Transcription
What is jouissance? This is a word that one finds in the writings of Lacanian, and in Jacques Lacan’s work, an awful lot, particularly in Lacan’s later period of his work. So this notion of jouissance, or enjoyment as it’s often perhaps erroneously translated, is going to be the topic of this lecture and a series of lectures that will follow on from it. Our objective today really is just to try to provide a series of exemplifications and examples of this concept, and what we will then do is progressively build on the articulation, the complexity of the concept, to try and give it a little bit more precision.
One of my own issues with how the word is sometimes used is that it seems to fall prey to that tendency, often within Lacanian theory, that a word is deployed with the assumption that everybody knows what it means, and it kind of loses its precision; it loses its shape and starts to be utilized in many different types of ways. So what we’re going to do is both try to exemplify it, give a sense of what the concept might refer to, but then also progressively try and refine its use so we can use it in a more analytically refined way.
Let me just also say, by way of introduction, that many of the examples and exemplifications of the concept that I will draw on actually come more from literature than the world of the social sciences, and I think we’ll find examples of this as I go on. I’ve been trying to collect these examples from novels, particularly from fiction, for some years now. I think we’ll find this is one area where the domain of fiction, in some respects, serves us much better than do social science conceptualizations of something like passion, which often seems to be the closest conceptual synonym, so to speak, to the notion of enjoyment or jouissance.
So let’s begin in a very elementary way and use a few turns of phrase that might start to evoke something of this concept. You can see I put some on the chalkboard: the notion that one might wallow in despair or wallow in one’s depression; one flies into a rage. Both of these are interesting ways of speaking, because, and I think the way the phrases are articulated tells us something; it’s almost as if when we say “fly into a rage,” that that phrase is telling us something about the exhilaration of being enraged, something of the stimulation, the arousal that comes with that. Wallowing in despair or wallowing in depression—again, it might, we might find that counterintuitive: why would one enjoy being in despair or enjoy being in depression? But I think again that phrase evokes something of the voluptuousness of a negative feeling, the fact that paradoxically we can enjoy a negative feeling, that we can be stimulated by the negative, in some respects. You could even say that as we approach this idea of jouissance, of enjoying, and of course the French word brings with it all the connotations of orgasm, the painful pleasure of orgasm, as we start to get to this psychological domain of libidinal enjoyment, of jouissance, we start to realize that in some ways this is a kind of erotic sub-negativity, then a whole series of arousal or painful stimuli that take us beyond a certain bodily threshold, beyond the threshold of pleasure, or somehow even more stimulating, or somehow arousing in a different kind of way, and that’s what we’re aiming at.
Let me give you two more examples before we actually turn to Freud. And as you know, in my attempt to introduce Lacanian concepts, I often try to ground them in Freud’s comments or theorization, so Freud. But here are two further examples. You’ll note up here that I’ve given this quote: “The rush of battle.” So at the beginning of Kathryn Bigelow’s award-winning film *The Hurt Locker*, there’s a simple quote that comes on the screen, and that quote says, “The rush of battle is a potent and lethal addiction; war is a drug.” And in the course of the film, you see a guy, a soldier, who is tasked in Iraq with dismantling bombs, and of course it’s a hugely traumatic process because you can lose your life at any point. He becomes traumatized by the whole process; he goes back home to the United States; he’s unable to readjust, and all he wants to do is go back. And at the end of the film, we see him back there again. That kind of behavior, whereby someone has made an attachment to something lethal or something traumatic—that’s kind of where we’re going; that’s kind of where we are heading with the notion of jouissance. And just while I’m using that example, let’s keep that notion of trauma in there somehow; that when, when an ordinary, anodyne form of stimulation or enjoyment, in the usual sense of the term, starts to become, starts to verge on, to be on the brink of something which is more traumatic, which is more stimulating and painfully so, that’s when we could rightfully speak of jouissance.
