logocentric – Page 15

Butler conclusion forgiveness pardon (3)

Butler, Judith. “On Cruelty.” Rev. of The Death Penalty: Vol. I, by Jacques Derrida, translated by Peggy Kamuf. London Review of Books 36.14 (2014): 31-33. 9 July 2014

Following Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’, Derrida underscores the toxic intimacy between crime and its legal remedy.

The law distinguishes between legitimate and illegitimate forms of the death penalty, establishing the procedures by which that distinction is made.

It also establishes the grounds on which the state can inflict deadly violence either in war or through such legal instruments as the death penalty.

The death penalty, for Derrida, considered as a form of legal violence, closes down the distinction between justice and vengeance: justice becomes the moralised form that vengeance assumes. Continue reading “Butler conclusion forgiveness pardon (3)”

Butler Freud aggression love thy neighbour (2)

Butler, Judith. “On Cruelty.” Rev. of The Death Penalty: Vol. I, by Jacques Derrida, translated by Peggy Kamuf. London Review of Books 36.14 (2014): 31-33. 9 July 2014

Beyond the Pleasure Principle calls into question the exclusive operation of the pleasure principle as the organising principle of psychic life. Are there modes of destructiveness that can’t be explained by the pleasure principle?

The death drive emerges as a way of explaining repetition compulsions that fail to establish any kind of sustainable mastery. Continue reading “Butler Freud aggression love thy neighbour (2)”

Butler Nietzsche morality punishment (1)

Butler, Judith. “On Cruelty.” Rev. of The Death Penalty: Vol. I, by Jacques Derrida, translated by Peggy Kamuf. London Review of Books 36.14 (2014): 31-33. 9 July 2014

‘Whence comes this bizarre, bizarre idea,’ Jacques Derrida asks, reading Nietzsche on debt in On the Genealogy of Morals, ‘this ancient, archaic idea, this so very deeply rooted, perhaps indestructible idea, of a possible equivalence between injury and pain? Continue reading “Butler Nietzsche morality punishment (1)”

zizek cynic right of distress

The Real of Violence, Cynicism, and the “Right of Distress”
Slavoj Žižek
THE SINTHOME 14 Summer 2013

Recall Marx’s brilliant analysis of how, in the French revolution of 1848, the conservative-republican Party of Order functioned as the coalition of the two branches of royalism (orleanists and legitimists) in the “anonymous kingdom of the Republic.” [1] The parliamentary deputees of the Party of Order perceived their republicanism as a mockery: in parliamentary debates, they all the time generated royalist slips of tongue and ridiculed the Republic to let it be known that their true aim was to restore the kingdom.

What they were not aware of is that they themselves were duped as to the true social impact of their rule. What they were effectively doing was to establish the conditions of bourgeois republican order that they despised so much (by for instance guaranteeing the safety of private property).

So it is not that they were royalists who were just wearing a republican mask: although they experienced themselves as such, it was their very “inner” royalist conviction which was the deceptive front masking their true social role. In short, far from being the hidden truth of their public republicanism, their sincere royalism was the fantasmatic support of their actual republicanism.

Marx describes here a precise case of perverted libidinal economy: there is a Goal (restoration of the monarchy) which members of the group experience as their true goal, but which, for tactical reasons, has to be publicly disavowed; however, what brings enjoyment are not multiple ways of obscenely making fun of the ideology they have to follow publicly (rage and invectives again republicanism), but the very indefinite postponement of the realization of their official Goal (which allows them to rule united).

Recall how it is when, in the private sphere, I am unhappily married, I mock my wife all the time, declaring my intention to abandon here for my mistress whom I really love, and while I get small pleasures from invectives against my wife, the enjoyment that sustains me is generated by the indefinite postponement of really leaving my wife for my mistress.

This is the formula of today’s cynical politics: its true dupes are the cynics themselves who are not aware that their truth is in what they are mocking, not in their hidden belief. As such, cynicism is a perverted attitude: it transposes onto its other (non-cynical dupes) its own division. This is why, as Freud pointed out, the perverse activity is not an open display of the unconscious, but its greatest obfuscation.

To draw attention to the fundamental violence that sustains a “normal” functioning of the state (Benjamin called it “mythic violence”), and the no les fundamental violence that sustains every attempt to undermine the functioning of the state (Benjamin’s “divine violence”).

