logocentric – Page 37

death drive in the early middle late Lacan barred subject vs. subject positions

Žižek, Slavoj. “Zizek_TheLacanianReal_Television” The Symptom 9 Summer 2008.

That’s why the Stalinist victim is the perfect example of the difference between the sujet d’énoncé (subject of the statement) and the sujet d’énonciation (subject of the enunciating). The demand that the Party addresses to him is: “At this moment, the Party needs the process to consolidate the revolutionary gains, so be a good communist, do a last service to the Party and confess.”

Here we have the division of the subject in its purest form: the only way for the accused to confirm himself as a good communist at the level of the sujet d’énonciation, is to confess, i.e., to determine himself, at the level of the sujet d’énoncé, as a traitor.

Ernesto Laclau was perhaps right when he once remarked that it isn’t only Stalinism which is a language-phenomenon; it is already language itself which is a Stalinist phenomenon. 2

Here, however, we must carefully distinguish between this Lacanian notion of the divided subject and the “post-structuralist” notion of the subject-positions. In “post-structuralism,” the subject is usually reduced to subjection.

He is conceived as an effect of a fundamentally non-subjective process: the subject is always caught in, traversed by, the pre-subjective process (of “writing,” of “desire,” etc.), and the accent is put on different modes of how individuals “experience,” “live,” their positions as “subjects,” “actors,” “agents” of the historical process.

For example, it is only at a certain point in European history that the author of works of art, a painter or a writer, began to see himself as a creative individual who, in his work, is giving expression to his interior subjective richness. The great master of such analysis was, of course, Foucault: one might say that the main point of his late work was to articulate the different modes of how individuals assume their subject-positions.

But with Lacan, we have quite another notion of the subject. To put it in a simple way: if we abstract, if we subtract all the richness of the different modes of subjectivization, all the fullness of experience present in the way individuals “live” their subject-positions, what remains is an empty place which was filled out with this richness; and this original void, this lack of the symbolic structure is the subject, the subject of the signifier.

The subject is therefore to be strictly opposed to the effect of subjectivation: what the subjectivation masks is not a pre- or trans-subjective process of writing but a lack in the structure, a lack which is the subject.

Our predominant idea of the subject is, in Lacanian terms, that of the “subject of the signified,” the active agent, the bearer of some signification who is trying to express himself in the language. The starting point of Lacan is, of course, that the symbolic representation represents the subject always in a distorted way, that it is always a displacement, a failure, i.e., that the subject cannot find a signifier which would be “his own,” that he is always saying less or too much, in short: something other than what he wanted, intended to say.

The usual conclusion from this would be that the subject is some kind of interior richness of meaning which always exceeds its symbolic articulation: “language cannot express fully what I’m trying to say…”

The Lacanian thesis is its exact opposite: this surplus of signification masks a fundamental lack. The subject of the signifier is precisely this lack, this impossibility to find a signifier which would be “his own”: the failure of his representation is a positive condition.

The subject tries to articulate himself in a signifying representation, and the representation fails; instead of a richness we have a lack, and this void opened by the failure is the subject of the signifier.

To put it in a paradoxical way: the subject of the signifier is a retroactive effect of the failure of his own representation; that’s why the failure of representation is the only way to represent him adequately. 3-4

It is at the level of this difference between the two deaths, of this empty place in the very heart of the Other, that we must locate the
problematic of the death drive.

The connection between the death drive and the symbolic order is a constant with Lacan, but we can differentiate the various stages of his teaching precisely by reference to the different modes of articulation of the death drive and the signifier.

In the first period (the first seminar, “The Function and the Field of Speech and Language…”), it is the Hegelian phenomenological idea that the word is a death, a murder of a thing: as soon as the reality is symbolized, caught in a symbolic network, the thing itself is more present in a word, in its concept, than in its immediate physical reality.

More precisely, we cannot return to the immediate reality:even if we turn from the word to the thing, from the word “table” to the table in its physical reality, for example, the appearance of the table itself is already marked with a certain lack. To know what a table really is, what it means, we must have recourse to the word, which implies an absence of the thing.

In the second period (the Lacanian reading of Poe’s Purloined Letter), the accent is shifted from the word, from speech, to language as a synchronic structure, a senseless autonomous mechanism which produces meaning as its effect If, in the first period, the Lacanian concept of language is still basically the phenomenological one (Lacan is repeating all the time that the field of psychoanalysis is the field of meaning, la signification), here we have a “structuralist” conception of language as a differential system of elements.

The death drive is now identified with the symbolic order itself: in Lacan’s own words, it is “nothing but a mask of the symbolic order.” The main thing here is the opposition between the imaginary level of the experience of meaning and the meaningless signifier/signifying mechanism which produces it.

