jouissance

Etymology

From Middle French jouissance, from jouir (“to enjoy”).

jouissance means Enjoyment, delight, pleasure. Lexicurio rates it Rare gem — a strength score of 83 out of 100.

Why this word is great

JOUISSANCE — [Noun] A transgressive, excessive, and paradoxical form of enjoyment that breaches the limit of the pleasure principle, linked to the fundamental division of the subject. From Middle French jouissance, from jouir ("to enjoy"), a verb with legal roots in coming into possession, often of property or rights. Unlike "pleasure," which implies a regulated economy of balanced satisfaction, or "bliss," which suggests a serene, untroubled unity, jouissance is the costly, disruptive surplus that shatters equilibrium. It is the searing, salt-sting of a wound you cannot stop probing, the compulsive scratch that reopens a healing wound, and the self-annihilating pitch of a laugh that becomes a sob—the quiet, profound truth that our most vital intensities are inseparable from our ruinous dissolution.

noun

Enjoyment, delight, pleasure.“friendship is enjoyed according as it is desired, it is neither bred, nor nourished, nor increaseth but in jovissance, as being spirituall, and the minde being refined by use and custome.”
A transgressive, excessive kind of pleasure linked to the division and splitting of the subject involved.“Instead Lyotard suggests that the worker experiences jouissance, a masochistic pleasure, in the imposed ‘mad destruction’ of their body.”