The Refusal To Enjoy
A disembodied case for the future
Descartes can’t be blamed for positing the necessity of God’s existence for establishing the truth of our shared reality. On the one hand, this move can be seen as halting the solipsistic madness of the self-causing cogito, on the other hand — and this falls outside the anachronistic light of reason — God’s existence constitutes the madness of the embodiment in reality.
As of writing, when we direct our attention to the recent victory of the Right in the elections of the American Empire, we find it to be enjoyed in a carnavalesque manner by the winning side. But before delving deeper into the contemporary political situation, we’ll turn our gaze to the 17th century.
Along comes Descartes, whose method of universal doubt shreds any and all suppositions, making him stumble, fall and hit the hard rock of the cogito: I think, therefore I am. If he had put the valor of doubt above this hard rock, he might’ve leaped over it with questions such as: “I still know nothing about thinking or existence as such. How can I conclude the certainty of their unity in the cogito if these are not thoroughly known first?” One of the early critics of Descartes claimed that this would continue the nauseating process of self-questioning, which he believed Descartes was not justified to put an end to. And is that argument wrong? Isn’t Descartes’ choice to cut doubt short at the cogito arbitrary? Descartes dismissed this critique. He argued that our innate knowledge of thought and existence is sufficient to prove the cogito, regardless of the prejudices attached to these words. He also claimed that using a definition to clarify these terms beforehand would have the opposite effect and bestow unnecessary obscurity on them, as well as set aside and devalue the sufficiency of the mind’s innate knowledge.
Descartes made his choice, and he stopped where he did. He was not a sceptic who put doubt over knowing for the sake of enjoying the abstract freedom of indeterminacy. As a philosopher with a method, he aimed for the truth and the necessity of closure it entails.
This is what we find with the Father of Modern Philosophy. He opened up a closure with the cogito, deciding that he was going to be a receptive target at this exact point, exposing himself to all the criticism for generations to come. He rejected the terminological and metaphysical baggage that preceded him, which he had studied during his scholastic education. By starting over from scratch as if nothing came before him, he could naively and infirmly reinstate, or better yet, revive philosophy in a radically modern iteration.
“In this regard [my text, the Principles of Philosophy] will have an effect contrary to that of the ordinary philosophy, for it may easily be observed in those who are known as pedants, that it renders them less capable of reasoning than they would have been had they never learned it at all.”1
Freed from the redundant complexities of the scholastic corpus, in the cogito, knowledge of the eternal truth was found in simplicity. In subsequent writings, this allowed Descartes to think about how to subordinate the actions of the machinic body to the desire of the cognitive soul, for example in his text Passions of the Soul. But, prior to that, philosophy needed to lay the groundwork of first principles by setting aside the superfluous excess of what previous generations had left it:
“So, when we have true principles in philosophy we cannot fail, by following them, occasionally to meet with other truths; and there is no way in which we can better prove the falsity of those of Aristotle, than by pointing out that no progress has been attained by their means in all the centuries in which they have been followed.”2
Descartes wrested himself loose from the archaic regurgitations of Aristotle in the unclear and indistinct jargon of the scholastics. According to Descartes, one will be more rightly fitted to apprehend the truth by starting with his own texts, rather than by beginning with ancient philosophy. With the method of universal doubt concluding with the cogito, Descartes had made himself into a type of first-person socratic figure who did not find stable rest in the anamnesis of the pythagorean forms, the parmenidean one, or homeric myth, but in the reflexive and positive truth of doubt — its cognitive existence independent from embodiment. With Descartes, philosophy afforded itself a new beginning.
What exactly did Descartes open up for modernity then? For one, he did away with the need for a final cause in the study of truth. He was concerned with the efficient cause only, and grounded reason in its own causality, the name of which is res cogitans, the cogito reified as substance. And, he opened up the diversification of self-grounding minds to find a unity in their diversification, underpinned by the uncreated substance, God. He asserted that diversification in the world is better than there being no evil and hence no freedom at all. All this necessitated was that res extensa, embodied space, was independent from the thinking substance, but just like it, created as well as linked to it by God.
