Author: logocentric

mcgowan desire anorexic

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

It is the initial act of sacrifice that gives birth to desire: the subject sacrifices nothing in order to create a lost object around which it can organize its desire. … The subject’s desire is oriented around this lost object, but the object is nothing as a positive entity and only exists insofar as it is lost. This is why one can never attain the lost object or the object that causes one to desire.

The coming-into-being of this object originates the subject of desire, but, having no substance, the object can never become an empirical object of desire. We may see an object of desire as embodying the lost object, but whenever we obtain this object, we discover its emptiness. The lost object is constitutively rather than empirically lost. 29

The anorexic doesn’t simply refuse to eat but eats nothing, the nothing that is the lost object. While all positive forms of food fail to address the subject’s lack, nothing does speak to the subject’s desire and allows that desire to sustain itself. The anorexic starves not because she can’t find … any food that would satisfy her but because she has found a satisfying food, a food that nourishes the desiring subject rather than the living being. The logic of anorexia lays bare the hidden workings of desire that operate within every subject.

Subjects believe that they pursue various objects of desire (a new car, a new house, a new romantic partner, and so on) and that these objects have an intrinsic attraction, but the real engine for their desire resides in the nothing that the subject has given up and that every object tries and fails to represent. Objects of desire are desirable only insofar as they attempt to represent the impossible lost object, which is what the anorexic reveals. Still the anorexic is exceptional, most nonanorexic subjects imaging that their lost object can be found in something rather than nothing. 30

The key to the politics of the death drive is grasping, in the fashion of the anorexic, the nothingness of the object and thereby finding satisfaction in the drive itself. But the subject’s relationship to its object inherently creates an illusion that makes this possibility almost impossible.

Though the lost object that initiates subjectivity has no substance, its status for the subject belies its nothingness. For the subject, the originary lost object is the object that seems to hold the key to the subject’s very ability to enjoy. Subjects invest the lost object with the idea of their own completion: the loss of the object retroactively causes a prior state of completion to arise – a state of completion that never actually existed – and the object itself bears the promise of inaugurating a return to this imaginary prior state. In short, it promises to fill in the subject’s lack and answer its desire. As a result of this investment on the part of the subject, the initial lost object becomes the engine for all the subject’s subsequent desiring. 31

Without the initial act of sacrifice, the would-be subject neither desires nor enjoys but instead suffocates in a world of self-presence, a self-presence in which one has no freedom whatsoever.  Through the loss of the privileged object, one frees oneself from the complete domination of (parental or social) authority by creating a lack that no authority can fill.  Ceding the object is thus the founding act of subjectivity and the first free act.  31

mcgowan breaking from autoerotic state sacrifice

… the subject’s openness to alienation in language, its willingness to sacrifice a part of itself in order to become a speaking subject, suggests a lack in being itself prior to the entry into language.

That is, the act through which the subject cedes the privileged object and becomes a subject coincides with language but is irreducible to it. The subject engages in the act of sacrifice because it does not find its initial autoeroticism perfectly satisfying – the unity of the autoerotic being is not perfect – and this lack of complete satisfaction produces the opening through which language and society grab onto the subject through its alienating process.

If the initial autoerotic state of the human animal were perfectly satisfying, no one would begin to speak, and subjectivity would never form.

Speaking as such testifies to an initial wound in our animal being and in being itself.

But subjectivity emerges only out of a self-wounding. Even though others encourage the infant to abandon its autoerotic state through a multitude of inducements, the initial loss that constitutes subjectivity is always and necessarily self-inflicted. Subjectivity has a fundamentally masochistic form, and it continually repeats the masochistic act that founds it. The act of sacrifice opens the door to the promise of a satisfaction that autoerotic isolation forecloses, which is why the incipient subject abandons the autoerotic state and accedes to the call of sociality.

But the term “sacrifice” is misleading insofar as it suggests that the subject has given up a wholeness (with itself or with its parent) that exists prior to being lost.

