Author: logocentric

ontogenetics phylogenetics

Phylogenetics:
In biology, phylogenetics is the study of evolutionary relationships among groups of organisms. A phylogenetic tree or evolutionary tree is a branching diagram or “tree” showing the inferred evolutionary relationships among various biological species or other entities based upon similarities and differences in their physical and/or genetic characteristics.

Ontogenetics:
The origin and development of an individual organism from embryo to adult. Also called ontogenesis; the entire sequence of events involved in the development of an individual organism.

subject designates that X

The “negation of negation” is not a kind of existential sleight of hand by means of which the subject pretends to put everything at stake, but effectively sacrifices only the inessential; rather, it stands for the horrifying experience which occurs when, after sacrificing everything considered “inessential”, I suddenly realize that the very essential dimension for the sake of which I sacrificed the inessential is already lost.

The subject does save his skin, he survives the ordeal, but the price he has to pay is the loss of his very substance, of the most precious kernel of his individuality. More precisely: prior to this “transubstantiation” the subject is not a subject at all, since “subject” is ultimately the name for this very “transubstantiation” of substance which, after its dissemination, “returns to itself”, but not as “the same”.

It is all too easy, therefore, to be misled by Hegel’s notorious propositions concerning Spirit as the power of “tarrying with the negative”, that is, of resurrecting after its own death: in the ordeal of absolute negativity, the Spirit in its particular selfhood effectively dies, is over and done with, so that Spirit which “resurrects” is not the Spirit which previously expired. The same goes for the Resurrection: Hegel emphasizes again and again that Christ dies on the Cross for real – he returns as the Spirit of the community of believers, not in person. So, again, when, in what is perhaps the most famous single passage from his Phenomenology, Hegel asserts that the Spirit is capable of “tarrying with the negative”, of enduring the power the negative, this does not mean that in the ordeal of negativity the subject has merely to clench his teeth and hold out – true, he will lose a few feathers, but, magically, everything will somehow turn out OK. … Hegel’s whole point is that the subject does NOT survive the ordeal of negativity: he effectively loses his very essence, and passes over into his Other.

One is tempted to evoke here the science-fiction theme of changed identity, when a subject biologically survives, but is no longer the same person – this is what the Hegelian transubstantiation is about, and of course, it is this very transubstantiation which distinguishes Subject from Substance: “subject” designates that X which is able to survive the loss of its very substantial identity, and to continue to live as the “empty shell of its former self”. [Indivisible Remainder 1996 226-27]

enjoyment and the law

Adam Kotsko writes

Christian Thorne has a really great essay on Zizek up, which promises to be the first of three. He argues that the main point of Zizek’s work is to provide a way out of the deadlock of enjoyment on the left — neither the ascetic and over-intellectualized Old Left nor the loosey-goosey, sexually liberated New Left have managed to deal with this problem adequately. Though Thorne doesn’t use the Lacanian lingo, the way he poses Zizek’s solution can be described essentially in terms of the shift from desire (which is based on the law’s inherent transgression) to drive (an autonomous jouissance that does not need any reference to authority to sustain it).

It’s the familiar formula that Zizek’s been hammering away at from the beginning: transgression (rebellion, sexual deviancy, even knowing cynical distance) gets us nowhere, because the law has already factored that in. Early on, he tended to emphasize the more truly subversive power of over-identifying with the “official” ideology without reference to its obscene supplement of enjoyment, and in his later work, it seems that he’s tended more toward the inscrutable inertia of drive — which seems to him to be the only point of “leverage” for starting something new (i.e., something that is not conceived in terms of the order it’s supposedly rebelling against).

I think it’s at this point that we can see clear parallels between Agamben and Zizek, both in their diagnosis of the structure of the law (which includes its own transgression/exception) and their attempt to get beyond rebellion or resistence and simply build something new (either conceived positively in terms of drive or negatively as in the messianic “as if not” strategy). If this comparison holds, then it may explain why I’ve been so attracted to both figures, even though many have viewed them as coming from very incompatible places.

 Here are the highlights of Christian’s essay:

So here, for easy reference, is his animating claim: that every political formation, in addition to generating the law, generates a particular more or less expected way of violating the law. Any set of prohibitions comes with its own accustomed transgressions, a particular way in which Law-in-the-abstract allows itself to be broken. Different laws produce different lawbreakers or different modes of rebellion. And what keeps us attached to a given political order—what makes us loyal to it—is not the law, but the transgression. We like living in a particular society because of the illicit pleasures that it affords us—because, that is, it grants us a particular set of turn-ons, and it does so not by openly trading in these latter, but precisely by seeming to disallow them.

Following the law is one path to subservience; breaking it is a second. Transgression, in fact, produces in us the more powerful political obligation; it is the device by which a governing order takes hold of us for good.

law by itself couldn’t possibly work; the law alone can never be lawlike in its effects, for if some authority genuinely denied us all pleasure, we would take measures to abolish it. But authority doesn’t deny us pleasures; it creates new ones and can become, indeed, just another target for our ardor. [great warmth of feeling; fervor; intense devotion; zeal]

Enjoyment, to bottom-line it, is not the heroic alternative to discipline and convention. It is discipline’s sidekick and in some sense the authentically nomian term — the secret bearer of law’s regularities and compulsions.

The libido is the vehicle of our subjection and thus the answer to why most of us, even those of us in the habit of striking defiant poses, don’t seek fundamental political changes or seek them only half-heartedly: Change would disrupt whatever erotic bargain we’ve quietly worked out with the prevailing order.

Žižek’s way of putting all this is to say that every political system — every code of law or tablet of rules — comes with an “obscene supplement”; he also calls it “the inherent transgression.” And his single greatest talent as an intellectual is to survey some corner of the social scene and find the smudge of obscenity that holds it together, to smoke out its anchoring enjoyment, to help you see how people are getting off on things that they don’t seem to be getting off on.

Reich perceived a basic contradiction in the political constellation of the early 1930s: The fascists successfully appealed to people at the level of pleasure and desire, even while implementing punishment. The socialists, meanwhile, had big plans for emancipating their fellows in several different senses at once, and yet comported themselves according to the petty morality of the well-cushioned parlor. Fascism, in short, broke through in Germany because it was a lot more fun — it seemed to run on expanded erotic energies — whereas the Left, as ever, preferred to educate its potential comrades in the gross national product of India while asking them pointedly whether they fully understood that children made their shoes. Marxists, Reich concluded, needed to buy some guitars; they would have to write some better tunes.

Žižek’s sense is that we almost all engage in unusual behavior—sexual or at least eroticized behavior—to some degree. The problem is that nearly all of that behavior takes place with reference back to authority or to the law. We develop most of our sexual quirks as a way of taking a position with regard to the Master; we carry some notion of authority around in our heads, and the ways in which we like to get off are almost always predicated on what we believe to be true about the people in charge. So Žižek does indeed reject as facile the usual anti-authoritarian thrust of radical psychoanalysis, convinced as it is that we can forthrightly strip down and hump our way to emancipation, but it does so only to reinstate that anti-authoritarianism in another, more difficult place.

Psychoanalysis in this mode doesn’t care what you get up to — it really doesn’t care how you take your pleasures — provided that these make no reference to the Master, provided, that is, that they aren’t even a rebellion against him. And to that extent there is one sense in which Žižek’s Lacanian-Hegelian system, otherwise committed to the ideas of negation and the lack, is fully invested in establishing a positivity or simple fact. Your task is to figure out the peculiar way you happen to desire when authority is entirely removed from the picture, when, that is, you no longer take the Master to be peeping from behind the curtains.

