Marchart, Oliver. “The absence at the heart of presence: radical democracy and the ‘ontology of lack”. Tonder, Lars. Lasse Thomassen. Radical Democracy: Politics between abundance and lack. Manchester UP. 2005.
Tada: Ontology was originally the study of being-qua-being starting with Aristotle. Then with Descartes and culminating in the work of Berkeley and Kant and heirs it turned increasingly to epistemology shifting from being-qua-being to questions of being-qua-understanding. Thus starting to look for the ‘grounds and conditions of of understanding and bypassing all the stuff about the nature of being. Then comes Heidegger but prepped by Hegel, Schelling and Nietzsche, there is a return to ontology.
However, ontology did not re-emerge in full glory, as a return to the pre-critical ‘pre-modern’ stable ground of being. By the time of its return, the ccategory of being had turned into something intrinsically precarious, something haunted by the spectre of its own absent ground. For this reason, today’s ontology must not be understood in terms of, to use Derrida’s words, traditional onto-theology, in which the role of being was to provide us with a stable ground, rather it must be conceived of as hauntology, where being is always out-of-joint, never fully present (18).
Heidegger work points out … He pointed out that metaphysical thought
whenever the traditional difference between the general (that is, ONTOLOGICAL) realm of being-qua-being and the particular (that is, ONTIC) realm of beings was established
has always taken this ontological difference for granted and never inquired into the difference as différance.
Hence being in the most radical Heideggerian sense does not reside on the ontological level, nor does it reside on the ontic plane.
Rather it is the play which simultaneously unites AND separates the ONTIC and the ONTOLOGICAL, thus introducing an irresolvable difference into being that amounts to a constitutive deferral of every stable ground of being — a move later taken up by Derrida with his concept of différance …
Laclau, Ernesto. “Can Immanence Explain Social Struggles?” Diacritics. 31:4. 2001. pp. 3-10.
What is important, however, in reference to these theological debates are the alternatives that remain in case the immanent route is not followed. For in that case evil is not the appearance of a rationality underlying and explaining it but a brute and irreducible fact. As the chasm separating good and evil is strictly constitutive and there is no ground reducing to its immanent development the totality of what exists, there is an element of negativity which cannot be eliminated either through dialectical mediation or through Nietzschean assertiveness (5).
In the same way that, with modernity, immanence ceased to be a theological concept and became fully secularized, the religious notion of evil becomes, with the modern turn, the kernel of what we can call “social antagonism.” What the latter retains from the former is the notion of a radical disjuncture — radical in the sense that it cannot be reabsorbed by any deeper objectivity which would reduce the terms of the antagonism to moments of its own internal movement — for example, the development of productive forces or any other form of immanence. Now, I would contend that it is only by accepting such a notion of antagonism — and its corollary, which is radical social division — that we are confronted with forms of social action that can truly be called political (5).
In the words of Marx: “By proclaiming the dissolution of the hitherto world order the proletariat merely states the secret of its own existence, for it is in fact the dissolution of that world order.” To put it in terms close to Hardt and Negri’s: the universality of the proletariat fully depends on its immanence within an objective social order which is entirely the product of capitalism—which is, in turn, a moment in the universal development of the productive forces. But, precisely for that reason, the universality of the revolutionary subject entails the end of politics—that is, the beginning of the withering away of the State and the transition (according to the Saint-Simonian motto adopted by Marxism) from the government of men to the administration of things.
As for the second revolution—the political one—its distinctive feature is, for Marx, an essential asymmetry: that between the universality of the task and the particularism of the agent carrying it out. Marx describes this asymmetry in nonequivocal terms: a certain regime is felt as universal oppression, and that allows the particular social force able to lead the struggle against it to present itself as a universal liberator — universalizing, thus, its particular objectives.
