Critchley on deconstitution of subjectivity Love is not some kind of tepid contract, nor is it an act of spiritual daring eviscerates excoriate the old self so that a new seslf can come into being, hue and hack at old self large enough for love to enter, an enrichment through impoverishment
How to Live has become the question How to Love.
On Violence
Author: logocentric
critchley humour superego love and desire
Superego I: Childish superego, takes on prohibitions of parent, you’re a worthless piece of …
Superego II: Humour This superego is potentially a friend, a tough friend, a friend that finds you ridiculous. This idea o
Whether the picture of Infinitely Demanding Ethics and Ethical Subject, infinite responsibility that divides me from myself leads to a form of self-hatred?
Sublimation not as tragic sublimation, but sumblimation as more assuaging form of sublimation, humour as self-mocking, I find myself laughably inauthentic, humour is a reminder of ones inauthenticity. The split is not masochistic self-flagellation, but a divided humourous self-relation.
One smiles at oneself and finds oneself ridiculous. Humour is the experience of the lack of self-coincidence. We do not coincide with ourselves. Humour is the eccentricity of ourself to ourselves.
Distinction between Being and Having: An experiential gap between being the one is, and relationship I HAVE to that BEING. Eccentricty, I’m eccentric with regards to myself, I’m not at ONE with MYSELF. I’m in a different orbit with regards to myself.
Humour is the enactment of that ECCENTRICITY. Human beings are NATURAL beings, we’re bodies, we’re animals. We have a self-relation to ourselves which is not one of coincidence. There is an uneasy disjunction between the body and the experience of THOUGHT. What is self-consciousness, the consciousness of self. But what is that, consciousness is already divided, I’m divided from myself as far as I reflect.
Black Sun of melancholia at centre of the comic human experience. Humour is anti-depressant
Conscience: is the internalization of the ethical demand that splits open the subject between itself and a demand that it cannot miss
Conscience is work of human being on itself, this work could be excessively demanding, Foucault has idea in late work, the idea of technology of self are forms of work upon the self. But Critchley is not with Foucault, there is this stoicism in Foucault a paganism, autonomy or idea of self-legislation. Foucault died and worked incredibly hard on vol 2 and 3 before he died. Monastic discipline in Christianity, what new form of discipline is Christianity with regards to the self.
With Christian subjectivity we get Abstention of sexual desire, and this leads to a deepening of the subject, a deepening of his subjective matrix. We see this most radically in Augustine who was a frat boy, a party animal until he converted to Christianity.
There were 2 wills raging within me will of the Flesh and will of the Spirit. From abstention of sexual practices we get a DEEPENING of subjectivity.
Critchley on Faith of the Faithless: Simone Weil, Song of Songs (Psalms)[??] Female mystics, what you find sublimation of discourse of carnal love into a discourse in relationship to the Divine. How the experience of love is described in these discourses. The links the experience of love has to absention of sexual practices and chastity.
Sexual practice takes on different character in female mystics. A key thinker here is Ann Carson’s DECREATION. How these women tell love. Love for Polette is an act of not a union, not a contract between 2 people, Love is the act of radical spiritual daring which annilates the self in order to give itself to another in love (God). This comes full circle to Lacan and psychoanalysis, because the ethics of psychoanalysis, for me, what does Lacan mean by jouissance and Feminine Jouissance, the difference between Phallic Jouissance and Feminine Jouissance. The former is male, the universal tendency to debasement in love. The phenomenon (freud) in my male patients is psychical impotence, physically capable but incapable with their wives, partners??? There is a split between IDEALIZATION and Debased object. in Phallic Jouissance the phallic jouissance is incapable of love, and desire is only in relation to debased object. Separation of LOVE and DESIRE.
What the hope is to put LOVE AND DESIRE IN THE SAME PLACE. THIS IS THE QUESTION.
What is Feminine Jouissance: Female mysticism: an experience of feminine jouissance connected to TRANSGRESSION, it is a different form of sublimation. Kierkegaard: Love as a radical act of self-impoverishment, of trying to give oneself over.
Here is Critchley article on Kierkegaard in the times on love
How does one reconcile oneself with one’s being towards death. No Critchley is on to a different question: Not how to live, which is about moratlity, but how to LOVE, which is about immortality.
There is something engaged there, eternal, immortal, what does being immortal mean? The discourse around the question of Love historically, continues to raise that question, Love as that experience that attempts to transgress that experience of finitute, and we can call it immortal.
