THE FEELING of enjoyment is a compelling force behind most human behavior. While pleasure is often associated with such feeling, it has been argued by art, philosophy, and psychoanalysis that enjoyment also constitutes an element of pain. Listening to sad music or eating spicy foods can render the feeling of this contradiction. Yet, deeper considerations of pain and pleasure lead to the discussion of more existential matters. Interpretations of enjoyment as a blend of pain and pleasure often results in the analyses of love, sex, death, and everything in between, creating space for more wonder—or perhaps chaos—into the ways we reckon our existence.  

Some foundations on enjoyment, pleasure, and pain

   Reflecting on enjoyment as containing both pain and pleasure, opens the door to theories in psychoanalysis and philosophy that attempt to understand the complexities of human enjoyment. According to psychoanalysis, enjoyment is born out of an innate division that afflicts all human beings: the antagonism between the body and language. “Enjoyment is obscure because it involves the body beyond the reasonable limits of the mind and this breach of the limits makes enjoyment always painful,” said Astrid Lac (Prof., UIC, Comparative Lit. & Culture), in an interview with The Yonsei Annals. In fact, Lac argues the near irrelevancy of pleasure when discussing enjoyment: “Why is enjoyment not all pleasure? If anything, it’s all pain.” According to Lac, the limits of describing enjoyment as pleasure lie in the incommensurability of their conceptual status: “The conceptual significance of ‘enjoyment’ lies precisely in the fact that it exceeds ‘pleasure’ in the conventional sense. To add to the difficulty, if enjoyment loses pleasure this way, it absolutely retains pain.”

   Works on pleasure and pain began with Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud, who invented the fundamental language of psychoanalysis. As Lac explains, Freud’s concept of the death drive Beyond the Pleasure Principle laid the foundation for subsequent theoretical investment in enjoyment. It is French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan who elevated the ordinary French word jouissance, the meaning of which includes anything from simple pleasure to sexual orgasm, to its current status as a distinct psychoanalytical concept (“enjoyment” is the English translation of jouissance), Lac explains. 

      In the branch of philosophy, there is French philosopher Georges Bataille. In his 1956 book Eroticism, he discusses pain and pleasure in terms of the erotic. The book states that the human condition is painful, causing people to perpetually long for a “continuity of existence.” This continuity, in simple terms, is the aversion to loneliness and the desire to be bound to others without constraints of time and space. One is afflicted at the realization that such continuity is impossible, for it would entail that human existence is connected to each other to the point where one’s death would imply another’s as well. As he formulates it, “We are discontinuous beings, individuals who perish in isolation in the midst of an incomprehensible adventure, but we yearn for our lost continuity.” 

   The reckoning of our discontinuance may be painful. Nevertheless, the human capacity to experience  eroticism offers a pleasurable exit to this agony.  Eroticism “...[destroys] the self-contained character of the participators as they are in their normal lives.” That is—whether one is immersed in lovemaking or praying in devotion to a God—erotic activities  enable its participants to grasp the sensation of an existence outside the confines of their discontinuous selves, rendering a pleasurable sensation. 

Blossoming impossibility in the novel Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

   Norwegian Wood was published in 1987 as a coming-of-age novel by Japanese author Haruki Murakami. The story is narrated in the first person by the main character Toru Watanabe as he reminisces about his time as a college student in Tokyo. Throughout the story, the traumatic suicide of his childhood best friend Kizuki follows him into adulthood—especially affecting his relationship with Naoko, Kizuki’s ex-girlfriend and Toru’s childhood friend who eventually becomes his lover. Love, eroticism, pain, and death are concurrent themes of this novel, defining the characters and their relationships.  

   Naoko’s character, defined by a mysterious sickness throughout the story, embodies the inability to feel enjoyment. Naoko hints at this possibility to Toru during his visit to the sanatorium where she was being treated, “The pain of growing up. [Kizuki and I] didn’t pay when we should have, so now the bills are due.” As a couple who grew up together, Naoko and Kizuki transitioned from childhood into adulthood seamlessly. That is, they lived in their own world of pleasure, where they did not face the pain and awkwardness of growing up. Yet, such “perfect” relationship, while bountiful in pleasure, was adept of any sort of pain; hence Naoko and Kizuki’s inability to feel enjoyment. Furthermore, Naoko’s incapability to enjoy is demonstrated through sex. Throughout her long relationship with Kizuki, Naoko never enjoyed herself sexually and never engaged in sexual intercourse with him. This was not out of the couple’s own will, but Naoko’s incapability to receive him, which is related to the “price” she believes they had to pay for not feeling the “pain of growing up.” 

   Naoko’s sickness, while it insurmountably afflicts Toru, is also what makes him fall in love with her and follow her until her death. That is, her illness is his greatest source of pain and pleasure. This is especially suggested in his description of her sickness during a pleasant afternoon, staring at the cherry blossoms: “In the spring gloom, they looked like flesh that had burst through the skin over festering wounds. The garden filled up with the sweet, heavy stench of rotting flesh. Naoko’s beautiful flesh lay before me in the darkness, countless buds bursting through her skin...Why did such a beautiful body have to be so sick? I wondered. Why didn’t they just leave Naoko alone?” Toru wants Naoko to be left “alone” for the causes of her sickness to emaciate from her, and he can have his lover all to himself. Nevertheless, he describes her sickness, as symbolized by the cherry blossoms, as something beautiful and innate to her, that, though they are rotten flowers growing out of her flesh, it “smells sweet” and is visually appealing. Naoko’s condition hence derives pain from Toru, for it makes it difficult for him to have her. Yet, it is this very condition which blossoms greatest pleasure in him.  

