Jacques Lacan Quotes

What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?

Love is giving something you don't have to someone who doesn't want it.

The real is what resists symbolization absolutely.

I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think. I am not whenever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think.

The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom

There is something in you I like more than yourself. Therefore I must destroy you

I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there's no way, to say it all. Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it's through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real.

I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you - the object petit a - I mutilate you.

But what Freud showed us… was that nothing can be grasped, destroyed, or burnt, except in a symbolic way, as one says, in effigie, in absentia.

I am there where it is spoken that the universe is a defect in the purity of non-being.

When one loves, it has nothing to do with sex.

I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object. What is realised in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.

Meaning is produced not only by the relationship between the signifier and the signified but also, crucially, by the position of the signifiers in relation to other signifiers.

All sorts of things in this world behave like mirrors.

The sentence completes its signification only with its last term.

...Desire, a function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing nameable. And at the same time this desire lies at the origin of every variety of animation. If being were only what it is, there wouldn’t even be room to talk about it. Being comes into existence as an exact function of this lack.

Even if what a jealous husband claims about his wife (that she sleeps around with other men) is all true, his jealousy is still pathological.

Reading in no way obliges us to understand.

Il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel.

Word is murder of a thing, not only in the elementary sense of implying its absence - by naming a thing, we treat it as absent, as dead, although it is still present - but above all in the sense of its radical dissection: the word 'quarters' the thing, it tears it out of the embedment in its concrete context, it treats its component parts as entities with an autonomous existence: we speak about color, form, shape, etc., as if they possessed self-sufficient being.

Anxiety, as we know, is always connected with a loss…with a two-sided relation on the point of fading away to be superseded by something else, something which the patient cannot face without vertigo

From an analytic point of view, the only thing one can be guilty of is having given ground relative to one’s desire (Seminar 7, 319)

Cuz words

The madman is not only a beggar who thinks he is a king, but also a king who thinks he is a king.

A secret to which truth has always initiated her lovers, and through which they have learned that it is in hiding that she offers herself to them most truly.

It is only true inasmuch as it is truly followed.

My thesis is that the moral law is articulated with relation to the real as such, to the real insofar as it can be the guarantee of the Thing.

I am where I think not.

by Baudelaire! things are pretty hot!

What is realised in my history is not the past definitive of what it was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.

If a man who thinks he is a king is mad, a king who thinks he is a king is no less so.

The sufferings of neurosis and psychosis are for us a schooling in the passions of the soul, just as the beam of the psychoanalytic scales, when we calculate the tilt of its threat to entire communities, provides us with an indication of the deadening of the passions in society.

The time for comprehending can be reduced to the instant of the glance, but this glance can include in its instant all the time needed for comprehending.

A secret to which truth has always initiated her lovers, and through which they have learned that it is in hiding that she offers to them most truly.

In other words, the man who is born into existence deals first with language; this is a given. He is even caught in it before his birth.

S'il n y a pas de rapport sexuel c'est que l'Autre est d'une autre race.

Amar es dar lo que no se tiene a quien no es

A certificate tells me that I was born. I repudiate this certificate: I am not a poet, but a poem. A poem that is being written, even if it looks like a subject.

Reality is for those who cannot face their dream.

What you’re referring to is what’s called “theory.” And when I said I’m not interested in theory, what I meant is, I’m not interested in posturing–using fancy terms like polysyllables and pretending you have a theory when you have no theory whatsoever. So there’s no theory in any of this stuff, not in the sense of theory that anyone is familiar with in the sciences or any other serious field. Try to find in all of the work you mentioned some principles from which you can deduce conclusions, empirically testable propositions where it all goes beyond the level of something you can explain in five minutes to a twelve-year-old. See if you can find that when the fancy words are decoded. I can’t. So I’m not interested in that kind of posturing. Žižek is an extreme example of it. I don’t see anything to what he’s saying. Jacques Lacan I actually knew. I kind of liked him. We had meetings every once in awhile. But quite frankly I thought he was a total charlatan. He was just posturing for the television cameras in the way many Paris intellectuals do. Why this is influential, I haven’t the slightest idea. I don’t see anything there that should be influential.

