Žižek reality of the Virtual 2004
UNIVERSAL and PARTICULAR
The category of the REAL is a purely formal category. REAL is not formless content disturbing order, it is a pure structural GAP. It is ENTIRELY NONSUBSTANTIAL category.
It is a difference but a pure difference. A difference which is paradoxically prior to what it is the difference between.
It is not that you have two terms and difference is the difference between the two terms. Paradoxically the two positive terms appear afterwards as attempts to dominate/cover-up this difference.
If you ask a right-winger how the entire social field is structured you will get a totally different answer from a centrist and a left-winger. There is no neutral way to define the difference between left and right, in itself it is just a VOID. The point is that there is no neutral way to define the difference between left and right, you either approach it from the left or right.
Crucial philosophically is this ‘pure formalism’ and we should precisely insist on purely formal materialism, the minimal feature of materialism is that there is pure difference, an antagonism within the ONE, a primordial fact is pure self-difference. Self-Difference and not mythological polar opposites ying-yang man-woman light-dark
Deleuze asserts some kind of primordial multitude as ontological fact. NO!
Multitude is already an effect of th inconsistency of the ONE with itself. THE ONE CANNOT COINCIDE WITH ITSELF. We don’t have primordial polarity between male-female etc.
No its more radical, as Lacan puts it, the binary signifier is primordially repressed, the second element is always missing. We have one but not the accompanying other. This original imbalance sets in motion the generation of multiplicity.
Woody Allen
Tolstoy where is Dostoevsky (the other of Tolstoy) In one short scene, all the big titles of Dostoevsky’s novels appear.
ONE cannot coincide with itself, because of pure difference the multitude explodes.
Today’s idealism/spiritualism no wonder the greatest spiritual movie director Tarkovsky, was at the same time practically obsessed with matter in decay. When heroes pray, the litteraly immerse their heads in mud. Oppose spiritual materialism, the pure formalism of true radical materialism. Quantum physics, you don’t need positivity of matter you can do it all with theorems.
How to think difference which is prior to the elements which it is the difference of.
KANT: Negative Judgement/Infinite Judgement.
excess over humanity which is inherent to humanity itself.
UNDEAD: You are alive precisely as dead. Human freedom has exactly status, it is neither NATURE, NOR CULTURE. Culture is already symbolic laws, and symbolic regulation. The conclusion to be drawn cultural symbolic prohibitions try to regulate is not directly nature, but this EXTIMATE KERNEL OF HUMANITY, the inhuman, the undead, not external to humanity, some MONSTROUS EXCESS WHICH IS INHERENT TO HUMANITY ITSELF.
POLITICS OF PURE DIFFERENCE
it won’t be what emerges today, the so-called identity politics, recognizing tolerating differences. Recognizing differences