Date: Mon, 20 Nov 1995 23:07:08 -0600 (CST)
From: David Pekerow <dpekerow-AT-condor.depaul.edu>
Subject: Re: jouissance




On Mon, 20 Nov 1995, Nick Zukin wrote:

> Thank you Clare, you have been very helpful.
> 
> I wonder about people's suggestions on this word, jouissance, if maybe it
> is that pleasure which cannot be wholly discussed, wholly put into words --
> a poetic pleasure -- which would suggest that it is that pleasure, that
> discourse, beyond the male discourse, and that is also a vague insight
> (vague as Being is vague in that it is also the most concrete, but anyhow
> still mostly indescribable) into, not only the feminine, but what is beyond
> the feminine/masculine.  This may be making too much out of it, but this
> seems how Drucilla Cornell treats it, at least somewhat.
> 
> Nick
> 
> 
> 

Um...

"The male discourse"?  Which one?  What would be the criteria for 
identifying a given discourse as male?  Not only that, but THE male 
discourse, the only site where maleness would exist.  

This is the big problem I have with Lacan and Irigaray on gender.  The 
language flirts with an ahistorical essentialism, ignoring how power 
relations have produced effects such that we now have "the masculine" and 
"the feminine."  Or we think we do.  For it is clear that the effort to 
instantiate these categories of gender as originary of sex fails in many 
instances; there have always existed what Judith Butler would call 
"abjects," those who, by virtue of their failure to comply with norms of 
gender performativity, do not qualify as "subjects."  Yet their exclusion 
>from the realms where the subject lives poses a threat to the stability 
of these realms, for there always exists a potential to effect a 
rearticulation of the discourses in which the "male" and "female" are 
adjudicated, thus altering what exactly constitutes a gendered subjectivity.

As for the term "jouissance," I think it is a beautiful metaphor for an 
unbounded pleasure.  Discursively, it appears in the same field as other 
psychoanalytic statements on "gender," which are in turn partially 
constitute the sum of discourses where "gender" is formulated and 
inculcated as the truth of sex.  In and of itself, it cannot constitute 
the "essence" of "feminine" pleasure.  Even "pleasure" itself would not 
always be that of jouissance.

David Pekerow
DePaul University