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Paradigms of Jouissance
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Paradigms of Jouissance

 

 

Jacques-Alain Miller

translated by Jorge Jauregui PARADIGM ONE: THE IMAGINARISATION OF JOUISSANCE

The first paradigm is the imaginarisation of jouissance. It specifies the consequences of the first movement in Lacan's teaching as regards the doctrine of jouissance, springing to life with the introduction of the symbolic as composing a dimension distinct from the analytical experience, and a register proper to existence.

As for jouissance these consequences remain concealed since the conceptual stage is engaged with determining the function of parole as giver of meaning,

[...]

This overture fixed for a long time what was conjectured as being the base, the kernel, even the whole of Lacan's teaching.

[...]

PARADIGM TWO: THE SIGNIFIANTISATION OF JOUISSANCE

This is the second movement in Lacan's teaching. Chronologically though it doesn't succeed the first one. It blends with it, bringing it somehow to completion; and then gradually imposes itself. Having the better of the first paradigm it will thoroughly dominate it. You witness a genuine conceptual rewriting that makes apparent the fact that all the terms that have been poured into the imaginary register, eventually recovered by the symbolic, are thoroughly symbolic terms.

The first paradigm organizes this huge imaginary reserve, and the second movement evinces the consistency and the symbolic articulation of what is imaginary.

[...]

PARADIGM THREE: THE IMPOSSIBLE JOUISSANCE

It's on account of Lacan pursuing the signifiantisation of jouissance to its very conclusion that the need of a third paradigm is set up. This change, this correction, this addition, this distinct paradigm, which is introduced in Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis,10 can be termed as 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.

That is the meaning of das Ding, which Lacan brings in from Freud's text, as a sort of Witz.

[...]

PARADIGM FOUR: NORMAL JOUISSANCE

In Los Angeles,11 I cautiously dubbed the fourth paradigm the fragmented jouissance, though I can stretch it up to normal jouissance. Let me refer the fourth paradigm to Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.12

There is an extraordinary antithesis between The Ethics of Psychoanalysis and Seminar XI; in the latter Lacan arranges a new covenant between the symbolic and jouissance. In The Ethics you have a layout of jouissance's massiveness as though positioned in a place normally out of reach. It calls for transgression, for a forcing, in an abyssal place, transgression being the only way to access it.

[...]

PARADIGM FIVE: DISCURSIVE JOUISSANCE

The elaboration of Lacan¹s four discourses belongs to the paradigm I term discursive jouissance [...] With Lacan discourse is alienation and separation unified, put together, and this grants his statement from L'envers de la psychanalyse, "there is a primal relation from knowledge to jouissance,"19 to be read as - there is a primal relation from the signifiers to jouissance. [...]

Subject is what is conveyed by means of a signifier for another signifier. The fact that no identifying representation is ever complete allows for the representation to repeat itself.

[...]

PARADIGM SIX: THE NON-RAPPORT

In the sixth paradigm, which I take from Seminar XX, Encore,22 a reversion with regard to Lacan's progression takes place, notwithstanding the fact that it presses forward with the arguments of the fifth paradigm. Here he argues that, "the signifier is the sign of the subject." [...]

The sixth paradigm is essentially grounded on the non-rapport, on the disjunction of the signifier and the signified, of jouissance and the Other, of man and woman as there's no such thing as a sexual rapport.

[...]

Image top left: Jacques Lacan; Graph of Desire (Complete)
Image top right: Jacques Lacan; Graph of Desire (Stage Three)

 

* "L'expérience du réel dans la cure analytique." Paris, 03/17/99. back up

10. Lacan, J., The Seminar, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, NY: Norton, 1992. back up

11. "The Subject Encore," UCLA at Irving, March 5-7, 1999. back up

12. Lacan, J., The Seminar, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, NY: Norton, 1981. back up

19. Lacan, J., Le séminaire, Livre XVII: L'envers de la psychanalyse, Paris: Seuil, 1991. back up

22. Lacan, J., The Seminar, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge: Encore, NY:Norton, 1998.


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