/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.22824050]

Why does he thinks fulfilling degenerate sexual fantasies leads to being overwhelmed and destroyed by "the real" but doesn't apply this logic to normal sexuality?

[Anonymous No.22824067]

Because normal sexuality is aligned with nature

[Anonymous No.22824074]

Because normal sexuality is regulated by fantasy - the symbolic. You don't get overwhelmed because there is some scenario you fulfill

[Anonymous No.22824157]

>>22824074
So it's only degeneracy if it goes against your fantasies, desires and roles you fulfill... AKA rape?

[Anonymous No.22824188]

Then you want to ignore rape

Is simple it disturbs your peace of mind, past rape happened already so you are left with present and future

[Anonymous No.22824194]

>>22824050
Because he was a Catholichud.

[Anonymous No.22824339]

>>22824050
>>22824074
Lacan does not think that "degenerate sexual fantasies" are overwhelming and lead to destruction by real and that on the other hand "normal sexuality" is regulated by symbolic only.

Lacan's main focus is on desire, understood in a specific way. Usually we think in terms of desire vs reason. Desire works by providing us with hypothetical laws - if you want x, then do y. And only reason provides categorical laws - you must do x no matter what your interests, situation of other desires. Lacan, following Kant, shows, that there are instances, when desire works in categorical way - you must do x no matter what. Desire works just like duty. Lacan thinks about desire as something compulsory, coercive, autistic, beyond all morality and self-preservation instinticts, without any care for consequences.

Both degenerate sexual fantasies and normal sexuality can "contain" this desire that leads to "destruction by real". A pedophile, who follows his drive with no concerns for his self-preservation or morality is an example of lacanian notion of desire, but also a normal heterosexual adult male who sacrifices everything to pursue an adult woman. I like this notion of desire, because there is something inherently noble and based about it, it captures something that your typical biological and psychological explanations can not explain.

[Anonymous No.22824373]

>>22824339
There is nothing noble about slavery to an irrational impulse.

[Anonymous No.22824390]

>>22824373
If that irrational impulse is elevated to the status of The Thing, then yes, following that impulse no matter what the consequences are is noble. Utilitiarian calculation or rational prudence and adherence to the prevailing moral code is the opposite of being noble.

[Anonymous No.22824402]

>>22824390
Only a genuine retard can think that following a compulsion is noble. You mistakenly compared compulsions to duty but duty is in fact voluntary: you can choose whether to shirk or not to shirk your duty, and it is precisely that voluntary, willed character that sometimes involves acting to one's own detriment which is considered noble. A compulsion, on the other hand, is a thoroughly squalid thing. Do you suppose selling off the belonging of your family to fuel a drug addiction is noble too?

[Anonymous No.22824416]

>>22824402
>you can choose whether to shirk or not to shirk your duty, and it is precisely that voluntary, willed character that sometimes involves acting to one's own detriment which is considered noble.
Lacan says the same thing about desire. It is not a blind compulsion without any space for you to decide wheter to follow it or not. You can ignore your desire, the feeling of coercion and compulsion inside of you, but Lacan formulates his own ethics by saying "do not give way on or do not give up on your desire". Addiction is a whole different thing. It is a chase after pleasure, not after your desire. I don't know how did you manage to read out the equation "any kind of compulsion equals good" out of my posts.

[Anonymous No.22824421]

>>22824402
you are a slave to duties which have the aura of voluntary action, but are at bottom compulsions themselves. Tell me, how do you feel when a duty is not followed, if not compelled by disgust and dissapointment

[Anonymous No.22824461]

>>22824421
You may be there tomorrow but your duties not

[Anonymous No.22824674]

>>22824416
>It is a chase after pleasure, not after your desire. I don't know how did you manage to read out the equation "any kind of compulsion equals good" out of my posts.
Probably because you used a compulsive chase after sexual pleasure in both of your examples. This doesn't actually dismantle the "utilitarian calculation" you mentioned - it only needs to suppose that one factor outweighs all others by far. But actually it seems you categorically distinguish desire from pleasure, in which case it seems to me you identify desire with an object selected by the rational will, a "Know Thyself" of sorts. In which case the earlier examples would be inadmissible IMO.
>>22824421
I disagree. Social obligations and duties are not the same. Currently, I have a lot of social obligations but no duties except for the ones I choose to impose on myself. I do not care about ignoring my obligations at all, because what people think or say is not very important. I would loathe to ignore a legitimate duty, however, precisely because duty receives the assent of the self and comes to be an important part of self-identity. But that only applies to legitimate duty, not to social obligation. It would be possible for a law to obligate you to tap dance every morning at 5 AM. It still wouldn't be a duty, nor would it feel like one.

