14 Lacan and queer theory
Lacan died before queer theory came into existence, though he surely would have engaged this new discourse – as he engaged so many others – had he lived to know about it. His psychoanalytic critique of ego psychology and of adaptation to social norms shares much in common with queer theory’s political critique of social processes of normalization. Indeed, while queer theory traces its intellectual genealogy to Michel Foucault, it can be argued that queer theory actually begins with Freud, specifically, with his theories of polymorphous perversity, infantile sexuality, and the unconscious. Lacan’s “return to Freud” involves rediscovering all that is most strange and refractory – all that remains foreign to our normal, commonsensical ways of thinking – about human subjectivity. Thus from an Anglo-American perspective, Lacan makes psychoanalysis look rather queer. By virtue of its flouting norms of all kinds (including norms of intelligibility), Lacanian psychoanalysis may provide handy ammunition for queer theory’s critique of what has come to be known as heteronormativity.
The term “heteronormativity” designates all those ways in which the world makes sense from a heterosexual point of view. It assumes that a complementary relation between the sexes is both a natural arrangement (the way things are) and a cultural ideal (the way things should be). Queer theory analyses how heteronormativity structures the meaningfulness of the social world, thereby enforcing a hierarchy between the normal and the deviant or queer. In its understanding of how the categories of normal and pathological emerge in a mutually constitutive relation, queer theory draws on Foucault’s revisionary account of modern power and, more specifically, on Georges Canguilhem’s critical histories of nosology.1 Foucault argues that power in the modern era can be distinguished by its operating productively (to proliferate categories of subjective being), rather than merely negatively (by prohibiting or suppressing types of behavior). Instead of a centralized, top-down model of power (which he calls juridical power), the nineteenth century witnessed the birth of what Foucault calls biopower, a more diffuse form of power that actively brings into existence modes of being through techniques of classification and normalization. Unlike juridical power, biopower is not invested in an individual (such as the king) or a group (such as landowners), but operates transindividually through discourse and institutions. Although Foucault’s conception of discourse differs significantly from Lacan’s, his transindividual notion of power nevertheless is somewhat homologous with Lacan’s theory of the symbolic order: both represent transindividual structures that produce subjective effects independently of any particular individual’s agency or volition.
One of Foucault’s prime examples of biopower’s operation is the late-nineteenth-century invention of the homosexual as a discrete identity, a form of selfhood. Before roughly 1870, Foucault contends, it was not really possible to think of oneself as a homosexual, no matter what kind of sex one had or with whom, because the category of homosexuality didn’t yet exist. Once the homosexual had been named as a type of person characterized by a distinct psychology, however, sexual activity with a member of the same sex could be understood as not only a sin or a crime, but also a sickness and a deviation from the norm.2 Through transformations such as this, modern power relies less on laws and taboos than on the force of social norms to regulate behavior. And, as the example of homosexuality suggests, processes of normalization depend heavily on forms of identity to ensure social control. The greater the diversification of subjective identities, the more securely power maintains its hold on us.
From Foucault’s account of power it follows that one does not resist the forces of normalization by inventing new kinds of social or sexual identity, as many sex radicals in the United States still seem to believe. In the 1960s and 70s, political movements such as civil rights, women’s liberation, and gay liberation developed around identity categories (Black, woman, gay, lesbian) to resist the status quo. Central to these movements was the work of consciousness raising, in which one learned how to actively identify as a member of an oppressed minority group. These forms of identity politics proved remarkably effective in generating large-scale social changes; yet their limitations stemmed from their faith in identity as the basis of political action. The critique of identity politics that emerged in the 1980s and 90s came from feminism (particularly psychoanalytic feminism) and from the grassroots response to the AIDS crisis. Public discourse early in the epidemic aggressively stigmatized the groups of people that first manifested AIDS mortalities, primarily injection-drug users and gay men. Right-wing politicians and the media characterized AIDS as a disease of identity – something you would catch because of the kind of person you were. AIDS was represented as a “gay disease” and even explained as divine punishment for unnatural sex, though lesbians weren’t falling sick.
