My story of yesterday generated a strange clutch of emails. I’ve written before about my ambivalent feelings on the subject of ‘safe’ BDSM, not simply because, on a very personal basis, desire and safety are almost mutually exclusive for me, but because I worry we live in a culture that constantly demands absolutes, assures us of them far too readily, and doesn’t allow people to prepare, despite their best efforts, for mishaps.
Jacques Lacan (the French psychoanalyst, whose theories I am using as methodology for my doctorate) described three types of ‘Jouissance’. The word itself has a complicated definition that changed throughout his career, from simple sexual pleasure to a much more complex drivenness towards ecstatic states that carried with them both pleasure and pain. I’m not going to go any further into the general description because there are far more eloquent descriptions out there than I could produce. But one of the best ways I’ve ever read it described is: you know that feeling just as you’re approaching orgasm, that there is something more magnificent, more mindblowing, more perfect just after it? Even though rationally, you know there isn’t? That imagined pleasure is Jouissance. So it doesn’t have to be something past an orgasm, but for example, the anticipated satisfaction you’re going to get from a really good whipping, or the imagined sense of wholeness you’re going to feel when your lover lets you fuck them with a strap-on. It’s going to differ with each person, and the possible source of that spectral pleasure is going to change for you, over time. It is an imagined or anticipated pleasure savoured in the mind, which seldom turns out to be quite as satisfying as you thought it would be. Not that it was bad, or even mediocre, but you have built it up in your mind. Keep in mind that the desire might not be for something overtly sexual, but the need for it, the yearning for it is a very driven, sexual sort of urge, a gnawing imperative. For instance, the anticipated enjoyment of the exercise of power, or of the fulfillment of an act of self-sacrifice or the driven need to create a good story. Underneath, Lacan contends, and I agree, it’s all libidinous, erotic in the broader sense. It’s about the pursuit of some kind of pleasure.
As I mentioned there are three types of Jouissance (and I and others have contended that there probably more.) But the type I’m describing is what he called Phallic Jouissance. This is an annoying name for it; it’s so easy to get bogged down with gender on this. I’m going to take a cue from Bruce Fink, a Lacanian scholar, and call it Fallible Jouissance, because that’s its more identifiable feature; the satisfaction, the enjoyment always fails to live up to its imagined perfection. It always just misses the mark, by a little bit.
Although fallible (Phallic) jouissance is chiefly identified with male desire, I’d argue that that’s bullshit. Anyone with a fertile imagination experiences it. Very few things in life match or exceed our expectations, and if they do, we often can’t enjoy anticipating them because we didn’t know they would. That’s complicated, let me offer you an example: you’ve always yearned to have a really good, hard, kinky spanking. You get it. It’s good. You may slip off his lap, you may find you didn’t enjoy the pain as much as you thought you would. You like it, but it doesn’t make you wet. Or… it’s good, it’s great in fact, but it just wasn’t quite what you imagined it to be. Now, on the other hand, say you’ve never really thought about being spanked, and your lover pulls you over his/her lap and gives you a couple. And it blows your mind. It’s fucking hot as hell and you fuck like animals afterwards. It was brilliant, but because you didn’t know it was coming, you didn’t get the pleasure of anticipating it. Get it? Jouissance isn’t the event, object or person of your desire, it’s the yearning for it.
Okay, so the most commonly experienced form of jouissance is, hopefully – and you’ll see later why I think it is an important force in our lives, just not one you have to consciously set yourself up for – fallible jouissance. Fantasy sets us up for fallible jouissance. And usually this is okay as long as you can keep in mind that, whatever you think you yearn for, it’s not going to be exactly the way you imagine it.
I have many problems with the question: “So, what are your hard limits” in the context of sex and kink. I want to acknowledge before anyone jumps down my throat that this is a useful question. It’s a safety question. It’s a question one really should ask if you play with someone you don’t know at all. However, it has its drawbacks and I’d like to examine them.