Here we find the real theoretical watershed in contemporary discussions: either we assert the possibility of a universality which is not politically constructed and mediated, or we assert that all universality is precarious and depends on a historical construction out of heterogeneous elements. Hardt and Negri accept the first alternative without hesitation. If, conversely, we accept the second, we are on the threshold of the Gramscian conception of hegemony. (Gramsci is another thinker for whom—understandably, given their premises—Hardt and Negri show little sympathy.) (5)
Laclau, Ernesto.”The Future of Radical Democracy.” Tonder, Lars. Lasse Thomassen. Radical Democracy: Politics between abundance and lack. Manchester UP. 2005. pp. 256-262).
… antagonism is irreducible, in which case social objectivity cannot be fully constituted. This explains why antagonisms cannot be conceived as dialectical contradictions. For the latter, negativity is only present to be superseded by a higher form of objectivity. Hegel’s Absolute Spirit and Marx’s classless society are the names of a fullness which makes it possible to detect the ultimate meaning of all previous stages and thus, to transform negativity in the apparential form of a deeper objectivity. What happens if, instead, we avoid this reductionist operation and take antagonisms at face value. In that case … what cannot be fully constituted is objectivity as such (257).
Every identity is a threatened identity … If an identity was not threatened by an antagonistic relation, it would be what it is as a pure objective datum. Between what it ontically is and the ontological fact that it is, there would be no distance. It would be mere positivity, closed in itself. Antagonism is what creates a gap between these two dimensions.
This distance between fullness of being and actual being is what we call lack. Representation of that distance, however, requires not only the discursive presence of actual being but also of the fullness of being.
But this creates an immediate problem, for fullness of being is that which is constitutively absent. The difficulty can be summarised in the following terms: the distance between full and actual being needs to be represented — which involves the two poles being somehow present in such representation — but one of the two cannot have a DIRECT representation because it operates through its very absence. Actual beings are the only means of representation. In such conditions, representation of the fullness of being can only take place if there is an essential unevenness among actual beings — that is, if an ontic particularity becomes the body through which an incommensurable fullness ‘positivises’ itself. This means that one element assumes an ontolgical function, which far exceeds, its ontic content. This is the moment of EXCESS. As we see, we are not dealing with an excess which is opposed to lack, but with one which directly results from the latter.
“If you asked me at gunpoint what I really like, I would say to read German idealism, Hegel. What I like most, what I love the best, is this objectivity of belief,” he says. Although people may claim not to believe in the political system, their inert cynicism only validates that system. This is all explained, according to Žižek, by Marx’s theory of “commodity fetishism”, the idea that the way we behave in society is determined by objective market forces rather than subjective beliefs. “The importance is in what you do, not in what you think. I love this dialectical reversal.”
When the claim is made that sexual difference at this most fundamental level is merely formal (Sheperdson) or empty (Žižek), we are in the same quandary as we were in with ostensibly formal concepts such as universality: is it fundamentally formal, or does it become formal, become available to a formalization on the condition that certain kinds of exclusions are performed which enable that very formalization in its putatively transcendental mode? (144)
The formal character of this originary, pre-social sexual difference in its ostensible emptiness is accomplished precisely through the reification by which a certain idealized and necessary dimorphism takes hold. The trace or remainder which formalism needs to erase, but which is the sign of its foundation in that which is anterior to itself, often operates as the clue to its unravelling. the fact that claims such as ‘cultural intelligibility requires sexual difference’ or ‘there is no culture without sexual difference’ circulate within the Lacanian discourse intimates something of the constraining normativity that fuels this transcendental turn, a normativity secured from criticism precisely because it officially announces itself as prior to and untainted by any given social operation of sexual difference (145).
How might we motivate an ethical subject to commit to a conception of the good
Jay Bernstein and me: motivational deficit, secular liberal democratic institutions suck, and demotivate
An ethics that motivate people to acts of political resistance
DEMAND: a demand that I approve, this begins to shape my ethical subjectivity.
fidelity to a demand that cannot be fulfilled.
divides subjectivity: a ‘dividual’ demand to which it responds and inability to be an equal to that demand, excess of demand over approval.
one can never attain the autarchy of self-mastery
comically ridiculous:
What’s the link between conscience and political action?
neo-anarchism: Seattle protests, anti-war, protests against G-8 in Germany, horizontal aggregation of a collective will by disperse groups, forging of a new language of civil disobedience
non-violence: Peace can be warlike without being violent
ne0 leninists:virile heroic figure
politics of powerlessness, refusal of violence, creative non-violence.
thomas paine deep democracy, pneumatic anarchism
Interstitial distance: creation of spaces of distance from state, Marx’s true democracy, inidigenous rights movements. Courtney Young, rise of Indigenous Rights Movement in Mexico
creation of new political actor, “indigenous” at a distance from the state.
