Jouissance

Comme tous les sports mais avec ses propres caractéristiques, le football, sport dont l’essence nous semble démocratique, met en jeu des sujets, dont la quête de jouissance, qui touche au réel, est bordée par les dit-mansions imaginaire et symbolique. En ce sens, la mise en place récente de la VAR – arbitrage vidéo –, en tant qu’instance délocalisée, hors regard et anonymisée, nous semble l’instauration d’un Autre visant à la dépossession des jouissances en jeu dans un cadre sportif. Loin d’être un simple gadget – une « lathouse » –, il est une expression de l’alliance entre science et capitalisme, dont les discours, et leur application contemporaine, ont pour conséquence de transformer les sportifs en objets a. Mais au-delà de cette réification, qui a pour corollaire l’exclusion du désir et de l’amour, une lecture métapsychologique permet d’emprunter à Freud la notion de « cruauté », affine à la pulsion de mort. Elle nous permet cette hypothèse finale qui consiste à lire, dans une exclusion symbolique et une colonisation de l’imaginaire, la projection du footballeur dans un temps de désorganisation spéculaire, où le corps morcelé, jusque-là symbolisé (pied, tête), est envoyé à une Hilflosigkeit originaire, la rage de scruter s’apparentant au « mauvais œil » envieux tel qu’abordé par J. Lacan. L’actualité de la crise du Covid-19 a été l’occasion d’alimenter cette hypothèse, et de mettre en lumière un enjeu social sinon sociétal, qui pousse les acteurs du football à une prise de parole inédite.

Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky, 2010) presents a vivid staging of enjoyment, which takes us all the way round Lacan’s Graph of Sexuation: from the phallic jouissance of fantasy (desire, [dis]satisfaction) and the jouissance of the idiot (masturbation, idios) to the concomitant jouissance of the Other (who enjoys fully), and crucially feminine jouissance, or the experience of the body in extremis. The film thus offers the opportunity to move from the “good old Lacan” who declared “the unconscious is structured like a language” to another Lacan, who declares “being is the jouissance of the body as such” and who presents new possibilities for embodied encounters in the cinema. This chapter explores Nina and Lily as the two ways in which to read (and misread) the right hand side of the Graph and the structure of femininity.
Nina’s transformation is a cinematic depiction of another satisfaction: but not what Lacan calls the “satisfaction that answers to phallic jouissance” in a complementary way, nor a jouissance “beyond the phallus” (both of which would correspond to the Other satisfaction and coincide with the mystification of Lily, as the one who fully enjoys). Instead, I examine Nina’s experience in terms of the feminine jouissance that Colette Soler suggests can be felt in radical, corporeal disruption precipitated by extreme physical action, and demonstrate the ways in Nina moves – for fleeting moments – between the two poles of sexuation through her ballet.
This enjoyment is, then, necessarily contrasted with that of Lily’s jouissance. Lily, as absolute Other, is the one who – like Hadewijch d’Anvers or Saint Teresa, in Lacan’s examples – seems to have access to full satisfaction: figuratively fucking God, “the one who gets off” (i.e. Thomas). Black Swan lays bare this fallacy – the fallibility of phallic jouissance, as Bruce Fink calls it – by conflating this impossible satisfaction with death, by depicting the pursuit and realisation of this fantasy as the very destruction of the Subject. I suggest that, perhaps even contra Lacan (or pursuing a very precise reading of him), God – “the good old God of time immemorial” – has no place here (there is no transcendent jouissance beyond the phallus) and it is only the “atheist” that has access to a (bodily, immanent) feminine jouissance.

L’articolo intende mettere in dialogo alcune analisi di Heidegger e Lacan a proposito della questione del soggetto e, in particolare, del rapporto tra il piano del significato e il piano di ciò che è al di là del significato nella costituzione del soggetto e nella sua esperienza. Passando attraverso diversi livelli, e mostrando le analogie e differenze tra i due autori, si cercherà di far emergere come tra quei due piani non ci sia un rapporto di mera giustapposizione, ma una relazione di implicazione reciproca e differenziale, in virtù della quale essi sono le due facce di un medesimo evento.

