sofaconfessions

from the hysterical variety of automutilation, which uses the body as writing-pad, intended for the desire of [the] Other of the signifier. … Such patients very often try to cope with this pressure by installing a pseudo-orgastic endpoint by means of cutting and auto-mutilation: once the blood is flowing, the pressure goes down a bit and “it” becomes manageable. This is completely different In a traumatic neurosis, the auto-mutilation concerns the jouissance of the Other of the body.

Lacan emphatically recommends: “to identify [with the symptom], while assuring oneself of a kind of distance towards one’s symptom.

alienation makes the subject dependent on the Other … – hence the necessity of the ideas of separation and destitution. … We are talking about identification with the Real of the symptom. … [this] choice by the subject implies the existence of a decision-taking instance, independent of the Other

Lacan coins the sinthome to designate the idiosyncratic jouissance of a particular subject. The identification with the symptom is in this respect not a Symbolic nor an Imaginary one, but a Real identification, functioning as a suppletion for the lack of the Other. On the other hand, the subject who believes in his symptom, believes in a sacred prescription of the Other that will never arrive. Meanwhile, this subject has to fall back on suppletions for this nonexistent Other; the most commonly practised suppletion being the institution of marriage

the essence of the subject … is situated at the place of the lack of the Other, the place where the Other does not provide us with an answer. The analysand has experienced the fact that the subject is “an answer of the Real” and not “an answer of the Other”. This change implies a change in the subject’s position vis-à-vis jouissance. Before, the subject situated all jouissance on the side of the Other and took a stance against this (a position that was particular to this particular subject, i.e., its fundamental phantasm); after this change, the subject situates jouissance in the body, in the Real of the body. Hence, there is no longer a jouissance prescribed by the Other,

Guilt and doubt are dubious privileges of neurosis. … the fewer actual actions, the more renunciation, the more the thumbscrew of guilt is haunting the neurotic.

the hysteric … ‘rejects jouissance in the name of knowledge about jouissance’. The violent jouissance, the transgressive pleasure associated with the Grail, is attenuated in these texts by a continual search for knowledge about the Grail, effecting a kind of cautious looking .. at that jouissance. … The moment of questioning represents the point at which the Grail knight is most forcibly required to interrogate (or indeed to acknowledge) the desire of the Other

‘imaginary identification is always identification on behalf of a certain gaze in the Other’

knighthood … is in no way oriented towards the transcendental beyond asserted by the Queste. … The notion of sanctity is now the abject support of the symbolic order, acting as a mask for the immanence of the network of social relations and their signifiers (S2). … The narrative sets up celestial chivalry as a paradox, pertaining at once to the field of the signifier (S1) and also to the domain of jouissance, insofar as its aim is to transgress the symbolic order – the Grail, the ultimate goal of celestial chivalry, is precisely … [‘that of which the heart of mortal man could not conceive, nor the tongue of earthly man relate’] (Queste, 19:25–6). … Zizek reminds us, ‘enjoyment is what cannot be symbolized …, so the only possible signifier of enjoyment is the signifier of the lack [and inconsistency]in the Other’. … The notion of ‘la chevalerie celestiel’ [of the Grail knights] betrays the [signifier] of chivalry as ‘inconsistent, porous, perforated’. This … allows … to perceive … the duplicity of the agent of discourse”. … This … allows the subject to perceive … the inconsistency of the … system of knowledge … through the process of separation from the Other. (Ramm, p.68)

The Grail is the abjected fallout that reveals the inadequacies or inconsistencies of its own discourse. … The surplus jouissance [of the celestial Grail] shows up the lack or inconsistency of the field of the [constitutive] signifier. … The Grail … is always already a constitutive (insofar as it is fundamentally absent) part of it. ….” (Ramm, p.74) “what was initially perceived as a gap, a lack (in discourse), has been replaced with … the Grail … , which is itself another lack – the empty metaphor”. (Ramm, p.159)

[The Thing] is … the suggestion of that which would exist which would render us complete. … That lost Thing … gives rise to the sense of incompleteness in the subject and ‘promises’ the solution to this incompleteness. … Lack is only experienced as lack in the light of the impression of something which would shore this lack but this something is strictly inconceivable. … This impossibility of imagining [the Thing] indicates … the fantastic nature of the subject’s relation to the other. … The other brings with it something irrecuperable to the subject …. The attempt to displace the intrigue of this alien aspect onto a fantasised image of the other is … [the] attempt to avoid the unknowability … of this alien aspect. … The Thing … would be that which would mark the limit encountered in the attempt to integrate the other. (Neill 2011, p. 152-154)

[in] imaginary objectification of the other, … one loves the other … inasmuch as the other resembles oneself. … One loves the other inasmuch as the other is misrecognised as resembling one’s misrecognition of one’s self.

The point of la traversee du fantasme is not to get rid of jouissance (in the mode of the old leftist Puritanism): the distance toward fantasy means, rather, that I as it were “unhook” jouissance from its phantasmatic frame and acknowledge it as that which is properly undecidable, as the indivisible remainder that is neither inherently “reactionary,” the support of historical inertia, nor the liberating force that enables us to undermine the constraint of the existing order.

he has to produce what she lacks, he has to guarante a wholeness. In exchange she offers herself as the answer to the question she has asked in his place, an answer she refuses beforehand. In a tacit conspiracy, the lack is never brought to the negotiating table.

Phallic jouissance is the obstacle … [because of] which man does not come to enjoy woman’s body, … because what he enjoys is the jouissance of the organ.