“You must, because you can!”

“You must, because you can!” is the compact formula for the superego imperative to enjoy. Its force lies in a reversal: what appears to grant permission for pleasure becomes an order to pursue it. The expression helps explain how contemporary hedonism can promise freedom and self-fulfillment while turning enjoyment into a demand that is difficult to refuse.

Reversing Kant’s Formula

The phrase reverses Kant’s “Du kannst, denn du sollst!”—“You can, because you must!” In the latter, obligation grounds the capacity to act; in the former, capacity becomes the ground of obligation. If enjoyment is available, the subject is implicitly told that it must be pursued. The change is small in wording but decisive in structure: possibility no longer leaves room for choice, but acquires the pressure of a command.

Permission Becomes Obligation

The expression describes the superego aspect of a supposedly nonrepressive hedonism. People are continually provoked to go to the limit and explore different forms of Jouissance. Yet the permission to enjoy does not remain permission: permitted enjoyment turns into obligatory enjoyment. The imperative thus complicates the familiar contrast between repression and liberation. A culture may openly encourage pleasure rather than forbid it, while making enjoyment itself a new requirement.

Balance and Excess

The command appears, at first, to advocate a life governed by the pleasure principle: have a good time, seek self-realization and self-fulfillment, and maintain homeostasis. Advice associated with the Dalai Lama, for example, is presented as counsel to preserve a balanced proper measure and avoid disturbing extremes. But the text distinguishes the injunction’s explicit appeal from its actual operation. Although it speaks in the language of balance, its functioning breaks through those limits and pushes toward excessive enjoyment. “You must, because you can!” therefore names the pressure beneath the reassuring invitation to live well.

Commodities and Jouissance

The passage also questions whether enjoyment marketed through commodities can be dismissed as false, in contrast to the post-1968 Leftist drive toward radical, asocial Jouissance. It asks whether the void at the heart of pleasure belongs to every form of enjoyment, not only the commodified kind. Marketed provocations to enjoy may themselves push subjects toward autistic-masturbatory forms of Jouissance; drug addiction is identified as an extreme case. Drugs are both a means of radical autistic experience and a commodity par excellence. In this context, the formula does not simply celebrate excess: it exposes how a demand to enjoy can connect apparent personal freedom to the market and to forms of enjoyment that undo social connection.