The civilizing of subjects necessitates their founding sacrifice (or “castration”) of jouissance,(joy. pleasure) enacted in the name of sociopolitical Law or in paranoid language persecutory Other, (like that archetypal villain in noir films)
Subjects, to the extent that they are civilized, are “cut” from the primal object of their desire. Instead, they are forced by social Law to pursue this special, lost Thing Each political regime has a body of more or less explicit, usually written Laws which demand that subjects forego jouissance in the name of the greater good. But who deems what is the 'good'?
by observing their societies’ linguistically mediated conventions, deferring satisfaction, and accepting sexual and generational difference. Subjects’ “fundamental fantasies,” according to Lacan, are unconscious structures which allow them to accept the traumatic loss involved in this founding sacrifice.
In order to be effective, a regime’s explicit Laws must also harbor and conceal a darker underside, a set of more or less unspoken rules which, far from simply repressing jouissance, implicate subjects in a guilty enjoyment in repression itself not a million miles away for the masochistic “pleasure-in-pain” as we purge expunge all that is 'bad' from our consciousness as our subconscious urges us to revolt.
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