Jouissance, as Edelman explains, is a movement beyond pleasure and pain, "a voyage beyond identity, meaning, and law." (25) This got me to thinking that what exactly lays beyond "identity, meaning, and law?" I came to the same answer Edelman did one paragraph later, which is the obvious theme of at least the first chapter, death.

I'd like to qualify my response to Anonymous. There seems to be way in which Zizek conceives of knowledge itself being destructive to ideology. Specifically, he seems to view understanding "the logic of enjoyment" (125) as antithetical to ideology, and, consequently, enjoyment. Earlier, Zizek writes that, "It is also clear why Facism was so terrified of psychoanalysis: psychonalysis enables us to locate an obscene enjoyment at work in this act of formal sacrifice" (82).

The story of the Titanic has never really intrigued me but I loved Zizeck's reading of it. Firstly, I had no knowledge of the overwhelming parallels between Morgan Robertson's story and the real event of the Titanic's crash. The fact that both ships were labeled "unsinkable" and then both sunk after hitting icebergs is eerily fascinating. The same description could be used for peoples' obsession with the underwater photos of the wreckage. People find jouissance in looking at images of the aftermath of a tragedy.