Philosophy in modernity starts with this incongruent split, which is at the same time a unity of the two substances (thinking and extension). That the cogito was thought of as its own cause, meant that it can be understood on its own terms, distinctly, without the need of something else. Doubt itself is the simple truth of first philosophy, the proof too, of my mind’s existence. And as Descartes will repeatedly emphasize throughout his works, he does not appeal to some faith or praise of God’s infinity to universalize his truth: “… I wish no one to believe anything that I have written, unless he is personally persuaded by the force and evidence of reason.”3 Is that true? Yes and no — and I can’t blame him for the ambiguity — without God, the res cogitans has no truth for Descartes, it is not just a substance, but a created substance. And insofar God’s infallibility comes to us from divine revelation, this cannot be contested in the realm of philosophy. Descartes believed that philosophy can only concern itself with the relative degrees of reality. Yet, in other places in his writings, Descartes does have tautological fun with the God question. The ambiguity of the position of God in Descartes philosophy is precisely its strength; the success of Descartes being able to hold a certain tension in his thought. The irresolved and uneasy relation between philosophy and God in Descartes, or, in adjacent terms, reason and revelation, would only continue to intensify in the rest of modernity.4
What for Descartes is the origin of the unity of thought and being, or their split in the first place? And if there is two substances, how do they meet? Many critics of Descartes emphasized the strangeness of the fact that in Descartes’s meditations, God’s existence only comes after the cogito, as an afterthought. So, naturally, Descartes was accused of atheism, since he seemed to not need God at all. But before drawing any conclusions from that, let’s take a closer look at where Descartes situates God. For him, God is on the side of res cogitans, the non-extended and intelligible substance. Ah, God. The most perfect perfection, the res cogitans, not as my own feeble mind, but as the uncreated substance. The very thought of the mind’s imperfection, leads to the thought of perfection. And this perfection would not be perfect if it did not exist in the first place — so God exists. The consequence of this is that whenever we err, it is because our finite understanding cannot grasp everything, while the infinity of the will overstretches, resulting in making the privation of res extensa apparent. This is the case especially when the soul is overtaken by physiological factors, by the passions for example. In other words, when we err, it is never the mind’s fault, and always the body’s. Descartes was consistent enough with himself to deduce from that, that properly speaking, the body and its senses can fool the mind, but not the other way around. The mind, when it thinks a discrete and clear truth, can only be certain of it when it comes from God, whose benevolence assures me he never deceives. Back in his meditations, the moment the evil genius fulfilled the function to prove the self-standing cogito, God was welcome to take his place.
“[A]t least through the instrumentality of Divine power, mind can exist apart from body, and body apart from mind.”5
Yet, in Descartes’s writings, we never come to know how, or why God has created two substances. God only comes at the end after having proven that the substances subsist in their own right. Does that not undermine the point of a substance in the first place? And would it not be better to posit God as the third substance? And besides creating these two, what assures the interconnection of the two, regarding the soul in the body? His infamous pineal gland sat in the center of the brain to do the job, the seat of the soul in extension. Of course, the knowledge that this was the location where the soul controlled the body, would fall flat if it did not fall back on God.
So, ultimately, God is the one holding the two substances together. He created them both, but Descartes left the origin of the created substances unknown. If this does not strike you as strange, I concede that it has done so to me. For Hegel, this createdness of the substances, was the point in his philosophy that Descartes left unthought. Fortunately, today philosophy is not bothered by such absurdities of some external guarantor being the crutch for obscure origins. No Great Outside can lay claim to being a principle that has merit on its own, and its vastness collapses in on itself when “I think”. But for Descartes, doubt as the proof of my mental existence as its own cause, namely the res cogitans, would not sustain itself were it not for the more perfect height of the realest reality, God. For him, it did adequately succeed to bring thought and being together. It saved him from the risk of a disembodied cogito with its innate knowledge, who has no need of God, or others.
Back in our world, in November 2024, Trump won the US elections. To analyze what led up to this, we should, regardless of the multiplicitous and complexity of causes that have preceded it, see into the way these causes are inscribed into our shared social space, if we are real materialists that is. Way back, Descartes opened up that path for real materalism to thread, which is worth exploring before continuing on the political analysis.