This, then, is the reason to go into analysis: The analyst has to be on the lookout for the one thing you desire — or the one way you desire, the one way you organize your satisfaction — that is not relational, not a position over and against bosses and fathers. Such is the knack that any good analyst has to develop: the ability to discriminate between Master-directed kink and kink that is truly your own. The bargain that analysis will make with you is that any enjoyment that survives the sundering of your psyche from authority is yours to keep. It’s just that most of your libidinal habits are not going to survive that sundering—or will be transformed by it into new ones.

Žižek, following Lacan, calls any enjoyment thus liberated a sinthome, which, in the original French, isn’t anything more than an arch misspelling of and murky pun upon the word symptom. The Lacanian point is that the enjoyment that you take home with you at the end of a successful course of psychoanalysis is likely to look like and sound like a symptom — fevered, morbid, a “deviation from normal functioning,” the clinicians like to say. But it won’t actually be a symptom, or it will be a symptom with a difference, a symptom that is not a symptom. Analysis, in other words, aims not to cure you or return you to normal functioning, but to help you find your way to a happier disorder. Žižek’s hunch is that most people will leave analysis freakier than when they went into it.

So can we tell the difference between the raunch that unshackles us and the raunch that fixes us in place? This is one of the more pungent questions that a political psychoanalysis prompts us to ask. For Wilhelm Reich was, of course, in one sense absolutely correct. It is not hard to agree that fascism succeeded in large part by devising new gratifications for its adherents. And perhaps it was only predictable that the Western Left would decide to take Reich’s advice and compete on that ground and help build consumer society’s all-singing-all-dancing-24-hour gaudy show.

But psychoanalysis allows us to take stock of where we rock’n’rollers remain least at ease—or, indeed, to describe with some precision the new forms of anxiety that have come to the fore in an age of sex-without-taboos. Žižek’s argument is, in this respect, best understood as proposing a new way to periodize recent history—a new way, that is, of identifying the novelty of the present. It bears repeating: If Žižek is right, then in the political organization of enjoyment, obscenity has always played some kind of role. Even public life organized around strong authority figures used to summon the obscene supplement in its support.

Even public life organized around strong authority figures used to summon the obscene supplement in its support. But we’ll want to at least consider the possibility that in our version of consumer capitalism, the obscene supplement has become primary and so largely supplanted what it had once been asked merely to buoy. The transgression has moved into the position of the master and so instituted a kind of authoritative obscenity. This marks a comprehensive change in what we might call the regime of enjoyment. Again: What keeps you attached to a society is the forms of deviant pleasure that it winks at.

In nearly every social order that has ever existed, there has been law: state law or generally recognized prohibitions, and some people get off on breaking the law, while other people get off on the law itself, get off on enforcing it, get off on playing the cop or exasperated schoolmarm.

What sets the present apart is that the prohibitions have to some considerable extent faded, which has produced a system of transgression without law or perhaps even transgression as law—what Žižek calls “the world of ordained transgression” — a society of compulsory pleasure in which you are perpetually enjoined to blow your load.

You can think of this, if you like, as the flip side to another of Reich’s signature arguments. Sex-pol claimed that if you raised children in a sexually liberated way, refusing to drum inhibition into them, then they would not be willing later in life to go along with authority, because they would not be in the habit of giving up what was important to their happiness. They would be able to resist the call to renunciation, and if authority threatened their enjoyment directly, they would mutiny. Libidinally unpoliced children would become anti-authoritarian adults. The simple corollary of this argument is a catastrophe that Reich never even paused to consider—the plausibility of which advanced capitalism endlessly demonstrates—which is that if authority doesn’t threaten such people’s enjoyment, they will never rebel.

If the social order gives people abundant opportunities to get off, it can abuse and exploit them in every other way.

 

outwith calum neill

I’m really pleased to hear you’ve found my book and that you are enjoying it. It’s curious that among all the Lacanian terminology that it is always outwith which snags people.

It’s a Scottish word but one which is apparently spreading in usage. Basically it means something close to ‘beyond’.

I prefer it to beyond in that it doesn’t carry the implication of exceeding or surpassing, doesn’t suggest a value relation, at least not in that simple sense.

You could also see it as close to ‘outside of’ but this seems clumsier and lacks the juridical sense that outwith carries, as in being beyond the scope or reach of something.

Partly too I wanted to use a word which would not be over or comfortably familiar to the reader in the hope that it would snag the eye and force the reader to think the relationship in question further.

Countdown

8:20 PM 09/06/2013
Listening to House

Wo Es war, soll Ich werden.
Where there was desire there shall I be, the subject should assume the object cause of desire, the subject should place itself in the place of the cause of desire, “the subject’s situating of itself as the cause of its own desire” 245 Neill

Now its Trance
Calum says this, “The ethical moment is purely subjective and, as Lacan stresses, one will have to pay for it. It is not already, and cannot already, be formulated in the symbolic order as one would encounter it but, rather, it entails the separation from and return to and, thus, change in and in relation to, the symbolic.” 247-8

This is what I’m getting from Calum. His disagreement with the Slovenian School regards the ethics of the Real, which Neill rejects. Ethics for Neill must include a role for the symbolic register. You can’t just do ethics out of the symbolic, in the Real, cause then how do you talk about it, it is without meaning if it remains ‘stuck’ there in the Real.

But I’m not convinced with Calum’s version of Lacanian ethics. He’s big on desire; emphasizes the conjunction of the symbolic and the Real. He says that ethics is about desire on that dangerous precipice between the two registers. But is desire radical? His emphasis on desire instead of the Real, the Real in his theory plays really a marginal role, whereas I tend to think a radical ethics places the Real center stage. I think this is how Terry Eagleton understands Lacanian ethics notwithstanding the fact that he is not a fan.

Hardstyle whatever that is
9:37 PM  Ok. Now I’m reading Terry Eagleton. I mean I read his book on ethics 2 years ago but I should have take real careful notes cause I don’t remember what he said bozo.  I am boze on this.  So here is an article I’m reading and I promise to be better.
Avatars of the Real I like this term.  However Eagleton concludes with a total rejection of what he considers to be a Parisian disdain for the everyday subtext which really all an ethics of the Real is a cover.

Hegel universal particular Strella Panos Koutras

June 2013 article by Žižek in IJZS Where Ž first mentions Strella.
Guardian Blog on Strella and family values

This is the missing chapter really, of Butler’s Antigone’s Claim

Žižek quotes from Marx

a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labor-power, are constrained only by their own free will. They contract as free agents, and the agreement they come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself. The only force that brings them together and puts them in relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interests of each.

Strella takes perversion to its ridiculously sublime end. Early in the film, Yiorgos traumatically discovers and accepts that the woman he desires is a transvestite. Strella simply tells Yiorgos: “I am a tranny. Do you have a problem with that?”, and they go on kissing. What follows is Yiorgos’s truly traumatic discovery that Strella knowingly seduced his father. His reaction is the same as when Fergus sees Dil’s penis in The Crying Game: disgust, escape in panic, wandering the city unable to cope with what he has discovered. Similarly to The Crying Game, A Woman’s Way depicts trauma being overcome through love; a happy family with a small son emerges.

However, the hero’s discovery that his transvestite lover is his son is not the actualisation of some unconscious fantasy; his disgust is only because he is surprised by an external event. We should resist the temptation to interpret the story as father-son incest.

There is nothing to interpret: the film ends with a completely normal and genuine happiness for the family. As such, it serves as a test for the advocates of Christian family values: embrace this authentic family of Yiorgos, Strella and the adopted child, or shut up about Christianity.

