The fundamental social transformation of the last few decades has not been the rise of globalization but the shift from a society organized around prohibition to one organized around the command to enjoy. Historically, both pre-capitalist and capitalist societies have operated with the prohibition of enjoyment as their starting point. Entrance into and continued membership in the social order here requires the sacrifice of one’s own private enjoyment for the sake of the functioning of the order itself. One spends one’s time on social rituals; one agrees to work rather than play; and one accepts all sorts of restrictions on private behavior in order to be a member of the society. Social prohibition finds its most succinct expression in the prohibition of incest, which, as Claude Lévi-Strauss notes, in the last instance signifies that “a person can not do just what he pleases.”01 Though we are not witnessing mass violations of the prohibition of incest, it is precisely this idea that one cannot do as one pleases that evaporates with the emergence of the contemporary imperative to enjoy.02

Social authority no longer calls for sacrifice. Instead, today’s various forms of authority bombard us with the idea that our own private enjoyment represents the highest duty. Private enjoyment is the focus of all our attention, and social institutions encourage this focus rather than admonishing it. From television advertisements and billboards to news organizations and magazines, the privileging of private enjoyment reaches throughout the social order and even into figures of political authority. We can see it in the recent behavior of the presidents of the United States and France. After the September 11th attacks, George Bush did not call for renewed sacrifice for the public good but instead established shopping as a new patriotic duty. And after his election to the presidency of France, Nicholas Sarkozy made an ostentatious display of his private enjoyment by dining at the ultra-expensive Fouquet’s and later by taking a cruise on the yacht of his billionaire friend Vincent Bollore. Sarkozy’s response to the controversy that erupted after the yachting incident is telling. He proclaimed, “I have no intention to hide, I have no intention to lie, I have no intention to make excuses.”03 Bush’s imperative to shop and Sarkozy’s unapologetic display of excess operate in the same way and belong to the same revolutionary movement. This movement works to obliterate the idea of a public responsibility to sacrifice and to privilege the idea of a private responsibility to enjoy without hindrance.

The dominance of the command to enjoy has played a central part in pushing us toward economic and environmental catastrophe. This dominance ensures that we will push our credit as far as possible and use resources without regard for the future habitability of the planet. But it also contains a revolutionary potential that emanates from the very disappointment that the command to enjoy produces. Under an authority that commands enjoyment, subjects experience their failure to enjoy all the more acutely than do subjects under a prohibitive authority. The epoch exponentially multiplies our disappointment. The absence of enjoyment that results from the command to enjoy opens up the possibility of reenvisioning the nature of enjoyment and abandoning the corrosive dream of enjoyment without restriction. In this sense, the failure of the command to enjoy marks the possibility for successfully constituting a society organizing around real enjoyment rather than just the future promise of it.

The problem with the command to enjoy and the society it produces is that it leaves subjects who retreat into private enjoyment with nothing to enjoy. The retreat into privacy leaves the subject clinging to life with nothing to make that life valuable.04 We lack the ability to simply enjoy our lives. We do not enjoy living but instead live out our mode of enjoyment. Without something rendering our life enjoyable, no one would go on. In fact, the absence of enjoyment inevitably produces a depression that interferes with or puts a stop to the flow of life. When I feel as if I can no longer enjoy, I no longer want to live. As Jacques Lacan points out, “it is Jouissance whose absence would render the universe vain.”05 Enjoyment does not just supplement our lives but rather makes them worthwhile in the first place, and it first emerges through an act of sacrifice.

The act of sacrifice is not simply a negative act in which subjects give up enjoyment for the sake of recognition and a public identity. It is also a productive act that gives rise to a form of enjoyment that does not exist prior to the sacrifice. By sacrificing, we elevate an object or an idea out of the everyday cycle of utility. In this way, sacrifice creates values around which subjects organize their enjoyment, and without it, they have no enjoyment to organize. One can only enjoy provided that one first opts to sacrifice enjoyment: the attempt to enjoy directly bypasses the act that makes enjoyment possible. As a result, a subject unwilling to sacrifice is a subject unable to enjoy.

