Dopamine and Surplus Jouissance

Source

A rough way of defining surplus jouissance would be to think of it, on analogy with Marx’s surplus value, as jouissance that is lost to the subject and recuperated by the Other.

- Justin Clemens and Russell Grigg, "Introduction to: Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis"

 

object a is constitutive of the parlêtre in two respects. It is constitutive of him as what he is missing (Lacan, 2001b , p. 573) – that is, as the object “that is no longer there.” But it is also the pathway or rail by which the “ plus-de-jouirs ” come to desire. (...) In other words, object a is what is missing and what all the objects that are not missing from reality seek to make us forget. In everyday discourse – in which the master signifier, S1 , organizes both psychical and everyday reality – the subject is a complete subject who does not conceptualize his lack, for the plus-de-jouirs that are proposed – combined with the more intimate plus-de-jouirs found in fantasy – act so as to fill in the gap. Without this filling-in activity, we would be hard-pressed to understand why the universal nature of castration could have been so thoroughly misrecognized prior to Freud’s time; nor would we be able to understand how certain contemporary authors, who are no dumber than others, can ridicule Lacan’s reference to lack and believe that they are truly in sync with our times when they claim, on the contrary, that we are now in what a certain film has called “the land of plenty.” 

Colette Soler," Lacanian Affects"

 

the very ambiguity of Lacan’s concept plus-de-jouir: it can be read as surplus enjoyment, but at the same time it can also mean no more enjoyment; it has the contours of an imperative, something like “Stop enjoying!” or “Cut it off!” So the very same gesture that prohibits, inhibits, and stops enjoyment produces a surplus, something one gets in place of the cut-off enjoyment. All ascetic practices testify to this, most notably those described by Hegel in The Phenomenology of Spirit under the heading of the unhappy consciousness, which is consciousness that is ultimately prepared to give up all its worldly possessions and corporeal enjoyment, all its autonomy, and treat itself like a thing. However, the more the subject does this, the more there emerges a residue, a bit of the substance that cannot be quite turned into the subject, and which is precisely the bit of enjoyment, the surplus enjoyment that has unexpectedly emerged in the operation—and the subject, the subject of self-consciousness, emerges precisely as correlative to that bit.  

Mladen Dolar, "Hegel as the Other Side of Psychoanalysis"

 

the loss of the object, the loss of satisfaction, and the emergence of a surplus satisfaction or surplus enjoyment are situated, topologically speaking, in one and the same point: in the intervention of the signifier (...)According to Freud, in the event of the loss of the object the investment is transferred to the unary trait that marks this loss; the identification with a unary trait thus occupies the (structural) place of the lost object. Yet, at the same time, this identification (and with it the repeating and reenacting of that trait) becomes itself the source of a supplementary satisfaction(...) He links the Freudian unary trait to what he writes as S1. Furthermore, he delinearizes and condenses the moments of loss and supplementary satisfaction or enjoyment into one single moment, moving away from the notion of an original loss (of an object), to a notion of loss which is closer to the notion of waste, of a useless surplus or remainder, which is inherent in and essential to jouissance as such... So, jouissance is waste (or loss); it incarnates the very entropy produced by the working of the apparatus of the signifiers. However, precisely as waste, this loss is not simply a lack, an absence, something missing. It is very much there (as waste always is), something to be added to the signifying operations and equations, and to be reckoned with as such. 

Alenka Zupančič, "When Surplus Enjoyment Meets Surplus Value"

In this Seminar, the emphasis is placed both on the signifier as a mark of jouissance - he can say that the master-signifier commemorates an irruption of jouissance - and, at the same time, it introduces a loss of jouissance and produces a supplement of jouissance. By an analogy that makes him borrow the term entropy from thermodynamics, he says: Entropy makes the plus-de-jouir to be recovered take shape. And, elsewhere in the Seminar:The plus-de-jouir takes shape from a loss. From then on, access to jouissance is not essentially through transgression, but through entropy, through the loss produced by the signifier This is how Lacan can say that knowledge is a means to jouissance (...) The autonomy of the symbolic order could not be better renounced. It is a means of jouissance in a double sense, insofar as it has the effect of lack and produces the supplement, the plus-de-jouir. 

Jacques-Alain Miller," Six Paradigmes de Jouissance" (Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator)

Start @ 4:18 for a great surplus Jouissance example (a baby with a pacifier)

“The trouble with jouissance is not that it is unattainable, that it always eludes our grasp, but, rather, that one can never get rid of it, that its stain drags along for ever.Therein resides the point of Lacan’s concept of surplus-enjoyment: the very renunciation of jouissance brings about a remainder, a surplus of jouissance.”

- Slavoj Žižek," The Indivisible Remainder"