place over a few years or even a longer time than that, uh, decades at certain ones, uh, this, this, this paradigm, paradigm three, lasts for one year, told, just one year. And so Seminar, Seminar Seven, it's really, it's interesting that in a certain way it's the most well-known, you know, *Ethics of Psychoanalysis*, Antigone, people identify with Lacan, and yet it's a hapax; it's, it's really, it's just a one-off, and it doesn't fit with really what comes before or what comes after. Slavoj Žižek said it's, it's the time in which Lacan fell totally under the sway of Bataille, and I, I think that fits with this idea of jouissance of truth; there's even a session entitled "The Jouissance of Transgression." So it's, he's totally along this line of, of train; he doesn't go as far as Bataille's, say, "Oh, it's in human sacrifice that we can find the jouissance," but he's, he's on the way there. So uh, the idea is that transgression's the only way to jouissance, and I think that explains the role that Antigone plays in, in this seminar. So through her total defiance of Creon's phallic rule, Antigone attains what Lacan calls this zone between two deaths, so a zone between symbolic death and real death. So she's symbolically dead; she's, she's, she no longer exists within the community, and yet she hasn't yet died. So it occurs when she's buried alive, and this, this zone of the beyond, Lacan—the other term he uses—the never-repeats is called *ate*. So what she gets from the Greek uh, so this is a, so she attains this beyond when she goes beyond and transgresses what the phallic law, phallic signifier authorizes, and it's through only through these extreme acts of sacrifice that one attains this zone between two deaths and attains the jouissance that corresponds to it. So we should imagine Antigone uh, buried, but buried in jouissance, in a sense. Lacan also talks about *Oedipus at Colonus*, which is the, the, the third play in the trilogy, starting with *Oedipus Tyrannus*, then *Antigone* is the second, and then *Oedipus at Colonus*, and, and there Oedipus himself goes, is this in this position of the beyond, and Lacan says a nice thing: he's like, "All of the heroes of Sophocles, for all of them, they have the status, except Oedipus in *Oedipus Tyrannus*, of the race run." So that, notice that notion that you've transgressed all the symbolic barriers, you're at this end point, you're between two deaths; that's that's jouissance in the Sophoclean uh, world. So this, but nonetheless uh, I think this, the danger of this, of tying enjoyment to transgression—maybe it seems self-evident to you—is that it remains covertly dependent on the phallic law that it transgresses, right. So there, there's a sense in which I think Antigone relies on Creon even though she's defying Creon, right? Like her, her, her defiance becomes an uh, an end in itself, right. Uh, there's, there's a little joke about this—does not really have to do with the jouissance—but uh, the joke goes like this: "Why was Antigone's uh, apartment so stifling hot in Thebes?" And the answer is, "Because she refused to put any Creon in her air conditioner." So I made up that joke myself; so it's probably not as good as my other one, which I've stolen from someone. Anyway, feel free to steal uh, uh, anyway, so I don't mean you can't steal a joke because they're all made by the big Other uh.

So I, I think this reliance on the paternal law becomes apparent when Antigone—when, sorry—when Lacan refers to the Apostle Paul in the *Ethics*, in Seminar Seven. So he says, he points out that transgression depends upon the paternal law that it violates; that's what he says, quoting him: it says, "We are in fact led to the point where we accept the formula that without a transgression there is no act, as—access, sorry—no access to jouissance, and to return to Saint Paul, that that is precisely the function of the law: transgression in the direction of jouissance only takes place if it is supported by an oppositional principle, by the forms of the law; if the, if the paths of jouissance have something in them that dies out, that tends to make them impassable, prohibition, if I may say, some say, so becomes its all-terrain vehicle, its half-track truck that gets it out of the circuitous routes that lead man back to the, in a roundabout way, toward the rut of a short and well-trodden satisfaction." So again, the point is that the phallic signifier and the paternal law end up being the thing that create the prohibition that allows transgression to flower. So there's no transgression without the phallic law. So in other words, the jouissance of transgression links jouissance to the transcendence of the thing, which gives it a political potential, I think, not evident in Lacan's earlier conception of phallus as signifier of jouissance. And yet, I think this form of jouissance still remains too tied to the logic of the phallic signifier that it's transgressing, because it needs the thing that it transgresses. So transgression, in other words, always relies on what it's opposed to. So Antigone, you might say, breaks from Creon's rule, but nonetheless depends on his prohibition, because without a symbolic law there's nothing to transgress, and I think this is why this third paradigm of jouissance, this conception of jouissance, is ultimately a dead end. I think that's why Lacan abandons it so quickly, right? Like he, he just, he, he dumps, basically Seminar Seven is, is this hitch in his thought, and then he just dumps it; there's no, there's never a, a, a, a return to this notion of jouissance of transgression, even though there are people you can look up on YouTube and like, "jouissance," and they'll say, "All jouissance is transgression." So there's still people that think this, wrongly, I think.

