By TODD ​​MCGOWAN*

The enjoyment of emancipation occurs through the confrontation of the limit, which is internal rather than external, through the confrontation of one's own restriction, rather than that imposed as something external.

1.

Understanding the politics of enjoyment requires recognizing its difference from pleasure. Enjoyment and pleasure exist in a dialectical relationship, [since one is a determined negation of the other]. Enjoyment is the privileged term in this relationship, because it is what drives the subject unconsciously. People act in favor of their enjoyment, even if enjoyment can never become their conscious goal.

It is unconscious desire that mobilizes enjoyment, not deliberate planning. Pleasure, on the other hand, is often the conscious goal of the person, even if he is not aware of what produces pleasure. Pleasure and enjoyment function dialectically in the following way: in the conscious effort to obtain pleasure, the person produces enjoyment; and this is the unconscious goal that is implicit in the conscious attempt to obtain pleasure.

Although it may seem that the distinction between pleasure and enjoyment makes little difference, that it is merely a semantic or psychoanalytic concern, it actually has clear political implications. Pleasure obeys the coordinates of the social field. That is why it is easy to find the meaning of pleasure. But enjoyment occurs at the moment of rupture of this meaning, when the contradiction erupts in the social field, beyond what people are experiencing.

The contradictory nature of enjoyment makes it painful to bear. Furthermore, its excessive status in relation to the field of current meaning allows it to play a determining role in structuring our existence. Since enjoyment exceeds the realm of current meaning, it seems meaningless. But this structural position allows it to give direction to what we do in a way that pleasure cannot.

One experiences pleasure when one remains within the limits of the social order, when one acquires a desired object that is available; now, enjoyment necessarily occurs at the limits of that order, at the point where one is escaping from it. The pleasurable object may be a new job, a romantic partner, a monetary reward, or even a juicy hamburger.

It does not matter what the content of what gives me pleasure is, because if it is to remain merely pleasurable, it must remain within the limits of what society grants as possible. All objects of pleasure fit within the possibilities made available by the existing social order. In general, none of these objects goes beyond its limits. [Enjoyment, however, can be transgressive].

2.

Freud defines pleasure in a precise but initially counterintuitive way. For him, pleasure is obtained by decreasing the arousal felt by the person – not by increasing it. According to his conception of the “pleasure principle” formulated in Introductory lectures on psychoanalysis, “pleasure is in some way connected with the diminution, reduction, or extinction of the quantities of stimulus prevailing in the mental apparatus, just as, in a similar manner, unpleasure is connected with their increase.”[I]

As he discusses below, the certainty of this conception and its proof come from the sexual act itself. Everything in this act moves towards the culmination, that is, the orgasm, which is experienced as the greatest pleasure imaginable. Therefore, Freud continues: “An examination of the most intense pleasure accessible to human beings, that of performing the sexual act, leaves little doubt about the validity of the pleasure principle.”[ii] Although the discharge of excitement is more materially evident in the case of men than in women, the sexual conduct of both sexes and intersexuals does support Freud's theory.[iii]

Completion is, for almost everyone, the high point of the sexual process – perhaps even the high point of life itself – because it marks the peak of pleasure.[iv] When you think of it this way, when you think of the pleasure principle as a release rather than a buildup of arousal, it starts to make a lot more sense and no longer seems counterintuitive. To let go of arousal is to experience a great, if brief, surge of pleasure. Even those blessed with the ability to have multiple orgasms are, however, doomed to a brevity of pleasure. They simply get to experience that brevity more often than those less gifted.

Pleasure is necessarily momentary because it is a culmination. One experiences pleasure as one’s excitement wanes; therefore, the experience ends quickly, at the exact point at which the excitement ends. The fleeting nature of pleasure is evident not only in sexual acts, but also in the case of eating a sweet or a doughnut; here too it disappears after a few seconds of pure delight. This applies even to the new BMW one might buy. The first few times one drives one feels the pleasure of owning and driving a powerful car, but this eventually fades. The pleasure cannot last. Later one may have the pleasure of remembering the earlier experience; however, this memory does not continue the first moment of pleasure – in fact, it is a distinct pleasure.

This led Freud to lament that people are so structured psychically, that they are unable to obtain pleasure in a sustained manner. Although it is possible to imagine constant pleasure in a utopian way, the structure of the human psyche makes it impossible for such a utopia to be realized. The best that can be hoped for consists of the rapid repetition of the pleasurable experience through which excess excitement is discharged. But each accumulation of excitement brings with it displeasure until it is possible to discharge what has previously accumulated. The realization of this utopia would imply maximizing displeasure in order to subsequently maximize pleasure, a goal that may seem less than utopian.[v]

Freud's theory of pleasure – the pleasure principle – allowed him to understand, albeit indirectly, why various difficulties are sought. This is because by putting an end to these difficulties, whatever they may be, one obtains pleasure.

