logocentric – Page 17

toscano on Badiou

Marxism Expatriated – Alberto Toscano on Alain Badiou

the echoes of a common “post-structuralist” theoretical conjuncture, and a critique of (or separation from) “thick” Hegelian-Marxist versions of dialectics and social ontology, might make one suspect that “the theoretical edifices of Laclau and Badiou are united by a deep homology”.4 This “deep homology”, which Zizek identifies in the notion of a contingent, subjective rupture of ontological closure, is nevertheless offset, still according to Zizek, by a fundamental divergence, inasmuch as, in the last instance, Badiou’s “post-Marxism” has nothing whatsoever to do with the fashionable deconstructionist dismissal of the alleged Marxist “essentialism”; on the contrary, he is unique in radically rejecting the deconstructionist doxa as a new form of pseudo-thought, as a contemporary version of sophism”.5 Rather than either homology, or frontal opposition, it might be more precise to argue that Badiou’s post-Maoism and the post-Marxism of Laclau et al. intersect in manners that generate, from the peculiar perspective of contemporary radical thought, a kind of “family resemblance” effect, but that, when push comes to shove, they are really indifferent to one another, born of divergent assessments of the end or crisis of Marxism. To a certain extent, they connect the same dots but the resulting pictures differ radically.

stavrakakis post democracy

PostDemocracy Yannis Stavrakakis

The term “postdemocracy” has recently emerged in sociology and political theory as part of an effort to conceptually grasp and critically mark the late modern pathologies of liberal democracy, especially in relation to late capitalist conditions.

In premodern societies religious imagination was the predominant discursive horizon for the inscription and administration of negativity. Following the dislocation of this horizon, it seems that political modernity has oscillated between (at least) three responses vis-à-vis negativity: utopian, democratic, and postdemocratic. Continue reading “stavrakakis post democracy”

Ž Ukraine Rabinovitch

Žižek. Barbarism with a Human Face in London Review of Books, 25 April 2014

The entire European neo-fascist right (in Hungary, France, Italy, Serbia) firmly supports Russia in the ongoing Ukrainian crisis, giving the lie to the official Russian presentation of the Crimean referendum as a choice between Russian democracy and Ukrainian fascism. The events in Ukraine – the massive protests that toppled Yanukovich and his gang – should be understood as a defence against the dark legacy resuscitated by Putin.

The protests were triggered by the Ukrainian government’s decision to prioritise good relations with Russia over the integration of Ukraine into the European Union.

Predictably, many anti-imperialist leftists reacted to the news by patronising the Ukrainians: how deluded they are still to idealise Europe, not to be able to see that joining the EU would just make Ukraine an economic colony of Western Europe, sooner or later to go the same way as Greece.

In fact, Ukrainians are far from blind about the reality of the EU. They are fully aware of its troubles and disparities: their message is simply that their own situation is much worse. Europe may have problems, but they are a rich man’s problems.

Can we think of the Ukrainian protesters’ reference to Europe as a sign that their goal, too, is ‘to reach the standard of an ordinary Western European civilised country’?

But here things quickly get complicated. What, exactly, does the ‘Europe’ the Ukrainian protesters are referring to stand for? It can’t be reduced to a single idea: it spans nationalist and even fascist elements but extends also to the idea of what Etienne Balibar calls égaliberté, freedom-in-equality, the unique contribution of Europe to the global political imaginary, even if it is in practice today mostly betrayed by European institutions and citizens themselves.

Between these two poles, there is also a naive trust in the value of European liberal-democratic capitalism.

Europe can see in the Ukrainian protests its own best and worst sides, its emancipatory universalism as well as its dark xenophobia.

Fanatical defenders of religion start out attacking contemporary secular culture; it’s no surprise when they end up forsaking any meaningful religious experience. In a similar way, many liberal warriors are so eager to fight anti-democratic fundamentalism that they end up flinging away freedom and democracy if only they may fight terror.

The ‘terrorists’ may be ready to wreck this world for love of another [world RT], but the warriors on terror are just as ready to wreck their own democratic world out of hatred for the Muslim other.

Some of them love human dignity so much that they are ready to legalise torture to defend it.

The defenders of Europe against the immigrant threat are doing much the same. In their zeal to protect the Judeo-Christian legacy, they are ready to forsake what is most important in that legacy.

The anti-immigrant defenders of Europe, not the notional crowds of immigrants waiting to invade it, are the true threat to Europe.

Mainstream liberals tell us that when basic democratic values are under threat from ethnic or religious fundamentalists, we should unite behind the liberal-democratic agenda, save what can be saved, and put aside dreams of more radical social transformation.

But there is a fatal flaw in this call for solidarity: it ignores the way in which liberalism and fundamentalism are caught in a vicious cycle.

