Jouissance

Jouissance as the First Moment of Emergence

What is the experience of emerging from this indeterminacy to difference?  What happens when a being emerges, what happens in the first moment of separation? This moment is jouissance, or naive, innocent enjoyment. This is the experience of living from… I become individualized by the experience of my needs. The way for me to become independent is to become dependent on the things outside me, which are good. This dependence is not experienced as a lack.

Living from . . . is not as means to an end

What do we say when we say we ‘live from. . .’? This is not living as means, but living immediately from. When we eat our favourite food, we don’t think of it as a means to an end but we just enjoy it.  He describes a way of living that is more than means-end. You talk to someone not because you need information, but because you enjoy talking to the person. You visit someone not because you need a favour, but that it is just good to be with that person. In the morning, just the scent of brewed coffee rouses you not because it’s a means to an end but because it’s good to drink and to smell coffee.

This is different from what Heidegger says; Heidegger thinks of things as tools and implements. For him, it’s always a means and a relation. Sometimes, we conduct things in our lives merely as means to an end.

Need here is not experienced as a lack. Levinas does not refer to someone in the desert who will die if he does not eat—bread in that situation really becomes a lack. Levinas speaks of the goodness of things, and the happiness of having needs.  It is good to have needs. The human being is happy for his needs.

In jouissance, there is no reflexivity yet, neither is it conceptualized or thought-out. One does not have a goal yet. It’s something that always natural.

There are two things which come up. First, there are good terrestrial nourishments. It’s good to be alive; we have to depend on the earth. There are fruits of the earth that is very good, but this is limited because you cannot just appropriate everything. Our needs will have to be limited.

Second, we see that while it is good to take things, people are not nourishments. I mean, I do not go to somebody just to take something, then I am making use of the other—I am cannibalizing the other. I am only treating the other merely as a means to an end. It’s not a naive and innocent enjoyment.

Sharing the good things

It is good to nourish oneself and it is good to feel alive. If it is really good to experience that, maybe there is even a greater good when you share it with other people. We are not told to abstain from the good things of the Earth; but that the good things of the earth must be shared. You try to share your blessings with other people. This will come when you become aware that the I is not just for itself, but for the Other. This is the idea that this being is fundamentally a being for the Other.

 

Escape

Bourgeoisie Mentality

Let’s begin with il y a; in order to become a particular being, Levinas imagined it must have taken a certain amount of effort to be in being. For Levinas, to continue to be is to fight for your space. It’s the struggle for the strongest. Society is about being sufficient, and therefore it is not concerned about the weak. If you are weak, then you are the damage that has to be sacrificed.

We are starting from the indetermination and there is an escape from il y a but there will also be another escape from Being. What is this escape all about? The book, On Escape, is divided into 8 sections; the first section is the critique of the bourgeoisie society, whose idea of being is self-sufficiency. You are bourgeois if you are afraid of always losing and you must assure that you must have always have enough for tomorrow.

Levinas does a phenomenology of need, pleasure, shame and nausea. What is fascinating here is that he articulates a very important experience of the human being. There is infinity inside us but it is present as absent and the absence is experienced as restlessness. Somebody who interprets restlessness as for wealth, power, or esteem will never have enough of it.

Nausea and Escape

Nausea shows the presence of being in all its powerlessness. It’s the powerlessness to get out. Being is not about limitation. Being has nothing to do with imperfection; the fact that it is is already perfect and you cannot add anything more to it. He will try to describe how we experience this need to escape. We experience nausea or unease. It’s a continuation of the metaphysical unease. He also uses the word malaise. When you’re not feeling well, you feel nausea, the only way to feel well is to vomit or to take it out.

Escape is not the quest for the marvellous, nor the quest for many lives. It is not an escape because my life feels constricted. It’s not an escape from constraining economic realities. It’s not a revolt against social convention and it’s not a search for refuge. This escape is not a quest for the creative, nor nostalgia for death. Escape is prompted by that feeling that that being you becomes a prison.

Need

Levinas says that there is this restlessness—something in us which wants to go out. He speaks of this as a need. A need is normally understood as a lack, if we need food and that means we lack food. The need is satisfied and filled up.

However, Levinas speaks of need in a different sense; he means a need beyond need. This need beyond need is one that cannot be satisfied or be filled up.

Later on in his studies, Levinas will make the distinction between need and Desire; needs are things that I take in.  The need beyond need is Desire. When we are thirsty, we take in water or any beverage. But we don’t relate to people on this level. We don’t need people. We don’t relate to them as if they are objects, we don’t try to use them or assimilate them. Desire is about being pushed to go out of oneself.

There is this ‘need’ is not a lack or a privation. He shows a concrete example of need, which is pleasure.

Pleasure

Pleasure appears as it develops; it is gradual development. This is a movement that does not tend toward a goal; it exists wholly in the enlargement of its amplitude. The human being feels his substance draining from itself. Pleasure is always a getting out, but it always betrays us because it’s not really going out. It’s a false going out. We try to get out and we try to get out through pleasure but pleasure was a disappointment.

Shame

Shame is the fact that one is bound to oneself, that one cannot run away from one’s self.