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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Although the term 'jouissance' is common currency in psychoanalysis today, how much does it really tell us? While often taken to designate a fusion of sexuality, suffering and satisfaction, the term has fallen into a purely descriptive use that closes down more questions than it opens up. Although assumed to explain the coalescence of pleasure and pain, it tends to cover a range of quite different issues that should be distinguished rather than conflated. By returning to some of the sources of the concept in Freud, and their elaborations in Lacan, this book hopes to stimulate a debate around the relations of pleasure to pain, autoerotism, the links of satisfaction to arousal, the effects of repression, and the place of the body in psychoanalytic theory. Leader aims to provide context for Lacan's work and encourage dialogue with other analytic traditions.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Jouissance
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
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Jouissance
Sexuality, Suffering and Satisfaction
Darian Leader
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Darian Leader 2021
First published in French as La jouissance, vraiment? Stilus, Paris, 2020
The right of Darian Leader to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This English edition © Polity Press, 2021
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4883-5 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4884-2 (paperback)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Leader, Darian, author.
Title: Jouissance : sexuality, suffering and satisfaction / Darian Leader.
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “A stimulating psychoanalytic investigation that encourages a rethinking of the term ‘Jouissance’”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020052820 (print) | LCCN 2020052821 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509548835 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509548842 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509548859 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Pleasure. | Pain. | Pleasure principle (Psychology) | Psychoanalysis.
Classification: LCC BF515 .L43 2021 (print) | LCC BF515 (ebook) | DDC 152.4/2--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020052820
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020052821
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Cover image: Nigel Cooke Athlete, 2019
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Photograph by Robert Glowacki, courtesy of Pace Gallery
© Nigel Cooke, courtesy Pace Gallery
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Acknowledgements
My Lacanian friends and colleagues were either delighted or horrified by this book, a polarisation that is perhaps not unrelated to the subject matter itself. The work grew out of a seminar at the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research in London, where we were studying the concepts of desire and jouissance. How did these develop and change in Lacan’s work, and what were their sources in Freud? As we studied these questions, a number of problems with the contemporary use of the terms became clear. The abundant and rather rhapsodic references to ‘jouissance’ seemed to distract from any proper scrutiny of the themes of sexuality and suffering that were apparently being evoked. In this book, through tracking the use of the term, I’ve tried to open up some questions about the body, satisfaction and pain that I hope will encourage further research.
I would like to thank everyone at CFAR for their input and encouragement, and especially Julia Carne, Astrid Gessert, Anouchka Grose, Berjanet Jazani and Anne Worthington. Thanks also to Devorah Baum, Pat Blackett, Marie Darrieussecq, Hanif Kureishi, Geneviève Morel, Jorge Baños Orellana and Jay Watts. I am grateful to Nigel Cooke not only for his wonderful cover image but also for a dialogue that has always kept me on my toes. Thanks to Luis Izcovich for his early interest in this book and for publishing a first version with Stilus in French, and to Pascal Porcheron for bringing it to Polity. Thank you to Susan Beer for her work on the English text, and to Stephanie Homer and everyone else at Polity for their input. At Wylie, Jennifer Bernstein was admirably patient with me, and Tracy Bohan was, as ever, a marvellous agent.
Jouissance
Let’s start with two clinical vignettes. A man complains of what he describes as a compulsion to begin affairs with married women. He recognises the excitement in this but says that it ultimately just brings him suffering. During sex, he is only able to sustain an erection if his partner inserts her fingers into his anus. He also suffers from pruritis ani, and finds himself unable to stop an intense scratching of the anal region, while knowing that this exacerbates the pruritis. He explains that his situation must somehow be linked to his “devouring mother”.
A woman also begins her analysis with a complaint linked to her love life. She is drawn repeatedly to men who drop her, generating a terrible anxiety and sense of abandonment. Despite the abundance of partners, sourced through social media, she is unable to orgasm except by masturbation when she is alone in her home. She describes an “oversexed father”, who would often comment lasciviously about women’s bodies.
