This chapter is part of a larger project in which I seek to revisit the history of cultural forms in Latin America from the perspective of jouissance. The term, popularized by the work of Jacques Lacan, is translated into Spanish as goce and into English—less felicitously—as enjoyment. An initial way to delimit the meaning of jouissance may be to reflect on the fact that artistic and cultural productions are predominantly thought in terms of pleasure, which is the exact opposite of jouissance. This connection of art to pleasure is, in turn, grounded on a fundamental convergence between the management of passions and the establishment of a political order. As Lacan points out in the seminar that launched his consistent exploration of jouissance, the role of Aristotle's ethics of the golden middle way is to elucidate the subjective conditions for the creation of a well-adapted and enlightened citizenry (1992, 29). Freud had a similar conception in mind when he wrote that civilization was the result of a successful renunciation of instinctual tendencies or forces—for which jouissance is a good representative. If we meditate on the arch of Latin American literature, say from Esteban Echeverria's “The Slaughter Yard” to Roberto Bolaño's 2666 (two anchoring points as arbitrary as any others), it is clear that questions of jouissance are a constant in the configuration of this literature. However, little seems to be gained by stating that there is jouissance. Already in Lacan, inutility was one of the attributes of jouissance. In contrast, the equivalence between pleasure and politics has been a formidable engine for the production of critical sense, as attested by the good fortune of Ángel Rama's notion of transculturation or by the long hold that the problematic of “imagining the nation” had on Latin Americanism until just a few years ago. The entire strategy of studying novels and cultural artifacts in terms of what they represent is subsidiary to the preemption of jouissance in favor of the economy that ties desire to communicability. In this sense, the extent to which a consideration of jouissance can illuminate the academic and political conversations of the present remains to be explored.