Question about humour, when Jon Stewart uses it Freud and psychoanalysis is a deeply conservative project, and Lacan even more. Lacan, “I never spoke about freedom.” Reich, R.D. Laing revolted against this conservatism. Satire might just be that pressure value that regulates the social order, let them poke fun at those in power and nothing will be done. There is no inherent emancipatory potential in the comedic.
critchley on badiou
Critchley at EGS 2010
What is the Generic: is what is indiscernible in any situation, is what punctures a whole in any situation, the generic procedure in politics is what punctures a whole in a situation in relation to a demand, the demand of radical equality.
Politics: punctures a whole in a situation of inequality with a maxim of equality. Is an act which declares itself, and happens LOCALLY. Here Badiou opposes the anti-globalization movment, its too global, politics as tourism. This is his Maoism, politics is about controlling the place where you live, work, think.
Paris Commune: On March 18, 1871, a group of Parisian workers who belonged to National Guard and defending Paris against Prussian troops, refused to give back their guns to authorities. A commune is established on March 25, they begin to give a series of declarations.
May’68. There is a moment of confrontation, and the police back down. An organized armed force is what is needed.
Maoism: Chinese Cultural Revolution, what Badiou is interested in is that moment when there are intense power struggles, Mao is losing power, he mobilizes the Red Guards against revisionism and bureaucratisation of regime. What that unleashes is the Shanghai commune which is brief. It is that moment of the Shanghai Commune which is the re-enactment of the Paris Commune. It’s that moment of commune that compels Badiou.
Has there been a political event since the Paris Commune?? Discuss.
Presentation over Representation: elected representatives no good, he likes Rousseau, theatrical representation, in the dark with actors, Rousseau doesn’t like this, the only true theatre is the presentation by the people, in the open air where people are engaged in lively activities. This is PRESENTATION. Badiou’s idea of politics is based on presentation, not representation.
What is politics on democratic model? There are humans who are citizens who through mechanism of vote, represent their will, translated into representative who represent that will in a legislative body, parliament or congress. It is bizarre, this is not a particularly good way of doing politics.
Dictatorship: Dictatorship is the natural form of organization of political will, Citizenry Discipline. This goes back to classical arguments, AGAMBEN, Eusticium, the moment when the law was suspended. There was always a clause in ROman law for suspension of law, and the dictator governs until danger is removed and normal course of things can resume. No republicanism without dictatorship.
Dictatorship is permitted in a state of Exception. In last century, do we exist in state of rule or state of exception? Normal politics is governance of polity by rule of law, for Carl Schmitt this is dreadful, the operation of state has to be subordinated to operation of law, subordinate to interpretation and philosophers, his concept of political overrides any legal authority, this means dictatorship. In Benjamin, state of exception has become the rule. All that Lenin is doing, think about implausibility of this, Feb 1917, there was almost revolution, between this and October Revolution he writes a book: studies the term dictatorship of proletariat in State and Revolution. Dictatorship is justified was legitimate.
Do we want to go down road of dictatorship. This makes Critchley nervous.
Politics for Badiou is the Commune. Subjective transformation, the rupture. This brief moment of politics without party and state. This is his understanding of 1968, what drives him, WHAT IS NOVELTY, WHAT IS CREATION.
Trinity of Concepts: EVENT FIDELITY TRUTH. Event is the moment of rupture. the 4 members of National Guard refuse to give guns back, Fidelity, is what persists in looking at things from standpoint of Event. Truth: is what Fidelity constructs in a situation, in relation to the event.
Event: retrospectively, something happens, fidelity constructs truths, which retrospectively articulates and names the Event. Something happens, persistance with it, constructs a Truth which retrospectively articulates the EVENT.
The event can have an obscure character, obscure moment, which fidelity and truth will retrospectively name and organize it.
Events are retroactively articulated, politics is thinking about the presence int erms of retroactive acts of intervention. The history of leftist politics since the Commune have been acts of re-interpretation of that Event.
After Paris and Shanghai Commune and 1968, politics does not happen. Politics is RARE, its infrequent, it is not continuity but the interruption of continuity. This is the PLATO in Badiou. What happens in the Republic, we have a political situation, 5th Century Athens, where 3 people leave the city and wonder down to the port and dream of another city and we have a record of that. But this is an impossible City, for Badiou the Impossible is something to be affirmed, but there is also something impossible about this impossibility (is it pessimissm?)
