Slavoj Žižek: “The Animal Doesn’t Exist” (respondent: Lorenzo Chiesa) The Human Animal in Politics, Science, and Psychoanalysis
Organised by: Lorenzo Chiesa (Reader in Modern European Thought, University of Kent) and Mladen Dolar (Professor of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana; Advising Researcher, Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht) KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 16 — 17 December 2011
New Guinea Tribe
Rejection of binary logic is a cover-up of a central antagonism Retroactive totalization, a violent cut, a violent impostition of a totality, there is a truth in it. What emerges through the animal, it is only through this minimal distance of speech that retroactively we can formulate not an eternal essence of animality but the deadlock of animality. Redefine the notion of essence, do not reject it.
UNIVERSAL and PARTICULAR: the first antagonism is not between particularities, but universality and particular are deal with this antagonism.
Corporate capitalism, liberal capitalism, capitalism with Asian values. There are only different capitalism, but they all try to obfuscate control a central deadlock.
Big Rule of Hegelian Dialectics
In each Hegelian totality or concrete universality, universality is one of its own species, it encounters itself as one of its own species. RABBLE, sticks out the only point of universality. In Rabble human as a social being exists, as an outcast universality comes to exist as such. A species which relates to itself as a universal being. What if this animal as such does exist and this is we humans. and this is the HORROR animals see in us. We are the ANIMAL for other animals.
Animals are immediately caught in their environment, speechless instinct NO! this is wrong. This is retroactive projection … I think that the true mystification in this standard opposition between human-animal, what effectively disappears here, what we miss is the most radical dimension of what WE humans are.
Becoming — Being. We are already constituted reason, speech and then measure animals. WHat this can’t think is HUMAN IN ITS BECOMING, it can’t think human from animal standpoint.
Psychoanalysis: Zupancic Freudian DRIVE which is NOT YET CULTURE BUT NO LONGER ANIMAL INSTINCT.
Not animal life but not yet human culture. Meillassoux After Finitude. Alenka elaborated a nice Lacanian answer to Meillassoux. NON-ALL Meillassoux reads in the masculine logic. You get a more provocative result if you read contingency along the FEMININE LOGIC OF SEXUATION. Contingency is non-all, precisely because you can’t totalize it through exception.
Fossils: Transcendental Kantian legacy can’t provide clear answer to status of FOSSILS. If you take this ontologically seriously, it refers before transcendental horizon. Meillassoux demonstrates transcendental tricks don’t work here. If we want to isolate the dimension Darwin didn’t see, I would like to rehabilitate, who said regarding fossils, that God planted those fossils. And Ž wants to dialectically incorporate this story
The true problem brings us to object (a). The true problem is not the fossil out there, was there life on earth before human beings, the true fossil are human beings, we are UNABLE TO SEE OURSELVES IN BECOMING. The problem is we cannot see ourselves as in-itself as it were. Its easy to claim tha we Christians can’t read pagan religions we reduce them to our perspective, you miss what Judaism is … what we miss even more what was Christ before he became a Christian, are we aware what a MONSTROSITY JESUS CHRIST WAS FOR THE JEWS. We have to see the past in its BECOMING. What was Christ before he became a Christian.
The whole of Christianity as an instution is not a fight against paganism but its own excess, the struggle of being human is not fight against animal nature, but fight against EXCESS that marks our break with NATURE. There is a wonderful text in Kant about education and humans, to control their excess. Man is an ANIMAL WHO NEEDS A MASTER. Only humans have a certain WILD UNRULINESS.
The BRUTALITY IS THE FREUDIAN DRIVE, not animal nature. We are not fighting animal nature, we are fighting the Freudian Drive.
The excess that needs to be explained is the OTHER SIDE of what we humans are in ourselves, what was lost the moment we got caught in our ideological self-perception.
I diagree with vulgar Darwinians when they look for solution in what human mind can do its complexities, talk, infinitesimal mathametics. No begin with Badiou, what defines a WORLD, are not its positive features, but the way a structure of a world relates to its OWN INHERENT POINT OF IMPOSSIBILITY. the true changes in world, are changes in the status of this impossibility.
Square root of minus one, before it was dismissed as nonsense. Even Marx said this, dismisses this. But revolution of math, even if square root of minus one, even if nonsensical you can integrate it and it functions. What is great about democracy, it takes traumatic impossibility, my God throne is EMPTY …Leader dies, VOID must be filled immediately, Democracy integrates it, and makes it the instrument of its relative stability. Capitalism, the impossibility of stability, makes it the very mode of its functioning. WHAT IF WE SHOULD LOOK for what makes us Humans, at this level, not at what we can do, but a changed status of what we can’t do, the changed status of impossibility.
How is it we humans obsessively care again and again about something with NO ADAPTIVE VALUE?
Objective reality is ontologically not-all I’m totally materialist. Quantum physics, reality in-itself is not fully ontologically constituted, there are gaps in reality. I would like to supplement Alain Badiou, his quote is problematic, his english theoretical writings. Where does Event come from if all there is is the order of Being?
An event is nothing but the part of a given situation, a fragment of Being. If an event is nothing but a fragment of Being, why asks Ž can we not describe it as such. Here is Badiou’s Kantianism. We are only free from our finitude, Kant tries to imagine what would happen to us if we gained full access to thing-in-itself. We would turn into puppets. So our freedom and ethical activity only emerges from standpoint of our finitude. That’s Kant. If event is nothing but fragment of being, why can’t we then reduce it to Being. Badiou says because of our finitude. Z says no, its because Being in incomplete, you must introduce the non-all of BEING.