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Jouissance, a series of photographs made during Ksenija Jovišević’s stay in Beijing in winter 2019/2020 is now available in print.

Jouissance :: In French, jouissance means enjoyment, in terms both of rights and property, and of sexual orgasm. The latter has a meaning partially lacking in the English word “enjoyment”. English editions of the works of Jacques Lacan have generally left jouissance untranslated in order to help convey its specialised usage.

Lacan considered that “there is a jouissance beyond the pleasure principle” linked to the partial drive; a jouissance which compels the subject to constantly attempt to transgress the prohibitions imposed on his enjoyment, to go beyond the pleasure principle. *Yet according to Lacan, the result of transgressing the pleasure principle is not more pleasure, but instead pain, since there is only a certain amount of pleasure that the subject can bear. Beyond this limit, pleasure becomes pain, and this “painful principle” is what Lacan calls jouissance. Lacan also linked jouissance to the castration complex, and to the aggression of the death drive.

Life itself, as he describes it at one point, is simply an “apparatus of jouissance” ***