Jouissance is prohibited to whoever speaks, as such
Russell Grigg
Jouissance is Prohibited to Whoever Speaks, as such[1]
There are two ways to enjoy, despite this prohibition on jouissance. The first is through transgression, which involves pushing prohibited enjoyment beyond the point of pleasure. This is the Sadian imperative: make yet another effort . . . to go beyond the pleasure principle, limited as it is by pathos for the other. No symptom is free of a trait of transgression. The second way is via surplus jouissance. The lineage is Kantian. This is the enjoyment whose origin lies not in mere compliance with the law but in what Kant calls “respect” of the law for the sake of the law itself. “Respect” for the law, moral rectitude, is not only independent of wellbeing but it also belittles appetitions. It does not arise from the body but from the law, or, in our terms, the imperative of the signifier.
The anorexic’s jouissance is Kantian. Body image is not the issue. Nor is it a question of the insistence of the oral drive; it is respect for the law that drives her. She repudiates oral pleasure for the sake of something higher. Her “respect” for the imperative of self-denial elevates her morally. In her relentless search for victory over her body’s demands she puts her will to the test and demonstrates her moral superiority over her weaker peers whom she scorns. Far from running away from her desire for food, she nourishes it: she reads recipes, she knows the menus of the grand restaurants of her city, she cooks delicious food for lesser mortals even as she starves herself, she loves “eating out”, always preferring the menu to the food.
Her life is in a spiral because there is always more that is not to be eaten. The real glutton is the law she lives by, for, as Freud showed, the more she sacrifices in the name of the law, the greater the sacrifice that is called for.
References
[1] Lacan, J., “Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire”, p. 696, in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, New York, W. W. Norton, 2006.