JEALOUSY - A HUMAN SENTIMENT

Giulia Sissa
University of Calilfornia Los Angeles

Immanuel Kant claims that sexual pleasure violates the humanity of a person. Desire itself transforms its object (and its cause) into an object/thing. Desire itself, in other words, objectifies/reifies everything it touches. The logic of the argument relies on the premise that there is something intrinsically despicable, in the sexual act itself. Eros degrades a person, ipso facto, to the level of a Sache. A moral posture of disapproval, religiously adopted a priori, generates the conflation of the grammatical and the ontological meanings of the word "object". A systematic blame of pleasure, at work in every sentence, word and syllable of Kantian anesthetic humanism, reduces Eros to hunger for inhuman meat. The flesh is just veal roast. Feminist theory, after Simone de Beauvoir, has been fascinated by this unsavory cuisine. But a different kind of unfinished Enlightenment can take Eros out of the Kingdom of Ends.

Moderator: Philipp Blom, Author and Historian