Jouissance

While joy and pleasure percolate beneath the surface of so much that Susan and I have lived at, through, and because of Rosslyn over two decades, I borrow an especially potent potion from the French to capture something more ample, more fugitive, and more elusive than happiness: joissance.

Beyond bliss, there is jouissance. Think of joy that exceeds pleasure. Think of paradoxical experiences that simultaneously sate and overwhelm, gratify while awakening a profound yearning that’s never 100% satisfied.

My Rosslyn adventure has catalyzed for me a confident comprehension that life’s most meaningful moments are not earned by resolving contradictions. They are experienced by embracing sometimes complex contradictions, fully inhabiting potentially puzzling paradoxes rather than yielding to reservation or trepidation.

Jouissance is the “gateway drug” to my lust for liminality and to accepting the irresistible allure of metamorphosis even when each beginning is concurrently an ending. Jouissance is the irresistible allure of ephemeral beauty, made more irresistible precisely because it will not endure. Jouissance is, perhaps, one way of revealing why some transitions are breathtakingly bittersweet, simultaneously provoking sadness and suffering even as they prove to be among my most life-affirming experiences!

Jouissance Archive

The following Rosslyn Redux posts, explicitly or indirectly, explore the experience of jouissance during our stewardship of Rosslyn in Essex, New York.

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