Todo arte se caracteriza por un cierto modo de organización alrededor de ese vacío

I speak without knowing it. I speak with my body and I do so unbeknownst to myself. Thus I always say more than I know. This is where I arrive at the meaning of the word "subject" in analytic discourse. What speaks without knowing it makes me "I," subject of the verb. That doesn't suffice to bring me into being. That has nothing to do with what I am forced to put in — enough knowledge for it to hold up, but not one drop more.

School of Resentment is a term coined by critic Harold Bloom to describe related schools of literary criticism which have gained prominence in academia since the 1970s and which Bloom contends are preoccupied with political and social activism at the expense of aesthetic values.[1] Broadly, Bloom terms "Schools of Resentment" approaches associated with Marxist critical theory, including African American studies, Marxist literary criticism, New Historicist criticism, feminist criticism, and poststructuralism—specifically as promoted by Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. The School of Resentment is usually defined as all scholars who wish to enlarge the Western canon by adding to it more works by authors from minority groups without regard to aesthetic merit and/or influence over time, or those who argue that some works commonly thought canonical promote sexist, racist or otherwise biased values and should therefore be removed from the canon. Bloom contends that the School of Resentment threatens the nature of the canon itself and may lead to its eventual demise. Philosopher Richard Rorty[2] agreed that Bloom is at least partly accurate in describing the School of Resentment, writing that those identified by Bloom do in fact routinely use "subversive, oppositional discourse" to attack the canon specifically and Western culture in general.

The golden age of cultural theory is long past. The pioneering works of Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault are several decades behind us [ … ] Some of them have since been struck down. Fate pushed Roland Barthes under a Parisian laundry van, and afflicted Michel Foucault with Aids. It dispatched Lacan, Williams and Bourdieu, and banished Louis Althusser to a psychiatric hospital for the murder of his wife. It seemed that God was not a structuralist.

Man goes round in circles because the structure, the structure of man, is toric

Does art imitate what it represents? In offering the imitation of an object, artists make something different out of that object. Thus they only pretend to imitate.

It is only through the radical defile of speech that we fall into the illusion that language is a register of conscious construction

Je pense où je ne suis pas, donc je suis où je ne pense pas. Je ne suis pas, là où je suis le jouet de ma pensée. Je pense à ce que je suis, là où je ne pense pas penser.

Gerçekten de insanların birbirine tahammül edebilmesi için belli bir eğitim şart.

The world is only a dream of each body.

Teaching has to deal not so much with lack of knowledge as with resistances to knowledge. Ignorance, suggests Jacques Lacan, is a “passion.” Inasmuch as traditional pedagogy postulated a desire for knowledge, an analytically informed pedagogy has to reckon with the passion for ignorance.22 Felman elaborates further on the productive nature of ignorance, arguing: “Ignorance is nothing other than a desire to ignore: its nature is less cognitive than performative … it is not a simple lack of information but the incapacity — or the refusal — to acknowledge one’s own implication in the information.

¿qué puede justificar la fidelidad, fuera de la palabra empeñada? Pero la palabra empeñada a menudo se empeña a la ligera. Sino se la empeñase así, es probable que se la empeñaría mucho más raramente.

Many people talk about messages everywhere, inside the organism a hormone is a message, a beam of light to obtain teleguidance to a plane or from a satellite is a message, and so on; but the message in language is absolutely different. The message. Our message, in all cases comes from the Other by which I understand “from the place of the Other.

Lacan define como ‘héroe’ al sujeto que (a diferencia de Caddell pero como Edipo, por ejemplo) asume plenamente las consecuencias de su acto, es decir, que no da un paso al costado cuando la flecha que dispara completa su círculo y vuela de regreso a él, a diferencia del resto de nosotros, que nos empeñamos en realizar nuestro deseo sin pagar su precio.

In valuing the image over the word, we fall victim to the image’s appearance of full revelation. Whereas the word prompts suspicion and questioning, the image produces belief and devotion. It is in this sense that Gilroy sees a latent fascism in the contemporary elevation of the image. The image today signifies the possibility of a completely successful process of manipulation.

