The Order of Joy Beyond the Cultural Politics of Enjoyment

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for Mia
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We live today under a new world order
The web which weaves together all things envelops our bodies,
Bathes our limbs,
In a halo of joy.
—Michel Houellebecq, Atomised
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 Contents

Preface xi

PART ONE Introduction 1

Chapter 1. The Structure of the Real 3

PART TWO Toward Anorganic Joy 33

Chapter 2. Trainspotting with Deleuze 35
Chapter 3. Exhausting Joy 51

PART THREE Joyful Immanence (There Is No Other) 65

Chapter 4. Order of Intimacy 67
Chapter 5. Return to Zero 89

PART FOUR Event 107

Chapter 6. Surprised by Joy 109
Chapter 7. Joy’s Laughter 133

PART FIVE a-Life 155

Chapter 8. Becoming Barely Virtual 157

Notes 175

Bibliography 177

Index 185

ix
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 Preface

THE CULT OF JOY

I would like and I hope I’ll die of an overdose [Laughter] of pleasure
of any kind. Because I think it’s really difficult and I always have the
feeling that I do not feel the pleasure, the complete total pleasure
and, for me, it’s related to death. . . . Because I think that the kind of
pleasure I would consider as the real pleasure would be so deep, so
intense, so overwhelming that I couldn’t survive it. I would die.
—Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture

Discussing his difficulty with the “middle range pleasures that make up
everyday life,” Michel Foucault attempted to describe in an interview
shortly before his death what, for him, constituted real pleasure. For Fou-
cault, real pleasure lies in excess of the quotidian tastes and pleasures that
ameliorate a life of work and responsibility. Real pleasure would be a
pleasure over and above everyday pleasures, not necessarily an antithesis
to them, but an overdose and an enhancement that could not be born by
a mortal. In the interview, Foucault gives as his example the near-death
experience of being hit by a car, and his use of drugs as the “mediation to
those incredibly intense joys that I am looking for’ (1988: 12). As James
Miller shows, those intense joys were also bound up with Foucault’s in-
terest in l’éclat des supplices—the splendor and explosive glory of death
by torture—and in S/M practices in San Francisco where that interest
could be acted out and elaborated (see Miller, 1993: 212–213; 262–272).
The evocation of an intense joy before death (and even a joy of death)
recalls the example of Georges Bataille, a writer of particular interest and
importance to Foucault. In a piece written for the journal Acéphale in June
1939, entitled “The Practice of Joy Before Death,” Bataille sketches in
the main elements of what would become his method of meditation, his

xi
xii Preface

atheological means of placing himself at the limit of an extreme inner

experience (see Bataille, 2001). “Joy before death belongs only to the per-
son for whom there is no beyond; it is the only intellectually honest route
in the search for ecstasy” (Bataille, 1985: 236). The practice of joy before
death presupposes that there is no beyond, no transcendence, no God even
as it rejects the endless deferral of a joy that will eventually come as the end
or product of a work (jouissance). Joy is not a jouissance in that sense, it is
joy in the immanence of imminent death—“a shameless, indecent saintli-
ness [that] can lead to a sufficiently happy loss of self ” (Bataille, 1985:
236–237). “Joy before death annihilates me . . . I remain in this annihila-
tion and, from there, I picture nature as a play of forces expressed in mul-
tiplied and incessant agony” (237). Though it contemplates agony and
annihilation, joy before death is essentially an affirmation of life, “the joy
of existence of all that comes into the world” (239). This affirmation gives
itself up, joyfully, to the play of forces that clash, constitute, and divide up
the self, multiplying its potential and enhancing its range of experience in
the transformative power of violent expenditures.
This is one of the main aspects that attracted Foucault to Bataille’s
writing, as a method and model, both of his life and his work. In an in-
terview with Duccio Trombadori, Foucault speaks about how the exam-
ple of Bataille’s experience enables one to live “as close as possible to the
impossibility of living, which lies at the limit or extreme . . . [which has
the effect] of ‘tearing’ the subject from itself in such a way that it is no
longer the subject as such, or that it is completely ‘other’ than itself so
that it may arrive at its annihilation, its dissociation” (Foucault, 1991:
31). This description not only provides a model for how one may contin-
ually transform one’s life, but also, since Foucault’s work was inextrica-
bly bound up with his life, offers a model for his thought. He regarded
the writing of his books “as direct experiences ‘to tear’ me from myself,
to prevent me from always being the same” (1991: 32). Foucault took
very seriously the idea that joy before death should be conceived as an
order of practice. It was a mode of experimentation, a process without a
definable end whose outcome (other than death) could not be foreseen. In
his own life, Foucault used extreme erotic experiences to break down, at
the level of the body, the formations of knowledge, the types of norma-
tivity and mode of subjectivity that had hitherto held it in its grip. Fou-
cault’s experiences were designed “to invent oneself” anew, make a new
self “appear” (Miller, 1993: 269). Through the épreuve of S/M practices,
something like a combination of medieval ordeal and scientific test, Fou-
cault underwent experiments in desexualization (273). The practices
broke down “the habitual dispositions of the body” by having it sub-
jected to “wave after wave of unfamiliar sensations.” In so doing, they
 Preface xiii

opened up “a general economy of pleasure not based on sexual norms”