A proper sacred family emerges at the end of the film, a family something like God the father living with Christ – the ultimate gay marriage and parental incest.

The only way to redeem Christian family values is to redefine or reframe the idea of a family to include situations like the one at the end of Strella. In short, Strella is an Ernst Lubitsch film for today, for the “trouble in paradise” when you discover that your gay lover is your son. Even if the family violates all divine prohibitions, they will always find “a small room vacant in the annex” of heaven, as the good-humoured devil says to the hero of Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait.

neill lacanian subjectivity 2011 pt1

Neill, Calum. Lacanian Ethics and the Assumption of Subjectivity 2011

Against what one might characterise as the ‘common-sense’ notion that language (pre)exists as a tool to be utilised by a subject (or person) in the expression of their (pre-linguistic) needs, wants, beliefs etc., the notion of subjectivity in Lacan’s work posits a subject who only ever comes to be anything at all because of the signifying chain of language, because of the (pre)existence of a symbolic order in which it comes to operate.

What is crucial here is that, if it is the order of signifiers which takes logical precedence, then signifiers are not arsenal to be deployed between subjects, or, to oversimplify, words are not carriers of meaning between people, but, rather, it is the subject which is constituted in the movement of signifiance between signifiers.  45

It is in this sense that Lacan borrows Hegel’s dictum that ‘the symbol manifests itself first of all as the murder of the thing’ and adds that ‘this death constitutes in the subject the eternalization of his desire’ (Ibid.).

An example of this notion of the signifier representing the subject for another signifier is already apparent in Freud when he writes, in A Project for a Scientific Psychology, of a soldier’s willingness to sacrifice himself for his country’s flag or, as Freud emphasises it, for ‘a many coloured scrap of stuff’ (Freud, 1966: 349). Here, the soldier is clearly not concerned with the thing of the flag, the flag as material object. The flag only assumes its significance in relation to another signifier, in this instance, the ‘fatherland’ (Ibid.). The soldier, the subject, is given his subjectivity through the mediating representation between one signifier, ‘the flag’, and another, ‘the fatherland’. 45

Ž interview 2008

Unbehagen and the subject: An interview with Slavoj Žižek  Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 15.4. 2010. 418–428

If beneath what you are asking me now is the big question, where does Freud really stand with regard to politics, I think the answer is pretty clear if you really look. I think Freud’s position was, to put it very simply, that psychoanalysis allows us, when you analyse a society, to formulate, to articulate Unbehagen in der Kultur literally, the uneasiness in culture, but more famously translated as Civilization and Its Discontents.

It does this basic symptomal job of showing how the failures, the pathological malfunctions, are symptomatic of the whole. I think that, for a true Freudian, it is totally wrong to distinguish the proper domain where you can use psychoanalysis. For the true Freudian it is not that Freud did his true job in his clinical analysis but then got a little bit crazy when he was writing Totem and Taboo and Unbehagen in der Kultur [Civilization and Its Discontents]. No, because the whole point of Unbehagen in der Kultur is that these pathological phenomena are conditioned by the truth.

They are the symptom, the result of what is wrong in the entire social body as such. In this sense, the two sides are necessarily connected. What is totally alien to Freud is this purely clinical idea that there is the normal functioning of society, then somebody doesn’t work, then the psychoanalyst would have been like the psychological mechanic, the repairman who will set me straight.

I think that Freud, to put it in fashionable terms, isolates a certain excess. He calls it death drive, a certain excess of destructability that is, as it were, undermining, destabilizing the social order, an excess that is ambiguous in the sense that it can be a source of constructive energy or it can be purely destructive.

The idea is that Freud isolates this space of excess, which then, of course, opens up the space for possible change. I think Freud’s basic answer would have been: psychoanalysis just does this elementary job of showing how there is a gap, a failure, a nonfunctioning excess in society. But then, about what to do, he leaves it open. We cannot jump from here directly to positive programs.

This then opens up all possible versions. You can have a conservative Freudian answer: the whole point is to control this threat. You can have a Reichian, naïve, Leftist answer: what is a threat is only a threat from the ruling perspective and we should identify ourselves with it. And you can have a liberal, middle-of-the-way game.

Laclau 2013 reply to critchley 2002

Thinking the political: The work of Ernesto Laclau  10 – 12 April 2013

Laclau’s opening presentation
Final roundtable session  Conspicuous by their absence are J. Glynos and A.J. Norval.

Ethics, Politics and Radical Democracy – A Response to Simon Critchley

First of all I would like to thank Simon for all the effort he has undertaken in preparing what is no doubt a very important article of his. I would like, however, to start by indicating two general areas in which my approach differs from Simon’s. Then I am going to go into the seven points that he has enunciated at the end of his article.

The first point of disagreement concerns the question of deconstruction. Simon has quite rightly pointed out that mine is a deconstructive approach and that my deconstruction leads to putting into question some of the sharp distinctions that we have found in recent philosophical writings. One of these distinctions is the distinction to be found in the work of Alain Badiou between l’être and l’événement, which is probably a leftover from his Sartrean past but which is quite an important structure in his approach. (Recently Slavoj Žižek has written that the difference between the work of Badiou and my own is the fact that I am a deconstructionist while Badiou is not one. That is probably true, although I think there are more important differences, the main one being that he is a Maoist and I’m a Gramscian.) But, anyway, what I want to take issue with Simon about in the first place is the idea that I am deconstructing the descriptive/normative distinction while I am not deconstructing the ethical/normative one. In fact I think I am deconstructing both.

Deconstruction consists in discovering the undecidability of things which are presented as being either joined or separated. So deconstruction involves two kinds of operation. On the one hand, it shows that between two things which have been portrayed as being essentially linked there is in fact some kind of undecidability which prevents them from being assembled together. On the other hand, deconstruction also involves showing that between two things which are originally presented as separated there is a certain amount of contamination. Now in traditional ethical theory the descriptive/normative distinction is fully accepted. It has, as you know, Kantian origins; in fact it is first and foremost with Kant that we have such a strict separation. If we go, for instance, to The Nichomachean Ethics we find that it is much more difficult to determine what is descriptive and what is normative. Nevertheless, this distinction is generally accepted in post-Kantian ethical theory. The deconstructive task here consists in showing that these two sides, which are in fact two dimensions of an ensemble that cannot be separated except in an analytical way, are contaminated. But, in the second place, from the point of view of the relationship between the normative and the ethical, the deconstructive task is quite the opposite. As people normally tend to collapse the ethical and the normative, the deconstructive task is to show that there is not such a strict overlap between the two. So, in fact, I think I am deconstructing both of these oppositions, both of the distinctions we are arguing about.

The second point on which I am going to take issue with Simon is the question of formal content. Let me put it bluntly. The distinction between the normative and the ethical that I am presenting in my work has absolutely nothing to do with the distinction between form and content, because among other things form is something which has a content of its own, it is a more general content. It is a content the space of which can be occupied by many specified instances, but this space is still organised around a set of essential contents. For me, the notion of the ethical is linked with the notion of an empty signifier, whereby an empty signifier is that option to which no content would correspond. It is, to use Kant’s term, a noumenon, an object which shows itself through the impossibility of its adequate representation. So if the ethical is conceived in this way, obviously it has nothing to do with any kind of formalism. If I had to choose between Hegel and Kant, I myself would choose Hegel. But the problem is that the ethical in the sense in which I try to specify it cannot be answered either by Hegelian or by Kantian ethics.

