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  • Ethics and Simulacrum
  • Alon Kantor*

What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.

Blaise Pascal

Now God’s power resides in the capacity to advance into emptiness.

Jacques Lacan

For should I thereby succeed only in arousing in other people a serious doubt whether it had not been granted me to throw a glance behind the dark veil which otherwise hides the beyond from the eyes of man, my work would certainly still belong to the most interesting ones ever written since the existence of the world.

Daniel P. Schreber

I. Preliminary Displacement

“. . . God demands a constant state of enjoyment . . . and it is my duty to provide him with this . . . in the shape of the greatest possible output of spiritual voluptuousness. And if, in this process, a little sensual pleasure falls to my share, I feel justified in accepting it as some slight compensation for the inordinate measure of suffering and privation that has been mine for so many past years.” 1 So writes Senatspräsident Schreber in his Memoirs and although he is considered to be a [End Page 483] mad man, his personal relationship with God, thought to be demented, perhaps evinces more than an ailment. Does he not speak here of an obligation coming from one knows not where, and of enjoyment by which he achieves his identitie(s), his time(s)? Here there is a description of a relationship of responsibility—“one-for-another”—which revolves around jouissance; moreover, which accomplishes itself through and by it. It is not fortuitously that we choose Schreber here. For Schreber’s experience of jouissance is not just a fantasy of playing with God, of self-indulgence. Schreber’s auto-eroticism is not just a play of one-self with one-self; he does not only masturbate or shit. 2 He “gives” himself time not only by creating a distance between himself and the obsessive world, but he cultivates a dutiful relationship in which he answers the call of God, and “the process is always accompanied by the generation of an exceedingly strong feeling of spiritual voluptuousness” (Freud 1911, 27). This relationship between Schreber and God is established by and through a weaving of two elements—the state of Blessedness and Voluptuousness—into a knot of duty and obedience; it is a matter of God’s wish. “Voluptuousness can be considered as part of everlasting Blessedness and is in a sense inherent in man and other living beings.” No law will stand in Schreber’s way towards God. “For me,” he writes, “such moral limits to voluptuousness no longer exist, indeed in a certain sense the reverse applies”(1988, 208). Schreber believes that his behavior “has been forced on [him] through God having placed Himself into a relationship with [him] which is contrary to the order of the world; although it may be sound paradoxical, it is justifiable to apply the saying of the Crusaders in the First Crusade to myself [i.e., Schreber]: dieu le veut (God wishes it)” (1988, 209). “In my relation to God . . . voluptuousness has become ‘God-fearing’ . . . . Mere common sense therefore commands that as far as humanly possible I fill every pause in my thinking—in other words the periods of rest from intellectual activity—with the cultivation of voluptuousness” (1988, 210–11). It is thus a matter of exigency of which the body is the very articulation, or rather the hand. “The body as possibility of a hand—and its whole corporeity can be substituted for the hand” (Levinas 1969, 167). It is the hand, [End Page 484] then, that obeys and gives time, eases, reaches yet postpones it à la fois; delivers both elemental qualities to jouissance, and takes them and holds them in reserve for future jouissance. This is...

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