In response to this reactionary discourse, gay activists insisted that HIV (the virus that causes AIDS) was transmitted via particular acts, not via types of people, and that the notion of AIDS as a “gay disease” was dangerously misleading because it promulgated the idea that one remained immune to HIV-infection as long as he or she identified as a normal heterosexual. Gay activists started to see how the discourse of identity that had proven so enabling in the 1970s had its drawbacks, as the hard-won political gains of gay liberation were eroded by the new rationale that AIDS seemed to provide for disenfranchising gay men. Rather than gradually being accepted into mainstream society, gays abruptly were recast as plague-spreading sex deviates, along with junkies and non-white immigrant groups (such as Haitians) that showed a demographically high incidence of AIDS. Public discourse showed less concern for helping those ill with the disease than for protecting the “general population” that they might contaminate. As Simon Watney has shown in his analysis of media discourse about AIDS in Britain and the United States, the idea of a general population implies a notion of disposable populations in much the same way that the category of the normal defines itself in relation to the pathological, on which it necessarily depends.3 Hence the “general population” can be understood as another term for heteronormative society. Those excluded from the general population – whether by virtue of their sexuality, race, class, or nationality – are by definition queer.
In this way, “queer” came to stand less for a particular sexual orientation or a stigmatized erotic identity than for a critical distance from the white, middle-class, heterosexual norm. Newly demonized gay men in the AIDS epidemic took up the pejorative epithet “queer” and embraced it as the label for a new style of political organization that focused more on building alliances and coalitions than on maintaining identity boundaries: an activism that ceded mainstream political campaigning in favour of shorter-term, more spectacular guerrilla tactics. Whereas gay liberation had placed its trust in identity politics, queer activism entailed a critique of identity and an acknowledgment that different social groups could transcend their identity-based particularisms in the interest of resisting heteronormative society. Thus while gay opposes straight, queer sets itself more broadly in opposition to the forces of normalization that regulate social conformity. Following Foucault’s understanding of the disciplinary function of social and psychological identities, queer is anti-identitarian and is defined relationally rather than substantively. Queer has no essence, and its radical force evaporates – or is normalized – as soon as queer coalesces into a psychological identity. The term “queer” is not simply a newer, hipper word for being gay; instead it alters how we think about gayness and homosexuality. Its anti-identitarianism gives rise to both the promise and the risk that queer offers for progressive politics – the promise that we may think and act beyond the confines of identity, including group identity, and the risk that in doing so the specificities of race, gender, class, sexuality, and ethnicity might be overlooked or lost. Queer theory is the discourse that explores those promises and risks.
Having its political origins in the AIDS crisis, queer theory found its intellectual inspiration in the first volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality (1976), a treatise that concerns power more than it does sex. How we understand the relation between Lacan and queer theory depends to a significant extent on how we interpret Foucault’s treatment of psychoanalysis in The History of Sexuality. Received academic opinion maintains that Foucault’s work provides a thoroughgoing critique of psychoanalysis, and many queer theorists have been quick to dismiss Lacanian thought as unremittingly heteronormative. Conversely, from a Lacanian vantage point, Joan Copjec has shown very persuasively the basic incompatibility between Lacan’s methodology and forms of historicism derived from Foucault.4 Yet in spite of its disparaging remarks about psychoanalysis, The History of Sexuality presents an argument that in certain respects is cognate with a radical Lacanian perspective on sexuality. Without diluting the specificity of either Foucault or Lacan, it might be possible to read them together in a new way, to rearticulate their bodies of work for the purposes of queer critique.
