Taking Rights Symptomatically: Jouissance, coupure, objet petit a

Abstract

The central claim made by this article echoes one of the most orthodox injunctions of bourgeois-liberal legalism: namely, that we enjoy our rights! But the basis for this injunction is anything but orthodox; indeed, it is this article's intention to re-functionalise rights discourse, making it workable for postmodernity by predicating it upon something other than modernity's rights-fetishism. 'Enjoyment', I shall argue, provides that ground. The enjoyment enjoined here, however, must be distinguished from that of canonical rights jurisprudence. That latter 'enjoyment' is largely philosophical, deriving as it does from the 'pursuit of happiness' so prized by the philosophes of the Enlightenment. The former notion of enjoyment invoked in this article is, however, psychoanalytic, particularly in the way it gives back in reverse form that which is desired. For if this article urges the postmodern subject to enjoy her rights, then it is because that enjoyment is, ultimately, an enjoyment of non-enjoyment. And it is precisely this failure of rights - their very impossibility - which ensures, so I will argue, not only their inevitability but success. That success remains vital to this day because, in the wake of socialism's collapse, rights provide one of the few (if not sole) viable counter-hegemonic discourses available under postmodernity, capable of combating either the specious universalism of global Capital or the malignant particularism of a revivified nationalism.