UNPLEASURE

Transgression contains nothing negative, but affirms limited being. – affirms the limitlessness into which it leaps as it opens this zone to existence for the first time … [T]ransgression opens onto a scintillating and constantly affirmed world, a world without shadows or twilight, without that serpent ‘no’ that bites into fruits and lodges their contradictions at their core.

Now the naturalist liberation of desire has failed.  The more the theory, the more the work of social criticism, the more the sieve of that experience, which tended to limit obligation to certain precise functions in the social order, have raised in us the hope of relativising the imperative, the contrary or, in a word, conflictual character of moral experience .. The naturalist liberation of desire has failed historically. We do not find ourselves in the presence of a man less weighed down with laws and duties than before the great critical experience of so-called libertine thought. 

comblement / fulfillment

The subject insistently posits the desire and the possibility of a complete satisfaction of the desire implicated in the amorous relation and of a perfect and virtually eternal success of this relation: paradisiac image of the Sovereign Good, to be given and to be received.

'Masochism is not a viable alternative to mastery, either practically or theoretically. The defeat of the self belongs to the same relational system, the same relational imagination, as the self’s exercise of power; it is merely the transgressive version of that exercise. Masochism consents to, indeed embraces that theft of being which mastery would remedy by obliterating otherness through a fantasmatic invasion of difference. To neglect self-defeat in sexual relations leads to that pastoralizing of sexuality that I have frequently criticized; but to privilege self-defeat in the relational field is to reduce that entire field to libidinal relationality.'

'From the start, the encounter with the Other is my responsibility for him.  That is the responsibility for my neighbour, which is, no doubt, the harsh name for what we call love of one's neighbour; love without Eros, charity, without concupiscence.  I don't very much like the word love, which is worn-out and debased.  Let us speak instead of the taking upon oneself of the fate of the other.'  

From An Interview with Jean Laplanche: