 | This article may be too technical for most readers to understand. (September 2024) |
Jouissance (pronounced [ʒwisɑ̃s] ) is a French language term held untranslatable into English.
In continental philosophy and psychoanalysis, jouissance is the transgression of a subject's regulation of pleasure. It is linked to the division and splitting of the subject involved, which spontaneously compels the subject to transgress the prohibitions imposed on enjoyment and to go beyond the pleasure principle.[1] Beyond this limit, pleasure then becomes pain, before this, initial "painful principle" develops into what Jacques Lacan called jouissance;[2] it is suffering, epitomized in Lacan's remark about "the recoil imposed on everyone, in so far as it involves terrible promises, by the approach of jouissance as such". He linked jouissance to the castration complex, and especially to the aggression of the death drives.
In feminist theory, jouissance describes a form of women's pleasure or sexual rapture, which is a fusion of mental, physical, and spiritual aspects bordering on mystical communion. Jouissance is considered the source of a woman's creative power.