Love and Pleasure Seminar

The " Literature and Psychoanalysis " seminar is run jointly by teachers from the Modern Literature department and the Clinical Psychology department of Aix-Marseille Université's ALLSH Faculty. The topic chosen for the autumn 2019 semester is " Amour et Jouissance ".

Thibaud receives the ring (Roman de la poire, Bnf Fr2186 4v)

Presentation

The deal might seem to be done :

What more literary theme than love, which we encounter at the birth of Greek pastoral poetry, then of medieval lyric poetry, which orders all the great novelistic narratives, and constitutes the central issue of the classical theatrical plot, both when it comes to reuniting young lovers in comedy and when it devastates tragic lovers to the death ? Love, for literature, is much more than an amorous discourse : it establishes, or presupposes, between lovers, a correspondence : at the very least a mute connivance, but more often an exchange, a dialogue, the establishment of a relationship. Yet precisely in this relationship something does not correspond : from this non-correspondence in correspondence is born literature.

Le premier baiser de l'amour (La Nouvelle Héloïse, Rey 1761 fig1) - Gravelot

On the other hand, what more central concept, in psychoanalysis, than that of jouissance¹, first with Freud who in Beyond the Pleasure Principlereelaborates Fechner's Lustprinzip, then with Lacan, who, as early as the first seminar in 1954, makes jouissance a category he opposes to movement, to the surpassing of love in joy² ? The category of jouissance then gradually asserts itself in Lacanian discourse, and forms the starting point of Seminar XX, Encore, where Lacan assumes his listeners to be in bed and amuses himself by doing so on the premises of a law faculty : " I won't take my eyes off that bed today, and will remind the jurist that, basically, law speaks of what I'm about to talk to you about - jouissance³. " In jouissance, the Other finally seems tamed, dominated, circumvented : yet it escapes, in the way that, in the written word, and more specifically in the letter, in the love letter, something escapes representation, expression. To the demand for love corresponds the impossible expression of a jouissance, the jouissance of La femme.

If there is a literary thought of love and an analytic theory of jouissance, how and why do they correspond / don't they correspond ? It would be pointless to oppose a literary discourse of love, a surface, a veneer, and beneath this discourse a psychoanalytic category of jouissance. On the contrary, the theoretical affirmation of a discourse on jouissance appears to be nourished by an underlying creative practice, the poetic practice of love correspondence, where it finds its models and the figures of its formalization. And reciprocally (or dissymmetrically), love correspondence, put to work by literature as non-correspondence, is nourished by an analytic experience linked to an unsatisfied demand, a failure of jouissance, or a nostalgia, or a hope without hope. /// constantly postponed or frustrated.

The aim of this seminar will be to interrogate this double correspondence (that which constitutes the love relationship and that which articulates literature and psychoanalysis), and to deconstruct it.

Schedules and rooms

Bibliography

• Guido Cavalcanti, Rimes, trans. Christian Bec, Imprimerie nationale Éditions, 1993
• J. Derrida, La Carte postale. De Socrate à Freud et au-delà, Flammarion, 1980, reed. 2004
• S. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. J. P. Lefebvre, Seuil, Points-Essais, 2014
• J. Lacan, Le Séminaire, book XX, Encore. 1972-1973, ed. J. A. /// Miller, Seuil, 1975, Points Essais, 2016
• Jacques Roubaud, Les Troubadours, bilingual anthology, Seghers, 1980
• Denis de Rougemont, L'Amour et l'Occident [1933], 10/18, 1972, reed. 2001
• Rousseau, Julie ou La Nouvelle Héloïse. Lettres de deux amants habitants d'une petite ville au pied des Alpes, ed. E. Leborgne and F. Lotterie, GF Flammarion, 2018

Notes

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