ŽIŽEK GOADS AND PRODS

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ŽIŽEK GOADS AND PRODS
NOTES TOWARDS A HEGELIAN SYSTEM OF SEXUALITY
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Philosophy

NOTES TOWARDS A HEGELIAN SYSTEM OF SEXUALITY

Slavoj Žižek's avatar
Slavoj Žižek
Feb 13, 2024
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ŽIŽEK GOADS AND PRODS
ŽIŽEK GOADS AND PRODS
NOTES TOWARDS A HEGELIAN SYSTEM OF SEXUALITY
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Titian's Rape of Europa, 1560–2

According to the popular (mis)conception of psychoanalysis, sex (sexual relationship) serves as the reference of all our activities: everything we do and feel has an ultimate sexual connotation. Along these lines, one is tempted to rewrite the entire history of modern philosophy:

- Descartes: "I fuck, therefore I am," i.e. only in intense sexual activity do I experience the fullness of my being (Lacan's "decentering" answer to it would have been: "I fuck where I am not, and I am not where I fuck," i.e. it is not me who is fucking, but "it fucks" in me);

- Spinoza: within the Absolute as Fuck (coitus sive natura), one should distinguish, along the lines of the distinction between natura naturans and natura naturata, between the active fucking penetration and the object being fucked - there are those who fuck and those who get fucked;

- Hume introduces here the empiricist doubt: how do we know that fucking exists at all? There are just objects whose movements appear coordinated.

- the Kantian answer to this crisis: "the conditions of possibility of fucking are at the same time the conditions of possibility of the objects /of/ fucking";

- Fichte then radicalizes this Kantian revolution: fucking is a self-positing unconditional activity which divides itself into fucker and the fucked object, i.e. it is fucking itself which posits its object, the fuckee;

- Hegel: "it is crucial to conceive Fucking not only as Substance (the substantial drive overwhelming us), but also as Subject (as a reflective activity embedded in the context of spiritual meaning)";

- Marx: one should return to real fucking against the idealist masturbatory philosophising, i.e., as he literally put it in German Ideology, real, actual life is to philosophy as real sex is to masturbation;

- Nietzsche: The Will is, at its most radical, the Will to Fuck, which culminates in the Eternal Return of "I want more," of a fuck going on forever;

- Heidegger: in the same way as the essence of technology is nothing "technological," the essence of fucking has nothing to do with fucking as a simple ontic activity; rather, "the essence of fucking is the fucking of the Essence itself," i.e. it is not only we, humans, that fuck up our understanding of Essence, it is the Essence which is already in itself fucked up (inconsistent, withdrawing itself, erring);

- and, finally, this insight into how the Essence itself is fucked up, brings us to Lacan's "there is no such thing as a sexual relationship."

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