The link between public sacrifice and enjoyment becomes apparent analogically in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language. In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein argues against the possibility of a private language. His claim is that language originates not in the private act of generating signifiers for certain referents but in the public act of acceding to a set of rules. The link between signifiers and referents is conventional rather than genetic.06 Language involves following rules, and one cannot follow rules in private without having a public frame of reference for the private rule following. As Saul Kripke says in his commentary on Wittgenstein’s private language argument, “if one person is considered in isolation, the notion of a rule as guiding the person who adopts it can have no substantive content.”07 By shifting the emphasis in language from the primacy of the first person to the primacy of the third person, Wittgenstein is able to eliminate the fetish of private meaning. By doing so, he not only solves a philosophical problem − that of the movement from the private world to the public − but he also undermines the philosophical basis of bourgeois individualism.

Just as Wittgenstein insists that there is no private language, we can insist that there is no private enjoyment. At first glance, this analogy between language and enjoyment seems completely inappropriate. Whereas language operates in a clearly intersubjective fashion because it requires at least two people to have a conversation and its aim is to facilitate communication between multiple people, enjoyment concerns no one but the individual subject. But the image of the isolated subject enjoying itself is as deceptive as the isolated subject speaking to itself. We learn to enjoy through our experience and idea of the Other’s enjoyment. Even the most seemingly pure moments of private satisfaction − like the child’s enjoyment of chocolate ice cream − have their basis in the public restriction placed on the object or in the object’s public sublimation. Though enjoyment involves one’s private response to a public restriction − and in this sense everyone enjoys individually − it has its basis in the prior accession to the law.

The transformation of authority from prohibiting enjoyment to enjoining it makes clear for us the nature of enjoyment. In the wake of this transformation, we have not witnessed an outbreak of enjoyment but rather its near total absence. As subjects commit themselves to their private enjoyment, this enjoyment eludes them, thereby revealing the emptiness of the private realm without its incorporation in the public. The great paradox of the command to enjoy is that it functions as a more effective interdiction of enjoyment than the direct prohibition. As Slavoj Žižek notes, the “obligation to enjoy (…) is the most effective way to block access to enjoyment.”08 In response to the absence of enjoyment that becomes visible in the wake of the command to enjoy, three stark alternatives present themselves.

The most common response is simply the attempt to continue to obey the imperative directly. The subject who opts for this course tries to enjoy itself, and the contradictions along the way do not discourage the effort but actually spur it on. The failures to enjoy push this subject to strive all the more to enjoy itself, though these attempts will never find success. Whatever enjoyment this subject finds will always remain inadequate in relation to what it expects. The second, more interesting, response is that of the fundamentalist.

Authentic fundamentalism represents an attempt to reinstall prohibition and thereby to restore the possibility for enjoyment that sacrifice produces. But this return, even its most authentic form, will always be false. It will always look like the community established in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village (2004) where inhabitants create an enclosed pre-modern world that exists within a wider modernity. The denial of the modern world is essential to the enjoyment that this enclosed community offers. The retreat from modernity only provides enjoyment against the backdrop of modernity. In the same way, the fundamentalist restoration of prohibition operates within the imperative to enjoy rather than toppling it. Prohibition here functions as a means for enjoyment rather than as an end in itself. There can be no question of returning to the epoch of prohibition after the revolutionary change in social authority. Whatever occurs will occur in light of the command to enjoy.