Evental Site: there is an evental site Paris, in the case of the commune, or Shanghai, but that evental site becomes the local space for the articulation of the general will, it is addressed to all. An event is addressed in principal to everyone, to all human beings.
butler vulnerability
Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance: Feminism & Social Change
Women Creating Change
Istanbul Workshop, September 16-19, 2013
Co-directors: Judith Butler and Zeynep Gambetti
There is always something both risky and true in claiming that women are especially vulnerable. The claim can be taken to mean that women have an unchanging and defining vulnerability, and that kind of argument makes the case for paternalistic protection. If women are especially vulnerable, then they seek protection, and it becomes the responsibility of the state or other paternal powers to provide that protection. On the model, feminist activism not only petitions paternal authority for special dispensations and protections, but affirms that inequality of power situates women in a powerless position and, by implication, men in a more powerful one, or it invests state structures with the responsibility for facilitating the achievement of feminist goals. In yet other instances, women struggle to establish practices (self-defense) and institutions (battered women’s shelters) that seek to provide protection without enlarging paternalistic powers. Continue reading “butler vulnerability”
For Lacan the crucial question is how can we preserve within our symbolisations a space for the recognition of the impossibility of their closure?
The Lacanian system is perhaps the closest we can get to a discourse opening itself up to what exceeds its limits.
Besides, the ethics of psychoanalysis, as formulated in the Lacanian tradition, point to the possibility and the ethical superiority of a symbolic recognition and institutionalisation of the political moment of real lack and this opens a huge field of creation of which the democratic revolution constitutes only one exampleperhaps the most important.
Even if this move is possibleencircling the unavoidable political modality of the realis it really desirable, is it ethically and politically satisfactory?
the ethics of the real entails a recognition of the irreducibility of the real and an attempt to institutionalise social lack. Thus it might be possible to achieve an ethically and politically satisfactory institution of the social field beyond the fantasy of closure which has proved so problematic, if not catastrophic. In other words, the best way to organise the social might be one which recognises the ultimate impossibility around which it is always structured.
stavrakakis the political
The unmitigated real provokes anxiety, and this in turn gives rise to never-ending, defensive, imaginary constructs.
Following from this, all human productions [Society itself, culture, religion, science] can be understood in the light of that structural failure of the symbolic in relationship to the real. It is the moment of this failure, the moment of our encounter with the real, that is revealed as the moment of the political par excellence in our reading of Lacan.
It is the constitutivity of this moment in Lacanian psychoanalysis that proves our fantasmatic conception of the socio-political institution of society as a harmonious totality to be no more than a mirage.
It is this traumatic moment of the political qua encounter with the real that initiates again and again a process of symbolisation, and initiates the ever-present hegemonic play between different symbolisations of this real. 73
This play leads to the emergence of politics, to the political institution of a new social fantasy (or of many antagonistic fantasies engaged in a struggle for hegemony) in the place of the dislocated one, and so on and so forth.
It is the lack created by dislocation that causes the desire for a new discursive articulation. It is this lack created by a dislocation of the social which forms the kernel of the political as an encounter with the Lacanian real.
Every dislocatory event leads to the antagonistic articulation of different discourses that attempt to symbolise its traumatic nature, to suture the lack it creates. In that sense the political stands at the root of politics, dislocation at the root of the articulation of a new sociopolitical order, an encounter with the real moment of the political at the root of our symbolisation of political reality. 74
stavrakakis dislocation the real
The objective in Lacan includes the symbolic Other as a lacking structure, the pre-symbolic real which escapes this Other and the symbolic and fantasmatic ways through which we are compensated for this lack and attempt to repress it, to make it bearable. Only thus is social reality constructedas an attempt to master the real through symbolisation.
On the one hand, acknowledging the symbolic and fantasmatic dimensions of this and every reality disrupts essentialist objectivism while, on the other hand, recognising, within the objective level, the trace of an unrepresentable kernel of the extra-discursive real disrupts constructionist objectivism.
To return to our example, it is now possible to identify two different natures: nature as reality, as a social construction, and nature as real, as that which is always located outside the field of construction and has the ability to dislocate it by revealing its limits.
