Refashioning Jouissance for the Age of the Imaginary

Abstract

Using contemporary fashion (both “high” and “low”) as my focus for analysis, I apply Lacan’s insight that sexual difference (feminine/masculine) is an effect of divergent psychical and bodily logics that guide a subject’s relation to jouissance. I point out Lacan’s growing reliance on Freud’s 1921 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (which demonstrated the pressure for group conformity in dress, and overcoming gender distinctions) for his understanding of sexual difference in relation to social order. I point out that Lacan used Freud’s vision of an ego-based rather than a subject-based society for his analysis of capitalist/university discourse in his 1969 Seminar XVII; and I argue that Freud’s text also inspired Lacan’s subsequent exploration of the logic of femininity (a heretofore neglected topic) in Seminar XX 1972-3 and in Télévision in 1975. Late Lacan thus grounds my argument that postmodern/capitalist culture is dominated in its management of enjoyment – its ethos, its economics and its fashions – by only the masculine model for jouissance. I ask that we consider entertaining ideas about what forming our culture on the feminine model of jouissance might be like.