The Jouissance of the Violent Other

This chapter develops the Lacanian concepts of jouissance and the Other to conceptualise the jouissance of the Other. Jouissance , a term often mistranslated as “enjoyment,” designates the obscene and necessarily unacknowledged lengths to which the subject must go to sustain desire in an object or, crucially, in the scene of the object&s;s attainment by another. This process is transformative, and it is often violently disruptive. This chapter explores the role of jouissance in different types of racism (subtle and overt). The first mode of racism appears sympathetic to the victims in places like Colombia, for example, but relies on and reinforces a neat divide between us and them. The subject secures its fantasy of peace, tolerance, and rationality by attributing jouissance to the Colombian Other as exceptional victim and victimiser. The second mode of racism resembles love more than hate for the Other but again reinforces the divide between us and them. Here, the Other is fetishised as an authentic, exotic, or erotic object: the kinds of characters who populate the pages of Latin American magical realist fiction, but who are never far from the grip of Latin American violence.