Author: logocentric

Žižek december 2011 Berlin

Slavoj Žižek: “The Animal Doesn’t Exist” (respondent: Lorenzo Chiesa) The Human Animal in Politics, Science, and Psychoanalysis
Organised by: Lorenzo Chiesa (Reader in Modern European Thought, University of Kent) and Mladen Dolar (Professor of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana; Advising Researcher, Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht)  KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 16 — 17 December 2011

Part 2

New Guinea Tribe
Rejection of binary logic is a cover-up of a central antagonism Retroactive totalization, a violent cut, a violent impostition of a totality, there is a truth in it.  What emerges through the animal, it is only through this minimal distance of speech that retroactively we can formulate not an eternal essence of animality but the deadlock of animality.  Redefine the notion of essence, do not reject it.

UNIVERSAL and PARTICULAR: the first antagonism is not between particularities, but universality and particular are deal with this antagonism.
Corporate capitalism, liberal capitalism, capitalism with Asian values.  There are only different capitalism, but they all try to obfuscate control a central deadlock.

Big Rule of Hegelian Dialectics
In each Hegelian totality or concrete universality, universality is one of its own species, it encounters itself as one of its own species.  RABBLE, sticks out the only point of universality.  In Rabble human as a social being exists, as an outcast universality comes to exist as such.  A species which relates to itself as a universal being.  What if this animal as such does exist and this is we humans.  and this is the HORROR animals see in us.  We are the ANIMAL for other animals.
Animals are immediately caught in their environment, speechless instinct NO! this is wrong.   This is retroactive projection … I think that the true mystification in this standard opposition between human-animal, what effectively disappears here, what we miss is the most radical dimension of what WE humans are.
Becoming — Being.  We are already constituted reason, speech and then measure animals.  WHat this can’t think is HUMAN IN ITS BECOMING, it can’t think human from animal standpoint.

Psychoanalysis:  Zupancic Freudian DRIVE which is NOT YET CULTURE BUT NO LONGER ANIMAL INSTINCT.
Not animal life but not yet human culture.  Meillassoux After Finitude.  Alenka elaborated a nice Lacanian answer to Meillassoux.  NON-ALL Meillassoux reads in the masculine logic.  You get a more provocative result if you read contingency along the FEMININE LOGIC OF SEXUATION. Contingency is non-all, precisely because you can’t totalize it through exception.

Fossils: Transcendental Kantian legacy can’t provide clear answer to status of FOSSILS.  If you take this ontologically seriously, it refers before transcendental horizon.  Meillassoux demonstrates transcendental tricks don’t work here.  If we want to isolate the dimension Darwin didn’t see, I would like to rehabilitate, who said regarding fossils, that God planted those fossils.     And Ž wants to dialectically incorporate this story
The true problem brings us to object (a).  The true problem is not the fossil out there, was there life on earth before human beings, the true fossil are human beings, we are UNABLE TO SEE OURSELVES IN BECOMING.   The problem is we cannot see ourselves as in-itself as it were.   Its easy to claim tha we Christians can’t read pagan religions we reduce them to our perspective, you miss what Judaism is … what we miss even more what was Christ before he became a Christian, are we aware what a MONSTROSITY JESUS CHRIST WAS FOR THE JEWS.   We have to see the past in its BECOMING.  What was Christ before he became a Christian.

Part 2

The whole of Christianity as an instution is not a fight against paganism but its own excess, the struggle of being human is not fight against animal nature, but fight against EXCESS that marks our break with NATURE.  There is a wonderful text in Kant about education and humans, to control their excess.  Man is an ANIMAL WHO NEEDS A MASTER.   Only humans have a certain WILD UNRULINESS.
The BRUTALITY IS THE FREUDIAN DRIVE, not animal nature.  We are not fighting animal nature, we are fighting the Freudian Drive.

The excess that needs to be explained is the OTHER SIDE of what we humans are in ourselves, what was lost the moment we got caught in our ideological self-perception.
I diagree with vulgar Darwinians when they look for solution in what human mind can do its complexities, talk, infinitesimal mathametics.  No begin with Badiou, what defines a WORLD, are not its positive features, but the way a structure of a world relates to its OWN INHERENT POINT OF IMPOSSIBILITY.  the true changes in world, are changes in the status of this impossibility.

Square root of minus one, before it was dismissed as nonsense.  Even Marx said this, dismisses this.  But revolution of math, even if square root of minus one, even if nonsensical you can integrate it and it functions.    What is great about democracy, it takes traumatic impossibility, my God throne is EMPTY …Leader dies, VOID must be filled immediately, Democracy integrates it, and makes it the instrument of its relative stability.  Capitalism, the impossibility of stability, makes it the very mode of its functioning.  WHAT IF WE SHOULD LOOK for what makes us Humans, at this level, not at what we can do, but a changed status of what we can’t do, the changed status of impossibility.

How is it we humans obsessively care again and again about something with NO ADAPTIVE VALUE?

Objective reality is ontologically not-all   I’m totally materialist.  Quantum physics, reality in-itself is not fully ontologically constituted, there are gaps in reality.   I would like to supplement Alain Badiou, his quote is problematic, his english theoretical writings.  Where does Event come from if all there is is the order of Being?

An event is nothing but the part of a given situation, a fragment of Being.  If an event is nothing but a fragment of Being, why asks Ž can we not describe it as such.   Here is Badiou’s Kantianism.  We are only free from our finitude, Kant tries to imagine what would happen to us if we gained full access to thing-in-itself.  We would turn into puppets.  So our freedom and ethical activity only emerges from standpoint of our finitude.  That’s Kant.  If event is nothing but fragment of being, why can’t we then reduce it to Being.  Badiou says because of our finitude.  Z says no, its because Being in incomplete, you must introduce the non-all of BEING.

Žižek love as political category may 2013 colonialism India

Žižek in Croatia at Subversive Festival, 16 May 2013.

EROS: Postmodern economy dissuades against stable love, quotes from Badiou In Praise of Love, you “fall” in love.  It is a Platonic experience.
Passionate fall in love, the entire balance of your life is lost.  It is a violent experience.  All the advisors we have today are trying to DOMESTICATE or erase this EXCESS of love.  How to find yourself in love without falling love.

AGAPE functions in a holy different way.   WHich political regimes in the 20th century consolidated their power by invoking ‘love’ of their leader.  North Korea.

Buddhism discipline sacrifice. Suzuki in the 1960s supported in his youth Japanese military expansion.  The attitude of total immersion into selfless now.  Anonymous impassive observer of life, you simply observe your knife hitting the body of another. Even the most radical spirituality is no guarantee that we won’t be doing awful things in our daily life.

Praise of Christian Love Buddhism all encompassing passion is one of indifference, quenching all passion which strive to install differences, while the Christian love, intolerant violent love, privilege one object above others.

Violent accept of LOVE. Get ride of Platonic Love of EROS, love of form, love of supreme good … THis is not true love, true love is going for a single person, the highest ethical act, not forsake all terrestial things for eternity, love is I know you are a miserable human being but I’m ready to forsake eternity for this

It is the of Christianity, a sword which separates and sets free, God rejoices in separation of universe into difference

Love your Neighbour  Jesus says, I did not bring peace but a sword, he who loves father and mother more than me is not worthy of me, if anyone comes to me and does not hate his mother and sisters and yes even himself … I have come to cause conflicts on earth, father against son, son against father.

How are we to read these statements?  Pagan: global balance ying-yang, cosmic balance. An individual is good when they act in accordance with social edifice, respect for his superiors, cares for his children etc.  Evil is defined when individual is no longer satisfied with their place.   This ethics is re-emerging in New Age Wisdom, Holistic approach.

Christianity does absolutely the opposite.  Each individual has immediate access to universality, universality of human rights, freedoms, I can particpate in this universal dimension directly irrespective of my place in global social order.   When God says if you do not hate your mother/father you can’t be my follower, father/mother here condense the entire hierarch socal order, the network of domination, the hatred Christ mentions is the hatred of established social hierarchical order.

Core of Christian Insight: Neither men nor woman, neither Jew nor Greeks, Christ dies God dies, all that survives is Holy Spirit which is a radically egalitarian society that opposes social hierarchy and social inequality

Che Guevara Revolutionaries as killing machines, hatred is a element of struggle. What you need is to love with hatred.  Toughen yourself, harden yourself without losing tenderness. What makes love angelic, elevates it over pathetic sentimentality is cruelness itself.

