Author: logocentric

mcgowan on stavrakakis 1

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. 2013.

The main thrust of Yannis Stavrakakis’s The Lacanian Left involves forging the link between democracy and enjoyment. He sees that this is a link that most advocates of democracy – even radical democracy – have insufficiently emphasized because they fail to see the possibilities of an enjoyment derived from the experience of failure or of the not-all.

He says: “Far from being antithetical to jouissance, democratic subjectivity is capable of inspiring high passions. … They mobilise a jouissance beyond accumulation, domination and fantasy, an enjoyment of the not-all or not-whole.”

Severing democracy from the image of the social good requires emphasizing its scandalous dimension – the location of power in an entity (the people) that does not substantially exist.

Democracy emerges not through the expression of the popular will in institutionalized forms but when we experience the ultimate groundlessness of political power itself, when we experience the absence of any foundational social authority making itself felt.

The democratic impulse is tied to the absence at the heart of the social order, but the association of democracy with capitalism and the good has had the effect of filling this absence with the myth of the sovereign substantive people. The contemporary geopolitical universe has broken this association and returned the scandal to democracy, placing it in the position of the lost object. 194

But we are already seeing the enjoyment that derives from contemporary invocations of democracy. The enjoyment that surrounded Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and the enjoyment that the 2011 Arab revolutions evinced are but two examples of this phenomenon, which becomes possible when the status of democracy shifts from being central to the capitalist order to being excessive.194

Identifying democracy with enjoyment can also change the way that we articulate its appeal.

We can make evident the contemporary disjunction between democracy and the good and emphasize the necessity of sacrificing the good for the sake of democracy and the enjoyment it provides.

If democracy becomes recognized as a lost object among contemporary subject and the advocates of democracy can marshal the enjoyment that it might engender, they will have a chance to triumph over the reign of the universalized service of goods that is global capitalism.

The political project of psychoanalysis is fundamentally democractic, but it envisions democracy as an excess that we can enjoy, though we cannot reconcile it with our enlightened self-interest.

It is not more knowledge that will bring about our emancipation but more enjoyment. 195

mcgowan democracy enjoyment excess

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. 2013.

Psychoanalysis suggests that enjoyment will almost always triumph over knowledge, even – or especially – when this enjoyment occurs at the expense of our self-interest. 190

[Psychoanalysis] represents an effort to mobilize our knowledge about enjoyment and its priority in order to make evident the identification of emancipation with enjoyment. … psychoanalysis reveals that enjoyment derives from emancipation from the power of authority. 191

As the existence of conservative populism shows, there is a conservative form of enjoyment, but this form borrows its structure from emancipatory politics. To be effective, conservative populists must convince their adherents that they are challenging social authority even at the moment when they cede themselves to it.

Enjoyment stems from an excess, from going beyond what social authority permits. … enjoyment is proper to the forces of emancipation who work to free us from social constraints imposed by authority figures. In this sense, democracy is the social arrangement organized around enjoyment and its excess.

But democracy has always been a signifier replete with enjoyment, an indication of an excess that no social structure can adequately contain. Democracy is excessive because it strips away all legitimacy justifying social authority.

Capitalism without democracy … Capitalism delivers the goods – and the good – just as efficiently, if not more so, without democracy as with it. … rather than being a good that we strive to attain without ever fully attaining it (an impossible justice to come), [:) DERRIDA ALERT] democracy becomes the lost object animating our desire, an object that impels us to act against our interest.

Democracy today does not help us to accumulate goods (or arrive at the good) but instead functions as a barrier on this path. Time spent insisting on freedom and equality, or even time spent engaged in democratic deliberation, is time that one cannot spend in the act of accumulation of goods. From the perspective of the service of goods, it is wasted time.

In fact, democracy requires that we sacrifice our interest on behalf of it: we must put at risk and even abandon the goods that global capitalism offers us in order to achieve it. This demand for sacrifice, far from lessening the appeal of democracy, actually constitutes it as desirable. 194

mcgowan on michael moore

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. 2013.

When [Michael] Moore succeeds as an activist filmmaker, he mobilizes the enjoyment of the spectator and works to align this enjoyment with increased freedom and equality.

