Enjoyment and the Real

What is the Lacanian Real? Is the Real what is inside of us or what comes upon us? Or both? It is that which we cannot signify--but are these the Freudian drives (“the violence within”) or social nightmares (“the violence without”)?

I’m setting  up a dichotomy here, partly because I think this is a point of genuine tension, one worth working out. 

The notion of the Real matters because it reminds us that we are never masters of our world, and of the discourses that interact with it. As my dissertation adviser would always remind me, “the world sometimes pushes back.” Radical constructivism is a form of relativism that seems self-defeating.

The problem for social theory is that the Real--in whatever form we imagine it: as social trauma, as individual compulsion--is immediately taken up into the symbolic chain. Despite knowing better, we tell stories so as to make sense of moments of death, destruction and decay. We memorialize these events--both in our individual and collective lives. But is there a form of commemoration that holds open possibilities for the ineffable and the unknowable? Can we signify a lack of meaning, thereby preserving it in its “reality?”

So, as was raised tonight--why is the “return of the real”  always viewed as a negative, as a trauma? Is there no place for the awe-some in one’s encounter with the Real?

The notion of jouissance was raised briefly tonight, and since it was not included in any of the texts we read, I thought I would take the opportunity to speak more about this concept, so important to Lacan’s thought.

My research led me to this rather wonderful Lacanian website/fan club/journal: Lacan.com

There,  I read this article by Adrian Johnston.

Johnston reminds us that a somewhat typical translation of the French, jouissance, would be the English, enjoyment. Yet it does not translate quite right. Why?

“Jouissance is ‘beyond the pleasure principle’ precisely to the extent that it breaks off negotiations with the reality principle, that it bypasses the moderating/mitigating influence of the ego on the drives.”

That is, jouissance is the type of pleasure we get when--put bluntly--we throw caution to the wind and act upon our deepest impulses. As might be expected, such actions rarely lead to a pure, undiluted enjoyment. In fact, jouissance leads to a realization that the drives, our desires, are dysfunctional. They promise what they cannot give. As Johnston says in his article, “one consequently arrives at a paradoxical point in Lacanian theory: jouissance is an enjoyment that is enjoyable only insofar as it doesn't get what it's allegedly after.”

What if falling into love--the abandonment of self for the image of the other--is as close as we can get to jouissance? But does falling in love always already mean falling out of love with someone else? Is every falling into love a moment of substitution? Of supplement? A sliding along the symbolic chain? 

Nostalgia is perhaps a part of every encounter with our jouissance.

Other Lacanian/psychoanalytic education texts:

The piece Jim and I wrote about empathy, in which we use Lacan and Levinas.

The work of Shoshana Felman and Deborah Britzman.

Finally, I highly recommend this collection of essays edited by Gail Boldt and Paula Salvio. In particular, I recommend the essay by Peter Taubman on “love” and classroom management.