(273). Foucault’s general economy redistributes pleasures away from
their normative focus on the genitalia, promising a new order of joy.
Miller quotes an interview in which Foucault speculates about the current
arid climate of sexuality being dissolved by this “great pleasure of the
body in explosion” (274), so that “the incredulity currently elicited by the
prospect of a life lived free of a preoccupation with penises, vaginas, and
orgasms, may one day seem as myopic, and historically curious, as the
Victorian dread of masturbation” (274).
In his experiments with anorganic and anorgasmic joy, Foucault felt
the instincts and drives of his body turn into a teeming mass of formless
pseudopods or an amoeba, decomposing into a microcosm of subhuman
particles ready to merge and change shape. Summing up the experience,
Foucault continued:

There is a creation of anarchy within the body, where its hier-

archies, its localizations and designations, its organicity, if you
will, is in the process of disintegrating . . . This is something
“unnameable,” “useless,” outside of all the programs of de-
sire. It is the body made totally plastic by pleasure: something
that opens itself, that tightens, that throbs, that beats, that
gapes. (Foucault, cited in Miller: 274)

In its own way, then, joy was for Foucault a mode of scientific inquiry, “a
game of truth” that enabled him to develop a technology of the self in
techniques of the body and its pleasures. In such a way, Foucault devel-
oped, in conjunction with the San Francisco S/M scene, a techne erotica
of bodies and pleasures to oppose the technology of health and pathology
that characterizes the modern regime of scientia sexualis (see Foucault,
1980: 57, 70–71). Rather than entering into the modern discourse on the
truth of sex, truth could be “drawn from pleasure itself” (1980: 57) in a
pleasurable remaking of the self via the body. Placing it within a network
of erotic forces, his body, Foucault claimed, disintegrated into an organ-
less plane of pliability and transformation. In this laboratory, the body
and soul became remodulated and reassembled as a teeming network of
pseudopods humming in amoebic joy beyond all programs of desire. Al-
ways connecting the practice of desubjectification in life with the practice
of writing (Foucault, 1972: 17), the development of this technology of joy
continued to shape and reshape the work until, reaching its peak in San
Francisco, it seemed to subsume the work itself, and a serene meditation
on the ancient uses of pleasure displaced the highly combative discourse
on sexuality, power, and governmentality.
xiv Preface

Foucault’s joy became the modality of his new technology of the

self and aesthetics of existence. Joy provides the possibility of experienc-
ing differently, making possible a different correlation of knowledge, de-
centering and dissolving norms and therefore reordering the conditions of
subjectivity. This is because joy, as the affirmation of difference, both es-
tablishes the terrain and inhabits the borders of fields of knowledge; joy
does not constitute a knowledge in itself, it is rather the condition and
fulminating ground of knowledge, its animation and excess. Similarly, joy
is not a type of normativity even though its affirmation is the precondi-
tion of any norm that can establish itself and its rule in the negativity of
its own difference. And joy forms subjectivity at the very point where it
swells and overflows the moment of imaginary fullness that seems to con-
firm it; joy tears open subjective forms into a nonsubjective space tra-
versed by the play of forces. Experience, then, for Foucault, is not a
means of self-knowledge, but a means through which the self can be
modified, elaborated, and transformed, not in relation to a law or a norm
or an idea, but through a process and practice of joy.
Commenting on Discipline and Punish, Gilles Deleuze also notes
how joy is both an external shaping power of Foucault’s work and an in-
tegral part of its style and manner. The book “is full of joy or jubilation
that blends in with the splendour of its style and the politics of its con-
tent. It is punctuated by horrible descriptions which are lovingly ren-
dered” (Deleuze, 1988: 23). The book is shaped by a “sense of gaiety in
horror,” not the “ambivalent joy of hatred,” but “the joy of wanting to
destroy whatever mutilates life” (23). In this tribute, Deleuze enlists Fou-
cault as part of his philosophical “cult of affirmation and joy” presided
over by Spinoza and Nietzsche (Deleuze, 2003: 144). “Spinoza or Nietz-
sche are philosophers whose critical and destructive powers are without
equal, but this power always springs from affirmation, from joy” (2003:
144). In its affirmative power, Foucault’s books are part of a Nietzschean
“comedy of the superhuman” since they elicit an “indescribable joy”
even when “they speak of ugly, desperate, or terrifying things” (258).
In Foucault (1988), Deleuze makes a subtle correlation between
Foucault’s life and work, as a continuous practice of joy before death, his
own conception of death—“and few men died in a way commensurate
with their conception of death” (Deleuze, 1988: 95). For Deleuze, Fou-
cault sought to escape the lines of power that seem to restratify all forms
of resistance by attaining “a life that is the power of the outside” (1988:
95). But “what tells us that this outside is not a terrifying void and that
this life, which seems to put up a resistance, is not just the simple distrib-
ution within the void of ‘slow, partial and progressive’ deaths?” (95).
Foucault’s practice did not invoke and experience a joy before death
 Preface xv

