Mystical Jouissance

Mystical Jouissance names the specific mode of enjoyment Lacan identifies in the testimony of the mystic: an enjoyment that is undergone, felt, traversed — yet about which the subject can report nothing. It is not ignorance in the ordinary epistemic sense, but a structural impossibility of knowledge: the jouissance is Real, yet it leaves no signifiable residue in the Symbolic. Lacan situates this experience precisely at the structural position of the "not-all" (pas-tout) — the side of feminine sexuation that is not wholly submitted to the phallic function and therefore opens onto an Other jouissance beyond the phallic, beyond the pleasure principle, beyond what can be articulated in the chain of signifiers.

This jouissance is thus doubly impossible: impossible to represent (it does not pass through the defiles of the signifying chain and leaves no coded message at the level of the big Other), and impossible to integrate into the fantasy ($◇a), which is precisely the barred subject's only available route of access to the Other. The mystic's experience stands as the limit-case testimony to this foreclosure of knowledge: it cannot be elaborated as knowledge (S2), cannot be captured in any discourse, yet it insists as an enjoyment that is undeniably experienced. This is why Lacan can take mystical "jaculations" seriously as theoretical evidence — they are not symptoms of delusion but the most honest available report of what it is like to be on the side of the not-all and to brush against the Real of the sexual non-relation without the protective screen of fantasy.

In jacques-lacan-seminar-20-cormac-gallagher (Seminar XX, Encore, 1972–73), Mystical Jouissance appears at the pivotal juncture where Lacan introduces the formulas of sexuation and elaborates the distinction between phallic jouissance and the supplementary, Other jouissance available to the feminine side. It is therefore an extension and specification of the canonical concept of Jouissance — not jouissance in general, but jouissance in its most radical form: the form that exceeds the pleasure principle (the "Beyond") and that cannot be metabolised by knowledge or by fantasy. The relationship to the Beyond is structural: as the Beyond canonical definition establishes, the late Lacanian "beyond" is precisely the dimension of jouissance that forces the homeostasis of the pleasure principle and exposes an "other reality"; Mystical Jouissance is the experiential — and for Lacan, empirically documented — instantiation of exactly that forcing.

The concept also stands in a precise negative relation to Fantasy ($◇a) and to Knowledge (S2). Fantasy is the barred subject's only available mediation with the Other; the mystic's experience is remarkable because it bypasses this mediation entirely, delivering the subject to the Other without the screen. Equally, the Graph of Desire and the Four Discourses both presuppose that jouissance is at least partially regulated and produced through the structure of discourse and the signifying chain — Mystical Jouissance marks the point where this regulation fails or is simply absent. And where Castration designates the structural loss of jouissance entailed by entry into the Symbolic (the constitutive minus that makes desire possible), Mystical Jouissance names a remainder or surplus that evades even that structural accounting — a jouissance that castration cannot fully subtract, localise, or signify, and which the mystic's "not knowing" faithfully, if paradoxically, attests.

Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and KnowledgeJacques Lacan · 1972 (p.153)

the essential testimony of the mystic, is precisely to say that: that they experience it but that they do not know anything about it… these mystical jaculations which are in short some of the best things one can read

The phrase "they experience it but they do not know anything about it" crystallises the structural disjunction between jouissance (in the Real) and knowledge (in the Symbolic) that is the theoretical core of Seminar XX: the copresence of "experience" and absolute epistemic void ("know nothing about it") is not a deficiency but the very signature of a jouissance that exceeds the signifying chain, making the mystic's "jaculations" — utterances that are cries rather than propositions — the only honest testimony available to the not-all.