Now, without knowing any more about these cases, I guess that most Lacanian readers would have little difficulty in distributing the term ‘jouissance’ quite widely here: there would be a jouissance in the presenting symptom, a repetitive behaviour that might promise enjoyment yet which brings pain; jouissance in the sexual excitement, with its prerequisites; jouissance in the apparently autoerotic activities, involving friction at the mucosa; jouissance ascribed to the parental figure; and perhaps jouissance in the recounting of some or all of the above to the analyst.
If we accept these uses of our term, we could ask the question of what exactly they have in common. Yet the very fact that they all seem valid should make us pause. We know nothing else about the cases beyond these brief vignettes, which consist of not much more than surface detail. And indeed, we find today with an increasing frequency that the term ‘jouissance’ is used purely descriptively. We speak of the ‘jouissance of the symptom’, for example, without a proper theory of what exactly this jouissance is or why it is there. When we go a bit further here, we tend to end up either with formulations that seem embarrassingly simplistic – invoking a ‘frozen signifier’ or ‘One of jouissance’ – or fall back on certain Freudian notions that, as Lacanians, we are supposed to have corrected.
Yet the popularity and currency of the term is beyond dispute. Sophisticated Lacanians are those who have a ‘clinic of the Real, of jouissance’, yet what this actually means in practice is that they profess to recognise the limits of sense, and the place of enjoyment in what is experienced consciously as pain. No attention is paid here to the possible differences between pleasure mixed with pain, pleasure that takes the place of pain, pleasure about pain, pleasure as a sequel to pain, and pain as a sequel to pleasure. And whether these two terms are the most useful here is also an open question, as analysts would surely agree that they are not opposing poles of an equation and, as the editors of a collection on Pleasure Beyond the Pleasure Principle point out, that less of the one does not necessarily mean more of the other.1
Lacan of course had a lot to say about the limits of sense, but much less about the enjoyment in pain and, curiously, this idea was made popular by authors who most Lacanians have little time for: Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and a few others. Freud’s explanations of enjoyment in pain are generally not accepted, as his various categories of masochism are deemed inaccurate. Curiously again, Freud’s earlier thoughts on a stimulus barrier, with their quantitative model of psychical excess, rejected for good reason by most post-Freudians, resurface with astonishing regularity in contemporary Lacanian accounts of jouissance. Jouissance is defined as a “too much”, yet this approach, as we shall see, had been dismantled or at least seriously questioned by Freud’s students.
So why is the notion of jouissance, or the label, so appealing? Its multiple meanings seem evident, yet whereas we can all approvingly cite Freud’s criticism of Jung’s distended use of his concept of libido, with jouissance things seem different. The history of psychoanalytic practice is seen as a prelude to the cutting edge of a clinic of jouissance, yet, the more we scrutinise this, the more we see that the term has settled into a lazy and descriptive use. It has come today to close down more questions than it opens up, and expositions tend to revert to binaries such as ‘desire/jouissance’, which, if examined carefully, are conceptually not always as robust as we might wish.
As Nestor Braunstein laments at the end of a chapter on ‘Desire and jouissance in the teachings of Lacan’: “Regrettably, after Lacan’s death in 1981 and with the passage of time, Manichean formulations have arisen that tend to oppose the two terms, provoking a forced choice loaded with hidden agendas between the first Lacan (the Lacan of the signifier and desire, allegedly a ‘primitive’ or ‘archaic’ Lacan), and the second Lacan (the Lacan of jouissance and the object (a), who would be the desired one, a point of arrival only ‘advanced’ Lacanians could reach).”2 This might invite us to reflect on the question of why binaries are so popular in Lacanian thinking today, despite the fact that Lacan tended to use non-binary models in his seminars and writings.