As a film thoroughly concerned with enjoyment and the body, Black Swan (Aronofsky, 2010) presents an opportunity to consider questions of psychoanalysis and embodiment in the cinema. This paper aims to pursue such a possibility by exploring both Aronofsky’s film and Lacan’s later work in terms of the concept of jouissance. Focusing particularly on the right hand side of Lacan's Graph of Sexuation and thus the question of feminine jouissance specifically, my goal is to develop a logic proper to the feminine as it is suggested by Nina’s dance and by Colette Soler’s theory of the body in extremis. Reading Black Swan, like reading Encore, must be pursued very carefully in order to avoid falling into the trap of relegating the feminine (in both instances) to absolute unknowability; instead, I argue that feminine structure should be understood – like masculine structure, but in an asymmetrical way – as a response to the unknowable that we might otherwise recognise as the sublime. To this end, I will read Nina’s dance as an embodied experience of an “immanent sublime”: the sheer (feminine) jouissance of the body.

Cet article vise à montrer le lien entre la notion de pulsion de mort chez Freud et celle de jouissance chez Lacan. L'objectif est de mettre en évidence l'évolution des rapports entre ces deux notions au cours de l'enseignement de Lacan. Au moment où Lacan donne un premier fondement théorique à la notion de jouissance, il critique la notion de pulsion de mort. Dix ans plus tard, la pulsion de mort est réhabilitée et assimilée en partie à la jouissance. Entre ces deux moments, la jouissance prend une place centrale dans l'enseignement de Lacan.

Cet article a paru en anglais dans Revista Agora, revue de psychanalyse brésilienne. Lien vers l'article : http://ref.scielo.org/dr6gnj

Nous pouvons lire dans son Séminaire XX Encore où Lacan s'interroge sur les jouissances féminine ou mystique, sa remise en question de la notion de sublimation en tant que jouissance au-delà de la jouissance. Nous voyons qu'il pense que la sublimation constitue à la fois l'a priori et la fin de l'expérience psychanalytique.

Queerness is many things, for example: an identity; a state of being; a characteristic; a mark of the unknown…The number of ways in which ‘queerness’ has been utilised is testament to not only the enigmatic properties of the term, but also the key thread that ties these utilisations together: politics. In every instance that the queer appears as a descriptive category, it represents an opposition to norms, discourses of truth and ways of doing. In this, queerness is inherently political. This essay seeks to explore the oppositional nature of queerness as explored in the first chapter of Lee Edelman’s forceful polemic ‘No Future’, which outlines his rationale for an embracing of the anti-normative attributes of queerness; with a critique informed by ‘Non-reproductive Futurism’ by Nina Powers, who considers the politics of Jacques Rancière to remedy what she sees as ‘Edelman’s body apolitic’. It is through a consideration of the call-and-response of these texts, alongside other readings, that will hopefully offer a way to simultaneously embrace the oppositional nature of queerness while forming a pragmatic politics that operates within current systems of power while also rejecting ‘cisheterorepronormative futurism’ (!)