Agape as political love (Eagleton) unconditional egalitarian love for the NEIGHBOUR can serve as foundation for a new social order. Form of appearance of love is communism, the urge to realize an egalitarian social order of solidarity, love is the force of this universal link, which in an emanicpatory collective links bypassing particularistic determinations.

Reply to terrorists: you shirk from authentic terror of the work of love.

Charity is a form of NON-LOVE today.  Starbucks … don’t think, just act buy a coffee contribute money, you can continue your ignorant pleasurable life and feel good you contributed in struggle against suffering, you feel good, see I’m helping all the children starving ….

Authentic Violent Love: If Europe is in gradual decay what is replacing its hegemony?
Capitalism with Asian Values, the clear and present tendency of capitalism to restrain democracy.  What is the hidden price of progress.  This very success engenders antagonisms, keep in view its dark underside.

Universality   Yes every universality can be false, it is always overdetermined by some particular content, Human Rights yes, but it secretly privileges white property male.
But this historicist relativism, beware universality is false universality, Marx is saying something, we are not only less universal than we think, we are also much MORE universal than we think we are.   As agents on a market, we as individuals occupy a universal position, we relate to ourselves as universal subjects, we are no longer identify ourselves, I relate to myself as engineer, today, I lose my job, I become an taxi driver etc.  Universality is a way of life, it is a mode of our immediate experience.

Capitalism force of capitalism to dissolve all particular modes of life.  I want to rehabilitate 2 texts of Marx usually dismissed as case of Marx’s racism and Eurocentrism.  British Rule in India and future results of British rule in India Žižek begins his defense of Marx  All Marx claims is that British Colonisation of India unintended created conditions for double liberation of India.  British knew if caste system collapsed that would create revolutionary conditions, so they put hard work into re-establishing and resusitating old ideological religious systems, so as to keep it stable and inert so it would remain ripe for exploitation.  Respect for local cultures was a crucial component of process of colonialization, British rule wanted India to remain with local religious cultural conditions, Yes we bring progress to India,  false respect for the Other is crucial to colonization, if you remove this you lose colonialism itself.  Radical ambiguity of colonization, the very power of social disintegration unleashed by colonization, which at the same time opens up the space for liberation and ANTI-COLONIAL liberation

Žižek pulls out his India story about English blah blah  But this is his most formal presentation of this story, he even has a quote.  Brahmin intellectuals yelled out Žižek is a colonizer, the lower Dallics Untouchables immediately accepted my message.  Message: It’s true when a foreign language is imposed, you feel deprived of the very core of your identity, but that which you feel deprived of is a specter engendered by this very colonialist imposition of a foreign language.  The very loss of something creates the lost dimension.

We don’t have a pre-colonial India and then brutal colonization which makes the people aware of what they lost and then in anti-colonial struggle they are trying to regain what they lost. NO! The pre-colonial India was something totally different, its irredemiably lost. In so far as it is not lost, it precisely serves colonizers. This ‘new’ dimension that you are craving for, A New Modern Democratic India, the very program of de-colonialization is something engendered by colonialization itself as a reaction to it.

Malcolm X  Not let’s return to those roots.  We don’t have any genuine tradition to rely on, we have to collectively re-invent our identity as condition of our freedom.  He found the new universalist frame in Islam.  He had no dreams of returning to origins.
The greatness of ANC rejected the bullshit of returning to African roots, the one who wanted to return to roots was King Buthelzi who was in cohoots and supported by the brutal Apartheid state.   MANDELA we should be white people at own game, by being more universal than they are.

Decolonization: India has a chance of achieving a more egalitarian democratic society.  Western conservative are aware of this.  WE shouldn’t be too glad about primacy of English language, it is no longer the english of true British people, but spoken by Mumbai and bankers in Bombay.    I don’t believe in anti-colonial resistance in name of LOST ROOTS, if anything advocate a FURTHER LOSS OF OUR ROOTS.
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WHERE THE DANGER IS GROWS ALSO WHAT CAN SAVE US   Friedrich Holderlin
This point of extreme loss is opportunity for REVERSAL.  The whole eschatology of Marx, capitalism is utter alienation, workers are deprived of all substantial objective conditions of their work but this VERY DEPRIVATION LIBERATES THEM FROM  ALL PARTICULAR roots and creates them as universal subjects who may re-approapriate universal SUBSTANCE.

We had a revolution, for Hegel it was French revolution, for us it was the commie revolutions, and things went terribly wrong.  The whole problem of HEgel, is how in these conditions of failure, commie how we experienced in 20th century was a fiasco, how to remain faithful to commie idea, there is a big unease with modernity, strange bedfellows: conservatives up to Eva Morales who said capitalism killed Mother Nature   NO!  when we are faced with horrors of global capitalism we must remain faithful to Marxist insight that modernization is an ambiguous process, the only way out is to bring modernization to its end.

The crude Mary Magdalen joke
Beware of the people too intent on healing other people’s wounds.  People found themselves in actual pre-colonial reality, they would scream as Mary M. There is no way back, we have to play the game of modernist project.  I am totally against imperialism, but anti-imperialism is a misused word.  When Japanese and Germans were fighting they used the words anit-imperialism, so I am no ready to sacrifice Eurpean modernity, AGAPE, universal love, not the wisdom of keeping a distance, fully following into love, full engagement, losing oneself without reserve.  I don’t agree with that so-called Wisdom which says: Don’t attach yourself to worldly objects, NO,  I say, Attach yourself to the end with worldly object with all the risks this involves.

Joke about Tiger Woods

Questions and Answer Session
In matters of love, miracles do happen, LOVE WHICH LUSTS FOR LIFE.  André Gorz wrote book, he fell passionately in love, for 58 years they were absolutely in love, in the end when she was dying of cancer, he killed himself with her together. The mass media propoganda, everything is changing you have to experience life, no when I meet the right person I don’t want to experience too much of life … A certain dismissal of ‘ordinary’ people.  I found nothing dismissive or cheap in the fact that an ordinary person wants his peaceful life. I’m not ready to betray this as some form of alienation. The only changes which truly count are those at the everyday level, these are the hardest to change.  Maybe we no longer live in an ideological in a big sense, projects to die for, ideology is in the everyday sense.  What is happening in Greece is not just political change, but a change in everyday ethics.

Erotic love passionate love, and political passion, the latter is limited, temporary, the former,EROTIC LOVE is not. Even if it doesn’t last, when you engage it should be withing the prospect of eternity. IT must be the prospect of eternity.

It’s a very dangerous game to engage in cultural thinking, this is western thinking, Yugoslave commies, Russia is slavic barbarian, so revolution happened in stupid despotic Asiatic country etc. What surprised me in Russia, some conservative told me opposite, Russia was good, all the evil came from western modernizers Peter the Great up to Stalin. Communism was a western brutal imposition. In China, you can’t call Mao a great Christian. The Great Leap Forward of late 1950s which is brutal event beyond imagination, over 50 millions died from 1958 – 1961.

The point of my negative reference to Buddhism, I reject that Christianity is totalitarian and Buddhism is peaceful. NO. UNIVERSAL LOVE: an authentic commie perspective is NOT Love for Humanity. No. All Men are Brothers. No thanks there are people I don’t want to love or be my brother etc. IT is always something wrong in proclaiming Universal love in all-encompassing love, I love you all, I love you all so much that I’m ready to kill who undermine this universal welfare, the ultimate example of this kind of Universal Love in East Germany the last session of commie party, boss of Stazi when people shouted to shout at him, he looked surprised, But I Love You All. Terror is for me always grounded in a false Universal Love. Authentic Love the majority of people are stupid, but I love you, and you. Agape. Love as a category of Political Struggle. Let’s establish solidarity. The only UNIVERSALITY is the UNIVERSALITY OF STRUGGLE. WE have problems here, there they have problems, is there a common front in each of our coutnries fighting against enemy. love as universal struggle.

And of course Žižek now standard explanation of his infamous claim that “Hitler wasn’t violent enough” He killed millions because he was afraid of making social change, it was a reactive violence.  Stalin: The violence was enactment of utter failure of how to include farmers in socialism. Brutal direct violence is sign of impotence.