When we encounter the real of nature … when what was excluded from our symbolisations of reality is resurfacing, then our constructions are dislocated. The real dislocates social objectivity. 69
stavrakakis the real
As soon as we recognise the centrality of dislocation in our experience, we can easily understand the play between possibility and impossibility governing the field of social construction. If it is construction that makes possible the sedimentation of social reality, this reality is always threatened by an encounter with impossibility, with the part of the real that escapes the boundaries of construction.
… dislocation and the lack it creates in our representations of reality, is exactly what stimulates our new attempts to construct new representations of this real.
This play between possibility and impossibility, construction and dislocation, is structurally equivalent to the play between identification and its failure which marks the subjective level. However, this argumentation is still located at the level of a certain phenomenology of the social.
How can we further approach the status of this element which stimulates our desire to represent it through social construction, but which, due to the impossibility to represent it fully, returns to dislocate all our social constructions?
It is here that Lacanian theory can be of great help. In Lacan, the cause of this play between possibility and impossibility is, of course, the real. This is then the paradox of Lacans relation to constructionist argumentation. Lacan is not a mere constructionist because he is a real-ist; that is to say, in opposition to standard versions of constructionism Lacanian theory of symbolic meaning and fantasmatic coherence can only make sense in its relation to the register of a real which is radically external to the level of construction.
This Lacanian real-ism is, however, alien to all other standard versions of epistemological realism in the sense that this real is not the ultimate referent of signification, it is not something representable, but exactly the opposite, the impossible which dislocates reality from within.
The real does not exist in the sense of being adequately represented in reality; its effects however are disrupting and changing reality, its consequences are felt within the field of representation. 69
stavrakakis 1999 dislocation and the real
Indeed it is possible to trace in constructionist argumentation a certain moment when`something external to social construction makes its presence felt. It is the moment in which a problem or a crisis dislocates our social constructions. … This conceptualisation of the moment of the meaningless event, of the accident or the disaster that destroys a well-ordered social world and dislocates our certainties,
representing a crisis in which we experience the limits of our meaning structures, is something we cannot neglect. 67
It is only in Laclaus argumentation that this moment of negativity acquires central importance. What Laclau shows is that the level of the
objective, social reality itself as a sedimentation of meaning, exists in an irreducible dialectic with the moment(s) of its own dislocation. Social reality is eccentric to itself because it is always threatened by a radical exteriority which dislocates it.
Furthermore, this moment of dislocation is exactly what causes the articulation of new social constructions that attempt to suture the lack created by dislocation.
Since dislocation denotes the failure and subversion of a system of representation (be it imaginary or symbolic) by not being representable, since dislocation creates a lack in the place of a discursive order, dislocation can be conceived as an encounter with the real in the Lacanian sense of the word.
The lack, however, created by dislocation produces the need (rather the desire in our Lacanian vocabulary) for its filling. Hence the dual character of dislocations: If on the one hand, they threaten identities, on the other, they are the foundation on which new identities are constituted (Laclau, 1990 New Reflections:39). 67-68
The real is exactly what destroys, what dislocates this fantasmatic reality, what shows that this reality is lacking. 68
If reality constitutes the symbolically constructed and fantasmatically supported part of objectivity, the real also belongs to the objective level, it is what exceeds the domesticated portion of the objective. It is exactly what accounts for the failure of all symbolic representations of objective reality: the object which accounts for the failure of every neutral-objective representation (Ž Plague of Fantasies 1997:214). 68
The real is not
an ultimate referent of external reality but the limit which hinders the neutral
representation of external (symbolic) reality (Ž Plague 1997:214).
It is thus revealed in the failure of symbolisation itself. It is the radical externality which does not permit the
internalisation of the socially constructed reality, it is exactly what keeps identification from resulting in full identity.
Nonetheless, the real cannot be conceived independently of signification: it is revealed in the inherent failure/blockage of all signification, it is
exactly what reveals all symbolic truth to be not-all, it can only be thought as the internal limit of the symbolic order. The real cannot be symbolised per se but is shown in the failure of every attempt to symbolise it (Ž Plague:217). It is an internally shown exteriority surfacing at the intersection of symbolisation with whatever exceeds its grasp. 68
Stavrakakis 1999 why do we need an exteriority, a real
The blind spot of constructionism … is that on the one hand it reduces everything to the level of construction and, on the other hand, it occupies a metalinguistic or essentialist position outside construction.