So uh, the problem is, I think, that it remains invested in phallus as just like the, the earlier formulation of jouissance in the earlier paradigm, paradigm two. So the conception of jouissance in Seminar Seven has inspired many political thinkers; Antigone serves as a model for the political act, and theorists like Slavoj Žižek, Joan Copjec, Alain Badiou, Žižek, but it's interesting. So Slavoj himself grasped, I think, the problem inherent in this appeal to Antigone as a political model. So here's what he says: so he laments, so he called it, says, "The overblown celebration of Antigone." He doesn't say that he's responsible for the overblown celebration of Antigone; he was, but okay. Then he says this: he says, "Antigone is sublime in her sad enumeration of what she is sacrificing, which indicates the transcendent contours of the thing to which she retains her unconditional fidelity." Is it—this is the big point—"is it necessary to add that this Antigone is a masculine fantasy par excellence?" So for, for, for Slavoj, Antigone is in love with her own self-sacrificing more than with what she hopes to accomplish politically, so which is why she's not a good political model, and this image of the self-sacrificing woman who's devoted to the sacrifice is precisely the problem, because it fits right within this patriarchal male fantasy. So it, it actually prohibits Antigone from acting as an a model for authentic revolutionary or radical political subjectivity. So in other words, she remains within the structure of a very traditional kind of femininity and remains tied to the phallic order that she's contesting.

So then I think there's a real, very radical break that occurs between paradigm three and paradigm four, and I think we can date this almost precisely. So it starts to get developed in the *Transference* seminar, which is Seminar Eight, right after the *Ethics* seminar, and, and what, what Lacan is giving birth to, discovering, is the idea of the objet a, and this gets in, it in the *Transference* seminar it has, takes the form of the agalma that Socrates seems to have within him, but then it gets its real formulation Seminar Nine, *On Identification*, and there he enacts a fundamental shift in the location of the subject's enjoyment. I think this is the really crucial gesture in the development of his thoughts. So enjoyment ceases to be associated in any way with the phallic signifier or even with the act of transgression and becomes the province of the object a, which is the object a that is just the gap within the signifying structure, this, this failure of the signifying structure, what doesn't fit within the signifying structure. So with this new twist by Lacan, you could say that enjoyment moves from center to margin, right, or from center to gap, and I think that is to me vitally important and a real uh, radicalization, and, and I think it's not, again, not surprising that the, the political charge that people have found in Lacan have found it in this fourth paradigm of jouissance, that that is first hinted at in Seminar Nine and then really fully developed in *Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis*, Seminar Eleven. So this move, I think, represents a fundamental challenge to Freud's conception of libido as inherently masculine, and I think it puts to rest, rest, any residual privileging of the masculine position. So it goes beyond just dividing between symbolic and real phallus, and it actually says, "Well, wait a minute, no, libido is—"

Actually, on the side of what doesn't fit, not on the side of the masculine, so more on the side of the feminine than the masculine, if we're gonna still think in those terms. So, uh, from its inception, I think psychoanalysis challenges the structure of phallic authority. I think this is absolutely clear to me that Freud's whole point is: phallus is a fraud. That that's the that's the the starting idea of psychoanalysis. Uh, so it recognizes that phallic authority is inevitably caught up in what Jennifer Friedlander calls the logic of man's imposture, from which it can't escape, right? So that is a basic psychoanalytic idea. And yet, I think as long as Freud and Lacan, following him, identify Jewish sons with the phallic signifier, even if it's the signifier of the missing Jewish sons, they limit in a certain way the la the radicality of the psychoanalytic project, and it's tied to a radical egalitarian politics. So I think they successfully deflate the phallus, but they don't dissociate it from Jewish sons. And this a kind of blurring between social recognition and Jewish science remains, and I think that's something that changes with the fourth paradigm. So, so what's important I think about Lacan's turn to locating enjoyment in the object is that it reveals that enjoyment is absolutely opposed to symbolic recognition. Right now, I think someone could say, well, that's hinted at early on. If maybe that's true, I think it becomes really clear once enjoyment gets located in the object, because that's what's missing in the symbolic structure; it's what is not signified. Right? So, as long as the phallus appears to function as the signifier of jurissance, symbolic recognition seems to convey enjoyment on those who receive it. So enjoyment in this way is distributed from the center of the symbolic structure, and those occupying the position of phallic authority are thus more approximate to Jewish sons and sons than those who don't belong to the symbolic structure, who don't fit. So non-belonging then would be the index of a distance from Jewish sons in the earlier paradigm, although this changes in Seminar Seven with Antigone. I think Lacan's conception of Jesus there remains too indebted to the phallic order that it contests, that it wants to transgress. Again, this investment of transgression in what it's opposing, so this reasons you could say still operates from center to margin, even if the margin involves this dramatic transgression of the center. And I think this is what completely changes with the development of abje ah in starting in Seminar Nine and then working through this the seminars up through Seminar 16.