In the act of sacrifice, the incipient subject gives up something that it doesn’t have. The initial loss that founds subjectivity is not at all substantial; it is the ceding of nothing. Through this defining gesture, the subject sacrifices its lost object into being.

But if the subject cedes nothing, this initial act of sacrifice seems profoundly unnecessary. Why can’t the subject emerge without it? Why is the experience of loss necessary for the subject to constitute itself qua subject? The answer lies in the difference between need and desire. While the needs of the human animal are not dependent on the experience of loss, the subject’s desires are. 28

mcgowan loss sacrifice

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

The subject as such emerges through the experience of loss.

It is the loss of a part of the subject – an initial act of sacrifice – that creates both subject and object, the object emerging through this act as what the subject has lost of itself. The subject takes an interest in the object world because it forms this world around its lost object. 26

When the subject submits to the imperatives of language, it enters into an indirect relation with the object world. … This means that the indirectness or mediation introduced by language deprives the subject of a direct relation to the object world that it never had.

… Prior to its immersion in the mediation of language, the subject had no object at all – not a privileged relation to objects but a complete absence of relationality as such due to its autoeroticism. In this sense, the subject’s willingness to accede to its alienation in language is the first creative act, a sacrifice that produces the objects that the subject cannot directly access. 27

🙂 Rothenberg makes a similar point with her garage analogy

Language is important not for its own sake but because it is the site of our founding sacrifice . We know that the subject has performed this act of sacrifice when we witness the subject functioning as a being of language, but the sacrifice is not an act that the subject takes up on its own.

mcgowan fantasy 2

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

The encounter with the traumatic gap in signification is inherently a political event because it exposes the contingency of the symbolic structure and makes evident the fundamental symbolic lie. At the point of this encounter, the symbolic law’s hold over the subject evaporates as its ultimate groundlessness and meaninglessness are revealed.

Subjects invest themselves in and submit to the symbolic law insofar as they believe in its ability to confer meaning and identity, and this is precisely what the encounter with the traumatic gap gives the lie to. Thus, fantasy’s ability to lure the subject toward the encounter with this trauma attests to the political importance of fantasy.

Fantasy assists public ideology by obscuring the dimension of the trauma, but in this very act of obscuring it, fantasy stages an encounter with it. In this way, the qualities that allow fantasy to assist ideology allow it to subvert ideology as well. 216

The political task as it might be envisioned by psychoanalytic thought entails not attempting to eliminate fantasy but transforming our relationship to it.

Fantasy functions in an ideological way when it works to cover over the structural necessity of absence within the social order, but fantasy appeals to us because it also conveys an experience of loss or absence that we can access nowhere else. One could say that we are never more inauthentic than when we fantasize but never more authentic at the same time. In order to provide the pleasure that comes from overcoming absence, fantasy must introduce and narrate loss. As it does so, it allows the fantasizing subject to experience the impossible loss that founds subjectivity itself. In every fantasy, this loss is enacted, whether implicitly or explicitly.

The political task involves fostering the recognition that we enjoy our fantasies for their depiction of loss rather than for the illusion of return. 221

mcgowan fantasy stavrakakis

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

Marxist claim: subjects must break the hold that fantasy has over them before they can take authentic political action and act according to their own class interests. Attacking fantasy thus becomes, for Western philosophy and for Marxism, the sine qua non of political activity. 207

🙂 McGowan disagrees with Stavrakakis, as McGowan thinks his notion of of traversing the fantasy is caught up, like the Marxists that Stavrakakis himself criticizes, in trying to rid oneself of fantasy, since fantasy hides the gap, we need, according to Stavrakakis, to make this gap apparent, be cool with it.

Quoting Stavrakakis “Fantasy negates the real by promising to ‘realise’it, by promising to close the gap between the real and reality, by repressing the discursive nature of reality’s production.”  Here, Stavrakakis sees the ideological dimension of fantasy, and psychoanalysis for him facilitates this recognition and provides a way to dissolve fantasy’s power.

