(plaisir)
** 1. In a number of books and essays, starting with the pointedly titled Le Plaisir du texte (1973), translated as The Pleasure of the Text (1975), French literary critic Barthes, Roland used the essentially untranslatable distinction between plaisir and jouissance as a crucial pivot around which his thinking on culture and literature turned. Unhappily, the English translation of The Pleasure of the Text blunts the significance of this distinction by rendering âjouissanceâ as âblissâ, which lacks the force of the French original whose nearer cognates include âorgasmâ and âcomingâ. For Barthes the distinction is political: plaisir is a conscious, subject-centred form of enjoyment capable of being put into words, but for that reason it is compliant and sedate; whereas jouissance is unconscious and inexpressible, and thus revolutionary and violent. Insofar as we experience plaisir we remain within ourselves, while jouissance threatens to dissolve or destabilize our selfhood. Extending this logic to literature, Barthes squares up this distinction with the one he later makes between alternate modernity texts, equating the former with plaisir and the latter with jouissance. 2. The second volume of Foucault, Michelâs unfinished series of books on the history of sexuality, entitled LâUsage des plaisirs (1984), translated as The Uses of Pleasure (1985), problematized pleasure in a number of ways that have subsequently become influential, particularly in Cultural Studies. At the level of language, Foucault observed that the Ancient Greeks and Romans did not have a single word, like pleasure, capable of referring to such a wide variety of acts and affects. Thus his history tries to show how and why a word like âpleasureâ became necessary. Consistent with his earlier work on medicine, Foucault shows that the term âpleasureâ performs a regulatory function, but the way that regulatory function applies varies geographically and historically. For example, Christian doctrine proscribes certain types of pleasure because they divert the believer from the true path. By contrast, the Ancient Greeks regarded pleasure as a subsidiary issue to the more important matter of the ethics of oneâs acts. Foucaultâs concept of pleasure is as open-ended as his concept of power, but interestingly he is quite adamant that pleasure is a better term than desire (in contrast to in the work of his close friend Deleuze, Gilles).