Jouissance: A Lacanian Concept, Néstor Braunstein, translated by Silvia Rosman,  State University of New York Press, 2020,  800 pp., hardcover, ISBN: 9781438479033

Published online: 19 February 2024

© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2024

It is always astonishing when a writer not only anticipates but speaks after (après-coup) their own death. Néstor Braunstein declared his last words in an unpublished letter that was sent to analysts and friends memorializing his last act. This goodbye letter is both an exegesis and exit, what Jacques Lacan calls an analytic act that confronts the hole in language. The Lacanian letter confronts the hole in language through the unsaid of desire, that is, what is incompatible with speech. Braunstein’s last words in the letter exemplifies the limits of representational speech and “the letter’s snare that determines, nay overdetermines its place” (Lacan, 2006, p. 536). It means following the singular movements of transformations and conversions of the body to awaken, map, and listen to them. This process may be painful since it involves waking up or working through those “snares,” which are sites of jouissance. It involves displacing the ego and mirror identity to confront the unnamable cå, the nucleus of being, until it is eventually brought back to life through language. Such language was the gift Braunstein’s work gave us all and continues to give, an understanding about the limits of signification and the vagaries and vicissitudes of jouissance.

Néstor Braunstein, Argentine born psychoanalyst, doctor, psychiatrist, scholar, and professor, worked and taught in Latin America and all over the world. After receiving a medical degree at the age of twenty, Braunstein became a leading figure of Lacanian psychoanalysis, founding a pioneering institute devoted to the Lacanian clinic (Fundacion Mexicana de Psicoanàlisis). He was the first to teach Lacan in Mexico and he published many works, including Jouissance: A Lacanian