Abstract:
In a blazing assault on the foundations of enlightenment values and rationality, Lacan’s Kant avec Sade attempts to read D.A.F. de Sade, the infamous French Marquis, as the consummate Kantian and in doing so, uncover the structural logic (and inconsistencies) underpinning both the virgin philosopher of old Königsberg and the libertine novelist’s ethics.
Published just 8 years after Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, Sade’s Philosophy in the Boudoir details the depraved acts inflicted by a band of libertines on their virtuous and beautiful victim Eugénie de Mistival, and is, Lacan argues, not just an extension of Kant’s ethics, but in fact its completion. Sade shows us the disturbing truth of Kantian ethics that Kant himself had failed to recognize or admit. For Kant the ultimate objective of the moral law is the realization of the supreme good, the point at which virtue and happiness coincide. But by renouncing all emotional factors as “pathological” in the moral realm, Kant paved the way for a system of ethics which exposed the true and hideous face of jouissance and its structuring as the other side of the law.
Nearly 60 years later and in light of our increasingly technologically mediated relationships, the question of sexual enjoyment and ethics has become ever more problematized. As cultural fantasies about “robotic sex” draw closer to our grasp, we must ask what the future entails for these new configurations of sexuality and Artificial Intelligence? Lacan’s groundbreaking contribution to the ethical debate Kant avec Sade whilst well-used in the literature on psychoanalytic ethics, has yet to be employed in relation to the (female) robot and its significance in human relationships. As sex becomes further “technologized” we are forced to inquire after the structure of enjoyment that drives it.
This paper will attempt to imagine how a reading of Kant avec Sade alongside Rupert Sanders’ 2017 film Ghost in the Shell can decipher the foundations of a future ethics that will derive from  relationships with forms of embodied Artificial Intelligence, given that the law and jouissance are for Lacan inexorably connected. Furthermore, Ghost in the Shell, reveals the Sadean universe residing inside the seemingly most innocuous fantasies of robot bodies that prevail in contemporary culture.
As developers and research units seek to legislate for Artificial Intelligence and “Robot Ethics”, the other side of the law as human jouissance, comes conspicuously into view. If Sade’s libertines’ fantasies of a perpetual victim grow out of their fascination with the “second death”, the inescapable law of castration, how would the “immortality” of the female robot body, and potential for endless torment, feature as a mode of fantasy for the desires of the libertines? What kind of ethics can be built around the assumption of a subject who does not know castration and who, supposedly, cannot suffer? And is the “sex-robot” the Sadean ethical imperative incarnate? This reading crucially allows us to stage the mutual haunting of two diametrically opposed philosophers through the fantasy of the female robot as undead subject.

Why  is  it  that  we  sometimes  think  of  Lacan  as  Marxist  when  he is  so  assertively  Freudian? Perhaps it is because Lacan perceives Marx rather than Freud as the discoverer  of  the  symptom  and  furthermore  places  Marx  as  central  to  his  fifth  Capitalist  discourse,  in  contrast  with  his  previous  discourses  which  are  all  in-spired  by  Freud.  In  this  way  Lacan’s  final  and  arguably  unfinished  Capitalist  discourse stands apart from all the others, yet at the same time it reveals contra-dictions and possible parallels with them as it attempts to unravel the dialectical tensions between the problematic production and consumption of meaning

What happens to a culture in which the death drive has been totally repressed and turned into a narcissistic desire to consume? Alexander Bove’s response to A. Kiarina Kordela’s first book, $urplus: Spinoza, Lacan (2007), puts ethics, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and biopolitics in conversation with each other. Drawing out a gap in Kordela’s logic, Bove concludes that the insertion Levinas’s concept of the face allows us to conceptualize the role of the death drive in ethics in late capitalism. (Jen Hedler Phillis)

Nural, U.Y., "Jacques Lacan'ın öğretisinin, mantıki zaman diyalektiği içerisinde, topolojisinin üçlü düzeneğinden geçerek anlaşılması üzerine", İstanbul Kültür Üniversitesi Psikoloji Kulübü Bülteni "Lacancı psikanaliz ve Türkiye'deki yansımaları" içinde, 2015, sayı 5, s. 4-9.