Descartes has ruled out any type of monism of the body-mind. Contact between these two is never simply direct. Descartes’ student Malebranche picked this up and developed “correlationism”, which more discreetly and clearly situates God by explaining how he mediates the two substances, making the pineal gland superfluous. He held that the two substances exist separately, yet in parallel. They function independently, but correlate because of God’s doing. In other words, the alignment of body and mind as a harmonious single thing is not on us. I think of raising my hand, and my body enacts it, or so I assume — in correlationism, all activity is ascribed to God as the mediator between mind and extension. Unlike Descartes, for Malebranche, it’s not that the res cogitans touches the extended substance through the pineal gland, but that the two substances operate in tandem, through the active mediation of God. Translated to psychoanalytical parlance; following Descartes, Malebranche was aware that reality makes sense (has its substances correlate) because the Big Other exists.
And now, just after the election results are out, we can observe the Big Other’s enjoyment being embodied by the Right’s righteous and hopeful celebration.
At last, everything makes sense again. Everything has been set straight. Normality has returned, the incoming four years will be nothing but memes. But as Descartes demonstrated, the Rightists are not one with their so-called common sense. Their passionate bodies are experienced as spontaneous and intuitive, but only because their body correlates with their mind as long as it is mediated by the Big Other.
“I exist too,” the leftist might say. And she does not have the ability to enjoy along with the banter of the victorious broligarchs. Her feelings admit to defeat. Yet her resentment, her moral indignation against the victors, and the appeal to her disagreeable passion is simply a cope, the Right can rightfully claim.
Her inability to enjoy might stem from an untrustworthy weakness. I mean, who could identify with what the Democratic party’s campaign and candidate represent? There is also those who did take note of the blatant inadequacy of the the Democratic campaign, like Bernie, who released the following statement in a letter in response to Trump’s victory: ”It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”6 For the Left still remotely in touch with its past, the political issues of capital and class come to the fore. And even though someone like Bernie is not blind to the enjoyment of the right, the fact that Trump has progressed from being a one time aberration in 2016, to an irreversible world historical moment, signifies a turning point that the extinction of the berniebro foreshadowed.
Enjoying the moment like the Right, or not being capable to enjoy it like the Left — I refuse all of it. Not because “I exist too”, but because I do, regardless of whether Big Other does or does not. I feel something — so take away that feeling, take away what caused it. And yet I think, so I exist. Again, I can’t blame Descartes.
But where does this knowledge of the Lack in the Big Other come from? It doesn’t really come from anything at all. Except for despair fleeing from itself, also known as courage. Here, the courage to doubt, which “sets out for us a very simple way by which the mind may detach itself from the senses.”7 Descartes’s doubt, the doubt that does not doubt that it doubts, but knows it to be the undeniable truth, is the power of the mind to refuse the body. Doubt then, is a denial to be embodied. Doubt is the hesitation, the faltering of sense. Doubt is a hiccup of reality, that reveals it not to be dependent on either embodiment or God’s benevolence. To paraphrase Lacan: all doubt clarifies, is that reality where I don’t think, is where I am, and that I’m not there, where I think. Merely this fragile doubt amounts to the certitude of I think therefore I am. Doubt proves that embodiment is not all, that knowledge of truth lies in the discordance between the mind and extension, which only the former is capable of cognizing, as it comes to see its shaky unground as certainty, but only after it negates the external crutch of being that reveals itself to come down to nothing.
From both the vitalist and anti-intellectual side, philosophy is sometimes accused of being stark and frigid, caught up in lifeless abstractions. In a similar but less cynical and more rigorous move, throughout Descartes’s oeuvre, we constantly find him being astounded by the breathtaking ignorance of the learned. Every so often he provides a funny, incisive or insulting remark to the literate, the studious, the scholars, and the philosophers of the letter. His writings could in part be seen as a response to those who enjoy to confuse themselves with complexity instead of ridding themselves of the prejudices which cloud the hardest, clear and discrete truths. His decision to begin with the most simple enabled him to start over from a new point, birthing modern philosophy in the process.
