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.

From 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.

From The New Yorker

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.

From Los Angeles Times

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

From The Guardian

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

From The Guardian