The hand that extends toward the fruit, the rose, or the log that suddenly bursts into flames – its gesture of reaching, drawing close, or stirring up is closely related to the ripening of the fruit, the beauty of the flower, and the blazing of the log. If, in the movement of reaching, drawing, or stirring, the hand goes far enough toward the object that another hand comes out of the fruit, flower, or log and extends toward your hand – and at that moment your hand freezes in the closed plenitude of the fruit, in the open plenitude of the flower, or in the explosion of a log which bursts into flames – then what is produced is love.

Çünkü günah kanun olmadan yaşayamaz. Bir zamanlar kanun yoktu ve ben hayattaydım, ama sonra buyruk gelince günah dirildi ve ben öldüm. Ve gördüm ki hayat getirmesi gereken buyruk, ölüm getirdi. Çünkü buyruktan fırsat bulan günah beni kandırdı, ve böylece beni öldürdü. [Romans, 7:7-11]

That the Sadian fantasy situates itself better in the bearers of Christian ethics than elsewhere is what our structural landmarks allow us to grasp easily. But that Sade, himself, refuses to be my neighbor, is what needs to be recalled, not in order to refuse it to him in return, but in order to recognize the meaning of this refusal. We believe that Sade is not close enough to his own wickedness to recognize his neighbor in it. A trait which he shares with many, and notably with Freud. For such is indeed the sole motive of the recoil of beings, sometimes forewarned, before the Christian commandment. For Sade, we see the test of this, crucial in our eyes, in his refusal of the death penalty, which history, if not logic, would suffice to show is one of the corollaries of Charity.

L'unica cosa di cui si possa essere colpevoli è di aver ceduto sul proprio desiderio

Those words make me laugh. I never talk about freedom.

Man finds his home in a point situated in the Other beyond the image of which we are made and this place represents the absence where we are.

Ne büyük zafer olurdu. İnsan sonunda herhangi bir başarı elde etmiş olurdu böylece; kendi yıkımını.

All scoundrels are based on this, to want to be...someone's big Other.

Unless we define happiness in a rather sad way, namely that it is to be like everyone else, which is what the autonomous ego could be resolved into - nobody, it must be said, knows what it is.

The performative dimension at work here consists of the symbolic efficiency of the “mask”: wearing a mask actually makes us what we feign to be. In other words, the conclusion to be drawn from this dialectic is the exact opposite of the common wisdom by which every human act (achievement, deed) is ultimately just an act (posture, pretense): the only authenticity at our disposal is that of impersonation, of “taking our act (posture) seriously.

Pada bahasa terdapat unsur ketaksadaran. Dalam ketidaksadaran inilah terdapat hasrat, dan hasarat manusia adalah hasrat akan yang lain. Yang simbolik ini ditandai dengan adanya kekurangan. Oleh karena adanya kekurangan inilah, maka manusia menghasrati sesuatu.

I have long stressed the Hegelian procedure at work in this reversal of positions of the beautiful soul in relation to the reality he accuses. The point is not to adapt him to it, but to show him that he is only too well adapted to it, since he assists in its very fabrication.

La ilusión es provocada por una especie de ‘cortocircuito’ entre un lugar en la red simbólica y el elemento simbólico que lo ocupa: quienquiera se encuentre en ese lugar es el destinatario, dado que éste no se define por sus cualidades positivas sino por el propio hecho contingente de encontrarse en este lugar.

Okurken eğitimin kökünde insanı yaratmaya dair belli bir fikrin yattığını görüyorsunuz; sanki insanı yaratan eğitimmiş gibi. Halbuki, işin doğrusu insanı eğitmek gereksizdir. Tüm eğitimini kendisi edinir. Öyle ya da böyle eğitir kendisini. Elbet bir şey öğrenmek zorunda kalacak ve bunun için dirsek çürütecektir.

İnsan kendi arzusuna ayak uydurmada giderek acizleşir. Hatta bu acizliği cinsel tetiklenmeyi kaybettirecek raddeye bile ulaşabilir. Bunu kaybetmese bile kişi arzu nesnesini nasıl bulacağını bilemez hale gelir, arayışında hüsran dışında hiçbir şey bulamaz ve kendini keşfetme şansını kademe kademe yok eden bir eziyet içinde yaşar.