The privileging of physicalist ontologies and rigid experimentalism within parapsychology helps to expose a 'hole' in the praxis of the discipline proper; what psychoanalysis generally refers to as a " lack ". Certain not to fill this hole, using the psychoanalytic approach pioneered by Jacques Lacan (i.e., Lacanian psychoanalysis), the following reading aims to develop theoretically a scene by which parapsychology can come, more self-reflectively, to better take in its scientific practice—the unconscious of its subject, how the discipline has chosen to carve itself out within, what Lacan calls the chaotic, polysemic pool of lalangue, that place where meaning slides around. Indeed, such a return to the unconscious actually opens up the field to more counter-hegemonic phenomena that are typically viewed as fringe. To illustrate this point, I deploy the Lacanian après-coup, otherwise known as retroaction (a causality not from the present time), in conjunction with extrasensory perception research to stage just such an encounter, between the subject of parapsychology and its lack. This not only thwarts the so-called 'source of psi' problem by showing how parapsychology is running from itself, but also reveals a homology between psi and the objet petit a—the little object of desire that must always be tamed. As such, the disciplinary contouring of parapsychological science evokes the wily qualities of the trickster. It follows that, in the future, a further psychoanalysis of parapsychology could work to develop the theoretical insights of this article with some of Lacan's other concepts, such as the jouissance of the body (i.e., the anxious pleasure that animates the subject), and the relationship between drive and desire.

Many central terms of Levinas’ philosophy have a clear emotive connotation, such as desire, enjoyment, indolence, horror, love/eros, sensibility, proximity, and obsession. But are these emotions? And does this make Levinas a “phenomenologist of emotions”?
The paper claims that the answer is “yes” by showing that Levinas generally conceives subjectivity in affective terms. However, this is not just a shift of perspective within the ontology of the subject, since Levinas explicitly wants to go beyond ontology. For this enterprise, the reconceptualization of affectivity/emotionality is crucial. Instead of conceiving it as “another mode of light” or understanding like many other approaches in phenomenology, Levinas makes it the point of entrance for transcendence, for the “otherwise than Being.” Emotion for Levinas is therefore essentially “vertigo,” passivity, and passion. It interrupts a subjectivity that dwells in its affective mode of enjoyment, either by exposing it to the horrors of the il y a, to the future of the other in eros and fecundity, or by calling it to its infinite responsibility, inscribed in its basic sensibility.

Draft; the ultimate version will be published in:
The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotions.
Thomas Szanto & Hilge Landweer (eds.). London/New York: Routledge 2019]
Please cite accordingly. Thank you!

As a film thoroughly concerned with enjoyment and the body, Black Swan (Aronofsky, 2010) presents an opportunity to consider questions of psychoanalysis and embodiment in the cinema. This paper aims to pursue such a possibility by exploring both Aronofsky’s film and Lacan’s later work in terms of the concept of jouissance. Focusing particularly on the right hand side of Lacan's Graph of Sexuation and thus the question of feminine jouissance specifically, my goal is to develop a logic proper to the feminine as it is suggested by Nina’s dance and by Colette Soler’s theory of the body in extremis. Reading Black Swan, like reading Encore, must be pursued very carefully in order to avoid falling into the trap of relegating the feminine (in both instances) to absolute unknowability; instead, I argue that feminine structure should be understood – like masculine structure, but in an asymmetrical way – as a response to the unknowable that we might otherwise recognise as the sublime. To this end, I will read Nina’s dance as an embodied experience of an “immanent sublime”: the sheer (feminine) jouissance of the body.

ΕΡΓΑΣΙΑ ΕΞΑΜΗΝΟΥ-ΚΛΙΝΙΚΗ ΚΟΙΝΩΝΙΚΗ ΨΥΧΟΛΟΓΙΑ
(Διδάσκουσα: Ντιάνα Χαρίλα)

