Žižek, S. Living in End Times New York: Verso, 2010.
Christian church faced with dilmemma starting in 4th century: how to reconcile feudal class society where rich lords ruled over impoverished peasants WITH Egalitaran poverty of the collective of believers as described in Gospels?
Thomas Aquinas believes that while in principle shared property is better, this only holds for perfect humans, majority of us dwell in sin etc. so private property and difference in wealth are natural and it is sinful to demand egalitarianism or abolish private property in “our fallen societies, i.e., to demand for imperfect people what befits only the perfect.”
Is this supplmenting of universality with exceptions a case of the concrete universal?
Structure of universal law and Hegelian “concrete universality” mobilize the gap between the pure universal principle or law and the pragmatic consideration of paritcular circumstances , i.e., the (ultimately empiricist) notion of the excess of the wealth of concrte partiuclar content over any abstract principle — in other words, here, unversality precisely REMAINS ABSTRACT, which is why it has to be twisted or adapted to particular circumstances in order to become operative in real life.
In the second case, on the contrary, the tension is absolutely immanent, inherent to universality itself: the fact that a universality actualizes itself in a series of exceptions is an effect of this universality being at war with itself, marked by an inherent deadlock or impossibility. … The idea’s imperfect [or, rather, catastrophic as in the case of Communism] actualizations bear witness to an “inner contradiction” at the very heart of the idea.
“concrete universality” an example:
Jewish story about death penalty and God who ordained it. devised a practical solution: “one should not directly overturn the divine injunction, that would have been blasphemous; but one should treat it as God’s slip of tongue, thismoment of madness, and invent a complex network of sub-regulations and conditions which, while leaving the possibility of a death penaly intact, ensure that this possibility will never be realized. The beqauty of this procedure is that it turns around the standard trick of prohibiting something in principle (torture, for instance), but then slipping in enough qualifications (“except in specified extreme circumstancess…”) to ensure it can be done whenever one really wants to do it.
It is thus either “In principle yes, but in practice never” or “In principle no, but when exceptional circumstances demand it, yes.”
Note the asymmetry between the two cases: the prohibition is much stronger when one allows torture in principle — in this case, the principled “yes” is NEVER allowed to realize itself; while in the other case, the principled “no” is EXCEPTIONALLY allowed to realize itself.
In other words, the only “reconciliation” between the universal and particular is that of the UNIVERSALIZED EXCEPTION: only the stance which re-casts every particular case as an exception treats all particular cases WITHOUT EXCEPTION in the same way.
And it sould be clear now why this is a case of “concrete universality”: the reason we should find a way to argue, in each particular case, that the death penalty is not deserved, lies in our awareness that there is something wrong with the very idea of the death penalty, that this idea is an injustice masked as justice. 20-21
Ambedkar saw how the structure of four castes does not unite four elements belonging to the same order: while the first three castes (priests, warrior-kings, merchant producers) form a consistent All, an organic tgriad the Untouchables, like Marx’s “Asiatic mode of production,” the “part of no part,” the INCONSISTENT ELEMENT WITHIN THE SYSTEM WHICH HOLDS THE PLACE OF WHAT THE SYSTEM EXCLUDES — as as such the Untouchables STAND FOR UNIVERSALITY.
As long as there are castes, there will be an excessive excremental zero-value element which, while formally part of the system, has no proper place within it. This is why the properly dialectical parados is that, if one is to break out of the caste system, it is not enough to reverse the status of the Untouchables, elevating htem into the “children of god” — the first step should rather be exactly the opposite one: to UNIVERSALIZE their excremental status to the whole of humanity.
Martin Luther directly proposed just such an excremental identity for man: man is like a divine shit, he fell out of God’s anus — and, effectively, it is only within this Protestant logic of man’s excremental identity that the true menaing of Incarnation can be formulated. 23
Protestantism, finally, posits the relationship as real, conceiving Christ as a God who, in His act of Incarnation, freely IDENTIFIED HIMSELF WITH HIS OWN SHIT, with the excremental real that is man — and it is only at this level that the properly Christian notion of divine love can be apprehended, as the love for the miserable excremental entity called “man.”
We are dealing here with what can be ironically referred to as the cosmic-theological proletarian position, whose “infinite judgment” is the identity of excess and universality: the shit of the earth is the universal subject.
The Phenomenology of Spirit, between the two readings of “the Spirit is a bone” which Hegel illustrates by way of the phallic metaphor (the phallus as organ of insernination or as the organ of urination). Hegel’s point is NOT that, in contrast to the vulgar empiricist mind which sees only urination, the proper speculative attitude has to choose insemination.
The paradox is that making the direct choice of insemination is the infallible way to miss the point: it is not possible directly to choose the “true meaning,” for one HAS to begin by making the “wrong” choice (of urination) — the true speculative meaning emerges only through the repeated reading, as the after-effect (or by-product) of the first, “wrong,” reading.
