The Plague of Fantasies (16)

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

pp. 49-50: Jouissance is thus the 'place' of the subject--one is tempted to say: his 'impossible' Being-there, Da-Sein, and. for that very reason, the subject is always-already displaced, out-of-joint, with regard to it. Therein lies the primordial 'decentrement' of the Lacanian subject: much more radical and elementary than the decentrement of the subject with regard to the 'big Other', the symbolic order which is the external place of the subject's truth, is the decentrement with regard to the traumatic Thing-jouissance which the subject can never 'subjectivize', assume, integrate. Jouissance is that notorious heimliche which is simultaneously the most unheimliche, always-already here and, precisely as such, always-already lost. What characterizes the fundamental subjective position of a hysteric (and one should bear in mind that for Lacan, the status of the subject as such is hysterical) is precisely the ceaseless questioning of his or her existence qua enjoyment--that is, the refusal fully to identify with the object that he or she 'is', the eternal wondering at this object: 'Am I really that?'

Another way to express the point is to say that jouissance designates the non-historical kernel of the process of historicization. As Jacques-Alain Miller defines the analyst as the subject who, in contrast to us, 'common' individuals caught in the everyday symbolic circuit, no longer confounds what he hears [j'ouis] with what he enjoys [jouir]; Miller, of course, is alluding here to Lacan's famous wordplay from 'The Subversion of the Subject...' regarding the superego injunction Jouis! ('Enjoy!'), 'to which the subject can only reply J'ouis ('I hear'), the jouissance being no more than a half-heard innuendo'. The subject can avoid this confusion only by 'traversing the fantasy', since it is precisely his fundamental fantasy which provides the frame anchoring his jouissance in that which he is able to hear/understand: when I achieve a distance towards the phantasmic frame, I no longer reduce jouissance to what I hear/understand, to the frame of meaning.

The most difficult and painful aspect of what Lacan calls 'separation' is thus to maintain the distance between the hard kernel of jouissance and the ways in which this kernel is caught in different ideological fields--jouissance is 'undecidable', 'free-floating'. The enthusiasm of fans for their favourite rock star and the religious trance of a devout Catholic in the presence of the Pope are libidinally the same phenomenon; they differ only in the different symbolic network which supports them. [....] So, when someone, while describing his profound religious experience, emphatically answers his critics: 'You don't really understand it at all! There's more to it, something words cannot express!', he is the victim of a kind of perspective illusion: the precious agalma perceived by him as the unique ineffable kernel which cannot be shared by others (non-believers) is precisely jouissance as that which always remains the same. Every ideology attaches itself to some kernel of jouissance which, however, retains the status of an ambiguous excess.