An important philosophical point on nature of Truth  Jews are seducing our German girls, exploiting German workers.  The moment you accept the debate at this point you are lost.   Where, in what do you see the solution, neo-Keynsian solution?  Varvougis REPLIES:   We need a Keynsian stablization, it buys us breathing space to dream about the good society.

Question on the film The Lives of Others

Bertolt Brecht: Humans are by natures evil, you can’t change humans, you can only change conditions to take away opportunity to do evil. We have maybe a certainty propensity for violence for acting out, which can be put to different uses. I don’t see a problem here. I’m totally the most brutal realist you can imagine. I didn’t use the word ideal, I used the word miracle. Life is shit, but miracles happen. Some people are just waling around being consumers working, boring and all of a sudden they same, ENOUGH. I cannot go on with this anymore. and risk his life to change something. I believe in miracles, life is generally shit, miracles happen, once here and there we find Andre Gorz.

Žžek thanks his translators and is very funny story about Haiti

Last question  I don’t believe in intimate self-experience, vulnerable fragile person, the lie he invented for himself so he could do the horrors he did.  I’m sure he played with kids and served cookies, the more brutal they are the more they need a private fetish, big bank managers who destroy lives of millions, the same role with private charities, let me give 2% of my wealth to them to Somalia.   We lie to ourselves.  We need a private myth.  Maybe the fundamental form of ideology today, is I’m not just embodiment of economic or ideological categories I”m also a warm fragile person.  That’s the lie.   Brecht precisely reduces capitalist to their social roles, don’t give me the bs that you are a warm caring person.  This isn’t just commie, this is the great legacy of Jewish ethics.   The total EXTERNALIZATION, the truth is how you INTERACT WITH OTHERS.  Not how does it mean to your spiritual growth, inner spiritual growth, authentic self-experience is b.s.  I believe in total externality.

A black lady in South Africa running away from a policeman, her heel breaks on her shoe and falls off. The policeman stops picks up her show and gives it to her. They both look at each other and feel foolish, should she put the shoe back on and they continue chasing each other, the policeman give her the shoe, bids her a good day and turns around and leaves. Now this is the morality I believe in. The policeman probably inside was an incredible racist, but it was what he did on the outside, how he treats other people. Superficial manners can do miracles. Do this 10 times and you might change. Huck Finn help a runaway black slave … their inner bad feeling is what is non-authentic. I believe in surfaces in good manners. what they did externally was right, on the outside on the surface … they did a good thing.

We should hate them, we should just learn to pretend to act like we like them. and to maintain a proper distance. Respectful distance, we should know the other, how can we know the other when we don’t know ourselves, and neither does the other, I believe in superficial manners.

Terror – Anxiety

Žižek the VOIDED SUBJECT always has something, I don’t believe in this pure existentialist bull shit, I am just a void.  Object and subject small a, doesn’t

Is there a place in Badiou’s ediface for DRIVE in the Freudian sense.  Badiou says death drive is decadent, wish for death etc.  Oops.  Hegel on Madness.  Hegel has this idea of how the possibility of madness, radical negativity of madness is constitutive of being mad.  It doesn’t mean we all have to be mad, but the only way to account for terror is a reaction against the threat of madness.  Death drive, radical negativity, for something to emerge.

Negativity has to emerge from time to time to remind us of our pure subjectivity to prevent it from falling into social order complacency.

In order to have anxiety and terror there must be at least a perspective of the event.  Anxiety and terror is the shadow of how an event affects animal life.  NO!

Where, what do we mean by subject?

Badiou promises to do in Logics of Worlds, to elaborate how multiplicity of being structures itself into multiplicity of worlds.  No passage from pure mathematized infinity into different worlds.  How can something like a world emerge within the multiplicity of multiplicity of Being.

Badiou’s ontology, multiplicity of multiplicities is TOO FLAT there is no inherent antagonism, tension.

Multiplicity of multiplicity of multiplicity … ontology is the discourse of the VOID, but why then isnt an event simply the order of BEING, why is it an exception.

Secretly he introduces another order of Being.  The EVENT IS AN EXCEPTION but not with regard to order of BEING as such.  Here he cheats.

when he speaks about EXCEPTION, there are only language and bodies with the exception of EVENTS.  Not far enough There is something which is NOT.  There are only bodies and languages BUT there are occurences which break with this logic.

The true problem with Alain, his ontology relies too much on the opposition between presence and representation.  Anti-statist As if we have some AUTHENTIC presentation: mass movement, and then you have some form of state,  Here I am for REPRESENTATION.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Žižek the Real Winnebago Tribe

Here is a version from Parallax View I think
Short 6 minute video on the Real, Birkbeck 29 June, 2011

The real is at the same time the obstacle that makes reality inaccessible.

Recall Claude Levi-Strauss’s exemplary analysis, from his Structural Anthropology, of the spatial disposition of buildings in the Winnebago, one of the Great Lake tribes, might be of some help here. The tribe is divided into two sub-groups (“moieties”), “those who are from above” and “those who are from below”; when we ask an individual to draw on a piece of paper, or on sand, the ground-plan of his/her village (the spatial disposition of cottages), we obtain two quite different answers, depending on his/her belonging to one or the other sub-group.

Both perceive the village as a circle; but for one sub-group, there is within this circle another circle of central houses, so that we have two concentric circles, while for the other sub-group, the circle is split into two by a clear dividing line. In other words, a member of the first sub-group (let us call it “conservative-corporatist”) perceives the ground-plan of the village as a ring of houses more or less symmetrically disposed around the central temple, whereas a member of the second (“revolutionary-antagonistic”) sub-group perceives his/her village as two distinct heaps of houses separated by an invisible frontier… 20

The point Levi-Strauss wants to make is that this example should in no way entice us into cultural relativism, according to which the perception of social space depends on the observer’s group-belonging: the very splitting into the two “relative” perceptions implies a hidden reference to a constant – not the objective, “actual” disposition of buildings but a traumatic kernel, a fundamental antagonism the inhabitants of the village were unable to symbolize, to account for, to “internalize”, to come to terms with, an imbalance in social relations that prevented the community from stabilizing itself into a harmonious whole.

The two perceptions of the ground-plan are simply two mutually exclusive endeavors to cope with this traumatic antagonism, to heal its wound via the imposition of a balanced symbolic structure. It is here that one can see it what precise sense the Real intervenes through anamorphosis. We have first the “actual,” “objective,” arrangement of the houses, and then its two different symbolizations which both distort in an anamorphic way the actual arrangement. However, the “real” is here not the actual arrangement, but the traumatic core of some social antagonism which distorts the tribe members’ view of the actual arrangement of the houses in their village.

The Real is thus the disavowed X on account of which our vision of reality is anamorphically distorted; it is SIMULTANEOUSLY the Thing to which direct access is not possible AND the obstacle which prevents this direct access, the Thing which eludes our grasp AND the distorting screen which makes us miss the Thing.

More precisely, the Real is ultimately the very shift of perspective from the first to the second standpoint. Recall the old well-known Adorno’s analysis of the antagonistic character of the notion of society: in a first approach, the split between the two notions of society (Anglo-Saxon individualistic-nominalistic and Durkheimian organicist notion of society as a totality which preexists individuals) seems irreducible, we seem to be dealing with a true Kantian antinomy which cannot be resolved via a higher “dialectical synthesis,” and which elevates society into an inaccessible Thing-in-itself; however, in a second approach, one should merely take not of how this radical antinomy which seems to preclude our access to the Thing ALREADY IS THE THING ITSELF – the fundamental feature of today’s society IS the irreconcilable antagonism between Totality and the individual.

What this means is that, ultimately, the status of the Real is purely parallactic and, as such, non-substantial: is has no substantial density in itself, it is just a gap between two points of perspective, perceptible only in the shift from the one to the other.

The parallax Real is thus opposed to the standard (Lacanian) notion of the Real as that which “always returns at its place,” i.e., as that which remains the same in all possible (symbolic) universes: the parallax Real is rather that which accounts for the very multiplicity of appearances of the same underlying Real – it is not the hard core which persists as the Same, but the hard bone of contention which pulverizes the sameness into the multitude of appearances.

