Word.ws English Dictionary

jouissances

jouissances is the plural 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 jouissances

What is jouissances the plural of?
Jouissances is the plural of jouissance.

Words near jouissances in the dictionary

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

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: jouissances (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: “jouissances.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/jouissances. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.