The Right definitely knows how to enjoy, take Trump’s recent announcement of DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), the new presidential comission which Musk believes could reduce the federal budget by one third. This meme is no doubt in line with the Right’s indulgence in seeing the Left, reacting against it, being incapable of enjoyment.
Descartes’s method, torn from its context, brings me to refuse the fundamentally Right’s proposal to return to embodiment, in favor of the Left’s disorienting and insecure rejection of it. Not because I do not know how to enjoy, but because I do. And, in addition to that: that which I am incapable of is also not to be known at all. There is nothing to know there, nothing which I would be capable of if I relinquished the poetry of the future, the impotence of the ought. I don’t reject this axis of being incapable of enjoyment versus knowing to enjoy because I operate above the sensuous enjoyment of the Right. The Left which does not dirty itself with this passion of ignorance in the guise of knowing how to enjoy, is a dead end too, and not supersensuous at all. The supersensous, the cogito, is not a transcendent, pure and cleansed realm above the raw and dirty real of the body. The Right’s celebration of embodying the Other’s enjoyment, and the Left’s disembodied incapacity to do so because it takes place where it is out of joint both obscure the fact that they themselves operate by having their impetus be obscured to them, namely, the cogito.
Analogous to my leftist critique of the Right and Left, which is in line with Žižek’s incisive new article8 on MAGA 2024: what Descartes has achieved with the inauguration of modern philosophy, is thanks to his retreat to the zero-point of the cogito, the decision to begin over from universal doubt, least of all immediate embodiment.
Then, how do I know “I exist”, given that God does not? Because reality, this political problem, is not mine alone. The cogito points to a rupture in what is. I exist, and that is not supposed to be. Because it would show the Right’s above-mentioned knowledge to be unintelligible only because of its embodied idiocy.
So, to step take a step back. I exist, there where there’s nothing to be, there where something other than the body refuses to take part in reality as we know it. This is, as seen from those taking the side of embodiment, assumed to be a part that is either yet to be included or simply looked over as if it doesn’t exist. And it’s true. It doesn’t exist, solely because it contains the whole of reality in the speech of its self-discrepancy. It’s not right, and it’s not on the Right, and not in the center either, but on the zero-point of the Left.
The minimal, subtle and fragile nature of Descartes’ assertion was enough to crown him the father of modern philosophy. It provided the irrefutable certainty of the unity of thinking and being, while at once being a vanishing and insubstantial moment of the disembodied subject. But does this modern philosophy concern itself with that which is embodied but can’t speak for itself? Or do we now receive the highest truths from the grace of the self-causing intellect? The word substance, as the self-subsistent, self-causing cause, has been the way out of the contingencies without essence for millennia. Subsequent development in modern philosophy has shown that the age of reason, of rationalism, with the scientific illumination of matters taken for granted in past, had to make way for the dark ground of being, the night of the world, and the death of God. Which are respectively put forth by Schelling, Hegel and Nietzsche most expressedly. Especially in German idealism and psychoanalysis, we find elaborations of Descartes’s cogito. The psychoanalytical subject was, as Lacan rightly claimed, the true inheritor of the cogito, visible in the unconscious disembodied slips of the subject. Freud and Lacan haven’t come on to the scene to shatter the ego and to reveal the underlying psyche with its primal drives and instincts underlying it. That is a complete misunderstanding of Freud’s Copernican revolution. Lacan’s reformulation of the cogito in
"I am that impossible piece of the real where I cannot think."9
means that any assertion of a life deeper than thinking and language, are ways to deceive oneself with the Other’s fantasy that there is a way out of the disjointed cogito, the perturbance of the Real. This deception is yet another symptomatic attempt to patch up the repetition of reality’s discordance with itself, from which this symptom itself emerges. As Žižek perspicuously notes in his reading of Kant:
“In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant summarizes this paradox of cogito at its purest:'In the pure thought of myself, I am the being itself [ich bin das Wesen selbst], yet no part of this being is given to me thereby for my thought.' So, in the unique point of cogito as the intersection between being and thought, I lose thought as well as being: thought, because all and every content is lost; being, because all determinate-objective being evaporates in the pure thought — and, for Lacan, this void is the Freudian subject of desire.”10
Descartes opened this up for German idealism and psychoanalysis. These two Cartesian traditions were concerned with thinking, not the primal shadow underneath the seemingly substantial ego, but the self-referring tautologies of thought and being stemming from their coincidental obliteration in the subject:
“[The] most radical zero-point of the Cartesian cogito [is] the point of the negative intersection between being and thinking: the vanishing point at which I don't think, and I am not. I am not: I am not substance, a thing, an entity, I am reduced to a void in the order of being, to a gap, a béance.”11
Philosophy is maddening, not only because it is madness that is more (or less) than idiotic in the etymological sense, but also because it ceases to be itself when it stops inverting what is given into a mere option among the series of madnesses which are held together by their negative universality. It is more than idiotic because it does not relativize madness into oblivion, as if it would be without its truth. And it is less than idiotic because it has to decide between assigning its own dislocated standard to itself or to forsake itself for false immediate embodiment, for example in the guise of vitalist affirmation. At least, these are post-cartesian temptations that Hegel seeked to remedy.
