play and desire

Dear Zsa Zsa,

It was Jürgen ("Mad Dog") Habermas' 90th birthday last week. This morning I read a news item about Festen for him. The story noted his insistence on an abstract, idealist position on the requirements of reason and justice. Against his critics who denounce his position as based on a counterfactual hypothesis, Habermas has always basically asserted that the point is to understand how far our real conditions of existence fail to be rational or just. The article affirmed my admiration for Habermas.

That affirmation shot directly to my desires in general (admiration being a kind of desire, after all). It is a curious emotion I am feeling: that my desires, whatever they are, are good. Well, in any case, in as much as they are desires, they're just fine. They don't hurt anybody, as desires.

Play and desire are complexly intertwined. [Insert psychoanalytic account here.]

I introduced you to my readers, Zsa Zsa, as my anonymized and shifting audience, and announced that my audience is usually someone I write to to flirt with. Just writing that it was Habermas' birthday, dropping in my joke nickname for him, and reporting that feeling affirmed for admiring him led me to feel affirmed in my desires generally, and then connecting desire to my continuing topic of play -- that's all flirtation.

None of that is to say that there's anything intellectually disingenuous about what I have written. In fact, this was the course my thoughts took this morning.

Let's accept that play has a libidinal element, and that when I play I often show off, and that when I show off it's often to flirt. What follows? Dissatisfyingly, the answer is that what follows is what follows.

Reason and justice are the big flirts in Habermas' thought. That is how Habermas incites desire, for me. That would likely seem perverse to many people, but I like it that way.