The problem with prohibition − and the return to it − is that it keeps alive the idea that enjoyment without restriction is ultimately possible. As much as any subject committed to heeding the imperative to enjoy, the fundamentalist believes in direct access to enjoyment, and this is the stumbling block to real enjoyment. Enjoyment is possible, but it is only possible through restriction and limitation. We do not enjoy the restrictions on our enjoyment but through them. We enjoy the limit. What Hegel calls the infinity of our subjectivity is nothing but this capacity for recognizing and enjoying what limits us, instead of simply experiencing a limit negatively. The third possible response to the imperative to enjoy lies in Hegelian infinity − grasping the necessity of the limit but recognizing at the same time that it is our limit rather than an external limit imposed on us by a figure of authority. One effect of the command to enjoy is that it renders visible the impossibility of direct enjoyment. With the emergence of the imperative to enjoy, one no longer has to wait for enjoyment. In the world governed by prohibition, enjoyment appears only as a future possibility: one sacrifices now for a future reward, either in retirement, in heaven, or in the coming society. But it is precisely this demand for enjoyment in the here and now that that reveals its elusiveness. Attempting to enjoy directly shows that there is no direct enjoyment. The only path to enjoyment goes through the act of sacrifice, and insisting on sacrifice as the form that our enjoyment takes represents the unique political opportunity that the transformation away from prohibition opens for us.

The absence of enjoyment following from the command to enjoy makes evident the necessity of restriction, but at the same time, it reveals the ultimate contingency of this necessity. This is what fundamentalism fails to properly recognize. Though enjoyment requires some act of sacrifice, it does not require a particular act of sacrifice, and no external force can specify the act for the subject. But this does not mean that the subject can restrict itself at random, like someone deciding what to give up for Lent. The limit emerges intrinsically out of the structure of the social order itself. The contradictions of every social order present subjects with a limit − a point at which they must sacrifice part of themselves − and they can either substantialize this limit (in the manner of the fundamentalist) or attempt to bypass it (in the manner of the subject of enjoyment) or constitute their enjoyment through it. There are few models for this third possibility, though recent cinema has produced an unsurpassable one.

The film that almost perfectly exemplifies this trajectory from the imperative to enjoy to an embrace of self-restriction is David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999). The film’s narrator, Jack (Edward Norton), begins fully immersed in the attempt to sustain his own private enjoyment. A traveling shot early in the film perfectly captures this commitment to enjoyment as it identifies all the furnishings in the narrator’s apartment along with titles indicating the styles and prices. This shot shows the narrator’s investment in constructing a private realm in which he could enjoy fully. But the result of the narrator’s quest for complete enjoyment is complete misery. As the film shows, he finds himself bored by his life and unable to discover any respite from the misery, even in sleep. His inability to sleep marks the full extent of his subjection to the imperative to enjoy. Sleep involves taking time off from the search for enjoyment, and thus the command to enjoy forces the subject to minimize time spent sleeping.09 The narrator minimizes his sleep down to none. But eventually the absence of enjoyment produced by the search for it catches up with the narrator. He finds a way out through someone he meets on an airplane − Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt). Though Tyler appears as a separate character, he is actually the narrator’s invented double, as the film’s conclusion reveals.

But the narrator needs this double in order to escape the misery created by the command to enjoy. With the help of Tyler Durden, the narrator abandons his pursuit of private enjoyment and embarks on the project of fight club. Despite its appearance, fight club does not function as an outlet for repressed aggression. The aim of fight club is not subjecting the opponent to violence but instead subjecting oneself through an act of self-sacrifice. It begins, in fact, when the narrator attacks himself, though it appears as if he is fighting with Tyler (who exists only in the narrator’s imagination). The selfsacrifice in fight club helps to reconstitute subjects as capable of enjoying.

The film does not simply depict individual acts of subjective reconstitution through fight club but rather shows a collective political organization emerging from the idea of sacrifice. Following the logic of the fight club, the narrator and Tyler Durden start what they call Project Mayhem, a collective effort to disrupt the functioning of contemporary capitalist society. Project Mayhem demands sacrifice on the part of its members − they must, for instance, wait outside the door of Tyler’s house for three days without food or water before they are allowed to enter − and it tries to eliminate the capitalist forces that sustain the imperative to enjoy. This is why Project Mayhem targets the financial infrastructure with the goal of moving us “one step closer to economic equilibrium,” as Tyler puts it.

