jouissance

[zhwee-sahnns]

noun

French

1. pleasure; enjoyment.

   The chef’s original impulse for jouissance in food, as well as in life, came from his parents, who were always cooking and experimenting with different flavors.

2. the use or exercise of a right, especially property rights.

Word History and Origins

Origin of jouissance¹

First recorded in 1480–90; from Old French, equivalent to jouiss-, stem of jouir “to enjoy” + -ance ( def. )

Example Sentences

The point is, jouissance will do something to you in a way plaisir doesn’t.

Read more on The Guardian

Meanwhile, fifty years after the death of the author was announced and a century after Eliot’s belated obituary for Romanticism, “Tradition” still pulses with energy and life, what the poststructuralists would have called jouissance.

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That’s emphatically, even ecstatically, the case with “Equipment for Living,” which insists at every turn that despite its inherent parasitism, criticism is a creative discipline — a venue for originality and exploration, for agon and jouissance.

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“A bit of fun,” is particularly British phrase that relates to the French concept jouissance as Dairylea does to Camembert.

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Sister Edgar, whose excitement, whose jouissance was destruction, gets subsumed into the multitude, into ecstasy, a human ecstasy and also a religious one.

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