This belief in the truth of the image leaves us especially vulnerable to ideological coercion (which is not to say, of course, that the image cannot be subversive as well). The image, much more than the word, inspires trust, and this trust is precisely what ideology hopes to engender. This is why fascists rely so heavily on imagery. In fact, cultural theorist Paul Gilroy links the rise of the image to the rise of fascism in the mid-twentieth century.

This is the transformation from a society founded on the prohibition of enjoyment (and thus the dissatisfaction of its subjects) to a society that commands enjoyment or jouissance (in which there seems to be no requisite dissatisfaction). Whereas formerly society has required subjects to renounce their private enjoyment in the name of social duty, today the only duty seems to consist in enjoying oneself as much as possible. The fundamental social duty in contemporary American society lies in committing oneself to enjoyment.

These conservative critics call for a return to “family values,” to a world in which prohibition kept us safe from outbreaks of enjoyment. This desire for a return to the past, however, is rarely genuine. Which is to say, such proclamations don’t really want the return to the past that they claim to want. Instead, they want the best of both worlds—the “benefits” of modernity (computers, cars, televisions) without their effects (isolation, enjoyment, narcissism)—and fail to grasp the interdependence of the benefits and the effects

It is only on the basis of the clinical facts that any discussion can be fruitful. These facts reveal a relation of the subject to the phallus that is established without regard to the anatomical difference of the sexes, and which, by this very fact, makes any interpretation of this relation especially difficult in the case of women. This problem may be treated under the following four headings: (1) from this 'why', the little girl considers herself, if only momentarily, as castrated, in the sense of deprived of the phallus, by someone, in the first instance by her mother, an important point, and then by her father, but in such a way that one must recognize in it a transference in the analytic sense of the term;

will respond by reciprocating this desire. The difference between romance and love is that the former never leaves the terrain of desire. The subject seeking romance sees in the other the possibility of the realization of its desire and thereby reduces the love object to an object of desire. This is why romance inevitably produces disappointment. Love, though it disturbs the subject, does not disappoint. In love, one can find satisfaction with the love object. But love also removes the subject from the terrain of desire. Though love necessarily begins with desire, it doesn’t end there. When one falls in love, one falls for the other’s way of enjoying itself, for the other’s satisfaction with its own form of failure, its satisfaction with the absence of the object that would realize desire. Love targets the point at which the subject exceeds itself and is not self-identical. According to Joan Copjec, “when one loves something, one loves something in it that is more than itself, its nonidentity to itself.” 5 We seek love to escape the constraints of our symbolic identity and to enjoy our nonidentity. In the act of love, one abandons oneself. When one falls in love, one loses all sense of oneself and one’s symbolic coordinates. Love is never a good investment for the subject, and this separates it definitively from romance. This is why capitalism necessitates the transformation of love into romance. This transformation allows us to love on the cheap. Many theorists of love, like Jacques Lacan and Alain Badiou, have remarked on love’s inherent disruptiveness. But this is apparent as early as Plato’s approach to the question of love.