Appeal to Universality
Infinite Responsibility: provide the glue to think of ethical subject, infinitely demanding, ethical subject, experience of fidelity, what differentiates contemporary anarchist practices turns on freedom and responsibility: 1960 non-repressive sublimation the joy of sex, this is pseudo-liberatarianism of which contemporary Anarchists are critical – ethical outrage of yawning poverty and disenfranchisement, visceral experience of deep democratization
what ties together the various groups? Not common set of theoretical doctrines, a shared sense of grievance and wrong, war is wrong etc. contemporary anarchism is closer to Levinas than Marcuse, opens me to the other’s infinite demand.
On a Hegelian view, the dilemma at the heart of the Kantian project takes the following form: how can I be subject to a law of which I am the author, given that I can only be legitimately subject to such a law because of the governing principle of autonomy. Hegel shows how this Kantian dilemma requires an intersubjective solution, namely that it is necessary to show, firstly that reason is social, and secondly, that the sociality of reason unfolds historically and cannot be reduced to the formal decision procedure of the Kantian categorical imperative or the solitary activity of the Fichtean ego.
Tada: The conservative Kantian in response to the ethical demand, in order to respond sees the ethical response as reflection of his moral autonomy and rationality, in other words, it doesn’t split her into two, doesn’t cause him any psychic imbalance, doesn’t really peturb him or her in the least, because, the ethical response is a moral categorical imperative, it is a reflection of the subject’s own inner reason.
Critichley wants to argue that things are not so ‘neat and tidy’.
It is this moment of incomprehensibility in ethics that interests me, where the subject is faced with a demand that does not correspond to its autonomy: in this situation, I am not the equal of the demand that is placed on me. … ethics is obliged to acknowledge a moment of rebellious heteronomy that troubles the sovereignty of autonomy (37).
Disappointment: the condition of the world in which we live is pretty grim, a state of war, what might justice be in a violently unjust world? It is this question that provokes the need for an ETHICS.
The main task of this book is responding to that need by offering a theory of ethical experience and subjectivity that will lead to an infinitely demanding ethics of commitment and politics of resistance (3)
active nihilsm, passive nihilism: American Buddhism, contemplative withdrawal where one faces the meaningless chaos of the world with eyes wide shut
Motivational Deficit
where citizens experience the governmental norms that rule contemporary society as externally binding buty not internally compelling, there is a motivational deficit at the heart of secular liberal democracy
Each of these forms of nihilsim express a deep truth: identification of a motivational deficit at the heart of liberal democracy, we are basically indifferent and then fall into active or passive nihilism.
What is required, in my view, is a conception of ethics that begins by accepting the motivational deficit in the institutions of liberal democracy, but without embracing either passive or active nihilism … What is lacking at the present time of massive political disappointment is a motivating, empowering conception of ethics that can face and face down the drift of the present, an ethics that is able to respond to and resist the political situation in which we find ourselves. This brings me to my initial question: if we are going to stand a chance of constructing an ethics that empowers subjects to political action, a motivating ethics, we require some sort of answer to what I see as the basic question of morality. It is to this that I would now like to turn (8).
Ethics of commitment and political resistance
A subject is the name for the way in which a self binds itself to some conception of the good and shapes its subjectivity in relation to that good (10).
Ethics is anarchic meta-politics, it is the continual questioning from below of any attempt to impose order from above. On this view, politics is the creation of interstitial distance within the state, the invention of new political subjectivities. Politics, I argue, cannot be confined to the activity of government that maintains order, pacification and security while constantly aiming at consensus. On the contrary, politics is the manifestation of dissensus, the cultivation of an anarchic multiplicity that calls into question the authority and legitimacy of the state. It is in relation to such a multiplicity that we may begin to restore some dignity to the dreadfully devalued discourse of democracy (13).