The imaginary level is governed by the pleasure principle; it strives for a homeostatic balance. The symbolic order in its blind automatism is always troubling this homeostasis: it is “beyond the pleasure principle.” When the human being is caught in the signifier’s network, this network has a mortifying effect on him; he becomes part of a strange automatic order disturbing his natural homeostatic balance (through compulsive repetition, for example).

In the third period, where the main accent of Lacan’s teaching is put on the real as impossible, the death drive again radically changes its signification. This change can be most easily detected through the relationship between the pleasure principle and the symbolic order.

Till the end of the fifties, the pleasure principle was identified with the imaginary level: the symbolic order was conceived as the real “beyond the pleasure principle.” But starting from the late fifties (the seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis) it is on the contrary the symbolic order itself which is identified with the pleasure principle: the unconscious “structured like a language,” its “primary process” of metonymic-metaphoric displacements, is governed by the pleasure principle; what lies beyond is not the symbolic order but a real kernel, a traumatic core. To designate it, Lacan uses a Freudian term das Ding, the Thing as an incarnation of the impossible jouissance (the term Thing is to be taken here with all the connotations it possesses in the domain of horror science-fiction: the “alien” from the movie of the same name is a pre-symbolic, maternal Thing par excellence).

The symbolic order strives for a homeostatic balance, but there is in its kernel, in its very centre, some strange, traumatic element which cannot be symbolized, integrated into the symbolic order: the Thing.

Lacan coined a neologism for it: l’extimité — external intimacy, which served as a title for one of the seminars of Jacques-Alain Miller. And what is, at this level, the death drive

Exactly the opposite of the symbolic order: the possibility of what was named by de Sade “the second death,” the radical annihilation of the symbolic texture through which so-called reality is constituted. The very existence of the symbolic order implies a possibility of its radical effacement, of the “symbolic death” … the obliteration of the signifying network itself.

This distinction between the different stages of Lacan’s teaching is not of merely theoretical interest; it has very definite consequences for the determination of the final moment of the psychoanalytic cure.

In the first period, where the accent is laid on the word as a medium of the intersubjective recognition of desire, symptoms are conceived as white spots, non-symbolized imaginary elements of the history of the subject, and the process of analysis is that of their symbolization, i.e., of their integration into the symbolic universe of the subject: the analysis gives meaning, retroactively, to what was in the beginning a meaningless trace. So the final moment of analysis is here reached when the subject is able to narrate to the other his own history in its continuity, when his desire is integrated, recognized in a “full speech” (parole pleine).

In the second period, where the symbolic order is conceived as having a mortifying effect on a subject, i.e., as imposing on him a traumatic loss – and the name of this loss, of this lack, is of course the symbolic castration – the final moment of analysis is reached when the subject is made ready to accept this fundamental loss, to consent to symbolic castration as a price to pay for access to his desire.

In the third period, we have the great Other, the symbolic order, with a traumatic element in its very heart; and in Lacanian theory, fantasy is conceived as a construction allowing the subject to come to terms with this traumatic kernel. At this level, the final moment of analysis is defined as “going through a fantasy” (la traversée du fantasme): not its symbolic interpretation but the experience of the fact that the fantasy-object, by its fascinating presence, just fills out a lack, a void in the Other. There is nothing “behind” the fantasy; the fantasy is precisely a construction the function of which is to hide this void, this “nothing,” i.e., the lack in the Other. The crucial element of this third period of Lacan’s teaching is then the shift of the accent from the symbolic to the real.

spirit is a bone rabinovitch

Žižek, Slavoj. “Zizek_TheLacanianReal_Television” The Symptom 9 Summer 2008.

The Spirit is a Bone.

“the spirit (the subject) is a bone, a skull (der Geist ist ein Knochen).”
If we read this proposition literally, it is vulgar-materialistic nonsense, reducing the subject to his immediate material reality. But where lies, in Hegel’s words, the speculative truth of this proposition? The effect of the phrase, “the spirit is a bone.” On the listener is the feeling of its utter inadequacy, of its absolute contradiction: it is total nonsense – how can we reduce the spirit, its dialectical movement, to an inert presence of a dead object,
of a skull?

The Hegelian answer is precisely this absolute contradiction, this absolute negativity that we feel when we experience the uttermost inadequacy of the proposition, “the spirit is the bone.”

We have here a kind of dialogic economy: we articulate a proposition defining the subject, and our attempt fails; we experience the absolute contradiction, the extreme negative relationship between the subject and the predicate – and it’s precisely this absolute discordance which is the subject as absolute negativity.

