From the Ethics of Pleasure to the Ethics of Jouissance
From the Ethics of Pleasure to the Ethics of Jouissance

Summary/Abstract: I will try to address here several questions about issues such as pleasure, (the) good, reality, and (feminine) jouissance, guided in that endeavor by the psychoanalytical discourse and practice. If the main purpose of human life, as Freud argues, is the search for some sort of happiness, clinical experience shows that for any particular individual, the question of the good and that of pleasure are quite distinct. « … The pleasure principle … is nothing else than the dominance of the signifier », writes J. Lacan. Jouissance is that supplement to pleasure which is also transgressive of it. The best description for what jouissance is can be called the void, the chaos which render pleasure and the signifier inconsistent and incomplete. There are several types of jouissance, most of them called phallic. The Other jouissance or feminine jouissance, “not-all phallic” (Lacan), is related to that void. It is synonymous to a particular ethics of the void, a “chaosmotic” ethics (in Joyce’s term), distinct from a “cosmic” ethics which would be that of pleasure and of the signifier

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