Brenda L Bethman. New Dictionary of the History of Ideas. Editor: Maryanne Cline Horowitz. Volume 3, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2005.
French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s (1901-1981) use of the term jouissance, like most other Lacanian concepts, shifts over the years and can be difficult to pin down. Translating from the French, jouissance can be rendered literally as “enjoyment,” “both in the sense of deriving pleasure from something, and in the legal sense of exercising property rights” (Evans, p. 1). The term has sexual connotations as well, also meaning orgasm in French.
Lacan’s Early Work: Jouissance as Pleasure
Lacan’s first use of the term jouissance can be found in the seminar of 1953-1954, where it appears just twice (1998, pp. 205 and 223) and is used only in relation to Hegel’s dialectic of the master and the slave. Here Lacan equates jouissance with pleasure, noting the “relation between pleasure [jouissance] and labour” and notes that “a law is imposed upon the slave, that he should satisfy the desire and pleasure [jouissance] of the other” (1998, p. 223). Until Seminar IV (1956-1957), jouissance as simply “pleasure” is Lacan’s only and infrequent use of the term.
In his early work, Lacan’s notion of jouissance, although not a Freudian term, has parallels to Freud’s concept of the drive. After 1957, the sexual connotations of the word move to the forefront, and in 1958 he first uses jouissance to refer explicitly to orgasm. Thus, in 1958, Lacan speaks of “masturbatory jouissance,” which he attributes to the phallic stage and the “imaginary dominance of the phallic attribute” (1977, p. 282).
Lacan’s Work of the Late 1950s and 1960s: Jouissance Versus Pleasure
After 1958, Lacan begins to distinguish between jouissance and pleasure. This can be found in Seminar VII (1960-1961), where Lacan discusses jouissance as an ethical stance in relation to Kant and Sade. In this phase of his work, jouissance comes to figure as that which Freud referred to as “beyond” the pleasure principle or, as Lacan puts it, “jouissance … is suffering” (1992, p. 184). In relation to Kant’s example of the man who refuses a night of pleasure with a woman if the price to be paid is death, Lacan remarks that, although that may be true for the man in pursuit of pleasure, the man in pursuit of jouissance (as the figures of de Sade’s are) will accept death as the price to be paid for jouissance: “one only has to make a conceptual shift and move the night spent with the lady from the category of pleasure to that of jouissance … for the example to be ruined” (1992, p. 189). In the acceptance of death as the price, the subject experiences jouissance, in which “pleasure and pain are presented as a single packet to take or leave” (1992, p. 189).
Despite these earlier references, it is not until 1960 that Lacan gives his first structural account of jouissance. In “Sub-version of the Subject,” he posits pleasure as that which “sets the limits on jouissance” (1977, p. 319). The sacrificing of jouissance also becomes here, for the first time, a necessary condition for subjectivity—the subject, by submitting him-or herself to the symbolic order must sacrifice some jouissance, since “jouissance is forbidden to him who speaks” (1977, p. 319). In this Lacan rewrites Freud’s theory of the castration complex: “Castration means that jouissance must be refused” (1977, p. 324). The sacrificed (or “alienated”) jouissance becomes the object, that which is the cause of desire but never attainable.
Lacan in the 1970s: Masculine and Feminine Jouissances
Finally, in the 1970s, especially in Seminar XX (1972-1973), Lacan brings to the forefront his distinction between masculine and feminine jouissance. Although he had discussed jouissance in conjunction with femininity as early as 1958, it is only in Encore that Lacan first comes to speak of a qualitatively different type of feminine jouissance. He posits feminine jouissance against that of the phallic, termed the “jouissance of the Idiot” (1998, p, 81). In Encore, Lacan defines phallic jouissance (which he sometimes refers to as sexual jouissance) as that which “is marked and dominated by the impossibility of establishing as such … the One of the relation ‘sexual relationship'” (1998, p. 6-7). Lacan’s use of the term One refers to mathematical logic (Frege), to the Platonic myth of the lovers’ unity in the Symposium, and to the (presumed) unity of the (male) subject in a philosophical sense. Phallic jouissance is thus seen as a barrier to these forms of unity. Or, to put it another way, “[P]hallic jouissance is the obstacle owing to which man does not come … to enjoy woman’s body, precisely because what he enjoys is the jouissance of the organ … Jouissance, qua sexual, is phallic—in other words, it is not related to the Other as such” (1998, pp. 7 and 9). The term Other here refers both to the linguistic Other and to the Other sex—woman. It is precisely man’s experience of phallic or sexual jouissance that “covers or poses an obstacle to the supposed sexual relationship” (1998, p. 9).
Although women have, according to Lacan, access to a jouissance that is beyond the phallus, men, by virtue of the fact that it is “through the phallic function that man as whole acquires his inscription” (1998, p. 79), have to make do with inadequate phallic or sexual jouissance, one that causes him to be unable to “attain his sexual partner … except inasmuch as his partner is the cause of his desire” (1998, p. 80). A further cause of the inadequacy of phallic jouissance is its incompatibility with feminine jouissance, thus posing an obstacle to the sexual relationship.
Feminine jouissance differs from masculine or phallic jouissance through its relation to the Other, especially the Other sex, which for Lacan means woman. Although in his earlier work, Lacan attributed to women a jouissance associated with the phallic stage and the clitoris (1977, p. 282), his work of the 1970s moved away from that position. In particular, Lacan posits for women a specifically feminine jouissance that is “beyond the phallus” (1998, p. 74). Women have access both to phallic, or sexual, jouissance, and to a supplementary form of jouissance by virtue of being not wholly subsumed by the phallic function as men are: “being not-whole, she has a supplementary jouissance compared to what the phallic function designates by way of jouissance” (1998, p. 73). It is, however, impossible to know anything about this other jouissance other than that some women (and men) experience it. Lacan’s paradigmatic example of feminine jouissance is that of mystics such as Hadewijch d’Anvers, Saint John of the Cross, and Saint Teresa, thus relating feminine jouissance to God. As he asks in relation to mysticism, “Doesn’t this jouissance that one experiences and knows nothing about put us on the path of existence? And why not interpret one face of the Other, the God face, as based on feminine jouissance?” (1998, p. 77).
In his later uses of the term jouissance, one can see just where Lacan parts ways with Freud. First, in his claim that “there is no sexual relationship,” Lacan asserts the inherent failure of genital sexuality, which Freud did not do. Finally, through his description of a specifically feminine jouissance, one that implies a different type of sexual satisfaction for women, Lacan’s later work does away with Freud’s notion of libido’s being only masculine.
Feminist and Political Applications of Jouissance
Feminists and cultural critics have appropriated Lacan’s term and refined it for their own purposes. Among feminists, jouissance is most often used by French feminists. The two most prominent are Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. Similarly to Lacan, both also discuss a specifically feminine jouissance, related to the mother and woman’s body. Kristeva views jouissance as bound up with the maternal and the semiotic chora and views art as “the flow of jouissance into language” (p. 79). Irigaray, in a manner almost as cryptic as Lacan’s, also claims that women experience two types of jouissance: a phallic one and one “more in keeping with their bodies and their sex” (p. 45).
In terms of the political, theorists such as Slavoj Žižek and Tim Dean have picked up on Lacan’s remarks in Television regarding racism, the melting pot, and the jouissance of the Other to view social problems such as ethnic hatred or homophobia as motivated by resentment of the (ethnically or sexually) other’s jouissance.