Thus, in order to de-essentialise constructionist argumentation we need to relate the production of reality constructions to something external to the level of construction itself.
This exteriority, however, cannot be a transparent exteriority, a new essence which is objectively accessible. If that was the case we would have a return to traditional essentialism and objectivism. In other words, this outside cannot be a base on which the superstructure of reality constructions is erected.
It has to be an exteriority impossible to represent, to construct at the level of symbolic meaning, but also impossible to avoid. …
But why is that exteriority necessary? It is not only because otherwise social constructionism becomes essentialist. It is also because any tautological entrapment into the world of social construction is incapable of providing an account of the cause that governs the productions of social constructions of reality.
The crucial question that social constructionism is incapable of answering is the following: if the level of construction is engulfing the totality of the real, what stimulates the production of new social constructions?
This cause has to be something external to the level of construction itself otherwise the argument enters into a tautological spiral. We have established then so far that in order to de-essentialise the constructionist argument and reveal the logic that governs its production and articulation, without however reoccupying a traditional essentialist position, we have to locate an exteriority which serves as the cause of our social constructions, an exteriority which is in itself unrepresentable but constitutive of the play of representation.
What can this element be? Answer: Dislocation
Stavrakakis 1999, 66-67
fantasy sinthome
If fantasy is the support that gives consistency to what we call reality (Ž Sublime Obj:49) on the other hand reality is always a symptom (Ž 1992). Here we are insisting on the late Lacanian conception of the symptom as sinthome.
In this conception, a signifier is married to jouissance, a signifier is instituted in the real, outside the signifying chain but at the same time internal to it. This paradoxical role of the symptom can help us understand the paradoxical role of fantasy. Fantasy gives discourse its consistency because it opposes the symptom (Ragland-Sullivan, 1991:16). Hence, if the symptom is an encounter with the real, with a traumatic point that resists symbolisation, and if the discursive has to arrest the real and repress jouissance in order to produce reality, then the negation of the real within fantasy can only be thought in terms of opposing, of stigmatising the symptom. This is then the relation between symptom and fantasy.
The self-consistency of a symbolic construction of reality depends on the harmony instituted by fantasy.
This fantasmatic harmony can only be sustained by the neutralisation of the symptom and of the real, by a negation of the generalised lack that crosses the field of the social. (Stavrakakis 1999, 64-65)
But how is this done? If social fantasy produces the self-consistency of a certain construction it can do so only by presenting the symptom as an alien, disturbing intrusion, and not as the point of eruption of the otherwise hidden truth of the existing social order (Ž 1991 Looking Awry:40). The social fantasy of a harmonious social or natural
order can only be sustained if all the persisting disorders can be attributed to an alien intruder. […]
When, however, the dependence of fantasy on the symptom is revealed, then the play — the relation — between the symptom and fantasy reveals itself as another mode of the play between the real and the symbolic/imaginary nexus producing reality. (65)
Stavrakakis on Lack
In other words it is the signifier as such, as instituted through symbolic castration, that introduces the idea of recapturing fullness, a fullness which is desired exactly because it is posited as lost/sacrificed. This fullness is in fact impossible to recapture because it was never part of ourselves.
Even the pre-symbolic real in which nothing is lacking should not be conceived as a stage of fullness. In Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis it is clearly stated that the real should not be understood as a raw and opaque mass (seminar of 2 December 1964). As Lacan also points out in his seminar on Anxiety, the non-lacking character of the real does not mean that the real is always full. On the contrary, it is plausible to conceive the real as full of holes. What it means is that it does not lack anything (seminar of 20 March 1963). There is no lack or absence in the real (II:313).
Lack is introduced then at the intersection of the real with the symbolic. It is the symbolic that entails lack.
Lack emerges in and through the symbolisation of the real. Before the introduction of the symbolic there is no lack and thats why we know that the real is not lacking; if it was lacking, lack would be introduced without the symbolic or before the introduction of the symbolic.
The real is related to lack exactly because in the process of symbolisation, the signifier produces the signified, creating the imaginary illusion of attaining the lost real. Sooner or later, the illusory character of this fixation of meaning is revealed. If the real is the domain of the inexpressible, the domain of death and inexpressible enjoyment (jouissance) then its presence, the encounter with the real, can only have as a consequence the revelation of the lack of our imaginary/symbolic constructs, of their inability to represent death and jouissance, to be real. (Stavrakakis 1999, 44)