With the concept of the pleasure principle, Freud implicitly explains the human self-destructive tendency by offering his version of the old joke about the man who continually hits himself on the head with a hammer. At one point a friend of his asks him, “Why do you do that, since it is patently absurd?” Here is how the man answers: “Because it feels so good when I stop.” Now, this good feeling that arises when one stops hitting oneself on the head provides the basis for the pleasure principle.

This is how Freud explains unpleasant dreams in The interpretation of dreams. As he conceives them, one is not attracted to negative thoughts as such, because one simply wants to create a path through which one can experience the pleasure of fulfilling a desire. In this book, Freud spends little time, indeed suspiciously so, on bad dreams, given their ubiquity in the minds of sleepers.

When addressing nightmares, he states: “what is distressing cannot be represented in a dream, that is, in our dream thoughts; that which appears distressing can enter a dream, unless, at the same time, it lends a disguise to the fulfillment of a wish.”[vi] Although Freud briefly considers the nightmare in The Interpretation of Dreams, he gives it a status of necessarily derived event, due to the prominence that the pleasure principle has in this work. The accentuated moment is the one in which one wants to get rid of the disturbances, not the previous one in which one wants to find them.

3.

Freud thinks only in terms of the opposition between the pleasure principle and its corollary, the reality principle (in which social constraints on the path to the release of excitation are taken into account). In doing so, he fails to consider the possibility of enjoyment, that is, the eventuality of an experience that brings satisfaction to the subject through the stimulation it causes in itself – and not through the release of stimulation. This is the position that predominates in Freud’s early thinking about how the psyche works. It leaves him unable to explain why people desire objects that cause them great suffering, which is a stubborn fact of the psyche.[vii]

Through his conception of the pleasure principle, Freud explains the accumulation of excess excitement—in foreplay, for example—as something that simply precedes eventual release. A person builds up tension or excitement simply to give himself or herself something to discharge. For him, there is no intrinsic value in the production of excitement in and of itself. The state of excitement and discomfort is only important because it is the prelude to a future release, which will put an end to this unpleasant state and produce pleasure.

A problem arises and it will be solved by means of the discharge of excitation – this is exactly what the pleasure principle describes. Thus, the problem has value only because of its final sequence. In this perspective, pleasure is only at the end of the story for the subject. However, enjoyment occurs before this end is reached. Now, this is what Freud eventually managed to see when, in 1920, he wrote Beyond the pleasure bases. There, he conceived of the death drive, which thrives on disturbances, rather than occurring in the effort to eliminate them.

The death drive is a contradictory agency. It throws obstacles in its path and is excited by the obstacles—not by the act of overcoming them. In the death drive, the primacy of the obstacle causes the distinction between suffering and pleasure to dissipate. One enjoys what frustrates conscious desire, what causes problems. While pleasure derives from overcoming contradictions, enjoyment comes from experiencing them, from struggling with them.

As Freud acknowledges when he writes Beyond the pleasure bases, pleasure is experienced through diminution, but enjoyment is experienced through the creation of excitement.[viii] In contrast to pleasure, enjoyment is derived from that which produces disturbance in our psychic equilibrium. But one cannot simply create excitement by wishing it into existence. The psyche, in fact, becomes excited by the emergence of a problem. What makes our existence enjoyable is the asking of questions, not the answering of them; it is the discovery of problems, not their solution; it is the construction of obstacles, not their elimination.

To speak in psychoanalytic terms, excitement comes from the emergence of an object that arouses desire, insofar as it appears as momentarily unattainable. Enjoyment requires a missing, lost or absent object that will not become present immediately and that is posed as a lost object. The jouissable object is necessarily contradictory: it appears as such only insofar as it is not present. When one enjoys such objects, one enjoys what is not present; now, it is the subject himself who thus assumes this contradictory position.

Objects that are there, that are present and that do not harbor this contradiction [that is, that are there and are not there as an object of desire], do not have transcendent value. They can be valued as useful objects, but they are not treated as sublime objects capable of providing enjoyment. The easy availability of an object indicates that it is just an everyday thing. It has no transcendent value, but only the status of something that is there to be used.