This kind of psychoanalytic politics evinces the attitude toward fantasy that both modern philosophy and Marxism take up, and this attitude certainly seems faithful to psychoanalytic practice and its attempt to assist the subject in “traversing the fantasy.”

Fantasy offers the subject a transcendent experience, and this transcendence, despite its illusory quality, has a political content. It represents a moment at which the subject is no longer bound by the limitations of the symbolic structure that ordinarily constrain it. As such, this moment of fantasmatic transcendence poses for the subject a fundamental challenge to the authority of that symbolic structure. In fact, the radical import of fantasy is located in precisely the same feature that causes fantasy to further ideology: the illusions of fantasy keep subjects content with the ruling symbolic structure, but they also provide a venue for thinking beyond that structure.  209

That is to say, the politics of attacking fantasy does not allow us to transcend the limitation that the prevailing ideology places on us. Through offering us an illusory image of transcendence, fantasy takes us beyond the limitation that the symbolic order places on us, and in doing so, it opens us to possibilities that were previously foreclosed. It is through fantasy that one sees the possibility of the impossible. If psychoanalysis allows us to see the political effectiveness of fantasy, it doe so because it emphasizes how fantasy allows us to experience the impossible. 211

mcgowan enjoyment is veil not miniskirt

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

They see an enjoying other where there is nothing but the image of enjoyment. The suicide bomber sees Western women in revealing clothes and believes that the bare skin promises an opening to enjoyment, but this represents a failure to understand that enjoyment operates through limitations and barriers rather than through revelations and transgressions. One can never go far enough in the direction of transgression to reach real enjoyment. It is the veil, not the miniskirt, that is the true garment of enjoyment . 110

mcgowan pt 2: real encounter between enjoying subject and enjoying other

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

Traditional authority figures ruled through prohibition: they demanded that subjects sacrifice their enjoyment for admittance into the social order. This type of paternal authority governs through the establishing of distance — distance between the authority figure and the subject, as well as distance between the subject and enjoyment.

The new authority, however, abandons distance for the sake of proximity. Rather than confronting us with an impenetrable demand that remains out of our comprehension, he assaults us with displays of his enjoyment. 103-104

Whereas prohibition creates a social authority that exists at a distance from the subject — or that installs distance within all of the subject’s relationships – the absence of an explicit prohibition leaves the contemporary subject in the proximity of a real other.  🙂 And this is a good thing!  Get close to the real other.

The social field of prohibition is a terrain stripped of all enjoyment where everyone is reduced to the form of symbolic identity. Without this terrain (which is the contemporary situation), one encounters the other beyond its symbolic identity, the enjoying other. It is others listening to music with their headphones, talking loudly on a cell phone, eating excessive amounts of food, communicating in an unknown language, or emitting an unusual odor. Public displays of enjoyment occur with increasing frequency today because the dominant form of authority does not function through prohibition. Rather than violating the ruling social imperative, the public display of enjoyment heeds it.  The result is rampant anxiety.  Without the distance from the other requisite for desire, one experiences the anxiety produced by its presence.
104

The ethical position, for psychoanalysis, necessarily involves the embrace of this anxiety — and this is at once the path to enjoyment 105

🙂 embrace the anxiety, embrace this brush with the real other. Screw the symbolic! It only produces a desiring subject. No?

mcgowan neighbour other enjoyment

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

🙂 Here 100 pages in, the neighbor or other that enjoys, doesn’t include us and we get paranoid or at least uneasy. We feel insignificant, but when we go to sporting events and music concerts we identify with the enjoyment that we see thereby “avoid the trauma of the encounter with the other’s enjoyment.”

The neighbor or real other is the enjoying other.

