You seem to have a pretty good sense of Jouissance, FC, to the extent that French thinkers like Lacan are pretty vague and obscure in their expositions (they never give it to you straight) and seem to encourage individual interpretations. Lacan, having started off publishing in a French surreal journal, and his term Jouissance, seems to open his thought up to the same dynamic as dreams and abstract art: most of the meaning to be derived from it comes from the discourse around it. And you’ve written more than I can go through in this particular window. So I’ll have to bounce around randomly and respond to what I can.
“Jouissance is almost the shadow side of the will to power.
Can we define, again, what Jouissance means?
It is the pleasure that isn’t really pleasure, that merges with pain - it indicates the threshold between pleasure and un-pleasure –
it is the will to power that does not actually lead to power, one might say -
It is the prospect of pleasure, that is pleasurable in the mind, but not in the body -it can split the subject in a physical and a psychical entity.”
Zizek certainly seems to connect Jouissance and the will to power. And given the essential role that both seem to play in pretty much all of behavior, one would have to assume that there is a connection. Now, it’s just a matter of articulating that connection.
To give you a sense of how I interpret it, I will describe my introduction in and trajectory from Lacan for Beginners. We start with sex. As Lacan describes it, sex is an activity in which we experience pleasure at a conscious level while experiencing discomfort at a subconscious one. The example he gives is that if you cut it off right before orgasm, what you would experience is discomfort. But I consider this a nominal doorway into the true subtlety of it. If you actually think about the act of sex, it is a process of working your way to a threshold that will take you to a place you’re really enjoying at the time. It’s as if you’re being pulled in 2 directions at once. And what results is a kind of push/pull tension that has been interpreted by Zizek as “the unbearable”.
Lacan then goes on to reverse this to point that for the hysteric. What is experienced on a conscious level is discomfort while at a subconscious level they are actually experiencing pleasure. And this makes perfect sense. Why else would hysteric repeat uncomfortable behaviors if they didn’t, at some subconscious level, experience pleasure. To give an example that will make a lot people uncomfortable:
A young man falls in with a woman that he is attracted to because she has that look of sex: buxom, big breasts, slightly rugged features, and an approachable personality. However, she likes to go out a lot without him, and he finds himself during these outings in a state of extreme duress as he imagines her with someone else. Now all he has to do is stop imagining such things and focus on something more productive or even leave her. But he can’t. And the reason for this is that what he was attracted to in the first place was what was, to his mind, a slut. Therefore, the reason he allows the pattern to go on is while he is experiencing extreme displeasure on a conscious level, what he is experiencing at a subconscious one is the pleasure of watching her as if she were in a porn flick.
And it is this complex interaction (or compellation) of pleasure and pain that constitutes Jouissance. And writing about it now, I realize that I have been confusing the terms “pleasure” and “Jouissance” in that pleasure is only a component of Jouissance and that, contrary to the hedonistic assertion, it is Jouissance, rather than pleasure, that actually draws us. And this dynamic underlies a lot of things we do. This, for instance. Think about the immeasurable discomforts we are willing to go through (like reading obscure French philosophy) to get to those moments of self transcendence that only seem so in hindsight and that we never get to experience in the moment: the (non) satisfaction of that which promises satisfaction and fulfills by never truly satisfying. It’s not like just jacking into the pleasure center of the brain and turning up the amplitude. And even that act would seem to have an underlying discomfort to it.
“The God Dionysus equals the workings of jouissance on a society brave enough to engage it as part of the world. But this God is embedded in a societal structure in that it outlines this structure, gives rise to the physical limits of this structure by a monthly or yearly festival in which, structurally, all components of the active social body participate in transcending this social body as such in a form of rapture, excess, pleasure beyond identity.”
Excellent, Zizek-like, mythological take on it. In Plague of Fantasies, he actually goes a lot into the little transgressions that a social/political structure will allow in order to sustain its power or hold over its subjects.
But the mythological figure I would offer up as defining of Jouissance is Orpheus as he ascends out of Hades with Eurydice. One can only imagine the “unbearable” longing (Jouissance) he must have felt when he could no longer take it and turned to her only to find her not there. It is in Orpheus that we see the aesthetic aspect of Jouissance, that work of art that makes you want to fold into yourself for longing: the (non) satisfaction of that which promises satisfaction and fulfills by never truly satisfying.