Sea, sun, sex and the discontents of pleasure

Abstract

This article focuses on party tourism as a kind of hedonism enjoyed on a massive scale in which the citizen is transformed into a ‘party animal’, a reduction which is experienced as a liberation from the daily routine of the ‘city’ or civilization, and in which the pursuit of unlimited enjoyment creates an exceptional zone where the body as an object of desire and as abject become indistinguishable. In this process, sociality tends to be reformed in the image of a ‘mass’ rather than ‘society’ and transgression/enjoyment paradoxically becomes the law. The article elaborates on this paradoxical notion of ‘forced enjoyment’ by reading Kant and Sade together: Sade (re)formulates Kant’s categorical imperative by universalizing transgression while, on the other hand, Kant illuminates Sade by stressing that the universal maxim and the particular tendencies always conflict.