Divided Self
Guilt is the affect that produces a certain splitting or division in the subject … This experience of self-division is … the sting of bad conscience … the phenomenon of guilty conscience reveals — negatively — the fundamentally moral articulation of the self. Namely, that ethical subjectivity is not just an aspect or dimension of subjective life, it is rather the fundamental feature of what we think of as a self, the repository of our deepest commitments and values (23).
Humour
super-ego is the cause of suffering
instead, we should find oneself ridiculous, learn to laugh at ourselves, “a super-ego which does not lacerate the ego, but speaks to it words of unsentimental consolation. this is a positive super-ego that liberates and elevates by allowing the ego to find itself ridiculous 83.
‘Super-ego II’ is the child that has become the parent: wiser, wittier and slightly wizened. It is the super-ego that saves the human being from tragic hubris, from the Promethean fantasy of believing oneself omnipotent, autarkic and authentic, and it does this through humour
It is indeed true, as Nietzsche would claim, that withoiut the experience of sublimation, conscinece cruelly vivisects thh subject, it pulls us apart. This is why we require the less heroic but possibly more tragic form of sublimation that I have tried to describe in this chapter (87).
Tada: JB is critical of the way in which Žižek makes sexual d. ahistorical Real, traumatic and thus outside the struggle for hegemony, JB asks how it can both occasion the chain and is also a link in the chain. How’s that. Žižek replies by accepting this paradox. Further according to the Hegelian concrete universality and also JB’s own work Žižek argues that sexual d is a ‘concrete universality’ in that it attempt to be universal gets overdetermined by its very particular contents. Žižek uses the example of religion, I wish he just used sexual d as an example. But he’s saying I guess the universal difference male/female though universal, will be overtaken by its particular content that tries to fill out this universal. Žižek here cites JB and says that each particularity asserts its own mode of universality (JB’s ‘competing universalities’) Does Žižek’s response satisfy JB? I think not. The very frame male/female is still a sticking point for JB. Even though she understands fully Žižek’s point about how that universality gets differentially articulated. (Man I’m getting good at this eh?)
This problem … is related to the ‘quasi-transcendental’ status that Žižek attributes to sexual difference. If he is right, then sexual difference, in it most fundamental aspect, is outside the struggle for hegemony even as he claims with great clarity that its traumatic and non-symbolizable status occasions the concrete struggles over what its meaning should be. I gather that sexual difference is distinguished from other struggles within hegemony precisely because those other struggles — ‘class’ and ‘nation’, for instance — do not simultaneously name a fundamental and traumatic difference and a concrete, contingent historical identity. Both ‘class’ and ‘nation’ appear within the field of the symbolizable horizon on the occasion of this more fundamental lack, but one would not be tempted, as one is with the example of sexual difference, to call that fundamental lack ‘class’ or ‘nation’ (143).
Thus, sexual difference occupies a distinctive position within the chain of signifiers, one that both occasions the chain and is one link in the chain. How are we to think the vacillation between these two meanings, and are they always distinct, given that the transcendental is the ground, and occasions a sustaining condition for what is called the historical?
Žižek replies:
I fully assume this paradox … This overdetermination of universality by part of its content, this short circuit between the universal and particular, is the key feature of Hegelian ‘concrete universality’, and I am in total agreement with Butler who, it seems to me, also aims at this legacy of ‘concrete universality’ in her central notion of ‘competing universalities’: in her insistence on how each particular position, in order to articulate itself, involves the (implicit or explicit) assertion of its own mode of universality, she develops a point which I aslo try repeatedly to make in my own work (314-315).