The other’s mode of enjoyment marks the other as absolutely singular. Everything else about the other — emotions, thoughts, desires, achievements, and so on — can be understood and communicated through the order of signification or language. We can share all these experiences through the mediation of the signifier, which informs them in their very origin. The other’s enjoyment unlike everything else about the other, disturbs us when we encounter it because it does not take us into account. While the other’s symbolic identity includes us as the source of the look that validates it, the other’s enjoyment not only ignores us but seems to go so far as to occur at our expense. When we encounter the enjoying other, we experience our own isolation, our own absolute insignificance for the other.

The encounter with the enjoying other occurs at moments when a radical cut emerges between the other and the subject. Events such as basketball games and rock concerts allow spectators to identify with the enjoyment that they see and thereby to avoid the trauma of the encounter with the other’s enjoyment. In contrast, the shared laughter of people speaking a foreign language, the rumor of an orgy at a secret society, or the strange noises that a toddler hears behind the closed door of the parental bedroom do not provide any opening to the outsider. One hears the enjoyment without any possibility of partaking in it through the act of identification, and one almost inevitably imagines that one’s exclusion is part of the enjoyment. The distinction between an enjoying other enjoying itself at my expense and an enjoying other indifferent to me becomes negligible. The pertinent fact is the other’s enjoyment that doesn’t include me. 102

butler parting ways interview

A good interview by Ray Filar in July 2013.

Judith Butler on the Israel/Palestine conflict and her recent book Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism

RF: So is Parting Ways a call for transformation?

Establish a firm constitutional basis for equality for all citizens, regardless of what their religion might be, or their ethnicity or race.

End the occupation, which is illegal and an extension of a colonial project. I consider both the West Bank and Gaza to be colonised, even though Gaza is not occupied in the same way that the West Bank is. The Israeli government and military control all goods that pass in or out of that area, and they have restricted employment and building material that would allow Palestinians to rebuild homes and structures that were destroyed by bombardment.

Butler_Judith_July2013small

The third call is probably the most controversial, but I do think that a lot of thought has to be given to how the right of return might be conceptualised, and how that right might be honoured, whether it’s via resettlement or compensation. Some plans involve a return to areas where people have lived, not necessarily to the exact homes they lived in.

But people who have been made stateless by military occupation are entitled to repatriation, and then the question is to which state, or to what polity or area? Those who have had their goods taken away are entitled to compensation of some kind. These are basic international laws.

RF: In your final chapter you cite a Mahmoud Darwish poem that says “a possible life is one that wills the impossible.” You describe this as a paradox – could you explain it? 

JB: Well, there are people who believe in realpolitik and who say: “There’s never going to be one state, there’s never going to be equality, there’s never going to be peace…don’t fool yourself. If you want to be political, get concrete and see what adjustments you can make in the current regime”.

Then I just think, ok, what would it mean if we lived in a world in which no one held out for the possibility of substantial political equality, or for a full cessation of colonial practices – if no one held out for those things because they were impossible? People do scoff when you say right of return. I was at a meeting with Palestinians and Israelis where people said: “That will never happen.” So I said, “well it will not be taken off the table.”

In fact in politics, sometimes the thing that will never happen actually starts to happen. And there have to be people who hold out for that, and who accept that they are idealists and that they are operating on principle as opposed to realpolitik. If there were no such ideals then our entire political sensibility would be corrupted by this process.

And maybe one of the jobs of theory or philosophy is to elevate principles that seem impossible, or that have the status of the impossible, to stand by them and will them, even when it looks highly unlikely that they’ll ever be realised. But that’s ok, it’s a service.

What would happen if we lived in a world where there were no people who did that? It would be an impoverished world.

 

butler 2012

TDR: Special Consortium Issue: Precarity and Performance, 56.4 (Winter 2012)

And who can afford to live out a life in which one’s labor is disposable and the worth of one’s knowledge unrecognizable by prevailing market standards? The result is surely rage. But perhaps we can ask more precisely, how to make sense of bodies who assemble on the street, or
who occupy buildings, or who find themselves gathering in public squares or along the routes that cross city centers?

