Jul 7, 2025
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We find a place for what we lose. Although we know that after such loss the acute stage of mourning will subside, we also know that we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else.
Sigmund Freud. Letter to Ludwig Binswanger. Mourning and Melancholia. Standard Edition. 1917.
It is the free men, the truly free men, who are mad. There is no demand for the petit a, he holds it, it is what he calls his voices, for instance. […] He does not cling to the locus of the Other, the big Other, through the object a, he has it at his disposal. […] Let’s say that he has his cause in his pocket, and that is why he is mad. (Lacan, 1967, p. 10)
The proximity of the object a in psychosis means that the subject has not separated himself from it as the object cause of desire. This separation, which for the neurotic subject is produced by the Other as the locus of speech and language, both regulates and limits his jouissance.
In the absence of this separation a plenitude of jouissance is apparent in such typical psychotic formations as erotomania [delusions of another person being infatuated with them], hypochondriasis [a condition in which a person is excessively and unduly worried about having a serious illness], and the persecutions characteristic of paranoia, as well as the feminization of the psychotic subject, or what Lacan calls the ‘pousse-à-la-femme’ we find in many transsexuals, with their unbridgeable certainty and the sometimes persistent pursuit of surgical interventions to better approximate their resemblance to their particular ideal of femininity.
Lacan on Depression and Melancholia Edited by Derek Hook and Stijn Vanheule
Lacan's further point is that this covert Sadean dimension of an "ethical (sexual) passion" is not read into Kant by our eccentric interpretation, but is inherent to the Kantian theoretical edifice. If we put aside the body of "circumstantial evidence" for it (isn't Kant's infamous definition of marriage-"the contract between two adults of the opposite sex about the mutual use of each other's sexual organs"-thoroughly Sadean, since it reduces the Other, the subject's sexual partner, to a partial object, to his/her bodily organ which provides pleasure, ignoring him/her as the Whole of a human Person?), the crucial clue that allows us to discern the contours of "Sade in Kant" is the way Kant conceptualizes the relationship between sentiments (feelings) and the moral Law. Although Kant insists on the absolute gap between pathological sentiments and the pure form of moral Law, there is one a priori sentiment that the subject necessarily experiences when confronted with the injunction of the moral Law, the pain of humiliation (because of man's hurt pride, due to the "radical Evil" of human nature); for Lacan, this Kantian privileging of pain as the only a priori sentiment is strictly correlative to Sade's notion of pain (torturing and humiliating the other, being tortured and humiliated by him) as the privileged way of access to sexual jouissance (Sade's argument, of course, is that pain is to be given priority over pleasure on account of its greater longevity-pleasures are passing, while pain can last almost indefinitely). This link can be further substantiated by what Lacan calls the Sadean fundamental fantasy: the fantasy of another, ethereal body of the victim, which can be tortured indefinitely and nonetheless magically retains its beauty (see the standard Sadean figure of a young girl sustaining endless humiliations and mutilations from her deprived torturer and somehow mysteriously surviving it all intact, in the same way Tom and Jerry and other cartoon heroes survive all their ridiculous ordeals intact). Doesn't this fantasy provide the libidinal foundation of the Kantian postulate of the immortality of the soul endlessly striving to achieve ethical perfection, i.e., is not the phantasmic "truth" of the immortality of the soul its exact opposite, the immortality of the body, its ability to sustain endless pain and humiliation? Judith Butler pointed out that the Foucaultian "body" as the site of resistance is none other than the Freudian "psyche": paradoxically, "body" is Foucault's name for the psychic apparatus insofar as it resists the soul's domination. That is to say, when, in his well-known definition of the soul as the "prison of the body," Foucault turns around the standard Platonic-Christian definition of the body as the "prison of the soul," what he calls "body" is not simply the biological body, but is effectively already caught into some kind of pre-subjective psychic apparatus. Consequently, don't we encounter in Kant a secret homologous inversion, only in the opposite direction, of the relationship between body and soul: what Kant calls "immortality of the soul" is effectively the immortality of the other, ethereal, "undead" body?
