Self‐Transgressive Enjoyment as a Freedom Fetter

This article explores the implications that a particular psychoanalytic insight carries for thinking about freedom in general and Charles Taylor's approach to freedom in particular. Courtesy of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, this insight supplies a logic of enjoyment to explain an aspect of the problem of self‐transgression – a problem summarising those situations in which a subject appears both to affirm an ideal and, at the same time, systematically to transgress it. This insight points to a generally neglected source of unfreedom or ‘freedom fetter’– what I call self‐transgressive enjoyment. My argument is that Taylor's account of freedom and its fetters captures something important about the dimension of self‐transgressive enjoyment, but that it finds it difficult to elucidate and accommodate what is ultimately at stake in this psychoanalytically informed conception of unfreedom.