{"id":989,"date":"2008-09-30T14:49:38","date_gmt":"2008-09-30T18:49:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=989"},"modified":"2008-10-01T12:11:13","modified_gmt":"2008-10-01T16:11:13","slug":"jouissance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2008\/09\/30\/jouissance\/","title":{"rendered":"Jouissance"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jason Glynos, Self-Transgressive Enjoyment as a Freedom Fetter<\/em>. Political Studies 56 (3), 2008<\/p>\n

– jouissance pleasure as pain, jouissance is fantasy of one-ness with mother<\/p>\n

– loss of jouissance = loss of one-ness with mother (lost object)<\/p>\n

– lost object is primordial = something we never had (impossible) thus its this that structures our desire<\/p>\n

– Jouissance linked to an impossibility and fantasied overcoming<\/p>\n

– impossibility is translated into a prohibition<\/p>\n

– once jouissance is turned into a prohibition, this gives man the illusion that it can be transgressed<\/p>\n

– we now have a prohibition of jouissance, a Law qua prohibition<\/p>\n

– plus-de-jouir happens through a transgression of the Law qua prohibition<\/p>\n

– the subject derives its being and identity via this transgressive enjoyment<\/p>\n

– representative of the Law \u2014 the Other \u2014 is the one who steals enjoyment, as thief of subject’s enjoyment<\/p>\n

– the subject’s enjoyment is constitutively ‘stolen’, always already taken, by the Other<\/p>\n

– thus the most intimate part of the subject, the subject’s own mode of enjoyment is structured by the Other<\/p>\n

How, then, is the subject’s own enjoyment structured? Precisely by acting in such a way as to ‘steal back’ the enjoyment that the Other has supposedly stolen from him or her. His or her enjoyment is supported by the thought that he or she is transgressing the Other’s laws and ideals, enjoying behind the Other’s back’. The neurotic subject sustains itself as a subject of desire through transgressive thoughts and activities (i.e. by doing things it is not supposed to do: by stealing a covetous glance, by secretly wishing the downfall of a successful colleague, etc.)<\/p>\n

The very prohibition creates the desire to transgress it, and jouissance is therefore fundamentally transgressive.<\/p>\n

What the law prohibits, desire seeks. It seeks only transgression, and that makes desire entirely dependent on the law (that is, the Other) which brings it into being. Thus, desire can never free itself completely from the Other, as the Other is responsible for desire’s very being (cited in Fink, 1997 A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 207)<\/p>\n

We enjoy our symptoms<\/p>\n

We resist cure, because we unconsciously take jouissance from our symptoms. “subjects enjoy their symptoms as a means of escaping deeper psychical tensions … However painful the symptom may be, its aim is to free the subject form sometimes even more painful conflicts.”<\/p>\n

Why do we procrastinate? We set ourselves stringent ideals (perfectionism) and then get a kick out of transgressing them.<\/p>\n

Jouissance and the GRIP of ideology, or Jouissance and transgression of an ideal<\/p>\n

Ideological critque is meant to weaken the grip of ideology and enhance freedom of subject. What holds the community together is a specific form of transgression of an ideal, of the Law.<\/p>\n

– KKK lynchings, Nazi pogroms (these remain hidden from public view), these transgressions provoke a form of collective enjoyment and a kind of solidarity in guilt thus reaffirming the cohesion of the group.<\/p>\n

Self-Transgressive Enjoyment<\/p>\n

What is responsible for ‘extraordinary’ outbursts is nothing other than the very ‘ordinary’, neurotic contemporary subject, with all his or her foibles. Zizek implies that the modality of our contemporary neurotic subjectivity can and ought to be made unavailable under an alternative regime.<\/p>\n

The subject procures a modicum of (unconscious) enjoyment in transgressing his or her own self-affirmed ideal.<\/p>\n

– Health ideal I affirm, while secretly smoking in the back room with my friends.<\/p>\n

Taylor treats self-understanding as a function of rational understanding … While self-understanding certainly plays an important role here, overcoming unfreedom qua self-transgressive enjoyment is not reducible to the abandonment of a particular mis-understanding and simultaneous adoption of a particular (rational) self-understanding, even though the practice of interpretation may of course function as an essential first step in this process. Rather, overcoming unfreedom from a psychoanalytic point of view resides essentially in the act of abandoning ones self-transgressively enjoyed attachment to a concrete ideal, not simply in abandoning or substituting a particular understanding of the subject’s relation to it. In other words, while a passage through, and reinterpretation of, the subject’s self-interpretation might be necessary, it is not necessarily sufficient to overcome self-transgressive enjoyment qua freedom fetter.<\/p>\n

A psychoanalytic perspective thus explains an otherwise counter-intuitive phenomenon in which the ‘pull’ or ‘desirability’ of a concrete ideal resides in the self-transgressive enjoyment it makes possible rather than simply in a mis-understanding (i.e. a false, misguided or irrational understanding).
\nIt is thus able to explain the resilience of an ideal’s attractiveness for a subject in the face of ‘corrective’ measures deployed at the level of rational understanding. It suggests that detachment from self-transgressive enjoyment may diminish a concrete ideal’s desirability, thereby allowing other reasons to defeat (or better support) its apparent worth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jason Glynos, Self-Transgressive Enjoyment as a Freedom Fetter. Political Studies 56 (3), 2008 – jouissance pleasure as pain, jouissance is fantasy of one-ness with mother – loss of jouissance = loss of one-ness with mother (lost object) – lost object is primordial = something we never had (impossible) thus its this that structures our desire … Continue reading “Jouissance”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ideology","category-subjectivity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=989"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/989\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":991,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/989\/revisions\/991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}