Other Jouissance

This paper traces Jacques Lacan’s theory of jouissance in James Joyce’s Exiles . According to Lacan, there are two kinds of jouissance, namely phallic and Other. The former is achievable through desire for different things in the Symbolic order while the latter is beyond the given order and can be attained through particular activities in sinthome . All major characters of the play are involved with jouissance in one way or another.  Richard Rowan as the major character in the play has got along with phallic jouissance and he is trying to move toward the Other jouissance via denial of the Symbolic order and dedication of his time to writing. After living in exile for years and experiencing the pleasures of the phallic jouissance, he is back to find a solution to his problem with the Symbolic order. The jouissance beyond the phallic one for Richard lies in writing which turns out to be his sinthome . An untextualized writing is considered to be Richard’s sinthome that opens up the path toward Other jouissance for him. 

The present article investigates Emily Dickinson's poem "I taste a liquor never brewed" and aims to solve the confusion of scholars that struggled to specify the precise meaning of some of the terms in the text and fully appreciate the psychic dynamics of it in terms of Lacanian psychoanalysis. The first question the article asks is how is 'desire' represented, and the second is whether the speaker of the poem longs for an 'Other jouissance.' In Seminar XX, Lacan defines Other jouissance as the most intense and ineffable kind and equals it to the jouissance of the mystics. Desire, in Lacanian teachings, is unattainable and an inevitable consequence of language. The famous Lacanian maxims "desire is the desire of the Other," and the "Other is the treasure trove of signifiers" indicate that desire could be represented through signifiers. The article integrates These Lacanian notions in Paul Ricoeur's three-staged hermeneutic Arc, which consists of 1) explanation, 2) understanding, and 3) appropriation. The poem will undergo these three stages of interpretation. By the end of the last stage, the world of the text is appropriated by the selected Lacanian notions. The results of the study are the following: 1) the poem is unique in displaying what Lacan termed 'Other jouissance,' 2) it demonstrates an intense desire for a supreme being—the Other, 3) desire is explicitly named in the poem: it is manifested explicitly in the words ‘liquor," tankards," Alcohol," inebriate," debauchee," drams," drink," little tippler.'