In a first move, the Real is the impossible hard core which we cannot confront directly, but only through the lenses of a multitude of symbolic fictions, virtual formations. In a second move, this very hard core is purely virtual, actually non-existing, an X which can be reconstructed only retroactively, from the multitude of symbolic formations which are “all that there actually is.”

Žižek Nov 2010

Žižek in Nov 2010 London.

Multiculturalism each particular culture and some legal space separate from each other
Here is the story of Jewish Lesbians with purple hair and Muslim women together in Bilan as an example of universality, solidarity in struggle.

Tragedy of Multiculturalism
The whole space is constructed with a clear class dimension.  The middle class blaming poor red neck working class.  The problem when we fight racism don’t focus on the poor confused guys, his son comes home beaten, things are getting stolen from the field and so on … nothing is offered them but just blame.  Then we get new rise of anti-immigrant politics with a strong base in poor and working class.  We need to break this alliance with anti-immigrant nationalism and working class.

An example of a dirty joke in order to make the point that this is how you reach out to the other, the gypsy.  Its not just being open to the other, we should be open to the other in the sense of participating in the same shared struggle.

Anti-Capitalism
fake moral anti-capitalism

Ruthless presentation of actual deadlock: Jack Bauer 24.  Season 7.  Shift from external to internal enemy.  In final episode, Bauer thinks he’s dying, and asks a Muslim priest to his death bed, and says with simple dignity, he’s my friend.  What I like it renders open Jack Bauer’s ethical confusion.  There is no easy solution offered, no I was doing it for the common good.  There is no humanizing, not its a tough job somebody has to do it, we pay the price for it, NO.   Ethical political contradiction, legal power and obscene counterpart, there is no way out, no way to feel good morally, I just have to live with it, all humanization is disgusting like Speilberg’s Munich.  If we remain within framework of existing coordinates thare is no way out.  Present total ethical confusion, noone is covered here.

I agree with Tariq Ali’s critique of Obama, but its a leftist cheap shot, making left feel good, look Obama didn’t do anything, ha this is typical.  But Žižek says this is too easy.
Animal Rights  Derrida, primordial scene, the primordial gaze of the other, Levinas excludes animals.  Žižek I saw a photo of a cat …
What kind of a monster did the cat sees, what were we for the cat, this monstrosity is something to think about.  What are we humans for animals.  What kind of monsters are we for them. 

Critique of Badiou  politics of subtraction, establish free territories outside of state power and use violence only as a defensive measure.  Badiou goes one step too far, when you don’t have violence in a society, you already have violence to maintain this non-violence.  Badiou is conceding too much to the enemy.  Class struggle is already violence, peace in capitalism is violence.  We should become aware of seeing this violence, which complicates things, we cannot get out of violence.

Žižek’s Jon Holloway story that he repeats again in Zagreb 2013.  Capitalists love these non-commercial zones where people relax.   Liberated zones.  Chiapas non-violent moral authority, now everyone loves them because they are no longer a threat.  Islands outside brutal commodification makes capitalism happy.

Here is the Question and Answer   The infamous quote about Hitler not being violent enough.  And here is Ghandi

Attracting attention, Žižek on himself

Žižek Dec 2010 princeton u. belief big Other chicken joke neils borg commodity fetishism ethnic dances

Žižek, S. Why Only an Atheist Can Be A True Christian  Wilson College, Princeton University.  12 Dec. 2010.
Here is the talk on YouTube

Eppur Si Muove: Although someone possesses true knowledge is forced to renounce it, this does not stop it from being true. It can also be used in the opposite sense, assert the deeper symbolic truth, make a statement its obviously false but nonetheless, even if its not true, in a deeper sense, the message has metaphorical truth.
Although he knows that there is no God, the idea of a god still moves him. This is nothing mystical, how does it evoke emotion? The well known conservative idea: IF THERE IS NO GOD THEN EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED.
Lacan inverts this: If there is no god then everything is prohibited, everything is regulated.
I visited Belgrade, there I encountered Nationalists engaged in ethnic cleansing: for them modern hedonist liberal society was not too much freedom, but too regulated, I can’t beat my wife I can’t rape, for them being a nationalist, I can steal, rape, kill. Hitler is false permissivity, pretend to sacrifice yourself and beneath this surface we can have lots of fun.

Sound of Music: Sister Maria, Julie Andrews, goes to Mother Superior in the monastery, I’m still in love, repent? Mother Superior sings Climb every mountain, go back and screw

Pretend to be one of us, Catholic priest and you can have all the boys you want.  It isn’t superfically follow the ritual and then do secret stuff, no you are obliged to particpate in obscene transgressions, take the KKK in Alabama 1950.  If you were against the church you would be teased, but if you spoke against the KKK, to be a real member of the white community you had to participate in these rituals.  When I was young in the Yugoslav army, you had to do fragging, it is there solidarity is asserted.

Stalinist commies were NOT atheists, commies had their own GODS which is why everything was permitted, commies did not perceive themselves as hedonists, but instruments of a historical necessity, perceiving yourself as instrument of historical necessity which permitted them to do whatever they wanted.  In 1956 when Kruschev denounced Stalin’s crimes, they had psychiatrists, delegated had heart attacks, hospitalized, Why?  They didn’t find out anything new, no, they all knew it, the point is that what in Lacanian theory we call the big Other, the public space, there it was admitted.

The big Other, I claim we believe more than ever.

CHICKEN JOKE
crazy as this sounds, this is how ideology functions today
Neils Borg joke: We don’t have to believe in it, it works objectively.  we don’t believe in democracy, justice

Commodity Fetishism
Of course we know that there is nothing magical about money, in our everyday ideology we are rational utilitarians, fetishism is not in what we think but WHAT WE DO.   They don’t know what they are doing but they are doing it.  They don’t know what they don’t know.  They don’t know the illusions they follow in their real social actions.  My father is a jerk.  If you observe the same teen interacting with his father, you see a different attitude.  It is not simply what you think and how things really are, OBJECTIVE BELIEF even if you don’t you believe, you believe without believing subjectively, you believe in your ACTS.

This is how RELIGION functions, we believe much more, even if we say we don’t, we believe through our acts.
INTERPASSIVITY: Weepers, Tibetan Prayer Wheel: objectively you are praying, think about sex whatever. Canned Laughter The TV set laughs. At the end of the show I feel relaxed as if I had laughed. The tv literally laughs for you.

Religion: we don’t need to, we need an other one Subject Supposed to Believe, exist as a presupposition, Xmas time, why did you buy present for kid, I don’t believe in Santa Claus, but the child pretend to believe in it to get presents and not disappoint parents. A belief can be objective without anyone believing in it.
Age of Innocence, movie: Winona Ryder, hero has a love affair with Michelle Pfeiffer. The young wife dies, he thinks he is free to marry Pfeiffer, but his son says that mother knew it all the time, she just pretended, everything is ruing for Daniel Day Lewis. Nothing changed, he just learned that the OTHER was not ignorant. We need another agent/group/subject that through their/his/her belief COVERS US. Have orgies, but there should be someone who does not know. MOLESTATION OF small children, children’s sexuality disappeared, to be transgressive, do what you want but there needs to be an appearance, a big Other who doesn’t know.

Everyone knows it but everyone pretends not to know it, and it works.
Life is Beautiful: holocaust was so brutal and violent it was too strong for a tragedy, a minimal of dignity of victim should be maintained. To imagine such a confrontation in Auschwitz is to presupposes a level of dignity which was not given to them. Comedy, not where you laugh, but a total ridicule of a scene. Primo Levi. In the movie Life is Beautiful, the son should know all along that father was lying, but was just playing the game so not to hurt his father. This would make the situation tragic.

Capitalism is a religion: Usually we say capitalism is brutal egotism, utilitarian, profiteering. NO. It is clear a capitalist works as a monk, what matters to him is to totally sacrifice himself to capital, so that just capital should circulate.
Christianity: A religion functions without people really believing in it. It can function objectively.

Nobody believed, not taking it seriously was a condition for taking part in nomenklatura, if you take the ruling ideology seriously you are close to being a dissident. The chicken should know that you are not corn, not you. It is not enough for us that there is no god, the illusion must be broken from within. This whole history of Christianity is dealing with this, Napoleon forced the Pope to crown him, Pope told him, you want to destroy Christianity, but we the church have been trying for 2000 yrs and have not succeeded.