It is the same as with a well-known joke from the Soviet Union about Rabinovitch, a Jew who wants to emigrate. The bureaucrat at the emigration office asks him why; Rabinovitch answers: “There are two reasons why. The first is that I’m afraid that in the Soviet Union, the communists will lose power, there will be a counter-revolution, and the new power will put all the blame for the communist crimes on us Jews – and there will be again the anti-Jewish pogroms…” “But,” interrupts the bureaucrat, “this is pure nonsense; nothing can change in the Soviet Union – the Soviet power will last eternally!” “Well,” responds Rabinovitch calmly, “that’s my second reason.”

The logic is here the same as with the Hegelian proposition, “the spirit is a bone”: the failure itself of a first reading gives us the true meaning.

Alain Badiou, Jacques-Alain Miller

Cher Jacques-Alain,

Merci de m’avoir fait parvenir ta lettre à Peter Hallward et ta “confession d’un renégat”.

“Renégat” n’est pas une insulte, c’est une description. Il est évident pour n’importe qui que celui qui vivait et pensait comme toi entre 1969 et 1972, et qui aujourd’hui fricote avec la clique de Sarkozy, poussant les choses jusqu’à engager une école lacanienne dans un dégoûtant et paradoxal soutien à l’expédition en Libye et à son chantre BHL est un renégat du gauchisme, pour ne rien dire du maoïsme.

Thank you for having sent me your letter to Peter Hallward and your ‘confession of a renegade’.

‘Renegade’ is not an insult, it’s a description. It is quite clear to anyone that a person who lived and thought as you did between 1969 and 1972, and today is hand in glove with the Sarkozy clique, even going so far as to commit a Lacanian school to a disgusting and paradoxical support for the Libyan expedition and its eulogist Bernard-Henri Lévy, is a renegade from leftism, to say nothing of Maoism.

Pourquoi du reste t’offenser de cette description ? Tu me sembles plutôt devoir assumer et défendre ta renégation comme étant celle du Mal au profit du Bien. Tu peux en somme l’appeler une Conversion morale.

Disons cela: ce qui est pour toi une Conversion est pour moi une Renégation. Ton point-ce-vue est du reste celui d’une majorité de tes contemporains, du moins en ce qui concerne les intellectuels. L’archi-minoritaire, et celui qui fut et est insulté — pour avoir refusé d’être un renégat —, c’est moi, et non toi. Je fais avec depuis bien longtemps.

Why then do you take offence at this description? It seems to me you should rather be proud of it, and defend yourself as having reneged on the Bad in favour of the Good. You could even call it a moral Conversion.

Let’s say it: what is Conversion for you is Renegacy for me. Your point of view, moreover, is that of the majority of your contemporaries, at least as far as intellectuals are concerned. The extreme minority, which was and is insulted – for having refused to renege – is me and not you. I’ve lived with this for a long time already.

Tu te doutes que la lecture des confessions d’un renégat n’est pas pour moi une lecture prioritaire. Je lirai cependant ton factum un de ces jours, sans doute même avec intérêt.

Quant au duel, n’y songe pas! Bien évidemment, je ne me bats pas en duel avec un renégat.

You doubt whether the confessions of a renegade would be priority reading for me. But I shall read your pamphlet one day, even with interest.
As for a debate, don’t think of it! I certainly wouldn’t debate with a renegade.

Bien à toi,
Alain
Regards

subject versus subject-position

Žižek, Slavoj. “Zizek_TheLacanianReal_Television” The Symptom 9 Summer 2008.

Here, however, we must carefully distinguish between this Lacanian notion of the divided subject and the “post-structuralist” notion of the subject-positions.

In “post-structuralism,” the subject is usually reduced to subjection. He is conceived as an effect of a fundamentally non-subjective process: the subject is always caught in, traversed by, the pre-subjective process (of “writing,” of “desire,” etc.), and the accent is put on different modes of how individuals “experience,” “live,” their positions as “subjects,” “actors,” “agents” of the historical process. For example, it is only at a certain point in European history that the author of works of art, a painter or a writer, began to see himself as a creative individual who, in his work, is giving expression to his interior subjective richness. The great master of such analysis was, of course, Foucault: one might say that the main point of his late work was to articulate the different modes of how individuals assume their subject-positions.

But with Lacan, we have quite another notion of the subject. To put it in a simple way: if we abstract, if we subtract all the richness of the different modes of subjectivization, all the fullness of experience present in the way individuals “live” their subject-positions, what remains is an empty place which was filled out with this richness; and this original void, this lack of the symbolic structure is the subject, the subject of the signifier.

The subject is therefore to be strictly opposed to the effect of subjectivation: what the subjectivation masks is not a pre- or trans-subjective process of writing but a lack in the structure, a lack which is the subject.

