The mystic as a figure of jouissance in Lacan’s psychoanalysis
A French Essay on the Mystics in Lacan’s Work
Jouir entre ciel et terre — the phrase sets enjoyment between heaven and earth — is a French-language essay by Raymond Aron, issued in Paris by L’Harmattan in 2003 as part of that publisher’s Études psychanalytiques collection. Its subtitle names its subject without ambiguity: les mystiques dans l’œuvre de J. Lacan, the mystics in the work of Jacques Lacan. The volume is a compact one, running to just over a hundred pages, and it carries both a bibliography and an index. Library cataloguing files it under psychoanalysis — more precisely, under the Freudian system — and under mysticism, and those two headings describe its double focus well: a body of religious experience on one side, a psychoanalytic theory on the other. The book’s task is to bring the two together by following a thread that runs through Lacan’s teaching.
The Mystic as a Figure of Jouissance
The central proposition of the book is that mysticism, for Lacan, is best grasped through the category of jouissance. In Lacanian usage jouissance is not simply pleasure; it names an enjoyment that goes past the ordinary regulation of pleasure and pain, an excess that the speaking subject both seeks and suffers. The mystic, on this account, is the exemplary figure of that excess — the person in whom enjoyment takes on an extreme, borderline form. The book’s title announces as much: the mystic’s enjoyment is stretched between two poles, neither wholly of this world nor wholly outside it.
This is the thesis that organises everything else in the essay. Mysticism is treated not as a doctrinal corpus to be summarised or judged, but as a structure of experience that psychoanalysis can recognise and describe — a way of inhabiting desire, speech and the body that illuminates something about the analytic process itself.
Silence, Wandering and the Initiatory Path
The book approaches its subject through the situation of the mystic rather than through doctrine. Its starting point is a silence: the mystic calls out and receives no answer. Faced with that silence, certain subjects respond by constructing something — they weave a fabric, they produce a speech, they adopt an attitude. What might look like mere dereliction becomes, in the book’s account, a path: a wandering that takes on the character of an initiation. Along that path the frustration of desire is not removed but intensified, and it is precisely this intensification that carries the subject toward suffering and toward ecstasy. The two are not opposites in this reading but the paired faces of the same movement — which is why the mystic can be described as a figure of jouissance. The generic name the book gives to these behaviours is “mystic,” and it uses the term to group together attitudes that otherwise belong to quite different religious traditions.
Lacan’s Seminars and the Psychoanalytic Process
The book does not treat this material in isolation. It turns to the places in Lacan’s seminars where mystics are explicitly invoked, and it follows the use he makes of them. Out of those references, according to the book, Lacan offers an articulation tied to the psychoanalytic process — that is, the mystics are not brought in as curiosities or as devotional exemplars, but as a way of formulating something that matters for analysis. The essay’s argument therefore runs in two directions at once: it reads the mystics through Lacanian concepts, and it reads Lacan through the mystics he chose to cite, treating the mystical register as a point at which the theory of enjoyment, the work of speech, and the limits of what can be said meet.
A Brief, Annotated Study
In form the book is an essay rather than a commentary or a textbook: a short, continuous argument supported by a bibliography of sources and closed with an index, evidently intended for readers already familiar with Lacanian vocabulary. Its brevity is matched by the narrowness of its focus — one motif in one author’s teaching — and its contribution lies in treating that motif as a coherent structure rather than as a series of passing allusions.
The BnF record gives the material description as “111 p. ; 22 cm,” with the bibliography occupying pp. 105–107. It lists the publication places as Paris, Budapest and Torino, and names the printer as Impr. Corlet in 14-Condé-sur-Noireau. The same record supplies the ISBN 2-7475-5600-X, marked “br.,” at 11.50 EUR; CiNii gives the ISBN as 274755600X. A Fnac listing dates the volume to December 2003, identifies it as a “broché” paperback, and records 112 pages, EAN 9782747556002 and a weight of 0.1300 kg.
CiNii records holdings in four libraries. Its catalogue entry also includes NII bibliographic ID BA70970093 and CRID 1970023484961045556, with LCC classification BF173/L15, DC21 class 150, and the LCSH subject heading “Lacan, Jacques, 1901-.” It records the language, country and title-language codes as “fr.” A HathiTrust record’s MLA citation lists the author as “Aron, Raymond, 1905-1983.”
