logocentric – Page 19

zupančič 7 subjectivation without subject

Zupančič, Alenka. The Ethics of the Real. New York: Verso. 2000.

‘Act so that the maxim of your will can always hold at the same time as the principle giving universal law’ — what is the paradox implicit in this formulation of the categorical imperative?

The paradox is that, despite its ‘categorical’ character, it somehow leaves everything wide open .

For how am I to decide if (the maxim of) my action can hold as a principle providing a universal law, if I do not accept the presupposition that I am originally guided by some notion of the good (i.e. some notion of what is universally acceptable)?

In other words, there is no a priori criterion of universality. It is true that Kant was convinced that he had found this criterion in the principle of non-contradiction. However, there is an impressive body of commentary demonstrating the weakness of this criterion. 92

Kant invents two stories which are supposed, first, to ‘prove’ the existence of the moral law and, secondly, to demonstrate that the subject cannot act contrary to his pathological interests for any reason other than that of the moral law. The first story concerns a man who is placed in the situation of being executed on his way out of the bedroom as a condition of spending the night with the woman he desires . The other story, which we have already discussed, concerns a man who is put in the position of either bearing false witness against someone who, as a result, will lose his life, or being put to death himself if he does not do so.

As a comment on the first alternative , Kant simply affirms: ‘We do not have to guess very long what his [the man’s in question] answer would be.’

As for the second story, Kant claims that it is at least possible to imagine that a man would rather die than tell a lie and send another man to his death.

It follows from these two comments that there is no ‘force’ apart from the moral law that could make us act against our well-being and our ‘pathological interests’. Lacan raises the objection that such a ‘force’ — namely, jouissance (as distinct from pleasure ) – does exist:

The striking significance of the first example resides in the fact that the night spen t with the lady is paradoxically presented to us as a pleasure that is weighed against a punishment to be undergone … but one only has to make a conceptual shift and move the night spent with the lady from the category of pleasure to that of jouissance, given that jouissance implies precisely the acceptance of death … for the example to be ruined. (Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. 1992, 189). 99

For Kant, it is unimaginable that someone would want his own destruction — this would be diabolical — Lacan’s answer is not that this is nevertheless imaginable, and that even such extreme cases exist, but that there is nothing extreme in it at all: on a certain level every subject, average as he may be, wants his destruction, whether he wants it or not. 100

Kant’s point can be formulated more generally: there is no (ethical) act without a subject who is equal to this act. This, however, implies the effacement of the distinction between the level of the enunciation and the level of the statement: the subject of the statement has to coincide with the subject of the enunciation – or, more precisely, the subject of enunciation has to be entirely reducible to the subject of the statement. 102

The am lying is a signifier which forms a part, in the Other, of the treasury of vocabulary. This ‘vocabulary’ is something that I can use as a tool, or something that can use me as a ‘talking machine’. As subject, I emerge on the other level, the level of enunciation, and this level is irreducible.

Here we come, once again, to the point which explains why the subject cannot ‘hide behind’ the Law, presenting himself as its mere instrument: what is suspended by such a gesture is precisely the level of the enunciation.

That ‘there is no deposit without a depositor who is equal to his task’, or ‘there is no (ethical) act without the subject who is equal to his act’, implies that we set as the criterion or the condition of the ‘realization’ of an act the abolition of the difference between the statement and the enunciation. 102

But the crucial question is why the abolition of this difference should be the criterion or the necessary condition of an act.

Why claim that the accomplishment of an act presupposes the abolition of this split?

It is possible to situate the act in another, inverse perspective: it is precisely the act, the (‘successful’) act, which fully discloses this split, makes it present. From this perspective, the definition of a successful act would be that it is structured exactly like the paradox of the liar: this structure is the same as the one evoked by the liar who says ‘I am lying’, who utters ‘ the impossible’ and thus fully displays the split between the level of the statement and the level of the enunciation, between the shifter ‘I’ and the signifier ‘am lying’.

To claim, as we are claiming here, that there is no subject or ‘hero’ of the act means that at the level of ‘am lying’, the subject is always pathological (in the Kantian sense of the word), determined by the Other, by the signifiers which precede him. At this level, the subject is reducible or ‘dispensable’.

But this is not all there is to it. Whereas the ‘subject’ of the statement is determined in advance (he can only use the given signifiers), the (shifter) I is determined retroactively: it ‘becomes a signification, engendered at the level of the statement, of what it produces at the level of the enunciation‘.

It is at this level that we must situate the ethical subject: at the level of something which becomes what ‘it is’ only in the act (here a ‘speech act) engendered, so to speak, by another subject. 103

However, the fact that the act ‘reveals’ the difference between the level of the statement and the level of the enunciation does not imply that the subject of the act is a divided subject. On the contrary, we know very well that when we are really dealing with an act, the subject ‘is all there in his act’.

What reveals the distinction between the statement and the enunciation, between the subject who says or does something and the subjective figure which arises from it, is precisely the abolition of the division of the subject. Of course, this does not mean that the subject of an act is a ‘full ‘ subject who knows exactly what he wants but, rather, that the subject ‘is realized’, ‘objectified‘ in this act: the subject passes over to the side of the object. The ethical subject is not a subject who wants this object but, rather, this object itself. In an act, there is no ‘divided subject’: there is the ‘it’ (the Lacanian ça) and the subjective figure that arises from it.

