This article aims to define the conceptual field of jouissance in Lacanian theory, and put forth the hypothesis of a relationship between certain neurophysiological mechanisms and specific clinical phenomena where jouissance is "kindled" and outside the control of the symbolic process. First, the author briefly introduces Lacan's notion of jouissance and the way it draws on Freud's theorization...

Jouissance is a Lacanian concept, infamous for being impervious to understanding and which expresses the paradoxical satisfaction that a subject may derive from his symptom. On the basis of Freud's "experience of satisfaction" we have proposed a first working definition of jouissance as the (benefit gained from) the motor tension underlying the action which was [once] adequate in bringing relie...

In his paper, "Asian-American Literature and a Lacanian Reading of Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey," Fu-jen Chen explores the protagonist's subjective progression into the post-Symbolic Real in Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey -from subject as Demand, through subject as Desire, to subject as jouissance. Tripmaster Monkey records Ah Sing's transformation from a racial paranoiac at the begin...

The paper explores a number of Lacanian ideas that the author has found to be clinically useful. These ideas include traversing the fundamental fantasy, the notion of objet a and the sinthome. The paper particularly focuses on the notion of desire and jouissance, as it is the economy of these that is at stake in the structure of the three forms of psychopathology recognised by Lacan viz psychos...

The article aims at showing how, in Hardy’s fiction, all sound aspires to the condition of silence.For example in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, sounds are very often conveyed as visual impressions, andTess’s voice is hardly every heard – her voice seems choked, throttled, “stuck in her throat”. Thearticle also examines Far from the Madding Crowd and the import of the voice, of silence,...