The Lacanian thesis is its exact opposite: this surplus of signification masks a fundamental lack.

The subject of the signifier is precisely this lack, this impossibility to find a signifier which would be “his own”: the failure of his representation is a positive condition.

The subject tries to articulate himself in a signifying representation, and the representation fails; instead of a richness we have a lack, and this void opened by the failure is the subject of the signfier.

To put it in a paradoxical way: the subject of the signifier is a retroactive effect of the failure of his own representation; that’s why the failure of representation is the only way to represent him adequately.

Ž in south korea june 2012 buddha buddhism

Zizek Lecture in South Korea Kyung Hee University in June 27 2012

Q and A Zizek in South Korea Kyung Hee University in June 27 2012

Universality is Universality of Struggle
Symbolic Castration
Father confused impotent person, but his symbolic identity you respect him
Famous Ninotchka Joke: Coffee Without Cream/Run Out of Cream/Only Have Milk/Coffee Without Milk
What you don’t have (negativity) is part of your identity. What is missing is part of your identity. Coffee without what it is.
I don’t drink coffee, that’s ok, I don’t have any. Today, the way ideology works today, is not as a direct lie, in the sense it directly tells something not true, ideology lies in not in what it says, it lies it says what it says, by generating in us implicit meaning, while it relies on the opposite meaning. To use the example of coffee, it is giving us coffee w/o milk, but it claims it is giving us coffee w/o cream. Be attentive to these implicit meanings, what is said w/o being said. In Europe, austerity, when those in power want to impose people austerity measures, they pretend they are offering coffee w/o milk, when they are really offering coffee w/o cream. Why is this so important?

– Hegelian Totality
precisely a totality of what there is, and what there is not. in true dialectical analysis, the point is not to include particular events in larger harmonious totality, the point is not to look at phenomena isolated, look holistically, this is NOT enough, but include in concept all its failures and so on, take capitalism, to take it as a totality, it is not enough to say as a system it is good, NO we should look at all those points where it fails, inside a country and outside, i.e., APPLE as a country, oooh, see it as a success, but we say NO Apple without FOXCON. or take the CONGO. It is a state that is immensely mineral rich but the state doesn’t funciton, you simply have local warlords and directly deal with foreign companies. Congo is not developed enough to be part of global capitalism NO. There are child warriors, as such as this hell on earth, CONGO IS PART OF TODAY’S GLOBAL CAPITALISM. global capitalism is also the dark side.
South Korea: One of your big companies, had intentions to buy all arable land in Madagascar. throw out local farmers. This is global capitalism. A proper dialectical analysis begins, you have a ideal universal notion, then look at failures and non-intended by-products, the dialectic will show these failures are NECESSARY failures, all mistakes, antagonisms are part of the UNIVERSAL NOTION.

The category which is more and more becoming crucial is the category of UNEMPLOYMENT
In standard Marxist story: Exploitation. But today the unemployed are becoming more and more crucial, not just RESERVE ARMY. but the forever UNEMPLOYABLE. Whole countries, Somalia, Congo, or whole regions in countries, in a sense Unemployed, excluded from world markets, you have people in advance that are Unemployable. Millions of students who study, but realize there is no chance they will get a job in the domain of their studies. We have somehow to expand the Domain of Proletarians. It is NOT just who work and exploited, it is those who are not working. Capitalism is more and more generating NECESSARY UNEMPLOYMENT.

Why don’t we see this more clearly? This shows the strength of the ruling hegemonic ideology. The omniprescence of anti-capitalism, look at any popular media, you have many anti-capitalist stories, but all these critiques are moralistic critiques, greedy bankers, polluting environment. The problem is what changed in recent capitalism, that this greed can be realized with such catastrophic consequences. The limit of this moralistic anti-capitalism, by blaming people, it prevents us from doing the crucial analysis of the SYSTEM. what is wrong with the SYSTEM as such. Almost everyone today is a Fukuyamist. Liberal democractic capitalism is the only game in town. All we can do is make it a little better. a little more efficient.
We can easily imagine the end of the world, but a little change in capitalism we can’t imagine.

class struggle: antagonism deadlock is constitutive of society
multiculturalist where problem is recognition, how can we be recognized: gay, women etc.
I am still for BINARY logic against multiplicity of struggles.

Laclau critique none of these struggles have apriori central position, all strategic consideration. There is no priority

Politico-economic antagonism is not at same level of these other struggles, it has a MORE SUBSTANTIAL position, of overdetermining, structuring other struggles.

Buddhism and Dalai Lama

Origin of fall of Buddhism. Mahayama: Bhodisava, you were already there liberated, out of this compassion with humanity, you CAME back into this world of suffering, so you postponed your liberation until all others are liberated this is a SACRIFICIAL logic. I don’t trust anybody that is willing to sacrifice themselves for you.

