jouissance – Page 3

feminine jouissance

Feher-Gurewich, Judith. “Is Lacan Borderline?” In The Dreams of Interpretation. Edited by Catherine Liu et. al. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. 147-158.

lacan’s crucial contribution to Freud’s discovery lies in his attempt to break down the fundamental deadlock that led Freud to declare that, because he could not figure out what a woman wanted, he felt unable to move beyond the bedrock of castration and therefore could not find the secret formula to resolve the transference and bring analysis to a close.

What Lacan explains is that to a certain extent Freud himself was trapped in the Oedipal fantasy because he believed an answer could be given to the enigma of femininity. Thus Freud himself could not see that what he had thus discovered was in fact the limit of psychoanalytic knowledge.

There is no mystery beyond castration anxiety and penis envy. Instead there is a hole.

The system of phallic signification of language, of science, of social intraction falls short in offering the ultimate answer to the enigma. The system in which we are inscribed as human beings does not include an explanation either of its origin or of its function. Beyond the fantasy we create as desiring subjects, there is no secret meaniing to be revealed. But this fantasy, or object a, is the best we have to assure the good functioning of desire.

duras Lol Stein vanheule

Page 144 Vanheule: Lacan doesn’t emphasize Lol’s failure to signify her existence, but indicates that by occupying the a-subjective position, and becoming totally absorbed in her fascination with the dancing couple, Lol copes with the desiring relation that unfolds between her financé and Anne-Marie Stretter.

By being the mere observer, Lol positions herself as an a-subjective observer in relation to the desiring couple, and gains a feeling of being: ‘this [Lol’s] being is never really specified, personified, presentified in her novel, in so far as she only exists in the form of this core object, this object a of something that exists as a gaze, but which is a gaze, a scattered gaze, a gaze-object, a gaze that we repeatedly see’ (Lacan Sem XII).

Indeed Lol’s a-subjective position as observer is functional: it helps her deal with social situations and avoid the position of the object a in relation to a ferocious Other.

By observing others and by explicitly positioning herself as the ‘excluded third’ (Lacan Other Ecrits) she avoids being the passive object of the gaze. With her outrageous reaction, by contrast, Lol’s mother destroys this a-subjective position vis-a-vis the desiring couple and creates a dual situation. Out of great concern, she actively addresses Lol, expresses her wish that the scene at the party hadn’t taken place and physically touches her. Lol can’t cope with this direct appeal by her mother, which urges Lol to manifest herself as a subject, and attacks her mother.

Another triangular situation, which Lol actively organized, consists of her relationship with Jacques Hold, the narrator of the story, and Tatiana Karl, ‘her best friend during her school years’ (Duras 1965 p. 1). Jacques Hold is fond of Lola Valerie Stein, but has an affair with Tatiana. Lol supports this affair and puts herself in the position of observer, where she watches love scenes between them. Lacan views this situation as subjectively interesting for Lol, and claims that ‘a knot is made again there’. Indeed, by occupying the a-subjective position of observer Lol revives from her lifeless marriage.

However, this triangular situation does not last, and ends up in a dual relationship when Jacques Hold falls in love with Lol. He seduces her, they plan to make love, yet at the moment Hold undresses Lol she literally goes mad. She suddenly thinks the police are in the buidling and that people are being beaten on the stairway, and starts to refer to hereself as Tatiana Karl and Lol Stein at the same time. The direct confrontation with Hold’s desire is a situation she cannot cope with.

[…] It appears that by evading physical interaction with a man who is attracted to the female body, Lol feels at ease and maintains a feeling of identity. obviously abstinence guarantees that she is not overwhelmed by jouissance: the a-subjective position as observer protects her from being the object of jouissance of the Other. At the same time her position qua gaze seems to provide her with a surplus jouissance, and a bearable level of sexual excitation. Through her a-subjective position Lol delimits her own being and creates an experience of consistency. 145

What is innovative about Lacan’s discussion of this fictional case is that it bears witness of a positive view of the object a in psychosis. Although the story does not have a happy ending, it shows tht Lola Valerie Stein’s position as observer doesn’t necessarily exclude her from social bonds. As long as desiring others do not come too close and she can maintain her abstinent position, she is not a victim of the non-instalment of a belief in the Other as a reference for making sense of desire.

Lol’s abstinent sexual attitude is a sublime coping mechanism by means of which she keeps the pressure emanating from desiring others at bay and prevents herself from being the object of jouissance of a cruel Other. The only problem is that she did not remain faithful to this non-physical sexual attitude, which suited her so well. 146

mellard Beyond Lacan

Mellard, James M. (2006) Beyond Lacan. Albany: State U of New York 288 pages.
Chapter 7: Hart’s Damage, Lacanian Tragedy, and the Ethics of Jouissance. pp. 179 – 208.

traditional oedipal subject founded on an ethics of desire to a postraditional subject founded on an ethics of jouissance

Oedipal Subject: eros and social life,
– subject oriented to desire (and thus constrained by castration and the pleasure principle)

– subject of desire
Damage is important in our understanding the shift from the old oedipal order to the new narcissism, from the order of desire to that of the drive.

