The Sweet Cycle

On a magazine cover in Ginza the author encountered a proposition stated without hedging: that sweetness is justice. The proposition is the occasion of this paper, not its target. What it names, in the idiom of intimate life, is a cycle that appears to harm no one and to benefit everyone who can be seen within it. A firm sells, a person who is indulged feels cared for, a person who indulges feels needed, the bond is strengthened, and the strengthened bond returns as a willingness to buy again. Inside its own boundary the cycle closes upon a surplus of satisfaction, and the satisfaction is real. This paper asks on what grounds, and under what conditions, such a cycle may be judged genuinely good rather than a forged closure that sustains its inner surplus by extraction across its outer edge. The inquiry proceeds by placing several incommensurable frameworks before the same phenomenon, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, the ethics of care, political economy, and feminist theory, and letting each say what it can and cannot say. None is permitted to adjudicate the others. A psychoanalytic foundation, reconstructed here in full from the author's prior work on lack, the objet a, and the cute as a mediation of lack, supplies the structural diagram on which the later analysis is fought. The political economy of amai, in which capital does not merely serve a pre-existing desire but produces and reproduces the desire itself and extracts a surplus from its reproduction, receives the most sustained treatment, because it is there that the difference between a genuine and a forged cycle becomes measurable. The paper does not close on a single verdict. It closes on a plurality of practices, just, ethical, eudaimonic, and co-creative, by which a sweet cycle might be made to keep its value within itself and to return that value to those who make it, with no one reduced to fuel.