Jouissance

In French, jouissance means enjoyment, in terms both of rights and property, and of sexual orgasm—the latter has a meaning partially lacking in the English word "enjoyment".

Poststructuralism has developed the latter sense of jouissance in complex ways, so as to denote a transgressive, excessive kind of pleasure linked to the division and splitting of the subject involved.

English editions of the works of Jacques Lacan have generally left jouissance untranslated in order to help convey its specialised usage. Lacan first developed his concept of an opposition between jouissance and the pleasure principle in his Seminar "The Ethics of Psychoanalysis" (1959–1960). Lacan considered that "there is a jouissance beyond the pleasure principle" linked to the partial drive; a jouissance which compels the subject to constantly attempt to transgress the prohibitions imposed on his enjoyment, to go beyond the pleasure principle.

Yet the result of transgressing the pleasure principle, according to Lacan, is not more pleasure but pain, since there is only a certain amount of pleasure that the subject can bear. Beyond this limit, pleasure becomes pain, and this "painful principle" is what Lacan calls jouissance. Thus jouissance is suffering (ethics)—something which may be linked to the influence of the erotic philosophy of Bataille, epitomised in Lacan's remark about "the recoil imposed on everyone, in so far as it involves terrible promises, by the approach of jouissance as such". Lacan also linked jouissance to the castration complex, and to the aggression of the death drive.

In his seminar "The Other Side of Psychoanalysis" (1969–1970) Lacan introduced the concept of "surplus-jouissance" (French plus-de-jouir) inspired by Marx's concept of surplus-value: he considered objet petit a is the excess of jouissance which has no use value, and which persists for the mere sake of jouissance.

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