Author: logocentric

dolar 1 into 2 (pt2)

Dolar, Mladen “One Divides into Two.” e-flux journal #33 March 2012.

What, if anything, is the Other? What is the Other the name for?

The first answer proposed by Lacan develops in the direction of the Other as the Other of the symbolic order, the Other of language, the Other upholding the very realm of the symbolic, functioning as its guarantee, its necessary supposition, that which enables it to signify.

And if this claim is to be placed within the general thrust of structuralism, which was then dominant, the name of the Other, in this view, would be the structure.

The Other is the Other of structure, and one can nostalgically recall its Saussurean and LŽevi-Straussian underpinnings.

What follows from there, in the same general thrust, is the notorious formula The unconscious is structured like a language — The unconscious is the discourse of the Other.
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Footnote:   What if anything, is the Other? But asking “What?” already precludes another way of asking, namely, “Who is the other?” For the question of the other is first dramatically posed in relation to another person, this alter ego next to me, the same as me and for that very reason all the more the Other.

This is where the whole drama of what Lacan famously called the mirror stage comes in, the mirror stage “as formative of the function of the ego,” as the title of his first paper runs.

In this drama, the “alter ego” is constitutive of the ego, precisely insofar as it is the agent of alterity, opacity, the foreignness of the Other, under the auspices of “the same,” and it is only by this other and through it that one can assume the self of the ego as “my own,”

The foreignness of the other intersects with the own-ness of the self; the other is on the one hand homogenized, so that I can recognize myself in it, but only at the price of alienating myself in this image of the other — the other is the same as me, my double, and precisely because of that my competitor, my opponent, an intimate enemy who threatens my life and integrity.

And one can, in another quick aside, point to the fact that Levinas took his cue from this same constellation, from the question of “Who is the other?” from the alterity of the other, epitomized strikingly and immediately by his or her face, in a way that cannot be circumvented and that circumscribes the very notion of the self so his whole enterprise hinges massively on the question of the two and how to conceive it, and on the ethics that follows, taking the Other as its guideline. This is his particular way of taking up the question of the two.

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There are two perspectives on this structure.

1.) The first, stemming from Saussure, treats language as a system in which all entities
are differential and oppositive, made of differences. No element has an identity or substance of its own; it is defined only through its difference from others, its whole being is exhausted by its difference, and hence they hang together, they are bound together with an iron necessity of tight interdependence. The symbolic is made of differences, and only of differences — and since it has no firm, substantial hold it can equally and with equanimity be applied to language, kinship, food, myth, clothing — the whole of culture.

2.) But the second perspective, the one that Freud opens up with the unconscious, presents the slide of contingency within this well-ordered system.

The words contingently and erratically sound alike; not ruled by grammar or semantics, they
contaminate each other, they slip, and this is where the unconscious takes the chance of appearing in cracks and loopholes.

The first perspective hinges on necessity, ruled by differentiality, which is what makes linguistics possible.

The second perspective hinges on contingent similarities and cracks and is the nightmare of linguistics, because its logic is quirky and unpredictable; it pertains to what Lacan called linguisterie and lalangue.

So if we have on one hand the Other of the Saussurean structure, or system, then the unconscious represents a bug in the system, the fact that it can never quite work without a bug.

With the unconscious the structure slips.

What was supposed to work as the Other, the bearer of rule and necessity, the guarantee of meaning, shows its other face, which is whimsical and ephemeral and makes meaning slide. The Other is the Other with the bug.

And what is more, it is only the bug that ultimately makes the Other other — the Other is the Other not on account of structure, but because of the bug that keeps derailing it.

The bug is the anomaly of the Other, its face of inconsistency, that which defies regularity and law.

Inside the Other of language, which enables speech, <strong>there emerges another Other that derails speech and makes us say something else than we intended</strong>, derailing the intention of meaning.

Yet the second Other cannot be seized and maintained independently of the first as another Other, the Other within the Other — the Other cannot be duplicated and counted, the bug makes it uncountable.

The alterity of the unconscious is not cut of the stuff of symbolic differences, it opens a difference that is not merely a symbolic difference, but that is, so to speak, “the difference within the difference,” another kind of difference within the symbolic one, a difference recalcitrant to integration into the symbolic, and yet only emerging in its bosom, with no separate realm of its own.

And the very notion of subjectivity pertains precisely to the impossibility of reducing the second difference to the first one.

In other words, the subject that emerges there is premised on a “two,”on the relation to a kernel within the symbolic order that cannot be symbolically sublimated.