Composed in a Lacanian milieu (though without ever mentioning Lacan’s name), The History of Sexuality launches a polemic against what Foucault calls the repressive hypothesis. This hypothesis states that human desire is distorted by cultural constraints, which, once lifted, would liberate desire and permit its natural, harmonious fulfillment, thereby eliminating the various neuroses that beset our civilization. Picturing desire and the law in an antagonistic relation, the repressive hypothesis infers a precultural or prediscursive condition of desire in its “raw” state. Foucault – like Lacan – maintains that no such prediscursive state exists. Instead, desire is positively produced rather than repressed by discourse; desire follows the law, it does not oppose it. In 1963, more than a decade before The History of Sexuality, Lacan argued that “Freud finds a singular balance, a kind of co-conformity – if I may be allowed to thus double my prefixes – of Law and desire, stemming from the fact that both are born together” (T, p. 89). This affirmation comports well with Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis.
Hence although it is accurate to characterize The History of Sexuality as a critical historicization of psychoanalysis, it is important to distinguish which version of psychoanalysis Foucault’s critique assails. This distinction is trickier than one might imagine, because Foucault rarely attributes proper names to the positions against which he is arguing. The liberationist strand of psychoanalysis whose reading of Freud recommended freeing desire from social repression stems primarily from the work of Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse – thinkers of whom Lacan was equally (though differently) critical. Reich and Marcuse were the psychoanalytic architects of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s, a project whose claims provoked both Foucault’s and Lacan’s skepticism.5 Foucault objects most strenuously to the way in which the idea of repression encourages us to think of desire as something that culture negates; and certainly Freud’s account of the incest taboo’s function in the Oedipus complex represents cultural imperatives as negating primordial desire. However, Foucault’s critique of a naive conception of repression – repression considered as a purely external force – prompts him to argue against all formulae of negation where desire is concerned, and thus his polemic leaves little conceptual room for any consideration of negativity.
Despite Lacan’s affirmation of the consubstantiality of law and desire, he and Foucault part ways on the question of negativity. This fundamental difference becomes evident when one recalls that the French title of Foucault’s introductory volume is La Volonté de savoir (the will to know), a phrase his English translator deliberately elided in titling that book simply The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Foucault’s preoccupation with charting epistemophilia – the project to elicit the truth of our being by “forcing sex to speak,” as he puts it – directly contrasts with Lacan’s emphasis on “the will not to know,” a formulation he uses to characterize the unconscious. While Lacan wants to reconceptualize the unconscious in de-individualized terms, Foucault wishes to rethink that which structures subjectivity in purely positive terms, without recourse to notions of repression, negation, or the unconscious.
Nevertheless, Foucault’s descriptions of power often sound remarkably cognate with a Lacanian conception of the unconscious. For example, in an interview conducted in France shortly after the publication of La Volonté de savoir, Foucault explained, “What I want to show is how power relations can materially penetrate the body in depth, without depending even on the mediation of the subject’s own representations. If power takes hold on the body, this isn’t through its having first to be interiorized in people’s consciousnesses.”6 Speaking here of a force that affects the human body without the mediation of consciousness, Foucault makes clear that by “power” he does not mean ideology. In this schema, power achieves its effects via routes distinct from those of identification, interpellation, or internalization. Foucault thus distances himself from the Marxist-Lacanian theory of power associated with Louis Althusser. Yet by marking the inadequacy of interpellation as an explanatory category, Foucault implies that power should not be apprehended in imaginary terms – that is, in terms of the ego and its dialectic of recognition/misrecognition. Instead, power operates similarly to a de-psychologized conception of the unconscious, insofar as it compromises the autonomy of the individual will and thereby undermines the humanist notion of the constituent subject. Indeed, as Arnold I. Davidson recently observed, “the existence of the unconscious was a decisive component in Foucault’s antipsychologism.”7
This commitment to antipsychologism betokens what Lacan and Foucault share most fundamentally in common; it is what makes them both in their own ways suspicious of subjective identity. For Lacan identity represents an ego-defense, a ruse of the Imaginary designed to eschew unconscious desire. Thus from his perspective – and here he parts company with Foucault – the category of desire is not wedded to identity, but, on the contrary, threatens identity’s closely regulated coherence. For Lacan desire is no longer a psychological category, since it is conceptualized as an effect of language – that is, as unconscious. Lacan depsychologizes the unconscious by considering it linguistic: “The unconscious is that part of the concrete discourse, in so far as it is transindividual, that is not at the disposal of the subject in re-establishing the continuity of his conscious discourse” (E/S, p. 49). In Lacanian thought, the unconscious does not exist inside individuals: it composes a crucial dimension of one’s subjectivity without being part of one’s mind. Hence the psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious introduces a constitutive division into human subjectivity that thwarts the possibility of any unified identity, sexual or otherwise.