Highlighting Bush’s obscene enjoyment fails as a political strategy because the people who identify with Bush do so precisely because of this enjoyment, not in spite of it.

If Bush doesn’t read reports, skips meetings, vacations too much, or stumbles when talking to reporters, such failures provide possibilities for identification. Popular identification with a leader occurs on two distinct levels. On the one hand, we identify with the strength of the leader and see ourselves expressed in that strength. This identification affirms our ego and provides pleasure. On the other hand, we identify with the weaknesses of the leader. This identification is the key to our ability to enjoy the leader. The more [Moore’s film] takes the side of knowledge against Bush’s obscene enjoyment, the more it cements the identification between supporters and him through a shared enjoyment. 188

Many figures on the side of emancipatory politics see the documentary as a valuable tool because it provides knowledge that traditional media outlets do not. It helps people to break from the ideological manipulation that dominates them. But … the documentary form’s obsession with the facts causes it to miss the role of enjoyment. … the focus of documentary form on revealing facts rather than facilitating enjoyment hinders its effectiveness as a political tool. It seems inherent to take the side of knowledge and thereby enable opponents to enjoy through disregarding what it teaches. 188

[Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth] Gore warns against excessive enjoyment – overuse of electricity, driving environmentally unfriendly vehicles, consuming without educating oneself, and so on. The entire film is an act of consciousness-raising and enjoyment-restricting. By seizing on Gore’s film as a rallying point, the forces of emancipation again cede the terrain of enjoyment to conservatism … 189

mcgowan superego

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. 2013.

Freud’s vision of the superego emphasizes its role in prohibition. The superego restricts what the subject can think and do; it extends the power of mastery by placing an authority within the subject’s psyche that is more demanding than any external master.

… Lacan picks up on Freud’s claim that the superego draws its energy from the reservoir of the id … Lacan dissociates the superego from prohibition and aligns it with an imperative to enjoy. Even when the superego bombards the subject with imperatives that appear in the guise of prohibitions, Lacan insists that these imperatives actually command enjoyment. 183

The superego … constantly reminds the subject of its failure to enjoy, and it promulgates an ideal of the ultimate enjoyment as a measuring stick against which the subject can contrast its own failures. No subject can obey the demands of the superego because the ideal it provides remains ever out of reach. The closer the subject approaches to it through obedience, the faster it recedes. The superego enjoins an enjoyment that it never allows the subject to find. 183

… the superego only emerges as such with the rise of expert authority and the decline of the traditional master. .. under the regime of the master, the idiotic and purely despotic dimension of the law manifests itself in the figure of the master. The master lays down the law that must be obeyed not because it is justified or practical but simply because the master says so, and the master’s authority derives from the nonsensical and completely random fact of birth or wealth.

This idiotic dimension of the law seems to disappear with the rise of expert authority. In every way, the expert’s status and dictates have a justification that the master’s don’t. 183

Under the regime of the expert, the idiocy of the law migrates to the superego, allowing the superego to exert a power that it never had under the rule of the master.

Thus, the proper birth of the superego occurs with the rise of expert authority and the evacuation of the external law’s idiocy. As the horror of external punishments abates — the practice of drawing and quartering criminals in public is no longer widespread, for instance — the internal horrors mount. This is a ramification of the rule of knowledge. 184

Ž on snowden

Freedom in the Cloud Assange, Manning and Snowden are the new heroes of the era of digitalized control.
August 13, 2013

Back in 1843, the young Karl Marx claimed that the German ancien regime “only imagines that it believes in itself and demands that the world should imagine the same thing.” In such a situation, to put shame on those in power becomes a weapon—or, as Marx goes on: “The actual pressure must be made more pressing by adding to it consciousness of pressure, the shame must be made more shameful by publicizing it.” And this, exactly, is our situation today: we are facing the shameless cynicism of the representatives of the existing global order who only imagine that they believe in their ideas of democracy, human rights, etc. What happens in Wikileaks disclosures is that the shame, theirs and ours for tolerating such power over us, is made more shameful by publicizing it. Continue reading “Ž on snowden”

ethics other relationality

Alterity, Intersubjectivity, Ethics

Workshop Abstract:

The ‘ethical turn’ across the arts and humanities has taken its place in social and cultural anthropology primarily as a way to address long-standing questions of human agency within cultural and political systems. Anthropologists have been developing their own take on questions of ethics and morality in ways drawing largely from neo-Aristotelian and Foucauldian theorisations. Building on this emerging literature, but cautious of some of its ontological assumptions, the premise behind this workshop questions the prioritisation of certain notions of the ‘self’ over inquiries into the nature of the ethical ‘subject’.