Now, what is an ethical experience? In another paper Simon has linked the notion of an ethical experience to the answer to a demand. I am not against this assertion, but I would argue, however, that the notion of the ethical experience is far more radical than this. It is related to the experience of the unconditional in an entirely conditioned universe. And this experience of the unconditional is the kernel of any notion of ethics. If we say that there is a radical distinction between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’, this distance between the two is precisely what constitutes the space of ethics. But this distance is experienced through a certain breech, or gap, which cannot be ultimately filled. Because of this the transition from the ethical to the normative is going to have the characteristic of a radical investment.

Here I want to take a small detour and speak about mysticism, because mysticism is a type of intellectual or experiential exercise in which the problem is exactly how to give expression to something which is essentially ineffable; how the ineffable can be in some sense expressed there. And this question of the discursive devices to which mysticism tries to give appropriate expression illuminates the central aspect in the organisation of the whole human experience. Let me quote a passage from Meister Eckhart:

You should love God non-mentally, that is to say the soul should become non-mental and stripped of her mental nature. For as long as your soul is mental, she will possess images. And as long as she has images she will possess intermediaries and as long as she has intermediaries, she will have no unity or simplicity. As long as she lacks simplicity, she does not truly love God, for true love depends upon simplicity.

At the continuation of that paragraph is the famous passage in which the notion of the negation of negation that is going to impress Hegel so much is formulated for the first time. Eckhart writes further, ‘Oneness is purer than goodness and truth. ‘… If I say that God is good then I am adding something to him. Oneness on the other hand is a negation of negation and a denial of denial. What does “one” mean? One is that to which nothing has been added’. Obviously this passage has a kind of Spinozian ring. The notion of oneness that is presented here involves a negation of difference, an annihilation of difference. But there is an ambiguity in the passage, and in fact I think in all mysticism of the Northern type. On the one hand, God is the Absolute Beyond, on the other he is something which is all-embracing. These are the two possibilities on which a classical distinction between introverted and extroverted mysticism has been formulated, but it is a distinction which is full of consequences for the problems that we have discussed so far. Obviously the whole Hegelian dialectic is an attempt to transform the beyond into something which is an all-embracing totality. In Saussurean terms we would say that we have a universe in which we have only relations of co-ordination and not relations of substitution.

Now, what is the consequence of this? If we have a total introverted mysticism, in that case the distinction between the ontic and the ontological practically disappears. I am going to come back later on to that distinction. But let me quote now from a poem by Robert Browning:

Do I task any faculty highest, to image success?
I but open my eyes, — and perfection, no more and no less,
In the kind I imagined, full-fronts me, and God is seen God
In the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul and the clod. (‘Saul’)

Now if God is expressed through the totality of things, we don’t have a point at which there is a radical investment and the possibility of establishing the distinction that I tried to establish between the ethical and the normative. What is important to see here is that for the mystic, especially of the introverted type, there is no lack of engagement at work. There is, on the contrary, active participation – a mystic is not an anchorite. Eckhart says as follows:

Those who are rightly disposed truly have God with them and whoever truly possesses God in the right way, possesses him in all places: on the street, in any company, as well as in a church or a remote place or in their cell. No one can obstruct this person, for they intend and seek nothing but God and take great pleasure only in him, who is united with them in all their aims. And so just as no multiplicity can divide God, in the same way nothing can scatter this person or divide them for they are one in the One in whom all multiplicity is one and is non-multiplicity.

That is to say, we have what I have called in other works a logic of equivalence by which a set of a different particularised actions act as part of a certain process of totalisation. But the possibility of this totalisation depends on this dialectic which Eckhart has explored, which is the dialectic between detachment and engagement. I am then fully detached because God is something beyond everything which is expressible. But precisely because of that I can engage in my activities in the world with an ethical seriousness that people who are preoccupied with small objectives are unable to develop. In fact, what I think Eckhart is describing here is something belonging to the figure of the militant. A similar argument was made by Georges Sorel when discussing the general strike. He says:

If I participate in an occupation of a factory, in a demonstration, in a strike, each of these movements is going to have a particular objective. If I am concentrating on the particularity of the objective in that case I am dispersing myself in the world. But if I see each of these activities as steps towards an ultimate end, which is the general strike, in that case precisely because I am detached from the direct identification with a particular objective I can engage in a more militant way in all these objectives.

An important point is that the general strike necessarily is an empty signifier. The general strike for Sorel is also something – an event which could possibly happen is some kind of an ultimate objective in which the fullness of being is going to be achieved. And in this fullness of being tangentially we are going to see a breech of the gap between the ontic and the ontological. In the fullness of being is in that sense the ethical moment which forges a variety of partial actions.

Now with these general remarks in mind I want to pass to some of the more concrete points raised by Simon in his paper. First, about the de jure/de facto distinction between normative content and ethical form, which, as we know from what I have said before, is not an ethical form but rather an ethical content. But this ethical content is given by a pure emptiness which later requires some form of radical investment. In fact here the moment of the decision is clearly unavoidable. Now, what about de jure and de facto? I would say that it is not simply de jure, not simply analytically, that the distinction between the ethical and the normative is made. Once an object is an object of ethical investment, this object is going to function discursively and with organised experience in a completely different way than it would in a purely normative order. For instance, at the beginning of the twentieth century the idea of the socialisation of the means of production was the object of some radical investment. How did this investment proceed by transforming socialisations of the means of production in the symbol of something beyond them? Because socialisation of the means of production is, strictly speaking, a way of running the economy. But for people who invested in this aim the end was much wider. Through a state of equivalence it involved the supposition of all forms of oppression. And in this sense it was the signifier of something beyond itself. So the fact that it was the object of ethical investment made a great deal of difference to the organisation of the whole of the normative experience. Any kind of normative experience required this ethical investment, but once this ethical investment is in operation there is not going to be an overlap in the distinction between de jure and de facto as such. Instead, we will have a totally different structuration of the field of historical experience.

The second point concerns Heidegger. I cannot accept the notion of the unity of the ontological and the ontic as the characteristic of Dasein in the way in which Simon suggested, among other things because Heidegger says from the very beginning of Being and Time that the ontic characteristic of Dasein is the fact that it is ontological. That is to say, the ontic characteristics which apply to a set of other realities are in fact organised in an entirely different way in the case of Dasein. What this involves is the idea that the ontic characteristic of Dasein is to be ontological; it is important that its meaning is not simply given but is rather constructed. I have to choose my life at any singular moment; I have an openness which precisely no content can really absorb. And so the ontic/ontological distinction is not a formal one; it is a distinction which actually organises a human reality as such. Then in point (4) Simon says the assumption behind the identification of the ethical with the ontological would seem to be that we can thematise and grasp conceptually the being of the ethical: i.e. that the nature of ethics can be ontologically identified and comprehended. If the ethical is an experience of the unconditional which is beyond any possibility of language, then it is impossible for the ethical to be identified and comprehended. In making this point I think Simon really has to some extent misunderstood my argument. The quotations he then provides from Levinas, Lacan etc. are quotations to which I would fully subscribe precisely because the being of ethics in not a being, it is a beyond-being, other-than-being. In that case there is something that you can invest in a normative order, but you cannot express it in a direct way. So I think that from this point Simon and I are not that far apart. Now, as far as Wittgenstein is concerned, I would disagree on a philological level. I think that when Wittgenstein is speaking about the ethical, the type of argument he is making is entirely different from the one that Kant or Levinas develop. I don’t accept the fact that the word ethics appears there and the mystical appears there. This is also something which relates to some of the problems of how to connect names and objects, which is typical of the early analytical philosophy but is something which I do not have time to enter into now.