This is why the reaction of the state power to those who endanger it is so brutal, and why, in its very brutality, this reaction is precisely “reactive,” protective. So, far from eccentricity, the extension of the notion of violence is based on a key theoretical insight, and it is the limitation of violence to its directly-visible physical aspect which, far from being “normal,” relies on an ideological distortion.

It is difficult to be really violent, to perform an act that violently disturbs the basic parameters of social life.

Addition: Life as the sum of ends has a right against abstract right. If for example it is only by stealing bread that the wolf can be kept from the door, the action is of course an encroachment on someone’s property, but it would be wrong to treat this action as an ordinary theft. To refuse to allow a man in jeopardy of his life to take such steps for self-preservation would be to stigmatize him as without rights, and since he would be deprived of his life, his freedom would be annulled altogether. /…/

Hegel does not talk here about humanitarian considerations which should temper our legalistic zeal (if an impoverished father steals bread to feed his starving child, we should show mercy and understanding even if he broke the law…), but about a basic legal right, a right which is as a right superior to other particular legal rights.

In other words, we are not dealing simply with the conflict between the demands of life and the constraints of the legal system of rights, but with a right (to life) that overcomes all formal rights, i.e., with a conflict inherent to the sphere of rights, a conflict which is unavoidable and necessary insofar as it serves as an indication of the finitude, inconsistency, and “abstract” character of the system of legal rights as such.

“To refuse to allow a man in jeopardy of his life to take such steps for self-preservation /like stealing the food necessary for his survival/ would be to stigmatize him as without rights“– so, again, the point is not that the punishment for justified stealing would deprive the subject of his life, but that it would exclude him from the domain of rights, i.e., that it would reduce him to bare life outside the domain of law, of the legal order. In other words, this refusal deprives the subject of his very right to have rights.

However, the key question here is: can we universalize this “right of distress,” extending it to an entire social class and its acts against the property of another class?

Although Hegel does not directly address this question, a positive answer imposes itself from Hegel’s description of “rabble” as a group/class whose exclusion from the domain of social recognition is systematic: “§ 244,

Addition: Against nature man can claim no right, but once society is established, poverty immediately takes the form of a wrong done to one class by another.” In such a situation in which a whole class of people is systematically pushed beneath the level of dignified survival, to refuse to allow them to take “steps for self-preservation” (which, in this case, can only mean the open rebellion against the established legal order) is to stigmatize them as without rights.

Clinamen

Sources: Wikipedia and this rather strange article

Clinamen is the Latin name Lucretius gave to the unpredictable swerve of atoms, in order to defend the atomistic doctrine of Epicurus.

When atoms move straight down through the void (kenon) by their own weight, they deflect a bit in space at a quite uncertain time and in uncertain places, just enough that you could say that their motion has changed. But if they were not in the habit of swerving, they would all fall straight down through the depths of the void, like drops of rain, and no collision would occur, nor would any blow be produced among the atoms. In that case, nature would never have produced anything

Clinamen is the word that Lucretius, in his 2nd century book, The Nature of Things, used to describe how the world works. Today, people are not inclined to read a physics book that is 2000 years old, but it is not the particular beliefs that Lucretius may have held that interest us but, rather, the way he used inversion to uncover a key truth that is just as true in the world of particle colliders and Hibbs’ Fields as ever.

Instead of describing solid things as fixed and resting in space, he got his readers to imagine that the whole solid spatial world was moving along in the same direction. Our analogy would be a 12 lane highway where commuter traffic is all moving along at exactly the same speed. In terms of the cars and trucks on the highway, there is no apparent motion, although they are all traveling, if they are lucky, at 60 mph.

What creates a sensation, however, is when something swerves. He called this a “clinamen,” and we can imagine how velocity — a car shooting forward or one slowing down — creates an issue.

dolar hegel freud

March 29, 2011 Hegel Freud Talk
April 2012 Hegel Freud Paper

Verneinung: negation
Verdrängung: repression (neurosis)
Verwerfung: foreclosure (psychosis)
Verleugnung: disavowal (perversion)
Verdichtung: condensation
Verschiebung: displacement

Discussion:

There is no interiority of the self: interior richness that went lost by being alienated, by going to other, by suffering in the other, there is no entity to start with, it is only be going into the other

Hegeian logic as a project is profoundly non-Aristotlean.

