ABSTRACT
Enjoyment is characterized as a kind of existential electricity that not only animates the subject but also threatens to destroy them. Enjoyment is always both before and beyond the symbolic field; it drives the symbolic but can never be fully captured by it. From a racist perspective, the immigrant is someone with perverse forms of excessive enjoyment and who thereby steals and/or corrupts our enjoyment. And thus what "people conceal by imputing to the other the theft of enjoyment is the traumatic fact that they never possessed what was allegedly stolen from them". According to Lacan, jouissance has a real status and is the only "substance" recognized in psychoanalysis". Doe's victims are chosen on the grounds that they embody a particular sinful excess and are subsequently dispatched in an elaborately sadistic manner. He seeks to punishexecute his victims not because of legal transgression but because they do not conform to imaginary unity, the homeostatic ego-ideal, of a god-fearing community.
