#zizek

This, in its own way, was a kind of collage, at least in spirit, because it combined three unrelated images in a single blog post, images that, when combined, took on new meaning, and for me, expressed something…

I despise the kind of book that tells you how to make yourself happy! The first duty of philosophy is making you understand what deep shit you are in.

Lacan's further point is that this covert Sadean dimension of an "ethical (sexual) passion" is not read into Kant by our eccentric interpretation, but is inherent to the Kantian theoretical edifice. If we put aside the body of "circumstantial evidence" for it (isn't Kant's infamous definition of marriage-"the contract between two adults of the opposite sex about the mutual use of each other's sexual organs"-thoroughly Sadean, since it reduces the Other, the subject's sexual partner, to a partial object, to his/her bodily organ which provides pleasure, ignoring him/her as the Whole of a human Person?), the crucial clue that allows us to discern the contours of "Sade in Kant" is the way Kant conceptualizes the relationship between sentiments (feelings) and the moral Law. Although Kant insists on the absolute gap between pathological sentiments and the pure form of moral Law, there is one a priori sentiment that the subject necessarily experiences when confronted with the injunction of the moral Law, the pain of humiliation (because of man's hurt pride, due to the "radical Evil" of human nature); for Lacan, this Kantian privileging of pain as the only a priori sentiment is strictly correlative to Sade's notion of pain (torturing and humiliating the other, being tortured and humiliated by him) as the privileged way of access to sexual jouissance (Sade's argument, of course, is that pain is to be given priority over pleasure on account of its greater longevity-pleasures are passing, while pain can last almost indefinitely). This link can be further substantiated by what Lacan calls the Sadean fundamental fantasy: the fantasy of another, ethereal body of the victim, which can be tortured indefinitely and nonetheless magically retains its beauty (see the standard Sadean figure of a young girl sustaining endless humiliations and mutilations from her deprived torturer and somehow mysteriously surviving it all intact, in the same way Tom and Jerry and other cartoon heroes survive all their ridiculous ordeals intact). Doesn't this fantasy provide the libidinal foundation of the Kantian postulate of the immortality of the soul endlessly striving to achieve ethical perfection, i.e., is not the phantasmic "truth" of the immortality of the soul its exact opposite, the immortality of the body, its ability to sustain endless pain and humiliation? Judith Butler pointed out that the Foucaultian "body" as the site of resistance is none other than the Freudian "psyche": paradoxically, "body" is Foucault's name for the psychic apparatus insofar as it resists the soul's domination. That is to say, when, in his well-known definition of the soul as the "prison of the body," Foucault turns around the standard Platonic-Christian definition of the body as the "prison of the soul," what he calls "body" is not simply the biological body, but is effectively already caught into some kind of pre-subjective psychic apparatus.  Consequently, don't we encounter in Kant a secret homologous inversion, only in the opposite direction, of the relationship between body and soul: what Kant calls "immortality of the soul" is effectively the immortality of the other, ethereal, "undead" body?