Žižek’s intervention:

Gerard Lebrun: Kant is too soft towards the crack (its irreducible), but Kant only draws epietemological consequence, Hegel what if this crack that appears to make in-itself inaccessible is a property of the thing itself. Hegel asserts the crack.

Hegel’s fundamental procedure: the coming of reason (the worst teleological Hegel), but really read him the cunning of reason means its opposite. Whenever you propose a project it will go wrong. If there is a Hegelian text on language it is Heinrich Kleist, if you want to move beyond platitudes, you say too much and then trying to get out of the sh** you fall into, read Hegel’s reading of Antigone, and compare it to Judith Butler, in one feature she follows Gerthe, I’m not doing this for anyone only for my brother. No just my brother, screw everyone. Hegel says only after exposing herself to the contingency of doing it, she because aware of what she is doing. It is not only with Hegel with have first level negation and then Freud adds this clinamen and so on, Hegel can’t think the as it were the foundational matrix of negation itself, what I’m tempted to do, by linking this ‘ver’ problem to the topic of repetition, can Hegel think repetition, the foundational operation of Hegel is something which post-Hegelian though focused on compulsion-to-repeat, the death drive and so on. Something begins visible in Hegel the very core of his operation. Hegel’s notion of totality, it is precisely the totality and all its verspragen. Include all its failures and so on. To speak today about Capitalism, is also to speak about Congo. This is not just a dark area outside, to put it in a political forum, to speak about death penalty, ok let’s debate about abolishing penalty but first let’s abolish guys like you. If you don’t want to speak Fascism don’t talk about capitalism. Hegelian totality all the lapses you have to include them.

When Hegel appears to promote this circular movement, this returning to itself, he always says that to what we return, there is no subject who loses itself, externalizes itself, this loss of self is the very genesis of self. The becoming-self is that you tear yourself out of your immediate natural self, this otherness is precisely you yourself as an object, Kafka the only Bolshevik writer, wrote in his diary, there was a dog who was whipped by his master, stole the whip from his master and started to whip himself and thought, “now I am free.”

I am never myself as a thing. Ontological pain. This return is the very constitution … the absolute is temporary. Hegel is not a cheap historicist. He is a more radical historicist, of course there are eternity above, and this eternity above can be changed.

Dolar clinamen void

Dolar March 30, 2011. The third day of Berlin conference. Mladen Dolar is responding to Aaron Schuster who claims you don’t need negativity to think clinamen which is Deleuzian. Think pure deviation without taking into account crack, void, negativity or Hegel.

Clinamen (inner torsion) version of the thing OR the Void (negativity, lack, dialectics) version of the thing.

Deleuze sees clinamen (pure deviation) the defining item in-itself. You don’t need negativity to think clinamen.

Hegel reads Atomism: introduces void introduces split , the basic unity as divided unity, division is only thing that cannot be further divided

Hegel’s position on the clinamen is curious, he doesn’t really bother with it. Hegel sees the void as the crucial speculative lesson, whereas for Deleuze sees the clinamen (torsion, deviation) is what we have to think without taking into account the void.

From this we arrive at this: Either you see the VOID or you see the CLINAMEN

CLINAMEN: has no time for negativity and void HEGEL and dialectics

VOID: This is the Hegelian way which is based on: lack void, negativity

SPINOZA: could be defined in way of clinamen, Substance expresses itself as inner torsion of substance, substance is pure clinamen, a clinamen in-itself.

CAN one think these 2 things together? CLINAMEN and VOID. EXCLUSIVE? Dolar tries to fit the 2 paths together and NOT make it an exclusive choice.

DOLAR: Take the Hegelian path BUT to see how the Hegelian path of negativity cannot be sustained unless we take this CLINAMEN this deviation encapsulated as INNER DEVIATION of NEGATIVITY

zizek cogito and real

Žižek’s talk on the second day March 29, 2011 at ICI Berlin.

How to relate symbolic order with Real of trauma?

If you read Freud’s Wolfman, he is not saying that the child was doing ok, the small wolfman and then he sees the coitus, and gets traumatized. No when the small wolfman saw the coitus it was not a trauma, he did nothing, he just inscribed it as neutral trace he didn’t know what to do with it. Only at 5-6 when perpelexed by sesxuality, and then to answer to symbolic deadlock he then retroactively traumatised the experience.

It is not about real as brutally intruding, it is the curvature of symbolic space which precedes its cause. The cause is a retroactive projection.

