Žižek on pleasure in pain

[writing on castrati singers being made to “cry to heaven after suffering a horrible mutilation] This is (the singing) voice at its most elementary: the embodiment of ‘surplus-enjoyment’ in the precise sense of the paradoxical ‘pleasure in pain.’ …Pain generates surplus enjoyment via the magic reversal-into-itself by means of which the very material texture of our expression of pain (the crying voice) gives rise to enjoyment….the same go[es] for love poetry and its ultimate topic: the lamentation of the poet who has lost his beloved….Poetry, the specific poetic jouissance, emerges when the very symbolic articulation of this Loss gives rise to a pleasure of its own.

Slavoj Žižek in The Plague of Fantasies, p. 58