And the same goes for social life in which the direct choice of the “concrete universality”of a particular ethical Iifeworld can end only in a regression to a pre-modern organic society that denies the infinite right of subjectivity as the fundamental feature of modernity.
Since the subject-citizen of a modern state can no longer accept immersion in some particular social role that would confer on him a determinate place within the organic social Whole, the construction of the rational totality of the modern state leads to Revolutionary Terror: one should ruthlessly tear up the constraints of the pre-modern organic “concrete universality” and fully assert the infinite right of subjectivity in its abstract negativity.
In other words, the point of Hegel’s analysis of the Revolutionary Terror is not the rather obvious insight into how the revolutionary project involved the unilateral and direct assertion of abstract universal reason, and as such was doomed to perish in self-destructive fury since it was unable to channel the transposition of its revolutionary energy into a concrete, stable and differentiated social order; Hegel’s point turns rather on the enigma of why, in spite ofthe fact that the Revolutionary Terror was a historical deadlock, we have to pass through it in order to arrive at the modern rational state. 26-27
This is why Hegelian dialectics is not a vulgar evolutionism claiming that while a phenomenon may be justified in its own time, it deserves to disappear when its time passes: the “eternity” of dialectics means that the de-legitimization is always retroactive, what disappears “in itself” always deserves to disappear.
Recall also the paradox of the process of apologizing: if I hurt someone with a rude remark, the proper thing for me to do is to offer a sincere apology, and the proper thing for the other party to do is to say something like “Thanks, I appreciate it, but I wasn’t offended, I knew you didn’t mean it, so you really owe me no apology!”
The point is, of course, that although the final result is that no apology is needed, one has to go through the elaborate process of offering it -“you owe me no apology” can only be said once I have actually offered an apology, so that, although formally “nothing happens,” and the offer of apology is proclaimed unnecessary, there is still a gain at the end of the process (perhaps, even, the friendship is saved).
Is it not that, here also, one has to do something (offer an apology, choose terror) in order to see how superfluous it is? This paradox is sustained by the distinction between the “constative” and the “performative,” between the “subject of the enunciated” and the “subject of the enunciation”: at the level of the enunciated content, the whole operation is meaningless (why do it -offer an apology, choose terror – when it is superfluous?);
but what this commonsensical insight overlooks is that it was only the “wrong” superfluous gesture which created the subjective conditions that made it possible for the subject to really see why this gesture was indeed superfluous. The dialectical process is thus more refined than it may appear; the standard notion is that one can only arrive at the final truth at the end of a series of errors, so that these errors are not simply discarded, but are “sublated” in the final truth, preserved therein as moments within it. What this standard notion misses, however, is how the previous moments are preserved PRECISELY AS SUPERFLUOUS. 28
This is why the obvious response “But is this idea ofretroactively canceling the contingent historical conditions, of transforming contingency into Fate, not ideology at its formally purest, the very form of ideology?” misses the point, namely that this retroactivity is inscribed into reality itself:
what is truly “ideological” is the idea that, freed from “ideological illusions,” one can pass from moment A to moment B directly, without retroactivity — as if, for instance, in an ideal and authentic society, I could apologize and the other party could respond “I was hurt, an apology was required, and I accept it” without breaking any implicit rules. Or as if we could reach the modern rational state without having to pass through the “superfluous” detour of the Terror. 28
…when something radically New emerges it retroactively creates its own possibility, its own causes or conditions. 28
Falling in love changes the past: it is as if I ALWAYS ALREADY loved you, our love was destined to be, is the “answer of the real.” 28 In Vertigo, it is the opposite that occurs: the past is changed so that it loses the ohjet a. What Scottie first experiences in Vertigo is the LOSS of Madeleine, his fatal love; when he recreates Madeleine in Judy and then discovers that the Madeleine he knew was actually Judy already pretending to be Madeleine, what he discovers is not simply that Judy was a fake (he knew that she was not the true Madeleine, since he had used her to recreate a copy of Madeleine), but that, BECAUSE SHE WAS not A FAKE — SHE is MADELEINE — MADELEINE HERSELF WAS ALREADY A FAKE — the objet a disintegrates, the very loss is lost, and we have a “negation of the negation.” His discovery CHANGES THE PAST, deprives the lost object of the objet a. 29
OBJECT A 2012, Žižek at the EGS
What Judy was doing in playing Madeleine was TRUE LOVE.
In Vertigo Scottie does NOT love Madeleine-the proof is that he tries to recreate her in Judy, changing Judy’s properties to make her resemble Madeleine. Similarly, the idea ofcloning a dead child for bereaved parents is an abomination: if the parents are satisfied by this, it is proof that their love was not genuine — love is not love for the properties of the object, but for the abyssal X, the JE NE SAIS QUOI, in the object. 29-30