   Pain and pleasure accompany Toru even during his contemplations of Naoko’s eventual death by suicide. Stranded on a deserted shore far away from Tokyo, emaciated from long days of traveling with no destination nor food, Toru’s memories of Naoko are not purely pleasurable ones about their cherished moments. Rather, his memories take him to a place where Naoko and death, along with him and life, coexist. In such place, Toru talks to Naoko and holds her in his arms. As the narrator describes it, “Death in that place was not a decisive element that brought life to an end. There, death was but one of many elements comprising life. There Naoko lived with death inside her.” In a way, Naoko’s death ultimately gives Toru what he has desired all these years: the security of having her. Naoko’s death renders pleasure, for he feels a newfound warmth from her. Nevertheless, this is the source of his pain, for he must also face the impossibility to sense her actual body. In that place of his memory, he felt pleasure: “I felt no sadness in that strange place. Death was death, and Naoko was Naoko.” Nevertheless, he also must reckon the fact that “[Naoko’s] flesh no longer existed in this world.” Toru finds comfort in the interphase between both the pleasure of feeling close to Naoko in spite of her death, and the pain of realizing that this feeling is not an objective reality. 

The ethics of love in the film Talk to Her by Pedro Almodóvar

   Talk to Her is a 2002 film by Spanish film director Pedro Almodóvar. The story follows Benigno, a nurse in his 30s who has been helplessly in love with his patient, Alicia, who has been in a coma for over four years. In a somewhat parallel situation to Benigno, at the same hospital, is Marco. He is a handsome man in his 30s, whose bullfighter girlfriend, Lydia, ends up in a coma upon being severely hit by a bull in a rodeo. Benigno and Marco develop a meaningful friendship. Love, pleasure, pain, and death accompany the characters in this film as they navigate ethical dilemmas within romance. Yet, unlike classic love stories in which feelings of love are a given, the very existence and condition of “love” in the characters are put into question. 

   Benigno and Marco’s respective relationships to pain and pleasure are introduced through their reactions to dance performance Café Müller[1]. Benigno, who is less immersed in the content as he is trying to memorize the form, opens his eyes wide in attention towards the stage and his mouth curves to a slight grin. His sole reason for watching the performance is Alicia. As he often does, he vicariously views performances and films that Alicia often watched before she got into a coma with the sole purpose of talking to her about them. He is feeling pleasure at the thought of sharing what he saw with Alicia. As such, Benigno is a character that only knows pleasure—innocently so. The film emphasizes his “peculiar” upbringing, for he spent his whole adolescence and adult life looking after his sick single mother—in a similar way he does with Alicia. Having established no other friendships or relationships with girls, Benigno never knew the pain of rejection and the love he gave was always accepted, albeit passively. Love, for Benigno, is a pleasurable dynamic between a passive female and an active male who devotes his time in attending to her needs and talking to her.

   Sitting right next to him, Marco, is fully engaged with the content as he weeps in awe as his forehead tenses inward with despair. Marco, with his emotional reaction to the performance, indicates that he feels both the pain and pleasure, and hence is enjoying the dance. Marco is a man who knows how to enjoy. In fact, crying is a defining trait for this character. In every scene, Marco is the only character crying. Next to Benigno’s enthusiastic expressions, he cries upon watching the sense of despair of the dancers of Café Muller. In contrast to a crowd of people smiling peacefully and swaying their bodies as they listen to the sad love song Cucurrucucú Paloma, Marco is weeping inconsolably. Such solitary cries not only indicate sadness, but painful realizations that the pleasure he perceives from such artistic expressions, will always be bound to the indulgence of the performers’ pain. 

   The absence of pain not only deters Benigno from enjoying but is also what makes his love for Alicia an “unethical” one. The film reaches its turning point when Benigno, not only has sexual intercourse with Alicia’s unconscious body and leaves her pregnant but insists—almost audaciously—on his love for her and his intentions to marry her. Lac explains that “The sexual act is a radically ethical event whereby one is directly confronted with the obscure truth of one’s own enjoyment, redoubled by the just-as-obscure truth of the other’s—the sexual partner’s—enjoyment.” If the enjoyment of the sexual act is thus doubly painful, “by the same token,” Lac adds, “that very doubling facilitates the most intimate openness to the universal condition of the speaking body, that is, the fundamental trouble of the psychical subject.” Nevertheless, Benigno does not “ignore” pain and pleasure. Rather, the notion that love entails both pain and pleasure is entirely absent from his comprehension of love. Through this lack of awareness, the film instigates the audience to ponder upon the ethics of Benigno’s “love” for Alicia. 

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   Human enjoyment transcends the pleasurable feeling. Enjoyment is a sensation of great consequence, for it lies at the core of understanding the painful human condition of the antagonism between the body and language. Discussions on pleasure and pain hence lead to the exploration of many existential matters, such as human sexuality, love, and death. In philosophy and psychoanalysis, Freud, Lacan, Bataille, among others have given their renditions on the term. In art, novels such as Norwegian Wood and films like Talk to Her give these theoretical abstractions human name and form. 

[1] Café Muller: Contemporary dance choreography by Pina Bausch; The performance consists of two women dancing with their eyes closed around a stage filled with wooden chairs as a man tries to move them away from the women.