MT: Mimetic desire can only produce evil? RG: No, it can become bad if it stirs up rivalries but it isn't bad in itself, in fact it's very good, and, fortunately, people can no more give it up than they can give up food or sleep. It is to imitation that we owe not only our traditions, without which we would be helpless, but also, paradoxically, all the innovations about which so much is made today. Modern technology and science show this admirably. Study the history of the world economy and you'll see that since the nineteenth century all the countries that, at a given moment, seemed destined never to play anything but a subordinate role, for lack of “creativity,” because of their imitative or, as Montaigne would have said, their “apish” nature, always turned out later on to be more creative than their models. It began with Germany, which, in the nineteenth century, was thought to be at most capable of imitating the English, and this at the precise moment it surpassed them. It continued with the Americans in whom, for a long time, the Europeans saw mediocre gadget-makers who weren't theoretical or cerebral enough to take on a world leadership role. And it happened once more with the Japanese who, after World War II, were still seen as pathetic imitators of Western superiority. It's starting up again, it seems, with Korea, and soon, perhaps, it'll be the Chinese. All of these consecutive mistakes about the creative potential of imitation cannot be due to chance. To make an effective imitator, you have to openly admire the model you're imitating, you have to acknowledge your imitation. You have to explicitly recognize the superiority of those who succeed better than you and set about learning from them. If a businessman sees his competitor making money while he's losing money, he doesn't have time to reinvent his whole production process. He imitates his more fortunate rivals. In business, imitation remains possible today because mimetic vanity is less involved than in the arts, in literature, and in philosophy. In the most spiritual domains, the modern world rejects imitation in favor of originality at all costs. You should never say what others are saying, never paint what others are painting, never think what others are thinking, and so on. Since this is absolutely impossible, there soon emerges a negative imitation that sterilizes everything. Mimetic rivalry cannot flare up without becoming destructive in a great many ways. We can see it today in the so-called soft sciences (which fully deserve the name). More and more often they're obliged to turn their coats inside out and, with great fanfare, announce some new “epistemological rupture” that is supposed to revolutionize the field from top to bottom. This rage for originality has produced a few rare masterpieces and quite a few rather bizarre things in the style of Jacques Lacan's Écrits. Just a few years ago the mimetic escalation had become so insane that it drove everyone to make himself more incomprehensible than his peers. In American universities the imitation of those models has since produced some pretty comical results. But today that lemon has been squeezed completely dry. The principle of originality at all costs leads to paralysis. The more we celebrate “creative and enriching” innovations, the fewer of them there are. So-called postmodernism is even more sterile than modernism, and, as its name suggests, also totally dependent on it. For two thousand years the arts have been imitative, and it's only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that people started refusing to be mimetic. Why? Because we're more mimetic than ever. Rivalry plays a role such that we strive vainly to exorcise imitation. MT

[...] la historia del deseo se organiza como un discurso que se desarrolla en lo insensato. Esto es el inconsciente. Los desplazamientos y condensaciones en el discurso del inconsciente son sin duda alguna lo que en el discurso en general constituyen desplazamientos y condensaciones, o sea, metonimias y metáforas. Pero aquí son metáforas que no engendran sentido alguno, y desplazamientos que no transportan ningún ser y en los cuales el sujeto no reconoce algo que se desplace.

Les souffrances de la névrose et de la psychose sont pour nous l'école des passions de l'âme, comme le fléau de la balance psychanalytique, quand nous calculons l'inclinaison de sa menace sur des communautés entières nous donne l'indice d'amortissement des passions de la cité. A ce point de jonction de la nature à la culture que l'anthropologie de nos jours scrute obstinément, la psychanalyse seule reconnaît ce nœud de servitude imaginaire que l'amour doit toujours redéfaire ou trancher. Pour une telle œuvre, le sentiment altruiste est sans promesse pour nous, qui perçons à jour l'agressivité qui sous-tend l'action du philanthrope, de l'idéaliste, du pédagogue, voire du réformateur. Dans le recours que nous préservons du sujet au sujet, la psychanalyse peut accompagner le patient jusqu'à la limite extatique du "Tu es cela", où se révèle à lui le chiffre de sa destinée mortelle, mais il n'est pas en notre seul pouvoir de praticien de l'amener à ce moment où commence le véritable voyage.

Greed is not, of course, an invention of modernity, but the onset of modernity allows for a change in its ethical status. Only within the modern world would it be possible to proclaim, with Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, that “greed is good”; to ancient societies, greed is always sinful (that is to say, always dangerous to the stability of the social order). In other words, the very thing that threatens to destroy ancient societies becomes the very lifeblood of the modern one. Because it involves such a complete upheaval, no other change in Western history, for the Marxist, approaches this one in importance. This type of valuation of the historical shift to capitalism, however, is not confined to doctrinaire Marxists. Even avowedly non-Marxist historians, though they might not emphasize the changing status of money, nonetheless tend to see the onset of modernity—the nascent moments of capitalism—as a time of epochal change, as a shift from a static society to a progressive one. This is what leads Fredric Jameson to claim that “the emergence of the modern world or capitalism, the miraculous birth of modernity or of a secular market system, the end of ‘traditional’ society in all its forms [. . .] remains for us (in the collective unconscious) the only true Event of history.” In whatever language we discuss the changes in society occasioned by modernity, few would dispute Jameson’s claim that it marks the historical shift in the West, leaving, as it does, a gulf between the structure of traditional society (a closed world) and modern capitalist society (an open universe).

