Joy-Sense

The speaking being has to use the signifier, which comes from the Other. This has an effect of cutting any notion of a complete jouissance of the Other. The signifier forbids the jouissance of the body of the Other. Complete jouissance is thus forbidden to the one who speaks, that is, to all speaking beings. This refers to a loss of jouissance which is a necessity for those who use language and are a product of language. This is a reference to castration, castration of jouissance, a lack of jouissance that is constituent of the subject. This loss of jouissance is a loss of the jouissance which is presumed to be possible with the Other, but which is, in fact, lost from the beginning. The myth of a primary experience of satisfaction is an illusion to cover the fact that all satisfaction is marked by a loss in relation to a supposed initial, complete satisfaction. The primary effect of the signifier is the repression of the thing where we suppose full jouissance to be. Once the signifier is there, jouissance is not there so completely. And it is only because of the signifier, whose impact cuts and forces an expenditure of jouissance from the body, that it is possible to enjoy what remains, or is left over from this evacuating. What cannot be evacuated via the signifying operation remains as a jouissance around the erotogenic zones, that to which the drive is articulated.

What is left over after this negativization (—) of jouissance occurs at two levels. At one level, jouissance is redistributed outside the body in speech, and there is thus a jouissance of speech itself, out-of-the-body jouissance. On another level, at the level of the lost object, object a, there is a plus (+), a little compensation in the form of what is allowed of jouissance, a compensation for the minus of the loss which has occurred in the forbidding of jouissance of the Other.