What is surplus enjoyment?

Slavoj Žižek, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Slavoj Žižek answers

Enjoyment, in the Lacanian sense, is not simply pleasure — and this distinction is the whole point. Pleasure operates according to the homeostatic logic of the pleasure principle: you are hungry, you eat, the tension is discharged, equilibrium restored. Jouissance is what exceeds this logic, what persists beyond the point where pleasure should have stopped, what the subject keeps circling back to even when — especially when — it hurts.1

The basic paradox is that jouissance is simultaneously impossible and unavoidable. It is never fully achieved, always missed, and yet we cannot simply renounce it — because every renunciation of enjoyment generates an enjoyment in renunciation, every obstacle to desire generates a desire for the obstacle.2 This reversal is the minimal definition of surplus-enjoyment: a paradoxical pleasure in pain, a gain produced by the very detour the subject takes around what it wants.

The structural homology with Marx is what gave Lacan the precise vocabulary. Surplus-value (Mehrwert) is the value extracted over and above what labor-power costs to reproduce; surplus-enjoyment (plus-de-jouir, Mehrlust) is the additional enjoyment produced by the formal detours in the subject's effort to attain pleasure — not a simple intensification but a qualitatively different register, an excess generated by the very machinery of seeking.3

Modern capitalism illustrates this perfectly: it begins with counting the pleasure of gaining profit, and this counting of pleasure immediately reverts into the pleasure of counting profit.4 The crucial thing about objet petit a — the Lacanian name for this surplus — is that it exists in a kind of curved space: the nearer you get to it, the more it eludes your grasp; the more you possess it, the greater the lack.5

Diet Coke is my favorite example here. You drink the caffeine-free, sugar-free version — you drink, in effect, the Nothingness itself, the pure semblance of a property that is merely an envelope of a void. And yet the thirst is not quenched; it intensifies. The more Coke you drink, the thirstier you are. The more profit you make, the more you want.

The more you obey the superego command, the guiltier you feel.6 This is the logic that is the very opposite of love — Juliet says to Romeo, "the more I give, the more I have." Surplus-enjoyment runs in the opposite direction: the more you have what you long for, the more you lack. And here the superego enters, because Lacan equates jouissance with superego: to enjoy is not to follow spontaneous inclination but to perform a weird, twisted ethical duty.7

The superego does not simply forbid — it commands enjoyment, and it is this command that produces the obscene surplus. Power holds us not only through repression and fear of punishment, but by bribing us for our obedience: what we receive in exchange for renunciation is a perverted pleasure in renunciation itself, a gain lodged in the very loss.8

There is no basic, temperate enjoyment to which surplus is then added — enjoyment is always already a surplus, always in excess of itself.9

Sources

  1. what is 'beyond the pleasure principle' is enjoyment itself, the drive as such. The basic paradox of jouissance is that it is both impossible and unavoidable: it is never fully achieved, always missed, but, simultaneously, we never can get rid of it
    Less Than Nothing, p. 319
  2. every renunciation of enjoyment generates an enjoyment in renunciation, every obstacle to desire generates a desire for an obstacle, and so on. This reversal provides the minimal definition of surplus-enjoyment: it involves a paradoxical 'pleasure in pain.'
    Less Than Nothing, p. 319
  3. the predominant motif which permeates all Lacan's references to Marx's analysis of commodities is the structural homology between Marx's surplus-value and what Lacan baptized surplus-enjoyment, the phenomenon called by Freud Lustgewinn, a 'gain of pleasure,' which does not designate a simple stepping up of pleasure but the additional pleasure provided by the very formal detours in the subject's effort to attain pleasure.
    Goads and Prods
  4. modern capitalism began with counting the pleasure (of gaining profit), and this counting of pleasure immediately reverts into the pleasure of counting (profit).
    Goads and Prods
  5. the objet petit a, which exists (or, rather, persists) in a kind of curved space - the nearer you get to it, the more it eludes your grasp (or the more you possess it, the greater the lack).
    The Fragile Absolute, pp. 51–52
  6. the more Coke you drink, the thirstier you are; the more profit you make, the more you want; the more you obey the superego command, the guiltier you are
    The Fragile Absolute, pp. 51–52
  7. Lacan, however, posited an equation between jouissance and superego: to enjoy is not a matter of following one's spontaneous tendencies; it is rather something we do as a kind of weird and twisted ethical duty.
    Goads and Prods
  8. power asserts its hold over us not simply by oppression (and repression) which are sustained by a fear of punishment, but by bribing us for our obedience and enforced renunciations - what we get in exchange for our obedience and renunciations is a perverted pleasure in renunciation itself, a gain in loss itself.
    Goads and Prods
  9. Surplus-enjoyment implies the paradox of a thing which is always (and nothing but) an excess with regard to itself: in its 'normal' state, it is nothing... there is no 'basic enjoyment' to which one adds the surplus-enjoyment, enjoyment is always a surplus, in excess.
    Goads and Prods