We may thus conclude that the act in the proper sense of the word follows the logic of what Lacan calls a ‘headless subjectivation’ or a ‘subjectivation without subject’.

zupančič 6 suicide

Zupančič, Alenka. The Ethics of the Real. New York: Verso. 2000.

After an act, I am ‘not the same as before’. In the act, the subject is annihilated and subsequently reborn (or not); the act involves a kind of temporary eclipse of the subject. The act is therefore always a ‘crime’, a ‘transgression’ — of the limits of the symbolic community to which I belong. 83

It might, therefore, be instructive to draw a distinction , with Kant’s help, between two different logics of suicide . First there is the suicide that obeys the logic of sacrifice. When duty calls, I sacrifice this or that and, if necessary, even my life . Here, we are dealing with the logic of infinite ‘purification’, in which sacrificing my life is just ‘ another step’ forward – only one among numerous ‘ objects’ that have to be sacrificed. The fact that it is a final step is mere coincidence; or, to put it in Kantian terms, it is an empirical, not a transcendental necessity.

It is this logic that governs Kant’s postulate of the immortality of the soul, and serves to preserve the consistency of the big Other.

According to this logic, it is the subject who has to separate herself infinitely from everything that belongs to the register of the pathological. At the same time, (the position of) the big Other only gets stronger; its ‘sadism’ increases with every new sacrifice the subject makes, and it therefore demands more and more of the subject. We can point to examples from popular culture, which seems to be more and more fascinated by this superegoic side of morality. Consider, for instance, Terminator 2.

The Terminator first helps people to wipe off the face of the earth everything that could lead, in the future, to the invention of machines such as the Terminator (and thus to catastrophe, and the eruption of ‘radical evil’). In the end, the Terminator him/itself remains the only model that could serve to decipher all the necessary steps for the production of such cyborgs. He/it throws him-/itself into a pool of white-hot iron in order to save the human race from catastrophe. The same type of suicide occurs in Alien 3.

Ripley first exterminates all aliens, only to find out in the end that the last one resides inside herself. In order to eliminate this last alien , she has to kill herself — she has to destroy the ‘stranger’ in herself, to cut off the last remains of the ‘pathological’ in herself.

The second type of suicide is less popular, for it serves no cause, no purpose. What is at stake is not that in the end we put on the altar of the Other our own life as the most we have to offer. The point is that we ‘kill’ ourselves through the Other, in the Other.

We annihilate that which — in the Other, in the symbolic order — gave our being identity, status, support and meaning.

This is the suicide to which Kant refers in the famous footnote from The Metaphysics of Morals in which he discusses regicide (the execution of Louis XVI) .

‘Regicide’ is not really the right term, because what preoccupies Kant is precisely the difference between the murder of a monarch (regicide) and his formal execution. It is in relation to the latter that Kant says: ‘it is as if the state commits suicide’, and describes it in terms of what he elsewhere calls ‘diabolical evil’. What we are dealing with is the difference between the ‘king’s two bodies’ . Were the monarch simply killed, murdered, this would strike a blow only at his ’empirical body’, whereas his ‘other body’, incarnated in his symbolic mandate, would survive more or less unharmed.

Yet his formal execution, which Kant — in spite of, or even because of, his almost obsessive insistence on form — describes as outrageously useless, is precisely what strikes a blow at the monarch’s ‘symbolic body’, that is, the given symbolic order.

Why is it that for Kant this act of ‘the people’ has the structure of suicide? Because people are constituted as The People only in relation to this symbolic order. Outside it, they are nothing more than ‘masses’ with no proper status. It is the monarch ( in his symbolic function) who gives people their symbolic existence, be it ever so miserable. A very audible undertone of Kant’s argument thus implicitly poses this question: if the French people were so dissatisfied with their monarch, why didn’t they simply kill him; why did they have to perform a formal execution, and thus shake the very ground beneath their feet (that is, ‘commit suicide’) ?

zupančič 5

Zupančič, Alenka. Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan. New York: Verso, 2000.

The subject cannot choose herself as subject without having first arrived at the point which is not a forced choice but an excluded or impossible choice.

This is the ‘choice’ of S, of unfreedom, of radical subordination to the Other, of the absolute determination of one’s actions by motives, interests and other causes.

The subject first has to reach the point where it becomes impossible to articulate statements such as ‘I act’ , or ‘I think’.

Passage through this impossible point of one’s own non-being, where it seems that one can say of oneself only ‘I am not’, however, is the fundamental condition of attaining the status of a free subject.

Only at this point, after we have followed the postulate of determinism to the end, does the ‘leftover’ element that can serve as the basis for the constitution of the ethical subject appear.

… this experience of radical alienation at the basis of freedom … 32

zupančič 4

Zupančič, Alenka. Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan. New York: Verso, 2000.

The advent of the subject of practical reason coincides with a moment that might be called a moment of ‘forced choice’.

Paradoxical as this may seem, the forced choice at issue here is none other than the choice of freedom, the freedom that first appears to the subject in the guise of psychological freedom.

