Jouissance Quotes

The 1980s: feminism, postmodernism, sexual/textual politics

While it might be tempting to generalise that Woolf 's writing was being discussed almost in two separate camps during the 1980s, formalists on the one hand, and feminists on the other, this would be to simplify things too far.
Many critics were attempting to make sense of and connect her feminist politics with her modernist practices. Such investigations coincided with the explosion of theory in literary studies, and once again the work of Virginia
Woolf was central to the framing of many of the major theoretical developments in literary critical engagements with feminism, postmodernism, deconstruction and psychoanalysis. In the context of the rise of 'high theory'
and the questioning of old-school Marxist, materialist, humanist and historicist literary theories, Woolf studies wrestled with the locating of her radical feminist politics in the avant-garde qualities of the text itself, and its endlessly transgressive play of signifiers, with the Woolfian inscription of radically deconstructed models of the self and of sexuality and jouissance. ~ Jane Goldman

The Orient is watched, since its almost (but never quite) offensive behavior issues out of a reservoir of infinite peculiarity; the European, whose sensibility tours the Orient, is a watcher, never involved, always detached, always ready for new examples of what the Description de l'Egypte called "bizarre jouissance." The Orient becomes a living tableau of queerness. ~ Edward W. Said

The smell of a woman is her most important quality. I'd loved women who were old and who were young; those with extra kilos and large rumps, and others so thin there was barely even skin to pinch, and every time I held them, I worried I would snap them in two. But for all of these, where they had merited my love was in their delicious smell. Scent is such a powerful tool of attraction, that if a woman has this tool perfectly tuned, she needs no other. I will forgive her a large nose, a cleft lip, even crossed-eyes; and I'll bathe in the jouissance of her intoxicating odour. ~ Roman Payne

Since it is sure of its ability to control the entire domain of the visible and the audible via the laws governing commercial circulation and democratic communication, Empire no longer censures anything. All art, and all thought, is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, to communicate and to enjoy. We should become the pitiless censors of ourselves. ~ Alain Badiou

Are we, intellectual sirs, not actively or passively 'producing' more and more words, more books, more articles, ceaselessly refilling the pot-boiler of speech, gorging ourselves on it rather, seizing books and 'experiences', to metamorphose them as quickly as possible into other words, plugging us in here, being plugged in there, just like Mina on her blue squared oilcloth, extending the market and the trade in words of course, but also multiplying the chances of jouissance, scraping up intensities wherever possible, and never being sufficiently dead, for we too are required to go from forty to the hundred a day, and we will never play the whore enough, we will never be dead enough ~ Jean Francois Lyotard

Only your hearts be frolic, for the time Craves that we taste of naught but jouissance. ~ Robert Greene