Marxist Leisure Heresy

A few months back, there was debate here at Fear and Loathing in Georgetown and over at Athens & Jerusalem about the end goal of Marxism. FLG's contention was the end goal was a wrongly understood version of Aristotle's Leisure. Withywindle objected, but then added to the analysis.

To recap: Basically, the goal of Marxism is Leisure, which is the removal of all constraints (traditional, social, cultural, economic, political, technological, and perhaps even biological) to maximize the available experiences that can be consumed and, well, experienced. It's a goal that one might call libertine or hedonistic.

But then what to make of Tracy Clark-Flory's call for mandatory condom use in porn?

Matt Zeitlin responds with a fascinating quotation from Slavoj Žižek, whom I wasn't familiar with until now:

Is this not the attitude of the hedonistic Last Man? Everything is permitted, you can enjoy everything, BUT deprived of its substance which makes it dangerous. (This is also Last Man’s revolution — “revolution without revolution.”) Is this not one of the two versions of Lacan’s anti-Dostoyevski motto “If God doesn’t exist, everything is prohibited”? (1) God is dead, we live in a permissive universe, you should strive for pleasures and happiness — but, in order to have a life full of happiness and pleasures, you should avoid dangerous excesses, so everything is prohibited if it is not deprived of its substance; (2) If God is dead, superego enjoins you to enjoy, but every determinate enjoyment is already a betrayal of the unconditional one, so it should be prohibited. The nutritive version of this is to enjoy directly the Thing Itself: why bother with coffee? Inject caffeine directly into your blood! Why bother with sensual perceptions and excitations by external reality? Take drugs which directly affect your brain! – And if there is God, then everything is permitted — to those who claim to act directly on behalf of God, as the instruments of His will; clearly, a direct link to God justifies our violation of any “merely human” constraints and considerations (as in Stalinism, where the reference to the big Other of historical Necessity justifies absolute ruthlessness).

Today’s hedonism combines pleasure with constraint — it is no longer the old notion of the “right measure” between pleasure and constraint, but a kind of pseudo-Hegelian immediate coincidence of the opposites: action and reaction should coincide, the very thing which causes damage should already be the medicine. The ultimate example of it is arguably a chocolate laxative, available in the US, with the paradoxical injunction “Do you have constipation? Eat more of this chocolate!”, i.e., of the very thing which causes constipation. Do we not find here a weird version of Wagner’s famous “Only the spear which caused the wound can heal it” from Parsifal? And is not a negative proof of the hegemony of this stance the fact that true unconstrained consumption (in all its main forms: drugs, free sex, smoking…) is emerging as the main danger? The fight against these dangers is one of the main investments of today’s “biopolitics.” Solutions are here desperately sought which would reproduce the paradox of the chocolate laxative. The main contender is “safe sex” — a term which makes one appreciative of the truth of the old saying “Is having sex with a condom not like taking a shower with a raincoat on?”. The ultimate goal would be here, along the lines of decaf coffee, to invent “opium without opium”: no wonder marijuana is so popular among liberals who want to legalize it — it already IS a kind of “opium without opium.”

And Matt also points out this little tidbit:

I should note that it’s particularly interesting that Clark-Flory who wrote a piece entitled “In Defense of Casual Sex”

FLG is gonna have to think about the Žižek quotation.