Communism will win There are miracles but only for those who believe in the miracle. Communism will win means that we who are engaged in the struggle, we can read events as signs of communism: Tahir Sq. etc, are all signs that point towards a possible communism but there is no guarantee, no objective necessity, communism will win for those who believe in communism, a bit of a tautology.

Truth is not a neutral objective truth. Truth is universal: but it is nonetheless PARTIAL. No if you look neutrally you see nothing, you only see truth if you are interested in truth, an emancipatory truth. Communism will come as an unintended consequence We Chinese commies are the best managers of capitalism. It less and less needs democracy. This should worry us. In Lacanian the gap between what you want and what you desire. People desire communism but they don’t want. What people usually desire they don’t want. People all the time think they desire something, but when they come close to it, they think its horrible and don’t want it. What you want is not the same is what you desire. Communism will come but people will not want it.

Why still keep the stupid name?

on Egypt

on Greece

On Marx To be a Marxist today, means not to return to Marx, in a radically critical way, totally reconstruct radically his analysis. A fundamental flaws we can see today in his notion of communism. His notion of communism is still a capitalism, that is, capitalism without the private property, then this wild development will continue. He didn’t see that this dynamism is only possible within the capitalist frame. Second limitation, he had ingenious insights 1848 revolution, 18th Brumaire, but in terms of analysis of power, he didn’t develop it properly. The horrors of 20th Century communism you can’t explain through a critical Marxism. Stalinism occured because communsm developed in the wrong place. No. This is wrong.

I don’t like the term Third Way. If you want the Third way, what is Second way: Fascism, Communism, the Second way failed because they stayed within capitalism, total productivity, efficiency and so on. I don’t like to talk about the Third way because the Second way wasn’t a serious second way. Too much of this we have extremes and we need proper balance. I don’t like balance, I like extremes.

on Violence: Hitler and Ghandi, the quote that got him in a lot of trouble

Hitler was afraid to do real social change. Tahir Sq. they stopped the entire functioning of the state. Mubarak’s violence was a violence aimed at restoring social order. It’s not that we live in peaceful times and some crazy revolutionary starts violence, but what about violence in Congo? Structural violence, the violence that is here as part of NORMAL state of things. The positive violence is violence of just occupying space and preventing things from going on as normal. Ghandi was much more violent than Hitler, because his aim was to stop the state from functioning. It was an anti-systemic violence.

chow butterfly

Teresa de Lauretis. “Popular Culture, Public and Private Fantasies: Femininity and Fetishism in David Cronenberg’s ‘M. Butterfly'” Signs, 24.2 (1999): 303-334.

When, on their way to prison, in the paddy wagon scene, Song, naked at his feet, tries to convince Rene to accept the Butterfly fantasy as a gay fantasy (“under the robes, beneath everything, it was always me…. I am your Butterfly”), Rene rejects him, saying: “I’m a man who loved a woman created by a man. Anything else simply falls short.”‘ He cannot accept Song’s transvestite fantasy of Butterfly, ostensibly because his fantasy is heterosexual; one could say, heterosexist. But what is a woman created by a man if not the masquerade of femininity? Then it is not the revelation of Song’s maleness — which Rene has obviously disavowed, known and not known, all along — that causes him to lose his love object, but the end of the masquerade. With it comes the realization that what he loved was not Song but Butterfly, the masquerade of femininity; that the object of his desire is a fantasy object, Butterfly, and that object alone can sustain his desire. 321

Butterfly, then, is a fetish in the classical, psychic sense defined by Freud: it is an object which wards off the threat of castration always looming above the male subject and allays his fear of homosexuality. It is quite literally an object, the sum of the accoutrements that make up the masquerade of femininity: the oriental woman costume, the long black hair, the face paint and rouge, the long red fingernails – all the props that Rene will barter from the prison guard for his final performance.

But the fetish is a particular object, set in a mise-en-scène and a scenario, a narrative, from which it acquires its psychic value as object and signifier of desire. This is Butterfly, a fantasy object which enables Rene’s desire and the very possibility of existing as a desiring subject, for desire is the condition of psychic existence. 321

The distinction between our two conceptualizations of the Butterfly trope in the film is the distinction between fetish and phallus.

By saying that Song’s Butterfly is the phallus, which must remain veiled, masqueraded (“the veiled thing that is the ‘oriental woman”‘), Chow adheres to the Lacanian definition of woman’s position in desire: she wants to be the phallus, the signifier of the desire of the Other. But what about Song’s desire? Since the Butterfly fantasy is also the scenario of Song’s desire, to equate “Butterfly” with the phallus is to assume that Song’s homosexual desire is from the position of a woman (woman as phallus).