It has transcendent value, that which goes beyond immediate utility, that which is absent and difficult to attain. The only objects with transcendent value are those that cannot be accessed, that are lost. The condition of being missing generates an excess of excitement that leads to enjoyment, which is why the subject must suffer this enjoyment instead of finding pleasure in it. The relationship between enjoyment and loss, a loss that produces excitement and gives the subject something to fight for, represents the key to the politics of enjoyment.

Consider the transformation that an ordinary object undergoes when it is lost. Suppose you lose your car keys. Despite looking for them everywhere you can, you cannot find them. Unlike a cell phone, you cannot call them to locate them. The more you look for these keys without being able to find them, the more they become an object of enjoyment. This is true even if, in typical circumstances—when you have them in your hands—they are the most banal object imaginable. But as they take on the form of a lost thing, something that you obstinately seek, they become an object of transcendent enjoyment.

4.

Lost keys acquire a value that goes far beyond that of allowing the vehicle to be operated. Finding them seems to be a key to all possible enjoyment, since everything else takes second place to the need to search for them. But the enjoyment does not really come from the act of finding them. When they are finally found, when they become present again as an empirical object, they immediately cease to be that which causes enjoyment. One simply feels relief at finding them, perhaps even a little pleasure. But at that very moment, the enjoyment ends. For it comes from the excess of excitement that the lost object produces in the person searching for it, and which disappears when the object becomes present again.

Enjoyment occurs when faced with something that is not present but is an object of desire. When an object is constantly present, one is unable to enjoy it. But when it is lost or disappears, one experiences the object as truly enjoyable. The absence of objects of desire animates the subject. Now, this dynamic is most clearly visible in romantic relationships.

When sex with a partner has been an everyday possibility for years, it can become a mechanical duty; it becomes a duty that many people in long-term relationships choose to forgo. But when one knows that time with one’s partner is limited or when one’s partner has been absent for a long time, sexual encounters become rewarded with pleasure. Most sayings are laughable, but the one that says “absence makes the heart grow fonder” manages to suggest well how the logic of pleasure works. Since pleasure involves an engagement with absence, it is always accompanied by a certain amount of suffering.

Since enjoyment necessarily involves suffering, any attempt to eliminate it will meet with strong resistance. Eliminating suffering [associated with the effort to achieve something one desires] is equivalent to eliminating enjoyment. In order to preserve the possibility of enjoyment, subjects cling to loss and the suffering it entails. [And this has political consequences].

Utopian plans to organize a society that aims to eliminate suffering fail, because the effort suffered is necessary in order to obtain enjoyment. If it were possible to rid life of suffering in a future society, it would supposedly create a society free of enjoyment. Such a world would not only be practically impossible, but also theoretically. If utopia does not contain non-utopian elements, it will cease to be enjoyable for people – and therefore also cease to be desirable.[ix] A utopia without non-utopian elements would be just a utopia – something without place.

Therefore, if the leftist conception of the future takes enjoyment into consideration, it cannot be configured merely as a utopia.[X]

An oppressive society, such as contemporary capitalism, continually strives to maintain a divergence between suffering and enjoyment. And this is what makes it oppressive. [The missing object appears as mediocre to the exploited while at the same time it appears as exceptional to the exploiter. The former suffers more and obtains little enjoyment, the latter suffers less but obtains much enjoyment. What the critique of political economy shows by examining a society centered on the capital relation has a counterpart in the psychic economy of economic agents differentiated into classes, exploiters and exploited].

Social hierarchy and class division tend to make those at the top enjoy while those at the bottom bear the brunt of the suffering. But this distinction cannot be maintained. One cannot maintain the capacity to enjoy when all suffering is confined to others. This lie, sustained by class society, is the source of the unnecessary suffering it produces. If one does not enjoy one’s own suffering, it is wasted. This is true for the rich as well as the poor, even if the rich try to circumvent this truth.

Emancipation does not imply the elimination of suffering, but the elimination of the constant struggle of the ruling class to separate suffering from pleasure. Bringing suffering closer to pleasure would allow, for example, the demolition of mansions, since they try to exclude and keep suffering outside their walls. Furthermore, the creation of an egalitarian form of housing would allow everyone to experience the interdependence of suffering and pleasure. A society that considers the intrinsic connection between suffering and pleasure would not allow the existence of social relations that establish a class hierarchy.

5.

An egalitarian society would be one in which suffering and pleasure were evenly distributed. In this case, the highest-paying jobs would be the most revolting; the most arduous ones, such as teachers and stockbrokers, would pay lower wages. According to a leftist position, we should pay the price of our own pleasure rather than trying to place it on the backs of the less fortunate. A move in this direction would be an emancipatory move. But it would be good to see how pleasure outweighs pleasure.

