“But first let me explain my understanding of Jouissance. As it was explained to me in my graphic guide, Lacan for Beginners (and I can easily imagine the snickering out there), it is a matter of looking more deeply into the experience of sex. On the surface, it is an experience of pleasure. But at the same time, it is an experience of discomfort. Lacan’s argument for this was that if you took the sexual act right up to the point of climax, then cut it off, you would experience extreme discomfort. In more blue-collar male circles, we refer to this as “blue-balls”. And this is a perfectly legit attempt on the part of Lacan to be more scientific and empirical.”
Now something I should go into deeper here (based on what I understand about Lacan (is that there is darker element at work here. As Lacan went on to explain, Jouissance is also at work in forms of hysteria and neurosis. It is always a matter of experiencing discomfort on the conscious level while experiencing pleasure at a more sub-conscious level. And think about it: why else would we repeat behaviors that, at a conscious level, give us discomfort unless we, at a subconscious level, experienced pleasure.
A young man falls in love with a young woman that has all the objet petit a’s: nice breasts, a face that is rough but nice to look at, and a sexually affable personality. In other words, what he is looking for is what he sees as a slut. He gets said young lady to fall in love him. The next thing he knows, that young lady is taking every opportunity she can to go out without him. (And I am taking this scenario out of Žižek’s Plague of Fantasies.) He begins to fantasize about her having sex with other men; can hardly help himself.
So you have to ask why it is he does this to himself. First of all, at a more superficial level, he does it because what he sought out in the first place was a slut. Therefore, that’s all he can imagine her being. But at a deeper Lacanian level, he does it because he experiences a kind of subconscious pleasure in imagining her with another man. Why else would he repeat the behavior?
And this negative aspect of Jouissance (that push/pull effect (is important to understand since, in Plague of Fantasies, it expands into acts of evil such as the extra bump concentration camp officials must have felt while exposing Jewish prisoners to debilitating exercise routines under the guise of looking out for their health.