Jouissance by Nstor A. Braunstein;

Author:Nstor A. Braunstein; [Braunstein;, Nstor A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438479057
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2020-07-15T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

Deciphering Jouissance

Jouissance Is Ciphered

I will now address a crucial turning point in Lacan’s teaching, which requires reviewing his previous developments and draw out its effects for analytical practice. I am referring to an expression that appears in Television:

What Freud articulates as primary process in the unconscious—and this is me speaking here, but you can look it up and you’d see it—isn’t something to be encoded [se chiffre], but to be deciphered [se déchiffre]. I mean: jouissance itself. In which case it doesn’t comprise energy, and cannot be inscribed as such. (T, 18–19, translation modified)

The assertion is unequivocal and definitive. What it mobilizes and displaces in Lacanian theory is so imposing that its commentary requires re-reading Lacan’s previous teaching and reflecting on Freud’s text as a whole. Lacan’s thesis condenses and concretizes a new theoretical conception of psychoanalysis, which goes hand in hand with other modifications noted in the restless and unsettling Lacanian revision of Freud at this time.

Please excuse the literality and exegetic insistence bordering on repetition: what is ciphered is jouissance, and that is why it can be deciphered. Who would decipher it? A good decipherer: the primary process (in the singular?) articulated by Freud, the pair condensation and displacement. It is a transparent expression, not open to misunderstandings: the primary process, the unconscious, is not cipher or concealment, but the start of an unveiling (aletheia). It is always already deciphering, the passage from what is ciphered, written, the letter, the codicil, or the score to another field: speech, discourse. It points to an Other that bestows signification, includes it in the network of meaning, makes it possible to become imaginary, and relates it to the I (ego) of the statement. A passage is thus indicated from the unsayable S() to signifying articulation s(A). The primary process thus functions as the passage from jouissance to discourse. In other words, the Freudian unconscious, which operates by condensation and displacement, is the process by which ciphered jouissance is deciphered and transferred to the social link, articulated speech directed to someone, ready to be filled with meaning by whoever listens. Ready for misunderstanding.

Jouissance is thus transplanted, exiled from the body to language: “To pass jouissance to the unconscious; that is, to what is countable, is in fact a cursed (sacré) displacement” (AE, 420). At the risk of being redundant: the unconscious is not the original site of jouissance that is jouissance of the body. It is from that homeland that jouissance must take the road into exile, go on to inhabit discourse and recover itself there: an impossible and eternal return. The subject constitutes itself as ostracized, going from the original One to the Other of speech. For Lacan, the possibility of dreaming with “empty speech and full speech in the psychoanalytic realization of the subject,” the title of the first section of the Rome discourse, can no longer exist (E, 206). From then on, the words able to say the whole truth are missing. Truth of the One, jouissance, and

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