The Libertine's Nature. Lars-Henrik Schmidt
– indefinitely, so to speak – to replace the reality with a principle of reality, to modify one’s wishes so they can come true.
In Rousseau there are two elegant metaphors for precisely this irreducible division into need and desire. Towards the North, claimed Rousseau, society came into being around the bonfire. Humans needed each other and the first words were simply “aidez-moi”; whereas society towards the South came into being around the well, where they wanted to maximize their happiness together with the other, which is why the first words were not “aidez-moi” but “aimez-moi.” It is then a question of a shift in accentuation that constitutes the double origin of sociality. Rousseau spoke of a double origin because both forms exist simultaneously and in a sense depend on each other.
Rousseau considered that a mythical explanation of the double relationship was called for, and the explanation was precisely a myth of origins. However, with the tragic philosophy of Social Analytics, we think beyond the theme of origins as understood as that which decides being. Here we are beyond being. What we want to do now is grasp the double relationship in the forms of articulation of “a third thing” that, however, is not in-dependent. It is Sade who puts us on the track of this third source of authority, one that for him has reality but that in the light of Social Analytics is first realized when suspended.
Sade’s Craving
It is the actual articulatory relationship we call craving. It is craving that is articulated as need or desire but which is not need or desire. The thesis is, then, that we can use Sade in a speculative attempt to develop a third track. Sade himself thinks in terms of the opposition between need and desire, but his praxis, both the libertine and the literary, cannot actually be contained in this problematic. Consequently, Sade is worth a closer look.
With Sade as a fellow player a problematic can be constructed that neither subscribes to the constellation need-necessity-satisfaction-system-market nor to the constellation desire-happiness-fulfilment-reciprocity-exchange, but rather to the following constellation: craving-pleasure-acting out-commoneness-taking.
The acting out of craving is experienced as pleasure. The source of pleasure belongs to the individual in his one-sidedness, where pleasure is taken at the expense of the other. The crux of the matter is to understand the implications of pleasure occurring at the expense of the other, who himself takes pleasure at a third person’s expense, who himself takes pleasure at a fourth person’s expense, and so on, but without the relations forming a synthesis, without them forming a system.
In Sade what this means is clear, but the issue that interests us is whether or not a contra-intentional possibility can be traced precisely in the will to reduce the other to an object of pleasure, also in Sade. Sade wants to but cannot (precisely because he wants to) accomplish his reduction.
Introducing the third constellation means then that a counterpart to prohibition and command must be introduced as well. This counterpart can be found in the offer, in the invitation to share commonness (which alludes to something more than communality and less than universality). When one shares commonness with someone, one abstains from turning this person into a pure object. One behaves with reserve because one does not long for the other, but one misses something else: the relation to the other, which means that one belongs to the difference to the other, and this is why one is a-miss. In the annihilation of the other, this difference, this missing, this reserve is lost, as the relation is broken off when the other exists in his or her self-dependence or self-sufficiency or even as nothing – it amounts to the same thing, since the other’s substantiation is the annihilation of reserve.
One cannot just take pleasure in the other; one must also take pleasure in the other’s pleasure. The other’s relation to himself, which involves me and my relation to myself, which involves…
Perhaps it is precisely because there are ways in which we cannot take pleasure in the other that we also take pleasure in the other’s pleasure: to make the other into a substitute is thus a social technique. To take pleasure in the other means that the other does not back out, in one way or another. This involves a diagnosis of craving (or a diagnosis of protest).
Abstention is then a necessity in but not a precondition for the social: it has a genesis but no origin; it is not caused or motivated but it derives from being a-miss. Its substitutional ground is the missing we cannot separate from life itself, from the inevitability of missing. Abstention is the superhistorical precondition for the social, for what I also call socius. In Social Analytics, socius is thus the name for the conjunction between conflictual commonness and common conflictuality, for the social coincidence.
Please, Please Me
The point should be (and may be expressed with a precise ambiguity) that one’s pleasure is the other’s pleasure: one takes pleasure in the other, and one takes pleasure in the other’s pleasure. With this a radical shift occurs, however, from the other to one-self (oneness), for the point of sensuality is that there can very well be coevalness in pleasure, which is something other than reciprocity and system, that is to say, commonness in craving: the unarticulated “disagreement,” or rather socius, unexperienced incompatibility. Thus it must be craving that creates the possibility for love, not the reverse. In other words, I wish to accomplish a revaluation.
Maybe this coevalness in pleasure, this complaisance, ought to be called sympathy in the same sense as compassion, but the situation today is that moral philosophy has monopolized the use of sympathy as a counterpart to antipathy and to egoism; it is hardly possible to extract a new meaning from this category: the concurrent feeling of sympathy is a form of reciprocity, but that is not the case with the being-in-tune of coevalness. One can empathize with the other, but one cannot feel the other’s feeling. Helvetius knew this, and Wittgenstein repeated it in his own fashion later. We are now left with another phenomenon: the possibility for resonance, which we will name common pleasure or simultaneous pleasure (with all the ‘simul’ associations); just like when an offer of meaning is repeated.
This is different from empathy since one also relates to the other’s relations, in that there is no common denominator, no joint object. Commonely one takes pleasure in loneliness and lonelily one takes pleasure in commoneness. Only he who is not alone can be lonely, so what counts here is being “one among people.” The loneliness of pleasure is not sad or lamentable but tragic, for it is in the midst of attempting to become one flesh that the radical difference makes itself felt. With those to whom one is attached one must refrain from becoming one flesh. One experiences here the situation of belonging to the difference from the other, and as a form of consumption pleasure is a confirmation of individuality in the middle of an attempt at transgressing individuality. The importance of the sense of imagination for pleasure is an indication of the condition of radically lonely commoneness, which is not to be mistaken.
The issue that is going to be of interest to us is, then, how one abstains from taking pleasure in the other and instead takes pleasure in the other’s pleasure, that is, instead of taking pleasure in the other. How does attachment imply abstention? This is what we are going to examine by seeing how a boundary is marked out with respect to taking pleasure in the other. And at this point two possible reasons can be given: either one is not capable of it, in which case abstention is a Nietzschean respect, or else one abstains from taking pleasure in the other with a view to one’s own pleasure. If the other is dead he cannot act as a substitute for one’s pleasure. This is among the theses that we are going to examine in what follows. There are ways in which one must abstain from taking pleasure in the other.
The fact is that inasmuch as the social must take place, one must abstain from the phenomenon we are going to analyze under the appellation “cannibalism.” A boundary is drawn with respect to how one can take pleasure in the other. Social anthropophagy is, as I am going to attempt to demonstrate, excluded, impossible in the social, for transgression is the same as terminating socius. It is therefore neither