Subject: Re: jouissance
Date: 	Sun, 12 Mar 2000 13:47:02 -0500



This is largely a summary of Bruce Fink's chapter 6 and 8 from The Lacanian 
Subject, from notes I took during the summer.  What needs to be distinguished 
here is Jouissance1 from Jouissance2. J2 is after the intervention of the 
symbolic.  So Jouissance1 is manipulated by the symbolic to produce certain 
forms of jouissance(2) - feminine jouissance, masculine jouissance, phallic 
jouissance and so on.  Also, keep in mind that jouissance is not practical.  It 
"knows" nothing, it is an abyss, it is boundless and untamed so to speak - it 
is the 'stupid stuff' of 'being' without 'thought.'  I would love to continue 
to talk about this, I just thought I'd whip this off first.  This may or may 
not help.

enjoy!
ken

***** (chapter 6)

Without language, there would be no desire as we know it - exhilarating, and 
yet contorted, contradictory, and loath to be satisfied - nor would there be 
any subject as such.

In Lacan's concept of alienation, the two parties involved, the child and the 
Other, are very unevenly matched, and the child almost inevitably loses in the 
struggle between them. By submitting to the Other ("your money or your life!") 
(Lacan also calls this the vel of alienation - survival always excludes the 
survival of one and the same party) the child nevertheless gains something: she 
or he becomes one of language's subejcts, a subject "of language" or "in 
language" - the child, coming to be as a divided subject.  In Lacan's concept 
of alientation, the child can be understood to in some sense choose to submit 
to language (as Mladen Dolar notes, this "choice" is forced), to agree to 
express her or his needs through the distorting medium or straighjacket of 
language, and to allow him or herself to be represented by words (you can see 
why Habermas can't deal with Lacanians).

Lacan's second operation, separation, invovles the alienated subject's 
confrontation with the Other, not as language this time, but as desire.  In an 
important sense, the subject is caused by the Other's desire.

This alienation gives rise to a pure possibility of being, a place where one 
might expect to find a subject, but which nevertheless remains empty.  
Alienation engender a place in which it is clear that there is, as of yet, no 
subject: a place where something is conspicuously lacking.  The subject's first 
guise is this very lack.

Lack has an ontological status in Lacan's work.  It is the first step beyond 
nothingness.

Alientation, in this way, represents the instituting of the symbolic order - 
which must be realized anew for each new subject - and the subject's 
assignation of a place therein.

So, if alienation is a "forced" choice which rules out being for the subject, 
instituting instead the symbolic order and relegating the subject to mere 
existence as a place-holder, then separation, on the other hand, gives 
rise to being... that being is of an eminently evanescent and elusive ilk.  The 
subject's being must come from the outside, from something other than the 
subject and the Other, something that is neither exactly one nor the other. 
One of the essential ideas here is that of a juxtaposition, overlapping, or 
coincidence of two lacks (not to be confused with a lack of a lack).  The 
subject lodges her or his lack of being in that "place" where the Other was 
lacking....

Lack and desire are, then, coextensive for Lacan.  Desire is always the desire 
of the other.  One learns to desire as an other, as if one were some other 
person... and it is through language that one attempts to mediate the Other's 
desire... keeping it at bay and symbolizing it every more completely (psychosis 
here results from a failure to assimilate a "primordial" signifier, which would 
otherwise structure the symbolic universe... this failure leaves one unanchored 
in language, without a compass reading on the basis of which to adopt an 
orientation.  This is where Zizek positions postmodernisn.  Postmodernism, for 
Zizek is psychotic.  It is the assimilation of the real into "reality."

Separation, then, leads to the subject's explusion of the Other, which gives 
rise to a new role for the Other's desire, that of object a.

Object a can be understood here as the remainder produced when that 
hypothetical unity breaks down, as a last trace of that unity, a last reminder 
thereof.  By cleaving to that rem(a)inder, the split subject, though expulsed 
from the Other, can sustain the illusion of wholeness: by clinging to the 
object a, the subject is able to ignore her or his division.  This is precisely 
what Lacan means by fantasy - and here formalizes it with the matheme $<>a - 
which is to be read: the divided subject in relation to object a.

Object a enters into fantasies and is an instrument or plaything with which 
subjects do as they like, manipulating it as it please them, orchestrating 
things in the fantasy scenario in such a way as to derive a maximum of 
excitement (jouissance).  This pleasure may also turn to disgust and even to 
horror,... since there is no guarantee that what is most exciting to the 
subject is also most pleasurable.

J.1 -------  Symbolic  -------- J.2

Jouissance is still open to symbolization, which furthers jouissance along... 
"second order jouissance."

Object a is therefore the subject's complement, a phantasatic partner that ever 
arouses the subject's desire. Separation results in the splitting of the 
subject into ego and unconscious, and in a corresponding splitting of the 
Other into Lacking Other and object a.

       Subject                   Other
     ego         $   <>   a            /A

/A = lacking other.

The idea of separation disappears from Lacan's later work, and Lacan uses 
alientation to illustrate both terms, but he adds the idea of traversing of 
fantasy (la traversee du fantasme) - the traversing of the fundemantal fantasy.

Traversing of fantasy involves the subject's assumption of a new position with 
respect to the Other as language and the Other as desire.  A move is made to 
invest or inhabit that which brough him or her into existence as split 
subject, to become that which cause her or him.... it is the process by which 
the subject subjectifies trauma, takes the traumatic event upon her or himself 
and assumes responsibility for jouisssance.

***** (chapter 8)

The dialectic of the part and the whole is crucial to Lacan's formulation of 
sexual difference or "sexuation" not "all and some" are translated in Encore 
and Feminine Sexuality and, further, misconstrued and detached from any 
context in Derrida's "The Purveyor of Truth."

Lacan's dialectic of part and whole has a twist: the whole is never whole (the 
Other does not exist), and the part is undefibale, unsituable, unsecifiable, 
and "has nothing to do with the whole."

Castration has to do with the fact that, at a certain point, we are required to 
give up some jouissance - the crucial point here is that Lacan's notion of 
castration focuses essentialy on the renunciation of joiussance and not on the 
penis (and therefore applies to both men and women insofar as they "alienate" a 
part of their jouissance.

When jouissance is sacrificed, it shifts to the Other... it as transferred to 
the Other's "account" - it is "squeezed" out of the body and refound in speech. 
The Other as language enjoys this is our stead.  In other words: insofar as we 
alienate ourselves in the Other and enlist ourselves in support of the Other's 
discourse that we can share some of the jouissance circulating in the Other.

Castration can thus be associated with other processes: in the economic 
register, captialism requires the extraction or subtraction from the worker of 
a certain quantum of value, "surplus value."  That value is taken away from the 
worker, the worker is subjected to an experience of loss, and transferred to 
the Other qua "free" market.

In the quest for love and attention, a child is sooner or later confronted with 
the fact that it is not its caregivers' sole object of interest.  Not 
surprisingly, one signifier comes to signify that part of the caregivers' 
desire which goes beyond the child ("the signifier of desire") ("the signifier 
of the Other's desire") - ie. the phallus.  Lacan sees no reason why this is 
necessarily the case, it is contigent and contextual...

Insofar as desire is always correlated with lack, the phallus is the signifier 
of the lack.  Its displacements and shifts indicate the movement of lack within 
the structure as a whole.  Whereas castration refers to a primordial loss which 
sets the structure in motion, the phallus is the signifier of that loss.