Which is to see homosexuality as sexual and gender inversion, in the old sexological formula that Lacan’s theory raises to a higher level of abstraction.27 Here is where my reading and Chow’s part ways or diverge — on the issue of the nature of desire and the conditions of spectatorial identification.

Not surprisingly, the film elicits in me a very different fantasy. …

[Chow denies or minimizes] the significance of Song’s homosexual desire for Rene, although her identification, unlike theirs, is not with Gallimard but with Song; in other words, Chow’s referring to Song as “she” signals her identification of Song as a woman, but also her identification with Song as a woman. However, if one defines Song as a woman solely on account of gender, without consideration of sexuality and desire, the motivation for his actions and his sexual relationship with Rene can only be a political one: Song is a spy, does what he does for the love of his country, not of Rene — a characterization the film ironizes (most evidently in the two scenes between Song and Comrade Chin) and openly disallows.

Alternatively, Song’s motivation is one of anticolonial resistance and revenge: he just plays the role of Butterfly to turn the orientalist fantasy against its colonial, imperialist creator. In my view, the film also belies this reading, especially (but not only) in the paddy wagon scene after the trial, when Song tries in vain to convince Rene to accept his transvestite fantasy of Butterfly as a gay fantasy. There, when the spying game is all played out, it seems to me beyond doubt that, whatever else he may be, Song is a man who loves a man.

Ž responds to his critics

February 28 2013 A Reply to My Critics.

Room B01
Clore Management Centre
Birkbeck, University of London
Torrington Square
London WC1E 7HX

If we cannot imagine a society which is not held together by a Master figure but in a different way then we can pack our luggage and just say ok let’s play pragmatic politics. The challenges are great here. I think that in this debate Badiou versus postmodern fluid plural multitude figures of authority I think that both poles are wrong. The structure of a Master as well as this polymorphous multitude structure doesn’t function. There are some hints in Lacan or somewhere you can have a social link which is not founded on the figure of the Master.

large want to be passive, permanent participation, engagement, I much perfer to be passive citizen, I want a state that does its work. I don’t despise ordinary people. Engaged people don’t know what they want

Rehabilitate an ‘elite’ A good politician tells the people what they want, if he’s good, people have this “oh my god, yes now I know what I want.”

Molecular self-organizing multitude against hierarchical order:

vanheule foreclosure delusional metaphor

Vanheule, Stijn. The Subject of Psychosis: A Lacanian Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

A delusion is primarily a speech event which is why he studies delusions in terms of ruptures in the conventinal use of speech. 98
… at the basis of psychotic outbreak a dramatic mental decomposition can be found and a delusion is an adaptive reaction to this problem of disintegration. … Delusions defend the subject against radical breakdown. … [but] delusions do not inherently provide stability. Only to the extent that a delusion creates an anchor, based on which the process of signification is stablized, can it be thought to be a stabilizing factor in mental life. 99-100

2009 Žižek on liberalism and what does it mean to be human

Tuesday 24th November 2009 – 2.30 pm Clore Lecture Theatre (B01), Clore Management Centre, Torrington Sq.

As long as we have liberalism as we have it, it will always generate fundamentalism

Fundamentalism is the SYMPTOM of Liberalism. LIBERALISM IS THE DETERMINING FACTOR. As long as we have liberalism the way we have it, it will generate fundamentalism.

Afghanistan was the singular most secular and tolerant Muslim country. The Fundamentalization of Afghanistan was the product of the way Afghanistan was caught in the global capitalist process. Kansas 30 years ago was the state with the greatest number of populist leftists, the home of John Brown. What happened in 30-40 this bedrock of progressivism turned into a bible thumping belt.

The solution to the opposition of Liberalism-Fundamentalism, this opposition is a real opposition but a FALSE opposition.

Mode of inclusion of Congo in the global market

The Hegelian Aufhebung

Every Fascism is the sign of a failed revolution. “Islamofascism” is there because the Left wasn’t there.

ooh we’re becoming robots, we’re getting post-human, are symptoms, How do we re-define humanity outside of this panic pseudo nightmares and Catholic Church

humanitarian panic or new age optimism, reject both sides. total rehabilitation of alienation, celebrate the LOSS the DISTANCE

The true threat to our survival is holistic civilzation, we need to restore the balance, NO we human introduced imalance, that is what makes us.

eyers Hegel Lacan is non dialectical

Eyers, Tom. Lacan and the Concept of the ‘Real’ New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

It is worth registering at this early juncture the significance of Lacan’s insistence on the inability of Hegelian logic to capture the paradoxical
character of the psychoanalytic object. If it is commonplace to associate the development of Lacan’s early ideas as discussed above with Hegel’s account of the lord and bondsman in his Phenomenology, then such a reading is placed in question if, as I argue, the precisely non-dialectical object finds its genesis in a concept (the ideal-ego) located and consolidated at this putatively ‘Hegelian’ stage of Lacan’s thinking. 31-32

Lacan himself makes this link explicit when he describes the ‘i(a)’ qua image of the other, in a discussion of the myth of Oedipus, as the ‘complement’ to the object-cause of desire: ‘he [Oedipus] is thus the victim of a lure, through which what issues forth from him and confronts him is not the true petit a, but its complement, the specular image: i(a)’.