When we turn to the detailed studies of the Lacanian term, the commentaries on jouissance are at times reminiscent of the low points of medieval theology. Scholars debate clearly inconsistent usages, desperate to prove coherence and order. We are told that Lacan has multiple categories, most significantly:
Jouissance of the body image
Phallic jouissance
Jouissance of the Other (subjective genitive)
Jouissance of the Other (objective genitive)
Other jouissance
Surplus jouissance
Jouissance of meaning
Jouissance of being
Jouissance of life
Jouissance of the body
Offhand remarks and scraps from the seminars and writings are taken as synecdoches of differentiated theories, with the assumption that the term ‘jouissance’ itself must somehow be indexing the same thing. When one then asks what this thing is, the answer tends to be along the lines of: well, Lacan said that jouissance is “the only substance”. Cue amateur expositions of Aristotle on substance. We could recall here once again Freud’s criticism of Jung for using the term ‘libido’ for the energy of so many different drives, as well as Erikson’s poke at the assumption of early analysts that libido was “the prime substance” that both social convention and the rest of psychic structure did their best to contain.3
Although Lacan could say that if a “Lacanian field” were to exist, it would be that of jouissance, this does not make of it necessarily a psychoanalytic concept, and its subsequent translation into a descriptive commonplace is disappointing.4 Rather than pretending we have some sort of refined and heightened knowledge of the psyche and of psychoanalytic practice because we can manipulate the label, it may well be worth pausing to see what our uses imply and presuppose. In this essay, I hope to encourage a questioning of the term, to comment on some of its appearances in Lacan’s work, and to try to return to some of its sources in Freud. To put my cards on the table right at the start, I think that we are better served by a plurality of concepts rather than one catch-all term, which risks obscuring and covering over important differences in matters both clinical and conceptual.
*
Now, the standard exposition of the development of Lacan’s term goes something like this. First of all, jouissance is linked to the body image, present in Lacan’s references to the jubilation of the mirror phase; then we have a Hegelian use where jouissance is tied to questions of appropriation and ownership; then, in the 1950s, jouissance emerges as the antagonist of desire; then at last it comes into its own in the Ethics seminar, with the concept of the Thing; it is developed further in ‘Kant with Sade’, becoming the fulcrum of Lacan’s approach to most clinical and metapsychological issues in the later 1960s and 1970s, from repetition to his rethinking of male and female sexuality.5
Introductory accounts usually trace the geneology of ‘jouissance’ back to Freud, and start by mapping out a territory: the negative therapeutic reaction, the refractory qualities of the symptom, and the coalescence of satisfaction and suffering to be found in so many human practices, from the use of drugs to the sense of compulsion that accompanies forced behaviours and repetitive acts. Freud had a fairly comprehensive model of what he called this “strange satisfaction” of the symptom some years before the more celebrated introduction of the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and we could take this as our point of departure. Elaborated in the Introductory Lectures of 1916–17, it both recapitulates and revises earlier concepts, using a schema of libido and frustration.
Libido here is carefully distinguished from any instinctual attachment to the mother, and Freud describes it in terms of how the infant repeats the experience at the breast but without a specific demand to be fed. Libido is not driven by hunger, and it is characterised by a sensual sucking – what later writers would call ‘non-nutritive sucking’ – that precedes sleep. It is this “pure act of sucking” that has brought satisfaction, and the libido is identified with “the effort to gain satisfaction”.6 The infant thus “performs actions that have no purpose other than obtaining pleasure”, caught up clearly with vital functions but not defined by them.