It is essential to the constitution of the subject that she cannot but believe herself free and autonomous.

The subject is presumed to be free , yet she cannot disclose this freedom in any positive way, cannot point to it by saying:’This act of mine was free; this precise moment I was acting freely.’

Instead, the more she tries to specify the precise moment at which freedom is real, the more it eludes her, ceding its place to (causal) determination, to the pathological motives which were perhaps hidden from view at first glance.

The left side of the schema presents the ‘fact of the subject’, the fact that the subject is, so to speak, free by definition, that the subject cannot but conceive of herself as free.

The right side illustrates the choice the ethical subject faces, in which she must choose herself either as pathological or as divided.

The paradox, however, is that the subject cannot choose herself as pathological (S) without ceasing to be a subject as a result. The choice of the S is an excluded, impossible choice.

🙂 Pathological means here to be fully determined by internal causes, hate/love/jealousy/fear/anger etc, and to be determined strictly by pathological motives would preclude freedom.

The other choice would simply be that of choosing oneself as subject, as the ‘pure form’ of the subject, which is the form of the division as such.

We might also say that in this case the subject chooses herself as subject and not as (psychological) ‘ego’, the latter being understood — in all its profundity and authenticity — as the locus of the pathological. 32

zupančič 3

However, if structuralism ultimately identifies the subject with structure (the Other), Lacan intervenes, at this point, in a very Kantian manner: he introduces the subject as a correlative to the lack in the Other; that is, as correlative to the point where structure fails fully to close in upon itself.

He does this in two different ways. The first consists in introducing a moment of irreducible jouissance as the ‘proof of the subject’s existence’.

The second – and this is what interests us here – consists in defining the subject via the shifter ‘I’ in relation to the ‘act of enunciation’.

Lacan ‘s claim that there is no Other of the Other means that the Other and the statement have no guarantee of their existence besides the contingency of their enunciation.

This dependence cannot in principle be eliminated from the function of the Other, and this is precisely what attests to its lack. The subject of enunciation does not and cannot have a firm place in the structure of the Other; it finds its place only in the act of enunciation.

This amounts to saying that the depsychologizing of the subject does not imply its reducibility to a (linguistic or other) structure. The Lacanian subject is what remains after the operation of ‘de-psychologizing’ has been completed: it is the elusive, ‘palpitating’ point of enunciation.

zupančič 2

Kantian ethics is an ethics of alienation since it forces us to reject all that “which is most truly ours.” and to submit ourselves to the abstract priciple that takes neither love nor sympathiy into account. 23

Guilt is the way in which the subject originally participates in freedom.

Freedom manifests itself in the split of the subject. The crucial point here is that freedom is not incompatible with the fact that ‘I couldn’t do anything else’, and that I was ‘carried along by the stream of natural necessity’.

Paradoxically, it is at the very moment when the subject is conscious of being carried along by the stream of natural necessity that she also becomes aware of her freedom. 27

I am guilty even if things were beyond my control, even if I truly ‘could not have done anything else’

Yet at this point we should push the discussion a little further in order to account for how these two apparently opposite conclusions seem to follow from Kant’s view – how Kant’s argument leads in two apparently mutually exclusive directions.

1. On the one hand, Kant seems persistent in his attempt to persuade us that none of our actions is really free; that we can never establish with certainty the nonexistence of pathological motives affecting our actions; that so-called ‘inner’ or ‘psychological’ motives are really just another form of ( natural ) causality.

2. On the other hand, he never tires of stressing, with equal persistence, that we are responsible for all our actions, that there is no excuse for our immoral acts; that we cannot appeal to any kind of ‘necessity’ as a way of justifying such actions – in brief, that we always act as free subjects.

In other words, where the subject believes herself autonomous, Kant insists on the irreducibility of the Other, a causal order beyond her control. But where the subject becomes aware of her dependence on the Other (such and such laws, inclinations, hidden motives . . . ) and is ready to give up, saying to herself: ‘This isn’t worth the trouble’, Kant indicates a ‘crack’ in the Other, a crack in which he situates the autonomy and freedom of the subject.

He does not try to disclose the freedom of the subject somewhere beyond causal determination; on the contrary, he enables it to become manifest by insisting to the bitter end on the reign of causal determination.

What he shows is that there is in causal determination a ‘stumbling block’ in the relation between cause and effect. In this we encounter the (ethical) subject in the strict sense of the word: the subject as such is the effect of causal determination, but not in a direct way — the subject is the effect of this something which only makes the relation between the cause and (its) effect possible. 29

zupančič 1

This is the real ‘miracle’ involved in ethics. The crucial question of Kantian ethics is thus not “how can we eliminate all the pathological elements of will, so that only the pure form of duty remains?” but, rather, “how can the pure form of duty itself function as a pathological element, that is, as an element capable of assuming the role of the driving force or incentive of our actions?”. 15-16

Pure form of duty as the sole motive for performing an act that is called ethical. Alenka wants to propose an ethics based solely on the drive.

surplus jouissance equals the objet petit a

What both Lacan and Kant are trying to get their heads arounds is articulating, conceptualizing a certain SURPLUS. 17

Triebfeder (drive or incentive) as one of the pivotal points of Kant’s practical philosophy. This Triebfeder is nothing but the object drive of the will. Now even if Kant makes a point of stressing that the ethical act is distinguished by its lack of any Triebfeder, he also introduces what he calls the echte Triebfeder, the ‘genuine drive’ of pure practical reason.