If, for Kojève’s Hegel, desire is ultimately a desire for recognition predicated on a negativity conspicuous in its contingent movements but statically fixed in form, Lacan here figures desire in an ambivalent relationship to an object that is simultaneously constituting and threatening, in the same way that the pre- Oedipal relationship with the mother is both mourned by the post- Oedipal subject and emerges in fantasy as something over-proximate and anxiety inducing.

Lacan takes from Kojève’s Hegel something of the contingent movement of what he calls, as the title of a famous article, the ‘dialectic of desire’, but not the immovability of the form of productive negativity, stopping up the movement of desire with objects whose obstinacy consists as much in their refusal to succumb to dialectical supersession as in the impossibility of the subject ever truly to ‘possess’ or know them, situated as they are in the opaque field of the Other 34 … Philosophically, we might distinguish between Kojève and Lacan’s logic here in terms of a distinction between dialectic and paradox.

While the dialectician seeks an overcoming that retrospectively reconstitutes what it has superseded at a higher level of becoming, the Imaginary (and later Real) object of paradox discussed by Lacan represents an impasse in such a movement, an impasse that can be generative as well as disruptive. 34

to the extent that the Real permits of no absence, no division and no mediation, the ontological ‘being’ of the signifier, paradoxically, escapes the metonymic logic of the Symbolic 53

The signifier qua letter, defined as it is through its persistence in the Real , is constructed by Lacan as a material unit that underlies, and undermines, the temporary epistemological sedimentation of meaning via the ‘Imaginary effects’ of the signifier-in-relation. 53

The dispersed protosignifiers that shore up the movement of primary narcissism, minimally co-coordinating the process of ego-formation, seem to live on in the signifier’s post-Oedipal isolated dimension, a paradoxical point of nondialectical collusion between the Imaginary and the Real-in-the-Symbolic… 53-54

What might seem, then, to be the relatively simple positing of a material, formal substrate and its Imaginary effects, a kind of linguistic structure of form and content, is in fact the overcoming of the form/content division, a theory of signification that posits a Real materiality only to insist on its Imaginary genesis. 54

eyers Real Symbolic

Eyers, Tom. Lacan the Concept of the ‘Real’ New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

A successful navigation of the Oedipal imbroglio, then, only allows the emphasis of the Symbolic to fall upon the negatively constituted movements of the signifier in relation. But as the title of a section of the seminar on psychoses states, ‘the signifier, as such, signifies nothing’, which is to say that in isolation and at its most material, which according to this logic points to its lack of relation, its lack of reliance on another signifier, the signifier stops up, rather than facilitates, meaning. […]

This is the signifier as isolated underpinning the movements of sense as its material ground. … Those signifiers that, in their isolation, actively signify the nothing, do so insistently within psychotic subjectivity, whereby the lack of a paternal signifier (essentially a ‘third term’ that dissolves the dyadic logic of the Imaginary) exposes signification to isolation and the failure of relation. Each psychotic signifier, then, is only countable as one; it cannot be taken as containing the potential for a total set of meanings, a logic that Lacan will later expand through his account of non- phallic, or ‘feminine’, sexuality. 43

that aspect of the signifier which cleaves most closely to the Imaginary, those isolated signifiers that route the most elementary forms of egoic identification, persist throughout to the degree that all signifiers, by their ‘nature’, have the potential to uncouple from relations of meaning and exist in isolation. 44

For the psychotic, it is the potential of the signifier to refer to something other than itself that is lost, namely the signifier in its relational aspect; and Lacan usefully compares this loss with the loss of the fundamental human ability to deceive, for signification to say more than it might mean: ‘you are in the presence of a subject insofar as what he says and does – they’re the same thing – can be supposed to have been said and done to deceive you’. …

Lacan’s comment highlights the multidimensional quality of relational signification, whereby the paradigmatic act of communication is to tell a lie by literally telling the truth; to lose this capacity is to reveal the materiality of the isolated signifier in its brute insistence.