This marks a dramatic change in the way the social order is constituted: rather than being tied together through a shared sacrifice, subjects exist side by side in their isolated enclaves of enjoyment.

A society of prohibition requires all its members to sacrifice their individual, private ways of obtaining enjoyment for the sake of the social order as a whole. That is to say, one receives an identity from society in exchange for one’s immediate access to enjoyment, which one must give up. This is, traditionally, the way in which society as such functions. This type of society operates in the manner of a sports team: the team demands individual sacrifices in order to ensure the team’s success. In order for the team to win, the individual must give up her or his dreams of wholly individual achievement and fit her or his abilities into the structure of the team. In a society of commanded enjoyment, this dynamic changes dramatically. Rather than demanding that its members give up their individual enjoyment for the sake of the whole, the society of enjoyment commands their enjoyment—private enjoyment becomes of paramount importance—and the importance of the social order as a whole seems to recede. Contemporary complaints about sports stars who are more concerned about individual statistics and money than about their team’s fortunes are indicative of this transformation. These sports stars are not simply anomalous narcissists. In the society of enjoyment, individual, private accomplishments and rewards are more important than the success of the team. In such a society, it is no longer requisite that subjects accept a constant dissatisfaction as the price for existing within a social order. To return to the example of the sports team, one can remain a member of the team without having to subordinate one’s own individual agenda to the larger plans of the team. Dissatisfaction now appears as something that one need not experience, in contrast to life in the society of prohibition, where dissatisfaction inheres in the very fabric of social existence itself. In the society of enjoyment, the private enjoyment that threatened the stability of the society of prohibition becomes a stabilizing force and even acquires the status of a duty.

But if Marx errs, his error does not lie, as his critics often allege, in underestimating “innate human selfishness.” Instead, his error—and, again, it is the common error today—lies in the other direction, in underestimating the capacity of subjects to act against their self-interest.

Psychoanalysis, however, calls into question the idea that we primarily act on behalf of our own interest. It allows us to see another power operating beneath the apparent predominance of self-interest. Of course, the commonsensical understanding of psychoanalysis is exactly the opposite of this, contending that psychoanalysis reduces everything to self-interest.

Marxism allows us to understand the role of economic and social contradictions in driving the movement of history, but it often provides an inadequate explanation of the actual politics of historical transformation—why change does or does not occur at a given time. It is on this question that psychoanalysis proves indispensable.

Any return to the past, to traditional values, will necessarily be mediated by the present.

The other alternative common today is the cynical embrace of the society of enjoyment—an attitude that proclaims that things simply are as they are, that there is no changing the structure of the social order. The cynic knows well enough the problems with the way things are but acts as if she/he doesn’t know, conducting her/his daily life certain that the social order, despite its problems, cannot be changed. This attitude resigns the subject to the private realm: for the cynic, change is possible on a personal level (i.e., I can change my weight, my degree of happiness, my lover, etc.), so that’s where I should keep my focus. As Paul Gilroy puts it, “A language of revolution may persist, but these days it is more like to turn away from the complexities of wholescale societal transformation and promote an ‘inward,’ New Age turn.

. In proclaiming the inevitability of this type of world, we help to make it inevitable, to make the status quo all the more unassailable. In this way, the strategy of cynical embrace of the society of enjoyment is every bit as flawed as the nostalgic attempt to return to a previous epoch. Both positions share a fundamental refusal to recognize their own complicity with the society of enjoyment.