This shift, Copjec suggests, has a cognate move-epochal, historical, and ongoing, neither personal nor idiosyncratic. It shifts emphasis to concepts — either ” meaning” or “being” — Lacan associates with the vel of alienation.

Heretofore, in that process known as ” oedipalization, ” it has been a good thing for subjects to be oriented to meaning (and thus to desire within the pleasure principle and oedipal law) rather than to being (and thus to drive and jouissance within the domain of the narcissistic ).

PostOedipal, PostTraditional Subject: Thanatos and the death drive

– oriented towards jouissance and thus denying contraints of castration and aiming beyond the pleasure principle. narcissistic subject of jouissance

Femme fatale turns desire toward jouissance

In so far as sexual difference is a Real that resists symbolization, the sexual relationship is condemned to remain an asymmetrical non-relationship in which the Other, our partner, prior to being a subject, is a Thing. Metastases of Enjoyment, 108

We may say that the narrator-protagonist of Damage merely takes a detour through desire and ordinary oedipal subjectivity before becoming the problematical subject of our postuniverse. His detour goes through the femme fatale, one guise of the maternal object who experiences desire and, as Copjec says, serves as a “defense against the drive” by her relation to jouissance (198).

As Zizek suggests in his discussions of film noir, the role of the femme fatale foregrounds the paradoxical role of “woman ” in the construction of ” man . ” That role raises issues of desire and drive. Zizek points out that Lacan’s controversial claim that “Woman is a symptom ” (Feminine Sexuality 168 ) of a man can be understood in two radically opposed ways because in Lacan’s career Lacan himself shifted his views on the symptom. In the first, the ” early”view of the 1950s, Lacan saw the symptom, Zizek says, as “a cyphered message,” one in which therefore the “woman-symptom appears as the sign, the embodiment of man’s fall, attesting to the fact that man ‘gave way as to his desire'” (Enjoy 154).

In this view as illustrated in Zizek’s discussion of the noir universe, “woman is not an external, active cause which lures man into a fall-she is just a consequence, a result, a materialization of man’s fall. So, when man purifies his desire of the pathological remainders, woman disintegrates in precisely the same way a symptom dissolves after successful interpretation, after we have symbolized its repressed meaning” (155).

But, Zizek asks, is there not more? “Does not Lacan’s other notorious thesis — the claim that ‘woman doesn’t exist‘ — point in the same direction? Woman doesn’t exist in herself, as a positive entity with full ontological consistency, but only as a symptom of man.”

In the second view, found in the late writings and seminars and foregrounding drive and jouissance, Lacan regarded the symptom” as a particular signifying formation which confers on the subject its very ontological consistency, enabling it to structure its basic, constitutive relationship to enjoyment (jouissance).”

In this late Lacanian view, both the symptom and woman-as-symptom change. Says Zizek, ” [I]f the symptom is dissolved, the subject itself loses the ground under his feet, disintegrates. In this sense, ‘woman is a symptom of man‘ means that man himself exists only through woman qua his symptom: all his ontological consistency hangs on, is suspended from his symptom, is ‘externalized’ in his symptom.

In other words, man literally ex-sists: his entire being lies ‘out there,’ in woman” (155) . Zizek is especially interested in film noir because, paradox ically, it expresses both these Lacanian views of woman and symptom.

The father Martyn thinks he knows is the oedipal father who in his ignorance allows him desire and pleasure. The one he does not know is the obscene, life- and joy-denying
primordial father who wills his death, murders him, and chooses to become him.

There is good reason Martyn does not know his father is or has become the anal or phallic or primordial father. According to Zizek, the anal father represents the tendency in Lacan’s seminar, especially beginning with The Ethics of Psychoanalysis ( 1959-1960), for every concept to have, as a Mobius strip does, an obverse, a paradoxical reverse or inner lining that contradicts or obviates it. The primordial father, Zizek writes, ” is the obscene, superego anal figure that is real-alive, the ‘Master of Enjoyment.'”

In Freud, this primordial father is the one who is murdered by the primal horde of brothers, murdered precisely because, expressing drive, he forbids their desire and pleasure by taking all the women for himself.