To ερευνητικό αυτό δοκίμιο αποπειράται να διερευνήσει κοινωνικό φαινόμενο των βασανιστηρίων, μέσω της οπτικής της δομικής ψυχανάλυσης, όπως αυτή προτάθηκε και αναπτύχθηκε από τον Jacques Lacan. Η νομική πραγματικότητα, όπως θεσπίστηκε και οριοθετήθηκε από διεθνείς θεσμούς και συνταγματικά σώματα, απαγορεύει κάθε είδους βασανισμό και επιβάλλει τον κολασμό στους θιασώτες του φαινομένου. Οι βασανισμοί συνιστούν, ως εκ τούτου, προσβολή των ανθρώπινων δικαιωμάτων και εν γένει του δημοκρατικού ιδεώδους. Παρά τις νομικές δικλείδες, οι βασανισμοί δεν αποτελούν σήμερα εξαλειμμένο φαινόμενο, δημιουργώντας καινές προκλήσεις για την πρόληψη, αλλά και την αποκατάσταση των θυμάτων. Η σύγχρονη δομική ψυχαναλυτική θεώρηση, ορμώμενη από τον εντοπισμό της υποκειμενικότητας και την προσέγγιση της ασυνείδητης επιθυμίας του ατόμου, ερμηνεύει την επιμονή διενέργειας των βασανισμών σήμερα, αξιοποιώντας τη θεώρηση της φαντασίωσης, σύμφωνα με τις φροϋδικές διδαχές. Με αυτή την αφετηρία, προτείνει μια ερμηνεία για τις δυναμικές του διπόλου θύτης-θύμα, προσφέροντας επιπλέον καίριες παρατηρήσεις για την κλινική παρέμβαση, αναφερόμενη στο ζήτημα της ανοίκειας απόλαυσης, της τραυματικής σιωπής ως σημαίνοντος και του Νόμου ως φορέα απόλαυσης, καταδεικνύοντας τη λανθάνουσα σχέση της νομοθεσίας με το έγκλημα. Καταληκτικά, η συλλογική νομοθετική παρακαταθήκη των διεθνών θεσμών κατά των βασανισμών έρχεται να συνδυαστεί με τη δομική ψυχανάλυση, προσβλέποντας στην ευαισθητοποίηση των επαϊόντων της υγείας και δημιουργώντας νέες προκλήσεις για την αντιμετώπιση του κοινωνικού φαινομένου των βασανιστηρίων. 
Λέξεις-κλειδιά: Ανθρώπινα Δικαιώματα, ανοίκειο, απόλαυση, ασυνείδητο, βασανιστήρια, δομισμός, επιθυμία, σιωπή, φαντασίωση, ψυχανάλυση, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan,

In 1933 Hans Bellmer completed work on his first doll, the beginning of a lifelong obsession with the prepubescent female form. As the nature of the object suggests, the doll was Bellmer's plaything , an object which he could dismantle and rearrange, disjoint and pull apart, and mutilate and dismember. The ravaged state of Bellmer's dolls provokes an urge to understand the sadism inscribed in them; to understand the aggressive and violent treatment of the female body. In my essay, I wish to explore this theme through the psychoanalytic work of Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalysts who introduced the theory of the Mirror Stage, which describes the moment the infant first identifies as a subject through their reflection in a mirror. Using the Mirror Stage, and related hypotheses, I aim to resolve the erratic appearance of the dolls and expose the subconscious anxieties that produced their mangled bodies.

Fantasies and especially excessive or ‘phantascistic’ fantasies, as they are referred to here, have the power to suppress within political communities, consciously and unconsciously alike, inner antagonisms in times of crisis. More precisely, they help to blur aporias within the ideological structures of a community through the evocation of a sensus communis (Kant) that establishes the community anew, similar to an act of religious conversion. Their impact on the space of reasons is analysed in this article as one that does not take part in the game of giving and asking for reasons, but operates in the background of communal reason via an emotionally and clandestine ‘code’ of what it means to be ‘We … – We who we are’. Next to theoretical elaborations of how and why these phantascistic fantasies are produced, the theory will be further explained through a series of exemplifications demonstrating the way that it has played out across a long history of conflict in the Middle East and a shorter history of contemporary politics in the United States. Through all of this, the aim is to illustrate how very concrete excessive  fantasies have an impact on a body politic’s form of enjoyment.

