on the possibility of critique

“She guards the treasures of daily life, but also of the night, the highest good. This is why the prostitute is a listener. She rescues the conversation from triviality; greatness has no claim upon her, for greatness comes to an end when confronted by her. She has seen every man’s desire fail and now the stream of words drains away into her nights. The present that has been eternally will come again.  The over conversation of silence is ecstasy.”

Walter Benjamin

What is most obscene about de Sade’s heroes is not their voluptuous physicality, but their glibness: the logorrhea of a too clever intelligence — an endless flow of words.

The intellect, as if to leave its domination ever more entrenched, has taken upon itself to speak for the body, and for the pleasures of the body: to justify them, explain them, analyze them away through a specious logic. It says everything. But in saying everything, feels nothing.  And thus the most extreme forms of pleasure become nothing more than the scaffolding of a philosophical argument.

There are perhaps two great political novels from the age of the French revolution: de Sade’s Justine and Friedrich Hoelderlin’s Hyperion. Few writers, and few works are so unlike.  It might seem that  de Sade and Hoelderlin share only their (feigned?) madness.  Of course,  each, in his own way, anticipated Nietzsche’s rediscovery of the Dionysian.  (Justine is struck by lightening…)   But for de Sade pleasure, subjected to the endless pressure of instrumental intelligence, becomes depraved: every utilitarian matrix refers to pleasure, but the variety of pleasures — the manifold complexity of feeling and experience — eludes the calculation of means and end.  De Sade’s perversions all derive from this one: the imposition of the form of instrumentality on pleasure — the demand that pleasure (or feeling, or experience…) be able to explain itself. Hyperion sets things right, if only negatively, and at its limits. Feeling is originary finitude: and experience does not have to justify itself but on its own terms. Hence every experience is its own justification.

There is something quite charming about  more mundane, stupid pornography, portrayed by actors whose words are as clumsy as their bodies are carefree and graceful. In a world where everyone always knows where everything should be put, the adult films’ stars betray, in their half-hearted attempts at acting,  the philosophical embarrassment that all of us feel with our bodies.  They seem like children, playing around insouciantly with gifts that they did not ask for, never expected to receive, and have no idea how to use.  Extravagant pleasure is the correlate not of expertise, but of a certain ignorance.