So the bottom line would be: there is an irreducible two, an irreducible gap between the One and the Other, and the unconscious, at its minimal, presents the figure of two that are not merged into one.

The problem that remains is that, well, the Other doesn’t exist.

dolar 1 into 2 pt1

Dolar, Mladen “One Divides into Two.” e-flux journal #33 March 2012.

This was an old Maoist slogan from the 1960s. Despite its air of universal truth it has become dated, and I fully realize the danger of appearing dated myself by starting in this way. Nowadays, one can recite this slogan in front of a class full of students and none will have ever heard it or have any inkling as to its bearing or its author — it’s almost like speaking Chinese.

However much we count, however many ones we add to the first one, we cannot count to the two of the Other. The progression of counting extends the initial one into a homogeneous and uniform process, while the Other presents a dimension that would be precisely “other” in relation to this uniformity.

In a nutshell, the otherness of the Other, if it can be conceived, is a dimension that cannot be accounted for in terms of One. If the Other exists, then we have some hope of escaping from the circle, or the ban, of One.

The dimension of the Other might present a two that would really make a difference, not merely a difference between one and another, that is, ultimately, between the one and itself, the count based on the internal splitting of one, but rather another difference altogether, beyond the delightful oxymoronic phrase “same difference.”

One can immediately appreciate the high philosophical stakes here. A large part of modern philosophy, if not all of it, has aligned under the banner of the Other, in one way or another, whatever particular names have been used to designate it, and if philosophy has thus espoused the slogan of the Other it has done so in order to establish a dimension that would beable to break the spell of One, in particular its complicity with totality, with forming a whole.

There is a hidden propensity of One to form a whole, to encompass multiplicity and heterogeneity within a single first principle. That program was pronounced at the dawn of philosophy, spelled out by Parmenides in three simple words, the slogan hen kai pan, one and all

So if the Other exists, if it can be conceived in terms other than the terms of one, it would permit us to get out of this ban and this circle.

Indeed, the task of modern philosophy, if I may take the liberty of using this grossly simplified and massive language, was to think the Other that would not be complicit in collusion with the One of hen kai pan, and thus, ultimately, the task to think the two, to conceive the Other that wouldn’t fall into the register of the One

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I will invoke Freud and now I will take the tricky path of conceiving the two in terms of the Other in psychoanalysis, the Other being a key psychoanalytic term

I said above “If the Other exists …” and this brings me to a very basic asset that lies at the heart of psychoanalysis and the work of Jacques Lacan. There is something like a spectacular antinomy at the foundation of psychoanalytic theory,

an antinomy worthy of Kantian antinomies, and Kant has brought the notion of antinomy to a pinnacle  where reason, as a striving for unity, runs into an irremediable two, an opposition that cannot be reduced.

This Lacanian antinomy of the two pertains to the nature of the Other.

One can pose it as the antinomy of two massively opposing statements:

1.  There is the Other, which is the essential dimension that psychoanalysis has to deal with. Notoriously, Freud spoke of the unconscious as “ein anderer Schauplatz,” the other scene, another stage, a stage inherently other in relation to the one of consciousness, to its count and to what it can account for. It defies the count of consciousness, which is ultimately the homogeneous count providing sense as a unitary prospect

So there is the Other of the unconscious. … “The unconscious is the discourse of the Other.”

And another of his formulas runs: “Desire is the desire of the Other”

There is an Other that agitates our desires and prevents us from assuming them simply our own. These two short statements, in no uncertain terms, place the unconscious and desire under the banner of the Other.

There is the unconscious, and there is desire only insofar as each intimately pertains to the Other, they are “of the Other,” and the Other is what stirs their intimacy.

There is the Other at the heart of all entities that psychoanalysis has to deal with, … the Other of a qualitatively different nature in relation to the realm of One.

2. The second part of this antinomy, in stark contradiction to the first, states bluntly: The Other lacks.

There is a lack in the Other, the Other is haunted by a lack, or to extend it a bit further: The Other doesn’t exist.

“There is the Other” vs. “The Other doesn’t exist.”

How can the very dimension on which psychoanalysis is ultimately premised not exist?

What is the status of this Other that is emphatically there, permeating the very notion of the unconscious, of desire, and so forth, and that yet at the same time emphatically lacks?

Can the two statements be reconciled in their glaring contradiction?

Is this a case of a Kantian antinomy, exceeding the limits of knowledge and unitary reasoning?

