What is the Real?
JACQUES- ALAIN MILLER
Beyond Prince Charming
& Pink Swords
MARIE HÉLÈNE-BROUSSE
Note on the Treatment
of the Symptom
by the Analytic Act
PIERRE-GILLES GUÉGUEN
Lacan's Legacy:
From the Universal to
the Particular
NATALIE WULFING
Lacan as Analysand
ÉRIC LAURENT
The Real
& the Semblance
JACQUES- ALAIN MILLER
Everlasting Couch
MARIE HÉLÈNE-BROUSSE
The Emperors Heron
FRANÇOIS REGNAULT
[...]More generally, we should always bear in mind that our most intense forms of enjoyment are not spontaneous outbursts but something learned by imitation, an acquired taste. Recall the first experience of smoking or drinking a hard liquor: as a rule, it was a slightly older peer who told us in half secret that adults are doing this, and then offered us to taste a cigarette or a drink, and our first reaction was, as expected, a distaste—we started coughing, spitting it out, and exclaimed: “Is THIS supposed to be pleasurable?” Then, gradually, we learn to enjoy it and maybe even get addicted... (There is something of this even in Coke: when one tastes it for the first time, one sees immediately why Coke, with its bitter taste, was first introduced as a medicine.) When one wants just direct pleasure, one doesn’t mess with the likes of tobacco or alcohol—a good fruit juice or chocolate drink does it better. And does ultimately the same not hold even for sex? A directly pleasurable thing is probably rhythmic squeezing of oneself, masturbation maybe, and definitely not the complex effort of a full act of copulation which, again, has to be learned.
A similar lesson can be learned from swearing. It may appear that when, in the middle of a polite conversation, one gets really mad and cannot hold back anymore one’s frustration, one explodes into wild swearing...but is it so? I have a ritual with (some of my) good friends: after we meet, we engage for the first five minutes in a formulaic session of rough and tasteless swearing and offending each other (all the “screw your mother up her ass” and “may you suffocate in your own shit” one can imagine); then, after we get tired, we acknowledge with a brief nod that this rather boring but unavoidable introductory ritual is over and, with great relief at getting rid of one’s duty, we relax and start to talk in a normal polite way, as the kind and considerate people that we really are. So, again, the lesson is that, while pleasures can be spontaneous, there is nothing spontaneous in excessive outbursts of enjoyment—they have to be learned the hard way.[...]
art: Saul Fletcher,Untitled, 2013
