A Beat

By Moonis Azad

In James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the young boy, Stephen is warned that he must apologise for something wrong he has done, or else, “the eagles will come and pull out his eyes.” For many young children these words are not only wrought with the Other’s imposing jouissance (the Other can make me an object of its enjoyment), but also a semblance of meaning (what I did was wrong). These words are too much for little Stephen to bear. The strategy he uses to defend against this “too much” is he turns the sentence of meaning into lalangue, a rhyming, rhythmic nonsensical repeating couplet, devoid of context: “apologise / apologise / eagles will come, pull out his eyes.”

Stephen can find a refuge from the label of “wrongdoer” and the image of excessive punishment, by focusing on the sounds of what was said to him. He turns the threat of being beaten into a beat.

Bruce fink notes that after the 1970s, Lacan found that many subjects in analysis often refuse to give up their miserable jouissance even after all meaning has been detached from it. The subject hangs onto what is causing it to suffer. Lacan found a way, taking some inspiration from buddhist “subitism,” to bring the subject to see the emptiness of its own jouissance. It is perhaps a way of allowing the subject to experience a nothing, an empty hole, around which its enjoyment revolved.

Maybe, many of us today are trapped in such protective bubbles of satisfaction, our little libidinal circuits, that bring us back to the same, suffocating suffering. We would rather beat ourselves up than suffer the beating of the Real that the symbolic brings. How can one make Stephen see that not only is the law of wrongdoing and apologizing groundless, but so is the beat he creates. What is this place of an other jouissance where one does not fear the law, nor succumb to the pressure of self-enclosed enjoyment?