This genuine object-drive of the will is itself defined precisely in terms of pure form as an absence of any Triebfeder.

We can see here, as well, that the Lacanian notion of the objet petit a is not far off: the objet petit a designates nothing but the absence, the lack of the object, the void around which desire turns.

After a need is satisfied, and the subject gets the demanded object, desire continues on its own ; it is not ‘extinguished’ by the satisfaction of need. The moment the subject attains the object she demands, the objet petit a appears, as a marker of that which the subject still ‘has not got’, or does not have — and this itself constitutes the ‘echte’ object of desire.

Thus we can see that the object-drive involved in Kant’s conceptualization of ethics is not just like any other pathological motivation, but neither is it simply the absence of all motives or incentives.

The point, rather, is that this very absence must at a certain point begin to function as an incentive. It must attain a certain ‘material weight’ and ‘positivity’, otherwise it will never be capable of exerting any influence whatsoever on human conduct. 18

butler open letter on Israel

Full text of Judith Butler and Rashid Khalidi’s open letter condemning censorship of Israel critics

Whether one is for or against Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) as a means to change the current situation in Palestine-Israel, it is important to recognize that boycotts are internationally affirmed and constitutionally protected forms of political expression. As non-violent instruments to effect political change, boycotts cannot be outlawed without trampling on a constitutionally protected right to political speech. Those who support boycotts ought not to become subject to retaliation, surveillance, or censorship when they choose to express their political viewpoint, no matter how offensive that may be to those who disagree.

We are now witnessing accelerating efforts to curtail speech, to exercise censorship, and to carry out retaliatory action against individuals on the basis of their political views or associations, notably support for BDS. We ask cultural and educational institutions to have the courage and the principle to stand for, and safeguard, the very principles of free expression and the free exchange of ideas that make those institutions possible. This means refusing to accede to bullying, intimidation, and threats aimed at silencing speakers because of their actual or perceived political views. It also means refusing to impose a political litmus test on speakers and artists when they are invited to speak or show their work. We ask that educational and cultural institutions recommit themselves to upholding principles of open debate, and to remain venues for staging expressions of an array of views, including controversial ones. Only by refusing to become vehicles for censorship and slander, and rejecting blacklisting, intimidation, and discrimination against certain viewpoints, can these institutions live up to their purpose as centers of learning and culture.

Judith Butler
Professor of Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley

Rashid Khalidi
Edward Said Professor in Modern Arab Studies, Columbia University

***********
Etienne Balibar, Emeritus Professor, Paris-Nanterre
Wendy Brown, UC Berkeley
Susan Buck-Morss Distinguished Professor, CUNY Graduate Center
Eduardo Cadava, Princeton University
Lisa Duggan, Professor, New York University
Kathy E. Ferguson, Professor, Departments of Political Science and Women’s Studies, University of Hawai’i
Paul Gilroy, London
Naomi Klein, Author and Journalist
Jacqueline Rose, Professor of English, Queen Mary University of London
Joan W Scott, Institute for Advanced Study
Professor Lynne Segal, University of London
Wallace Shawn, Writer
Marianne Hirsch, Professor, Columbia University
Udi Aloni, Filmmaker and writer
Amy Kaplan, University of Pennsylvania
Saba Mahmood, UC Berkeley, Associate Professor
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Syracuse University
David Palumbo-Liu
Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor, Stanford
Bruce Robbins, Columbia University

Žižek

Excerpt from: Slavoj Žižek Event: Philosophy in Transit Penguin Books. January 2014.

For Lacan, the Unconscious is not a pre-logical (irrational) space of instincts, but a symbolically ar-ticulated knowledge ignored by the subject.)

These ‘unknown knowns’ were indeed the main cause of the troubles the US encountered in Iraq, and Rumsfeld’s omission proves that he was not a true philosopher. ‘Unknown knowns’ are the privileged topic of philosophy – they form the transcendental horizon, or frame, of our experience of reality.

At its most elementary, event is not something that occurs within the world, but is a change of the very frame through which we perceive the world and engage in it.

Finally, Kelvin grasps that Solaris, this gigantic brain, directly materializes our innermost fantasies which support our desire; it is a machine that materializes in reality my ultimate fantasmatic object that I would never be ready to accept in reality, though my entire psychic life turns around it. Harey is a materialization of Kelvin’s innermost traumatic fantasies.

The way to break out of the Hollywood frame is thus not to treat the Thing as just a metaphor of family tension, but to accept it in its meaningless and impenetrable presence. This is what happens in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011), which stages an interesting reversal of this classic formula of an object-Thing (an asteroid, alien) that serves as the enabling obstacle to the creation of the couple.

At the film’s end, the Thing (a planet on a collision course with Earth) does not withdraw, as in Super 8; it hits the Earth, destroying all life, and the film is about the different ways the main characters deal with the impending catastrophe (with responses ranging from suicide to cynical acceptance). The planet is thus the Thing – das Ding at its purest, as Heidegger would have it: the Real Thing which dissolves any symbolic frame – we see it, it is our death, we cannot do anything.