For Lacan we should take ontology literally: Ontic (beings) and logos (language) and this GAP the gap between being and logos, this gap is antagonistic.

Language is the torture house of being, of the radical Incompatibility between: Body of jouissance and Language

Antigone Heidegger’s reading, he ignores what Lacan calls ‘between 2 deaths’ between symbolic and real deaths. Francois Balmes, he wrote on Lacan, he was excellent, Zein and Seit may sound stupid but accurate: The problem with Heidegger is that his theory works for neurotics but can’t cover psychotics. In neurosis you are still within Dasein, past and future etc. In psychosis you are outside normal functioning of language, future past preset. But in a way you are still within human universe, you are outside but in a way still inside.

Žižek mentions that Heidgegger’s correspondence with Swiss psychiatrist he only comments on those cases where patients probably neurotic, are still within symbolic. He doesn’t touch what Žižek calls the Musselman or what Malabou calls post-traumatic. This leads him to the subject of Antigone. Humans beings no longer Dasein in Heideggarian sense. Why keep for them the term subject? People so totally traumatized their personalities are erased, you are not engaged in reality, you are a living dead. There is no space in Heidegger for living dead.

Human beings which are no longer Dasein, you don’t get engagement, Musselman, why do you keep the term subjects. Early Heidegger dismisses modern subjectivity presupposes, as if I am here, reality is over there, I passively observe it, but no we are thrown into it. In naive terms of people so traumatised their personality was erased, you find this type of subject, you are living dead, you are not engaged. No wonder Heidegger made tasteless remark about producing corpses, but this terrifying position in which you are living dead, alive but no engaged, death camps, Here we come to COGITO. The reason after long flirting with Heidegger and different subversions of ego, logic of fantasme he returns to COGITO.

I think where I am not. I think where I am not. The unconscious is not being outside thought, but thought outside being. Finally he asserts cogito ergo sum, as an empty identity. Unique point where I neither think nor am, brief nobody without substance. This empty point of cogito, is neither onto, nor logical. It is real of jouissance

Heidegger doesn’t have concepts to think this, the terrifying position of Musselman, the living dead in Auschwitz.

There is another dimension in cogito, a dimension is a first step this gap between BEING and LOGOS, language and thinking.

There must be a deadlock in substance to push it towards productivity.

Hegel: Things become what they always were, becomes what it is. Things become what they always already are, always already are is necessity, become is contingency.

Caesar just crossed a shitty small river, by crossing it he retroactively structured his past.

ACT: the true act is beyond the realization of possibilities, the true act creates his own possibilities. T.S. Eliot every really great work of art doesn’t only designate a break, it chages the entire past. The entire past is differently structured. The best example is Kafka, Borges wrote on Kafka had forerunners, Blake, Dostoevsky, but we can only say that after Kafka is here, Kafka retroactively creates his own forerunners. This is what Hegel means by totality or concrete universality. Historicist thinks in continuous evolution, for a dialectical materialist there is no continuum, retroactively re-written, history is continually being rewritten, history is constantly rewriting the totality itself.

The primordial form of negativity, is excessive

Hegel and Madness: Hegel tries to develop out of animals human spirituality emerge. He starts at habits, to simplify, his idea is that first you have traumatic gap: madness, which you try to control through mechanical habits. If you want to think creatively, you can only do it against the background of thinking automatically, you can be free only as far as you obey the rules of language. Madness always remains as a potential threat to our existence, we can be human only against the persisting insisting background of madness.

When you have a totality and something appears as its lowest excremental outpost, that is truth of totality. The standpoint of truth is the outcast. Why is notion of Rabble important?

Hegel’s concrete universality is totally misunderstood, if think parts vis a vis an organic totality. We cannot be members of society as directly abstract individuals, you can only occupy a place in a specific role: worker, mother. No. Hegel’s point is totality becomes concrete when you include abstraction.

Cogito: Marx of German Ideology, cogito is ideological illusion, what exists is concrete living people blah blah. You experience yourself as actually existing abstraction, you relate to all your particular features as contingent. Lacan says personality is the stuff of the “I”.

My truth is the void of the cogito.

You have to be shattered, you have to say hello and encounter abstract negativity: WAR and the necessity of rebellion. From time to time you have to have war.

Sexuality: Hegel is not radical enough measured by his own standards. He is almost a vulgar evolutionist. We humans gradually put on it human symbolic mediated form. Instead of directly raping her, I write poems a sumblimated idealized form.

