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Reviewed by Kim Shaw

The intention of Scott Wilson's The Order of Joy: Beyond the Cultural Politics of Enjoyment is to present a new order of joy that is capable of addressing a new order of experience borne by changes occurring in the twentieth-century and poised to accelerate in the twenty-first. To discuss the new order of joy apparent in this evolution, Wilson affirms the necessity of distinguishing joy from jouissance. This is important, as many of the concepts on which the meaning of jouissance depends have largely been rendered inoperative as a result of the changing relations Wilson observes. Through a rereading of Lacan by way of Deleuze, Wilson unfolds his thesis on joy.

For Lacan, the notion of jouissance is fluid, "elaborated differently and continually modified in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s in relation to Freud, Hegel, Sade, and Bataille" (6). To an extent, Wilson's elaboration of the order of joy is a continuation of this process, though not as a "revised form of psychoanalytic practice". Wilson makes a point of noting his "book has nothing to say or to contribute to the analytic experience" (10). Working from an "intuition that certain fundamental cultural premises necessary to the formulation of the understanding of jouissance have changed", Wilson examines concepts of "work, leisure, knowledge, production, truth, meaning, the good, utility, sex" and "the body" in order to determine "where these concepts have been placed under strain by transformations in three overlapping domains: commerce, war, and the state" (11). While these three domains remain interlocked and interdependent, they have nonetheless altered in significant ways. For Wilson, it is the area where these domains intersect that "the new divisions of joy can be discerned, divisions that disclose the characteristic symptomatology or structure of feeling that characterizes supercapitalism" (11). It is also important to note, however, that the cultural, social, economic, scientific and technological changes that have occurred not only "alter the contemporary field of existence" but "also have effects retroactively as the understanding of speech and being alters accordingly" (11).

Wilson's order of joy is presented as a Borromean knot referencing, while modifying, Lacan's structure of the Real, also presented in the form of a Borromean knot. Within this structure, the divisions of joy Wilson identifies are; anorganic joy, experienced in the intersection between war and state; joyful immanence, present where the domain of war intersects with commerce; and event, located in the intersection between commerce and state. At the centre of Wilson's Borromean knot is a-life. A reference to both "the Lacanian object a and Deleuze's notion of the singularity of a life" (31).

Anorganic joy, Wilson explains, "is experienced in an intensive space evacuated by the phallic signifier that, for Lacan, provided the focus (in the organ) and the principle organization of jouissance" (26). An example of this is given in a chapter titled "Trainspotting with Deleuze" which considers the effects of heroin use in Danny Boyle's 1996 film. The joys of heroin, Wilson asserts, "are beyond the orgasm and unrelated to the organ" as it "lays bare the desire to go beyond the mundane pleasures and enjoyments of everyday life within a domain that lies beyond desire, a domain exterior to any limit that could define or provoke desire: a state of desirelessness and plenitude, an experience beyond standard or phallic measure" (37). Backing this view, Wilson cites one of the film's characters "as her shot hits home, inducing her anorganic joy", she convincingly declares, heroin "beats any meat injection, beats any fucking cock in the world" (37). In short, Wilson's concept of anorganic joy is presented in contrast to the Lacanian concept of phallic jouissance.

Joyful immanence—there is no Other—occurs where the domain of war overlaps the circle of commerce. The field of immanence is not internal to the self, nor does it come from an external self. Instead, Wilson explains citing Deleuze and Guattari, "it is like the absolute Outside that knows no Selves because interior and exterior are equally part of the immanence in which they have fused" (27). Likewise, the joy "that infuses the field of immanence" is not defined by any kind of opposite such as "sadness or horror". As might be expected, Wilson explains citing Bataille, this joy is exactly the state that arises when "the fullness of horror and that of joy collide" (27). The image that is given in illustration of this is that of the eater and the eaten presented in an analysis of a scene from a nature documentary that "depicts the well-known practice of the European mantodea in which the female devours the head of the male during an act of amorous combat" (69). One of several lessons to be learnt here is that in the joy of immanence "human transcendence from the animal world's order of intimacy can no longer be assumed" (27).

Event, names the joy that arises when functionality attains a spiritual level within the intersection of the circle of commerce and the circle of governance. Instead of the inevitable failure of meaning, identified by Lacan, that tragically occurs in the intersection of imaginary and symbolic registers and its association with a jouissance that is always missed, Wilson follows the functionalist response of Deleuze and Guattari in relation to the question of meaning to arrive at the event. Rather than simply addressing the question of "what happened?" the event "sustains the question of meaning" by "remaining virtual to anything that might happen" (31). Again, Wilson cites Deleuze and Guattari in naming the event as "the part that eludes its own actualisation in everything that happens" (31). Thus, in "the place of meaning - which was only ever a semblance covering over the trauma of its lack - irrupts the event that requires event management" (30). Wilson explores the notion of event in an analysis of Christopher Nolan's film Memento (2000). A film that, in Wilson's words, "forces its audience into the brain-damaged, decentered head of its protagonist", effectively normalising the condition from which he suffers (124). Namely, a form of amnesia that has left him with a short-term memory that can only retain new facts for as little as ten minutes. With its excessive use of repetition, "scene-cycles, visual and verbal echoes that confuse the sequence of the narrative and its temporality", this film, Wilson argues, "puts pressure on the short-term memory of an audience, demonstrating its fragility in a very tangible way" (124). Within the loss of certainty (that was never really available) that accompanies the loss of memory and a will to forget, the event celebrates.

The final component to be considered in Wilson's order of joy is a-life, which should not be mistaken for an individual life. It has no character, subjectivity, qualities or identity. It is a "kind of bare life", Wilson tells, "stripped of all insignia, all forms of identity and personality, unexchangeable, unsacrificable, yet finding its illumination at the threshold of death" (158). As mentioned previously, a-life references both Lacan's object a and Deleuze's notion of the singularity of a-life:

An immanence of immanence requires the minimal maintenance of a-life in all its singularity. It is not a question of the life of the Mechanosphere; it is only the presence of a-life that indicates that the One is composed of multiplicity. It is not thought that betrays the presence of a-life, but joy. Joy playing with death that is no longer its defining opposite or end point (172-3).

Wilson explains how Deleuze and Guattari "dispense with the Other in favour of the multiplicity engendered by the extimate virtuality" of Lacan's objet petit a, "that is, the multiplicity of the One" (168). As the Other does not exist, "because there is no Other" only the multiplicity of the One, "the immanence of a-life can only be joyful" (168).

The Order of Joy: Beyond the Cultural Politics of Enjoyment
(2008)

by Scott Wilson
State University of New York Press
ISBN: 978-0-7914-7449-5
208 pp US $60.00

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