The film begins with an introductory sequence, shot in slow motion, involving the main characters and images from space, which introduces the visual motifs. A shot from the vantage point of space shows a giant planet approaching Earth; the two planets collide. The film continues in two parts, each named for one of two sisters, Justine and Claire.

In part one, ‘Justine’, a young couple, Justine and Michael, are at their wedding reception at the mansion of Justine’s sister, Claire, and her husband, John. The lavish reception lasts from dusk to dawn with eating, drinking, dancing and the usual family conflicts (Justine’s bitter mother makes sarcastic and insulting remarks, ultimately resulting in John attempting to throw her off his property; Justine’s boss follows her around, begging her to write a piece of advertising copy for him). Justine drifts away from the party and becomes increasingly distant; she has sex with a stranger on the lawn, and, at the end of the party, Michael leaves her.

In part two, ‘Claire’, the ill, depressed Justine comes to stay with Claire and John and their son, Leo. Although Justine is unable to carry out normal everyday activities like taking a bath or even eating, she gets better over time. During her stay, Melancholia, a massive blue telluric planet that had been hidden behind the sun, becomes visible in the sky as it approaches Earth. John, who is an amateur astronomer, is excited about the planet, and looks forward to the ‘fly-by’ expected by scientists, who have assured the public that Earth and Melancholia will pass each other without colliding. But Claire is getting fearful and believes the end of the world is imminent. On the internet, she finds a site describing the movements of Melancholia around Earth as a ‘dance of death’, in which the apparent passage of Melancholia past Earth initiates a slingshot orbit that will bring the planets into collision soon after. On the night of the fly-by, it seems that Melancholia will not hit Earth; however, after the flyby, background birdsong abruptly ceases, and the next day Claire realizes that Melancholia is circling back and will collide with Earth after all. John, who also discovers that the end is near, commits suicide through a pill overdose. Claire becomes increasingly agitated, while Justine remains unperturbed by the impending doom: calm and silent, she accepts the coming event, claiming that she knows that life does not exist elsewhere in the universe. She comforts Leo by making a protective ‘magic cave’, a symbolic shelter of wooden sticks, on the mansion’s lawn. Justine, Claire and Leo enter the shelter as the planet approaches. Claire continues to remain agitated and fearful, while Justine and Leo stay calm and hold hands. The three are instantly incinerated as the collision occurs and destroys Earth.

This narrative is interspersed with numerous ingenious details. To calm Claire, John tells her to look at Melancholia through a circle of wire which just encompasses its circular shape in the sky, thus enframing it, and to repeat this 10 minutes later so she will see that the shape has become smaller, leaving gaps within the frame – a proof that Melancholia is moving away from the Earth. She does this, and grows jubilant when she sees a smaller shape. However, when she looks at Melancholia through the frame some hours later, she is terrified to see that the shape of the planet has now expanded well beyond the frame of the wire circle. This circle is the circle of fantasy enframing reality, and the shock arrives when the Thing breaks through and spills over into reality.

There are also wonderful details of the disturbances that happen in nature as Melancholia approaches the Earth: insects, worms, roaches and other repellent forms of life usually hidden beneath the green grass come to the surface, rendering visible the disgusting crawling of life beneath the idyllic surface – the Real invading reality, ruining its image. (This is similar to David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, in which, in a famous shot after the father’s heart attack, the camera moves extremely close to the grass surface and then penetrates it, rendering visible the crawling of micro-life, the repelling Real beneath the idyllic suburban surface.)…

This fact offers yet another example of the split between reality – the social universe of established customs and opinions in which we
dwell – and the traumatic, meaningless brutality of the Real: in the film,

John is a ‘realist’, fully immersed in ordinary reality, so when the coordinates of this reality dissolve, his entire world breaks down;

Claire is an hysteric who starts to question everything in a panic, but nonetheless avoids complete psychotic breakdown;

and the depressed Justine goes on as usual because she is already living in a melancholic withdrawal from reality.

The film deploys four subjective attitudes towards this ultimate Event (the planet-Thing hitting the Earth) as Lacan would understand them.

John, the husband, is the embodiment of university knowledge, which falls apart in its encounter with the Real;

Leo, the son, is the cherubinic object-cause of desire for the other three;

Claire is the hysterical woman, the only full subject in the film (insofar as subjectivity means doubts, questioning, inconsistency);

and this, surprisingly, leaves to Justine the position of a Master, the one who stabilizes a situation of panic and chaos by introducing a new Master-Signifier, which brings order into a confused situation, conferring on it the stability of meaning.