… it is not enough to say that the genus Religion is divided into a multitude of species … the point, rather, is that each of these particular species involves its own universal notion of what religion is ‘as such’, as well as its own view on (how it differs from) other religions. Christianity is not simply different from Judaism and Islam; within its horizon, the very difference that separates it from the other two ‘religions of the Book’ appears in a way which is unacceptable for the other two. In other words when a Christian debates with a Muslim, they do not simply disagree — they disagree about their very disagreement: about what makes the difference between their religions … This is Hegel’s ‘concrete universality‘: since each particularity involves its own universality, its own notion of the Whole and its own part within it, there is no ‘neutral’ universality that would serve as the medium for these particular positions.
Thus Hegelian ‘dialectical development’ is not a deployment of a particular content within universality but the process by which, in the passage from one particularity to another,the very universality that encompasses both also changes: ‘concrete universality’ designates precisely this ‘inner life’ of universality itself, this process of passage in the course of which the very universality that aims at encompassing it is caught in it, submitted to transformations (316).
Tada: Here JB. is making the point that Žižek’s discussion of 2 levels of EL’s theory of hegemony. One level is at the level of the battle over content, over establishing a universal out of particularized contents, which one will emerge and so on. But then there is also the level of the very frame within which that content appears. And this Z. insists is what is taken for granted. So JB. says:
And yet, if hegemony consists in part in challenging the frame to permit intelligible political formations previously foreclosed, and if its futural promise depends precisely on the revisability of that frame, then it makes no sense to safeguard that frame from the realm of the historical. Moreover, if we construe the historical in terms of the contingent and political formations in question, then we restrict the very meaning of the historical to a form of positivism. That the frame of intelligibility has its own historicity requires not only that we rethink the frame as historical, but that we rethink the meaning of history beyond both positivism and teleology, and towards a notion of a politically salient and shifting set of epistemes (138).
Tada: Z. argues that this very frame is CAPITALISM! Damn you Žižek! Butler rejects the Lacanian category of lack. As she states here about Žižek’s use of the term:
Butler states:
His resistance to what he calls ‘historicism’ consists in refusing any account given by social construction that might render this fundamental lack as an effect of certain social conditions, an effect which is misnamed through metalepsis by those who would understand it as the cause or ground of any and all sociality. So it would also refuse any sort of critical view which maintains that the lack which a certain kind of psychoanalysis understands as ‘fundamental’ to the subject is, in fact, rendered fundamental and constitutive as a way of obscuring its historically contingent origins (140).
As I hope to make clear, I agree with the notion that every subject emerges on the condition of foreclosure, but do not share the conviction that these foreclosures are prior to the social, or explicable through recourse to anachronistic structuralist accounts of kinship. Whereas I believe that the Lacanian view and my own would agree on the point that such foreclosures can be considered ‘internal’ to the social as its founding moment of exclusion or preemption, the disagreement would emerge over whether either castration or the incest taboo can or ought to operate as the name that designates these various operations (140).
Tada: JB. construes this particular Žižekian intervention as one of ‘levels of analysis’, a topography which she says makes no sense, ‘falls apart’.
(140-141) Žižek proposes that we distinguish between levels of analysis, claiming that one level — one that appears to be closer to the surface, if not superficial — finds contingency and substitutability within a certain historical horizon (here, importantly, history carries at least two meanings: contingency and the enabling horizon within which it appears). …
The other level — which, he claims is ‘more fundamental’ — is an ‘exclusion/foreclosure’ that grounds this very horizon (SZ 108). He warns both L and me against conflating two levels,
1. the endless political struggle of/for inclusions/exclusions WITHIN a given field
2. a more fundamental exclusion which sustains this very field (Z 108).
Tada: But this ‘levels of analysis falls apart, JB argues that the distinctions do not hold up:
On the one hand, it is clear that this second level, the more fundamental one is tied to the first by being both its ground and its limit. Thus, the second level is not exactly exterior to the first, which means that they cannot, strictly speaking, be conceived as separable ‘levels’ at all, for the historical horizon surely ‘is’ its ground, whether or not that ground appears within the horizon that it occasions and ‘sustains’ (141).
Elsewhere he cautions against understanding this fundamental level, the level at which the subject’s lack is operative, as external to social reality: ‘the Lacanian Real is strictly internal to the Symbolic’ (Z 120).
