Death Drive 1
this is starting point but at the end we have perfect reconciliation. Hegel was well aware that this excess of negativity could never be culturalized. In contrast to Kant Hegel never believed in perpetual peace. Hegel thinks that this radical negativity, this excess will explode again. This excess is neither Nature nor Culture. Hegelian progress, once you are in culture, retroactively you de-naturalize nature. The price we pay to move into culture, what before was a natural instinct becomes an absolute eternal repetitive drive. That is a REPETITIVE drive.
Aim the true satisfaction of the drive is the circular movement of the drive itself.
Goal is what you official want
Concrete Universality
outlines Schuman and then exposes his source as Charles Rosen
Maybe the true ideological revolution is not a chang in the explicit rules, but the revolution in this background, I’m saying the same thing but the virtual resonance, the virtual background has changed. The implicit, you can’t pin it down, but somehow everything is different.
Billy Bathgate This is a good discussion
Doctorow’s novel and the movie. The novel must have been better after seeing the movie. We have a failed novel, we have a failed repetition (movie) but the repetition, generates retroactively a truly spectral presence of what the novel should have been. It is a virtual object of another kind, the film does not repeat the novel on which it is based, rather they both repeat the virtual X.
Retroactive movement: a movement described it is something which was first conceptualized by Bergson, in spite of my turmoil, I experienced a feeling of admiration for the facility of the passage from abstract to concrete. THe war exploded, what happened, before at the level of abstract knowledge everybody knew about it, expected it, but nonetheless nobody believed it really could happen, a fetishist disavowal, I know very well but nonetheless I don’t believe it could really happen. FIrst it was probable but impossible, but then when it happend it suddenly become REAL and possible. When it really happened, it retroactively became totally possible and acceptable.
The logic we have here is not standard linear logic of possibility. i.e., we have a sitatuation A, with certain possibilities, and one possiblity is realized. NO. we have something that is considered impossible HAPPENS and then retroactively it becomes possible. THIS IS THE LACANIAN ACT.
the ACT it retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility.
The Hegelian temporality, eternity it’s always done this way. You may think Hegel is closure, in development thing becomes what it always already was. … Hegel may appear to be a totally closed structure. NO. We should read the Hegelian notion of totality in this Bergson way.
Pure Past: T.S. Elliot, every new work of art retroactively changes the past. After a certain new work of art, classical works of art are perceived in a different way. The priority of synchrony over diachrony. Yes this is a good 10 minutes
Dostoevsky didn’t only influence Kafka, only through Kafka are we able to note this dimension in Dostoevsky that has become discernible to us.
This retroactive structure in the sense, in every historical point we live in a totality which is necessary, but this totality is retroactively
… Hegel deduces the necessity of contingency. Not only the necessity of contingency but the contingency of necessity. Things become necessary in a way that is ultimately contingent.
Hegel’s narrative is about the very rise of necessity. This is why for Hegel, he insists on Monarchy, Constitutional Monarchy. Hegel was very aware that exactly what people attribute to him, total rational State, where everything is rationally regulated is nonsense, Hegel was aware that in order to have a rational totality you have to have a contingent element on top. The function of the King is to sign his name, the less he knows all the better.
Hegel’s point is that you have state as rational totality, at the top you need an element of radical contingency
Reality is ontologically incomplete
Reality is not fully constituted. Great works of art are like shots on a film, but the film wasn’t developed. If you come later it isn’t an obstacle, there are things you can only understand with a delay. How I perceive this ontological openness, how to interpret quantum physics. Ž quotes the shitty book by Nicholas Fearn. BUt he makes the point of the ontological incompleteness of reality. He uses the video game analogy.
The difficult reality is incomplete but doesn’t collapse into itself, if you look closely enough it is blurred, there is no zero level, the closer you get is blurred.
The basic operation of Hegel, you have a certain epistemological limitation, you solve the problem, by showing how the problem is its own solution.
Adorno, you have 2 irreducible levels: Its wrong to ask oneself, can we get a unified theory, does this mean that we can’t know society. The result of this individual deadlock between individual psychic intersubjective experience and autonomous social structures, this gap. What we misperceive as the limitation of our knowledge of reality, is a basic feature of social reality itself.