Let me now address point (5) in Simon’s critique. Again, I am not entirely in agreement with Simon about the way in which he links a particular decision with a rule in the beautiful quotation from Wittgenstein concerning rule-following which he includes here. Simon says, ‘This quotation would seem to illustrate well the relation between ethics and normativity. There is a rule which possesses universality, for example the sequence of prime numbers, and yet each expression of that rule demands a decision, an act of continuing the sequence’. And he concludes, ‘In this sense the rule would be ethical and the particular decision would be normative’. I think this cannot be solved if the ethical is understood in the way I understand it myself, because in the first place there is no rule which would be in itself and by itself ethical. This rule requires ethical investment and this ethical investment is already something which enters into the order of the normative. So I do not think that the moment of the universality of that rule is what transforms it into the ethical, because you cannot have a universality which is fully normative, as in case of Kant.

Now let me comment briefly on the point in which I am seriously risking banality, which is point (6) in Simon’s argument concerning the two alternatives he presents: ‘If there is some specific content of the ethical then the distinction between the ethical and the normative cannot be said to hold. Yet conversely, if there is no content of the ethical at all then one might be entitled to ask, what’s the point?’ I have two responses here. First, I do not think that we are actually presented with only these alternatives that Simon is discussing in this passage – either we have a meta-ethical position or an ethics with a particularised ethical content. I want to suggest that there are some other alternatives. Let me quote a famous passage from Marx, in which he tries to explain why in Aristotle there cannot be a conception of value in the economic sense: ‘It cannot be a notion of value simply because there was slave labour and the idea that there was an abstraction that was called abstract labour is something which could not emerge in the ancient world.’ Once you have that brief move from one branch of industry to the other then labour power becomes something of an abstraction. This abstraction is not simply an abstraction in thought; it is an abstraction which is actually organising social relations. But once I have the category of abstract labour I can perfectly well see how, in the past, in those societies in which abstract labour could not emerge, labour was nevertheless organised. I do not think that is a matter of restricting the analysis to the present; rather, the present through its form and distinction shows something which also has the characteristics of meta-theory, of the wider theory of society. So I think the two elements are here together – which is why the theory of hegemony has emerged these days and could not have emerged two hundred years ago. It is emerging exactly at the moment in which the plurality of subject positions is seen to be constantly rearticulated in a new way; that is to say, the experience of hegemonic relation today has illuminated something concerning also the general characteristic of human society. Now, is this content exclusively descriptive? I would argue it is not, and there I would agree with Simon. It is not entirely descriptive because in order to see hegemony I have to see the contingency of social arrangements, and once I see the contingency of social arrangements, I can start conceiving of ways of developing social possibilities which could not exist if society were considered to be grounded in the will of God, in nature, or whatever there is. That is to say, I also agree with some of the conclusions that Simon has reached here, in the sense that democratic hegemony is what reveals the nature of hegemony as such; and it is only with democratic hegemony that the full extent of the hegemonic relation can be historically recognised.

Žižek Cornel West 2005

Žižek and Cornel West at Princeton on 17 Nov 2005.
Chicken Joke
Commodity Fetishism
Christianity, Father why did you forsake me?

Cornel West on the n* word  The word is associated terrorizing, traumatizing and stigmatizing of people.   Anytime you terrorize, traumatize and stigmatize so that they lose self-respect.  In the case of Jay Z, who loves the people, Malcolm X if they want to use it, that’s fine.  But we have to be cautious if love is at the center of the word.  As long as the love is there, but most times the love isn’t there so I’m suspicious of the use of the word for the most part.   John Brown and Eminem have deep love and can use it.

Žižek israel palestine law/sin law/love totality

Žižek, Slavoj.  “The Jew Is Within You, But You, You Are in the Jew.”  Udi Aloni. What Does a Jew Want? Columbia University Press. 2011.   EBOOK

Ismail Kadare’s The Palace of Dreams tells the story of the Tabir Sarrail, the “palace of dreams” in the capital of an unnamed, vast nineteenth-century Balkan empire (modeled on Turkey). In this gigantic building thousands assiduously sift, sort, classify, and interpret the dreams of citizens systematically and continuously assembled from all parts of the empire. Their intense work of bureaucratic interpretation is Kafkaesque: intense yet a meaningless fake. The ultimate goal of their activity is identify the Master-Dream that will provide clues to the destiny of the empire and its sultan. This is why, although supposed to be a place of dark mystery exempted from the daily power struggles, what goes on in the Tabir Sarrail is caught in a violent power struggle—which dream will be selected (or, perhaps, even invented) as the Master-Dream is the outcome of intense dark intrigues.

“In my opinion,” Kurt went on, “it is the only organization in the State where the darker side of its subjects’ consciousness enters into direct contact with the State itself.”

He looked around at everyone present, as if to assess the effect of his words.

“The masses don’t rule, of course,” he continued, “but they do possess a mechanism through which they influence all the State’s affairs, including its crimes. And that mechanism is the Tabir Sarrail.”

“Do you mean to say,” asked the cousin, “that the masses are to a certain extent responsible for everything that happens, and so should to a certain extent feel guilty about it?”

“Yes,” said Kurt. Then, more firmly: “In a way, yes.”1

In order to interpret properly these lines, there is no need for any obscurantist themes like the “dark irrational link (or secret solidarity) between the crowd and its rulers.” The question to be raised is that of power (domination) and the unconscious: how does power work, how do subjects obey it? This brings us to the (misleadingly) so-called erotics of power: subjects obey power not only because of the physical coercion (or its threat) and ideological mystification, but because of their libidinal investment into power. The ultimate “cause” of power is objet a, the object-cause of desire, the surplus-enjoyment by means of which the power “bribes” those it holds in its sway. This objet a is given form in (unconscious) fantasies of the subjects of power, and the function of Kadare’s Tabir Sarrail is precisely to discern these fantasies, to learn what kind of (libidinal) objects they are for their subjects. These obscure “feedbacks” of the subjects of power to its bearers regulates the subjects’ subordination to power, so if they are disturbed the power edifice can lose its libidinal grip and dissolve. The Palace of Dreams is, of course, itself an impossible fantasy: the fantasy of a power that would directly try to deal with its fantasmatic support.

In European societies antisemitism is a key component of this obscure “feedback”; its fantasmatic status is clearly designated by the statement attributed to Hitler: “We have to kill the Jew within us.” A. B. Yehoshua provided an adequate comment to this statement: “This devastating portrayal of the Jew as a kind of amorphous entity that can invade the identity of a non-Jew without his being able to detect or control it stems from the feeling that Jewish identity is extremely flexible, precisely because it is structured like a sort of atom whose core is surrounded by virtual electrons in a changing orbit.” In this sense Jews are effectively the objet petit a of the Gentiles: what is “in Gentiles more than Gentiles themselves,” not another subject that I encounter in front of me but an alien, a foreign intruder, within me, what Lacan called lamella, the amorphous intruder of infinite plasticity, an undead “alien” monster who cannot ever be pinned down to a determinate form.

In a sense Hitler’s statement tells more than it wants to say: against its intention, it confirms that the Gentiles need the antisemitic figure of the “Jew” in order to maintain their identity. It is thus not only that “the Jew is within us”—what Hitler fatefully forgot to add is that he, the antisemite, his identity, is also in the Jew. What does this paradoxical entwinement mean for the destiny of antisemitism?

WHAT GOES ON WHEN NOTHING GOES ON?

