Jouissance is Fun!

A recent thread on the dialectics of fun brought me to the realization that fun is jouissance and jouissance is fun. This not only solves the translation problem, but also makes it easier to present Lacan's ideas to eighteen-year-old American college freshman.

Jouissance : A French word which derives from the verb jouir meaning to have pleasure in, to enjoy, to appreciate, to savour; with a secondary meaning, as in English, of having rights and pleasures in the use of, as in the phrases “she enjoyed good health”, “she enjoyed a considerable fortune”, and “all citizens enjoy the right of freedom of expression”. The derived noun, jouissance, has three current meanings in French: it signifies an extreme or deep pleasure; it signifies sexual orgasm; and in law, it signifies having the right to use something, as in the phrase avoir la jouissance de quelquechose.

The interpretation of fun as "extreme or deep pleasure" is unproblematic, and certainly sexual orgasm is fun. (When asked where her husband is, for example, a wife might say "Right now I'd guess he's off having fun with some little whore.") Only the third meaning of jouissance superficially seems wrong for "fun", but consider these usages:

Since 1919 American women have had the fun of voting.

I am now experiencing the fun of home-ownership.

In their prime the Dakota had dominated much of the West, but after Little Big Horn the fun was over.

"Fun", of course, can be painful -- e.g., the expressions "too much fun" or sentences of the type "He had so much fun that he couldn't get out of bed for three days". Lacan recognizes this:

Jouissance, for Lacan, is not a purely pleasurable experience but arises through augmenting sensation to a point of discomfort (as in the sexual act, where the cry of passion is at times indistinguishable from the cry of pain), or as in running a marathon.

The brings us to the third paradigm (after the imaginarisation and the signifiantisation) --

the paradigm of the impossible jouissance, that is, real jouissance.

Lacan considered this Seminar as effecting a sort of scission. It constitutes a privileged reference as far as it bespeaks his third attribution to jouissance - assigned to The Real.

Now, the Real, (le real) is, of course a fish -- specifically, a kind of sturgeon , as I have shown. But Lacan does not speak of le real, of course, but la real -- contrary to his usual practice, he uses ordinary language rather than technical language. Furthermore, he speaks not of a sturgeon, but of a salmon:

But sometimes desire is not to be conjured away, but appears as here, at the centre of the stage, all too visibly, on the festive board, in the form of a salmon. It is an attractive-looking fish, and if it is presented, as is the custom in restaurants, under a thin gauze, the raising of this gauze creates a similar effect to that which occurred at the culmination of the ancient mysteries.

Now, why did Lacan engauze his real meaning this way? Why did he occult le real (the sturgeon), hiding it behind la real and the salmon?

Well, ancient mysteries are like that. And if he just flopped un real real on your plate, that wouldn't be the elusive object of desire any more, would it?

[John Emerson has asserted the moral right to identify Pseudo-Kotsko as the author of this post.]

I am emersonj at gmail dot com.

Original materials copyright John J Emerson

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