The workshop will approach questions of ethics from different theoretical and disciplinary perspectives, which have thus far remained marginal in the emerging anthropology of ethics and morality. Anthropology has traditionally sought to understand the socially or relationally constituted nature of persons and the historical processes within which they are embedded, and yet literature on ethical agency has often foregrounded voluntaristic notions of self-cultivation. We ask what contributions theories concerned with the relational or intersubjective nature of subject formation framed as responsibility for the other can make to our conceptualisation of ethics and ethical agency.

Theories of subjectivity, gendered or sexual difference, affect, and the ‘post-human’ have become prominent in investigations that question the bounds of the self/subject, and the ways in which we can conceptualise it as socially or politically emplaced. We ask what such theories, and different disciplines’ elaborations and critiques of them, can usefully lend our conceptualisations of ethics and morality.
We hope to open up avenues for further research and collaboration amongst those attending the workshop, in the form of publication and/or a broader conference at a later date.

Workshop format:

The aim of the workshop is primarily to exchange ideas across disciplines and with different theoretical and ethnographic references. The day therefore will be structured so as to promote as much discussion as possible, rather than presenting polished research results. The workshop will be divided into four thematic sessions, with a keynote lecture delivered by Associate Professor Jarrett Zigon of the University of Amsterdam.

The four sessions will address the themes of:

• Feminism and the question of the other
• Ethics, violence and politics
• Post-humanism and animal/human relations
• Affect and the ethics of noise

Each of the four sessions will be structured around a research paper, to be pre-circulated to all workshop participants, which will form the starting point for the discussion. The discussions will be co-facilitated by the paper authors and workshop organisers. In the abstract and in the suggested questions for discussion below, we have started to shape and open the discussions in particular directions. However these questions are both preliminary and open-ended, and we welcome different perspectives and challenges that are relevant to the workshop’s themes and concerns.

Workshop preparation

After registering each participant will receive the research papers in advance for each of the four sessions and you are strongly encouraged to read these prior to attending the workshop. The workshop welcomes participants across academic disciplines keen to engage in lively discussions and raise questions and ideas during the day.

Questions to initiate discussion:

• What analysis of attachments and detachments across sameness and difference do concepts such as affect enable or disable?

• What are the challenges to more recent feminist theories that attempt to show how ethics is suggested and solicited by an ontology of interdependency between people?

• How do lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex subjectivities complicate ethical and political responses to deeply ingrained normative practices?

• In light of the central place of ‘the Other’ in anthropological concerns, how can feminist and other theories of alterity inflect anthropological theories of ethics?

• How do questions of politics enter into, impact upon, or undermine our theorisations of the ethical?

• Can claims of relationality and acknowledgment of difference be shown to be fundamentally non-violent? How do we continue to address violence within ethics?

• How can psychoanalytic theories addressing subject/object, or self/other, relations, help us to theorise the space in which ethical subjectivity is formed?

• Do contemporary theories of affect push us beyond concepts of ‘relationality’ or ‘intersubjectivity’ in theorisations of ethics?

• Can Levinasian theories of ethics as the pre-subjective relation to the Other inform ethnographic inquiries into ethical relationality?

• What other approaches from philosophy or other disciplines can inform the study of ethics and morality?

• Do these theoretical approaches invite us to question the idea of intersubjectivity as the place of ethical relationality?

Žižek ethics of the real

Ágota Kristóf’s The Notebook awoke in me a cold and cruel passion

Slavoj Žižek The Guardian, Monday 12 August 2013

The young twins are thoroughly immoral – they lie, blackmail, kill – yet they stand for authentic ethical naivety at its purest

There is a book through which I discovered what kind of a person I really want to be: The Notebook, the first volume of Ágota Kristóf’s trilogy, which was followed by The Proof and The Third Lie.