The fundamental thing to recognize about the society of enjoyment is that in it the pursuit of enjoyment has misfired: the society of enjoyment has not provided the enjoyment that it promises. It has, instead, made enjoyment all the more inaccessible. The contemporary imperative to enjoy—the elevation of enjoyment to a social obligation—deprives enjoyment of its marginal status vis-à-vis the social order, bringing it within confines of that order, where we can experience it directly and fully. What the society of enjoyment thus makes manifest is the impossibility of any direct experience of enjoyment: if we try to experience it directly, we necessarily miss it; enjoyment can only be experienced indirectly, through the act of aiming at something else— as a by-product. This is because the barrier to enjoyment is essential to the experience of it. In fact, what we enjoy is the barrier itself. For instance, children’s enjoyment of Christmas morning derives from the barrier to enjoyment represented by the wrapping paper over their gifts and the prohibition against opening gifts prior to Christmas day. Without the wrapping paper—with direct access to the gifts—Christmas would be just another day. When we experience enjoyment directly, when we have gifts without wrapping paper and on any (or every) day of the year, enjoyment (and the gift) loses its value, a value produced by inaccessibility. Kierkegaard makes a similar observation relative to religion when he insists that our relationship with the greatness of God can never become a direct one but must occur through the mediation of the lowly figure of Christ. He suggests that God sent Christ to us because he understood the importance of what Kierkegaard calls “indirect communication.” If we were to see God as he really is rather than through the humiliated image of Christ on the cross, God would be degraded in our eyes; we couldn’t properly see his greatness. The same is true for enjoyment: when we experience it directly, it loses all value and becomes commonplace, and as a result we don’t actually experience it. Hence, the problem with the society of enjoyment is not that we suffer from too much enjoyment, but that we don’t have enough. Far from finding new ways of restraining enjoyment, as many contemporary cultural critics suggest, we must find new ways of making it possible. This entails a move from inhabiting a society of commanded enjoyment to engaging in a politics of enjoyment.

If a society were based on only a common positive characteristic (the same language, for instance), this characteristic would not in any way act as a control on people’s behavior. It would not stop them, as Lévi-Strauss puts it, from doing just what they please, in the way that prohibition, and specifically the incest prohibition, does.

The incest prohibition creates societal coherence through directing people’s interest away from what is closest to them (the family) and toward the social organization itself. As a result, for instance, rather than continuing to desire the mother, the subject must desire someone from another family, from the social order at large. This directing of interest away from the family and to the society at large is the most important function of the incest prohibition. Without this redirection of interest, nothing would propel the child out of the family, out of a concern for only her/his immediate environment. As psychoanalysis makes clear, there is no want of passion on the part of the child for her/his fellow family members, no initial revulsion at the familial (or familiar) love object. The incest prohibition, then, not only creates a desire for something beyond the immediate scope of the child, but it also produces a feeling of disgust with the idea of taking someone immediately present (a family member) as a love object. In this way, the prohibition opens us up to the social world, freeing us from the narrow focus of our initial interest through a complete redirection of it.

Because of all these inherently antisocial features, enjoyment represents a danger to the very logic upon which every social order constitutes itself, and the social order must try to ward off this danger. However, even though enjoyment represents a threat to the social order and its stability, every social order must use enjoyment in order to perpetuate itself. In fact, Lacan even goes so far as to say that the founding signifier of the social order (what he calls “the One”)—and, by extension, the social order itself—“far from arising out of the universe, arises out of enjoyment.” Consequently, despite the prohibition against enjoyment, enjoyment still makes itself felt within society. Religions, for instance, often promise an afterlife of unrestrained enjoyment in exchange for the sacrifice of enjoyment in the here and now

Though the social order always seems to hold out the promise of its own compensatory enjoyment to its initiates, this is a promise that it cannot but break. The social order can’t keep its promise of compensatory enjoyment—enjoyment that might come close to the enjoyment that the incest prohibition bars—because such unrestrained enjoyment necessarily threatens the self-perpetuation of the social order itself. Whereas the self-perpetuation of the social order depends on conservation of resources, calculation of possibilities, and allowances for the future, enjoyment occurs without any consideration of how it will be sustained, without any fear of using itself up. Enjoyment also shatters barriers; it overcomes differences, distinctions, and hierarchies (including those of social class). Most importantly, however, those who are enjoying themselves are not, at the moment of enjoyment at least, “productive members of society.