In some ways, the question is too large, since there are all kinds of assemblies: the revolutionary assemblies in Tunisia and Egypt, the demonstrations against educational cuts and the emerging hegemony of neoliberalism in higher education that we have seen in Athens, Rome, London, Wisconsin, and Berkeley, to name but a few. And then there are the demonstrations that are without immediate demands, such as Occupy Wall Street.

Then, of course, there are the riots in the UK, which are also without explicit demands but have a political significance that cannot be underestimated when we consider the extent of poverty and unemployment among those who were looting.

When people take to the streets together, they form something of a body politic, and even if that body politic does not speak in a single voice — even when it does not speak at all or make any claims — it still forms, asserting its presence as a plural and obdurate bodily life.

What, then, is the political significance of assembling as bodies, stopping traffic or claiming attention, or moving not as stray and separated individuals, but as a social movement of some kind?

This assembling of bodies does not have to be organized from on high (the Leninist presumption), nor does it need to have a single message (the logocentric conceit) to exercise a certain performative force in the public domain. The “we are here” that translates that collective bodily presence might be re-read as “we are still here,” meaning: “we have not yet been disposed of.”

Such bodies are precarious and persistent, which is why I think we have always to link precarity with forms of social and political agency where that is possible. When the bodies of those deemed “disposable” assemble in public view, they are saying, “We have not slipped quietly into the shadows of public life; we have not become the glaring absence that structures your public life.”

In a way, the collective assembling of bodies is an exercise of the popular will, and a way of asserting, in bodily form, one of the most basic presuppositions of democracy, namely, that political and public institutions are bound to represent the people, and to do so in ways that establish equality as a presupposition of social and political existence.

So when those institutions become structured in such a way that certain populations become disposable, are interpellated as disposable, deprived of a future, of education, of stable and fulfilling work, of even knowing what space one can call a home, then surely the assemblies fulfill another function, not only the expression of justifiable rage, but the assertion in their very social organization, of principles of equality in the midst of precarity.

Bodies on the street are precarious — they are exposed to police force, and sometimes endure physical suffering as a result. But those bodies are also obdurate and persisting, insisting on their continuing and collective “thereness” and, in these recent formations, organizing themselves without hierarchy, and so exemplifying the principles of equal treatment that they are demanding of public institutions.

In this way, those bodies enact the message, performatively, even when they sleep in public, or when they organize collective methods for cleaning the grounds they occupy, as happened in Tahrir and on Wall Street. If there is a “we” who assembles there, at that precise space and time, there is also a “we” that forms across the media, and that calls for the demonstrations and broadcasts its events.

Some set of global connections is being articulated, a different sense of the global from the “globalized market.” And some set of values is being enacted in the form of a collective resistance: a defense of our collective precarity and persistence in the making of equality and the many-voiced and unvoiced ways of refusing to become disposable.

I think it may be important to keep active the relationship between the various meanings of the precarious that both Isabell and Jasbir have laid out: (1) precariousness, a function of our social vulnerability and exposure that is always given some political form, and precarity as differentially distributed, and so one important dimension of the unequal distribution of conditions required for continued life;

but also (2) precaritization as an ongoing process, so that we do not reduce the power of precarious to single acts or single events. Precaritization allows us to think about the slow death that happens to targeted or neglected populations over time and space. And it is surely a form of power without a subject, which is to say that there is no one center that propels its direction and destruction.

If we only stayed with “precaritization,” I am not sure that we could account for the structure of feeling that Lauren has brought up. And if we decided to rally under the name of “the precarious” we might be making a social and political condition into an identity, and so cloaking some way that that form of power actually works.

So maybe precarious is what we feel, or would rather not feel, and its analysis has to be linked to the impetus to become impermeable, as so often happens within zones of military nationalism and rhetorics of security and self-defense.

But it seems also important to call “precarious” the bonds that support life, those that should be structured by the condition of mutual need and exposure that should bring us to forms of political organization that sustain living beings on terms of equality. It is not just that a single person is precarious by virtue of being a body in the world.

