Word.ws English Dictionary

jouisance

jouisance is the obsolete spelling of jouissance.

Meaning of jouissance

Noun

jouissance (countable and uncountable, plural jouissances)

  1. (obsolete) 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.1603, Michel de Montaigne, translated by John Florio, The Essayes […], London: […] Val[entine] Simmes for Edward Blount […], →OCLC
  2. 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.2013, Benjamin Noys, Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism, Zero Books, →ISBN

Questions about jouisance

What is jouisance the obsolete spelling of?
Jouisance is the obsolete spelling of jouissance.

Words near jouisance in the dictionary

  1. Joubert syndrome
  2. Jouberts
  3. joug
  4. jough
  5. jougs
  6. jouisance
  7. jouissance
  8. jouissances
  9. jouissant
  10. jouk
  11. jouked

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: jouisance (page history and authors); jouissance (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “jouisance.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/jouisance. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.