Key-words: Political Enjoyment, normative orders, 'nightly law', sensus communis, Eichmann-trial, jouissance

As a film thoroughly concerned with enjoyment and the body, Black Swan (Aronofsky, 2010) presents an opportunity to consider questions of psychoanalysis and embodiment in the cinema. This paper aims to pursue such a possibility by exploring both Aronofsky’s film and Lacan’s later work in terms of the concept of jouissance. Focusing particularly on the right hand side of Lacan's “Graph of Sexuation” and thus the question of feminine jouissance specifically, my goal is to develop a logic proper to the feminine as it is suggested by Nina’s dance and by Colette Soler’s theory of the body in extremis. Reading Black Swan, like reading Lacan’s  Encore, must be pursued very carefully in order to avoid falling into the trap of relegating the feminine (in both instances) to absolute unknowability; instead, I argue that feminine structure should be understood – like masculine structure, but in an asymmetrical way – as a response to the unknowable that we might otherwise recognise as the sublime. To this end, I will read Nina’s dance as an embodied experience of an “immanent sublime”: the sheer (feminine) jouissance of the body.

Picasso's sculptures of 1949-56 are usually interpreted biographically.  This paper instead reads them as expressions of Picasso's belief that art is a sign language.  This idea is often associated with his Cubist work, but in fact is first enunciated by Picasso in 1945.  In 1948, Picasso tells Françoise Gilot: “If I telegraph one of my canvases to New York…any house painter should be able to do it properly.  A painting is a sign—just like the sign that indicates a one-way street.”  This paper interprets key works, from the two "Pregnant Women" of 1949-50 to the "Bathers" of 1956, as sculptural realizations of this idea.

The 21th century duly noted the relativism of truth, disseminated in generalized storytelling. In the post-truth era, me, the emotion, I speak…
What’s the situation with an analysis? In the first text, Jacques-Alain Miller distinguishes three modalities. With its procession of admissions and illuminations, an analysis that starts gives prominence to the truth. Then, revelation gives way to repetition, the subject discovers that its truths are not eternal, but variable and pathetic. Finally, the third phase reveals the real of jouissance and unmasks the truth as a necessary fiction.
In the second text published here, J.-A. Miller takes up again the central opposition between the truth and the real: the “lying truth,” the constituent alliance of truth and lie is a fiction that covers the real. As such, the jouissance of the speaking being, its emotions, its sensations are not of the order of the truth (always lying a little), but rather of the real (which, for its part, makes fun of the truth).
The strength of Lacanian psychoanalysis, its precision, its modernity is linked to its orientation towards the real. But let’s not be fooled by it: in an analysis, as Lacan indicates  in the seminar XX On Feminine Sexuality…, the place of truth is “reduced, but essential.” At the end of the experience, the subject will have the occasion to understand—concludes J.-A. Miller—“how did the variations of its truth, of its path of lies, develop.”

Pascale Fari

This article is a commentary on the Lacanian appropriation of Breaking the Waves by Slavoj Zizek, Frances Restuccia and others who argue that the film’s saintly heroine, Bess, performs an authentic feminine act paradoxically in her very suicidal over-identification with her husband’s male chauvinistic desire pressing her to have sex with other men, through which she successfully demonstrates the deadlock of sexual difference and subverts the phallic-masculine symbolic order. By contrast, this paper argues that the heroine is rather trapped in what Angela McRobbie called the postfeminist masquerade, a feminine gender performance that returns to old forms of patriarchal subordination but with an ironic distance, thereby allowing the subject to imagine herself free of the capture of the masculine symbolic universe. In a cynical move which undermines the postfeminist association of irony with freedom, the director equates Bess’s belief in God with her acting for the gaze of his camera, betraying his skepticism about a feminine subject not captured by the cinema’s patriarchal apparatus.