where death, retroactively, transforms life into a destiny, a narrative, as

an “indivisible and decisive” event. Rather, death becomes “multiplied
and differentiated” (95). Following Bichet, Deleuze suggests, Foucault re-
garded death as “being coextensive with life,” “something made up of a
multiplicity of partial and particular deaths” (95). Foucault’s practice of
multiple deaths, therefore, maintained death as an immanent principle
distributing new configurations of experience in a new order of joy.

NEW ORDER
A general economy of pleasure, enjoyment, and joy shapes particular or-
ders of subjective existence. Pleasure and pain constitute a continuous
fluctuating surface that provides the interior and exterior boundary of the
subject in its sensitive broaching of the real. In the intermediate position
between the subject and the real there are things. Useful things, nice
things, terrifying things, favorite things, phantasmatic things, desirable
things, vision things, epistemic things, things of nothing, real things that
find their contours in the subject’s negotiation with its own reality. That
reality is not simply the subject’s own, of course, but is shared insofar as
it is symbolized and rendered sensible by vision, language, and discourse.
But just as there are different languages and different formations of dis-
course, so there are different modalities of pleasure. There is no hierarchy
in the relationship between language and pleasure, words and things. Dif-
ferent modalities of pleasure—including pain, suffering and misery,
laughter and tears—inhabit the gaps in language and articulate the expe-
rience and knowledge of things in different ways. Pleasure silently shapes
and configures the order of things.
All order is in-formed by pleasure, and historically different orders
of knowledge therefore also imply different orders of pleasure, enjoyment,
or joy. There is a pleasure in finding resemblance between things, in clas-
sifying them, in identifying things and differentiating them with others, in
making lists, and placing things in a hierarchy. There is an enjoyment in
making things, destroying them, interpreting and toying with them, con-
suming them. As Foucault demonstrated, there is a joy in trawling the
archive and reconstituting horrors in lovingly rendered descriptions of
agony and botched mutilation. Pleasure forms the basis of any discursive
formation at least as fundamentally as an episteme, the rules, regularities,
and relations that are shaped by the very pleasure that they afford.
Through reversing the hierarchy of knowledge over enjoyment in
order to excavate an “arche-aesthesia” of pleasures that in-form different
epistemic orders in The Order of Things (1986), it might be amusing to
read the constitution of one or another of Foucault’s archaeological layers
xvi Preface

as the expression of an archaic drive arrested, during a particular epoch,

at one of Freud’s stages of infantile sexuality. Following this suggestion for
a moment, it could no doubt be possible to think of the Renaissance’s pas-
sion for resemblance as an expression of the oral drive that seeks out simil-
itude, running its lips over the prose-flesh of the world, its mouth mapping
out the shape of a nipple in a knuckle, a thumb, a walnut, or a breast in a
hillock or an apple. And one can see in the classical age’s enthusiasm for
representation, classification, and exchange the analytic rigor proper to
anal eroticism, the anal level being the locus of metaphor. (The fact that
the Marquis de Sade is located at the end point of the classical age, as its
revelation and apotheosis, would then be no coincidence, of course.) The
genitality of the modern age is evident in its self-conscious avowal of ma-
turity and production, retrospectively placing itself in a teleological struc-
ture, at the end of a process of historical development, endlessly defining
and redefining its normativity in relation to the perversions of nongenital,
nonreproductive sexual activity.
However amusing it might be to characterize these periods in this
way, it would only reinscribe Foucault’s account of historical discontinu-
ities into a rather traditional history—albeit a psychoanalytic history of li-
bidinal development. A Foucaultian arche-aesthesia of pleasures would
instead historicize jouissance itself as the basic “stoff ” of the drive in psy-
choanalysis, even as it located different formations of pleasure, enjoyment,
or joy as the (non)bases of epistemic order. Such formations would not nec-
essarily mean that everyone, during a particular historical epoch, experi-
enced pleasure in the same way. Nor would it mean that it is impossible to
experience the pleasures of classification outside the classical era, or to
enjoy only in the context of modernity. Rather, Foucault’s epistemic divi-
sions are a device to look at how certain experiences of pleasure shaped
thought in distinctive ways. And it is arguable that, along the lines sug-
gested by Foucault, one mode of pleasure or enjoyment took on dominance
over another in its shaping of a certain field of knowledge and discursive
practice. A dominant mode of pleasure-knowledge established how certain
ideas appeared, the way in which science is practiced, the objects it pro-
duced, what kinds of experiences were reflected in philosophies, and so on.
These modifications in pleasure and enjoyable experience are also linked
to, but not determined by, technological changes that have transformed
modes of human, social existence, just as they are related to various things
that have, along with the empirical positivity given to them by one regime
of knowledge, a certain heterogeneity with regard to that knowledge that
affects the shapes, the rules, the regularities that pleasure in-forms.
The major and most common criticism of Foucault’s work of this
period concerns radical historical discontinuity itself, the sharp edges that
 Preface xvii