Her Master-Signifier is the ‘magic cave’ that she builds to establish a protected space when the Thing approaches. One should be very careful here: Justine is not a protective Master who offers a beautiful lie – in other words, she is not the Roberto Benigni character in Life Is Beautiful. 11

What she provides is a symbolic fiction which, of course, has no magic efficacy, but which works at its proper level of preventing panic. Justine’s point is not to blind us from the impending catastrophe: the ‘magic cave’ enables us to joyously accept the End. There is nothing morbid in it; such an acceptance is, on the con-

levi bryant on badiou

Levi Paul Bryant: I’m not talking about Paul, but rather Badiou’s reading of Paul (I know that’s really scholastic, so don’t hate me too much for drawing the distinction!). I hope to write something about this when I get the time, but I think Badiou is doing something deeply necessary. My thesis is that we can describe the difference between the project of 20th century emancipatory project and 21st century emancipatory politics as the difference between class logic and set logic. When referencing class logic the names that should come to mind isn’t Marx but the Russel and Whitehead of the Principia. A class is a collection of entities defined by a shared intension or set of essential attributes. 20th century emancipatory political theory showed the fraught and untenable nature of these classes with respect to identity by demonstrating how they deconstruct themselves or are internally unstable or how they are historical or how they are social constructions, etc., thereby showing how they can’t function as legitimate grounds of privilege. Under Badiou’s reading, this would be part of what Paul was critiquing with respect to the privilege of various groups.

The problem is that while this deconstruction of social logics based on logical classes has been deeply necessary it didn’t take us very far in presenting an alternative picture of what social assemblages should be. Enter set logics. Set logics aren’t defined by a shared intenSion or set of essential properties defining membership under a shared identity, but rather sets are defined purely through extenSion. The members of the set need not share a common quality or essence– they can all differ completely from one another –to be members of that set because it’s simply the mere fact of existing (extension) that defines membership. In this regard, societies based on class logics are monarchic in that the essence defining identity functions as a monarch defining inclusion and exclusion, while societies based on a set logic are anarchic as there need be no common identity to be a member of the collective.

Badiou is angling for the latter. It’s difficult to see how this could possibly be a form of intolerance as there’s no essence (nationality, race, gender, economic status, knowledge expertise, etc) defining criteria for membership. Anyone and everyone can belong. So what we get here is the beginning of a picture of a post-postmodern social assemblage where it’s taken for granted that identity has been dissolved… Or something like that… A society based on mere existence rather than identifying predicates.

Levi Paul Bryant Daniel, I’m not sure that’s accurate. For Badiou it’s not that the Jew and Greek are ***overcome*** but that the Mosaic law as a condition for class membership and kinship descent as a condition for group membership become “indifferent”. So if you *want* go ahead and get circumcised and follow the dietary law, but this is no longer a *condition* for community membership. All the customs can be retained if one so desires, but these are no longer a foundation for the social assemblage. So in principle, under Badiou’s reading, such a community could be composed of Jew, Greek, *atheist*, Hindu, *satanist* (?!?!?!), pagan, etc. Those predicates no longer define the assemblage and membership shifts from being based on custom/law and origins (kinship) to being based on the work of love. Under my reading, the work of love means attending to the singular in each instance and acting according to what that singularity requires as response. For example, the law as a “bad universal” dictates that everyone that steals be imprisoned, while a society of love might look at the specific circumstances such as hunger, joblessness, childhood pathology that generated the symptom of cleptomania, as what needs to be addressed and in different ways in each circumstance. Again, it’s hard to see how this is intolerant, but maybe I’m giving Badiou too much credit… That’s what I take from it anyway.

Badiou on truth and the event and politics

“A Discussion of and around Incident at Antioch: An Interview with Alain Badiou.” by Ward Blanton and Susan Spitzer Art and Research A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods. Vol 3. No. 2 Summer 2010.

This interview took place at the Western Infirmary Lecture Theatre, University of Glasgow on 13 February 2009 and was conducted as part of ‘Paul, Political Fidelity and the Philosophy of Alain Badiou: a Discussion of Incident at Antioch’ a conference at the University of Glasgow, 13 – 14 February 2009.

The conference was organized in response to the forthcoming translation by Susan Spitzer of Badiou’s Incident at Antioch, a play completed in the mid-1980s and described by the conference organizers as ‘a work of political theatre which stages the “turn” of an ancient apostle in the context of haunting contemporary questions about revolutionary creativity and political violence’.

The interview was immediately preceded by the first public reading of scenes of the play in English.

What I say is that we can find in Paul a very complete theory of the construction of a new truth.

Allors! Why so, the theory of the construction of a new truth.

The beginning of the truth is not the structure of a fact but it’s an event. So something which is not predictable, something without calculation, something which is not reducible to specificity. At the beginning of all new creation we have something like that that I name an event.

After that we have a subjective process, the process of creation, of construction, which is defined by faithfulness to the event itself. Or, if you want, the subjective construction is to organise consequences of the event in the world, the concept world.

The event is like a rupture and after that we must organise consequences of this rupture, and that is the subjective process of the creation of a new truth.

And finally the result is a new form of universality.

So we can summarise that arrangement in a very simple manner: The beginning of the construction of a new truth is an event. The subjective process of that sort of construction is the organisation of consequences of the event. And the production, the final production is something which is universal in a precise sense that I won’t explain exactly but we can define really in what sense the result is universal.

The three points are explained in a very pure manner by Paul. First an event: the resurrection of Christ. After that a subjective process: faith, faith in that sort of event. And organisation of the consequences of the event, which is a subjective construction that is a debate, maybe an objective one in the form of the Church.