It is the aggressive attempt to export liberal permissiveness that causes fundamentalism to fight back vehemently and assert itself.

When we hear today’s politicians offering us a choice between liberal freedom and fundamentalist oppression, and triumphantly asking the rhetorical question, ‘Do you want women to be excluded from public life and deprived of their rights?

Do you want every critic of religion to be put to death?’, what should make us suspicious is the very self-evidence of the answer: who would want that?

The problem is that liberal universalism has long since lost its innocence. What Max Horkheimer said about capitalism and fascism in the 1930s applies in a different context today: those who don’t want to criticise liberal democracy should also keep quiet about religious fundamentalism.

Rabinovitch, a Jew, wants to emigrate. The bureaucrat at the emigration office asks him why, and Rabinovitch answers: ‘Two reasons. The first is that I’m afraid the Communists will lose power in the Soviet Union, and the new power will put all the blame for the Communists’ crimes on us, the Jews.’

‘But this is pure nonsense,’ the bureaucrat interrupts, ‘nothing can change in the Soviet Union, the power of the Communists will last for ever!’

‘Well,’ Rabinovitch replies, ‘that’s my second reason.’

Imagine the equivalent exchange between a Ukrainian and an EU administrator. The Ukrainian complains: ‘There are two reasons we are panicking here in Ukraine. First, we’re afraid that under Russian pressure the EU will abandon us and let our economy collapse.’

The EU administrator interrupts: ‘But you can trust us, we won’t abandon you. In fact, we’ll make sure we take charge of your country and tell you what to do!’ ‘Well,’ the Ukrainian replies, ‘that’s my second reason.’

If Ukraine ends up with a mixture of ethnic fundamentalism and liberal capitalism, with oligarchs pulling the strings, it will be as European as Russia (or Hungary) is today. (Too little attention is drawn to the role played by the various groups of oligarchs – the ‘pro-Russian’ ones and the ‘pro-Western’ ones – in the events in Ukraine.)

But there is another kind of support which has been even more conspicuously absent: the proposal of any feasible strategy for breaking the deadlock. Europe will be in no position to offer such a strategy until it renews its pledge to the emancipatory core of its history. Only by leaving behind the decaying corpse of the old Europe can we keep the European legacy of égaliberté alive. It is not the Ukrainians who should learn from Europe: Europe has to learn to live up to the dream that motivated the protesters on the Maidan. The lesson that frightened liberals should learn is that only a more radical left can save what is worth saving in the liberal legacy today.

The Maidan protesters were heroes, but the true fight – the fight for what the new Ukraine will be – begins now, and it will be much tougher than the fight against Putin’s intervention.

A new and riskier heroism will be needed. It has been shown already by those Russians who oppose the nationalist passion of their own country and denounce it as a tool of power.

It’s time for the basic solidarity of Ukrainians and Russians to be asserted, and the very terms of the conflict rejected. The next step is a public display of fraternity, with organisational networks established between Ukrainian political activists and the Russian opposition to Putin’s regime.

This may sound utopian, but it is only such thinking that can confer on the protests a truly emancipatory dimension.

Otherwise, we will be left with a conflict of nationalist passions manipulated by oligarchs. Such geopolitical games are of no interest whatever to authentic emancipatory politics.

badiou declaration

Badiou, Alain. “A present defaults – unless the crowd declares itself”: Alain Badiou on Ukraine, Egypt and finitude. 23 April 2014.

I will say once again that I think that the fundamental figure of contemporary oppression is finitude … the imposition of finitude, that is to say, the exclusion of the infinite from humanity’s possible set of horizons. … As such, each of these things can be encapsulated in terms of the general oppressive vision of finitude.

Today I would like to take the example of Ukraine, the way in which the historic events in Ukraine … What strikes me about the Ukrainian situation, considering what we learn reading the press, listening to the radio etc., is that it is captured and understood according to an operation that I would call the complete stagnation of the contemporary world.

The commonplace narrative is to say that Ukraine wants to join free Europe, breaking with Putin’s despotism. There is a democratic and liberal uprising whose goal is to join our beloved Europe – the motherland of the freedom in question – while the sordid, archaic manoeuvres of the Kremlin’s man, the terrible Putin, are directed against this natural desire. Continue reading “badiou declaration”

zupančič not-mother pt 2

Zupančič, Alenka. Not-Mother: On Freud’s Verneinung. E-flux Journal 2012

What is at stake in the Freudian discovery that, when dealing with the unconscious, the alternative “mother/not mother” is not exhaustive (negation of negation doesn’t bring us to the supposedly original affirmation)… It is not a “more or less mother,” nor is it a difference in intensity with regard to two extremes, or absolutes; it is a paradoxical entity of “with-without.”

The third term (or third possibility), which is included rather then excluded, is nothing other than the very point of the (onto)logical impossibility of the third.