It is possible to understand the contrast between pleasure and enjoyment by considering sexual acts again. According to Freud's conception of the pleasure principle, the culmination of the act – the discharge of excitement – ​​is everything. But once the focus is on enjoyment, the status of the pleasure principle is diminished and, therefore, the view of things undergoes a great transformation.

Instead of seeing the initial flirtation, the passionate kiss, and the intimate touching as merely foreplay to the main event, that is, orgasm, one comes to see the latter as merely a momentary pleasure, something that puts an end to the enjoyment obtained from such foreplay. The existence of orgasm allows consciousness to accept all the obstacles that stand in its way—the flirtation, the inconvenient articles of clothing that must be removed, the fundamental barrier of the desire of others. It is these obstacles, not the grand finale, that produce sexual enjoyment. To understand this reversal is to understand how enjoyment works in contrast to pleasure.

The barriers to the culmination of the sexual act are what make the act enjoyable; yet no one except those of a perverse orientation would be able to remain content with the barriers alone, without taking the process to its ultimate point. Orgasm takes the enjoyment obtained from the obstacles to the sexual act beyond the suspicions of consciousness. Although he never fully articulates it, this is what Freud's discovery of a drive beyond the pleasure principle implies.[xi] The crucial point ceases to be the final orgasm and becomes the one in which the problem itself manifests itself.

If the emotion of orgasm as an example of sexual pleasure is too difficult to accept, one could instead think of a roller coaster in an amusement park (which in some ways reproduces the dynamics of the sexual act). The pleasure produced by the roller coaster occurs during the moments when one descends the steep slopes at a breathtaking pace. In these moments, the person experiences a decrease in excitement and feels pleasure at the end. But the pleasure produced by the roller coaster occurs earlier – at that moment when one is slowly climbing the slope in preparation for the explosion of pleasure that follows. The person finds pleasure in the accumulation of excitement or in the encounter with an obstacle (the big hill) that occurs in the slow movement; this, by the way, as is well known, does not provide pleasure.

No one would ride a roller coaster that only went up and never gave pleasure because the psyche must find a way to translate its impulse for enjoyment into the consciousness of pleasure. But at the same time, no one would ride a roller coaster that only went down and gave nothing but pleasure. The expectation of eventual pleasure is that point at which one enjoys in the process of life. One cannot simply renounce pleasure completely. If there were no pleasure, there would be no enjoyment either. But pleasure functions as a reward that the unconscious pays to the consciousness for it to accept the suffering inherent in enjoyment—since it has to pass through the censorship of consciousness.

Suffering is a necessary ingredient of enjoyment, as illustrated by the anxiety produced by riding a roller coaster. Enjoyment occurs through some form of self-destruction, which is why it is absolutely irreducible to conscious intention. The self-destructive form of enjoyment requires that the drive to enjoy be unconscious. Although one can consciously strive for pleasure, one cannot consciously strive to enjoy, for enjoyment involves suffering and damage to the psyche.

If one were to try to enjoy consciously, suffering would inevitably be transformed into a source of pleasure; for example, if one were to try to lose a game, the loss obtained would be transformed into a form of victory. If one really loses the game, it is because it was lost as such. If one tries to suffer consciously, one may even succeed, but this suffering perversely causes pleasure. In this sense, since enjoyment requires suffering, since one must suffer in order to obtain it, the search for it must remain unconscious. For the fundamental connection with an absent object gives enjoyment a radical political potential. And this is so even though it cannot be the result of conscious planning. Now, this poses a problem about how to integrate enjoyment consciously into political struggles.

6.

Now, enjoyment has a radicality that pleasure lacks. Pleasures are always recognized pleasures or pleasures associated with recognition. They occur when the social order authorizes them, such as the purchase of expensive goods or the experience of social approval. Even illegal activities, which are not mere entertainment, can be socially acceptable and bring pleasure. This is what happens when people shoplift, take bribes, or evade taxes. These acts violate the law, but they remain within the realm of what capitalist society recognizes as acceptable because they participate in the demand to accumulate without limits. Anyone who submits to this demand remains on the terrain of capitalist society; he is conforming to its unwritten regulations. By behaving in this way, one remains mainly within the limits of pleasures.

Enjoyment, in contrast, can occur at a time when recognition ceases. Social authorities generally never officially sanction enjoyment. Here is what Joan Copjec said about it: “Enjoyment flourishes only when it is not validated by the Other.”[xii] That is, social authority cannot provide a structure through which one can enjoy enjoyment, since the latter always occurs beyond these symbolic structures.

