ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we relate the ever more frenetic search for satisfaction in our current societies to the pursuit of objectivity that was initiated with the modern sciences, and schematically captured by Descartes in his famous dualism between res cogitans and res extensa. In this dualism, the subject is situated at the top of all thinking, as an instance capable of affirming its being and containing the norm of what counts as an object. With Kant and psychoanalysis, and from within the Cartesian schema, we propose to address the issue of what resists objectification, and to see what this implies as to the search for satisfaction. It is Kant’s Critique of Judgment , and in particular his concept of a natural purpose, that will allow us to consider that the impossibility of objectification is in a very specific sense related to pleasure and displeasure, satisfaction and dissatisfaction. But it is Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, with in particular the focus on the compulsion to repeat, that genuinely pursues these questions. From within this viewpoint, subjectification is intrinsically bound up with a structural lack, that is, with the acknowledgement of the fact that the objects that would satisfy our needs are not the objects around which our subjectivity is constituted. From within this viewpoint, attempts to find the eventually satisfying object, individually or collectively, are seen as a forcing, a source of violence to what subjectivity structurally amounts to. Both the discourse of fatalist complaint – we are subjected to ever more inhumane demands of productivity that we cannot escape – and the discourse of liberation – we need to get out of this situation, this is possible with the right kind of action – witness to that forcing.