Judaism God is dead. Woody Aloni, God is speaking to his people, you have made me a single entity in the world through your prayers. Marshal Mcluhan, the other rabbi says God go away, god runs away. The structure of illusion, what you still have here, we know its an illusion but it still fully functions as an illusion.
On that moment on the Cross for Christianity, Father why did you abandon me, God himself becomes for a moment an atheist, what dies on the Cross is not the terrestial rep of Divinity, but God dies himself and Holy spirit is the community of believers.

Book of Job. And then 3 theological friends come. Your suffering has a deeper meaning. He rejects the idea that his calamity has deeper meaning. God comes everything that Job says is true, Chesterton says it is supreme moment of blasphemy, God becomes for an instant an atheist, the maker is astonished at the things he made, I don’t control anything, all is a mess.

What dies on the CROSS? God as the big Other, God as such.

Death of Christ: radical renunciation, God is saying NO YOU SHOULD NOT TRUST ME, there is no meaning guaranteed, don’t trust me, I trust you, where there is love between two of you I will be there. We are condemned to our freedom. RUINING THE STRUCTURE OF ILLUSION FROM WITHIN, this atheist message is the Christian message, God dies on the cross we are condemned to freedom.

Levinasian Ethics: Experience of the Other as vulnerable, the wounded perplexed suffering face. We are still in a position of Masters, it is the other who is fragile not ourselves, when the other addresses us, I don’t accept it, the problem of animals, as Derrida demonstrated, the Animal that I am, how Levinas with all his celebration of otherness, the face, EXPLICITLY excludes animals. If there is a paradigm case of confronting wounded other, it is the animal, all philosophy disavows this, rationally you accept it, but nonetheless you ignore it. A photo of a cat submitted to a lab experiment, broken bones, without fur, helplessly looking into camera. Jeremy Bentham, instead of asking can animals talk/reason/think, denying things to animals, half blind pigs fattened and slaughtered, philosophical way to deny this is Cartesian notion of animals as machines, cries of pain should not disturb us, just imagine malfunction of machine there is nothing behind it. What do we see in the perplexed gaze of tortured animal, I claim that instead of just asking the standard philosophical questions what are animals for us, but what are WE for animals, what does the tortured animal see when the see us, inhuman dimension of human being, Freud said it was DEATH DRIVE. This excessive monstrosity of being HUMAN, some philosophers got it, Kant, in his unknown text on education, human is an animal who needs a master. Human nature is explosive radical crazy freedom, it is to control this excess that humans need education not animals. I see in the animals gaze is my MONSTROSITY.

I claim that some things, ordinary things we do, could be read against this background, how to cope/control this other as neighbour. A kiss is clumsy but tender answer to a question that eludes the power of language. A kiss is by the mouth, it is as if the message of a kiss is, I know that there is a monstrosity in you beyond language, an abyssal potential evil, but with my kiss in you, I accept you in this dimension, and by kissing we can reach a momentary peace.

I don’t care about your ethnic dances, I want to hear your dirty jokes.

Ž Syriza Greece

6th Subversive festival
15 May, 2013.  Alexis Tsipras and Slavoj Žižek, The Role of the European Left Moderator: Srećko Horvat
Žižek starts here
If Syriza wins nothing will be the same.  Al Gore that dummy, everyone expected him to win, “I am the guy who once was the future American President”  All history will be read as pointing towards the Syriza victory.   If Syriza wins and does something it will be the end of the old Europe.  The very soul of Europe will change.
Radical egalitarianism, radical democracy this is at the core of European identity and this is at stake today.  Brussels technocrats, anti-immigrant fascists they are the true threat to Europe.  You have economic neo-liberalism combined with anti-immigrant populism, this is not Europe.  Syriza stands for Europe, what Europe stands for, not just the marginals etc.
Syriza is the voice of true reason and moderation, the dangerous experimenters are in power, what is attributed to Syriza is what the Euro-technocrats are doing. asdf
Žižek pt 2
After 1968, capitalism welfare state wasn’t in total crisis. While today the systemic crisis is here, so return to social democratic welfare state is not the solution, for all our sympathies for Latin America, we can’t simply follow the Latin American way.
Alliances, I’m not fascinated with Tahir Sq.  What about the morning after What will your victory mean in the lives of ordinary people when life returns back to nomral.  Its a question of intelligent alliances.  Its not simple redistribution, since for a couple decades we’ll still live within capitalism. In the old commie days, patriotic bourgeoisie, genuine interest to produce for the people, its not just strike at the rich, but a carefully planned strategy, competition, small level prod’n of consumerist goods.  Crazy as it will sound, a dream of what Syriza will be, within global distribution, should make life easier for truly productive capitalists, its the link with State clientelism with international banks, this is bad even for productive capitalist classes.  If you are a good honest capitalist you can still vote for us.
Golden Dawn one aspect of unfortunately a trend all around Europe.  Croatia and Slovenia the discourse is changing, in the last decades there is a subtle re-writing of WWII.  It wasn’t simply that the good side one, a subtle rehabilitation of soft fascism.  Things that were unthinkable in Europe 30 years ago are back, before fascists were not tolerated.
Banking System Today’s economy needs banks.  Not Wall St. but Main St.  too simplistic.  If you look really closely how indebted countries works, this structure of debts, 80% of money is speculative money.  Iceland, a couple of private speculators ruined everything.  Simply in the interests of capitalist production, the ongoing global banking system cannot do its function, a more popular democratic banking system is necessary simply for capitalist prod’n to survive.  Syriza should not just a crazy leftist solution, but make it a better bourgeois state.  You will have to do, what capitalist ruling class could not do themselves.

Žižek pt 3 If you want to have a real popular mobilization beyond, above the standard bureacratic politics, you need a charismatic leader look at Chavez, there are genuine charismatic leaders that are not Stalin.  Its first time in my life I’m accused of being a social democrat.  The so-called Stalinist State Socialism was also a catastrophe.  I don’t believe that local forms of self-organization, have the potential to universalize themselves.  I am shameless saying back to Marx from Hegel, we have to re-invent the state.  I’m totally opposed to John Holloway, who said I was in Greece, a park was proclaimed a liberated zone, entrance prohibited to capitalism.  that’s crazy.  This idea of some type of immediate self-transparent direct democracy.   I don’t like enthusiastic moments, where after you have nostalgic moments, then your phone rings I have to go back to the bank my boss is calling.  When the enthusiasm is over I want the Left to change things at the everyday common-sense level.   Don’t fall in love with enthusiastic moments.  It lasts for 2 months.   I’m not talking about bourgeois state, we should re-invent these large scale mechanisms.
Žižek pt 4 The old Ricardo dream, you will get the good function of money.   There are differences up and down but I don’t believe there was a Golden Era.  American Leftists it was the 1950s, I’m skeptical.  Argentinian cooperatives, I’m skeptical.  Latin American countries like to point out factories taken over by workers, but re-visit the same factories a year later.  You can’t universalize the cooperatives.  Maurizio Lazzarato’s book The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition did something very important.  Capitalism can less and less globally afford even these formal freedoms.  What I like in Lazzarato’s work, all the ideological networks that make us accept this form of slavery, the universalization of capitalism, in a way a different levels we are all capitalists.  Aren’t you acting as a self-entrepreneur, we are all capitalists.  As all efficient forms of ideology, if I decide to economize and invest in education, am I not treating myself as object of investment, this change of everyday attitudes, everyday forms perceived as apolitical.  Ideology which matters is everyday, how you preceive your everyday situation.  Never underestimate the power of ideology today.

Žižek May 9 2013 madness and Hegel

Žižek 9 May 2013 and broken down into 8 videos on YouTube
13.40 Antonio Damascio “Descartes Error” Cognitivist rejection of Descartes.  Descartes draw a strict line of description neutral abstract thinking and animality, Descartes drew a strict distinction.
18:00 Smoking gun on Heidegger
21:25 Deleuze and Hegel: Hegel should simply be ignored. Forget Hegel.
28.00 Pittsburgh Hegelians

29:30 The Concept of Madness
Plato describes Socrates being seized by an idea.  A description of someone in a hysterical seizure.  Then we know Plato, the hypothesis of the evil spirit, universalized madness, debates between Derrida and Foucault.  And Hegel dismissed as ultimate madman of philosophy.
31:20 Anti-Event Philosophers
Platonic Idea we have some eternal order/ideas existing in immutable way, nothing really happens, all that really happens is remembrance, rediscovering all that already is deep within ourselves, rediscovering truth that is already there. The ultimate philosopher of ANTI-EVENT.
Hegel has a system, dialectical movement, but in the course of dialectical movement, things are already becoming what they eternally are.