So it’s all a bit deficient in the field of Christianty. And universality of the results, very fundamental in Paul, that is the new faith is for everybody: it’s not for Jews, it’s not for Romans, it’s not for Greeks, it’s not for males, it’s not for females, it’s really for everybody.

The very famous advance that: ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female’ (Gal. 3.28).

All categories, social differences are dissolved from the point of view of the construction of the truth. So we can understand this theory as a particular new religious thought, certainly we can. But we also can understand this theory as an abstract formalisation of what is the process of the truth, with religious words naturally, but the general formalisation is good enough for any truth. […]

And so the same idea, the same abstract or formal idea concerning what is the new truth. And it is not the opposition between Catholic interpretation and Protestant interpretation, it’s a difference between an interpretation which assumes the signification of the words themselves, the iteration ‘God’, ‘the son’, and so on, and an interpretation which is a purely formal label and we say that Paul is not only the apostle of a new religion but is also the philosopher of the new formal construction of what is a universal truth.

*****
So for the readers of this text, or for the audience of this text’s future performance, what do you hope the performance of Paulinism can incite today?

That’s a political question, directly: What is the new grouping of today? I’ll tell you something about that concerning maybe the situation in France, of the political situation. You know I think that in our societies, the societies of the Western word, the rich societies – they become poor today, more and more. They are exposed to disaster. But in their general existence, I think there exist four groups – I don’t use the word class because it’s too classical now – four components, if you want, of power societies, which can support some possibilities of revolt.

There exist four groups which are able in some circumstances which are able to play a role in the direction of real change, the form of a movement of revolt.

First, the educated youth of today in universities, in campuses, in high schools and so on.

Two, the popular youth in the banlieues in French, the popular suburbs.

Third what I shall name the ordinary workers, the big mass of people which are not absolutely poor, not at all rich, with hard work, precarity sometimes, and so on.

And four the workers coming from other countries, immigrants, including undocumented workers and so on.

In France we can say that there exist different movements concerning these four groups, for example mainly demonstrations of students concerning many points, riots in the banlieues of the popular youths, with many cars burned and so on, a sort of violent revolt without community, we have the big demonstrations of ordinary workers, in France in December 1995, for example, with millions of people during many weeks.

And we have also organisations and important demonstrations of immigrants in the workforce. So all these four groups are capable of revolt. But the point is that that sort of revolt is always practically the revolt of one of these four components. And so I can say something like that is your idea of a new grouping.

I name revolt of movement simply when we have demonstrations, riots and so on, of one of these groups. And politics begins when we have something which is not reducible to revolt of movement because there are two, three or four components engaged in the movement.

So politics is really the construction of the new grouping which is not reducible to the four groups. And politics is always to create a passage, a passage between one group and another group. So ‘surprising grouping’ is a mixture of two, three or four because that involves components of our society.

One-by-one we have only revolt of movements when we have beyond one-by-one we are in a political possibility. And a very important part of the action of the state is to create the impossibility of something like that, to create impossibility of union between two or more components of the social organisation.

On this point I have a proof. I have the proof that many laws, many decisions of the state, many activities of the police and so on are entirely organised not only by the possibility to escape movement and so on but more, it’s much more important to create the impossibility of politics, if we name politics the creation of the passage between two different groups. And so the situation today is again that sort of activity of the state.

Sometimes politics engaging two components exists. For example a union, limited but real, between some students and some workers coming from other countries. The movement of undocumented workers in France, which is a significant movement, with normal difficulty, is really a movement which is a mixture, a union between some intellectuals, some young students and some workers coming from Africa and it is something which has existed now for practically more than ten years, it’s not something which vanished.

You know also sometimes the relationship between a part of the students and ordinary workers, that being the case during the strike last year. So the relationship between two groups, which is the beginning of a new grouping, so the beginning of politics, exists in the limited sense. The union of four groups would be the revolution, which is why the state is the absolute impossibility of union.

And I don’t know any circumstances which is really the union of the four components. And maybe it’s only in extraordinary circumstance that something like that is possible I think, for example war. For example war.

And in any case it’s also a lesson of the last century, because the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, the movement of liberation of people and so on, have all been in the form of a war. So the question is also, what is revolutionary politics when it’s not war but peace? And we don’t know, really. We do not have an example of a complete union of the different popular components of the situation without that sort of terrible circumstances, exceptional circumstance like war.

So the political problem of today is really first, I agree with you, one of a new grouping, and is probably the problem to pass from two to three, something like that. Because two exists in some limited manner, but then the passage from two to three, and three creates maybe the possibility of four, the possibility of global change.

So my answer, my complete answer, we can define precisely not only what is the beginning of politics which is always to create maybe a small passage from a group to another group, and so a small, real novelty in the organisation of politics.

But we know also what is the present stage of all that, which is in my position the passage from two to three. Four is an event. Four is the number of an event. And three, the number of new forms of organisation. One is nothing, movement and revolt. Two is the beginning of politics. Three is beginning of new forms of organisation. And four is change.

So we can hope.

10 questions academics should ask themselves

New year, new career: 10 questions academics should ask themselves

Apply a spot of healthy self-reflection to find out whether your current career plan is still the right one for 2014 and beyond.

