The Plague of Fantasies (15)

From Slavoj Žižek's The Plague of Fantasies, (London: Verso, 1997)

pp. 48-49: What psychoanalysis can do to help the critique of ideology is precisely to clarify the status of this paradoxical jouissance as the payment that the exploited, the servant, receives for serving the Master. This jouissance, of course, always emerges within a certain phantasmic field; the crucial precondition for breaking the chains of servitude is thus to 'traverse the fantasy' which structures our jouissance in a way which keeps us attached to the Master--makes us accept the framework of the social relationship of domination. [....]

Jouissance concerns the very fundamentals of what one is tempted to call psychoanalytic ontology. Psychoanalysis chances upon the fundamental ontological question: 'Why is there something instead of nothing?' apropos of the experience of the 'loss of reality [Realitatsverlust]', when some traumatic, excessively intense encounter affects the subject's ability to assume the full ontological weight of his world-experience. From the very outset of his teaching, Lacan emphasized the inherent and irreducible traumatic status of existence: 'By definition, there is something so improbable about all existence that one is in effect perpetually questioning oneself about its reality.' Later, after the crucial turning point of his teaching, he links existence ('as such', one is tempted to add) to jouissance as that which is properly traumatic--that is, whose existence can never be fully assumed, and which is thus forever perceived as spectral, pre-ontological. In a key passage from 'Subversion of the Subject and Dialectic of Desire', for example, he answers the question 'What am I?':

[quotation from Lacan] 'I' am in the place from which a voice is heard clamouring 'the universe is a defect in the purity of Non-Being'. And not without reason, for by protecting itself this place makes Being itself languish. This place is called Jouissance, and it is the absence of this that makes the universe vain.

Jouissance is thus the ontological aberration, the disturbed balance (clinamen, to use the old philosophical term) which accounts for the passage from Nothing to Something; it designates the minimal contraction (in Schelling's sense of the term) which provides the density of the subject's reality. Someone can be happily married, with a good job and many friends, fully satisfied with his life, and yet absolutely hooked on some specific formation ('sinthom') of jouissance, ready to put everything at risk rather than renounce that (drugs, tobacco, drink, a particular sexual perversion...). Although his symbolic universe may be nicely set up, this absolutely meaningless intrusion, this clinamen, upsets everything, and there is nothing to be done, since it is only in this 'sinthom' that the subject encounters the density of being--when he is deprived of it, his universe is empty. At a less extreme level, the same holds for every authentic intersubjective encounter: when do I actually encounter the Other 'beyond the wall of language', in the real of his or her being? Not when I am able to describe her, not even when I learn her values, dreams, and so on, but only when I encounter the Other in her moment of jouissance: when I discern in her a tiny detail (a compulsive gesture, an excessive facial expression, a tic) which signals the intensity of the real of jouissance. This encounter with the real is always traumatic; there is something at least minimally obscene about it; I cannot simply integrate it into my universe, there is always a gulf separating me from it.