What is of special interest here are the perverse paradoxes Kant gets involved in when he endeavors to articulate the interaction of a beautiful woman and a sublime man: man’s ultimate message to a woman is “even if you do not love me, I shall force you to respect me by the sheer force of my sublime grandeur,” whereas woman’s counter-claim is “even if you do not respect me, I shall force you to love me for my beauty.” These para­ doxes are perverse insofar as their underlying premise is that, in order to discover the sublime grandeur of man’s moral stance, woman must cease to love him, and vice versa, man must disdain woman for her lack of proper moral attitude if he is to experience the true character of his love for her. Along these lines, Kant even provides his own formulation of the impossibility of sexual relationship: in sexual­ ity, man’s object is either the nonspecified universality of “any woman” (if he is driven by raw bodily passion) or the fantasy-image to which no actual woman can ever correspond in reality (the romantic notion of sublime infatuation). In both cases, the real object—the actual woman in her uniqueness—is annihilated. tarrying

Jujutsu With Zizek books.google