Slavoj Being and Subjectivity: Act and Evental Enthusiasm
I would like a coffee, no cream. Sorry we have run out of cream. Can I bring you a coffee without milk?
For Badiou, 1 comes secondary, 1 is an operation, 1 is the effect of counting, multiplicity is there from the beginning.
For Alenka and me, of course there is no original 1, but this absence is inscribed in the multiplicity from the very beginning. It does NOT mean “we are multiple fuck the ONE” It means the 1 as absence is already here. Ontologically the zero level is a barred 1, there is no ONE. There is multiplicity because 1 cannot be 1.
Freud says somewhere “multiplicity in dreams is always a sign of CASTRATION” If you dream of many phalluses it means you don’t have one. Multiplicity is always the blocked sabotaged impossibility of the ONE.
When Lacan primordial repression is the repression of the binary signifier. Lacan’s theory of sexual differentiation is not Ying Yang bullshit. There is only one signifier, Male, but this does not make woman, more but LESS. Why?
Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a parody of Tolstoy. Dostoevsky is missing. A scene in the movie, as if this absence of D. returns. The 2 guys talk and bring in all the D. titles. Did you meet the Idiot. Ah you mean the Brother K.
We are tempted to insist on the primacy of the barred ONE, the impossible ONE. There are ONEs of course, but the existing ONEs are an echo of their own impossibility. What there is is always originally multiplicity. But why do we then always start to count to 1? Because multiplicity is always marked from the beginning by the lack or impossibility of the ONE.
In Badiou there is no ontology of the EVENT. When Badiou announced program for Logics of the Worlds. In previous book Being and Event he didn’t really account for how a World emerges out of BEING. In this book he also does NOT do it.
23:00 He says there is multiplicity, then I don’t know from where, but ALL OF A SUDDEN THERE ARE WORLDS.
23:15 WHY DOES BEING QUA BEING (THIS PRE-REPRESENTATIVE MULTIPLICITY) WHY DOES IT ORGANIZE ITSELF INTO WORLDS?
WORLDS ARE MODES OF TRANSCENDENTAL APPEARANCE. Each of the worlds is characterized by its transcendental a priori.
Alenka’s solution
Already the multiplicity from the very beginning is multiplicity because the ONE is impossible. This is the answer to why multiplicity, precisely to fill in this gap, has to appear to itself. WORLDS happen precisely to fill in this gap, to appear to itself.
BORING KANTIAN PROBLEM: We live in appearances but can we reach the THING-IN-ITSELF? THE REAL? For Hegel the problem IS EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE. The True enigma is OK there is BEING MULTIPLICITY OUT THERE BUT WHY DOES BEING START TO APPEAR TO ITSELF? The true enigma is NOT how to see reality behind appearance. But why does the real begin to appear to itself?
THE TRUE FIGHT WITH BADIOU
Z remains a old-fashion transendentalist and Badiou is a dialectical materialist.
Žižek: When Badiou mentions World, the POINT as minimum of yes/no, I claim that all the coordinates are already the coordinates of symbolic universe with subjectivity included. There is NO WORLD OUTSIDE LANGUAGE AND SUBJECT.
Badiou FANATICALLY insists that WORLD is dialectics in NATURE. Animals, even rocks, a group of stars, can be a WORLD. Ž thinks this is totally illegitimate.
28:00 More Lacan than Badiou:
Lacan: Existence is absolutely NOT the same as BEING. Existence is for Badiou, is a transcendental determination. Things exist within a transcendental world, you exist the more you are recognized within this transcendental space.
Even Hegel has this distinction in a nice way in Hegel’s LOGIC. In Hegel, existence is a category of ESSENCE. Existence is BEING which is the APPEARANCE of some ESSENCE. What does NOT have an ESSENCE, IS, but does not EXIST.
FOR LACAN Neither the subject exists NOR the WOMAN. Lacan does NOT say: Il n’ya pas de femme. But he says La Femme n’existe pas.
30:45 BRUCE FINK
IL N’YA PAS is much more radical than IL N”EXISTE PAS.
Lacan says Il n’ya pas de grand Autre. There is no big Other. He doesn’t say the big Other doesn’t exist.
The Lacanian distinction between existence, and INSISTENCE What doesn’t exist, INSISTS for LACAN: Subject doesn’t exist it just leaves TRACES in existence
DRIVE doesn’t exist it INSISTS
32:30 APPEARANCE AND PHENOMENON
the distinction is that appearance is an appearance of something. You look behind, what is appearing.
A phenomenon is an appearance behind which there is nothing
An appearance of something AND An appearance that just fills in the lack, that there is NOTHING behind it.