When I first heard someone talk about Ágota Kristóf, I thought it was an east European mispronunciation of Agatha Christie; but I soon discovered not only that Ágota is not Agatha, but that Ágota’s horror is much more terrifying than Agatha’s.

The Notebook tells the story of young twins living with their grandmother in a small Hungarian town during the last years of the second world war and the early years of communism. The twins are thoroughly immoral – they lie, blackmail, kill – yet they stand for authentic ethical naivety at its purest.

A couple of examples should suffice. One day they meet a starving deserter in a forest and bring him some things he asks them for.

When we come back with the food and blanket, he says: ‘You’re very kind.’
We say: ‘We weren’t trying to be kind. We’ve brought you these things because you absolutely need them. That’s all.’

If there ever was a Christian ethical stance, this is it: no matter how weird their neighbour’s demands, the twins naively try to meet them. One night, they find themselves sleeping in the same bed as a German officer, a tormented gay masochist. Early in the morning, they awaken and want to leave the bed, but the officer holds them back:

Don’t move. Keep sleeping.’
‘We want to urinate. We have to go.’
‘Don’t go. Do it here.’
We ask: ‘Where?’
He says: ‘On me. Yes. Don’t be afraid. Piss! On my face.’
We do it, then we go out into the garden, because the bed is all wet.

A true work of love, if there ever was one! The twins’ closest friend is a priest’s housekeeper, a young voluptuous woman who washes them, playing erotic games with them. Then something happens when a procession of starved Jews is led through the town on their way to the camp:

Right in front of us, a thin arm emerges from the crowd, a dirty hand stretches out, a voice asks: ‘Bread.’
The housekeeper smiles and pretends to offer the rest of her bread; she holds it close to the outstretched hand, then, with a great laugh, brings the piece of bread back to her mouth, takes a bite, and says: ‘I’m hungry too.’

The boys decide to punish her: they put some ammunition into her kitchen stove so that when she lights it in the morning, it explodes and disfigures her. Along these lines, it is easy for me to imagine a situation in which I would be ready, without any moral qualms, to murder someone, even if I knew that this person did not kill anyone directly.

Reading reports about torture in Latin American military regimes, I found particularly repulsive the (regular) figure of a doctor who helped the actual torturers conduct their business in the most efficient way: he examined the victim and monitored the process, letting the torturers know how much the victim will be able to endure, what kind of tortures would inflict the most unbearable pain, etc.

I must admit that if I were to encounter such a person, knowing that there is little chance of bringing him to legal justice, and be given the opportunity to murder him discreetly, I would simply do it, with a minimum of remorse about taking justice in my own hands.

What is crucial in such cases is to avoid the fascination of evil that propels us to elevate torturers into demonic transgressors who have the strength to overcome our petty moral considerations and act freely. Torturers are not beyond good and evil, they are beneath it. They do not heroically transgress our shared ethical rules, they simply lack them.

The two brothers also blackmail the priest: they threaten to let everybody know how he sexually molested Harelip, a girl who needs help to survive, demanding a weekly sum of money from him. The shocked priest asks them:

‘It’s monstrous. Have you any idea what you’re doing?’
‘Yes, sir. Blackmail.’
‘At your age … It’s deplorable.’
‘Yes, it’s deplorable that we’ve been forced to this. But Harelip and her mother absolutely need money.’

There is nothing personal in this blackmail: later, they even become close friends with the priest. When Harelip and her mother are able to survive on their own, they refuse further cash from the priest:

‘Keep it. You have given enough. We took your money when it was absolutely necessary. Now we earn enough money to give some to Harelip. We have also taught her to work.’

Their cold-serving of others extends to killing them if asked: when their grandmother asks them to put poison into her cup of milk, they say:

‘Don’t cry, Grandmother. We’ll do it; if you really want us to, we’ll do it.’

