Jouissante substance

subversion and Lacanian resolution in the clinic and in the city of discourses

Abstract

This article reflects on the concept of jouissante substance, elaborated by Lacan in The Seminar, Book 20, and its inscription in the clinical and discursive field, and the subversion and resolution of the concept represent for human and psychoanalytic knowledge. The knowledge of modern science, created by Descartes, and the split between res cogitans and res extensa, left indelible marks, kept the body foreclosed from science and created a discursive dichotomy. The intimate relationship between science and capitalism is responsible for promoting a double rejection - of the subject and of jouissance. As an effect of this alliance, Lacan, in 1966, a year before designating the “generalised child”, highlights the progressive increase in the “epistemosomatic fault”, an expression that exposes the epistemic gap and the disjunctive character between knowledge and truth, in which jouissance is installed. The jouissante substance, motivated by the logic of the philosophers of the Abbey of Port-Royal, was the path Lacan found to subvert the Cartesian model - to point out that there is another way of doing science - and to resolve what he called the “error about being”, insofar as it rescues and includes jouissance at the center of the analytical experience and banishes the body from the place of the impossible. The purpose of the article is to reflect on “subjects reduced to pieces of bodies scrutinised by discourses” and also to extract the consequences of the jouissante substance.