The price to pay for this concrete freedom of the cogito, this sickening cure of the pharmakon, is the discrete and clear dislocation of ourselves. Today, the ubiquity of the Digital Other has made all of us into Newtonians, insofar as he’s taken to have said “Physics, beware of metaphysics.” We unconsciously operate with the axiom that the physics of the social space must beware of the metaphysical cogito lurking behind the externality of numeric degrees and quantities. Digital life, both mechanical and smooth-functioning, has, far from disembodying us, inserted a new digital God as our Malebranchian, occasionalist embodier. And if this virtual reality is taken to be disembodied — and this merits repetition — it should instead be reduced to the axis of knowing enjoyment and the incapacity to have it, behind which lurks the decision to sever oneself from these two which are still all too corporeal. To sever oneself from the pressure to be embodied, to refuse to enjoy.
But disembodiment can’t be the end of it, can it? What about reintegrating the cogito back into reality, back into the body? Not as a mode or part of the body, but something else. Yes, but only by assuming its inexistence in reality. In other words, as that which has been excluded to constitute reality, the incongruity of which is patched up by the Big Other, thank God. Embodiment signifies a new kind of triumph, one that is sensuous and speechless, the point of common sense, where everything is needless to say, because there is no need to speak. This is the triumph of incorporation (which has etymological root in the word embodiment) into the Other’s regime. For the Right, the outspoken subject is the part supposed to be incorporated into the whole, returned to its proper and mute place. This whole, this perverted madness posturing as natural common sense stupefies subjectivity. It rests on the myth that in the future, we’ll be fully one with our bodies, directly linked to the enjoyment of the unspeakable, as we were before the present day disembodied aberration disturbed it. Only on the Left, can this disembodied aberration, that is the subject be assumed as such. The continuation of today’s right wing upsurge without any great shocks, is indeed as Žižek in his article says, the worst of all futures. To begin afresh is what Descartes did, as is the task of the contemporary Left to do, by refusing both the pressure to be embodied as well as the resignment to itself for its inability to do so.
“The most that the will can do while this commotion [of the passions] is in its full strength is not to yield to its effects and to restrain many of the movements to which it disposes the body.”12
Descartes, R. (1997). Key philosophical writings. Wordsworth Editions Ltd. 217.
Ibid., 272.
Ibid., 337.
R, Descartes. Arguments demonstrating the existence of God and the distinction between soul and body, drawn up in geometrical fashion. https://dbanach.com/homepage/13-descartes%20geometrical%20arguments.htm
https://x.com/BernieSanders/status/1854271157135941698
Descartes, R. (1997). Key philosophical writings. Wordsworth Editions Ltd. 130.
Žižek, S. (2012). Less than nothing : Hegel and the shadow of dialectical materialism. Verso Books. 644
Zupančič, A. (2000). Ethics of the real: Kant, Lacan. Verso. Foreword by Žižek. ix.
Žižek, S. (2012). Less than nothing : Hegel and the shadow of dialectical materialism. Verso Books. 630.
Descartes, R. (1997). Key philosophical writings. Wordsworth Editions Ltd. 379.