It occurs at the contradictory points of the structures that mark their impossibility. One enjoys what is absent within the symbolic structure, not what has a place in it. Even when enjoyment operates in a conservative way, it is nevertheless a potentially radical experience since there is a force at work, even if it has taken a conservative direction.

All enjoyment comes from a sense of non-belonging. One enjoys by escaping recognition and validation, and freedom from social authorities. Enjoyment is emancipatory because it coincides with the subject's freedom from restrictions imposed by external determinations.[xiii] The contradiction that inhabits the social order and undermines all authority becomes the source of the subject's enjoyment rather than constituting itself as an external limit. The enjoyment of emancipation occurs through the confrontation of the limit, which is internal rather than external, through the confrontation of one's own restriction rather than one imposed as something external.

* Todd McGowan is a professor at the University of Vermont. Author of, among other books, The end of dissatisfaction? Jacques Lacan and the emerging society of enjoyment (State University of New York Press) [https://amzn.to/4g0Ryeq]

Translation: Eleutério Prado.

Notes

[I] sigmund freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, trans. James Strachey, in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1963), 16:356.

[ii] sigmund freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, 16:356.

[iii] It cannot be said that there is an inherent sexism in the concept of the pleasure principle; however, this does not mean that it should be accepted as the final word, especially since Freud himself did not do so.

[iv] Even opponents of psychoanalysis tend to agree with Freud on this point. Michel Foucault fantasized about dying at the moment of orgasm because that is the moment of maximum pleasure. This unusual correlation between the founder of psychoanalysis and his uncompromising opponent confirms the common-sense status of the pleasure principle. It also offers a compelling reason why we should question it as the last word on such things.

[v] Most utopias follow the reality principle rather than the pleasure principle. For example, in his Utopia, Thomas More downplays all potential ways to build excitement: no one wears sexy clothes; no one eats different food than others; no one accumulates wealth; and so on. More's theory, which nearly all later utopians follow, is that adhering to the reality principle and thus keeping excitement to a minimum will produce a more stable and contented society.

[vi] sigmund freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Second Part), trans. James Strachey, in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), 5:470-471.

[vii] The brevity of pleasures allows them to exist without being mixed with suffering. One may cry when one’s ice cream is gone, but this subsequent sadness is distinct from the pleasure one had in eating it. The absence of any mixture of suffering allows pleasure to seem appealing, but its transience places a fundamental limit on its political valence. Because it ends so quickly, there are no radical pleasures.

[viii] Although Freud takes the great leap forward of theorizing the death drive, he does not make jouissance (or Genuss) central to his thought. It is up to Lacan, in his later theorizing, to fill this gap when he takes jouissance as one of his main points of reference.

[ix] What makes Fredric Jameson’s recent utopia desirable is its obvious shortcoming, not its perfections. In American Utopia, Jameson makes the outrageous argument that we should universalize the military and forge a utopia that way, since support for the military is so strong and already functions as a socialist institution. This argument completely elides the fact that support for the military depends on the nationalist violence it perpetuates, which Jameson’s utopia would eliminate. But this (fatal) flaw in the utopian vision makes it possible to imagine enjoying the world Jameson imagines.

[X] Walter Davis provides a powerful basis for rejecting utopian thinking by recognizing its connection to reactionary thinking. He states, “Utopia is nostalgia projected into the future.” Walter Davis, The Ohio State University, private conversation. As Davis recognizes, unconscious conservative nostalgia for a supposedly better past haunts the desire at the heart of the utopian project, even though that project is consciously centered on a different future.

[xi] Freud goes beyond the pleasure principle in 1920 when he writes the eponymous text in which he makes this move forward. See Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1955, 18:1-64.

[xii] Joan Copjec, Imagine There's No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), p. 167. Although enjoyment occurs in a contradictory gap in the structure of signification, it nevertheless depends on the Other for its formation. There is no such thing as isolated enjoyment, a enjoyment that occurs without reference to otherness. Enjoyment breaks down the barrier between self and otherness.

[xiii] The model for free enjoyment is not final transgression but Kant’s moral law. As Kant conceives it, giving ourselves the moral law is the only way to free ourselves from the determinations that accompany our social situation. The moral law does not derive from this social situation but from our spontaneous self-relation as subjects of signification. Thus it opens up a field for action that has no cause in the situation that would otherwise completely determine us. We enjoy freedom from the dictates of our society by heeding the command we give ourselves through the moral law. In his own (though unspoken) way, Kant theorizes the opposition between pleasure and enjoyment, between the pleasures of following society’s rules and the enjoyment of freedom that comes from obeying the moral law.

the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE