McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. 2013
🙂 Here 100 pages in, the neighbor or other that enjoys, doesn’t include us and we get paranoid or at least uneasy. We feel insignificant, but when we go to sporting events and music concerts we identify with the enjoyment that we see thereby “avoid the trauma of the encounter with the other’s enjoyment.”
The neighbor or real other is the enjoying other.
The other’s mode of enjoyment marks the other as absolutely singular. Everything else about the other — emotions, thoughts, desires, achievements, and so on — can be understood and communicated through the order of signification or language. We can share all these experiences through the mediation of the signifier, which informs them in their very origin. The other’s enjoyment unlike everything else about the other, disturbs us when we encounter it because it does not take us into account. While the other’s symbolic identity includes us as the source of the look that validates it, the other’s enjoyment not only ignores us but seems to go so far as to occur at our expense. When we encounter the enjoying other, we experience our own isolation, our own absolute insignificance for the other.
The encounter with the enjoying other occurs at moments when a radical cut emerges between the other and the subject. Events such as basketball games and rock concerts allow spectators to identify with the enjoyment that they see and thereby to avoid the trauma of the encounter with the other’s enjoyment. In contrast, the shared laughter of people speaking a foreign language, the rumor of an orgy at a secret society, or the strange noises that a toddler hears behind the closed door of the parental bedroom do not provide any opening to the outsider. One hears the enjoyment without any possibility of partaking in it through the act of identification, and one almost inevitably imagines that one’s exclusion is part of the enjoyment. The distinction between an enjoying other enjoying itself at my expense and an enjoying other indifferent to me becomes negligible. The pertinent fact is the other’s enjoyment that doesn’t include me. 102