It is against this background that one should approach the Middle East imbroglio. One cannot but respect the brutal honesty of the first-generation founders of the State of Israel who in no way obliterated the “founding crime” of establishing a new state: they openly admitted they had no right to the land of Palestina, it is just their force against the force of the Palestinians. On 29 April 1956 a group of Palestinians from Gaza crossed the border to plunder the harvest in the Nahal Oz kibbutz’s fields; Roi, a young Jewish member of the kibbutz who patrolled the fields, galloped toward them on his horse brandishing a stick to chase them away; he was seized by the Palestinians and carried back to the Gaza Strip; when the UN returned his body, his eyes had been plucked out. Moshe Dayan, then the chief of staff, delivered the eulogy at his funeral the following day:

“Let us not cast blame on the murderers today. What claim do we have against their mortal hatred of us? They have lived in the refugee camps of Gaza for the past eight years, while right before their eyes we have transformed the land and villages where they and their ancestors once lived into our own inheritance.

It is not among the Arabs of Gaza but in our own midst that we must seek Roi’s blood. How have we shut our eyes and refused to look squarely at our fate and see the destiny of our generation in all its brutality? Have we forgotten that this group of young people living in Nahal Oz bears the burden of Gaza’s gates on its shoulders?”4

Apart from the parallel between Roi and the blinded Samson (which plays a key role in the later mythology of the IDF), what cannot but strike the eye is the apparent non sequitur, the gap, between the first and the second paragraph: in the first paragraph Dayan openly admits that the Palestinians have the full right to hate the Israeli Jews, since they took their land; his conclusion, however, is not the obvious admission of one’s own guilt, but to fully accept “the destiny of our generation in all its brutality.” i.e., to assume the burden—not of guilt, but—of the war where might will be right, where the stronger will win. The war was not about principles or justice, it was an exercise in “mythic violence”—the insight totally obliterated by the recent Israeli’s self-legitimization. As in the case of feminism, which taught us to discover the traces of violence in what appears, in a patriarchal culture, as a natural authority (of a father), we should remember the grounding violence obliterated by today’s Zionism—Zionists should simply read Dayan and Ben-Gurion

The same violence goes on today, but disavowed, masked as multicultural tolerance. On August 2, 2009, after cordoning off part of the Arab neighborhood of Sheikh-Jarrah in East Jerusalem, Israeli police evicted two Palestinian families (more than fifty people) from their homes; permitted Jewish settlers immediately moved into the emptied houses. Although Israeli police cited a ruling by the country’s Supreme Court, the evicted Arab families had been living there for more than fifty years. The event, which, rather exceptionally, did attract the attention of the world media, is part of a much larger and mostly ignored ongoing process.

Five months earlier, on March 1, 2009, it was reported that the Israeli government had drafted plans to build more than seventy thousand new housing units in Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank; if implemented, the plans could increase the number of settlers in the Palestinian territories by about three hundred thousand—a move that would not only severely undermine the chances of a viable Palestinian state but also hamper the everyday life of Palestinians. A government spokesman dismissed the report, arguing that the plans were therefore of limited relevance: the actual construction of new homes in the settlements required the approval of the defense minister and prime minister. However, fifteen thousand of the plans have already been fully approved; plus, almost twenty thousand of the planned units lie in settlements that are far from the “green line” that separates Israel from the West Bank, i.e., in the areas Israel cannot expect to retain in any future peace deal with the Palestinians.

The conclusion is obvious: while paying lip service to the two-state solution, Israel is busy creating the situation on the ground that will render a two-state solution de facto impossible. The dream that underlies this politics is best rendered by the wall that separates a settler’s town from the Palestinian town on a nearby hill somewhere in the West Bank. The Israeli side of the wall is painted with the image of the countryside beyond the wall—but without the Palestinian town, depicting just nature, grass, trees… is this not ethnic cleansing at its purest, imagining the outside beyond the wall as it should be, empty, virginal, waiting to be settled?

This process is sometimes covered in the guise of cultural gentrification. On October 28, 2008, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the Simon Wiesenthal Center can build its long-planned Center for Human Dignity–Museum of Tolerance on a contested site in the middle of Jerusalem. (Who but) Frank Gehry will design the vast complex consisting of a general museum, a children’s museum, a theater, conference center, library, gallery and lecture halls, caffeterias, etc. The museum’s declared mission will be to promote civility and respect among different segments of the Jewish community and between people of all faiths—the only obstacle (overturned by the Supreme Court’s ruling) being that the museum site served as Jerusalem’s main Muslim cemetery until 1948 (the Muslim community appealed to the Supreme Court that museum construction would desecrate the cemetery, which allegedly contained the bones of Muslims killed during the Crusades of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries).

This dark spot wonderfully enacts the hidden truth of this multiconfessional project: it is a place celebrating tolerance, open to all… but protected by the Israeli cupola, which ignores the subterranean victims of intolerance — as if one needs a little bit of intolerance to create the space for true tolerance. And as if this were not enough, as if one should repeat a gesture to make its message clear, there is another, even vaster similar project going on in Jerusalem: Israel is quietly carrying out a $100 million, multiyear development plan in the so-called holy basin, the site of some of the most significant religious and national heritage sites just outside the walled Old City, as part of an effort to strengthen the status of Jerusalem as its capital.

The plan, parts of which have been outsourced to a private group that is simultaneously buying up Palestinian property for Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem, has drawn almost no public or international scrutiny. As part of the plan, garbage dumps and wastelands are being cleared and turned into lush gardens and parks, now already accessible to visitors who can walk along new footpaths and take in the majestic views, along with new signs and displays that point out significant points of Jewish history—and, conveniently, many of the “unauthorized” Palestinian houses have to be erased to create the space for the redevelopment of the area. The “holy basin” is an infinitely complicated landscape dotted with shrines and still hidden treasures of the three major monotheistic religions, so the official argument is that its improvement is for everyone’s benefit—Jews, Muslims, and Christians—since it involves restoration that will draw more visitors to an area of exceptional global interest that has long suffered neglect.

However, as Hagit Ofran of Peace Now noted, the plan aimed to create “an ideological tourist park that will determine Jewish dominance in the area.” Raphael Greenberg of Tel Aviv University put it even more blundly: “The sanctity of the City of David is newly manufactured and is a crude amalgam of history, nationalism and quasi-religious pilgrimage… the past is used to disenfranchise and displace people in the present.” Another big Religious Venue, a “public” interfaith space under the clear domination and protective cupola of Israel…

What does all this mean? To get at the true dimension of news, it is sometimes enough to read two disparate news items together—meaning emerges from their very link, like a spark exploding from an electric short circuit. On the very same day the reports on the government plan to build seventy thousand new housing units hit the media (March 2), Hilary Clinton criticized the rocket fire from Gaza as “cynical,” claiming: “There is no doubt that any nation, including Israel, cannot stand idly by while its territory and people are subjected to rocket attacks.” But should the Palestinians stand idly while the West Bank land is taken from them day by day?

When Israeli peace-loving liberals present their conflict with Palestinians in neutral “symmetrical” terms, admitting that there are extremists on both sides who reject peace, etc., one should ask a simple question: what goes on in the Middle East when nothing goes on there at the direct politico-military level (i.e., when there are no tensions, attacks, negotiations)?

What goes on is the incessant slow work of taking the land from the Palestinians on the West Bank: the gradual strangling of the Palestinian economy, the parceling of their land, the building of new settlements, the pressure on Palestinian farmers to make them abandon their land (which goes from crop burning and religious desecration up to individual killings), all this supported by a Kafkaesque network of legal regulations.