Although that is surely true, since accidents happen and some of us are then snuffed out or injured irreversibly. What seems more important than that form of existential individualism is the idea that a “bond” is flawed or frayed, or that it is lost or irrecoverable.

And we see this very prominently when, for instance, Tea Party politicians revel in the idea that those individuals who have failed to “take responsibility” for their own health care may well face death and disease as a result.

In other words, at such moments, a social bond has been cut or destroyed in a way that seeks to deny a shared precariousness and the very particular ethos and politics that ideally should follow from that — one that underscores global interdependence and objects to the radically unequal distribution of precarity (and grievability).

So I want to caution against an existential reading and insist that what is at stake is a way of rethinking social relationality. We can make the broad existential claim, namely, that everyone is precarious, and this follows from our social existence as bodily beings who depend upon one another for shelter and sustenance and who, therefore, are at risk of statelessness, homelessness, and destitution under unjust and unequal political conditions.

As much as I am making such a claim, I am also making another, namely, that our precarity is to a large extent dependent upon the organization of economic and social relationships, the presence or absence of sustaining infrastructures and social and political institutions.

In this sense, precarity is indissociable from that dimension of politics that addresses the organization and protection of bodily needs. Precarity exposes our sociality, the fragile and necessary dimensions of our interdependency.

Whether explicitly stated or not, every political effort to manage populations involves a tactical distribution of precarity, more often than not articulated through an unequal distribution of precarity, one that depends upon dominant norms regarding whose life is grievable and worth protecting, and whose life is ungrievable, or marginally or episodically grievable — a life that is, in that sense, already lost in part or in whole, and thus less worthy of protection and sustenance.

In my own view, then, we have to start from this shared condition of precarity (not as existential fact, but as a social condition of political life) in order to refute those normative operations, pervasively racist, that decide in advance who counts as human and who does not.

My point is not to rehabilitate humanism, but rather to struggle for a conception of ethical obligation that is grounded in precarity.

No one escapes the precarious dimension of social life — it is, we might say, our common non-foundation. Nothing “founds” us outside of a struggle to establish bonds that sustain us.

I thought to take up this question of the human since references to precarity sometimes rely on ideals of humanization and sometimes actually decenter the human itself. It is always possible to say that the affective register where precarity dwells is something like dehumanization.

And yet, we know that such a word relies on a human/animal distinction that cannot and should not be sustained. Indeed, if we call for humanization and struggle against “bestialization” then we affirm that the bestial is separate from and subordinate to the human, something that clearly breaks our broader commitments to rethinking the networks of life.

On the one hand, I want to be able to say that the “human” operates differentially, as Fanon clearly thought it did ([1952] 2008; [1961] 2005), such that some are humanized and others are not, and that this inequality must be opposed. But the critical task is to find a way to oppose that inequality without embracing anthropocentrism. So we have to rethink the human in light of precarity, showing that there is no human without those networks of life within which human life is but one sort of life.

Otherwise, we end up breaking off the human from all of its sustaining conditions (and in that way become complicit with the process of precaritization itself ). So the point is not to develop a conception of the human that would include every possible person first because such conceptions come to operate as exclusionary norms, and they are based on this breaking off of the human from its own material need, and the broader fields of life in which that need is implicated.

To think critically, usefully, about how the norm of the human is constructed and maintained requires that we take up a position outside of its terms, not as the nonhuman or even the anti-human, but rather precisely through thinking forms of sociality and interdependence, no matter how difficult, that are irreducible to uniquely human forms of life and so cannot be adequately addressed by any definition of human nature or the human individual. To speak about what is living in human life is already to admit that human ways of living are bound up with nonhuman modes of life.