By theorizing subjectivity in terms of language and culture, Lacan also denaturalizes sex. There is no natural or normal relation between the sexes, he insists: “il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel.” The axiomatic status in Lacanian doctrine of the impossibility of the sexual relation aligns this brand of psychoanalysis with queer theory’s critique of heteronormativity. As do queer theorists, Lacan maintains that no natural complementarity between man and woman exists – and that, furthermore, such complementarity is not a desirable ideal either. Indeed, Lacan warned his fellow psychoanalysts about using the power of transference in the clinical setting to inculcate cultural ideals such as harmonious heterosexuality. He launched his sternest polemic against viewing the goal of analysis as “adaptation to reality,” because this goal reduces clinical work to little more than the imposition of social norms. Lacan was aware of how misbegotten the social ideal of genital heterosexuality is, how readily it functions as a normative requirement of adaptive therapies. As he scoffed in the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, “Goodness only knows how obscure such a pretension as the achievement of genital objecthood [l’objectalité genitale] remains, along with what is so imprudently linked to it, namely, adjustment to reality” (S VII, p. 293). Adaptation to reality and achieving genital heterosexuality go hand in hand as aspirations because, Lacan recognises, social reality is heteronormative. Since the purpose of Lacanian psychoanalysis is not “adjustment to reality,” clinical work must take care to resist promoting heteronormativity. Earlier in the same seminar, Lacan is quite explicit about this danger, noting that “strengthening the categories of affective normativity produces disturbing results” (S VII, pp. 133–4). It is significant that Lacan emphasizes the potential dangers of abusing therapeutic power in his Seminar on Ethics, because he thus makes clear that far from operating as an agent of social normalization, psychoanalysis should consider its work as resisting normalization. Lacan’s ethical critique of subjective adaptation marks his theory’s distance from Foucault’s representation of psychoanalysis as a normalizing institution.
But in denaturalizing sex and sexuality, Lacan suggests more than the comparatively familiar idea that sex is a social construct. Psychoanalytic antinaturalism does not boil down to mere culturalism. Rather, his account of how discourse generates desire specifies more precisely the function of negativity in creating human subjectivity. Lacan locates the cause of desire in an object (l’objet petit a) that comes into being as a result of language’s impact on the body, but that is not itself discursive. The objet petit a is what remains after culture’s symbolic networks have carved up the body, and hence the object reminds us of the imperfect fit between language and corporeality. Refusing the category of the prediscursive as a misleading fiction, Lacan argues that the object-cause of desire is extradiscursive – something that cannot be contained within or mastered by language, and therefore cannot be understood as a cultural construct. This distinction between the prediscursive and the extradiscursive is crucial for grasping the difference between Lacan and Foucault, since Foucauldian epistemology has no conceptual equivalent of the category of extradiscursivity. Foucault’s theory of discourse, which so effectively accounts for the operations of power, fails to distinguish the prediscursive from what exceeds language’s grasp.