One other example: this comes from an 1826 essay by an English author called William Hazlitt. He has a whole essay called “The Pleasure of Hating,” and I think that also starts to approximate something of what we’re talking about with this notion of jouissance; this idea that although we may say, “No, of course I don’t, I didn’t enjoy having that fight,” or “No, anger is a terrible, awful, negative emotion,” one can be thoroughly stimulated, impassioned; one can be inflamed, aroused by negative emotions. So that gives us a whole series of implications, a whole series of indications of the kind of phenomenon that we will be looking at.
Let’s say one more thing before we turn to Freud. I’ve been trying to collect these descriptions of this phenomenon for a while, precisely because I think that social scientists don’t often have a concept to do this kind of work. Sometimes they might talk loosely of passion, that doesn’t sound typically—not for them, presumably; so they don’t have an adequate, as far as I can tell, concept to do this kind of conceptual work, this conceptualization. Here’s one: “morbid excitation,” that comes from the work of the Lacanian leader. I like that as well, because the morbid excitation infuses the subject; they are aroused, they are stimulated, but there is a morbidity to it. Respect helps us with an everyday colloquial turn of phrase: the idea that you may “get off on” something. And again, it’s really helpful because when we use that phrase, I think we intuitively grasp that people can get off on any number of things, from bullying people to being sadistic to being horrible to perhaps even having pain inflicted upon oneself. What one gets off on isn’t perhaps a far wider range of phenomena than we normally imagined, and that idea of “getting off on,” it’s useful; I think it nicely encapsulates something of the problematics, the domain of jouissance.
Also useful: sometimes when Lacan talks about enjoyment, there’s this—and the Lacanians talk about it—there’s this idea that it’s kind of disgusting, that there’s a smear of enjoyment, but you can’t really pinpoint it to any one element of a given scene, but that it somehow pervades the scene like a noxious odor. And I don’t know why, but in trying to collect these images, I was, I was always trying to think of a nice example. Slavoj Žižek gives a few, actually, which we may refer to, but there’s an idea that the enjoyment is sometimes, in some respects, kind of difficult to pinpoint, but it nevertheless pervades the scene; that it’s somehow almost obscene. And I think if you’re an everyday neurotic subject like me, one of the things that you find very unsettling, actually, is one’s own enjoyment; or differently put, maybe there’s certain modes of enjoyment, of “getting off,” that are okay, but goodness, I mean, I wouldn’t want anyone to see me in that situation. So there’s a kind of relationship of disgust or disavowal or displacement or rejection that most people have in relationship to their own enjoyment.
Just a brief example: we can imagine that it’s a kind of obvious example, but let’s say we have a high court judge who has to rule on a case. As he’s ruling on the case, he becomes—as he’s giving the verdict—he becomes infused with some kind of righteous anger: “Yo, whoa, hanged by the neck until dead!” And his anger—it was righteous, you could say that here. Even though in that moment of speaking the law, of meting out the law, of doing something which should be right, which is the law, he has the authority to do that; there’s a kind of Gideon righteousness, the kind of inflamed, impassioned mode through which that enjoyment, or through which the law is animated. And that theme is certainly one we’ll come back to: how law itself, symbolic law, which should be at some level objective or neutral, idealistically, is itself reliant on jouissance to be animated, to become a kind of passion, not merely an objective law. But I give that example because if after that court case I go up and I say, “Excuse me, your High Court Judge Honor, and your Justice—or what did we call the guy?—Madam, you—you were enjoying that,” you can guess what will happen, presumably: he would be irritated; he would be angry; he would dismiss that completely. So it’s an important qualification: we tend, if we’re not perverse subjects, let’s say, if we’re not, except Richter, for not perverse, we tend to be somewhat disturbed by our own enjoyment; we don’t like the idea that other people might witness our enjoyment. And in the moment of enjoyment, in the Gideon righteousness of giving a legal decision for the judge, or in the midst of a screaming match with my—I fly into a rage—if someone were to say to me, quite rightly so, “And here, the—the words make sense: you enjoyed that,” you would say, “No, I didn’t.” You wouldn’t want to own it. Maybe that’s the easiest colloquial way of putting it: one typically doesn’t own one’s jouissance.
