The story of Wilde's life is around two jouissances: pleasure or more responsibility from his marriage to the constant Constance, who died of back pain because of hard life, and pleasure from what Wilde calls the love beween an old man for a younger boy, the love between intellect and youth, the most noblest love. Wilde describes the second pleasure: an city under siege for 20 years, and suddenly the gate throws open, the citizen inside pours out, wandering in the field, plucking the wild flower, and he felt relieved.
These two kinds, I think, Wild pursued both equally because, as he defended in the court, there is such thing as morality or immorality in thought. That is certainly what Lacan is seeking to prove in the Kant versus Said. In some sense, these two kinds of pleasure resembles the relationship of being or nothing. If you want your existence, then you must purse the platry jouissance, or the surplus jouissance, the surplus jouissance that everyone of us is after. If you want to pursue the second pleasure that is beyond, that exists in the act of saying, in the act of watching as Wild is observing the other two young boys making love, and in the act of destroying, then nothing will be your destiny like what Wild ended up with, wife died, children sent away.
These two kinds of jouissance also resember the sexual jouissance that man and woman enjoys separately: the former the phallic, the latter the jouissance of the big Other. Although the woman's jouissance is fantastic, spectral, or in otherworldly, but it si the ultimate reference for our miserable partial life.
Throughout the fiilm, it narrates the Wilde's story aobut the Selfish Giant. It seems that he is describing hmself, but the story ends with the word of wounds of love. So whether is the price he is willing to pay or the Giant has come to appreciate the children as Wild is desperate to meet his boys.
One Last thing is another famous work by Wilde, the portrait of the young artist Dorian Gray. When the real man withered and old, the paint become young and hansome again. Masks and faces are hard to differentiate. Which one is truer, platry jouissance or homesexual jouissance of the lost?
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