new formations NUMBER 9 WINTER 1989

Slavoj Zizek

THE UNDERGROWTH OF ENJOYMENT:
HOW POPULAR CULTURE CAN SERVE AS AN INTRODUCTION TO LACAN

The English reception of Jacques Lacan, predominantly at least, has still not integrated all the consequences of the break marked by the seminar on Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959-60), a break which radically shifted the accent of his teaching: from the dialectics of desire to the inertia of enjoyment (jouissance), from the symptom as coded message to the sinthome as letter permeated with enjoyment, from the 'unconscious structured like a language' to the Thing in its heart, the irreducible kernel of jouissance that resists all symbolization.1 The aim of the present article is to exemplify some of the key motifs of this last stage of Lacanian theory via a reading of certain narratives borrowed from popular cinema and literature. What is proposed here is not some kind of 'applied psychoanalysis', a psychoanalytic reading of the products of culture, but on the contrary the articulation of some of the fundamental concepts of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory (gaze and voice as objects; the frontier separating reality from the Real; the role of the 'answer of the Real' in the production of the meaning-effect; rendu and sinthome) by the use of examples taken from popular culture, and first from the cinema. Why cinema? The use of the Lacanian theoretical apparatus in film theory is well known, and has been especially influential in Britain, from the suture theories of Screen in the 1970s to the feminist explorations indebted especially to the concepts of fantasy and identification. The Lacan who served as a point of reference for these theories, however, was the Lacan before the break; and it is only in French film theory over the last decade that a shift has occurred which corresponds (and has perhaps been directly indebted) to the late turn in Lacanian teaching; a turn that could be summarized concisely by the formula: 'from the