Kant and Sade: the Ideal Couple Zizek 1998
I remember learning that Lacan’s original description of jouissance establishes it as something occurring in a purely imagined and symbolic space and was like well clearly this is incorrect. Obviously jouissance is a physical sensation and therefore grounded in the body. And it’s not like I didn’t understand what he was saying, it just made zero sense to me to imagine pleasure to the point of pain as occurring in a space that was purely conceptual, that the threat of it was tied solely to its impact on consciousness and not to the deeply visceral fear of pain and loss of physical control.
And Kristeva’s exploration of jouissance (specifically feminine jouissance) does address this, as she imagines a female experience of jouissance felt through physical pleasure. And it’s fascinating to me to establish that dichotomy, that the jouissance Lacan described exists in a phallic mode. Is it a product of western culture’s desire to triumph over the body? Of the politics of civilization, of defeating viscerality through reason and self-control? Is that what pushes jouissance into a purely imagined realm, for Lacan?
Another side of it is that the concept of jouissance can admittedly feel a little “yeah, duh” as an autistic person. Bliss to the point of pain— so much of sensation is like that. So many things that feel good also hurt. The familiarity of sensory sensitivity and overstimulation colors my understanding of jouissance inherently.
To me, the experience of jouissance is so deeply visceral it feels like a reflex, not just a physical experience but something that possesses, that occupies the body. When I think of jouissance I think of watching a horror movie and breaking out into excited, overwhelmed laughter at a moment of visual/narrative climax. The feelings of disgust/revulsion, horror, discomfort, catharsis, surprise, and pleasure all converge and cause a transcending and uncontrollable physical response. Or perhaps the overstimulation, alarm, amusement, panic, indignation of being tickled to the point of tears, or the heady, delirious feeling of laughing to the point of physical pain. I don’t think I could ever see it as something occurring only within the realm of consciousness.
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"Why doesn't art stop, why do people continue to create?"
from Coming (original title Jouissance), Jean-Luc Nancy with Adèle van Reeth. Translated by Charlotte Mandell
Lacan comments, in Encore (1999, p.97), that ‘The foundation of knowledge is that the jouissance of its exercise is the same as that of its acquisition’. According to Soler (2016, p.111) this ‘can mean only one thing: there is neither loss nor entropy. A signifier that has been transformed into jouissance in the process of its acquisition – in other words that has become an element of knowledge – will be enjoyed with the same jouissance (that is without loss) in the exercise of knowledge’. Thus, the elements of lalangue, whether letters or signs, are enjoyed and re-enjoyed without loss. ‘This’, says Soler (2016, p.112), ‘is a different constant than that of the joui-sense-laden fundamental fantasy’. This is a departure from the hegemony of the unary trait/signifier that indexes an experience for the first time, thus producing a loss. This process, as we know, causes object (a) to be subtracted, the loss thus perpetuated in the jouissance of repetition. It seems that the elements of lalangue, in the form of letters or signs, are enjoyed and re-enjoyed in the autistic subjects’ inventions, without such a loss. It is the fact that they are enjoyed without loss which perhaps is the critical aspect of the superior homeostasis described by Miller (2019, p.147). Belief in the real unconscious i.e. in knowledge that is enjoyed in the real outside of meaning, is the precondition, ‘for one to be able to identify with the symptom, with the constant in which one cannot believe and yet forces itself upon one and is experienced – either in exultation or fascination (in the case of James Joyce in Finnegan’s Wake) or, on the contrary and more generally speaking, in horror or execration. Unless one manages, in the end, to make it one’s own perhaps even with a certain amount of enthusiasm’ (Soler, 2016, p.112). This horror and execration can be seen in Grandin, Joey and Charlie, prior to the evolution of the sinthome, which is an engineered subjectivity that is fully one’s own. In terms of coherence, this represents a gradual process, from total chaos and overwhelming affect to a local coherence, which constitutes a temporary localisation and relief, and finally to the refined sinthomatic invention, which constitutes a global coherence that ‘takes within its parentheses life in its entirety’ (Miller, 2011, p.62).
On l'appelle père jouissif de moules exotiques.