Here we see the unequaled role that the prohibition of enjoyment plays in the construction of a social order. It provides the foundation on which all the structures of society necessarily rest. Prohibition performs this function because it eliminates the threat that unrestrained enjoyment poses to society as a whole. Without prohibition, enjoyment would constantly threaten the stability and security of the social order. The antisocial danger represented by enjoyment finds perhaps its most poetic expression in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991), in the figure of Hannibal Lecter. The film demonstrates, quite clearly, that Lecter derives his enjoyment from eating people: he doesn’t eat people because he bears them ill-will, but simply because he enjoys it. Rather than facilitating harmonious intersubjective contact, as the example of Lecter indicates, enjoyment threatens the big Other, insofar as it disregards the desire of the Other altogether. Though Lecter’s mode of procuring enjoyment is undoubtedly extreme, it is nonetheless exemplary, because all enjoyment involves seeing the Other as nothing more than a tool and not showing “consideration” for the Other. As Serge André points out, to enjoy something “is to be able to use it to the point of abusing it—the abuse being precisely that which the law seeks to delimit.” In the act of barring this unrestrained enjoyment from the social order, prohibition produces habitable space in which we can coexist without directly confronting the horror of the Other’s enjoyment, which is why Lévi-Strauss sees prohibition at the root of everything social.

It is this that Lacan grasps when he rewrites Dostoyevsky’s “without God, everything is permitted” to “without God, nothing is permitted.” That is, without God, without some Law that demands renunciation, one cannot have any enjoyment. This is why the introduction of the Law is an obscene act, an act producing the possibility of the enjoyment it prohibits. Enjoyment requires the barrier to it that the Law provides. This means that we must qualify the idea that entrance into society requires the renunciation of enjoyment: one must indeed renounce one’s enjoyment, but this enjoyment is something that does not exist prior to its renunciation.

In fact, desire is sustained dissatisfaction. This state of sustained dissatisfaction is the normal state for subjects within a society of prohibition. Prohibition produces dissatisfied, desiring subjects, subjects who remain securely within the confines of the social order.

Desire is consonant with the social order because of its reliance on absence rather than presence. When I desire an object, its absence is often helpful in building up my desire: the longer the desired object remains away, the stronger the hold of desire over me. All of our clichés about desire—like “absence makes the heart grow fonder”—affirm this fundamental truth of desire. By the same token, when the object becomes a constant presence, my desire tends to wane. And if I gain too much proximity to the object of desire, the object suddenly disappears or loses its desirability. This aspect of desire is correlative to the functioning of the social order, which is itself a symbolic entity. It allows subjects to relate to each other through the mediation of a symbolic order, which means through absence rather than presence. The symbolic order is, as Lacan puts it, the absence of things, and this absence is crucial for the possibility of mediation, because it serves to eliminate rivalry. If one subject doesn’t have a thing, at least another doesn’t have it either, which provides some degree of consolation for lost enjoyment. This is why prohibition is so important for holding society together: if I see that no one else is able to enjoy, I feel as if we are partners in loss rather than rivals in enjoyment.

The symbolic order thrives on the deprivation of the subjects belonging to it: it creates a bond of lack. In this way, prohibition works to create coherence within society. The prohibition of enjoyment holds the social order together through the shared dissatisfaction it produces.

Because of our ability to imagine an enjoyment that the symbolic order prohibits, the imaginary offers us a separate register of experience, distinct from the symbolic order.

In Lacan’s triadic division of experience, the symbolic order constitutes our social reality, the imaginary provides an avenue for the illusory transgression of that reality, and the Real marks the point at which the symbolic order fails—the gap that always haunts it. Though the imaginary assists prohibition by providing a safe outlet for enjoyment, it also represents a danger to the society of prohibition. The imaginary thus has an ambiguous status within the society of prohibition, and we must examine both its role in supplementing the power of prohibition and the threat that it poses.

This is why one cannot think the society of prohibition without the imaginary housing the image of the denied enjoyment. This image is what allows subjects in the society of prohibition to sustain themselves in the midst of their dissatisfaction.