Editor’s Column: Reading Enjoyment

This issue focuses on enjoyment. Enjoyment is arguably intrinsic to the experience of literature. Literature pleases; it entertains us. And yet what we mean by enjoyment is not commonly agreed. In The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes famously distinguishes between pleasure (plaisir) and enjoyment (jouissance). In French, the latter (from the verb jouir, meaning “to come”) carries with it a sexualized valence, evoking at once joy or bliss and also dismay. Barthes argues that the experience of plaisir results from a “comfortable practice of reading,” a communicable knowledge about the reader’s societal values, whereas the experience of jouissance “imposes a state of loss” by jolting the reader out of docility and complacency, out of his or her sense of communal belonging (14). Enjoyment in reading disrupts a reader’s affective economy, fostering “queer feelings” or a general sense of joyful discomfort.¹ Enjoyment pluralizes meaning, indulging in hermeneutic excess; such hedonism perverts (in the Latin sense of pervertere, meaning to overturn, to turn upside down) pre-existing norms of readability: “Reading is the gesture of the body (for of course one reads with one’s body) which by one and the same movement posits and perverts its order: an interior supplement of perversion” (Barthes, The Rustle of Language 36).

Yet Barthes himself refuses a strict opposition between plaisir and jouissance. He maintains that the text of pleasure, or, more generally, any experience of aesthetics, holds the potential for unruliness, because the idea of pleasure itself—or rather the insistence on pleasure—“can embarrass the text’s return to morality, to truth: to the morality of truth: it is an oblique, a drag anchor, so to speak, without which the theory of the text would revert to a centered system, a philosophy of meaning” (The Pleasure of the Text 64–65). The reader’s taste for pleasure, then, produces cognitive friction, blocking the most blatant forms of instrumentalization and commodification: literature’s reduction to either objective knowledge or pure didacticism. At the same time, however, pleasure and the processes of normalization are not at all mutually exclusive:

Now the subject who keeps the two texts in his field and in his hands the reins of pleasure and bliss is an anachronic subject, for he simultaneously and contradictorily participates in the profound hedonism of all culture … and in the destruction of that culture: he enjoys the consistency of his selfhood (that is his pleasure) and seeks its loss (that is his bliss). He is a subject split twice over, doubly perverse.

(The Pleasure of the Text 14)

Reading enjoyment can result in the fortification of selfhood or in its demise. Enjoyment, then, proves to be far more than an aesthetic category. Rather, it seamlessly spills over into other fields—such as ethics and politics. In For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, Slavoj Žižek ties enjoyment to the subtle workings of ideology, proposing, in turn, a corrective to the view of enjoyment as a subversive, anti-bourgeois category. Žižek underscores enjoyment’s ideological trappings in today’s permissive societies; the injunction Enjoy! all too often results in the self’s submission to societal regulations and prohibitions. Rather than associating the superego with a straightforward internalization of the Law, Žižek argues that the superego embodies the obscene or repressed underside of the Law, “marking a point at which permitted enjoyment, freedom-to-enjoy, is reversed into obligation to enjoy—which, one must add, is the most effective way to block access to enjoyment” (237).

Reading enjoyment is an invitation to reread enjoyment critically, comparatively, to revisit its assumed meaning(s). What is enjoyment? What constitutes enjoyment today? Who enjoys? What does it name? How do we translate it? What are enjoyment’s politics and ethics? Can literature, and the arts more generally, capitalize on enjoyment? Is enjoyment still possible after ideological critique and its hermeneutics of suspicion?

The volume opens with Lorenzo Chiesa’s “The First Gram of Jouissance: Lacan on Genet’s Le balcon,” in which the author traces Lacan’s complex notion of jouissance, attending to its numerous meanings in the...