The CUT as such. Isn’t it clear, here Hegel is not at level of Freud. It is not culture overcome sexuality making it civililized, sexuality is precisely the domain that separates humans from animals.

Rituals try to control not nature but death drive, sexual passion.

Nature — civiliszed sex. you have something in between, even Kant got this: Man is an animal who needs a master, Why? Not to control civilized instincts, but there is a strange excessive, unruliness, that has to be controlled. Cutting its links to organic reproductive goal, and develops other plurality of aims. Sacrifice all utilitarian interests for this.

Something has to repeat itself (without aufhebun). Madness, sexual passion, war are always there as a possibility.

STRUGGLE FOR RECOGNITION: when I see/encounter another consciousness, I am the absolute, and now there is another which is an absolute, 2 are there when there is only place for 1.

There is no sexual relation: women are from Mars blah blah

Sexual difference is not the difference between men and women, but difference of gap, incessant production of what is feminine and masculine, we are constantly are defining what is masculine and feminine but because there is a difference that produces this incessant production

Sex/Gender

sexual difference is niether sex nor gender it is precisely what stands at the of nature and culture

zupancic the real

Zupančič Realism in Psychoanalysis
ICI Conference Berlin 2011 Lecture on the second day, 29 March 2011

The absolutely crucial point of this ‘psychoanalytic realism’ is that the real is not a substance or being, but precisely its limit.

That is to say, the real is that which traditional ontology had to cut off in order to be able to speak of ‘being qua being’.

We only arrive at being qua being by subtracting something from it – and this something is precisely the ‘hole’, that which it lacks in order to be fully constituted as being;

the zone of the real is the interval within being itself, on account of which no being is ‘being qua being’, but can only be by being something else than it is.

One can ask, of course, how can it matter if one cuts off something that is not there to begin with?

It matters very much not only because it becomes something when it is cut off, but also since the something it becomes is the very object of psychoanalysis.

zupancic materialism and real

Zupančič Realism in Psychoanalysis

Conference ICI Berlin
One Divides Into Two: Dialectics, Negativity & Clinamen
Slavoj Žižek, Alenka Zupančič, and Mladen Dolar
March 2011

One of the great merits of Meillassoux’s book is that it has (re)opened, not so much the question of the relationship between philosophy and science, as the question of whether they are speaking about the same world.

I emphasize … another dimension of his [Meillassoux’s] gesture, a dimension enthusiastically embraced by our Zeitgeist, even though it has little philosophical (or scientific) value, and is based on free associations related to some more or less obscure feelings of the present Unbehagen in der Kultur. Let us call it its psychological dimension, which can be summed up by the following story:

After Descartes we have lost the great outdoors, the absolute outside, the Real, and have become prisoners of our own subjective or discursive cage. The only outside we are dealing with is the outside posited or constituted by ourselves or different discursive practices. And there is a growing discomfort, claustrophobia in this imprisonment, this constant obsession with ourselves, this impossibility to ever get out of the external inside that we have thus constructed.

There is also a political discomfort that is put into play here, that feeling of frustrating impotence, of the impossibility of really changing anything, of soaking in small and big disappointments of recent and not so recent history. Hence a certain additional redemptive charm of a project that promises again to break out into the great Outside, to reinstitute the Real in its absolute dimension, and to ontologically ground the possibility of radical change.

One should insist, however, that the crucial aspect of Meillassoux lies entirely elsewhere than in this story which has found in him (perhaps not all together without his complicity) the support of a certain fantasy, namely and precisely the fantasy of the ‘great Outside’ which will save us – from what, finally?…

it is a fantasy in the strict psychoanalytic sense: a screen that covers up the fact that the discursive reality is itself leaking, contradictory, and entangled with the Real as its irreducible other side. That is to say: the great Outside is the fantasy that covers up the Real that is already right here.

In Lacan we find a whole series of such, very strong statements, for example: ‘Energy is not a substance…, it’s a numerical constant that a physicist has to find in his calculations, so as to be able to work’.

The fact that science speaks about this or that law of nature and about the universe does not mean that it preserves the perspective of the great Outside (as not discursively constituted in any way), rather the opposite is the case. Modern science starts when it produces its object.

This is not to be understood in the Kantian sense of the transcendental constitution of phenomena, but in a slightly different, and stronger sense.