Because of the power of his drive to jouissance, he would murder them if necessary to prevent their desires or drives. Zizek suggests that politically, in the exchange of master for leader, the primordial father paradoxically follows the oedipal father. ” In all emblematic revolutions, from the French to the Russian,” says Zizek, ” the overthrow of the impotent old regime of the symbolic Master (French King, Tsar) ended in the rule of a far more ‘repressive’ figure of the ‘anal’ father-Leader (Napoleon, Stalin ).”

This historical pattern suggests to Zizek that in the myth of the primal horde Freud had things backward.”

The order of succession described by Freud in Totem and Taboo (the murdered primordial Father-Enjoyment returns in the guise of the symbolic authority of the Name) is thus reversed: the deposed symbolic Master returns as the obscene-real Leader.”

In this account, Zizek suggests, ” Freud was the victim of a kind of perspective illusion: ‘primordial father‘ is a later, eminently modern, post-revolutionary phenomenon, the result of the dissolution of traditional symbolic authority” (Metastases 206 ) .

johnston vicious circle super-ego

Johnston, A. (2001) The vicious Circle of the Super-Ego: The Pathological Trap of Guilt and the Beginning of Ethics. Psychoanlytic Studes (3): 3/4. 411-424.

“desire is a defense, a prohibition against going beyond a certain limit in jouissance”

One of the easiest ways to gain a preliminary understanding of Lacanian desire is by returning to the Freudian concepts of Trieb and sublimation.

For Freud, sublimation is the typical means by which Trieb adapts itself to the constraints and obstacles it comes to encounter at the level of the reality principle. Reality forbids certain drive-aims qua the attainment of satisfaction linked to determinate drive-objects. Thus, reality is said to be responsible for what Freud designates as ‘aim-inhibition’ (a catalyst for sublimation). 413

The aim-inhibited drive then seeks other forms of satisfaction via different objects; and, if these alternate modes of securing gratifcation are not at odds with the various prohibitions of the reality principle (usually, socio-cultural laws and norms), then the new libidinal arrangement is dubbed a successful sublimation of the drive.

However, especially in the later texts of the second topography, Freud repeatedly emphasizes that Trieb is ‘fundamentally conservative’, that drives unceasingly seek to recover their earliest forms of satisfaction. Furthermore, in, for example, Civilization and Its Discontents, he argues that ‘instinctual renunciation’ (i.e., the aim-inhibition of the drives demanded by human reality) is, despite appearances to the contrary, an unavoidable libidinal fate for all subjects

As such, the Freudian subject lives in a state of unsatisfactory compromise: sublimation provides pleasurable outlets for Trieb, but Trieb itself is incapable of ever being fully satisfied with these compromises, since they are, by the very definition of the mechanism of sublimation, deviations from the original cathetic trajectory (i.e., the ‘earliest state of affairs’ which all drives struggle in vain to recover; in the seventh seminar, Lacan designates this posited ‘ground zero’ of the libidinal economy das Ding).

The libidinal life of the human being is therefore marked by certain constitutive ‘lacks’ or ‘absences’—as Lacan puts it, the ‘sovereign Good’ of das Ding is always missing from the reality of subjective ‘ex-sistence’ — and this condition of (non-)existence is precisely what Lacan intends for his notion of ‘desire’ to designate.

Desire is the residual remainder/by-product of the subjection of jouissance (i.e., Trieb an sich, the unconditional attachment to das Ding) to the ego-mediated negotiations between the pleasure and reality principles.

Das Ding
But where does this take us? Is the Law the Thing? Certainly not. Yet I can only know of the Thing by means of the Law.

In effect, I would not have had the idea to covet it if the Law hadn’t said: ‘Thou shalt not covet it.’ But the Thing finds a way by producing in me all kinds of covetousness thanks to the commandment, for without the Law the Thing is dead. (Lacan, Book VII, p. 83).

Zupančič ethics and tragedy pt2

Zupančič, Alenka. Ethics and tragedy in Lacan. (2003) The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté, New York: Cambridge UP. 173-190.

IT IS EASIER TO ACCEPT INTERDICTION THAN TO RUN THE RISK OF CASTRATION.

To put it simply: the law gives a signifying form to the impossibility involved in the very phenomenon of desire.

The fundamental operation of the law is always to forbid something that is in itself impossible. The fact that the law links this impossible to some particular object should not prevent us from seeing this.

By designating a certain object as forbidden, the law does two things:

1) it isolates the impossible Thing that the desire aims at but never attains, and

2) it provides an image of this Thing. This image (my neighbor’s wife, for instance) has to be distinguished from what, on the level of the symbolic, is nothing else but the signifier of the impossible as such.

The law condenses the impossible involved in desire into one exceptional “place.” Via this logic of exception, it liberates the field of the possible. This is why the intervention of the law can have a liberating effect on the subject.