What must be more firmly established … however, is the more general claim that the Symbolic as such, for all subjects, contains Real elements that point to the constant potential for meaning to dissolve, even as the very same elements form the essential foundation that allows the very horizon of the Symbolic to cohere.

… the Real simultaneously supports and threatens the Symbolic from within. 45

eyers signifier in isolation signifier in relation

Eyers, Tom. Lacan and the Concept of the ‘Real’ New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

it is my contention that Lacan’s work, early and late, and following Freud’s example, maintains the immanence of the Real in the Symbolic, against the arguments of those who see a gradual displacement of questions of language in the later seminars in favour of accounts of the Real, jouissance, etc. Underlying this chapter, indeed the totality of this book, is the contention that Lacan always considers language as fundamental to the Real, to sexuality and so on, and vice versa. (note 34, pg. 179)

Lacanian reinvention of the notion of the signifier tout court, predicated as it is on a displacement of any Saussurian certainty as to the signifier’s connection to the signified. 37
:)Yes, I agree that Lacan broke this tight relationship between signifier and signified. Scary?

:)constitutive interpenetration of Symbolic and Real,

Lacan, far from being a thinker of a hypostatized linguistic lack or void, insists on the singularityand substan-tial persistenceof those elements in the Symbolic that immanently escape any negative constitution of reference and that point to the ultimate overdetermination of the Symbolic by the Real,… Overdetermination, to be clear, signifies in this instance the absolute reliance of the production of meaning on those Real elements of the Symbolic that, while inherently meaningless, nonetheless provide the ground for meaning’s emergence. 37

🙂talks about Real elements of the Symbolic that although meaningless provide the ground for “meaning’s emergence.” Booya

Lacan’s philosophy of language will accordingly be distinguished from both the structuralist emphasis on complex totalities and the post- structuralist logic of a potentially limitless semiotic freeplay; Lacan, I will argue, manages, in part through his codevelopment of the relationality of the signifier and the material underside of the same, to avoid theorizing language either as an internally complex but exhaustive totality or as an endlessly creative, pliable resource.

The rich paradox at the heart of Lacan’s Symbolic is precisely the simultaneous insistence, then, on the irrecuperability of the rift between signifier and signified, and the equal insistence that a limited, contingent and material ‘stopping up’ of significatory freeplay is inevitable, with the notable caveat that such points of consistency are guaranteed not through the ruse of a transcendental signifier or an external guarantor of meaning, but by the repetitive, contingent iteration of the signifier’s materiality, its tendency to slip loose of or withdraw from networks of relation.

Terms including ‘letter’, ‘unary trait’, ‘phallic signifier’, ‘empty signifier’ and others are used, if not interchangeably, then to designate different aspects of the same phenomenon, namely the material insist-ence of the signifier beyond any significatory function. As a result, in this chapter I begin to develop what will be a central typology to be used throughout the rest of the book, namely the distinction between what I call the ‘signifier- in-relation’ and the ‘signifier- in-isolation’.

These concepts are intended to condense Lacan’s multifarious terms relating to language into their most pertinent, opposing characteristics: the ‘signifier- in-relation’ designates the signifier as it exists negatively, defined purely by relation to other signifiers and producing meaning as the result of its perpetual displacement along the axes of metaphor and metonymy, while the ‘signifier- in-isolation’ designates the signifier as Real, isolated in its material element away from the networks of relation that render it conducive to meaning.

🙂Eyers is now using the above distinction to claim that psychotics are not entirely outside the Symbolic.

Must psychosis be explained as entirely outside the ambit of Symbolic logic, or is it rather just an unmediated dyadically organized Symbolic logic that prevails in psychotic subjectivity? 39-40

Here, we come to recognize that, far from the Symbolic being radically foreclosed or revoked by the phenomena of psychosis, the rejection of the paternal signifier makes operative and primary those Real, aspects of signification – which is to say, signifiers torn away from the negative constitution of meaningful communication and tied to the aggressive movements of primary identification – that, as we shall see, must be presupposed, if kept at bay, for ANY signification to be operative for the subject. 41

For the common variety of neurotic, which by the end of Lacan’s teaching must be considered to be anyone who has acceded fully to the Symbolic, the dyadic logic of demand that accompanies primary narcissism has been nuanced with the metonymy of desire in the signifier; desire, properly speaking, is absent for the psychotic precisely by virtue of the lack of a full installation of the paternal law. 42

🙂The materiality of the signifier is Eyers’ Signifier in Isolation.

It is worth asking about the ‘nature’ of these isolated elements of the Symbolic, for it is partly in Lacan’s elaboration of this most material, which is to say most insistent and non- relational, aspect of signification that he most fully departs from, and subverts, Saussure’s insistence on the inevitability of the relationship between the signifier and the signified. 42