Saree Makdisi, in Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, described how, although the Israeli Occupation of the West Bank is ultimately enforced by the armed forces, it is an “occupation by bureaucracy”: its primary forms are application forms, title deeds, residency papers, and other permits. It is this micromanagement of daily life that does the job of securing the slow but steadfast Israeli expansion: one has to ask for a permit in order to leave with one’s family, to farm one’s own land, to dig a well, to go to work, to school, to a hospital… One by one, Palestinians born in Jerusalem are thus stripped of the right to live there, prevented from earning a living, denied housing permits, etc. Palestinians often use the problematic cliché of the Gaza strip as “the greatest concentration camp in the world” — however, in the last year this designation has come dangerously close to truth. This is the fundamental reality that makes all abstract “prayers for peace” obscene and hypocritical. The State of Israel is clearly engaged in a slow process, invisible, ignored by the media, a kind of underground digging of the mole, so that, one day, the world will awaken and realize that there is no more Palestinian West Bank, that the land is Palestinian-frei, and that we can only accept the fact. The map of the Palestinian West Bank already looks like a fragmented archipelago.

In the last months of 2008, when the attacks of illegal West Bank settlers on Palestinian farmers grew into regular daily events, the State of Israel tried to contain these excesses (the Supreme Court ordered the evacuation of some settlements, etc.), but, as many observers noted, these measures cannot but appear halfhearted, counteracting a politics that, at a deeper level, IS the long-term politics of the State of Israel, which massively violates the international treaties signed by Israel itself. The reply of the illegal settlers to the Israeli authorities basically is: we are doing the same thing as you, just more openly, so what right do you have to condemn us? And the answer of the state basically is: be patient, don’t rush too much, we are doing what you want, just in a more moderate and acceptable way… The same story seems to go on from 1949: while Israel accepts the peace conditions proposed by international community, it counts that the peace plan will not work.

The wild settlers sometimes sound like Brunhilde, from the last act of Wagner’s Walküre, reproaching Wotan that, by counteracting his explicit order and protecting Sigmund, she was only realizing Wotan’s own true desire, which he was forced to renounce under external pressure, in the same way that the illegal settlers only realize the state’s true desire it was forced to renounce because of the pressure of the international community. While condemning the open violent excesses of “illegal” settlements, the State of Israel promotes new “legal” West Bank settlements, continues to strangle the Palestinian economy, etc. A look at the continuous changes on the map of East Jerusalem, where the Palestinians are gradually encircled and their space sliced, tells it all.

The condemnation of extrastatal anti-Palestinian violence obfuscates the true problem of state violence; the condemnation of illegal settlements obfuscates the illegality of the legal ones. Therein resides the two-facedness of the much-praised nonbiased “honesty” of the Israeli Supreme Court: by way of occasionally passing a judgment in favor of the dispossessed Palestinians, proclaiming their eviction illegal, it guarantees the legality of the remaining majority of cases.

THE “NAME OF THE JEW

And, to avoid any kind of misunderstanding, taking all this into account in no way implies an “understanding” for inexcusable terrorist acts. On the contrary, it provides the only ground from which one can condemn the terrorist attacks without hypocrisy. Furthermore, when Western liberal defenders of peace in the Middle East oppose, among Palestinians, the democrats committed to compromise and peace and the Hamas radical fundamentalists, they fail to see the genesis of these two poles: the long and systematic endeavor by Israel and the USA to weaken the Palestinians by way of undermining the leading position of Fateh, an endeavor that, up to five or six years ago, even included the financial support of Hamas.

The sad result is that Palestinians are now divided between Hamas fundamentalism and Fateh corruption: the weakened Fateh is no longer the hegemonic force that truly represents the substantial longings of the Palestinians (and is, as such, in a position to conclude peace); it is more and more perceived by the majority of Palestinians for what it is, a crippled puppet supported by the U.S. as the representative of the “democratic” Palestinians.

Similarly, while the U.S. worried about Saddam’s basically secular authoritarian regime in Iraq, the “talibanization” of their ally Pakistan progressed slowly but inexorably: Taliban’s control now already spreads over parts of Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city. There is a shared interest on both sides of the conflict to see “fundamentalists in control” in Gaza: this characterization enables the fundamentalists to monopolize the struggle and the Israelis to gain international sympathies.

Consequently, although everyone deplores the rise of fundamentalism, no one really wants secular resistance to Israel among the Palestinians. But is it really true that there is none? What if there are two secrets in the Middle East conflict: secular Palestinians and Zionist fundamentalists—we have Arab fundamentalists arguing in secular terms and Jewish secular Westerners relying on theological reasoning:

The strange thing is that it was secular Zionism that brought god to bear so much on religious ideas. In a way, the true believers in Israel are the nonreligious. This is so because for the religious life of an orthodox Jew god is actually quite marginal. There were times when for a member of the orthodox intellectual elite it was in a way “uncool” to refer too much to god: a sign that he is not devoted enough to the real noble cause of the polemical study of Talmud (the continual movement of expansion of the law and evasion from it). It was only the crude secular Zionist gaze that took god, which was a sort of alibi, so seriously. The sad thing is that now more and more orthodox Jews seem convinced that they indeed believe in god.

The consequence of this unique ideological situation is the paradox of atheists defending Zionist claims in theological terms. Exemplary here is The Arrogance of the Present, Milner’s exploration of the legacy of 1968, which can also be read as a reply to Badiou’s The Century as well as to his exploration of the politico-ideological implications of the “name of the Jew.” In an implicit, but, for that reason, all the more intense, dialogue with Badiou, Milner proposes a radically different diagnosis of the twentieth century.

His starting point is the same as Badiou’s: “a name counts only as far as the divisions it induces go.” Master-Signifiers that matter are those that clarify their field by simplifying the complex situation into a clear division—yes or no, for or against.

Milner goes on: “But here is what happened: one day, it became obvious that names believed to bear a future (glorious or sinister) no longer divide anyone; and names dismissed as thoroughly obsolete began to bring about unbridgeable divisions” (21–22).

Names that today no longer divide, generate passionate attachment, but leave us indifferent, are those that traditionally were expected to act as the most mobilizing (“workers,” “class struggle”), while those that appeared deprived of their divisive edge violently reemerged in their divisive role—today, the name Jew “divides most deeply the speaking beings”: “Contrary to what knowledge predicted, the culminating point of the twentieth century did not take the form of social revolution; it took the form of an extermination. Contrary to what the Revolution has been promising, the extermination ignored classes and fixated on a name without any class meaning. Not even an economic one. Not a shadow of an objective meaning” (214).

Milner’s conclusion is that “the only true event of the twentieth century was the return of the name Jew” (212)—this return for an ominous surprise also for the Jews themselves. That is to say, with the political emancipation of the Jews in modern Europe, a new figure of the Jew emerged: the “Jew of knowledge” who replaces study (of Talmud, i.e., of his theological roots) with universal (scientific) knowledge.

We get Jews who excel in secular sciences, and this is why Marxism was so popular among Jewish intellectuals: it presented itself as “scientific socialism,” uniting knowledge and revolution (in contrast to Jacobins, who proudly said, apropos Laplace, that “the Republic doesn’t need scientists,” or millenarists who dismissed knowledge as sinful). With Marxism, inequality/injustice and its overcoming becomes an object of knowledge (201).

Enlightenment thus offers European Jews a chance to find a place in the universality of scientific knowledge, ignoring their name, tradition, roots. This dream, however, brutally ended with holocaust: the “Jew of knowledge” couldn’t survive Nazi extermination—the trauma was that knowledge allowed it, wasn’t able to resist it, was impotent in the face of it. (Traces of this impotence are already discernible in the famous 1929 Davos debate between Ernst Cassirer and Heidegger, where Heidegger treated Cassirer with impolite rudeness, refusing a handshake at the conclusion, etc.)