Self-shattering has become something of a keyword in queer theory over the past few decades. Generally mobilized as a way of invoking the radically destabilizing power of sex, the term envisages a link between the ecstatic disorganization of the self that is said to be a feature of (some kinds of) erotic activity, and the disruptive shattering of the social/political/sexual order that queer theory prizes. "The self which the sexual shatters provides the basis on which sexuality is associated with power," Leo Bersani claims in the dynamite essay that is generally credited with occasioning many of the key proposals of that strand of queer theory known today as the antisocial thesis or queer negativity. But this is a broad and suggestive claim that demands further qualification. For the precise mechanism of this shattering is subject to different interpretations and conceptual commitments. How should the self be theorized here? Through what mechanisms is it articulated with power? How will its shattering impact power relations precisely? And what aspect of "the sexual" is capable of inducing such shattering? This essay pursues these questions by comparing the figuration of self-shattering in Black Swan (dir. Aronofsky, 2010) and Showgirls (dir. Verhoeven, 1995) – two films that have sparked a string of popular comparisons but model what I take to be radically different versions of the practice.

This chapter explores the difficulties of replicating real life experiences online. In particular, it focuses on what digital technology struggles to capture about the live music experience. Using arguments from Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt and Gilles Deleuze I argue that what is missing from digital live performance is an experience of ‘jouissance’, a feeling of pleasure which is experienced through the incommensurable uniqueness of the event.

Il secondo volume della collana Matemi è il frutto di un lavoro seminariale che ha coinvolto numerosi filosofi e psicoanalisti attorno alla questione “desiderio-godimento”. Le diverse prospettive raccolte nel testo sono attraversate da un presupposto etico unico: senza interrogare desiderio e godimento, filosofia e psicoanalisi non possono interrogare, cioè fare, niente. Per questo i vari contributi non si limitano a spiegare desiderio e godimento ma a consegnarli alla loro vitalità.
Emergono nuovi intrecci e inedite interruzioni, delucidazioni necessarie e frammenti opachi. L’implicazione “desiderio-godimento” viene sviluppata fino a rivelare il suo sfaldamento. Il desiderio del filosofo e il desiderio dello psicoanalista vengono convocati nella loro divergenza. Le impasse pratiche e teoriche di psicoanalisi e filosofia appaiono evidenziate dall’urgenza a cui infine si riducono desiderio e godimento: il soggetto portato, attraverso desiderio e godimento, di fronte al suo superamento; la comunità ricondotta alla sua “nuova” origine.
Ne esce un’analisi problematica della contemporaneità: non solo eclissi del desiderio e trionfo del godimento, ma anche il rovescio di questa endiadi.

Freud had ascribed the Eros to biological pressure, but it is also a product of our culture because our culture sets down the rules of proper sexual conduct. Sexuality becomes a problem only when it is destructive and harmful to anyone. "Fifty Shades of Grey" is part of the popular culture that promotes destructive sexual behavior or domestic abuse under of the guise of the notion of 'love' and 'romance'.

This paper shows how hegemonic discourses are sustained through the play of lack and jouissance. Lack refers to the symbolic limits of discourse and is both the condition of possibility and of impossibility of hegemony: while it vitiates the realization of a full identity, it at the same time keeps spurring the search for it. Jouissance describes the paradoxical satisfaction in dissatisfaction that subjects procure from this lack, from the failure to attain the enjoyment that hegemonic discourse promises. Looking at how organizations become enmeshed with the formation of state subjects, the paper considers identification with the discourse of a strong Russia at a Russian elite university as an empirical illustration. This discourse becomes hegemonic in students’ identification not only because it proposes a comprehensive project that unifies a range of diverse signifiers and promises enjoyment, but also because it fails to provide a full symbolic suture and subjects are unable to obtain the promised enjoyment. This constant lack forms the basis for repeated acts of identification that strive to overcome it and provides a jouissance that keeps subjects attached to the illusory quest for real enjoyment – and thus to identification with a strong Russia.