By elaborating this distinction, Lacan provides a novel anti-identitarian account of desire. His concept of the object remains central to his demonstration that in its origins desire is not heterosexual: desire is determined not by the opposite sex but by l’objet petit a, which necessarily precedes gender. Lacan’s theory of the object revises both the Freudian notion of sexual object-choice (in which the object is assumed to be gendered) and object relations theories that succeeded Freud (principally in the work of Melanie Klein and D. W. Winnicott). Lacan develops his theory of the object from Freud’s ideas about polymorphously perverse sexuality and component instincts – that is, he develops Freudian theory beyond Freud’s own conceptual impasses. In his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud claimed that the peculiar temporality of human sexual life compelled him to conclude that the instinct has no predetermined object or aim: “It seems probable that the sexual instinct is in the first instance independent of its object; nor is its origin likely to be due to its object’s attractions” (SE 7, p. 148). By invalidating the popular notion that erotic desire is congenitally oriented toward the opposite sex, this psychoanalytic insight poses a fundamental challenge to heteronormativity. And it is thanks to ideas such as this one – the instinct’s original independence of its object – that Freud rather than Foucault may be credited as the intellectual founder of queer theory.
In order to grasp Lacan’s theory of l’objet petit a and how it deheterosexualizes desire, we need to consider further Freud’s account of the sexual instinct and its contingent object. As his severing of the natural link between instinct and object implies, Freud disassembles the instinct into its components, arguing that the notion of a unified instinct in which the parts function together harmoniously on the model of animal instinct is a seductive fiction; it does not describe accurately how human instinctual life operates. There is no single, unified sexual instinct in humans, Freud maintains, but only partial drives, component instincts. Instinct is an evolutionary concept, a way of thinking about an organism’s adaptation to its environment. For Freud, however, the human subject is constitutively maladapted to its environment, and the unconscious stands as the sign of this maladaption. Psychoanalytic thinkers after Freud have formalized the distinction between instinct and drive that remains somewhat inchoate in Freud’s own work.8 The distinction is particularly important in terms of the epistemological status of psychoanalysis, since drive theory tends to be taken as one of the most retrograde aspects of Freudianism, a mark of its essentialism. But in fact the instinct/drive distinction confirms Freud’s departure from biologistic conceptions of sexuality. If instinct can be situated at the level of biological necessity, then drive is the result of instinct’s capture in the nets of language, its having to be articulated into a signifying chain in any attempt to find satisfaction. Lacan spells out this distinction: “the instinct is the effect of the mark of the signifier on needs, their transformation as an effect of the signifier into something fragmented and panic-stricken that we call the drive” (S VII, p. 301).
Fragmented or partialized by symbolic networks, the drive is thereby disoriented (“panic-stricken”) in a manner that gives the lie to conventional notions of sexual orientation. The very idea of sexual orientation assumes that desire can be coordinated in a single direction, that it can be streamlined and stabilised. Another way of putting this would be to say that the idea of sexual orientation disciplines desire by regulating its telos. The notion of orientation – including same-sex orientation – can be viewed as normalizing in that it attempts to totalize uncoordinated fragments into a coherent unity. The conceptual correlate of orientation is sexual identity, a psychological category that conforms to the instinctual understanding of sex. Instinct, orientation, and identity are psychological concepts, not psychoanalytic ones. These concepts normalize the weirder psychoanalytic theory of partial drives and unconscious desire by unifying the latter’s discontinuities into recognizable identity formations. The impulse to coordinate and synthesize is a function of the ego and betrays an imaginary view of sex. This is as true of the notions of homosexual orientation and gay identity as it is of heterosexual identity. Both straight and gay identities elide the dimension of the unconscious. As an orientation or identity, homosexuality is normalizing though not socially normative. In other words, while homosexuality is far from representing the social norm, as a minority identity it does conform to the processes of normalization that regulate desire into social categories for disciplinary purposes.
