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11. The Fate of Jouissance in the Pervert-Hysteric Couple
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Chapter 11 The Fate of Jouissance in the Pervert-Hysteric Couple LUCIE CANTIN The Drive as an Effect of Language A woman under analysis had long complained of her frigidity. One day, she related with both astonishment and anxiety that she had experienced “jouissance” while reading a seemingly banal passage from a book she had casually plucked from a friend’s library. In her powerful bodily response to mere words on a page, one can see how in human beings, something in the language- and word-based relationship of the subject to the Other mobilizes an energy that follows not the laws of nature, but instead a logic of the signifier. Freud was right to describe the death drive as an unbounded, unmarked, and unchanneled energy, unrestricted by an economics of satisfaction and pleasure . With the drive, one is no longer in the realm of the instincts. Rather, the drive is introduced by the Other and responds to the signifier .This is what Lacan wanted to stress when he formalized the matheme of the drive (S / 䉫 D) as, precisely, the response of the subject to the Demand of the Other.1 In fact it is the drive which shows most clearly that the Other is primarily language itself, the result of the signifier whose effect and defect mark the subject’s body and history and mobilize a new energy, which 167 This material was presented, in different form, on a panel called “Jouissance:The Roots of Violence,” at theThird Annual Conference of the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, on the theme of Aggressivity andViolence, GeorgeWashington University ,Washington DC, November 1997. is no longer oriented around the conservation and survival of the living organism (or species) per se.The literal other, who in reality embodies the effects of the signifier, also bears the stakes of speech and the dimension of address therein.The relationship of the subject to the Other is initiated by this encounter.The subject’s interpretation of the Other’s request (or demand) solicits a response from the subject.Thus, the drive is an effect of the signifier, the effect of the real, resulting from the defect of language; but it is spontaneously processed in the realm of the response to the Other, where drive finds its axis and perhaps even the illusion of a possible object. The signifiers of the Other’s discourse not only divert the body from a logic of the organ, but also parcel it up into the pieces that collectively compose the psychoanalytic body as such. These selected pieces, invested and animated by an energy that is the effect of the Other, produce the body as a nexus of drive multiplicities (multiplicités pulsionelles) which function autonomously as traces left by the encounter with the Other. It is here that the free energy of the death drive described by Freud takes its full meaning. The energy is at once free, that is, unbound , separated from the logic of the organism, but it also remains unchanneled and can therefore circulate freely. One must therefore ask what happens to this unbridled energy of the drive, which is still nothing other than the death drive. The drive takes its source in the letter and the mark of the body, which are the effects of the signifier. From the moment the energy is released, the drive’s aim becomes to link up that free energy with an object, which can be anything, according to Freud, so far as it links up and channels the energy by offering it the imaginary of an illusory object. Seduction as Refuge From Castration: The Letter of the Body, the Insufficiency of the Signifier Clinical practice shows that, whereas the drive is produced by the signifier and by the encounter with the Other and its defect, it is also in the field regulated by the logic of the signifier that the drive finds paths other than the symptom, the acte manqué or the “passage to the act.” In other words, drive can find there (in the realm of the signifier) an aim other than the one which closes itself on the letter of the body or inscribes itself in the outside of the relation to the other. In the history of the body’s formation, it is the signifier of the Other’s desire that makes possible the regrouping of the drive multiplicities and their ordering, by allowing for the building up of the body image, of the ego...