Jouissance - Lacan's Early Work: Jouissance As Pleasure, Lacan's Work Of The Late 1950s And 1960s: Jouissance Versus Pleasure
French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's (1901–1981) use of the term jouissance, like most other Lacanian concepts, shifts over the years and can be difficult to pin down. Translating from the French, jouissance can be rendered literally as "enjoyment," "both in the sense of deriving pleasure from something, and in the legal sense of exercising property rights" (Evans, p. 1). The term has sexual connotations as well, also meaning orgasm in French.
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Lacan's first use of the term jouissance can be found in the seminar of 1953–1954, where it appears just twice (1998, pp. 205 and 223) and is used only in relation to Hegel's dialectic of the master and the slave. Here Lacan equates jouissance with pleasure, noting the "relation between pleasure [ jouissance ] and labour" and notes that "a law is imposed u…
After 1958, Lacan begins to distinguish between jouissance and pleasure. This can be found in Seminar VII (1960–1961), where Lacan discusses jouissance as an ethical stance in relation to Kant and Sade. In this phase of his work, jouissance comes to figure as that which Freud referred to as "beyond" the pleasure principle or, as Lacan puts it, "jouissance … is su…
Finally, in the 1970s, especially in Seminar XX (1972–1973), Lacan brings to the forefront his distinction between masculine and feminine jouissance. Although he had discussed jouissance in conjunction with femininity as early as 1958, it is only in Encore that Lacan first comes to speak of a qualitatively different type of feminine jouissance. He posits feminine jouissance against that of …
Feminists and cultural critics have appropriated Lacan's term and refined it for their own purposes. Among feminists, jouissance is most often used by French feminists. The two most prominent are Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. Similarly to Lacan, both also discuss a specifically feminine jouissance, related to the mother and woman's body. Kristeva views jouissance as bound up with…
Irigaray, Luce. "The Bodily Encounter with the Mother." Translated by David Macey. In The Irigaray Reader, edited by Margaret Whitford, 34–46. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991. Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Translated by Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York…
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