With this distinction in mind, we can begin to appreciate how Freud’s radical claim that psychoanalysis “has found that all human beings are capable of making a homosexual object-choice and have in fact made one in their unconscious” does not go far enough in dismantling an identitarian view of sex.9 The contention that everyone has made a homosexual object-choice in his or her unconscious undermines the notion of a seamless sexual identity, but without challenging the assumption that object-choice is determined by gender. For an object-choice to qualify as homosexual, it must represent a selection based on the similarity of the object’s gender to that of the subject making the selection. This implies that the gender of objects still is discernible at the level of the unconscious, and that sexuality concerns recognizably “whole” objects, such as men and women (or at least masculine and feminine forms). But such assumptions are invalidated by Freud’s own theory of partial drives, as well as by the concept of objet petit a, a kind of partialized object that Lacan derives from Freudian drive theory. In developing his concept of objet petit a, Lacan invokes the oral, anal, and scopic drives that Freud discusses in “Instincts and their vicissitudes” (1915), adding to Freud’s incomplete list the vocatory drive (in which the voice is taken as an object). From the partial drives Lacan emphasises, one sees immediately that the gender of an object remains irrelevant to the drives’ basic functioning. Indeed, throughout his work Lacan remained dubious about the idea of a genital drive, and he was less optimistic than Freud sometimes seemed concerning the possibility of subordinating the partial drives to genitality at puberty. Lacan never was prepared to concede unequivocally the existence of a genital drive. As he concluded late in his career, “[a] drive, insofar as it represents sexuality in the unconscious, is never anything but a partial drive. That is the essential failing [carence], namely the absence [carence] of anything that could represent in the subject the mode of what is male and female in his being.”10 The drives’ partiality revokes heterosexuality at the level of the unconscious.
If, as far as the unconscious is concerned, it makes no sense to speak of heterosexual or homosexual object-choices, then a theory of subjectivity that takes the unconscious into account could be extremely useful from a queer perspective. Yet while Foucault’s project to rethink power as intentional but nonsubjective introduces formulations that are homologous with a de-individualized understanding of the unconscious, queer theory generally has been reluctant to take on board any psychoanalytic categories except those of imaginary ego formation. Queer theorists have developed subtle analyses of heterosexual ego defenses, unpacking the various strategies that heterosexual identity employs to maintain its integrity. But the full potential of Lacan’s radicalization of Freud has not yet been exploited by queer critique, which, in spite of its postmodernism, has tended to remain at a psychoanalytic level equivalent to that of Anna Freudianism. This disinclination to utilize Lacan may be explained in several ways, one of which has to do with the emphasis on psychic negativity that follows from understanding sexuality in terms of the unconscious and partial drives. Queer theory’s social utopianism – its desire to create a better world – often carries over into a misplaced utopianism of the psyche, as if improved social and political conditions could eliminate psychic conflict.
Freud’s partializing of the drive discredits not only the viability of sexual complementarity, but also the possibility of subjective harmony. In contrast to the functionality of sexual instinct, drive discloses the dysfunctionality of a subject at odds with itself as a result of symbolic existence. Characterized by repetition rather than by development, the drive does not necessarily work toward the subject’s well-being. In fact, its distance from organic rhythms means that the drive insists at the level of the unconscious even to the point of jeopardizing the subject’s life. For this reason, Lacan aligns the drive with death rather than life, claiming that “the drive, the partial drive, is profoundly a death drive and represents in itself the portion of death in the sexed living being” (S XI, p. 205). It bears repeating that the death drive is not an essentialist or organicist concept, since it derives from an inference about the effect of language on bodily matter; it is as cultural subjects that humans are afflicted with the death drive. There is no essential, inborn death drive; rather, the dysfunctional, antinaturalistic way in which partial drives fail to conduce toward life lends every drive an uncanny, death-like quality.
