The End of Dissatisfaction?: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment by Todd McGowan

Author:Todd McGowan [McGowan, Todd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Popular Culture, Literary Criticism, Semiotics & Theory
ISBN: 9780791485712
Google: X_foLy-_rjEC
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2012-02-01T22:03:34+00:00

When the men from Ruby attack the Convent, this signals their refusal of their own enjoyment and their effort to put a definitive end to their own troubling enjoyment, which they are unable to eliminate in any other way.

In attacking the feminine jouissance of the Convent women, the men of Ruby fail to recognize the inevitably partial nature of enjoyment itself. If we can only obtain enjoyment as the enjoyment of the other, then our enjoyment is always destined to remain incomplete. We will never have it; instead, it will always have us—and part of it will always remain the other’s. In this sense, one can understand why the men of Ruby refuse to recognize their own enjoyment in the Convent women: this refusal sustains the image of a complete enjoyment (even as it represents this enjoyment as unattainable). To accept the partiality of enjoyment is to free oneself from the authority of the symbolic Law and from the logic of prohibition and transgression. The society of commanded enjoyment offers us the opportunity to embrace the partiality of enjoyment at the same time that it demands we strive for an illusory total enjoyment. When we don’t see our own enjoyment in that of the other, we necessarily succumb to this demand and miss this opportunity.

Morrison takes great pains to show that each of the men involved in the attack has targeted something in himself more than himself—his idiosyncratic way of obtaining enjoyment—for the violence to eliminate. K.D., for instance, hopes to wipe out his own humiliating pursuit of Gigi and her ultimate rejection of him. As the men attack the Convent, K.D. recalls to the other men the horror of Gigi, making clear that this is what motivates his participation: “The girl whose name he now scandalized he had stalked for years till she threw him out the door” (278). Morrison reveals that “he had loved her for years, an aching, humiliating, self-loathing love that drifted from pining to stealth” (149). This sense of humiliation is the enjoyment that K.D. wants nothing to do with. As with K.D., each of the other male attackers has their own enjoyment at stake in the act. Even more important, however, is the question of the entire community’s relationship to enjoyment. The Convent women represent the enjoyment that threatens to envelop all of Ruby, to destroy the cohesive social order. One might argue, then, that the attack had a certain justification, that the men, with the best of intentions, were simply trying to preserve their way of life—or even to return Ruby to the purity that it once had. The problem with this line of thinking, as the sequel to the attack demonstrates, is that enjoyment is not as easy to wipe out as all that. Guns do not provide enough armament to eliminate it. And the effort to wipe it out, to return the social order back to its traditional mode of functioning, de facto perpetuates it, even increases its presence.49

The film Pleasantville (1998) provides a perfect illustration of the inevitable failure of attempts to wipe out enjoyment.

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