So, as a result of this development—so this is basically the night, the mid-1960s, toward the end of the 1960s—uh, with this development, I think the phallic signifier becomes not the location of Jewish sons, but the signifier of its absence, uh, signifier of castration. So libido is not is no longer masculine. Phallus comes to represent a flight from libido, I think. So it marks the turn, phallus that is, marks the turn away from Jewish sons, betrayal of the abjaya through the effort to transform this constitutively absent object into a full presence; that's what phallus tries to do. So at this point, uh, so the political valence of Lacan's thought, I think, changes dramatically with this theorization of abjay as the site of joisons. So the political charge ceases to be limited to exposing the fraud of phallic authority and becomes instead a reorientation of how we should map the social terrain in terms of Jewish sons. So once Lacan conceptualizes enjoyment as occurring in the gaps of the signifying structure, he actually associates it with those who lack social recognition, who lack phallic authority, that and the or the symbolic identity that comes from that's bestowed by that phallic authority. So with this move, I think enjoyment itself becomes radicalized in a way that it was not even through Antigone, through Seminar Seven, through the third paradigm. So according to this the conception of Jewish sons that locates it in abjaya, what Malaria calls the fourth paradigm, social belonging corresponds to a missing Jewish songs, to missing out on Jewish songs, since it occurs Jerusalem is in the gaps of the symbolic structure. So subjectivity enjoys only insofar as it is alienated from the social order out of which it emerges. So the subject can enjoy because it doesn't simply exist in the identity that has been laid out for it. So that so enjoyment might be, you could maybe say, is the distance between subjectivity and symbolic identity. There's a distance between that, and that's where joisons occurs. So the failure to fit is now the basis for success at enjoying. So in in contrast, I think those who belong to the social order have to find their enjoyment through those who don't belong. So those inside have to enjoy parasitically. So enjoyment doesn't just come through defiance of the phallic law, but through the possibilities opened up by its inherent failure. So the phallic signifier becomes the signifier of the failure to enjoy, not of enjoyment. I don't think Lacan makes this explicit, but this is my reading of it. So, uh, enjoyment becomes located at the site of the absent object that defies the realm of signification altogether. So the signifier remains important, as it always will be for Lacan, but it's only important for the gaps within the signifying structure that it can't account for. So enjoyment moves from the gaps to those on the inside who attempt to appropriate it through spectacles like what we see in Squid Game, for instance. If you've seen the show Squid Game, you see how uh it's all these people who don't fit in that are participating in the Squid Game, and then these really wealthy phallic got all guys, I think, come and enjoy through them at the end, uh, and and they're pretty impoverished in their enjoyment. So the Jewish science associated with the object becomes apparent, I think, in jokes that show juices occurring where the figure of phallic authority cannot see or experience for himself. So this is an anti-sexist joke. So these jokes, I think, uh, find comedy, jokes like this find comedy in what doesn't fit within the phallic order.

So here's here's one joke. So a wealthy old man, his young wife, and a handsome stranger are shipwrecked on a desert island. And seeing the situation, the young life quickly loses interest in the wealthy husband and starts to flirt with the handsome stranger. The three build a lookout tower to watch for passing ships that could rescue them from the island, and the stranger offers to take the first watch up in the tower. As the husband and wife are gathering driftwood in the sand, the stranger yells down, "Hey, no sex on the beach, get back to work!" And the husband yells back, he's like, "We're not having sex, nothing going on here." And then later the stranger yells out again, he's like, "Hey, cut out the sex on the beach, uh, get to work!" And the husband's like, "Look, nothing's happening, you're delusional." The stranger's like, "Okay." And then so so the stranger gets done with his turn on the watch, and the husband takes his shift in the tower. While he's up in the watchtower, his wife and the stranger start to have passionate sex on the beach, and the wealthy husband on watch exclaims, "Wow, it really does look like [ __ ] from up here!" So in this joke, the husband has the phallus, so he has the wealth, everything that allows him to attract this appealing female romantic partner, but his possession of the phallus is what excludes him from Jewish sons. So the young lover is able to dupe him by acting as if he sees the husband enjoying when he knows full well that he isn't, right? So the joke plays on the symbolic father, the phallic figure's inability to see enjoyment while believing himself to have a monopoly on it. So here the couple enjoys through the symbolic father's castration, even though he's on high in the tower and you can see everything that's going on, he's actually blind to what happens right in front of his eyes because he doesn't simply perceive ever but always looks through the fantasy structure that the strangers already foster on him. So there's a blindness to the phallus that this joke plays on because it's missing what it's missing is Joey sons. Uh, the phallic figure does hold the keys, sorry, the phallic figure doesn't hold the keys to enjoyment; instead, it occurs right where what, right where he cannot experience or perceive it. So I think as Lacan situates shui sans in the abjaya, he takes the side of those who can enjoy where the symbolic father looks but can't see. So zhuissance becomes what defies the logic of power, what emerges where power ceases to have a hold. The phallus can't see where it fails, it can't, and and which is what blinds it to Jewish sons, just as in this desert island joke. So the turn to the object that begins in Seminar Nine, I think, represents the radical political turn in Lacan's intellectual trajectory, which I think then continues into Seminar 16, from another to the other, and the further paradigms of suicides.