Indeed, the connection with nonhuman life is indispensable to what we call human life. In Hegelian terms, if the human cannot be the human without the inhuman, then the inhuman is not only essential to the human, but is therefore the essence of the human. The point is not to simply invert the relations, but rather to gather and hold this merely apparent paradox together in a new thought of “human life” in which its component parts, “human” and “life,” never fully coincide with one another. In other words, if we have to hold onto this term “human life” in order to describe and oppose those situations in which “human life” is jeopardized, it will have to be done in such a way that the very conjunction — human life — will on occasion seek to hold together two terms that repel one another, or that work in divergent directions.

Human life is never the entirety of life, and life can never fully define the human — so whatever we might want to call human life will inevitably consist of a negotiation with this tension. Perhaps the human is the name we give to this very negotiation.

What seems to follow is this: while it is important to ask, Whose life qualifies as a human life?, we have also to ask the inverse question: What of human life is inevitably nonhuman?

If there is a human life that does not qualify as human, that has to be marked and opposed, then the question becomes: Through what modes of sociality is that opposition articulated?

And how do those modes of oppositional sociality redefine and resituate the human in light of animal and organic networks of life? There has to be a way to find and forge a set of bonds that can produce alliances over and against this grid of power that differentially allocates recognizability and uses the “human” as a term through which to institute inequality and unrecognizability.

The beginning of such alliances can be found in ethical formulations such as these: even if my life is not destroyed in war, something of my life is destroyed in war when other lives are destroyed in war, and when living processes and organisms are also destroyed in war. Since the existence of other lives, understood as any mode of life that exceeds me, is a condition of who I am, my life can make no exclusive claim on life (“I am not the only living thing”). At the same time, my own life is not every other life, and cannot be (“My life is not the same as other lives”).

In other words, to be alive is already to be connected with, dependent upon, what is living not only before and beyond myself, but before and beyond my humanness. No self and no human can live without this connection to a biological network of life that exceeds and includes the domain of the human animal.

This is why in opposing war, for example, one not only opposes the destruction of other human lives, but also the poisoning of the environment and the assault on living beings and a living world.

Ž critique of Butler October 2010

Žižek Penn Humanities Forum 13 Oct. 2010
pure surface, frozen image, positive ethical utopia of eternity, this image is real and at the same time virtual. Plato has to corected, a Platonic ideal is not deeper, just an ethical act when it occurs, this is eternity, this is the Real. The Real as virtual.

I am against the notion of Otherness Universal solidarity of struggle. India I had a wonderful time. I was in a taxi with my friend and the driver asked in his language to Ž’s friend … dirty joke as entry exchange of obscenity as moment of solidarity, we are not politically correct b.s., to have authenticate relation to other you need a surplus enjoyment, and then you can go on to talk seriously.   I don’t understand my culture, I don’t understand yours, ditto for you, but we have a common universality of struggle.  we are eternal.  this is a sublime moment.

Real as virtual
flesh, blood veins, repuslive body of decay, we take recourse in decaying body in order to avoid fascination of the Real.
real that emerges in the guise of an illusory spectacle, this is what we deny when we cut up chickens on stage, directly address the audience etc.
There is nothing transgressive talking about veins, shit underneath, aging bodies, gas, there is nothing sublime going on here.
Ethical Experience and critique of Judith Butler
This dimension of eternity is necessary to supply the big motive of pomo ethics, the precarious fragility of human being
caught in decentred representations, this precarious state of subjectivity which for Butler and Levinas accounts for zero level of all ethics.
The others face makes an unconditional demand on me. The encounter with the other which opens up the space for discourse, the Real of a violent encounter which throws me off my existence as a simple human animal.
Crux of the difference between Žižek and Butler
Desire is desire of the other.
dimension of ethical in psychoanalytic experience.
In my unconditional responsibility, I assume supremacy over the other (acts of charity, bombard us with images of starving children).  Butler explains which faces are worthy of grief and which are not, the pictures dying of napalm, helped end Vietnam war.  But Ž says images of sick and starving children, fragility of other staring back at you has the obverse, the moment the other doesn’t want to play this role, we all love this weak other, like Starbucks ads say we can save by buying a capuccino, but the minute they the other organize, they become terrorists.  Who cares about computers when kids are starving in Africa says Bill Gates.  This is an effort at depoliticization. Forget about politics and ideology, and get together, business and charity and don’t think.
Starbucks is today the example of Levinasian ethical paradigm
This vulnerable precarious other
Žižek goes into the animal that I am. Another gaze excluded by Levinas, the gaze of a wounded suffering animal.
dfas
Monstrosity of the HUMAN
What are we for animals?  This is not New Age b.s.  If you turn around the perspective and ask simply not what does it mean the gaze of the frightened animal, but what do you see in the animals gaze, you see your own monstrosity, this is what philosophers don’t want to talk about.  What?  DEATH DRIVE.
Kant: Man is an animal that needs a master, wild irrational excess of violent freedom in man, which animals don’t have, which is why animals don’t need education, it is nature “turned against itself”an excess of wild freedom.
What were the first Christians in the eyes of the Jewish establishment. What kind of monsters were they?

