“Du kannst, denn du sollst!”

Once, I was lost
to the point of disgust
I had in my sight
lack of vision
lack of light
I fell hard
I fell fast
mercy me
it'll never last

then, in the dust
all the things
we discussed
were thrown to the wind
so at last
we begin
'cuz we fall hard
we fall fast
mercy me
it'll never last
---

What survived of the sexual liberation of the 1960s was the tolerant hedonism easily incorporated into our hegemonic ideology. The superego imperative to enjoy thus functions as the reversal of Kant’s “Du kannst, denn du sollst!” (You can, because you must!)—it relies on a “You must, because you can!” That is to say, the superego aspect of today’s “non-repressive” hedonism (the constant provocation we are exposed to, enjoining us to go to the end and explore all modes of jouissance) resides in the way permitted jouissance necessarily turns into obligatory jouissance. This drive to pure autistic jouissance (through drugs or other trance-inducing means) arose at a precise political moment: when the emancipatory sequence of 1968 exhausted its potentials. At this critical point (mid-1970s), the only option left was a direct, brutal, passage a l’acte, which assumed three main forms: the search for extreme forms of sexual jouissance; leftist political terrorism (RAF in Germany, Red Brigades in Italy); and, finally, the turn towards the real of an inner experience (Oriental mysticism). What all three share is the withdrawal from concrete socio-political engagement.

--Slavoj Zizek on the heritage of May '68

There is something true to the notion that jouissance has become central to our time because the focus is no longer on thought, meditation, and thoroughness, but on feeling, orgasms, and immediacy. The obsession with jouissance is revelatory of the fact that, nowadays, to be you must either jouir, have an orgasm, or refrain from doing so, which explains why hell is no longer others but impotence, alienation, and the mere possibility that existence may not be about feelings and that raw jouissance is a just merely another form of enslavement, which reinforces nothingness. This fact explains why even pain, “sin,” privation and personal morality have become sources of jouissance. It is for this reason that Sunday’s sermons in big American mega-churches look as gigantic orgies where the goal is to get high on Jesus and on the fact that he is leading his followers to more stuff and thus to more jouissance.

Camus thought that the worm of absurdity was within the human heart and he was right. The saddest thing about the 1960s and its so-called sexual liberation is that they didn’t liberate sex, but that they maximized the absurdity of human existence by divinizing jouissance in order to kill thought in an attempt to eradicate the possibility for people to be miné, to be undermined. In our world, it has become difficult to find Roquentins, people who like the hero of Sartre’s Nausea think and think and think without jouissance blocking their awareness of absurdity, without seeking to escape nothingness. However, it is easier to find Estelles, people who, as the heroine of No Exit, cannot live without jouissance. In our world, the most important things are the mirror and other’s people gaze because they accentuate jouissance by externalizing it thus making it the main means of self-actualization and self-worth.