Naive as it is, such a subjective attitude in no way precludes a monstrously cold reflexive distance. One day, the twins put on torn clothes and go begging. Passing women give them apples and biscuits and one of them even strokes their hair. Another woman invites them to her home to do some work, for which she will feed them.

We answer: ‘We don’t want to work for you, madam. We don’t want to eat your soup or your bread. We are not hungry.’
She asks: ‘Then why are you begging?’
‘To find out what effect it has and to observe people’s reactions.’
She walks off, shouting: ‘Dirty little hooligans! And impertinent too!’
On our way home, we throw the apples, the biscuits, the chocolate, and the coins in the tall grass by the roadside.
It is impossible to throw away the stroking on our hair.

This is where I stand, how I would love to be: an ethical monster without empathy, doing what is to be done in a weird coincidence of blind spontaneity and reflexive distance, helping others while avoiding their disgusting proximity.

With more people like this, the world would have been a pleasant place in which sentimentality would be replaced by a cold and cruel passion.

chomsky Ž debate

Žižek Chomsky debate

If one defines and uses this term the way I do (and I am not alone here: my understanding echoes a long tradition of so-called Western Marxism), then one has to conclude that what Chomsky is doing in his political writings is very important, I have great admiration and respect for it, but it is emphatically not critique of ideology. Continue reading “chomsky Ž debate”

mcgowan war and loss sacrifice

But the result of war is the failure of having and the renewed experience of loss. … of course no one fights wars with the express intention of losing them, but every war brings with it sacrifice and loss, which is ultimately the substance of the social bond and the source of our ability to enjoy that bond. The pursuit of pleasure of having leads to the loss that inevitably accompanies this pursuit. 161

… one cannot discount the fact that societies also go to war simply to defend themselves and survive. But even the seemingly pure war of defense produces sacrifice that allows subjects to enjoy the social bond, and in this way it goes beyond simple defense. Note 28, 316

The conquering drive of empires has its roots in the search for what no amount of imperial possession can provide – the enjoyment of the experience of loss. Empires conquer increasing quantities of territory in order to discover a territory that they can’t conquer… powerful societies ultimately go to war in order to re-enact a constitutive loss and facilitate the enjoyment that this loss entails. 161

mcgowan loss enjoyment

Few can embrace the idea that the social bond exists through a shared sense of loss. This is why the moments when the shared sense of loss becomes visible are often quickly followed by the attempt to assert a positive collective identity. Or, to put it in other terms, when enjoyment becomes visible, we retreat toward pleasure. 159

Attacks of September 11, 2001 … immediately reinvigorated the social bond for a majority of Americans. The loss that they occasioned brought subjects back to the shared sacrifice that defines their membership in American society. Even as they were horrified by the image of the towers burning and then falling, most Americans, in the strict psychoanalytic sense of the term, enjoyed the attacks insofar as the attacks allowed them to experience once again their social bond with great intensity. …

This is a bond that one suffers, just as one suffers from a terrorist attack. Even though it followed from an attack, this bond was not one formed though the male logic of friend/enemy, which is why the heading in Le Monde on September 12, 2001, could proclaim, “Nous sommes tous Américains.”

The bond formed around the September 11 attacks was not initially a bond of exclusivity with a clear outside and inside. Any subject willing to accede to the experience of loss could become a part of American society at that moment.

The not-all of the social bond occurs through the experience of loss, but the recognition of this type of bond is unbearable. One enjoys it without deriving any pleasure from it. It is, in fact, painful. Not only is it painful, but it also entails complete humiliation. The society experiences the shame of being a victim and enduring trauma – the shame of enjoyment itself. 160

In order to disguise this shameful enjoyment, the United States quickly turned to an assertion of power that would carry with it the promise of a restored wholeness – the recovery of an imaginary perfect security. The attack on Afghanistan brought pleasure to most members of American society. This pleasure had the function of rendering the enjoyment that emerged through traumatic loss bearable, but it could not fulfill its inherent promise. Enjoyment satisfies, and pleasure always disappoints.

Because we seek respite from the loss that binds us, we flee from the social bond despite our purported desire for it. The authentic social bond exists only in the shared experience of loss – that is, only according to the female logic of not-having. 160