And here’s a further theme that we’ll explore as we go on in these lectures: the problem of what to do with one’s jouissance is a very useful way of opening up one perspective on various domains of social antagonism, prejudice and racism. Because if human beings have enjoyment, they get off on things, they—they have certain enjoyments that they are not particularly comfortable with having, presumably. It’s a lot easier to spot them, to project them in everyday psychological language, to locate them in others and to see their enjoyment as a problem rather than being able to admit to something of one’s own enjoyment.
So let’s get to our Freud quote, and then we will, we’ll look to Tony Blair, former British Prime Minister, and we’ll take a quote out of his autobiography. Obviously, as you know, Tony Blair read a lot of Lacan in his undergraduate years, and it’s a Lacanian analyst—ah, gotcha. All right, so let’s quickly do some work by Freud, and then we’ll look at that quote by Tony Blair to draw to a conclusion for today.
So I’m reading from Sigmund Freud. This is from *The Penguin Freud Library*. I’m going to take a quote from *Instincts and Their Vicissitudes*, but I’m also going to refer to Freud’s *Three Essays on Sexuality*. And let’s just say that the *Three Essays on Sexuality* were published in 1905. The date of this mini-lecture is 2020. We’re talking about a text that’s obviously more than 100 years old, but I think there’s still something very perceptive, very incisive, and perhaps somewhat destabilizing, somewhat unnerving about his comments. So here are a couple comments he makes. In first—the first comment, he’s talking about sexual excitation. He says, “Sexual excitation arises as a byproduct of a large number of different processes that occur in the organism as soon as they reach a certain degree of intensity, and most especially of any powerful emotion, even though it is of a distressing nature.” This is interesting, for it seems to be suggesting that the bottom basis, the arousal, and the sexual arousal—and of course, but for Freud, sexual doesn’t just mean sex in the narrower sense; it means a kind of bodily intensity, arousal that has a libidinal quality—but he’s suggesting here that what might arouse the subject could be any number of things. And I suppose here it’s worthwhile thinking of bungee jumping, extreme sports, those limit experiences, all of those things that get one’s heart beating, heart palpitations, that degree of exhilaration, the kind of enthused, impassioned, inflamed subjectivity. Freud’s trying to suggest that any number of unexpected phenomena and stimulations might produce some kind of libidinal, sexual response. He continues: “Feelings of tension are necessarily involved in pleasure. Sexual excitement is counted as a pleasurable feeling, but also undoubtedly as pleasure.” So here, I think this is distinctively where psychoanalysis is making an interesting point: the libidinous death drive in sexual pleasure; we tend to approach it like that. But Freud is also suggesting it wouldn’t be sexual pleasure unless there was some tension, some pain, some—could we dare say it—that it’s almost that it has to have an erotogenic, painful element to it before it becomes properly sexual. “Excitation masks work. Intense affective processes trench upon sexuality. There are sexually exciting effects of many emotions which are in themselves unpleasurable. Feelings of apprehension, fear, or horror persist in a great number of people throughout their adult life.” That’s the end of the quote. And what that makes me think of is—maybe I’m dating myself with the reference—but what is it about the *Friday the 13th* movies? I mean, you know, that’s a dated franchise, but the whole idea—and these films were pretty successful—I don’t watch a lot of horror cinema today, maybe the same thing happens—but you would have these college kids, American college kids, that go off in the summer, going to do some summer camp, and you know, there’s all sorts of sexually titillating things that start to happen, but at the same time there’s this awful serial killer killing them off one by one. You can say that the genius of the filmmaker of those films is that they seem to realize that you can combine two forms of arousal, two forms of almost salacious titillation: the arousal of the intensities that come both with conventionally understood sexual feelings, as well as the intensities, the threshold, the arousal that comes with fear, that comes with the traumatic scene of death.
So let’s say we’re close then. We have explored, really, I suppose we’ve introduced the concept, and as we progress, I will try and get more and more examples, but just by way of conclusion, I want to give a quote from Tony Blair’s autobiography. It’s called *A Journey*, and we’ve returned to Tony Blair, actually. I think he has more to say about jouissance than he realizes. I’ll do this quote and then I’ll end with three questions, three critical questions, with which we will problematize the notion of jouissance.
