ABSTRACT
Black Swan is a film clearly concerned with the body and embodied experience. It presents an opportunity to explore psychoanalysis and the body, and in doing so the author suggests ways of reading the film and approaching its staging of femininity through different modes of enjoyment. The chapter explores how the film takes us around the types of enjoyment described by Lacan's Graph of Sexuation: on the masculine side, the dissatisfaction of phallic jouissance in Nina's training regime, the image of a corresponding Other jouissance that is embodied by Saint Lily and promoted by Thomas. It shows how this manifests itself as the masturbatory jouissance of Nina's fantasies. Phallic jouissance is sustained by the fantasmatic ideal of a non-castrasted Exception who has access to greater jouissance. Nina's libidinal economy is organised around this phallic phantasm, this ideal end. Feminine jouissance persists but cannot be counted within the phallic field.