In other words, what is included as something (as an entity) receives the very logical impossibility on which the alternative mother/not-mother is based.

The fact that it is included doesn’t mean that the impossible now becomes possible (one of the possibilities, as in the intuitionist logic); rather, it is included in its very onto-logical impossibility — hence its spectral character: as included in reality, the impossible-real can only be a specter.

This is then where a first cut is produced, the split between in and out, which also and immediately coincides with the dividing lines between good and bad, foreign, or alien, and familiar.

[In the] original pleasure-ego, these dividing lines simply coincide: the inner — the good — the familiar, on the one side, and the outer — the bad — the alien on the other. But already in the next step things become more complicated and these dividing lines fall out of joint.

but of whether something which is in the ego as a presentation can be rediscovered in perception (reality) as well

In other words, what is at stake here is the famous reality check, or “reality testing,” based on the presupposition of an original loss of pleasure.

The crucial aspect of which is the loss of immediacy: From now on, all pleasure will be a found-again-pleasure.

The same goes for all objects of reality: As objects of reality (which is thus constituted as objective reality, that is, constituted through the opposition subjective-objective) they are never simply found, but always refound, found again,

“The first and immediate aim, therefore, of reality testing is not to find an object in real
perception which corresponds to the one presented, but to refind such an object, to
convince oneself that it is still there.”

So the moment we begin dealing with thinking and with certain relation to reality, both our pleasure and the existence of things are no longer immediate, but bear the mark of repetition and of the gap the latter implies.

The second repartition of the dividing lines doesn’t simply replace the first, however, but adds to it with a twist, resulting in a gap, or a third dimension, that haunts from then on the very consistency of the distinction between inner and outer, and blurs the subject-object division and relation.

We could also recapitulate the movement described by Freud like this. The first mythical difference between inside and outside is not yet a real difference, but a process of differentiating the indifferent, or the indistinct, led by the primary process of the pleasure

zupančič not-mother pt 1

Zupančič, Alenka. Not-Mother: On Freud’s Verneinung. E-flux Journal 2012

The negation itself is negated (we could say that we now get something like, “this is not not-mother”), yet something of it persists — the repression, the symptoms persist beyond becoming conscious of the repressed.

Here, we come across one of the crucial (and constitutive) discoveries of psychoanalysis, without which the latter would be little more than a hermeneutics of the unconscious, depending entirely on the (correct) interpretation, or translation, of the text deformed by the unconscious into its full and nondeformed version.

Soon after his early enthusiasm that things might indeed work this way, Freud came up against the problem that they actually don’t, that the right interpretation (and its acceptance) doesn’t yet eliminate the symptom, and that the real kernel of the unconscious is not to be situated — in the case of dreams, for example — in the latent content, as opposed to the manifest content, and as “deciphered” from it. Continue reading “zupančič not-mother pt 1”

schuster doing nothing

Doing Nothing: Notes on Laziness

In a world that is obsessed with activity, with being occupied, the idea of doing nothing is absolutely terrifying. That is a tragic misconception. Leisure brings us life at its best.

1. In praise of leisure

Leisure is absolutely fundamental to Western philosophy, and, one could add, to Western civilization itself. The Greek word for leisure is schol?, from which is derived the Latin scola, or the Dutch or English school. Leisure for the ancient Greeks was not a matter of indolence, but rather meant intellectual cultivation outside of productive labour. This is also where we get the idea of ‘liberal arts’, studies that have intrinsic value, as opposed to ‘servile arts’, those dealing with practical skills. Continue reading “schuster doing nothing”

Il n’y a de cause que de ce qui cloche

Excerpt from Mladen Dolar interviewed by Aaron Schuster in 2009 in Metropolis Magazine

Zupančič deals with this Lacanianism: Il n’y a de cause que de ce qui cloche. Right here

Schuster: What is the new conception of freedom you see in the wake of Kafka and Freud?

Dolar: ‘Lacan was notoriously a man of extremely difficult style, but this arduous side was as if counterbalanced by his great talent to produce a number of short and striking slogans (like “The Woman doesn’t exist” or “There is no sexual relationship”).

And one of these slogans is Il n’y a de cause que de ce qui cloche: “There is a cause only in something that doesn’t work”, or “There is a cause only in what limps”.

The line is paradoxical and I suppose counterintuitive. For it would seem that causality is what works in a network of causes and effects which constitute the basis of regularity and law, and so that which doesn’t work or doesn’t add up would appear to be a breach of causality, a crack in the causal chain. Continue reading “Il n’y a de cause que de ce qui cloche”

zupančič Möbius strip

The Odd One In On Comedy. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. 2008

Perhaps the simplest way of describing the Möbius strip would be to say that it has, at every point, two sides (the surface and its other side), yet there is only one surface. Starting at any point on the strip and continuing the movement along the same side, without ever crossing the edge, we come sooner or later to the reverse side of the point where we started.