[Anonymous No.22824957]

>>22824674
>Probably because you used a compulsive chase after sexual pleasure in both of your examples.
I will try clarify myself, because I didn't do a good job. I provided those examples, because the OP was talking about sexuality. Even if we elaborate those two examples, we can imagine cases, where one is attracted to other people wtihout the main aim of sexual gratification. Leaving aside the topic of sexuality, we can talk about desire in a non-sexual setting: for example, an artist who has this burning desire to carry out a project, even though it does not bring him any pleasure, is costly financially, socially etc. Or a scientist, who pursues a truth without any recourse to the consequences of this pursuit. One good example that Lacan takes from Kant and reformulates is a hypothetical situation of a man, who has a chance to get with a woman for a day with the knowledge that he would have to die the next day. Kant thinks that no rational man would do it, and Lacan, of course, says that if the man had The Desire, he would absolutely do it. Because he does not weigh the pleasure and unpleasure like an utilitarianist would. That's why for Lacan desire is beyond what Freud called the utilitarian "pleasure principle".
>But actually it seems you categorically distinguish desire from pleasure, in which case it seems to me you identify desire with an object selected by the rational will, a "Know Thyself" of sorts
Desire and the pursuit of pleasure are different things, because as I tried to show above, desire does not aim at the pleasure. Lacan tries to articulate what it aims at and he just follows what Pascal and Nietzsche has already said: desire aims at the continuation of desire itself. It is a complex topic that I don't want to go into deeply. Whether desire is a product of rational will selecting an object: there are similarities, Lacan would say that there is selection, but it is selected not by your rational will, but by your unconscious. You "get" desire, even if you didn't ask for it. The only thing that is in your control is whether you accept it or deny it.

[Anonymous No.22825091]

>>22824957
Okay, I get it now, thanks for explaining. Besides my obvious disagreements with all psychoanalysis (trying to explain everything through the subconscious), this seems a lot more reasonable. I don't know if "the Desire" is the best term to render it but yeah, it's like having a personal mission or meaning that smashes through everything else. Naturally, in that case it is always more authentic to pursue this than not to do so. But I don't think just anything can fulfil this function, as we discussed earlier.

[Anonymous No.22825107]

>>22824339
Desire can't be self destructive, that's jouissance, morbid pleasure that you can't stop going after.

[Anonymous No.22825322]

>>22824957
this was a good explanation. but what is the difference between desire and pure practical reason? or to put it another, if there is the possibility for a pure ethical motive according to some desire, then what would make it different from the Kantian categorical imperative? after all kant said somewhere that pure practical reason is the faculty of desire.

[Anonymous No.22825939]

>>22824050
>Why does he thinks fulfilling degenerate sexual fantasies leads to being overwhelmed and destroyed by "the real"
Because the fulfillment of these desires lead to the breakdown of the consistency of the symbolic universe which the subject constructs. When the big other tells him to have degenerate sex and this sex does not totally fulfill him, as it necessarily can’t, then he begins to have questions about the integrity of the big other which is itself an expression of the real. Zizek said it best when he said that the real for Lacan is the axiomatic structure below the big other which predetermines signification itself. Additionally, there’s the issue of the role of the phantasy in sexual desire which, when phantasy is seen as mere phantasy, has a traumatic effect of its own. All this counts for regular sexual desire as well or even drinking a can of coke but on a much less psychically severe level.

[Anonymous No.22826837]

>>22825322
Alenka Zupančič tries to formulate an answer to this question in her book What is Sex? The basic gist of the argument is that both of these things are the same, the only difference is that Kant couldn't follow the implications of his own findings and limited the pure desire by giving it a logical and moral content (law of non-contradictions, the morality of treating other persons as ends, never as mere means etc). Lacan and his followers argue that pure desire is "amoral", it could very well treat other peoples as mere means, and for that very reason Lacan presents de Sade (the guy, who both practiced and wrote about treating other people as mere means - sadistically) as the truth of the kantian notion of practical will/pure desire.