It makes it possible for Achilles not to spend every minute of his life trying to figure out why he cannot catch up with the tortoise, or trying obstinately to do so. It can make him a productive member of the community.

This is the reason why Lacan, although he refuses to put analysis into the service of producing happy members of the community, also refuses to subscribe to the discourse advocating the liberation of desire from the repression and the spoils of law.

His point is that the law supplements the impossibility involved in the very nature of desire by a symbolic interdiction, and that it is thus erroneous to assume that by eliminating this interdiction, we will also eliminate the impossibility involved in the desire.

What he warned against, for instance, in the turmoil of 1968, was not some chaotic state that could result from the abolition of certain laws and prohibitions.

He didn’t warn against human desire running crazy. On the contrary, he warned against the fact that desire, tired of dealing with its own impossibility, will give up and resign to anything rather than try to find its own law. 178

We have already quoted Lacan’s thesis according to which “it is easier to accept interdiction than to run the risk of castration.” However, as should be clear from what we just developed, this does not mean that interdiction keeps us safe from being exposed to castration (that is, from undergoing a loss of something that we have).

The “fear of castration” is the fear of losing that which constitutes a signifying support for the lack involved in the experience of the desire as such. Interdiction is what provides that support; it is what gives a signifying form to the lack (or to the experience of “castration”) which is already there.

Psychoanalysis, as Lacan conceived it, is not something that will restitute the good old law where it is lacking. Although many clinical problems can indeed be traced to the failure of the law to function for the subject as a stabilizing factor, the job of psychoanalysis is in no way to make sure that the subject will finally subscribe to the ideal of this or that authority.

One should rather say that once things have gone so far (as to produce a neurosis, for instance), they can only go further.

In principle, it is easier to go by the law than to find one’s own way around desire.

But all the malfunctions and dysfunctions that appear in the clinic (as well as in the psychopathology of everyday life) remind us not only that this doesn’t always work, but also that it never works perfectly.

Psychoanalysis is not here to repair the damage, to help the social machine to function more smoothly and to reconstruct whatever was ill-constructed.

It is there to take us further along the path that our “problems” have put us on, it is there as the “guardian” of the other way, the one that consists in finding our own way around our desire.

Emblematic of this “other way” is the story of Oedipus who, although unknowingly, steps out of the shelter of interdiction, is led to give up the thing that captivated him, and enters the realm where “the absolute reign of his desire is played out . . . something that is sufficiently brought out by the fact that he is shown to be unyielding right to the end, demanding everything, giving up nothing, absolutely unreconciled” (S VII, p. 310).

This is what makes it possible for Lacan to insist upon the fact that the renunciation of goods and of power that is supposed to be a punishment, “is not, in fact, one” (S VII, p. 310).

Consequently, tragedy, at least in the perspective of what Lacan calls the tragic dimension of analytical experience, is not necessarily all that “tragic,” but can produce the kind of liberation that takes place in the case of Oedipus.

Zupančič ethics and tragedy pt1

Zupančič, Alenka. Ethics and tragedy in Lacan. (2003) The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté New York: Cambridge UP. 173-190.

Duties that we impose on ourselves and experience as “sacrifices” are, as often as not, a response to the fear of the risks involved in the case if we did not impose these duties. In other words, they are precisely the way we hang on to something that we fear most of all to lose. And it is this fear (or this “possession”) that enslaves us and makes us accept all kinds of sacrifices.

Lacan’s point is that this possession is not some empirical good that we have and don’t want to lose. It is of symbolic nature, which is precisely what makes it so hard to give up.

To renounce this “good” is not so much to renounce something that we have, as it is to renounce something that we don’t have but which is nevertheless holding our universe together.

In other words, “psychoanalysis teaches that in the end it is easier to accept interdiction than to run the risk of castration” (S VII, p. 307).

This formula is, in fact, crucial for the “ethics of psychoanalysis,” which could be defined as that which liberates us by making us accept the risk of castration.

In a certain sense, it puts us in the position where we have nothing to lose. However, while not false, this way of putting things can be misleading, since it suggests some kind of ultimate loss beyond which we no longer can desire or get attached to anything, which is precisely not the point.

The loss in question is rather supposed to liberate the field of the desire – liberate it in the sense that the desire no longer depends upon the interdiction (of the Law) but is led to find and articulate its own law.

The intervention of the law, far from simply “repressing” our desire, helps us deal with the impasse or impossibility involved in the mechanism of the desire as such. To put it simply: the law gives a signifying form to the impossibility involved in the very phenomenon of desire. 178

glynos fantasy

Glynos, Jason and Yannis Stavrakakis. (2008) “Lacan and Political Subjectivity: Fantasy and Enjoyment in Psychoanalysis and Political Theory.” Subjectivity, 2008, 24, (256-274)

The idea of the subject as lack cannot be separated from the subject’s attempts to cover over this constitutive lack at the level of representation by affirming its positive (symbolic-imaginary) identity or, when this fails, through continuous identificatory acts aiming to re-institute an identity.