Tradition dictates that the start of a new year is a fitting time to make plans and promises for the 12 months to come. Eat and drink less, exercise more, keep in touch with friends and family regularly – these are the stock fixtures on many a list of new year’s resolutions, whether solemnly written out or only half-intended.

This seasonal tendency towards a spot of healthy self-reflection could just as usefully be applied to your career and, specifically, whether your current career plan is still the right one for 2014 and beyond. Below I offer a list of 10 questions which you might find handy to prompt your reflection.

The intent is not to lead you sententiously in one direction or another, nor is this one of those magazine-style quizzes where you add up your answers and find out at the end whether you and your career plan are a perfect match. These are prompts – what you want to do; what you can do; what, perhaps, you ought to do. The questions aren’t necessarily presented in order of priority, and there is no expectation that you’ll find all of them relevant, but some at least may resonate with you.

1) How did you get to where you are now?

Let’s be honest: very few careers follow an absolutely linear path, where each step is meticulously pre-arranged and executed as part of a master plan. Happenstance is a crucial determinant in almost all professional stories, just as most of us are, at times, constrained in our options. But each career step entails a positive choice (apply or don’t apply; stay or go; keep trying or move on) and it’s important to remember why we made those choices.

Why did you opt to study your subject? Why did you stay on in academia? Why did you choose job X? Why did you move to university Y? Implicit in these questions is, of course, the path not travelled: why did you do X, but not Y or Z? It’s almost never true that there was “nothing else”; it’s more likely the other options were unpalatable and/or unfeasible.

2) How much do you know about other options?

When it comes to careers, I’ve heard one phrase from researchers more than any other: “I don’t know what else I could do.” Don’t stay in academia just because it’s the only thing you know; make an informed decision that it’s the best career for you. Of all your friends and family members, how many do jobs you don’t fully understand? Here’s a resolution for 2014: find out how they actually spend their time. Your go-to question could be: what does a typical working day for you involve?

3) What do you find fulfilling in your current work?

When do you feel that you’re both energised and doing good work? Which days do you leap out of bed, or at least crawl out of it less slowly? Don’t be content with sweeping answers – “when I’m doing my research” – because any activity is made up of myriad tasks and responsibilities. Deconstruct what you really mean. Doing bibliographic searches? Reading papers? Being at your desk/bench? Doing experiments? Searching the archive? Writing up?

4) What do you find unfulfilling or frustrating?

There’s nothing wrong with admitting that you dislike parts of your job, even in such a powerfully vocational career as academia. Apply the same principle as you did to what fulfils you by deconstructing your answers in order to get to the specifics.

5) Do you have talents you’re not currently using, but would like to?

This question is fairly self-explanatory, with the caveat that we are talking here about demonstrable talents rather than mere desires. For example, my passion for tennis is not, sadly, indicative of any ability whatsoever, which is why it would be a preposterous career step. But if you have a proven capacity for, say, successfully leading teams and a job that primarily involves working on your own, then it’s worth considering whether you are making the most of what you have to offer.

6) What, realistically, will you need to do in order to maximise your chances of succeeding in your current career?

If you know what you want to achieve, do you know what is required for you to get there? If publications or funding are high on your list, as they are for most early career researchers, then how – in the spirit of resolutions – are you going to commit to getting them done? If you’re not sure what’s required, then start by making a list of who will be able to advise you.

7) Are you good enough?

Perhaps this question is better expressed as: can you convince others that you’re good enough? Either way, the point is a tough yet vital one. Knowing the career you want is one thing, but do you have what it takes? The harsh reality is that there are more PhD students than there are postdoc jobs , just as there are far more postdocs than there are permanent academic positions, more lecturers than endowed chairs, and so on. What’s your evidence that you’re good enough to last the course?

8) What practical considerations must you keep in mind?

This question is another self-explanatory one. It’s a truism, for instance, that to make it in academia, you have to move around (preferably internationally). But this is not a workable scenario for everyone, and it pays to be realistic about such things. Are you being honest with yourself about whether you can, or are willing to, do what’s practically required?

9) Whose career advice are you seeking?

What I really mean here is: how many opinions have you sought? Career pathways in academia are various and often complex, and they have undergone significant changes in the last 20 years. In other words, it’s unwise to assume that what worked for the preceding generations of academics will work now.

If you’re looking at other career options, then the need to hear a mix of viewpoints – what a job is really like – is even more critical. All you can do is to be ecumenical in the range of people from whom you seek advice. If you’re not already seeking multiple and varied opinions, then add that to your list of new year’s resolutions.

10) How do you tend to make decisions?

Here’s a final reflection on the nature of reflection itself. Some people like to gather facts and details which they can weigh up carefully before acting; some are inclined to be more instinctive and spontaneous in their decision-making; and some oscillate between the two depending on the stakes.

Put more directly, some readers of this piece will like the kind of reflective thinking these questions intend to prompt; others simply won’t. Either reaction is fine, because, at the end of the day, nobody cares about your career as much as you do, and you are responsible for it. So, don’t try to operate against your preferences, try to work with them.

I wish you every success in your career during 2014.