| Long abstract |
Jouissance is the strangest glistening, a dark glamour of rap-ture and disruption. It shines and cuts and leaves its bearer not knowing what to make of herself—or her pleasure. She is left beside herself, feeling ecstatically severed from herself, seized by subtleties, strange to say, even though bliss is an overwhelming force. (“Spiritual joy,” says American Heritage; “paradise,” “seventh heaven,” “cloud nine,” adds Roget’s.) Bliss is a word for impossibilities, felt and grasped as such. Something (im)possible coursing through the body, bending the mind. Then, on a dime: rapid, luminous deteriorations.If per chance it didn’t exist, queers would invent it. Along with irony, bliss is a quintessential queer accouterment. It’s he-donistic and wedded to pain. It’s clearly buoyant, yet it is dark. It’s provocatively sexy, intimate, scandalous, and bodily, while it’s evasive of capture and speech. Beyond the reach of words, it’s both spiritual and material — spiritual materialist — a material-ity that is ineffable and escapes norms. It’s the perversion every-one shares, no one knows, and, with its shadows and ties to loss, society denies in favor of “pleasure.”
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