This lack necessitates the constitution of every identity though processes of identification with social available traits of identification found, for example, in political ideologies, practices of consumption, and a whole range of social roles; and vice versa: the inability of identificatory acts to produce a full identity by subsuming subjective division (re)produces the radical ex-centricity of the subject and, along with it, a whole negative dialectics of partial fixation. Subjectivity in Lacan’s work, then, is linked not only to lack but also our attempts to eliminate this lack that, however, does not stop re-emerging. (260-261)

A different relation to fantasy and thus mode of enjoyment or subjectivity is possible

– phallic jouissance: a subject is in thrall to his fantasy and thus insensitive “to the contingency of social reality.” an aversion to ambiguity

A non-phallic form of enjoyment (jouissance feminine or Other jouissance) Here the subject is taken to acknowledge and affirm the contingency of social relations and to pursue an enjoyment that is not guided by the impulse to “complete”, to “totalize”, or to “make full or whole”, an enjoyment situated, rather, on the “the side of the not-whole”.

infinite of desire jouissance

Zupančič, Alenka. The Ethics of the Real. New York: Verso. 2000.

The problem of the infinite is not how to attain it but, rather, how to get rid of its stain, a stain that ceaselessly pursues us. The Lacanian name for this parasitism is enjoyment [jouissance]. 249

The death drive is not a drive that aims at death. It aims neither at life nor at death. The drive can be ‘mortal’ precisely because it is indifferent to death (as well as to life); because it is not preoccupied with death, because death does not interest it. … it is indifferent to death. 250

How, then, does the infinite parasitize the finite, our existence as ‘finite beings’ ?

there are two modes of this parasitism, each of them resulting in a different figure of the infinite: first, there is the infinite of desire, which might be described as a ‘bad infinity’

there is the infinite of jouissance (linked to the logic of the Real, and of the realization). Ethics itself can be situated in the passage from the one to the other.

This passage, however, can itself take two different paths.

The paradigm of the first is indicated by the figure of Antigone, and brings out the co-ordinates of ‘classical ethics’ .

The paradigm of the second is evident in the figure of Sygne de Coûfontaine, and constitutes what we might call ‘modern ethics’. 250

swales disavowal

Swales, Stephanie S. Perversion: A Lacanian Psychoanalytic Approach to the Subject. Routledge, 2012.

The mechanism of disavowal should be understood as a defense, not against the lawgiving Other’s demand that the child sacrifice jouissance, but against the inadequacy of the lawgiving Other.

Disavowal is a creative attempt to prop up the Law and to set limits to the excess in jouissance experienced due to the child’s problematic relation to the first Other.

The disavowal of the lawgiving Other might be described in the following terms: “I know very well that my father [or father figure] hasn’t forced me to give up my mother and my corresponding jouissance, but I’m going to make believe that the force of Law exists with someone or something that represents my father.” 78

The mechanism ofdisavowal, as I have said, involves the maintenance of two contradictory pieces of knowledge together with a strongly held belief that one of the two pieces of knowledge is true. In matters of superstition — in which a belief is held despite evidence to the contrary—therefore, disavowal is often pertinent.

For example, “I know very well that if, in one breath, I blow out all the flames of the candles on my birthday cake, my wish won’t really come true, but nevertheless I believe it’s true. Consequently, I make a wish every year and try my best to blow out all the candles with one breath.”

swales pervert

Swales, S. (2012). Perversion: A Lacanian Psychoanalytic Approach to the Subject. New York: Routledge.

Encountering a patient who in the initial sessions does not see himself as lacking is by no means an uncommon event. Most often, this type of patient is obsessive, and his difficulty in seeing himself as lacking in relation to the therapist can be attributed to his structural reasons for negating the Other and attempting to neutralize the Other’s desire.

Correspondingly, the obsessive often fears seeing himself as dependent (even in terms of knowledge) upon the therapist Other.

The obsessive prefers not to see himself as desiring because it threatens him with aphanisis and reveals to him that he is a subject lacking in being.

The process of getting the obsessive to face his own lack in the process of analysis is referred to as hystericizing his desire, and this involves regularly reminding the obsessive of the Other’s presence and desire. 241

However, the perverse patient, as mentioned above, can have a sure answer to the question of identity at the level of jouissance while remaining perplexed at the level of desire. The therapist, then, should foster the perverse patient’s curiosity in himself. Why does he desire what and how he desires?