By conceptualizing human subjectivity in linguistic terms, Lacan divests Freud of the residual traces of biologism that persist in classical psychoanalysis. As part of this larger project, he develops psychic negativity – particularly the theory of the death drive – in terms of jouissance, a category technically absent in Freud’s oeuvre. Primary among the many meanings that this strictly untranslatable French term may be said to evoke is that which lies “beyond the pleasure principle.” Jouissance positivizes psychic negativity, revealing the paradoxical form of pleasure that may be found in suffering – for instance, the suffering caused by neurotic symptoms. As the death drive was for Freud, jouissance is an absolutely central concept for Lacan, though it too has been neglected in queer appropriations of French psychoanalysis. Queer theory, which has such an elaborate discourse of pleasure, shows little regard for what exceeds the pleasure principle. Although it emerged as a response to the AIDS crisis, queer theory has not shown itself especially adept at thinking about death as anything other than a terminus.11
This conceptual lacuna results in part from Foucault’s extensive work on the meaning and role of pleasure in Greek culture. The second volume of his History of Sexuality, The Use of Pleasure (1984), examines how erotic and other pleasures became objects of Greek ethical thought – that is, how pleasure (specifically, aphrodisia) became a matter for debate and reflection centuries before it became a question of law or prohibition.12 Part of what fascinates Foucault about Greek ethical discourse on pleasure is its difference from modern ideas about pleasure; in particular, he argues that although one’s handling of pleasure in Greek culture was subject to discussion, pleasures were not understood as indices of one’s identity. Greek ethical practice did not entail what Foucault calls a “hermeneutics of the self,” that is, a process of self-decipherment based on one’s erotic behavior. Skeptical about the deployment of theories of desire in understanding the self, Foucault counterposes to modern techniques of self-identification the elaborate Greek discourse on aphrodisia, in which self-fashioning didn’t depend on uncovering the self’s true desire. He thus develops an historical rationale for his introductory volume’s polemic, which famously concludes that “the rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures.”13
By arguing against the potentiality of any theory of desire, Foucault is attempting to situate his account of sexuality firmly outside a psychoanalytic framework. In order to do so, he positions desire as an irremediably psychological category and, more improbably, implies that pleasure is a category somehow exterior to psychoanalysis. Foucault wants to suggest that pleasure remains epistemologically distinct from desire – that, as Arnold I. Davidson puts it, “although we have no difficulty talking about and understanding the distinction between true and false desires, the idea of true and false pleasures . . . is conceptually misplaced. Pleasure is, as it were, exhausted by its surface; it can be intensified, increased, its qualities modified, but it does not have the psychological depth of desire.”14 From a psychoanalytic perspective, however, the distinction between true and false pleasures is precisely what the concept of jouissance addresses. The elementary idea of subjective division entails recognizing that one psychic agency may experience pleasure at the expense of another – that pleasure or satisfaction at the level of the unconscious may be registered as unpleasure by the ego.
Now the Freudian category of unpleasure is not exactly what Lacan means by jouissance; neither should we understand it simply as an especially intense form of aphrodisia, since jouissance is not a subset of pleasure. Rather, pleasure functions prophylactically in relation to jouissance, establishing a barrier or limit that protects the subject from what Lacan calls jouissance’s “infinitude” – a limitlessness that can overwhelm the subject to the point of extinction. Hence jouissance is not to be equated with the petite mort of orgasm, since the latter confers a pleasure and a limit that helps regulate jouissance. The existence of jouissance as infinitude – like the concept of the death drive – remains an inference that Lacan draws from subjectivity’s dependence on symbolic life: in the symbolic order, one’s jouissance is always already mostly evaporated. Thus Lacan develops Freud’s notion of subjective division in terms less of different parts of the mind (conscious, preconscious, unconscious; ego, id, super-ego) than of a subject constitutively alienated in the Other, where Other is understood not as another person or a social differential, but as an impersonal zone of alterity created by language. For Lacan there is no subject without an Other; and hence his theory of subjectivity de-individualizes our understanding of the subject, showing how subject is far more than a synonym for person.