Locate properly our Monstrosity
So called fundamentalists are not egotists, but are ready to sacrifice their lives, same with capitalists, MEME, spreads like a computer virus, it programs its own retransmission, we humans are nonetheless are unwitting victims of a thought contagion.  Daniel Dennett too. we are dealing with a parasite that occupies the individual and uses it for its own purposes.  An idea can spread even if in the long term it can only bring destruction to its bearers.  CAPITAL: like a meme, they use us to reproduce and multiply itself, the productive force, the capitalist process of production is development of productive forces, capitalism is NOT sustained by greed of capitalists, greed is subordinated to impersonal power of capital.  What we need is MORE not less EGOTISM.  In Lacanian terms, individual greed and striving of capital to expand is difference between DESIRE AND DRIVE.  Krugman says most of would still follow the herd even knowing there would be a breakdown.  Memetic functioning of capitalist drive.
Fetishist Disavowal
Marx’s key insight remains valid  Freedom is not located in political sphere proper, are human rights respected, is there free judiciary etc.  The key to freedom for Marx is apolitical network of social relations from market to family, a change in social relations which appear apolitical, a change that can’t be done through elections in narrow sense, we don’t vote about who owns what, about relations in factory.  Radical changes in this domain have to be done outside legal sphere.  This limitation of legal democratic approach was shown in Obama’s reaction to BP oil spill.  Sue them! it is all held within a narrow legalistic frame. The true task is not COMPENSATION, but to change situation so that they won’t be in situation to cause damage
They tell you about global warming and then you go outside and see the sun and the birds chirping and you say “my god can this be true”
Humanity should get ready to live in a more plastic nomadic way.  Large population migrations will be necessary, desertification, global warming, large population movements who will organize it. Trans-state global mechanism to do it.
Sometimes the impossible happens: The Act  You do something which within the existing ideological universe appears impossible, but while doing it it creates its own possibility, through the act itself it becomes possible.  This is what we need.
Future: continuation of the present, full actualization of the tendencies already here.

The ultimate horizon of the future, some ecological breakdown, zero-point, a virtual attractor to which our reality if left to itself tends.  We have to break with this through acts, there is no future in future, there is something in avenir.

Avenir: what is to come, a break with the present

We should adopt catastrophe as virtual point.  Bring logic of existing system to end, there is ecological breakdown.  OK this is our destiny, but we can indefinitely postpone it, and slowly undermine it.  Admit the catastrophe as a destiny, but not as natural necessity, but as symbolic destiny, this does not mean it will really arrive, it is a dialectical point, destiny is inevitable, but what we can change is the inevitability of destiny.  If everything is predestined why work, why not sit and masterbate, no if there is a concept marxists should take from theology it is predestination.  It is predestined, we are not free within this predestiny but we are free to change destiny itself.

Every new work of art changes the entire past.   Kafka created his own predecessors.
Commodity Fetishism