How did the European left react to this rupture? The core of Milner’s book is the close analysis of the Maoist proletarian left (la Gauche proletarienne), the main political organization emerging out of May 1968. When it fell apart, some of its members (like Benny Levy) opted for fidelity to the name of the Jew, others chose Christian spirituality. For Milner, the entire activity of the proletarian left was based on a certain disavowal, on a refusal to pronounce a name. Milner proposes a nice Magrittean image: a room with a window in the middle and a painting covering up and obstructing the view through the window; the scene on the painting exactly reproduces the exterior one would have seen through the window. Such is the function of ideological misrecognition: it obfuscates the true dimension of what we see (183).

In the case of the proletarian left this unseen dimension was the name of the Jew. That is to say, the proletarian left legitimized its radical opposition to the entire French political establishment as the prolongation of the Resistance against the Fascist occupation: their diagnosis was that the French political life was still dominated by people who stood in direct continuity with the Petainist collaboration. However, although they designated the right enemy, they kept silent on the fact that the main target of the Fascist regime was not the left, but the Jews. In short, they used the event itself to obfuscate its true dimension, similarly to the “Jew of knowledge” who tries to redefine his Jewishness so that he will be able to erase the real core of being a Jew.

Benny Levy’s transformation from a Maoist to a Zionist is thus indicative of a wider tendency. The consequence drawn by many from the “obscure disaster” of twentieth-century attempts at universal emancipation is that particular groups no longer accept “sublating” their own emancipation in the universal one (“we — oppressed minorities, women, etc. — can only attain our freedom through universal emancipation,” i.e., the Communist revolution): fidelity to the universal cause is replaced by fidelities to particular identities (Jewish, gay, etc.), and the most we can envisage is a “strategic alliance” between particular struggles.

Perhaps, however, the time has come to return to the notion of universal emancipation, and it is here that a critical analysis should begin. When Milner claims that the class struggle, etc. are no longer divisive names, that they are replaced by “Jew” as the truly divisive name, he describes a (partially true) fact, but what does this fact mean? Should it not also be interpreted in terms of the classic Marxist theory of antisemitism, which reads the antisemitic figure of the “Jew” as the metaphoric stand-in for class struggle?

The disappearance of the class struggle and the (re)appearance of antisemitism are thus two sides of the same coin, since the presence of the antisemitic figure of the “Jew” is only comprehensible against the background of the absence of class struggle. Walter Benjamin (to whom Milner himself refers as to an authority, and who stands precisely for a Marxist Jew who remains faithful to the religious dimension of Jewishness and is thus not a “Jew of knowledge”) said long ago that every rise of Fascism bears witness to a failed revolution — this thesis not only still holds today but is perhaps more pertinent than ever.

Liberals like to point out similarities between left and right “extremisms”: Hitler’s terror and camps imitated Bolshevik terror, the Leninist party is today alive in Al-Qaeda—yes, but what does all this mean? It can also be read as an indication of how Fascism literally replaces (takes the place of) the leftist revolution: its rise is the left’s failure, but simultaneously a proof that there was a revolutionary potential, dissatisfaction, that the left was not able to mobilize.

1 + 1 = 3

How are we to understand this reversal of an emancipatory thrust into fundamentalist populism? It is here that the materialist-dialectic passage from the Two to Three gains all its weight: the axiom of Communist politics is not simply the dualist “class struggle,” but, more precisely, the third moment as the subtraction from the Two of the hegemonic politics. That is to say, the hegemonic ideological field imposes on us a field of (ideological) visibility with its own “principal contradiction” (today, it is the opposition of market-freedom-democracy and fundamentalist-terrorist-totalitarianism: “Islamo-Fascism,” etc.), and the first thing to do is to reject (to subtract from) this opposition, to perceive it as a false opposition destined to obfuscate the true line of division. As we have already seen, Lacan’s formula for this redoubling is 1+1+a: the “official” antagonism (the Two) is always supplemented by an “indivisible remainder” that indicates its foreclosed dimension.

In other terms, the true antagonism is always reflective, it is the antagonism between the “official” antagonism and what is foreclosed by it (this is why, in Lacan’s mathematics, 1 + 1 = 3). Today, for example, the true antagonism is not the one between liberal multiculturalism and fundamentalism, but between the very field of their opposition and the excluded third (radical emancipatory politics).

Badiou already provided the contours of this passage from Two to Three in his reading of the Pauline passage from Law to love [St. Paul the Foundation of Universalism]. In both cases (in Law and in love) we are dealing with division, with a “divided subject”; however, the modality of the division is thoroughly different. The subject of the Law is “decentered” in the sense that it is caught in the self-destructive vicious cycle of sin and Law in which one pole engenders its opposite; Paul provided the unsurpassable description of this entanglement in Romans 7:

We know that the law is spiritual; but I am carnal, sold into slavery to sin. What I do, I do not understand. For I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I concur that the law is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. For I know that good does not dwell in me, that is, in my flesh. The willing is ready at hand, but doing the good is not. For I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil I do not want. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. So, then, I discover the principle that when I want to do right, evil is at hand. For I take delight in the law of God, in my inner self, but I see in my members another principle at war with the law of my mind, taking me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Miserable one that I am!

It is thus not that I am merely torn between the two opposites, Law and sin; the problem is that I cannot even clearly distinguish them: I want to follow the Law and I end up in sin. This vicious cycle is (not so much overcome as) broken, one breaks out of it, with the experience of love more precisely: with the experience of the radical gap that separates love from the Law.

Therein resides the radical difference between the couple Law/sin and the couple Law/love. The gap that separates Law and sin is not a real difference: their truth is their mutual implication or confusion — Law generates sin and feeds on it, etc., one cannot ever draw a clear line of separation between the two.

It is only with the couple Law/love that we attain real difference: these two moments are radically separate, they are not “mediated,” one is not the form of appearance of its opposite. In other words, the difference between the two couples (Law/sin and Law/love) is not substantial, but purely formal: we are dealing with the same content in its two modalities.

In its indistinction/mediation, the couple is the one of Law/sin; in the radical distinction of the two, it is Law/love. It is therefore wrong to ask the question “Are we then forever condemned to the split between Law and love? What about the synthesis between Law and love?” The split between Law and sin is of a radically different nature than the split between Law and love: instead of the vicious cycle of the mutual reinforcement, we get a clear distinction of two different domains[Law – love rt]. Once we become fully aware of the dimension of love in its radical difference from the Law, love has, in a way, already won, since this difference is visible only when one already dwells in love, from the standpoint of love.

In authentic Marxism, totality is not an ideal, but a critical notion — to locate a phenomenon in its totality does not mean to see the hidden harmony of the Whole, but to include into a system all its “symptoms,” antagonisms, inconsistencies, as its integral parts.

Let me take a contemporary example. In this sense, liberalism and fundamentalism form a “totality”: the opposition of liberalism and fundamentalism is structured in exactly the same way as the one between Law and sin in Paul, i.e., liberalism itself generates its opposite. So what about the core values of liberalism: freedom, equality, etc.? The paradox is that liberalism itself is not strong enough to save them — i.e., its own core — against the fundamentalist onslaught. Why?

The problem with liberalism is that it cannot stand on its own: there is something missing in the liberal edifice; liberalism is in its very notion “parasitic,” relying on a presupposed network of communal values that it is itself undermining its own development. Fundamentalism is a reaction — a false, mystifying, reaction, of course — against a real flaw of liberalism, and that is why it is again and again generated by liberalism. Left to itself, liberalism will slowly undermine itself — the only thing that can save its core is a renewed left. Or, to put it in the well-known terms from 1968, in order for its key legacy to survive, liberalism needs the brotherly help of the radical left.