So in his autobiography, his 2010 autobiography, Tony Blair gives a little characterization. In the United Kingdom, as many will know, we have this thing called Prime Minister’s Questions. Prime Minister’s Questions happens at least once a week, and the poor Prime Minister is reeled into the House of Parliament, and everyone grills this person; they ask—and of course, there’s Tony, buddy explains—you, you try to prepare, but sometimes as a news item that comes up before. So this is what he says: “Prime Minister’s Questions was the most nerve-wracking, discombobulating, nail-biting, bowel-moving, terror-inspiring, courage-draining experience in my Prime Ministerial life, without question. I hated it. The whole thing is a giant, just sort of modern, non-physical duel; it’s blood sport, and the Prime Minister is the quarry.” Then Blair goes on to say—well, when he’d go to America, he would describe what Prime Minister’s Questions was to people who may not know—and he said what often would happen was many of his American colleagues said, by quoting, “Oh, but you always seem to enjoy it so much.” And I suppose my concluding thought is that maybe Tony Blair himself hadn’t quite grasped the concept of enjoyment, but certainly his American interlocutors seem to have.
Three questions then, with which to conclude for today: Is jouissance an affect? Is it, as some people sometimes say, a Lacanian theorist’s way of dealing with affects? Is it a kind of affect theory? Now, when I ask that question, it comes with a slight critical edge, because if we go back all the way to Lacan’s first seminar, he’s got—following in the footsteps of Claude Lévi-Strauss—he’s got some pretty critical things to say about explanations by virtue of affect. He says, for example, “The affective is not like a special density which would escape an intellectual accounting.” I’m going to use all of his words here; sometimes that confuses the issue, but let’s say that the early Lacan, who’s so interested and focused on signifiers and on the symbolic, he’s highly critical and suspicious of explanations by way of affect. And one can appreciate why: you can explain almost any instance of social life by affect. Why did so-and-so do something? They were angry; they were sad. So he doesn’t think it’s a precise way of approaching psychical life to get too used to explanations by way of affect. Now, if that’s the case, are we not sailing into somewhat perilous waters by thinking of jouissance as a kind of affect theory? That’s question number one. Question number two: when people talk about jouissance, they often say that it is—and I’ve alluded to this a number of times already—that it’s, it’s like a smear; it’s like a stain; it’s hard to pinpoint; that it’s not—it’s something that cannot be encapsulated within the symbolic realm; that it cannot be encapsulated within an imaginary identity either. It seems to, by definition, be real. And of course, here I’m referring to the three registers that Lacan speaks of—a crucial contribution to his work—the idea that there’s the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. So people often say that jouissance is outside of the symbolic; it gets extra-discursive; it’s in the real; it’s in the domain of bodily impassion, whatever that is. So is jouissance completely outside the domain of the symbolic? We could say, in some respects, it does seem to be, but then again, how do we explain something like the jouissance of profanity, or the jouissance of swearing, or the fact that jouissance seems to take form in the fact that you can have a whole community who has a kind of shared mode of jouissance? So, second problematization. And the last one is: we’re in the realm of psychoanalytic theory; the unconscious looms large. And I’ve seen it time and time again: colleagues say that enjoyment or jouissance—and remember, just while I’m at it, sometimes talking about enjoyment is the wrong word, because jouissance is always enjoyment plus suffering; enjoyment to the extreme; it is an enjoyment that stretches the subject beyond the bounds of pleasure towards the traumatic. So it’s not really enjoyment, and this we understand—we’re using it precisely in this particular sense. Enjoyment is far more anodyne; it’s not as—it’s not as compulsive; it’s not as nearly painful as the kind of enjoyment we’re talking about here. Back to our question though: is enjoyment unconscious? Time and time again, colleagues in the secondary literature say this is unconscious enjoyment, and I’m not so sure. Because if enjoyment is, by definition, a state of bodily arousal, if—if enjoyment is, in a way, the physiological, an aroused body which is taking on some kind of stimulation despite what I would consciously prefer, then it seems to me that jouissance can’t correctly be said to be unconscious. We’ll start next time with a response to these three questions.