34:00 NO it isn’t like this says Ž.  No event in Plato? Look at what actually happens in Plato, (see Badiou), the zero-level of the Platonic experience, we live ordinary daily life immersed in our daily shit, then we encounter an idea, Saul’s conversion in to St. Paul, something happens a radical cut and you discover another dimension. No wonder Plato was celebrating Love as Madness, Plato emphasized Love as the beginning of Wisdom.

We should never forget how it all begins for Plato: you are in your daily universe, thinking about daily shit, and then you confront someone who is your love, and your life is forever changed, you can feel this brutal encounter in Plato, if you are passionately in love then in your most intimate rational interests: parents, colleagues, children, can vanish, you experience a weird indifference to moral obligation to those around you. Falling in Love is the Platonic Event. This is missing in ‘Oriental’ thought. The oriental idea you are in undisturbed state of bliss, you get too engaged and fall into. Plato emphasizes this falling into as FULL engagement.

38:00 Descartes Cogito is precisely a PURE EVENT. Here Descartes misunderstands himself. Cogito is NOT a substance which is thinking. No. Cogito is this experience of a thing that exists only in sofar as it is thinking, only in the course of the process of thinking. What is CRUCIAL is not to forget that when he describes this pure experience of COGITO he’s not playing a intellectual game, he’s describing a concrete mystical/spiritual experience, you have this THE NIGHT OF THE WORLD, when you withdraw in a kind of psychotic reduction, you withdraw from reality into the abyss of your soul, the point of darkess, darkness as the absolute depth of your soul. What Descartes is describing as ‘Cogito Ergo Sum’ is precisely this thought disconnected from reality, this pure moment of inwardness which is at the same time the moment of MADNESS.

Hegel was well aware of how in order for Human Spirit, our Symbolic universe to develop we have to go through the zero-point of madness, Hegel is more Foucaultian than Foucault, madness is not just a possibility of things go wrong, but our rational world emerges only as a defence against the threat of madness. Even if most of us our not mad, the only way to understand human reason is as a reaction as a form of madness, a form of madness. Wonderful passage in Freud’s reading in his analysis of paranoia, Judge Schreber, Freud says that in a paranoiac system what we usually take as the sign of madness is on the contrary an attempt to get out of madness, the paranoiac construct is an ersatze normality, the true madness is the night of the World, the withdrawal from reality. The paranoiac is a crazy attempt to cure yourself. Lacan sometimes along these lines proposed there is a moment of madness in all rationality, every rationality is an attempt to get out of madness. Platonic Event, encounter the IDEA. We can formulate the basic Platonic experience independently of this idealist substantialist metaphysics. In authentic moments of LOVE, POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT, we encounter some kind of ABSOLUTE, something strikes you, morality can act as ABSOLUTE, did you see that bullshit the life of PI.

44:00 Ang Lee wants to meet Ž. But in the novel, when you must do something, when you experience something as ethical pressure, you must do it because you cannot NOT do it. You CANNOT NOT DO IT. Absolute is something much more fragile something that belongs to the order of appearance than ordinary reality, Absolute is you have a duty, you can say fuck off if you are an unethical person. You cannot not do it. An entity totally powerless fragile, but nonetheless you CANNOT get rid of it. The more fragile the more it has a hold over you.

I think therefore I am, I am only so far as I am caught in the process of thinking.

46:00 HEGEL Philosopher of the EVENT

In what sense for Hegel is TRUTH itself evental? Appearance misleading false appearance is immanent to TRUTH. Yes of course first you cling to one idea its partially true, the other side is partial, then a higher synthesis NO NO. The ABC in the conflict between appearance and reality, the truth is in appearance. Innocent bystander, you are in a certain situation, what matters is not what you sincerely think deep in yourself, but how your situation appears to an observer, even if appearance is false, it is socailly determining, it is stronger. The drama of false appearances. There can be more truth in superficial appearances. Through totally invented accusation, the two women discover that they are attached. Inner self-experience doesn’t get it all, it is the 3rd party external observation.

1:05 Derrida started to imitate his American followers who misunderstood him. The TRUTH CAN ARISE OUT OF A MISRECOGNITION.
Immanence of Appearance to TRUTH. Something starts as misleading appearance but triggers a process making it true. This is Hegelian dialectic. Alenka Zupancic: Evental Status of a TRUTH. The truth emerges out of a series of EVENTS, out of an evental process, what begins as a misleading process becomes a TRUTH. This holds at a fundamental level of SEXUALITY.

1:10 infantile sexuality this notion is oppressed today, it is as if this is the price we are paying for our permissivity. Everything is permitted today, do it with dogs, but children are innocent, pedophilia is the ultimate crime. Innocent child as returned with a vengence. Children are the innocent observers, we can participate in orgies etc, but children must not know about it, parents who are swinging, if you mention this to my son but don’t tell my son, on condition that the child doesn’t know it, we need an innocent gaze.

So we should ask: Who are the typical bad guys. Fred Jameson says this about WIRE the HBO series, today the only acceptable bad guys in movies are terrorists, serial killers and pedaphiliacs. House of Cards, with Kevin Spacey, you can still be the point of identification as a murderer, all other murderers are relativized. Copjec told me there was that hit series HOME ALONE, a celebration of children, invincible, they always win, a protection of the innocence. Let’s go a step further.

What is so scandalous about infantile sexuality?

The scandal resides in 2 features:

1. Alenka Zupancic, infantile sexuality is something weird, its neither biologically grounded, nor fitting symbolic cultural norms.  Biologically sexuality is made for copulation. It invades before biologically mature sexuality.  The problem here is its not we have first infantile, then once puberty enter we can start fucking in a normal way, no it ruins the entire field. The way infantile sexuality approaches sexual topic remains in power to the end.

Quote from Laplanche: drives precede what is innate and instinctual. Instinctually biologically fucking with genitals, but you don’t start at biologically and then get cultural, no you start with unnatural sexuality,

It is instinctual sexuality (fuck to get children) which is adaptaive, it has evolutionary function, infantile drives already present in the unconscious. why this strange intrusion in children neither biology (biologically infantile sexuality is meaningless), nor culture, normativity.  But some wierd in-between.

The reason for this strange excess, is the link between sexuality and cognition. Against the standard idea of sexuality as instinctual force which is sublimated though culture, one should assert the link between sexuality and cognition.

1:20 Childrens’sexuality is not masturbatory pre-genital, it is deeply cognitive, where do babies come from? And it is deeply embedded in fantasies, the small child sees some strange things, the enigma of the other’s desire, he feels something obscene in adults, what do they want from me, This is for Laplanche, the original experience of subjectivity, what do the others see in me?  I have something in me that others see in me but I don’t know what.  Children’s sexuality is grounded in such a cognitive search, but there is always a missing link you never get the answers, that why you have fantasies.

1:24 What I’m saying is 2 things: 1. these are childish fantasies, when you reach puberty you know answers, NO.  You need Fantasies to the end.  THis is what Lacan means by there is no sexual relation.  To get aroused you need fantasy excess.  The problem for psychoanalysis, is not vulgar pan-sexualism, the enigma of psycho-analysis is the opposite, what are we thinking when we are doing sex, there has to be some detail, you imagine the curl of the hair: somebody observing you, the scent of her hair, her calves.

The structure of infantile sexuality which is a cognitive missing link remains here to the end. We never reach maturity. The structure of sexuation through cognitive missing link and fantasy, this structure remains to the end.

1:27  Did you see David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. This is a nice fantasy structure. The best scene, Kyle observes from the closet Dennis Hopper, breathing through oxygen mask etc. Chion said only way to read the scene is a visualized audio hallucination. Oxygen breathing, this is a child listening to parent’s copulating, he hears strange sounds, the parent’s fucking but he doesn’t know what fucking is, so makes up scenario, imagines daddy breathing etc.

