Francis of Assisi’s Perfect Jouissance: Theorizing Conversion through Objects and Affects in Early Franciscan Fragments

Abstract “Conversion” has often been used to designate an event or period of discrete and intense change, especially in relation to an individual’s belief and religious identity. The sources on Francis of Assisi’s conversion show how pleasure and unpleasure converged in relation to material objects and the affects that they helped to create and sustain. Among others, Francis of Assisi’s objects of conversion included lepers, cloth, fire, ice, and his own body. Instead of conversion as a discrete change in a predictable direction, taking the materials of Francis’s conversion as the primary objects of the story animates a sense of perfect jouissance, suggesting that conversion entails realignments between pleasure and unpleasure—an experience Francis described, toward the end of his life, as “perfect joy.”