Freud’s account here of an oral satisfaction distinct from nutritive demand has often been described as a jouissance, defined as an autoerotic enjoyment. Autoerotic is taken to mean with no link to the Other, or, in the unfortunate language of some Lacanians, a pure One of jouissance, that is temporally prior to the imposition of the symbolic. The infant turns away from the Other to procure its own isolated enjoyment. But Freud’s autoerotic is slightly more complicated: it is both relational and sequentially secondary. The oral drive, he argues, is not primarily autoerotic but only “becomes” so by “giving up the outside object” like the other erotogenic drives.7
Autoerotism is described as a development, something that follows the primary and differentiated relation to the Other, and which no doubt retains the traces of this. We are not moving from a cut-off monad lost in autoerotic enjoyment to some sort of object relation but, on the contrary, from an object relation of sorts to an activity that appears solitary. This crucial point troubles narratives that see child development as a move from ‘narcissism’ to the ‘object’, yet even those studies of autoerotism that subscribed to this paradigm were forced to acknowledge that “during the autoerotic activity the former relationship to the object need not, or better, cannot be fully in abeyance”.8 Now, as Freud continues, the “tenacity” of the libido here to cling to certain objects will “vary from one person to another”, and we are often unable to say why. There are a number of subsequent references to this problem, and Freud will devote several pages to the issue of libidinal fixity in Inhibition, Symptom and Anxiety, rethought in terms of the second topic.9
The sections that interest us the most now are those concerned with symptom formation. What happens, Freud asks, when the libido is frustrated? It seeks alternative pathways and objects, a rerouting that will arouse “displeasure” in another part of the psyche. A veto is thus imposed on the new methods of satisfaction, which use infantile templates, and so the libido turns to the construction of symptoms, which constitute a “substitute” for the frustrated satisfaction by means of a regression of the libido to “earlier times”.10 This past is not to be understood solely in terms of how people “remember” it but “as they imagine it from later hints”. So, a regression that includes the influence of the Other, perhaps in the form of things heard or seen.
These will operate under the shaping influence of phantasy, which reroutes the libido to its fixation points or their derivatives, consequent to the experience of frustration. Following its pathways, a symptom can be built that is a “substitute” for the sexual material, a combination of both the repressed satisfaction and the repressing force that militates against it. Since the veto of the repressing forces generates a “violent opposition” to the new methods of satisfaction, its objections are factored into the symptom in the form of “distortions and mitigations”.11
And hence the mechanisms of condensation and displacement that disguise and distort the phantasy material, as well as their punitive aspect. A symptom will now serve the purpose both of sexual satisfaction and its opposite – including both defence and punishment – to give it a characteristic “double-sidedness (Zweiseitigkeit)”. The two conflicting currents of the repressed and the repressing force are combined, fused in the hysterical symptom and separated temporally in the obsessional compulsion, generating a kind of satisfaction that might seem “cruel and horrible” or “unnatural”.
And now the key passage: “In some way the symptom repeats this early infantile kind of satisfaction, distorted by censorship arising from the conflict, turned as a rule to a feeling of suffering, and mingled with elements from the precipitating cause of the illness. The kind of satisfaction which the symptom brings has much that is strange about it.”12 The person in question will feel this “alleged satisfaction” as suffering and will complain about it, and “this transformation is a function of the psychical conflict under pressure of which the symptom has to be formed. What was once a satisfaction of the subject is, indeed, bound to arouse his resistance or his disgust today.” Freud gives the example of the child who once drank his mother’s milk with such pleasure and later reacts to dairy with disgust.
This was also the structure, for Freud, of the celebrated example of ‘jouissance’ in the Ratman case. As his patient describes the rat torture, Freud noted a “horror at pleasure of his own of which he himself was unaware”, a reaction that is taken to be the sign of a repression of an anal sadistic trend.13 But, whereas for Freud it is a horror at a pleasure, Lacanian expositions tend to emphasise the fusion of these two elements rather than their reactive relationship. It seems important to consider the difference between these two interpretations and, crucially, to recognise that the Freudian model is predicated on the idea of repression and conflict.
So, a very nice Freudian model of jouissance! We have a solid explanation of why what is experienced consciously as suffering involves a repudiated enjoyment. It revolves around a theory of conflict, with censorship largely responsible for the affective transformation. If we stopped there, we might well distinguish the “strange satisfaction” that is a result of this process from other forms of conscious or non-conscious satisfaction, and there would be no reason to use the same terminology for both. But Freud has more to say on this.
“It is something else besides”, he continues, “that makes symptoms seem strange to us and incomprehensible as a means of libidinal satisfaction.”14 There is a return here to an “extended autoerotism”, setting an “internal act in place of an external one, an adaptation in place of an action”. The symptom “represents something as fulfilled: a satisfaction in the infantile manner. But by means of extreme condensation that satisfaction can be compressed into a single sensation or innervation and, by means of extreme displacement, it can be restricted to one small detail of the entire libidinal complex.” And hence the difficulty, or strangeness, in recognising this aspect of the symptom as a satisfaction.
