Euthanasia of Freedom and Sexual Conatus

One of the tours de force in Joan Copjec’s Read My Desire concerns the correlation between the Lacanian formulas of sexuation and the Kantian antinomies of reason. This paper traces the modern itinerary of freedom, from the dynamic antinomy (male side) and Kant’s free public world Scholar of the Enlightenment, through Marx’s democratic State as the locus of transcendent freedom, to Copjec’s sex qua real, i.e., as a freedom that emerges out of the signifier’s own non-symbolizable effects. Accordingly, today’s gender and other identitarian self-proclamations—whose “dico, ergo sum”: “I say, therefore I am” (Jacques-Alain Miller) endeavors to subsume one’s being under the signifier and, hence, eliminate the real—amount to the euthanasia of freedom. Opposing this development, this essay proposes Spinoza’s substance qua power of self-actualization and immanent causality, as well as the singular conatus (striving to persevere in one’s own being), as key ontological concepts required to sustain the two intertwined aspects of the real as both (an impossible) pre-symbolic cause and (an increasingly prohibited, yet inevitable) post-symbolic effect.