The Jouissance of Language, or Lacan’s Ab-Aristotelianism
This chapter looks at the various negations involved in the “other” of meaning, beyond the philosophically comfortable couple sense/nonsense(Freud’s analysis of jokes as the Unsinn in Sinn), and toward a theorization ofsomething closer to Lacan’s real, as “ab-sense.”This underscores the importance of lack as a foundation of desire—Lacan’s famous dictum “there is no such thing as a sexual relationship”—and as a founding principle of “otherness” within language and between languages. A reading of a passage in Democritus points to the way in which this radical otherness of language undermines the very foundation of materialist physics, just as Lacan undermines rationalist models of contemporary science.This in turn becomes a meditation on the nature of feminine sexuality and jouissance, particularly in Lacan’s most important seminar devoted to this question, Encore.