The significance of this reconception of subjectivity lies in how the jouissance of the Other complicates individual pleasure. Our existence as subjects of language entails a self-division and loss of plenitude from which the Other is believed to be exempt. Having lost something, I imagine the Other as enjoying it; or, to put this another way, correlative to any sense of subjective incompleteness is the feeling that somebody somewhere has it better than me. This is what Lacan means by his phrase “the jouissance of the Other” – the suspicion that somebody else is having more fun than I am, and perhaps that whole classes of people are better off than me. Elsewhere jouissance appears unlimited, in contrast to the constrained pleasures that I am permitted to enjoy. Hence any experience of pleasure is intertwined with some supposition about jouissance, specifically, the Other’s jouissance. From this it follows that a commitment to the individual “pursuit of happiness” (as the 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 
i
ek 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 with the death instinct.”16 This remarkable passage provides another way to grasp the fundamentally psychoanalytic idea that for historical reasons we aim at jouissance through sex, even though jouissance comprehends more than what is meant by eros. Jouissance has as much to do with Thanatos as with Eros. Freud’s separation of sexuality from genitality – a separation that decisively loosens the grip of heteronormativity on our thinking – was reconceived by Lacan in terms of jouissance and l’ objet petit a. As the cause not the aim of desire, objet a deheterosexualizes desire by revealing its origin in the effects of language, rather than the effects of the opposite sex. His insistence that jouissance is not reducible to sex – like Foucault’s demonstration of the historically contingent relation that sex bears to identity – represents another way of pointing to the comparatively incidental place of genitalia in sexuality.
Hence the Lacanian category of jouissance could be extremely useful to the kinds of analysis that interest queer theory. Unfortunately, however, Foucault’s strategic account of pleasure has misled many US queer theorists into viewing pleasure optimistically, as if it weren’t complicated by jouissance and could be extended without encountering anything but ideological barriers. In other words, queer theory’s utopianism often pictures the obstacles to sexual happiness as wholly external, as if there were no internal limit to pleasure. (By “internal,” I mean in the sense not of psychologically inside a person, but inside the mechanism of pleasure itself – the mechanism whereby pleasure is understood as inseparable from the Other’s jouissance.) Developing a discourse about sex that focuses primarily on pleasure rather than on either biological reproduction or the reproduction of social norms remains a vital political enterprise. But it is awfully naive to imagine that sex could be a matter only of pleasure and self-affirmation, rather than a matter also of jouissance and negativity. If sex is to be understood in more than naturalistic terms, we will need to think about those forms of negativity that Freud named the unconscious and the death drive. To render political and cultural discourses on sex less naive would involve the considerable effort of reshaping those discourses according to psychoanalytic rather than psychological principles. This implies not a project of translating Anglo-American debates into Lacanian vocabulary, but the far more challenging enterprise of thinking about sex in terms of the queer logics that psychoanalysis makes available.
1. See Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological (1966) (New York: Zone Books, 1989).
2. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978), pp. 42–3.
3. Simon Watney, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
4. Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994).
5. See Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (New York: Random House, 1955) and Wilhelm Reich, The Function of the Orgasm: Sex-Economic Problems of Biological Energy, trans. Theodore P. Wolfe (New York: Noonday Press, 1961).
6. Michel Foucault, “The history of sexuality” (interview with Lucette Finas), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 186.
7. Arnold I. Davidson, “Foucault, psychoanalysis, and pleasure,” Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis, ed. Tim Dean and Christopher Lane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 44; original emphasis.
8. See S XI, esp. pp. 161–86; and Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
9. Freud makes this claim in a 1915 addition to a famous footnote in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (SE 7, p. 145).
10. Jacques Lacan, “Position of the unconscious,” trans. Bruce Fink, Reading Seminar XI: Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, eds. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, and Maire Jaanus (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), p. 276.
11. The principal exception to this general problem is Leo Bersani’s work; see especially Bersani, “Is the rectum a grave?” AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), pp. 197–222.
12. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1985).
13. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, p. 157.
14. Davidson, “Foucault, psychoanalysis, and pleasure,” p. 46.
15. See, for example, Slavoj iek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (New York: Verso, 1991).
16. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, p. 156.