On should not forget that in spite of some occasional ‘objectivist’ formulations, the reduction of individuals to embodied economic categories (terms of the relation of production) is for Marx not a simple fact, but the result of the process of ‘reification’, that is, an aspect of the ideological ‘mystification’ inherent to capitalism. As for Laclau’s second point about class struggle being ‘just one species of identity politics, one which is becoming less and less important in the world in which we live’, one should counter it by the already-mentioned paradox of ‘oppositional determination’, of the part of the chain that sustains its horizon itself; class antagonism certainly appears as one in the series of social antagonisms, but it is simultaneously the specific antagonism which ‘predominates over the rest whose relations thus assign rank and influence to the others. It is a general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity‘.
[M]y point of contention with Laclau here is that I do not accept that all elements which enter into hegemonic struggle are in principle equal: in the series of struggles (economic, political, feminist, ecological, ethnic, etc.) there is always ONE which, while it is part of the chain, secretly overdetermines its very horizon (320).
I have dealt extensively with the rhetorical and discursive devices through which contingently articulated social relations become ‘naturalilzed’ in order to legitimize relations of power (288).
If I have called the general equivalent unifying an undisturbed equivalential chain the empty signifier, I will call the one whose emptiness results from the unfixity introduced by a plurality of discourses interupting each other the floating signifier. In practice, both processes overdetermine each other, but it is important to keep the analytical distinction between them.
(305).
Butler’s critique relies on the opposition between
1.the (hypostasized, proto-transcendental, pre-historical and pre-social) ‘symbolic order’, that is, the ‘big Other’, and
2. ‘society’ as the field of contingent socio-symbolic struggles.
… all her main points against Laclau or me can be reduced to this matrix:
– to the basic criticism that we hypostasize some historically contingent formation (even if it is the Lack itself) into a proto-transcendental pre-social formal a priori.
For example, when I write ‘on the lack that inaugurates and defines, negatively, human social reality’, I allegedly posit ‘a transcultural structure to social reality that presupposes a sociality based in fictive and idealized kinship positions that presume the heterosexual family as constituting the defining social bond for all humans’ (JB, 141-142).
Butler further states:
the disagreement seems inevitable. Do we want to affirm that there is an ideal big Other, or an ideal small other, which is more fundamental than any of its social formulations? Or do we want to question whether any ideality that pertains to sexual difference is ever not constituted by actively reproduced gender norms that pass their ideality off as essential to a pre-social and ineffable sexual difference (JB, 144).
(309).
Far from constraining the variety of sexual arrangements in advance, the Real of sexual difference is the traumatic cause which sets their contingent proliferation in motion.
The gap between symbolic a priori FORM and history/sociality is utterly foreign to Lacan — that is to say, the ‘duality’ with which Lacan operates is not the duality of the [a priori form]/[norm], the symbolic Order, and its imperfect historical realization: For Lacan, as well as for Butler, there is NOTHING outside contingent, partial, inconsistent symbolic practices, no ‘big Other’ that guarantees their ultimate consistency. In contrast to Butler and the historicists, however, Lacan grounds historicity in a different way: not in the simple empirical excess of ‘society’ over symbolic schemata … but in the resistant kernel within the symbolic process itself.
… the Real is neither pre-social nor a social effect — the point is, rather, that the Social itself is CONSTITUTED by the exclusion of some traumatic Real. What is ‘outside the Social’ is not some positive a priori symbolic form/norm, merely its negative founding gesture itself.
Tada: comment by me: I get it. Ok so it’s the Real that, within the symbolic, is what kick starts the process of historicity. That is, it is after Z, “the cause which sets their contingent proliferation in motion”. This means that yes there is contingency, but not because we have a normative sedimented order on one hand, and then, empirical or discursive untamed excess that is, the not-normativized, on the other. Historicity begins, contingency happens because there is a REAL (capitalism) caught within the symbolic that is unsymbolizable, that prevents things from sticking and becoming stone. Am I making sense