Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment

Translator’s Note

vii TransLaTor’s noTe ThetitleToward an Architecture of EnjoymentistakendirectlyfromHenri Lefebvre’s French working title, Vers une architecture de la jouissance, and, in that sense, is unproblematic. The proverbial elephant in the room makes its appearance in the form of jouissance, a word ripe (some might say rife) with connotations that has repeatedly proven problematic to translators of contemporary French prose. Its range of associations and ambiguity is legendary, and justifications of its translation, rather than its wholesale adoption, have now become commonplace. The usual fallback position, and one I obviously do not follow here, is to leave it untranslated. One would have to examine this tactic on a case-by-case basis to explicate the underlying rationale, but the primary reason can be traced to its use in psychoanalytic texts, particularly the work of Jacques Lacan, for whom it was a core concept. The most recent and most accurate translation of Lacan’s Écrits, by Bruce Fink,“translates” it as such; it is assumed, as Fink notes in a short glossary at the end of the book, that readers of Lacan are sufficiently familiar with the term and its meanings to preclude the need for English translation. But even for Fink, in the context of Lacanian psychoanalysis , jouissance is a form of “enjoyment”:“I have assumed that the kind of enjoyment beyond the pleasure principle (including orgasm) denoted by the French jouissance is well enough known by now to the Englishreading public to require no translation.”1 Of course, such familiarity is open to question, particularly outside the narrow circle of Lacanian psychoanalysts and those scholars who engage regularly with his ideas.There appears to be a tacit assumption on the part of many that its appearance in French must inevitably refer back to Lacan, thereby foreclosing any viii Translator’s Note further attempt at interpretation.Lacanian discourse may have poisoned the well of jouissance for generations, but translators must be open to the possibility of other readings.Unfortunately,given Lacan’s significance as a thinker and the widespread distribution of his ideas, directly or indirectly, in twentieth-century scholarly writing, the term has become accepted as a common element of academic discourse, in need of no further explanation—and no translation.As a result,its use (and abuse) is widespread. It is worth considering, however, that the word predates its use by Lacan and has been employed, even by his contemporaries, in ways that are less troubled with multiple and often confused interpretations . In French, the word has a lengthy pedigree; its earliest use has been traced to the fifteenth century, where it is intended primarily as a form of usufruct.2 In the sixteenth century it began its association with what we may call“pleasure,” initially the pleasure of the senses generally and then, around 1589, sexual pleasure. Littré in his majestic, though now somewhat superannuated,dictionary of the French language traces the verb from which it is derived, jouir, to Latin gaudere. Other than its nontranslation in psychoanalytic contexts, it has been variously rendered as“pleasure,”“enjoyment,”“contentment,”“satisfaction,”“bliss.”The emphasis so often found on sexual pleasure and on orgasmic relief is misplaced; while jouissance can certainly have this meaning, its semantic range is much broader, and sexual release is not its primary meaning, as a glance at any large French monolingual dictionary will reveal. In fact, it is the sense of overall “well-being” that the verb jouir designates: “to experience joy,pleasure,a state of physical or moral well-being procured by something.”3 The release should be seen as one that is organic rather than purely orgasmic, one that covers a panoply of sensual and psychic satisfactions. (Moreover, since when has it been decided that “sexual pleasure” must be limited to the moment of orgasm, to the exclusion of all that precedes and follows, or that sexuality must be so instrumental, resolutely directed toward the achievement of a goal?) There are pros and cons to each of these potential translations, and each would have to be examined in the context in which it was made. But the question remains: how does Henri Lefebvre employ the term here, in this book, in the context of architectural space? Every translation is an act of interpretation.4 This inevitably entails the elucidation of meaning—the evaluation of a word’s connotational and denotational elements within a microcontext of some sort (the sentence Translator’s...