It is thus important for the therapist to highlight manifestations of the pervert’s putting himself into question, for instance by ending a session when a pervert says, “I don’t know why I …” The therapist’s task of inscribing lack into the pervert will be an ongoing one throughout the process of therapy. 242

For instance, a masochistic patient who has undergone several months of therapy might escalate the dangerous practices in which he engages in the (usually unconscious) hope that the therapist’s anxiety will peak and s/he will enunciate a prohibition of those activities.

In this example, the masochist’s actions put the therapist in somewhat of a bind: if the therapist enunciates a prohibition, s/he deviates from analytic neutrality and the therapy might suffer from the associated risks (e.g., that the pervert attribute to the therapist a lasting wish that he stop engaging in those especially dangerous masochistic practices such that the pervert will repeatedly demand via his actions that the therapist play the role of lawgiving Other and the treatment will become stuck at the levels of perverse enactment and of demand);

if, on the other hand, the therapist does not prohibit the masochist’s dangerous practices, at the most the masochist might end up getting a serious injury or even getting killed and the therapist might face malpractices charges. At the least, the therapist risks being put into the position (illustrated in Jiménez’s 1993 case of Matías) of impotent witness of the pervert’s dangerous and/or criminal activity. 244

swales perverse patient

Swales, Stephanie S. Perversion: A Lacanian Psychoanalytic Approach to the Subject. Routledge, 2012.

A perverse patient will be especially likely to heed prohibitions if they are given by a trusted group psychotherapist whom the patient has put in the position of symbolic Other. In many cases, perverse patients are looking for ways to bolster their paternal functions, and a group therapist whom the pervert “elects” to the position of symbolic Other can have a good deal of influence on the patient as the subject-supposed-to-No!

This will only be possible, however, if the patient puts the therapist in the position of symbolic Other; if the patient relates to the therapist on the imaginary plane—as an other like himself—then the group therapist’s prohibitions will have no therapeutic effect. 236

Consequently, the therapist should look for signs that the patient is speaking to her or him as a symbolic Other before advising the patient to abstain from doing something. Such signs often include the patient’s admissions that there is some kind of knowledge—namely, unconscious knowledge — that is at work in her or him of which s/he her- or himself is ignorant, but about which the therapist is a knowledgeable authority. So too is symbolic transference evident when the patient thinks of the therapist as being the cause of her or his desire to be curious about himself and put his understandings of his life into question.

The necessary condition for true analytic or psychodynamic work is the patient’s having a question about himself that he addresses to an Other (the analyst or therapist) with the expectation that the Other (as subject-supposed-to-know) knows something about the answer that eludes the patient himself.

In my work with Ray, that question was “Why am I an exhibitionist, and how can I prevent committing future acts of exhibitionism?” Even though we understand the “constancy of [the pervert’s] jouissance as an answer, an answer which is already there” (Miller 1996b, p. 310) the pervert’s desire enables him to have a question that drives the progress of the analysis or therapy. 238

While the pervert may seem to want to get away with murder, what he really desires is to bolster the lawgiving Other’s existence. In his article, Clavreul made no mention of the pervert’s suffering due to the inadequacy of the paternal function. When the pervert’s subject position is seen as an attempt to prop up the paternal function, one can no longer maintain that the pervert cannot undergo traditional Lacanian analysis and that the only two positions available to the analyst of a pervert are those of moralizer and impotent voyeur. 239

Certainly, it is difficult to do analytic work with perverts. This is largely because the pervert prefers to play the role of object a (object cause of the Other’s jouissance) in relation to the therapist, causing her anxiety and jouissance. Analytic work with a pervert requires that the therapist maneuver the pervert into the role of split subject (as someone who sees himself as lacking at a certain level) so that the therapist can take up the role of object a as object cause of the patient’s desire to do therapeutic work. In working with a pervert, the therapist must be alert to ways to get the patient intrigued by his own unconscious manifestations when the pervert occasionally lapses back into the role of object a. 239

Situating the work at the symbolic level of desire means, for one thing, that the therapist should avoid responding to the patient’s requests for advice and interpretation.

Although it is common for a patient at the beginning stages of his psychotherapy to see his psychotherapist as a subject-supposed-to-know, the psychotherapist should not fall prey to the trap of believing that s/he holds privileged knowledge about the patient and what is good for him (or that if s/he does not give him advice, no one else in the patient’s life will do so; in the vast majority of cases, the patient gets plenty of advice from his PO, his group therapist and fellow participants, and his friends and family).

Interpreting from the position of subject-supposed-to-know incites an imaginary order relationship of rivalry with the patient in which the patient sooner or later tries to disprove the therapist’s theories and interpretations. Working at the level of demand means giving knowledge to the patient and fostering a relationship which is based on the patient’s dependency on that knowledge. In providing the patient with ready-made interpretations, the therapist puts words into the patient’s mouth and stymies the patient’s own curiosity about himself.

