Jouissance

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Jouissance is a French term which can be roughly translated as "enjoyment" and is contrasted with plaisir. In every sense of the word it is whatever "gets you off." Something that gives the subject a way out of its normative subjectivity through transcendent bliss whether that bliss or orgasmic rapture be found in writings , films, works of art or sexual spheres; excess as opposed to utility. It is a popular term in postmodernism and queer theory used by Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Judith Butler, and others. Leo Bersani considers jouissance as intrinsically self-shattering, disruptive of a 'coherent self'.

For Barthes (1977, p.9) plaisir is, "a pleasure...linked to cultural enjoyment and identity, to the cultural enjoyment of identity, to a homogenising movement of the ego." As Richard Middleton (1990, p.261) puts it, "Plaisir results, then, from the operation of the structures of signification through which the subject knows himself or herself; jouissance fractures these structures."

Likewise, thanks to the emphasis the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan placed on the term, it has been applied extensively to cultural and literary studies. Clark (2004) explains that for Lacan jouissance signifies the condition or bliss, arrival, merging with the other, which can be associated with orgasm, but also the obtention of any particularly desired object or condition. Nonetheless, for Lacan, is not a purely pleasurable experience, but one that arises through augmenting sensation to a point of discomfort (as in the sexual act, where the cry of passion is at times indistinguishable from the cry of pain). Such experiences, as Freud recognised in his essay “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), seem to come close to death, and in Freud’s theory imply an urge to regress to the inorganic state that preceded life. For Lacan, on the other hand, jouissance seems to imply a desire to abolish the condition of lack (la manque) to which we are condemned by our acceptance of the signs of the symbolic order in place of the Real.

The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, a known Lacanian theorist, has adopted the term into his philosophy.

[edit] References

• Middleton, Richard (1990/2002). Studying Popular Music. Philadelphia: Open University Press. ISBN 0-335-15275-9.
  • Barthes (1977).
    • Robert Clark, University of East Anglia. "Jouissance." The Literary Encyclopedia. 1 Jan. 2004. The Literary Dictionary Company. 18 March 2007. <http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=602>