Audio Link: Ž on Hegel May 12 2013.
Real is impossible and unavoidable. As long as we are subjects of market we are universal.
7:00 Universality, oh we can’t reach universality, imperialism imposing their universality.
8:00 India struggle for universal
8;30 desire is indestructable, it avoids you as such it always returns
9:00 Freedom in a hidden way there was a pathological motivation, even if your act was pure you did it maybe to boast to others. What causes true anxiety, is the prospect that our act truly was free and this trauma is domesticated by reducing it to the pathological. What’s traumatic for Kant is that its terrifying to accept a FREE act, so he reduces it to something pathological.
The unbearable fact is that we are immortal, responsible in the afterlife …
11:30 Hegel’s materialism: Can the Hegelian moment of negation of negation account for redoubled impossibilities.
I’m not free I negate freedom but this escape from freedom proves impossible.
12:10 Lacan’s Alienation and Separation. Alienation in Symbolic order constitutive of the subject. The Subject is the RESULT of the process of alienation. It emerges as a result, alienation is not standard Hegelian view, no, alienation for Lacan is just re-doubled. Ancient Egyptians secrets, what we saw as secrets of Egyptians for us, were secrets for them as well. The secrets remain its just redoubled.
Self-negated pessimism. A form of optimism which is worse than pessimism.
15:00 optimism is negated, life is shit. but the very form of pessimists position is negated, life is shit is too much of a principled position, in a wierd optimistic way, life goes on……….
15:50 Aaron Schuster: subtracted from the nothingness of pessimism, violent peterbation of self-cancelling nothing
17:30 immortality, vampires undead.
Where does Hegel stand with regard to all of this. Can formal matrix of dialectic process account for this downward synthesis, the lowest of the lowest.
19:00 Where the danger is grows also what can save us. Where the danger is is also hope for a reversal. Hegel is usually taken as clearest case of this paradigm, NO, Hegel is not part of this paradigm.
20:00 textbook Hegel. It is Marx not Hegel who follows this logic. Precapitalist modes of economic production, the uniqueness of the CMP, labour is torn out of its primoridal condition into its objective conditions … the worker appears as objectless, purely subjective capacity of labour with its objective conditions of production.
22:50 Proletariat substanceless subjectivity
23:40 The true Hegel. Resolution misses its goal and turns into nightmare, how to remain faithful to goal of original liberation and not get conservative, oh a nihilistic mistake. How at the very moment is liberation goes wrong, how to nonetheless save the day through repetition and redeem its rational core. Our moment is still Hegelian. What Hegel called absolute Freedom and Terror was pretty mild compared to Stalin. The Jacobins were simply overthrown by a vote in Assembly National, ha do that to Stalin.
26:00 return from Marx to Hegel. From Marxist revolution eschatology, to Hegel’s tragic vision of history as open. The historical process always redirects are activity into an unexpected direction. Accepted the alienation of the historical process, we can’t control, not because we are puppets, no, there is no big Other. This acceptance of alienation. It implies a fully engaged position, aware of the risks involved. There is no higher historical necessity, only activity open to risks of open contingent history. The conclusive moment of the dialectic process is not synthetic unity, return at a higher level to some form of the One, for Hegel, alienation is also constitutive of the subject, subject does not pre-exist its alienation, but emerges through it. It’s only nature that only alienates itself from itself, the subject is the outcome of the self-alienation of nature.
The big Other doesn’t exist, no higher historical necessity, no World Spirit (forget Charles Taylor). Nonetheless, because self-alienation of nature is constitutive of subject, when you break out of alienation, you don’t get overblown narcissistic subject that appropriates the other, the GAP is displaced, we experience ourself as alienated from the other, we see how this alienation is displaced into the other itself, there is no substantial other to which we are alienated, the gap is redoubled.
On late Heidegger: historicity goes all the way down, cannot be reduced to a non-historical absolute. His achievement is a transcendental historicism, different historicist modes of being. The ultimate horizon is the horizon of this play of different transcendental horizons. For Heidegger at much higher level, does same as west coast American pseudo-follower of Foucault, what is this table? we can only ask what discursive regime, the ontic question is subordinated to the ontological horizon, the ultmate catastrophe is the ontological one. The true catastrophe is not whether humanity will destroy itself ontically, the true catastrophe has already happened, humanity dwells in technology etc. From the beginning of zein and seit Heidegger was bothered, transcendental is not creation, objects appear within a horizon of being, what Nature would be without man? The past carries with it a temporal index, our coming was expected on earth, we should bring this logic to the end, later the last big revolution will retroactively redeem earlier revolution, human being and nature: that is to say, what is nature outside humanity with no relation to humanity 1929-1930, perhaps animals are in an unknown way aware of their lack, their poorness. The definition of animal as poor in the world, as stone without world, when Heidegger as animals as poor in the world he means that we as humans are dwelling within a world, and we cannot but experience animals as within this world, we can’t step outside our horizon of meaning, and simply look at reality. He doubts this transcendental reply, not that things are simply there, it is something that characterizes immanently, the sorrow of nature as Derrida, the animal that I am: our human exploded to redeem nature from its suffering. it raises the right question: NOt what is nature for language, can we grasp nature adequetely through language, but What is language for nature, how does emergence of language affect nature.
Aaron Schuster: on the one hand official position, symbolic order is ultimate horizon, all we can do is concoct invent beautiful stories, myths about what went on before, BUT the symbolic order is a reaction to some RADICAL deadlock (sorrow in nature) dislocation, that is already there in nature. So that the Freudian civilization and its discontents, nature is not homeostatic universe things in their own place and then human being displace nature NO. a displacement was already in place in nature.
Higher level of non-resolution. Lacan speculates on infinite pain of being a plant. on the one hand you have this eternal poetry of dislocation of sexuality in human species in contrast to poor animals who nonetheless have instincts that tell them when/how to copulate. The fascination of national Geographic, animals a universe that works, I think we should go here a step further, when you watch National Geographic, they report on human community which is treated as a small animal community, one should risk a step further, a secret awareness already in nature, no go further than New Age, maybe nature is the ultimate invented tradition, True Materialism begins when you transpose the gap as specifically human. when we transpose this gap back into nature itself. Sexuality, when Lacan introduces Lamella, Seminar XI. the deadlock is already there in nature, it means that human speech is not a fall from some natural balance but a reaction reacting to a fall that was already there.
The Wound can be healed only by the spear that Cut it.
The spirit is itself the wound it tries to heal. The spirit of human subjectivity is the power of tearing apart, spirit is nothing but the process of overcoming immediacy and organic unity.
a withdrawal the creates that which it withdraws from.
50:00 India