Working at the symbolic level of desire, however, involves the therapist’s expressions of desire that the patient do the work of psychotherapy.

Correspondingly, the therapist should aim to be positioned in the transference as the object-cause of the perverse patient’s desire to participate in psychotherapy and as the placeholder for the patient’s unconscious. This transferential position enables the patient to work through (via emotive speech) his issues with the Other.

Another way in which Lacan described the analytic progress of a subject is “the constant culmination of the subject’s assumption of his own mirages” (1953/2006a, p. 251).

One of the functions of the analytic method is to enable the subject to discover something about his unconscious, realizing that what he took to be his own individual thoughts and desires are actually ones he appropriated from the Other.

The subject calls who he thinks he is—the sum total of his ego misidentifications — radically into question.

The therapist aims to get the patient to speak about his experiences, fantasies, and dreams, to associate to them, and to be interested in possible Other, unconscious meanings of his utterances.

A difficult and delicate stage of the pervert’s treatment is the beginning stage. It is more difficult to get a perverse patient than a neurotic patient to question who he is and why he has become who he is. This is the question that psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy aims to answer. This question, when unanswered, is what drives the patient to undergo psychotherapy. 241

mcgowan enjoyment

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2013.

McGowan explores another modality of enjoyment which departs somewhat from the enjoyment of the death drive, this enjoyment is an libidinal, affective enjoyment as opposed to knowledge. McGowan’s uses the work of filmmaker Michael Moore as a case in point.

Combating the expert is much more difficult than combating the master: the knowledge that would subvert mastery becomes part of the power that the expert wields and thus loses its subversive power. 171

The Enjoyment The Expert derives from providing counsel

CSI: Crime Scene Investigations and House M.D. display this dynamic in its most open form: the shows present a problem that appears utterly unsolvable to the viewer, and then they reveal the expert’s genius at finding a solution. Expert knowledge – a knowledge not accessible to the ordinary subject – has all the answers and thus becomes the undisputable locus of authority. The popularity of these shows derives from their ability to allow audiences to share in the expert’s enjoyment, an enjoyment that typically is the site of trauma for the subject. 172

Contact with expert authority has a traumatic effect on the subject because of the proximity of the expert. While the old master remained at a distance, the expert is always in the subject’s face, like Dr. Buddy Rydell in Anger Management, never allowing the subject room to breathe. As Anger Management shows, this proximity has the effect of stimulating the subject. Under the rule of the expert, subjects experience what Eric Santner calls “a sustained traumatization induced by exposure to, as it were, fathers who [know] too much about living human beings.

Exposure to this type of authority, to “this excess of knowledge,” produces “an intensification of the body [that] is first and foremost a sexualization.” Instead of emancipating the subject, knowledge traumatizes and plays the central role in the subjection of the subject to the order of social regulation. 172

Unlike the master, the earlier form of social authority, the expert not only prohibits enjoyment but also appears to embody this enjoyment through the act of laying down regulations. The expert enjoys informing subjects about the dangers they face or the ways they should alter their behavior, and it is this enjoyment that subjects rebel against.

Reign of expert: transformation of knowledge from a vehicle of liberation to an instrument of power (172)

As long as authority remains in the position of the traditional master, knowledge can have a revolutionary function. 173 Political activity consists in acts of informing, raising consciousness and bringing issues to light.

Conservatism permits people a way of organizing their enjoyment in a way that today’s emancipatory politics does not. Emancipatory politics may offer a truer vision of the world, but the Right offers a superior way of enjoying. 173

Whereas emancipatory politics could offer the enjoyment that comes from defiance of authority, conservatism could offer the enjoyment that comes from identification with it. This is the enjoyment that one feels when hearing one’s national anthem or saluting the flag. It resides in the fabric of the national’s military uniform that makes the fingers touching it tingle. This eroticism is not that of emancipatory politics – and it is perhaps not as powerful – but it is nonetheless a form of eroticism. It produces a libidinal charge. The struggle between conservatism and emancipatory politics has historically been a struggle between two competing modes of organizing enjoyment with neither side having a monopoly. 174

Knowledge is important only insofar as it relates to the way that subjects mobilize their enjoyment. If subjects see through ideology manipulation and have the proper knowledge, this does not necessarily inaugurate a political change.

The enjoyment of a Twinkie does not derive from the physiological effect of sugar on the human metabolism but from the knowledge of the damage this substance does to the body. Knowing the harm that accompanies something actually facilitates our enjoyment of it, especially when we are capable of disavowing this knowledge. 175

Enjoyment … depends on some degree of sacrifice that allows the subject to suffer its enjoyment. Sacrifice is essential to our capacity for enjoying ourselves. There is a fundamentally masochistic structure to enjoyment.