Or, as Lacan puts it: an insect walking on this surface can believe at every moment that there is a side which it hasn’t explored, the other side of that on which it walks. It can strongly believe in this other side, in this beyond, even though there is no other side, as we know. Without knowing this, the insect thus explores the only side there is.

The paradox embodied by the topology of the Möbius strip thus consists in there being only one surface (in this sense we are dealing with immanence), yet at every point there is also the other side. It is in this sense that we should understand the concept of inherent contradiction (of the finite) as the generating point of something that is not reducible to simple finitude. [Odd One 54]

Zupančič comedy #2

Zupančič. “The ‘Concrete Universal’ and What Comedy Can Tell Us About It.” Lacan The Silent Partners. Edited by Slavoj Žižek, New York and London: Verso. 2006. 171-197.

The Odd One In On Comedy. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. 2008

In psychoanalysis the main problem does not lie simply in the subject becoming conscious of her unconsciousness, of all that (often painfully) determines her actions and experiences.

This is insufficient: the main problem is precisely this unconsciousness is embodied outside ‘herself’, in the manner of rituals of her conduct, speech, relations to others — in certain situations that keep ‘happening’ to her.

In short, it is not simply that in analysis the subject has to shift her position (or even ‘adapt’ herself);

the major part of the analytic work consists precisely in shifting the ‘external practices’, in moving all those ‘chickens’ in which the subject’s unconsciousness (and her relation to herself) are externalized.

And one of the major obstacles that can occur in analysis is precisely that the subject can become all too eager to change herself and her perception fo the world, convinced that in analysis she will experience a kind of intimate revelation on account of which everything will be different and easier when she re-enters the world.

In other words, the subject is ready to do quite a lot, change radically, if only she can remain unchanged in the Other (in the Symbolic as the external world in which, to put it in Hegel’s terms, the subject’s consciousness of herself is embodied, materialized as something that still does not know itself as consciousness). Continue reading “Zupančič comedy #2”

zupančič why P? 3

Zupančič, Alenka. Why Psychoanalysis: 3 interventions. Aarhus University Press 2008.

First let us situate on the same line the two elements that we arrived at in our discussion following different paths.

First, the surplus (of) distortion,

which at the same time disturbs and carries the relationship between the manifest and the latent content.

Second, the falloff, the leftover of the conscious interpretation,

which is not simply unconscious, but propels the work of the unconscious interpretation and is present in the unconscious formations as their ‘formal’ aspect (and not as a particular content), as the form of the distortion itself, its ‘grammatical structure.’

To these two, we can add in the same line a third element, namely what psychoanalysis conceptualised with the notion of the drive.

The drive … embodies a fundamental inner split of all satisfaction, the non-relationship between demand and satisfaction, leading to the possibility of another, supplemental satisfaction. This has the effect of de-centring not so much the subject as the Other, and the de-centring at stake could be best formulated as follows: 31

the subject never finds the satisfaction directly in the Other, yet he can only find it through the detour of the Other. This detour is irreducible. 32

The drive is something other than the supposed solipsistic enjoyment, and one should conceptually distinguish between the two. 32 Continue reading “zupančič why P? 3”

zupančič why P? 2

Zupančič Zupančič, Alenka. Why Psychoanalysis: 3 interventions. Aarhus University Press 2008.

It is in this sense that we should understand a crucial Lacanian thesis concerning the issue of the cause:

“Il n’y a de cause que de ce qui cloche”

There is but the cause of that which does not work, or which does not add up. 24

(pssst … check out Dolar’s interpretation here)

There are (at least) two important ideas behind this proposition.

1. the non-immediate character of the causal relationship, which has its classic philosophical articulation in the Hume – Kant debate. The connection between cause and effect involves an irreducible gap, or leap, on account of which Hume wanted to dismiss the very notion of the cause, and which led Kant to propose rational subjectivity as the transcendental constitutive background against which the leap involved in the passage from a cause to its effect remained possible without the causal structure simple falling apart. 24

2. the other important idea involved in Lacan’s account of causality: something appears in this hole, in this interval, in this gap, in this structural split of causality, and it is for this something that psychoanalysis reserves the name of the cause in the strict sense of the term (the cause of object a, the objet as the distortional cause of itself). 25

The elements exposed above could be related to yet another discussion of causes in psychoanalysis: to the already mentioned two aspects of the question of the cause (the question of the unconscious causes, and the question of the unconscious as cause) we can add a third one, which seems even more fundamental and concerns

3. the very cause of the constitution of the unconscious. This is a debate developed in a very intriguing way by Jean Laplanche in answer to the deadlocks of the Freudian theory of sexual seduction (of children). 25 Continue reading “zupančič why P? 2”