Kant con Sacher-Masoch. Elementos para una crítica masoquista de la Ley en La Venus de las pieles

Reading Kant through Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs offers a way of understanding how the restoration of unity can be achieved in the face of what threatens the established order. The novel posits a quest for self-transcendence through consensual submission, while highlighting how power uses philosophy to domesticate and normalise singularity. In this process, limits are set to prevent potentially overreaching transformations, ensuring that changes respect already consolidated values. Thus, singularity ends up being absorbed by the general framework, in a dynamic that recalls the practical purpose of Kantian morality, de facto inapplicable, but which, by adhering to the formal definition of the Law, becomes a tool to neutralise any attempt to undermine the ultimate foundations of the constituted order such as the Subject, the Law, the Duty, The Ultimate End or the State. The most striking aspect is that this same normative scheme resurfaces, mutatis mutandis, in the devices of neoliberalism, so that the Kantian ideology of submission to duty translates today into the construction of a subject perfectly adapted to the systemic priorities of contemporary capitalism, perpetuating structures that prevent the possibility of a true emancipation or subversion of the existing order.