X8JKsF

tim dean
US Declaration of Independence puts it) overlooks pleasure’s dependence on
the jouissance of the Other – and thus misconstrues the pursuit of pleasure
as an issue of self-determination, rather than of one’s relation to the Other.
Lacan’s formulations concerning “the jouissance of the Other” are also
useful for thinking about mechanisms of social exclusion, such as racism
and homophobia. Slavoj ˇ Ziˇzek has devoted many volumes to showing how
ethnic intolerance, including its recent manifestations in eastern Europe, can
be understood as a reaction to the Other’s jouissance. 15 He argues that organizations
of social and cultural life different from one’s own, such as those
maintained by other racial and ethnic groups, can provoke the fantasy that
these groups of people are enjoying themselves at his or her expense. For
example, the anti-Semite imagines that Jews have “stolen” his jouissance,
while the white supremacist fantasizes that immigrants are overrunning his
national borders, sponging off the government and enjoying entitlements
that are rightfully his. This preoccupation with how the Other organizes
his or her enjoyment helps explain the obsession with reviled social groups’
sexual behavior, since although jouissance remains irreducible to sex it tends
to be construed in erotic terms. The jouissance of different sexual groups –
for instance, gays and lesbians – plays a significant role in how certain heterosexual
fantasies are organized and can account for the violent reactions
some straight people have to the very idea of homosexuality. Parents who
believe that their child would be better off dead than gay may be caught in
the fantasy of homosexuality as an infinitude of jouissance, a form of sexual
excess incompatible with not only decency and normalcy but even life itself.
Indeed, this is how AIDS often has been understood: death brought on by
too much jouissance. As a reaction formation to jouissance, homophobia
thus involves more than ignorance about different sexualities; it is unlikely
to be eradicated via consciousness-raising or sensitivity-training.
I have suggested that the emphasis on pleasure in Foucault’s genealogy of
sexuality remains compromised by his neglecting its negative dimension, a
negligence that follows as a consequence of his methodological insistence on
thinking of power productively, in purely positive terms. But Foucault does
come close to conceptualizing jouissance at one crucial moment in his first
volume of The History of Sexuality. Less than five pages from the end of the
book, Foucault claims that sexuality is imbricated with the death drive in
as much as the deployment of sexuality has succeeded in persuading us that
sex is so important as to be worth sacrificing one’s life for the revelations
it can impart: “The Faustian pact, whose temptation has been instilled in
us by the deployment of sexuality, is now as follows: to exchange life in its
entirety for sex itself, for the truth and the sovereignty of sex. Sex is worth
dying for. It is in this (strictly historical) sense that sex is indeed imbued
250