separate one episteme from another. How did one space of knowledge
transform into another? Moreover, how is it that Foucault himself, still
writing at the edge of modernity, could describe, as if from the outside,
these different systems of knowledge, including his own? Precisely, he
suggests, because of the relation to ‘the outside’. “Discontinuity—the fact
that within the space of a few years a culture sometimes ceases to think as
it had been thinking up till then and begins to think other things in a new
way—probably begins with an erosion from outside” (Foucault, 1986:
50). An enigmatic formulation, the ‘thought from outside’ is given further
elaboration in a contemporary essay on Maurice Blanchot (Foucault,
1987) where it is called the thought of ecstasy or joy, “born of that tradi-
tion of mystical thinking which, from the time of Pseudo-Dionysus, has
prowled the borderlands of Christianity” (1987: 16). As Deleuze argued,
throughout Foucault’s work, he never stopped trying to open his own dis-
course to this exterior space, just as he sought to transform his thought
through joy, submerging his own voice in the ceaseless murmuring of dis-
course unfolding in the void (Foucault 1971).
For Lacanian psychoanalysis, this space is the space of the Thing
that is “situated in the relationship that places man in the mediating po-
sition between the real and the signifier” (Lacan, 1992: 129). The chain
of signifiers is articulated along the threshold of the real that resists sym-
bolization absolutely. Folding back from a (missed) encounter with the
real, the chain of signifiers circulates around the Thing that is hollowed
out in the fold, the vacuole that results though the (missed) encounter. In
Lacanian terms, it could be suggested, the pleasurable modifications of
order by and in which things are arranged and enjoyed takes place in the
space of the Thing. Further, it is in this extimate space of the outside that
is “more distant than any exterior” but is twisted, folded, and doubled by
“an Inside that is deeper than any interior” (Deleuze, 1988: 110), that the
relationship between exterior and interior is derived from the Thing that
establishes their phantasmatic limits. It is in this space that the Thing of
pleasure transmutes into the Thing of enjoyment and the Thing of joy,
thereby altering the topography of the space of order in which its plea-
surable objects are constituted and arranged (for a further discussion of
how the transmutation of pleasures support the changes in epistemic
order described in Foucault’s Order of Things, see Wilson, 2004).
In an appendix to Foucault (1988), Deleuze discusses the succession
of epistemic shifts outlined in The Order of Things and speculates on a
new “Formation of the Future.” After the death of man, erased like a face
drawn at the edge of the sea, Deleuze wonders about the coming of the
Nietzschean superman in the context of a new formation of knowledge.
For Nietzsche, the superman liberates the life within man for the benefit
xviii Preface

of another form, just as language liberated itself from nineteenth-century

linguistics in the sovereign form of literature. Deleuze suggests that, fol-
lowing language into the twentieth century, life broke free from biology,
and labor from economics. To do this,

Biology had to take a leap into molecular biology, or dis-

persed life regroup in the genetic code. Dispersed work had to
regroup in third-generation machines, cybernetics and infor-
mation technology. What would be the forces in play, with
which the forces within man would then enter into a relation?
(Deleuze, 1988: 131)

And indeed, what would be the mode of super-enjoyment that relates

these forces with the superman—or indeed the superwoman? What joy is
this? The joy that would animate the supermen and women apparently in
charge of the very code that gives them the secrets of the book of life, the
men and women in charge of the domain of silicon, the men and women
for whom both organic and inorganic matter is at their disposal to ma-
nipulate, simulate, virtualize, fuse, and meld together in living machinic
assemblages, following the trajectory of the literature that long ago liber-
ated itself from the labor of resemblance and representation. It is this new
order of joy that is the subject of what follows in this book where, in
order to account for its emergence, joy will be rigorously distinguished
from jouissance in a rereading of Lacan through Deleuze.
 Part One
Introduction