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Wikipedia Wiktionary Tumblr Wikisource YouTube Shop Featured: A Scheme for abolishing all Words is one of the wittiest and smartest comments on semantics. (Illustration: extreme close-up from the movie "The Big Swallow" (1901), produced and directed by James Williamson (1855-1933)

Frisson is a French term intended to convey the shiver or thrill of fright that can be strangely pleasurable, as when reading good horror fiction. Sometimes accompanied by the sensation of the hairs raising on the back of the neck. Note that this is not synonymous with fear which is a more powerful and visceral feeling. By extension, the term is used to denote an experience of intense excitement.

The frisson and the aesthetics of André Breton

We find in this description by André Breton the notion of the British sublime sensibility and the contemporary body genre:

J'avoue sans la moindre confusion mon insensibilité profonde en présence des spectacles naturels et des oeuvres d'art qui, d'emblée, ne me procurent pas un trouble physique caracterisé par la sensation d'une aigrette de vent aux tempes susceptible d'entraîner un véritable frisson. Je n’ai jamais pu m’empêcher d’établir une relation entre cette sensation et celle du plaisir érotique et ne découvre entre elles que des différences de degré.

I acknowledge without least confusion my major insensitivity in the presence of natural spectacles and of works of art which, from the start, do not get to me a physical disorder characterized by the feeling of a brush of wind to the temples likely to involve a true shiver. I never could prevent me from establishing a relation between this feeling and that of the erotic pleasure and discover between them only a difference in degree.

Namesakes

• Le Frisson des vampires