And how can one posit the Other as the very notion surpassing the boundaries and the framework of One while maintaining that it lacks?

Is this an exhaustive alternative?

dolar being and void pt 1

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

The path of the void and of non-being is the path that one cannot possibly adopt and therefore one must not adopt it (‘it must not be’) – but why the prohibition since one cannot conceivably adopt it at all?

Why prohibit something that cannot be anyway?

The tacit presupposition of the first statement, its implicit assumption, is that one must act in favour of being to counteract a possible catastrophe, to abjure the void. One is on a battlefront, and being is a weapon one has to use against an unfathomable enemy.

… being would be like a defense mechanism against the void, and by presenting being as a matter of choice and decision there is a disavowed primacy of the void as the lure, the temptation and the threat, lurking behind any talk about being, part and parcel with its logos.

So how did the void come about? It came about as the discourse of being as the defense mechanism against the void.

Atomism emerged as a reaction against the Parmenidian assertion of being, not accepting the choice and the alternative, but taking both paths at the same time, … it introduces the void as the essential component of being. … one posits the non-being at the core of being

atomism includes a certain insight that Hegel sees as valid and far-reaching, namely that there is a principle of negativity which moves both thought and being, and that this principle forms the inside of both at their core,

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The Lacanian real – and if there is a Lacanian materialism, then it pertains to the notion of the real – is neither a thought, an idea, nor a being (nor matter for that matter), but something emerging precisely in their rift, something that gets lost in the subsequent self-evident division into being and thought and their opposition.
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So what is indivisible to Hegel is neither the one nor the void, the indivisible is the division itself.

However far we seek for a minimal element, we never arrive at a one as the minimal and the indivisible, but at the division. … what cannot be divided any further is the division;

Against the Parmenidian exorcism of the void, he takes up the atomistic espousal of the void as the way to address the basic matrix of being.

Against the exclusion of the void, there is the inclusion of the void into each particle, the missing half of anything positively existing, of any manifestation of being, and this invisible missing half endows being with Unruhe, its unrest, its restlessness, its being ever propelled, the fact that it can only be addressed in its becoming, its production and its incompleteness.

glynos fantasy

Glynos, Jason and Yannis Stavrakakis. (2008) “Lacan and Political Subjectivity: Fantasy and Enjoyment in Psychoanalysis and Political Theory.” Subjectivity, 2008, 24, (256-274)

The idea of the subject as lack cannot be separated from the subject’s attempts to cover over this constitutive lack at the level of representation by affirming its positive (symbolic-imaginary) identity or, when this fails, through continuous identificatory acts aiming to re-institute an identity.

This lack necessitates the constitution of every identity though processes of identification with social available traits of identification found, for example, in political ideologies, practices of consumption, and a whole range of social roles; and vice versa: the inability of identificatory acts to produce a full identity by subsuming subjective division (re)produces the radical ex-centricity of the subject and, along with it, a whole negative dialectics of partial fixation. Subjectivity in Lacan’s work, then, is linked not only to lack but also our attempts to eliminate this lack that, however, does not stop re-emerging. (260-261)

A different relation to fantasy and thus mode of enjoyment or subjectivity is possible

– phallic jouissance: a subject is in thrall to his fantasy and thus insensitive “to the contingency of social reality.”  an aversion to ambiguity

A non-phallic form of enjoyment (jouissance feminine or Other jouissance) Here the subject is taken to acknowledge and affirm the contingency of social relations and to pursue an enjoyment that is not guided by the impulse to “complete”, to “totalize”, or to “make full or whole”, an enjoyment situated, rather, on the “the side of the not-whole”.

Seminar VI commentary by miller

This is Jacques-Alain Miller’s commentary on Lacan’s Seminar VI Desire and Its Interpretation.

What does Lacan show? That desire is not a biological function; that it is not directed to a natural object; that its object is fantasmatic. Thereby, desire is extravagant. It is elusive to anything that wants to master it. It plays tricks on you. But also, if it is not recognised, it produces symptoms. In an analysis, it is a question of interpreting, that is to say, of reading in the symptom the message of desire that it contains.

If desire goes astray, it arouses in exchange the invention of artifices which play the role of a compass. An animal species has its natural compass, which is unique. In the human species, the compasses are multiple: these are signifying montages, speeches. They say what has to be done: how to think, how to enjoy, how to reproduce. However, the fantasy of each remains irreducible to common ideas.

