Jouissance and affective neuroscience: a critical neuropsychoanalytic integration

Abstract

ABSTRACT Jouissance is a multifaceted Lacanian concept that refers to a paradoxical blend of pleasure and unpleasure, an excess of pleasure that becomes traumatic. While jouissance appears as a pinnacle of Lacanian theoretical complexity, it has been critiqued as a nebulous descriptor that shuts down questions rather than deepening rigor. Specifically, Darian Leader has charged the Lacanian use of jouissance as theoretically imprecise, ignoring vicissitudes of bodily innervation, obscuring the relationship with the Other, and implicitly maintaining problematic Freudian quantitative, homeostatic ideas. I propose that affective neuroscience, when interpreted within a Lacanian neuropsychoanalytic framework, offers tools to answer some of these critiques of jouissance. At the same time, an integration of jouissance with affective neuroscience draws out radical perspectives in neuropsychoanalysis – specifically against a straightforward application of homeostasis – that demonstrate the importance of maintaining the concept of jouissance as excess. This article attempts to advance interdisciplinary dialogue in Lacanian neuropsychoanalysis.