Have you ever had so much fun that you thought your head was going to explode?
Yeah, about three times in a lifetime, right?
This very dilemma – the thin line between extreme pleasure and profound suffering – was the ice that neo-Freudian French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan skated on.
Let’s say you know that your limit of beer that you can enjoy is four a night.
Four is good. You feel tipsy and loose, and your friends seem to like you more. Three, eh, not so much. Two? Naw, you might as well be drinking water.
Five? Six? Eighteen, like in college once, when security had to rush you to the health center and the dean required that you attend Alcoholism Awareness counseling sessions for the next six semesters? No. There are consequences the next day. At the very least you feel vaguely covid-like and muzzy.
But please note that drinking four beers a night is no ticket to an orgasm. It’s good, but your head doesn’t explode with joy. It’s kind of normal. It’s your steady state-of-being.
That modest steady state IS THE MOST FUN YOU AND ANY OTHER HUMAN BEING CAN EVER HAVE, according to Lacan, at least as I read him.
You have to balance fun with consequences. It’s the basic problem with being human. And even a lifetime of four nice beers a night is probably too many for your longterm “fun”, as public health officials take constant delight in reminding us.
We’re built to enjoy as little as possible. But our friend Mr. Capitalism and his enforcer, Mr. Mad Man Ad Man, make us continually test our limits.
The System tells us that our sole job in life is to find the next thing, the better thing. As soon as you push your financial limits trying product A, as seen in the photo of Hell shown below, you wish you’d chosen product B below:
btw, remember Kodak?
Ads make you desire the next thing, which must be better than your current thing. But we don’t need ads, because we’re desiring machines. I desire the best fruit at the fruit stand. We all do. Advertisers latch onto that natural desire like lamprey, and goose it.
And it’s not just advertising. It’s reviews. It’s Amazon reviews, it’s book reviews – sometimes this site! – it’s car reviews, it’s audio reviews, it’s hobby websites, it’s your friends’ opinions over coffee, whatever.
They are all opinions. Another name for an opinion is a lie. A lie is an individual opinion that you may not know that you don’t share until you blow right past pleasure and into pain.
“She’s great in bed!” says your friend.
You somehow manage to incur her favor and then seduce her.
Pleasure?
No, pain, because you picked up bedbugs (or worse) at her place. Or because she’s like a dead eel in bed. Or because her feet were too cold.
And even if she was Maximum Allowable Fun – like four beers are – there’s an insidious part of you that says, like Saul Bellow’s Henderson, “I want. I want.” More.
Meaning, yeah, she was great. We had fun. But my head didn’t explode. So to speak. So you go off in search of a better product.
I avoid putting my own photographs on my laptop desktop because I find them almost painfully good. Not because I’m a great photographer but because they give me so much pleasure. Some of the time. Same thing with my paintings. It almost hurts. Looking at them is almost too pleasurable. More than I can stand. Some people feel that way about their kids or grandkids, or dogs or cats.
We all love what we love.
Lacan calls this intense love, this pleasure that is the most pleasure we can stand without our heads blowing up (or without crying, or at least tearing up) “jouissance” .
Unfortunately, we are condemned to await the next, “better” grandkid. It’s only human.
