“That is to say: desire and jouissance are inherently antagonistic, even exclusive: desire’s raison d’etre (or ‘utility function’, to use Richard Dawkin’s term) is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire.” -from Zizek’s Plague of Fantasies
And here I find myself at odds with myself in that my understanding of Joiussance doesn’t just conflict with the above, but the graphic guide’s, Lacan for Beginners, translation of the term as sexual climax. Still, as I wrote previously on the issue:
“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.”
And I should take the genealogical approach of tracing back to an earlier post:
“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.”
The problem (and maybe my peers on the Žižek board can help with this (is that, in the first quote, Žižek distinguishes Jouissance from desire (the process of desire being that which leads to Jouissance: sexual climax as the beginner’s guide defines it (while I tend to convolute the two terms. To me, that push/pull experience described in the part on Jouissance in the beginner’s guide suggested that the dynamics of the sexual climax are built into the process of getting there. I mean think about it: isn’t the experience of sex one of working one’s way to a threshold that will take you out of place that you’re really enjoying at the time? Of being pulled in two directions? It was through this understanding of Jouissance that I was able to apply it to other experiences of pleasure such as that song that makes you want to fold into yourself and, thereby, gives you pleasure. It even applies to the pleasure that we get from what we are doing here: it is a series of not always comfortable actions pursued for that experience of the breakthrough. And lot of what Žižek describes in the book seems to support my model such as his descriptions of thwarted lovers: the way they seem to take pleasure in their pain.
It just seems to me that desire is a redundant term in that it seems to encompass Jouissance.
Or have I totally mucked up in my interpretation? Merely hijacking the term for my own uses?