The two greek painters, who will do a more realistic painting the winner paints a curtain, ok pull apart the curtain to see what you painted
PHENOMENON evokes/raises the desire for something behind but there is nothing behind, it is appearance in the abyss
I would locate here the status of the subject.
Subject is for me an APPEARANCE BUT NO SUBSTANCE
The mystery of the SUBJECT: Appearance is not a simple appearance that can be SUBTRACTED. IT is NOT as if you can take away appearance and get things as they really are.
What if there is an apparance precisely as appearance is crucial for the consistency of that which appears. So that you take away appearance and you lose the thing-itself. The whole FREUD turns on this.
35:30 ENDS
36:00 The ultimate ambiguity, is Kant’s Transcendental appearance.
Kant can not accept appearance THAT ITS APPEARANCE AGAINST THE ABYSS OF NOTHING.
He still thinks there must be something substantial behind appearance which appears.
The Hegelian step is NO! Conclusion of first part of Phenomenology of Spirit, of course appearance is like a curtain we look behind, behind appearance is just a VOID, what we find there is what we put there. THIS DOES NOT MEAN THAT IN THE USUAL SENSE THAT EVERYTHING IS JUST AN APPEARANCE. EVERYTHING IS REAL BUT THIS IS NOT RELATIVISM.
38:15 BEST BOOK IS THEORY OF SUBJECT the breakthrough is there the rest of Badiou’s work is trying to catch up.
38:30 the best friendly shot at a friend (Bosteels) the best! from Belgians are well know for 2 things
He opposes Sophocles terror/anxiety ORestia courage/justice
subjective attitudes doesn’t JUSTICE stick out, replace JUSTICE WITH enthusiasm.
For reasons of consistency.
What does Terror mean here? He oscillates between 2 meanings. Bad superego terror represented by CREON. Fuck you we also need our own TERROR. THere is always a terrorist aspect in SUBTRACTION
ENTHUSIASM WILL BE CENTRAL CATEGORY OF HIS IMMANENCE OF TRUTH.
41:00 Question on ACT
44:00 Žižek replies
The problem of EVENT is Badiou seems to struggle about the relationship between Event and its nomination.
Sometimes he claims more radically, transcendentally, nomination is part of the EVENT, event becomes event only through its nomination,
Sometimes he adapts a pomo attitude, the event is traumatic excess and we try to but fail to find a proper name.
A communist struggle is going on but the Marxian names for it are not good names. We didn’t nominate the event in a correct way.
There is the danger of this pomo pseudo-Nietzche b.s. the real is the event/horror we try to nominate it, but it always fails on the other hand Badiou celebrating the Master Signifier.
46:00 Theoretical couple Badiou/Barbara Kassam
The Master Signifier, Badiou who is the Badiou of Master SIgnifier, is masculine Badiou. We have the event of Chrisianity, but Christ himeself was a feminine hysterical guy, the master who provides the NAME is ST. PAUL. It is Paul who provided the MASTER SIGNIFIER that created Christianity.
47:50 Badiou made a book with Roudinesco (Ž yikes!!!) He says: without a MASTER (Kant a human being is animal who needs master) to become a subject you need a master, Badiou goes very far here.
Here I agree with him, with a precise political stake, to rehabilitate the marxist tradition of cult of PERSONALITY. Che GUAvara, Mao, Stalin, Fidel, we need a name a MASTER. Neutral theory is not enough we need a NAME a master that introduces a NEW ORDER.
Sometimes Badiou links Psychoanalysis with LOVE. At the same time, His best example of evental structure is RELIGION, St. Paul We live in secular era, religion is not evental, I just use Paul as example of formal evental structure. But how was it possible to happen there? Z believes category of LOVE is much more mysterious.
Kant = Science
Fichte = Politics
Schelling = Art supreme medium of truth is art
Hegel = LOVE category of life is central
51:50 NIGHT OF WORLD
Alenka accepts Badiou’s claim that event as real in its brutality is not enough, you need to nominate the EVENT.
She does something he doesn’t do. She introduces distinction between master signifier and signifier of the barred other. Signifier of barred other.
when you present the signifier of the inconsistent Other
when you name properly the antagonism, the real the defines a certain field: class struggle, when this turns into a Master signifier you already de-eventalize it, you lose it.
CHIESA: fuck it there will always be Master signifier obscene super ego fantasy etc.
Communist Hypothesis, the link to a master is not the ultimate social link there is a possibility of being together collectively that is not sustained by a MASTER.