Modern science literally creates a new real(ity); it is not that the object of science is ‘mediated’ by its formulas, rather, it is indistinguishable from them; it does not exist outside them, yet it is real.

It has real consequences or consequences in the real. More precisely: the new real that emerges with the Galilean scientific revolution (the complete mathematisation of science) is a real in which – and this is decisive – (the scientific) discourse has consequences.

Such as, for example, landing on the moon. For, the fact that this discourse has consequences in the real does not hold for nature in the broad and lax sense of the word, it only holds for nature as physics or for physical nature.

At stake is a key dimension of a possible definition of materialism, which one could formulate as follows: materialism is not guaranteed by any matter. It is not the reference to matter as the ultimate substance from which all emerges (and which, in this conceptual perspective, is often highly spiritualized), that leads to true materialism.

The true materialism, which – as Lacan puts is with a stunning directness in another significant passage – can only be a dialectical materialism, is not grounded in the primacy of matter nor in matter as first principle, but in the notion of conflict, of split, and of the ‘parallax of the real’ produced in it.

In other words, the fundamental axiom of materialism is not ‘matter is all’ or ‘matter is primary’, but relates rather to the primacy of a cut. And, of course, this is not without consequences for the kind of realism that pertains to this materialism.

stavrakakis agonism

Stavrakakis, Yannis. “Challenges of Re-politicisation: Mouffe’s Agonism and Artistic Practices.” Third Text, Vol. 26, Issue 5, September, 2012, 551–565

Check out Mouffe’s take on agonism/art

Indeed, are we really conscious of the ease with which the post-democratic malaise is accepted and legitimised, of the ease with which people accommodate themselves to power strctures and resist change?.”

Why are people so willing and often enthusiastic – or at least relieved – to submit themselves to conditions of subordination, to the forces of hierarchical order? What had already emerged with Etienne de la Boétie as the troubling question of voluntary servitude, and through Stanley Milgram’s experiment as an elementary psycho-social structure of obedience to power, is today further reinforced through the transformations in the ways in which the social bond is regulated and obedience secured.

And it is not a problem of false consciousness or education. It is a problem of desire.

No, the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for.

In his preface to the Anti-Oedipus, Michel Foucault locates this problematic at the centre of their explorations. In his view, the strategic adversary of Deleuze and Guattari is the fascist tendencies implicit in all of us, informing our judgement and behaviour: ‘the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us’.

Foucault was right when he observed that power does not only denote coercion and repression: power relations are tolerated and even desired, because they produce identity, give meaning, procure pleasure. In a similar vein, Jacques Lacan indicated the crucial role of enjoyment ( jouissance) in securing obedience – in Lacan the super-ego command is ‘Enjoy!’. Indeed, in late capitalist societies, it is the command to enjoy — through consumption — that increasingly constitutes the ethical foundation of the social bond

Hence it is utopian to think that persuasive critique and a (local) de-legitimisation of hegemonic discourses alone can threaten their smooth reproduction. Very often we ourselves function as the worst enemies of our freedom, of another more enabling structuration of our desire.

to thematise and highlight our personal implication in the reproduction of power structures and of the inability of conscious knowledge to effect a shift in this relation.

What is called for, in other words, is a restrained re-politicisation able to function at both the cognitive and affective levels in order to make us assume responsibility for our multiple accommodation to power structures.

Can contemporary art function as an agent of such a re-politicisation?

The first step in any subjective – or collective – change is to assume responsibility for our direct and indirect, conscious and unconscious, cognitive and affective implication in our symptom: to put it in Lacan’s terms, we need to identify with our symptom, to thematise our own attachment to what secures our servitude.

In this way we can also avoid the fetishisation and demonisation of the enemy figure as an alien intruder destabilising our supposed harmony, characteristic of ‘speculative leftism’; Kentridge’s use of his own image in the depiction of Eckstein offers a useful mechanism sublimating violent antagonism into democratic agonism: true change always requires an ambiguous struggle against our own selves and no easy solution is available here, no purity can ever be achieved.

dolar being and void pt2

Mladen Dolar (2013) “The Atom and the Void – from Democritus to Lacan.” Filozofski vestnik Volume XXXIV, Number 2, 11–26.

Hasn’t one avoided the void by espousing it? The void can be seen as the way to make non-being manageable, to turn it into something countable, the very condition of count.

But ‘is’ there non-being which cannot be quite accounted for by the binary couple of the one and the void?