[Michel Foucault. Jacques Lacan.] Someone, I think it was me, once said: “Two French dispshits philosophizing about pleasure could create enough fertilizer for all of the farms in the south of France, with just a little left over for the Tuileries.”

Jouissance. It's a French word that means pleasure. But wait folks, there's more! It also means enjoyment in rights and property. [1] And orgasm. Satisfaction? Oh, it's wayyy beyond that! In fact, it can be SO swell it can be downright painful. [1-a] It's complicated! [2] Anyhoo, did you know that every day people leave Jouissance just lying around? Unused? The fancy French philosopher Jacques Lacan called this SURPLUS JOUISSANCE (plus-de-jouir). [3] Before, there was nothing to be done but let all of that surplus Jouissance float out into space. That is, until now. Based on the theories of Michel Foucault [4] & Jacques, [5] FOOL CO. has found a way to trap all of that surplus jouissance in Ghostbusters-like containment vessels, then we store it in our warehouse and pass the Jouissance [6] on to you!! (Note: The location of FOOL CO. is a lacuna, and its "true" locus cannot be determined because a European system of cartography privileges itself over other cultural methods of discovery (such as the Aboriginal Walkabout). GPS and maps are a cultural text. Deconstruction [7] demands a deeper reading of the fallacy of location because it is restrained in meaning as a signifier of cultural hegemony.)

FOOL CO. IS OPEN ALL DAY SATURDAY!

FOOTNOTES

1. Americans have a different term for jouissance. It is known as “fuck-you money.”

1-a. Transgressing the pleasure principle, according to Lacan, is not more pleasure but 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. (possibly also known as les balles bleues!)

2. Lacan also linked jouissance to the castration complex, the death drive, and probably cocaine as well because––Freud!

3. Note the cute and phony conflation of Marx’s notion of surplus value! By the way, My friend W**** subsisted on boiled lentils and paid actual earned income to see a Lacanian psychoanalyst biweekly. This is known in Lacanian therapy as transference in which the marks’ bank account is “transferred” into the Credit Suisse portfolio of the bullshitter-with-a- glorified-comparative-literature-degree. In this case, all of the surplus jouissance was entirely on the “doctor’s” side of the ledger.

4. Foucault was highly influenced by the American philosopher and dorsal acrobat GG Allin (1956-1993) who sang: “You got cancer, so go f***in’ die. If ya got AIDS spread it around and take some lives. Die when you die when you die you’re gonna die.”

5. Lacan considered that jouissance is essentially phallic. In his seminar "Encore: plus de merde s'il vous plait!” 1972–1973 (That must have been one long seminar!) Lacan introduced the idea of specifically feminine jouissance, saying that women have “a supplementary jouissance...a jouissance of the body which is...beyond the phallus." This feminine jouissance is ineffable, for both women and men may experience it but know nothing about it. Or––simply expressed––Lacan hated women.

6. Many billionaires exhibit symptoms of jouissance, i.e., the pleasure of surplus wealth makes them colossal assholes. Witness early mornings on propaganda networks CNBC or Fox Business, when retired and hideously ugly CEOs are given a public therapy couch to whine about Obama and taxes and generally make fools of themselves.

7. Poststructuralism has developed the meaning of jouissance to denote transgressive, excessive forms of pleasure as a license for male authors to write plotless books about doing blow, copulating multifariously, violent outbursts, driving cars off the road and generally behaving like jerky assholes as a profound exercise in total existentialism. (Or, as Genet put it, “crime affirms existence" while simultaneously providing lawyers work crafting non-disclosure agreements.)

Noam Chomsky on Jacques Lacan: “Jacques Lacan I actually knew…But quite frankly I thought he was a total charlatan. He was just posturing for the television cameras in the way many Paris intellectuals do. Why this is influential, I haven’t the slightest idea. I don’t see anything there that should be influential.”

The above footnotes are a parody of some of the Wikipedia entries on jouissance. This is post postmodern humor: a satire of codswallop, hokum, and bunk. Academic obscurantism smacks of a highbrow version of the revelations of L. Ron Hubbard: inspeak, jargon, neologisms, cult devotion, and ritualized thought disorders that evade confrontation while at the same time claiming to be therapeutic and profound. It also reminds me of the Breitbart-Bannon post-fact Trumpery. Not so deep when the other side embraces it, eh? How did postwar French “continental” intellectuals devolve into a daffy stew of solemn absurdity? Tom Wolfe and others have surmised this initial motivation:

Richard Dawkins debunks further here:

http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/dawkins.html