If we drop this we are back to J.A. Miller
54:20 Let’s say a political system is in a crisis. If we take this crisis in a pre-evental way: It means we inscribe it, the system fails blah blah, the crucial pt. is NO! This failure, is not simply failure of the system, in this FAILURE THE TRUTH OF THE SYSTEM APPEARS.
For Freud/Marx crises, the basic antagonism of capitalism appears, symptoms are the truth of normality
To provide the name for this NECESSITY, why failures are structurally necessary, the big other itself is Barred. this is the politics of NOMINATION
55:50 Laclau
populist politics is always the politics of failure, things are basically ok, but jews traitors foreigners always fuck it up. scapegoats. corrupted the old order, the crack, the failure is not in the order as such, its an accidental corruption, you need to re-establish the proper order. NO
The EVENT IS TO FIND A NAME social antagonism, class struggle, which clearly locates the failure in the ORDER ITSELF.
58:20 Foucault
Big shift History Sex vol 1 is different from vol 2 and 3. This tension is already in his early works on Madness. Already described in Derrida.
Even in early works on madness.
The oscillation in early Foucault, on one hand he says I want to describe till now MADNESS was described by the external standpoint of science/power. I want madness itself to SPEAK. At the same time he makes it clear, that madness, substantially in-itself, is not an in-itself which is described differently, madness is an affect of mechanisms of madness. Madmen prior to modernity, was located in hermeneutics, you were devil, or divine that spoke through you. Madness was hermeneutics, a madman is that which a higher truth speaks through you. With moderinity it become POSITIVIST science. Something is wrong with brain, we incarcerate them.
In Vol 1. accent is power generates resistence to itself, resistance to power is way for power to reproduce itself more effectively
Beware, if a girl pretends to be shameful, she rejects you, but this rejection is already … they give you an entire classification of techniques
so again Foucault goes fo far as to say, power itself generates the man to be liberated. Resistance is part of power, the circle is closed.
NO LIBERATION, no space for liberation. resistance in advance is incorporated.
IN vol 2 and vol 3, he is looking for islands of resistance. He has here also rehabilitates the subject, the idea through some kind of self-education, self-relating you can acquire a distance, a resistance. No longer this co-optive pessimism.
1:04 BUTLER
This is my problem with Judith Butler. She always speaks the language of resistance. We can just occupy spaces and resist, the big OTHER OF POWER is here, but there are spaces of resistance. What if we play off the early and late Foucault. How can we have resistances which are not just caught up in counter-power. Sexuality is not the expression of sex, real sex is an effect of the discourses we have on sexuality. With these discourses, disciplinary discourses. Discourses, disciplinary discourses, a Paulian theory of transgression, every discourse of power generates the transgression it fights.
For Ž, he disagrees with all this FOUCAULT. I don’t like RESISTANCE the term. It has all this marginalist connotation, ooh the big Other is there, we can just screw it a bit, irony, displacement, performative fun, repetitiveness.
1:06 Adrian Johnson critique of Badiou where latter just focuses on Event and reactions to event.
There is a whole pre-evental strategy.
1:09 Tahir sq. Occupy wall st.
I don’t share his naive optimism. It’s still open. There are things which I am ready to extend retroative logic here. Something happens and retroactively we decide if it is an Event or not.
When Badiou was explaining FORCING event, for him forcing an event, is to impose the logic of event as immediately logic of Being. THIS IS STALINISM.
What Z doesn’t like, this is the “totalitarian temptation” says Badiou. I think there is something totally wrong in saying Stalin instead of treating communist vision as Evental, this idea, don’t translate the Event immediately into Being this is KANT.
Regulative use of idea, stalinst arrogant mistake, to take something as regulative as CONSTITUTIVE as making up reality. THIS IS KANT. Badiou makes an explicit reference to Kant’s REGULATIVE IDEA.
Here I”m more Hegelian, to explain horrors of Stalin, its’ too simply to claim that Stalin was too faithful to commie idea. No the problem is not Stalin wanted to impose to immediately Communist idea as order of being. NO THE IDEA itself was not correct. What’s the problem with forcing if you have a GOOD idea, fuck it force it if you want. But Stalin had a bad idea.
1:14 Master signifier which introduces a NEW ORDER, but there was no point de capiton. RESTRUCTURES THE WHOLE FIELD
Occupied Mexico City, they had power, they debated and talked for week or two then they said let’s go home.
1:18 HARDT NEGRI
Maybe events function in a different way, authentic political events. TJ Clark, he says this doesn’t mean system is powerful is going to go on, what he is saying is that there will not be a magic moment, where terracotta armies will emerge. Maybe we should change here the field.