The sacrifices depicted in Fight Club are in no way arbitrary. The film shows two distinct acts of sacrifice. Both work directly in response to the conditions established by the predominance of the command to enjoy. The command to enjoy manifests itself most prominently in the care and preservation of the body. In order to enjoy fully, one must sustain the purity of one’s body − keeping up an appealing image in order to attract others and keeping oneself fit in order to avoid illness or injury that could detract from one’s capacity to enjoy. The fight club targets the perfect body and damages it. The violence that the fights inflict on the body actually opens up the possibility for enjoyment where the ideal of the undamaged body had closed it off.

In addition to the bodily sacrifice that preoccupies most of Fight Club, the film also depicts Project Mayhem blowing up all of the country’s financial records. These records sustain the system of credit that is integral to the functioning of the command to enjoy. The credit system embodies the contradictions of this command. On the one hand, it enables subjects to purchase more than they can afford and thereby to access the possibilities for enjoyment that bombard them on a daily basis. But on the other hand, it constantly undermines any enjoyment by fostering a sense of indebtedness. One can borrow to enjoy, but this enjoyment will always come at the expense of future possibilities. The sacrifices of the body and of the credit system that we see in Fight Club form the foundation of its response to the enjoyment imperative.

The key to understanding the commentary on enjoyment that Fight Club formulates lies in paying attention the film’s formal structure. It relies on atrick ending, which reveals that the narrator and Tyler Durden are really thesame person. Their appearance as distinct throughout most of the film worksto hide the sacrificial dimension of what the narrator does. We don’t see thathe blows up his own apartment or that his assault on himself begins fightclub. Fincher includes this deception of the spectator in order to underlineour inability to recognize the enjoyment that derives from sacrifice itself. Werequire the illusion that external forces impose sacrifice on us or that wesacrifice ourselves to accomplish some ultimate good. We see most of the filmthrough this illusion, and at the end Fincher pulls it away in order to forcethe spectator to make the equation between sacrifice and enjoyment.

One of the distinguishing traits of fascism is its call for sacrifice and for the necessity of the limit. What, then, distinguishes the turn toward sacrifice in Fight Club − what I would call a leftist version of sacrifice − from the fascist version? Many viewers of Fight Club, in fact, see in it an embrace of fascism. The cruelty of the fights and the harsh discipline of Project Mayhem seem to push the film in the direction of fascism. But the film distinguishes itself from the fascist call for sacrifice through the light in which it depicts the act of sacrifice. The point is not simply that leftist sacrifice is selfsacrifice and fascist sacrifice is the sacrifice of the Other, though there is some truth to this way of figuring the distinction. It is rather that the fascist call for sacrifice always has as its ultimate goal the idea of unrestricted enjoyment. Fascism imagines present sacrifice for the sake of a future in which sacrifice will no longer be necessary, so that it posits enjoyment not in the act of sacrifice itself but in the imaginary result of the sacrifice. In contrast, the version of sacrifice envisioned by Fight Club and made visible by the failures of the command to enjoy does not aim at a future enjoyment.

Fight Club provides a model for how to respond to the dissatisfaction produced by the command to enjoy. There is no need, however, to start up a fight club in your neighborhood or to begin punching oneself in the face in order to take up the kind of response that it exemplifies. The current economic collapse and environmental disaster offer opportunities to respond with the idea of an enjoyable sacrifice − that is, a sacrifice conceived as an end in itself rather than as the means to some future fully realized satisfaction. One sacrifices or limits oneself in the struggle against climate change not in order to realize a future in which sacrifice will no longer be necessary and we will be able to enjoy without restriction. The impetus behind this sacrifice cannot be the possibility of returning to a balanced earth in which we can freely enjoy in harmony with the natural world. Instead, the impetus must be the act of sacrifice itself, and the goal of sustaining the planet as habitable can function only as an alibi for the sacrifice, not as the goal driving it.