Jouissance
A favorite recent word
A recent favorite word is “jouissance.” I learned it about three years ago. Beautiful not only for how it sounds—fun to pronounce, a little misshapen, over-long—but how it emerged in my life as something lived.
I mean, definitely better than “riz.”
First of all, it’s from the French, though different from plaisir, different from délice, different from luxe, calme, volupté. And it gets used in different ways in different places. Some say it refers to an enjoyment that must also include suffering. Some say it’s delight when there’s transgression involved. Some say (in France), if I have this right, that it refers to female orgasm, even to a mystical level.
I think about jouissance as pleasure relating to struggle, also pleasure/pain in what’s not allowed—or not always forbidden, but when pleasure and pain are found in something inverted or hidden away, a place society can’t find, is not permitted.
A psychotherapy session, for example.
First of all, talk therapy is super weird, at least I think so. How, once a week, every week, I pay to sit in a room with another person for fifty minutes. Same couch, same person, same fifty minutes each time.
Of course, some weeks, one of us is sick, we miss a session. Some weeks we’ve done more than one. Still, same person, same fifty. I don’t think I do anything else in my life so rigidly.
Still, within the rigidity…
The other person, the analyst, is a stranger to me. I know her name, I know a bit about her training. I recently learned, almost by accident, that she has a kid. Otherwise, I know maybe a couple things, very little (she’s not online) beyond how she is in the sessions. Whereas me, in the room, with the stranger, I reveal everything, exposure maxxed. I am at my most embarrassing, my most embarrassed. I tell her things no one knows, things I’m not sure I even know. Shames, fantasies, secrets. I’ve broken down multiple times. I’ve flirted with her, I’ve snapped at her.
A friend who did a long analysis described it ultimately feeling like he and his therapist constructed a jungle gym, metaphorically, over time. For me, after three years, it feels like we’re collaborating on an enormous lexicon. Words and motifs, each week adding to it, me on the couch and she in the chair, until it’s time to end and we both stand. I walk home, the asphalt path, just before sunset. Raw and exhausted, also unburdened and further educated. Cars honking through their evening commutes.
Interestingly, jouissance in French also has a legal component: it refers to the right to use and enjoy a thing. Does the fact I pay for therapy contribute? That there’s a legitimacy to this very strange thing?
Sometimes the stain of it hangs on for hours.
Sometimes it feels close to immoral, not destructive but out of bounds, investigating my psyche at such length. Like I’m getting away with something there should be laws about.
The point is: this is how I understand jouissance.
People say jouissance also can be found in grief, parenthood, and endurance sports. (Those three together, has someone written that op-ed?) Or maybe you’re the housewife shoplifting at CVS, maybe you’re the CEO cleaning a dominatrix’s kitchen on your hands and knees: it’s possibly in there, too, I wouldn’t know. For Jacques Lacan, philosopher king of jouissance, the purest form exists in what he called a symptom: a thing you can’t stop doing, that causes you suffering but you still persist. I sometimes wonder, how much longer will I see my therapist? Does the lexicon at some point end?
For now I persist. Partly because most weeks, when I write down my notes afterward, post-session, and see the pleasure and pain combined, it all somehow feels… delicious.
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What the what
“Meditations in an Emergency” is a weekly essay from author Rosecrans Baldwin about something beautiful. Paying subscribers receive a Sunday supplement with three-plus things to love, plus a monthly travel-lust ballyhoo.
Rosecrans is a correspondent for GQ, a contributor at Travel + Leisure, and the bestselling author of Everything Now, winner of the California Book Award. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. His debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.
For magazine articles, bio, contact info: rosecransbaldwin.com.
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