pleasure

collective noun

phobia

optical illusion

reading

happiness

sandwich

Pleasure without Champagne is purely artificial. Oscar Wilde

is a force that can be taken up, used, incited, fomented, and manipulated, but is not itself discursively constituted.

This apparent inconsistency begins to recede once we realize that, for Foucault, pleasure is a force that can be taken up, used, incited, fomented, and manipulated, but is not itself discursively constituted. Foucault's concern is with the relationship among pleasure, discourse, and power, and the way in which pleasures can get used and taken up by institutional discourses and aligned with power/knowledges. Thus, he is concerned about the way in which various sexual pleasures get categorized and correlated to specified personality profiles and identities that can then be managed and disciplined.

is a strategic point, on the side of organization. It interrupts and organizes desire.

The ''idea of pleasure'' is then a strategic point that ''interrupts the positivity of desire and the constitution of its field of immanence'' (131). Hence, for Deleuze, desire must be the term for what passes into and becomes arranged in the dispositif (although he accepts Foucault's unease at the Lacanian inflection of desire as lack). Deleuze's Spinozist version of desire implies no such negativity: ''For me, desire includes no such lack... it is also not a natural given. Desire is wholly a part of the functioning heterogeneous assemblage. It is a process, as opposed to a structure or a genesis. It is an affect, as opposed to a feeling. It is a haecceity the individual singularity of a day, a season, a life. As opposed to a subjectivity, it is an event, not a thing or a person. Above all, it implies the constitution of a field of immanence or a body-without-organs, which is only defined by zones of intensity, thresholds, degrees and fluxes'' (Deleuze 2006, 130).

I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.

is, along with pain, like light and darkness, in that they succeed each other.

Pain and pleasure, like light and darkness, succeed each other. Laurence Sterne

is always already mediated... to seek one's pleasures is to already know in advance something of how one wishes to take hold of one's desires.

Hence, for Deleuze, desire must be the term for what passes into and becomes arranged in the dispositif (although he accepts Foucault's unease at the Lacanian inflection of desire as lack). Deleuze's Spinozist version of desire implies no such negativity: ''For me, desire includes no such lack... it is also not a natural given. Desire is wholly a part of the functioning heterogeneous assemblage. It is a process, as opposed to a structure or a genesis. It is an affect, as opposed to a feeling. It is a haecceity the individual singularity of a day, a season, a life. As opposed to a subjectivity, it is an event, not a thing or a person. Above all, it implies the constitution of a field of immanence or a body-without-organs, which is only defined by zones of intensity, thresholds, degrees and fluxes'' (Deleuze 2006, 130).

is always derived from something outside oneself, whereas joy arises from within.

Pleasure is always derived from something outside yourself, whereas joy arises from within. (David R. Hawkins)

It is always by way of pain one arrives at pleasure. Marquis de Sade

pleasure, n.All

pleasure