So, the “strange satisfaction” is a result of a rather complicated process, starting from frustration, moving through phantasy and ending in the construction of symptoms, construed as a form of sexual activity that includes the very forces that work against such activity. The exposition is clear and illuminating, but there is a major problem here, which will cast its shadow over both Freud’s later work and that of Lacan. On this model frustration generates the search for alternative pathways, and the conflict that this produces, but it is not seen as itself changing or distorting or actually forming the libido itself. Yet this was exactly the point made by so many of Freud’s students: frustration will generate hatred and rage that will mix with or create libido, a conclusion that Freud always shied away from.
Although Freud often acknowledges the interdependence of sexuality and aggression, he repeatedly tries to separate what he took to be two distinct currents. In the Three Essays, discussing sadism, he could evoke “an aggressive component of the sexual drive which has become independent and exaggerated”, yet later in the same text can argue that “the impulses of cruelty arise from sources which are in fact independent of sexuality, but may become united with it at an early stage.”15 The demarcation is even clearer in the contemporary book on wit, where hostile and libidinal tendencies are repeatedly distinguished. Similarly, in ‘Drives and their Vicissitudes’, he can state that there is an early “ambivalent” striving for the object, which may include “injury and annihilation”, yet later that hate is “older than love”, deriving from the ego’s “repudiation of the external world”.16 Annexations of the sexual drive by such forces tend to be explained in terms of the theory of libidinal stages.
Even in the late 1920s, well after he had theorised the death drive, Freud still tried to distinguish libido and aggression, to result in a work like Civilisation and its Discontents with its references to “non-erotic aggressivity”. This constituted, as one of his students termed it, “a curious kind of blind spot”.17 Where Ernest Jones was arguing that any form of frustration can generate guilt, Freud suggested that this may only apply to the repression of aggressive trends, while libidinal ones would produce symptoms yet not a sense of guilt. The separation between the two seems uneasy and even artificial in this work, and was challenged by several of the early analysts. Even Lacan could write in his 1951 paper ‘Some reflections on the ego’ that “the characteristic dimension of the libido is aggression”.18
Where so many other analysts were linking libido and aggression, Freud is keeping them apart, which leaves his concept of libido relatively uncontaminated. Rather than seeing libido itself as a hybrid of attachment and repulsion, absorption and destruction, preservation and cancellation – what he termed “an original bipolarity in its nature” – it retains its character of a primary gravitation, on a basically oral model.19 Yet, as some of his students noticed, the oral experience might itself be made up of a fusion of acceptance and repudiation, satisfaction and frustration, sucking and biting, fondness and revenge.
Analysts here either recognised this or undid the apparent contradiction by positing temporal stages instead: an early and late oral phase, a two-stage anal phase etc., on Abraham’s model of libidinal development.20 This neat compartmentalisation removed the radical hybridity of a libido based on contraries and in itself has the structure of an obsessional symptom. Rather than recognising, for example, coexisting love and hate for an object, we can say that there’s first a stage of love and then one of hate. This is rather like the Ratman’s removing a stone from the road and then returning to put it back: a temporal separation obscures the pain of conflict.
Similarly, positing a splitting at the level of the object was another way of resolving the issue. Rather than introducing a division in time – as in Abraham’s model – it was often argued that archaic aggression was directed at an object labelled ‘bad’ while libido was drawn to a different object labelled ‘good’. Although it is undeniable that such binary splittings play an essential role in psychical life, and at many levels, the assumption that they polarise distinct sets of relations is problematic and, once again, it removes the fundamental dimension of hybridity from the libido itself by assuming an initial separation.
*
The model that took these tensions the most seriously came from Karin Stephen, the sister-in-law of Virginia Woolf, and analysand of James Glover and Sylvia Payne. The craving of the body for forms of sense-stimulation, she observed, is met with continued disappointment, establishing a state of “uneasiness, soon experienced as fear, leading to a reaction of rage”.21 For Stephen, the body’s pleasure zones are transformed by frustrations