1:29  Judith Butler Narrative
There is normal sex, heterosexual, straight, and then we have this childish games, that if not refocused on heterosex, they are used as subordinated moments for genital sex. If I like to look at you it is ok only if its foreplay to proper penetration its okay.

Butler/Deleuze Version: we have polymorphous perverse paradise of plural practices which is violently normativized to a genital paradigm. This is also false.  There is no plurality of perversions and then bad patriarchy which subordinates it. NO wrong. It is not enough to reassert infantile sexuality which is polymorphous perverse sexuality which is then totalized regulated by the Oedipal genital norm.  Infantile sexuality is not the original base of sexuality which is then captured and regulated by the heterosex norm.

The idea here is that Alenka Zupancic, copulation fucking is a central point but precisely as such it ESCAPES normativity. THERE IS NO SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP.

We do have this perverse polymorphous mastabatory practices, but always against the background of a cogntive hole, could have been filled in by a full genital sex, but this can’t be done there is no formula here.  There is no knowledge here, there is no formula for sex. Full sex copulation, its space has be sustained by perverse scenarios.

Already Lacan says Seminar XX, simple observation, turns around completely the standard idea that Catholic church its sexual teaching privileges normative genital sexuality at the expense of oppressed perverse infantile drives etc.  As if the only thing church tolerates is genital straight heterosexuality NO. Absolutely NOT TRUE.

If you look at the church imaginary it is full or oral/anal drives and art, saints eating shit, fondling each other, but never fucking, copulation is prohibited in the church imaginary. Reject Catholic sexual morality imposes normative sexuality on polymorphous perverse sexuality of humans.

One should insist that there is nothing necessarily asocial in partial drives, they function as glue as society, in contrast to the sexual straight couple.

Pre-genital oral, anal drives, the Church and Army is full of this.  What they feel threatened by is copulation, the couple.

Zupancic there is something profoundly disruptive at stake in copulation, the kind of social bond it proposes (copulation) that Christianity proposes, it doesn’t need copulation, natural copulation is utterly banned from the religious imaginary.

Christianity is all about jouissance of the body, the body of God as constituting another person’s jouissance, partial drives and the satisfaction they procure are abundantly present. In its libidinal aspect, satisfaction and bonding by way of partial objects with the exclusion of sexual coupling.  Infantile sexuality is part of Christianity. The pure enjoyment, enjoyment for sake of enjoyment is not banned, what is banned is sexuality in form of copulation. Christianity fully acknowledges the polymorphous perverse satisfaction of drives but Christianity desexualizes the pleasure they provide.  Why this oppression of Sexuality in Church?

1:41 What happens in copulation is precisely a certain link, coupling of 2 dimension which make it problematic for Church. On the one hand sexuality in sense of partial drives, you can’t find satisfaction put finger up here, squeeze here, technical stuff of how to do it  then we have the inter-subjective LINK, but isn’t the tendency today that the 2 should be kept apart.

If you are frigid = problem of partial drives.  Sexual topic is reduced to question of partial drives. Sexual topic is reduced to topic of partial drives, if you can’t get erection do this … sexuality is subordinated to, does it contribute to your relation to other. What happens in intense copulation the 2 dimensions go together.

The mystery of sexuality is intense bodily enjoyment and connection with Other, not in this metaphysical sense, communicating with sould no fuck soul, it is brutally concrete, not connecting with souls, the more you reduce the other to an object, the more you have spiritual surrender.

The Church prefers missionary position, this is way to maintain distance from other,  in other words the Church wants to protect us from the miraculous EVENTAL, traumatic event of SEXUALITY. a traumatic event that can’t be reduced to reproductive copulation.

1:44.20 This missing link, no sexual relationship, the last trap here. If you read Lacan, you must notice AMBIGUITY. 1. massively endorses philosophic topic, division between animal and humans. Animals=instinct you know when to copulate. Humans we need fantasies, poetry it doesn’t function. This idea of Opposing nature as domain of immediate BALANCE, no, we have to do a step: This idea that it’s not enough to say man is de-natured animal, Nature is already de-natured it doesn’t know it.
Alenka Zupancic: are you aware of something, conscious of something. UNCONSCIOUS of something. Both nature and man don’t know how to do it. Nature doesn’t know that it doesn’t know. Lacan gives some hints in Seminar II. LAMELLA undead object. at the level of animal sexuality. Oscillates Lacan between simple celebration of humanity, Man doesn’t have instinctual coordinates, which is why has to invent things NO Nature has gap itself, The battler is DENATURALIZING nature. The ultimae idealist resistance, we have nature, then somehow things go wrong with humans.

This wonderful idea in Shcelling, Benjamin, this idea human language was created to give words to the pain that is already in nature, to redeem the pain in nature. If we drop this mystical topic, and say radical discord that is ALREADY IN NATURE. with humanity nature becomes UNCONSCIOUS of its own DISCORD. THis is the way I read quantum physics, the latter denaturalizes nature, what we get is not culture but not nature in the usual way we understand it.
151:00 What would be materialist theology. Kierkargards idea of anxiety: tried to develop logical proof of God, while he’s trying to deduce existence of God, God himself is watching with anxiety, because if he fails, then God himself like the cat walking over the cliff on thin air, will suddenly drop. Will god’s existence depend on philosophy proving his existence.

Like monarch anxiety if General Assembly deciding if partial or absolute monarch.
Crazy as it may sound, each of us as subjects are in position of GOD, our existence depends on the other, fuck it, I exist if the whole world disappears, for you to exist you depend radically on the others.

The lesson of Quantum physics, at the micro level, things can go on, you can cheat ontologically. Einstein answer to Borg, God does not cheat. Ok, maybe God doesn’t cheat but he can be cheat, at quantum level things can happen that God doesn’t know about. IT isn’t is God cheating, NO. We can cheat on GOD.

Ž around May 2013

Žižek slamming Jameson
The Cynic. Do not need symptomal reading of ideology. Who needs complex theories, things are so obvious we just have to inform the people.
Pics from Guantonamo but Žižek showed these pics to friends and asked them “what is this?” answer: Avantgarde theatre. No. This is an intro to the Obscene underside of American culture.

The truly subversive thing today
Not to engage in any dreams, but brutal confrontation. Most of the critical analysis, whenever you talk about poverty, its much more mobilizing to talk about poverty in Africa, then the Bill Gates game, today, its precisely this need to present a terrifying situation, presenting a light at the end of the tunnel that prevents change.

Hegel and Literature
Point de capiton, Rebecca Comay hesitates here. What I think is no, Hegel is there totally consequent, he is applying the same logic all around the Phenomenology. You need a brutal regression at the. The theory of the Monarch. To get a modern state, does not depend on tradition, but a rational state, you need on the top a king, who is who he is by just a stupid biological fact. Hegel does not violate anything, this is a crucial mechanism of Hegel. To finish the mediation itself, you need a brutal return to immediacy.

What is the possible limitation of Hegel?
Can Hegel think negation of negation. Negate something into nothing, the second move is not “nothing is the subordinated moment you then get a complex” no nothing is even less than nothing ..”

Aaron Schuster on wierd optimism
The Joke by Milan Kundera.
Hegel cannot think pure repetition, he has a wonderful theory of repetition, but as an idealizing moment, second time sublation into iseal form.
He can’t think a purely mechanical repetition, a repetition without this moment of sublation.

A True post-Hegelian space
pure repetition.  The problem is that the entire theory of exploitation by Marx is based on this model.  When talk is returning to Marx, question, what happens to his labour theory of value and theory of exploitation.  You know Marx is Capital when he emphasizes, that natural resources are not source of value, he give example of oil, if we apply Marx directly, Chavez is exploiting U.S.  We have to do something different with Marx.
Second anniversary of Petrograd revolution where people played themselves. It was really a wierd moment. They repeated the attack on Winter Palace. How would Benjamin to account the urge to stage revolution itself as aesthetic itself. Ranciere tries to rehabilitate this type of aesthetics.
What do you mean by emanicpation, is it emancipation that Marx had in mind?

On Moshe Postone
Marx is not historicist enough, Marx emphasizes the definition of work.  He does something strange. If we approach labour, its’ only worker on one side and object on other side.  The moment we move to universal dimension the social dimension disappears????  In a communist society production will become automated, we will have collective worker, just manipulating the process.  We have to think these limitations of Marx.

