This term changes its meaning and its significance throughout Lacan’s work and while in earlier works it is used in direct relationship with Freudian drive and its satisfaction, in later works its sexual connotations become more apparent. Jouissance (used in its original French, in italics and in a singular form) refers to the sexual enjoyment that comes with the satisfaction of drive. Its English translation, enjoyment, connotes a positive pleasure. However, Lacan’s usage of the term covers a broader meaning and it signifies the combination of pleasure and suffering – positive and negative pleasure together – with its sexual connotations of orgasmic experience.

The earlier usage of the term is within the relationship of the slave to his master; “… an action is undertaken, and established the relation between pleasure [jouissance] and labour. A law is emposed on the slave, that he should satisfy the desire and the pleasure [jouissance] of the other” (S1, 223); “[The slave] is not dead for himself, nor in actual fact. For whom he is dead? For the person of his master. And in relation to what? In relation to the object if his pleasure [jouissance]. He effaces his pleasure so as not to arouse the anger of his master”. (S2, 269). Only later in Lacan’s work, it becomes more explicit that the term jouissance is related to the sexual pleasure; for instance while he is talking about the feminine orgasm and satisfaction (Lacan, 1982, p. 89).

The term jouissance has a strong relationship with the Freudian description of the first relationship between the primary caregiver (most of the time, the mother) and her baby. The mother, who is described as the first love object for both the girl and the boy, is the one who through her love, introduces the baby into a life of love, and even to the point of being the seducer who excitates the infantile sexual desires of the baby (Freud, Female Sexuality, 371-392). Observing an ordinary mother-child relationship, Freud describes the mother “…herself regards [the baby] with feelings that are derived from her own sexual life: she strokes him, kisses him, rocks him and quite clearly treats him as a substitute for a complete sexual object” (Freud, S.E.VII, 223). This is the unmediated and immediate experience of satisfaction for the baby, the remnants of which will constitute the basis for love in all the rest of his life. This is also the experience of satisfaction which lies beyond the pleasure principle.

Later on in the child’s life, and with the successful dissolution of the Oedipus Complex, and in Lacanian terms the child’s entry into the language (the Symbolic), the child has to give up his/her first love object and surrender his complete and unmediated satisfaction [jouissance]. While being a strong blow to his/her narcissism, this entry also serves for the child a means to find a place in the symbolic law, that of the father. From this point on, the subject [subjected to the Symbolic / Language / Law] is punctured, is lacking. The individual, however, will continually seek for the traces of the first experience of satisfaction [jouissance]. The Lacanian terminology introduces another term here, the objet a, as the object cause of desire for the person, the object that promises the total satisfaction [jouissance], but which is never there when the subject thinks s/he achieves it.

Total satisfaction, which the subject seeks, yet is never available to him, since he has been subjected to the language/culture and has been marked by it (castrated) is also what s/he is in constant search for the traces of. This is the lost love – of the mother, the full and immediate/unconditional satisfaction. The subject, following the traces of jouissance, that is the object cause of desire, is doomed to fail. Because of the structural impossibility of the full satisfaction (due to the gap between the Real and the Symbolic; the need and demand) every object which seems like a promise to the satisfaction proves to be insufficient the moment it is achieved. In Lacan’s own words, ‘jouissance is forbidden to him who speaks, as such’ (E, 319). Jouissance is lost for the subject of language, like the heaven from where Adam and Eve were exiled forever.

Finding (or one should say, the fantasy of finding) the total satisfaction, on the other hand, would mean that the subject is in search of the death. Jouissance would come to signify the satisfaction of a drive (in Lacan’s terminology, the merging with the objet a), which is so desired yet at the same time painful and deadly. The total match of the desire with the objet a, that is full satisfaction [jouissance] would be the place of the suicide bomber, or the suicide, which is the ultimate narcissistic act. Hence the famous Lacanian formulation, cancelling out the distinction between the Freudian life and death drives: every drive is a death drive.

Jouissance is concerned with the subject’s assumed relationsip with the Other; in this regard it is closely concerned with fantasy. It still has a crucial function, though. “The symbolic prohibition of enjoyment in the Oedipus Complex (the incest taboo) is thus, paradoxically, the prohibition of something which is already impossible; its function is therefore to sustain the neurotic illusion that enjoyment would be attainable if it were not forbidden” (Evans, 2003, p.92). Therefore, object a is only the symbol of the remnant for the forever lost other, the reminder of the jouissance, which was never there anyway. It exists as a promise in a place between the need and the demand where desire becomes possible, as the basic motivation for the already lacking (castrated) human subject.

YASEMIN DINC

(ALSO SEE Phallic jouissance; Feminine jouissance)

References

Evans, D. (2003). An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. 3^rd ed. London New York: Brunner-Routledge.

Freud, S. (1977). Female Sexuality in On Sexuality, V. 7. Tr & Ed. James Strachey. London: Penguin Books.

Freud, S. (1953). Three Essays on Sexuality. Standart Edition VII, Tr & Ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press.

Lacan, J. (1989). Ecrits: A selection. Tr. Alan Sheridan. 2^nd ed. London: Tavistock.

Lacan, S. (1985). Feminine Sexuality. Tr. Jacqueline Rose. Ed. Juliet Mitchell & Jacqueline Rose. London: W. W. Norton.

Lacan, S. (1988). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book I. Tr. John Forrester. Ed. Jacques-Alan Miller. London: W.W. Norton.

Lacan, S. (1988). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book II. Tr. Slyvana Tomaselli. Ed. Jacques-Alan Miller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.