Until recent times, our compasses, as diverse as they are, always pointed to the same north: the Father. We believed that patriarch to be an anthropological invariant. His decline is accelerated with equality of conditions, the increased power of capitalism, the domination of technology. We are in the process of leaving the age of the Father.

Another discourse is the the process of supplanting the old one. Innovation in the place of tradition. Rather than hierarchy, the network. The attraction of the future outweighs the burdens of the past. The feminine overtakes the manly. There where there was an immutable order, transformational fluxes push incessantly at every limit.

Freud is from the age of the father. He did a lot to save it. The Church ended up finally noticing that. Lacan followed the path opened up by Freud, but it drove him to suppose that the Father is a symptom. He shows it here in the example of Hamlet.

What we learned from Lacan – the formalisation of Oedipus, the accent put on the Name of the Father – was his only starting point. Seminar VI already reworks it: Oedipus is not the unique solution to desire, it is only its normalised form; it is a pathogen it does not exhaust the destiny of desire. In fact it is with a praise of perversion that the volume ends.

Lacan gives it the the value of a rebellion against the identifications which assure the maintenance of the social routine. This Seminar announced “the realignment of previously instated conformisms, or even their explosion”. That is where we are. Lacan speaks to us.

johnston harman interview pt 6

Graham – Two full chapters of the book are dedicated to your ongoing friendly dispute with the prominent young Swedish philosopher Martin Hägglund of Yale University. Having seen the two of you debate in person on one occasion (in New York in 2012), I can say that it does seem to be an unusually fruitful dialogue between friends. What is the major philosophical difference between you and Hägglund? Is there any way it can be resolved, or does it ultimately boil down to two “irreducible and competing intuitions,” as the phrase goes? Continue reading “johnston harman interview pt 6”

johnston harman interview pt 5

Graham – The third chapter of your book targets what you call “neo-Spinozism.” Where can we find this philosophy today, and why is it not the path we ought to pursue?

As I describe it therein, neo-Spinozism is a big tent today, especially in Continental philosophical circles. Amongst Continentalists, much of this is to be attributed to the lasting influences of Althusser and Deleuze.

The third chapter you ask about is set up by the second chapter of Adventures in Transcendental Materialism (“For a Thoughtful Ontology: Hegel’s Immanent Critique of Spinoza”). I revisit Hegel’s various interrelated criticisms of Spinoza (and of those, such as Schelling at certain moments, who fail to maintain sufficient distance from Spinozism) with an eye to their enduring relevance. Continue reading “johnston harman interview pt 5”

johnston harman interview pt 4

Graham – Along with Žižek you have worked closely with another leading European philosopher, Catherine Malabou. What has been Malabou’s significance for you, and what is the most important thing present-day philosophy can learn from her?

Žižek was responsible for first drawing my attention to Malabou’s work— specifically, her groundbreaking 2004 text Que faire de notre cerveau? (What Should We Do with our Brain?). It was around 2006 that I read this book, which was a real experience that compelled me promptly to devour the rest of her published writings then available. Continue reading “johnston harman interview pt 4”

johnston harman interview pt 3

In short, my immanent critique consists in pitting Žižek’s dialectical/transcendental materialism against his glosses on quantum physics.

In terms of a contemporary materialist interfacing with the natural sciences, I favor biology generally and neurobiology particularly for several reasons. Continue reading “johnston harman interview pt 3”

johnston harman interview pt 2

Adrian Johnston is interviewed by Graham Harman about his new book out in May 2014, Adventures in Transcendental Materialism Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers.

Having said all of the above, I nonetheless deliberately preserve and play upon certain senses of the (apparent) tension between the terms “transcendental” and “materialism.”

As the preceding already reveals, transcendental materialism fundamentally is preoccupied with two of the biggest of big issues in the history of philosophy, ones closely interrelated: the freedom-determinism dispute and the mind-body problem. Continue reading “johnston harman interview pt 2”

johnston harman interview pt 1

Adrian Johnston is interviewed by Graham Harman about his new book out in May 2014, Adventures in Transcendental Materialism Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers.

Here are some important excerpts

Graham – Your title contains the phrase “transcendental materialism.” There is a tension between these two words that in some sense drives all of your intellectual work. “Transcendental” generally refers to a sort of philosophy, like Kant’s, that asks about our conditions of knowing the world rather than about the world itself. Meanwhile, “materialism” has always been a philosophy that turns in the most hardnosed fashion towards the world itself, viewing humans as a material thing just like everything else. Stated briefly, how does one reconcile the transcendental and materialist standpoints? Continue reading “johnston harman interview pt 1”