Disagrees with Badiou
extra state agency, the communist party which was undermining the state authority, Stalinism is not absolute state authority, it undermined state authority.
China pretends to be normal state, ministries blah blah, and then you have weird entity called Communist Party China, this party does not exist, there are no laws regulating it.  The functioning of communist party, it controls the state, but has no full legal status.  It is here we plead for Hegel, state socialism is precisely that the rule of law, the state was undermined.   When Hegel says when some idea is actualized in wrong way, in some ways you have to blame the idea, you can’t say oh they misinterpreted Marx.  What the world needs today is a good radical critique of Marx, only we can do it.

The Big Moment Will Never Arrive
Ok there was a crisis, do you hear any consistent proposal of radical left to get out of it.  I’m not optimistic.  The first duty of theory is to put into question this model, “there will be a true theory that will come …”  As if we intellectuals will provide the true theory and people will learn it, NO.  There will be dangerous moments, catastrophes, this big event, even what Benjamin was expecting, in a much more Hegelian way we must renounce this there will not be a big revolutionary moment.  No program for future.  in the sense in the complexity of history, you cannot include into the historical process the effects of your intervention … you HAVE TO TAKE A RISK AND INTERVENE.

But somehow the most subversive thing sometimes may appears as just a repetition.

zupančič sexual difference pt 3

Sexual Difference  Her lecture at EGS 2011 Summer course

Goto part 2

And sex does not function as a stumbling block of meaning (and of the count) because it is considered morally naughty. It is considered morally naughty because it is a stumbling block of meaning.

This is why the moral and legal decriminalization of sexuality should not take the path of its naturalization (“whatever we do sexually is only natural behavior”).

We should instead start from the claim that nothing about (human) sexuality is natural, least of all sexual activity with the exclusive aim of reproduction.

There is no “sexual nature” of man (and no “sexual being”). The problem with sexuality is not that it is a remainder of nature that resists any definite taming; rather, there is no nature here — it all starts with a surplus of signification.

If we now return to the question of what this implies in relation to ontology in general, and, more specifically, to the performative ontology of contemporary gender studies, we must start from the following, crucial implication: Lacan is led to establish a difference between being and the Real.

The real is not a being, or a substance, but its deadlock.

It is inseparable from being, yet it is not being. One could say that for psychoanalysis, there is no being independent of language (or discourse) — which is why it often seems compatible with contemporary forms of nominalism.

All being is symbolic; it is being in the Other. But with a crucial addition, which could be formulated as follows: there is only being in the symbolic — except that there is real.

There “is” real, but this real is no being. Yet it is not simply the outside of being; it is not something besides being, it is — as I put it earlier — the very curving of the space of being.

It only exists as the inherent contradiction of being. Which is precisely why, for Lacan, the real is the bone in the throat of every ontology: in order to speak of “being qua being,” one has to amputate something in being that is not being.

That is to say, the real is that which the traditional ontology had to cut off in order to be able to speak of “being qua being.” We only arrive to being qua being by subtracting something from it — and this something is precisely that which, while included in being, prevents it from being fully constituted as being. The real, as that additional something that magnetizes and curves the (symbolic) space of being, introduced in it another dynamics, which infects the dynamics of the symbolic, makes it “not all.”

It is because sexual difference is implicated in sexuality that it fails to register as symbolic difference.

Indeed, psychoanalysis doesn’t try to de-essentialize sexual difference. What de-essentializes it most efficiently (and in the real) is its implication in sexuality as defined above; that is, as the out-of-beingness of being.

And this is what psychoanalysis brings out and insists upon — as opposed to the gender differences, which are differences like any other, and which miss the point by succeeding too much, and by falling in the trap of providing grounds for ontological consistency.

It might seem paradoxical, but differences like form- matter, yin-yang, active-passive  … belong to the same onto-logy as “gender” differences.

Even when the latter abandon the principle of complementarity and embrace that of gender
multiplicity, it in no way effects the ontological status of entities called genders. They are said to be, or to exist, emphatically so. (This “emphatically” seems to increase with numbers: One is usually timid in asserting the existence of two genders, but when passing to the multitude this timidity disappears, and their existence is firmly asserted.)

If sexual difference is considered in terms of gender, it is made — at least in principle — compatible with mechanisms of its ontologization.

De-sexualization of ontology (its no longer being conceived as a combinatory of two, “masculine” and “feminine” principles) coincides with the sexual appearing as the real/disruptive point of being.

And taking the sexual away (as something that has no consequences for the ontological level) opens again the path of the ontological symbolism of sexual difference.

This is why, if one “removes sex from sex,” one removes the very thing that has brought to light the problematic and singular character of sexual difference in the first place. One doesn’t remove the problem, but the means of seeing it and eventually tackling it.

Continued in pt 4 the final part

copjec sexual difference 2012

Joan Copjec (2012): The Sexual Compact, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 17:2, 31-48

The psychoanalytic category of sexual difference was from this date deemed suspect and largely forsaken in favor of the neutered category of gender. Yes, neutered, I insist on this; for it was specifically the sex of sexual difference that dropped out when this term was replaced by gender.

Gender theory not only thrust the term sexual difference out of the limelight but also it removed the sex even from sex. For, while gender theorists continued to speak of sexual practices, they ceased to question what sex is; no longer the subject of serious theoretical inquiry, sex reverted then to being what it was in common parlance: that which is involved in a highly restricted set of activities or in attachments to certain objects or person.

Although it was acknowledged that sexual difference was conceived by psycho-analysis not as a biological given but as an effect of a specific technique, or apparatus – namely language – the new wave of feminists worried that the structuralist conception of language was ahistorical and produced effects that were invariant. For this reason the apparatus (l’appareil) of language was dislodged from its role as the smithy of sex and replaced by historically variable technologies or dispositifs – that is, the complex machinery of social practices and knowledges, relations of power, norms and ideals – responsible for constructing gendered positions and relations.

The recourse to technologies of gender quickly encountered a problem, however:that of technological determinism. How to insure that what came out of the machine was not simply what was put into it, that the gendered subject was not completely stripped of autonomy? This problem was fixed by a well-recognized and anodyne truth: techniques had to be continually redeployed, repeated, but repetition always fails because nothing can be repeated in the same way twice. Or: there is no such thing as repetition.

It was on this denial of repetition that gender theory staked its hope, for the dooming of repetition meant variation was inevitable and this margin of variation, this slim difference, was seized upon as the site of resistance, the launching pad of thousands of small differences. 35

The elimination of sexual difference in favor of a study of the social technologies of gender construction left biology behind altogether and produced subjects without any vitality, subjects without bodies or, more precisely, subjects without sexual organs 38

Sex can never be put on display because it is nothing other than that teetering, unsettling displacement which permanently throws the subject’s identity off balance. In short, Foucault attributed to Freud a position he never held and then attacked it, arguing that far from demanding release from the shackles of power, sex operates in solidarity with it; sex, the notion of sex, Foucault insisted, is saturated with power through and through.

In truth, Lacan and Foucault wereon the same side in regard to the way sex had – incorrectly – become a political factor during this period and the role it was being made to play in the new paradigm of human domination. Both cautioned the students that the demand for sexual liberation did not oppose power but, on the contrary, played into its hands. What they disagreed on was what sex meant, how it was conceived, in psychoanalysis.

Lacan argued forcefully that sex is not repressed, that the mechanism of repression does not apply to it, and for this very reason it made no sense to say that sex sought to be liberated from repression. Lacan thus enjoined the students not to sacrifice their enjoyment to those in power by parading it, exposing it as if it were a predicate – more: the major one – of their identity.

In Foucault’s view, sex was nothing more than a fictional construct of power that serves to bind subjects to unified, determinate, and normative identities. Political opposition to bio-power must take the form, therefore, not of liberating suppressed sexual identities but of liberating oneself from them, freeing oneself from classification by their categories.

Thus, while Lacan and Foucault were allied in their opposition to the demand for the liberation of sex, on the grounds that this demand was a ruse of power, Lacan put all his energy into showing that sex, or jouissance, was not answerable to the opposition liberation/repression and castigated the jouissance restructured by the demand for liberation as a sham, while Foucault pursued the idea that sex and the demand to be liberated, to be known, to assert one’s identity, were inextricably intertwined. 39