Self-Transgressive Enjoyment as a Freedom Fetter

Abstract

This article explores the implications that a particular psychoanalytic insight carries for thinking about freedom in general and Charles Taylor's approach to freedom in particular. Courtesy of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, this insight supplies a logic of enjoyment to explain an aspect of the problem of self-transgression – a problem summarising those situations in which a subject appears both to affirm an ideal and, at the same time, systematically to transgress it. This insight points to a generally neglected source of unfreedom or ‘freedom fetter’ – what I call self-transgressive enjoyment. My argument is that Taylor's account of freedom and its fetters captures something important about the dimension of self-transgressive enjoyment, but that it finds it difficult to elucidate and accommodate what is ultimately at stake in this psychoanalytically informed conception of unfreedom.