That kind of a question immediately guarantees that the jouissance you experience will be of the fallible variety. When I enumerate my hard limits for you, you will imagine each one of them, and already, you have formed an idea of the way it’s going to go in your brain. It also draws a line of transgression – and all transgressive lines are erotically tempting to cross. If I say “I absolutely will not ever fuck you and another guy at the same time.” At that point, many people, even those for whom the whole thought of that didn’t have much allure, may become very intrigued by the idea. Being a person who is particularly intrigued by transgression, the minute you tell me your limits is the minute those are pretty much the only things I really want to do now. Of course, I won’t do them. I respect people’s limits and I can control my actions, but I can’t control my fantasies; now my desire has jumped further, to a place you aren’t willing to go. Finally, this demand for hard limits always smacks of ass covering (see what I did there?). We live in a society that is investing ever-greater effort and labour, not into being productive or innovative or adventurous, but in covering its ass. If I don’t mention every hard limit I have, then it’s not your fault if you cross one, right? I’m sorry I forgot to tell you that getting fucked by your doberman was not one of my hard limits – my bad.
How about, okay, you can cut me, but not too deep. How deep? Two millimeters. Two millimeters where? Now I’m thinking, what the fuck? Uh… not over my carotid artery? I’m dealing with someone who is not willing to take responsibility to act responsibly. Conversely, if you have agreed to let me cut you, and – Jesus – that’s 3 mm deep at least!!! Well fuck that. It’s over, RG, you butcher!
In writing erotica, of course I’m interested in exploring characters, their limitations, their boundaries, and their transgressions. But my interest in that stems from my ambivalence to enumerating and delineating limits in my own intimate relations with the world.
Meanwhile, although I think that fallible jouissance can lead to real disappointment and dissatisfaction and to a curious version of the lived equivalent of ‘porn creep’ – a need to constantly escalate the extreme of your kink in order to get off on it – I also think, that inability to ever hit the mark perfectly, is what powers our creative drive. So, it has its uses.
I don’t have limits with lovers. If I think I have to tell you my limits, then my limit is: you. I expect a lover to be sensitive and observant and intuitive. And I expect them to get it wrong from time to time. Because the one thing I am sure of is that, if I don’t allow them, and myself that freedom, I will never have an experience of ‘Feminine Jouissance’ with them. Because feminine jouissance is an anticipation only of the unknown, and the terror and exhilaration of the unknown. You don’t have to be a woman, but you do need to make yourself very vulnerable in order to experience it.
And I’ll blog about that form of jouissance in my next post.
I had a near mental orgasm reading this. What an illumination. Thank you- I’ll have another 🙂
Wow. I should get verbose and academic more often, right?
Please, do! I enjoy your academic writing at least as much as your smut — and it’s not as often that you share as much of that here. Oh, and your recipes are also delightful!
It would be my pleasure.
While I didn’t experience joissance in reading this post, I agree that that there is something wonderful about your academic writing. Please share more.
Hmmm. I could perhaps pervert your drives and acclimatize you to this. 😛
Excellent blog. You even made Lacon theory sound accessible
HA… I’m so delighted if I did. He’s so NOT as accessible as his ideas deserve to be.
The problem I found with Lacan is the same problem imposed by so many philosophers: the elevation of mental contemplation above physical experience. In Ecrits, Lacan elevates the notion of jouissance to an untenable position, much as Barthes in S/Z likewise abstracts post-structuralism beyond meaningful boundaries. My very best experiences, sexual and otherwise, have always been unexpected pleasures – the trick is to immerse oneself entirely in the moment, which our modern sensibility makes unnecessarily difficult. In fact I believe it’s possible to make a very credible case for the idea that after a certain number of years on the planet, jouissance becomes difficult or impossible precisely because one expects disappointment from real-life experiences (especially here in the repressed United States of Abstinence). Conversely the marvel is to be refreshed anew by something joyous and wholly unexpected.
I’d go slightly further, out on a philosophical limb perhaps, and say that in its way the concept of jouissance is as stifling as any of the stale Politically Correct formulations so many would impose on every aspect of our lives. It is, only, a construct. It can be temporarily helpful in a limited range of circumstances (as per the concept of l’objet p’tit “a”) but cannot and should not be applied more generally. And as sexual response is such a delicate and easily-crushed thing, I’d argue that the best approach is to reject all external impositions and simply look inside to determine what works for you at a particular moment in time with a particular partner (or partners). And remember – next time around it may all be quite different.