Through sacrifice and loss, we reconstitute the privileged object that exists only as an absence. This is why actually obtaining the privileged object necessarily disappoints: when the lost object becomes present, it loses its privileged status and becomes an ordinary empirical object.

Knowledge thus helps us to enjoy not in the way that we might think – that is, by showing us what is good for our well-being – but by giving us something to sacrifice: if we know, for instance that cigarettes are unhealthy and could kill us, this elevates the mundane fact of smoking into an act laced with enjoyment. With each puff, we repeat the sacrifice and return to the primordial experience of loss. The death that we bring on is not simply the price that we pay for smoking; it is the means through which we enjoy the act of smoking. In this sense, every cigarette is really killing the smoker. If it didn’t, the act would lose its ability to provide enjoyment (though it may still produce bodily pleasure).

Under the rule of the traditional master, prohibition sustains the possibility for this type of enjoyment: we can enjoy an act because it transgresses a societal prohibition. 176

But prohibition no longer plays this role in contemporary society. No universal prohibition bars certain activities; instead, knowledge about the harm that activities cause begins to play the role that prohibition once played. We don’t avoid smoking simply because it is wrong but because we know the harm that it causes. We don’t refrain from extramarital sex because it is wrong but because we know the societal and physical dangers it entails. Even conservative think and talk this way.

When, for instance, conservatives argue for excluding information about condoms from sex education classrooms, they claim that we know condoms aren’t 100 percent safe in preventing the spread of HIV. In each case, the authority is knowledge, not law. The libidinal charge in politics involved with challenging the master has largely disappeared today, and now that libidinal charge has attached itself to challenging the experts, who represent the new agents of authority. 176

Conservative populism – the most powerful form of right-wing politics today – owes its ascendancy to the development of this form of authority. The appeal of populist leaders consists in the relation that they take up to enjoyment. While the traditional master prohibits enjoyment, the populist leader liberates subjects from the restrictions on their enjoyment posed by experts.

Though conservative populists often call for a return to traditional values (advocating restrictions on abortion, prayer in schools, and the like), they do not deploy these values in the service of prohibition.. instead, their rhetoric places traditional values in the position of liberation and freedom. The populist leader proposes to free subjects from constricting expert authority in order that they might freely embrace the traditional values that this new authority threatens to eviscerate. In this way, traditional values, despite their function as a source of prohibition, become transformed into their opposite – a source of apparent liberation. 177

Creationism is a doctrine linked in its very foundation to authoritative rule and prohibitions on behavior. … But today the champions of creationism characterize themselves as rebellious challengers of authority rather than its acolytes. They fight for the freedom to believe and teach a doctrine that defies the ruling ideas laid down by expert authority – scientists who understand the complexitieis of evolutionary science that no layperson can master. 177

… proponents of teaching creationism characterize themselves as its most vociferous opponents. This sounds like a radical cause to take up, a way of refusing to believe just what we’re told. The way in which proponents of creationism advance their case exemplifies the tactics of the contemporary populist leader. 177

Whereas the distribution of enjoyment once created a level playing field for the forces of emancipation and those of conservatism. Now both modes of enjoying – enjoying transgression and enjoying obedience – become the exclusive province of conservatism, and emancipatory politics is stuck with knowledge, which provides enjoyment only for the experts themselves (and those who identify with them). 178

According to Dolar, “The whole point of Lacan’s construction of university discourse is that this is another lure, that the seemingly autonomous and self-propelling knowledge has a secret clause, and that its truth is detained by the master under the bar.” In university discourse, the master signifier occupies the position of truth, which means that expert authority works ultimately in the service of mastery.

For her part, Zupančič adds, “What Lacan recognizes in the university discourse is a new and reformed discourse of the master.” University discourse emerges in response to the failure of the discourse of the master, but it is not a radical social structure. It represents a retooling of the authority involved in mastery in order to allow that authority to cope with the exigencies of capitalist relations of production. As the truth of university discourse (and expert authority), mastery is hidden and all the more effective because of this obscurity within which it dwells. 182

When Moore succeeds as an activist filmmaker, he mobilizes the enjoyment of the spectator and works to align this enjoyment with increased freedom and equality.

Moore’s own presence in the films functions as an avatar of the enjoyment that derives from challenging the injustice of contemporary capitalism. His disheveled hair, his old baseball cap, his excess weight – all these aspects of his physical appearance attest to his personal commitment to enjoyment rather than propriety. He looks more like a bowling partner than an expert authority, and this look helps to link the cause of emancipation with enjoyment in his films.