Author: logocentric

140 Ž begins his critique of butler the act neighbor as Thing

Slavoj, Žižek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence.” The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard. 2006. 134-190.

The limit of such a reference to the impenetrable background into which we are thrown and on account of which we cannot be taken as fully accountable and responsible for our acts is the negativity of freedom: even when the entire positive content of my psyche is ultimately impenetrable, the margin of my freedom is that I can say No! to any positive element that I encounter.

This negativity of freedom provides the zero-level from which every positive content can be questioned. Lacan’s position is thus that being exposed/overwhelmed, caught in a cobweb of preexisting conditions, is not incompatible with radical autonomy.

Of course, I cannot undo the substantial weight of the context into which I am thrown; of course, I cannot penetrate the opaque background of my being; but what I can do is, in an act of negativity, “cleanse the plate,” draw a line, exempt myself, step out of the symbolic in a “suicidal” gesture of a radical act —what Freud called “death drive” and what German Idealism called “radical negativity.”

What gets lost in this “critique of ethical violence” is precisely the most precious and revolutionary aspect of the Jewish legacy.

Let us not forget that, in the Jewish tradition, the divine Mosaic Law is experienced as something externally, violently imposed, contingent and traumatic—in short, as an impossible/real Thing that “makes the law.”

What is arguably the ultimate scene of religious-ideological interpellation — the pronouncement of the Decalogue on Mount Sinai — is the very opposite of something that emerges “organically” as the outcome of the path of self-knowing and self-realization: the pronouncement of the Decalogue is ethical violence at its purest.

The Judeo-Christian tradition is thus to be strictly opposed to the New Age Gnostic problematic of self-realization or self-fulfillment, and the cause of this need for a violent imposition of the Law is that the very terrain covered by the Law is that of an even more fundamental violence, that of encountering a neighbor: far from brutally disturbing a preceding harmonious social interaction, the imposition of the Law endeavors to introduce a minimum of regulation onto a stressful “impossible” relationship.

When the Old Testament enjoins you to love and respect your neighbor, this does not refer to your imaginary semblable/double, but to the neighbor qua traumatic Thing.

In contrast to the New Age attitude which ultimately reduces my Other/Neighbor to my mirror-image or to the means in the path of my self-realization (like the Jungian psychology in which other persons around me are ultimately reduced to the externalizations-projections of the different disavowed aspects of my personality), Judaism opens up a tradition in which an alien traumatic kernel forever persists in my Neighbor — the Neighbor remains an inert, impenetrable, enigmatic presence that hystericizes me.  The core of this presence, of course, is the Other’s desire, an enigma not only for us, but also for the Other itself.

For this reason, the Lacanian “Che vuoi?” is not simply an inquiry into “What do you want?” but more an inquiry into “What’s bugging you?  What is it in you that makes you so unbearable, not only for us but also for yourself, that you yourself obviously do not master?”

— in Serb, there is a vulgar expression which perfectly renders this meaning: when somebody is getting on one’s nerves, one asks him, “What for a prick is fucking you? [Koji kurac te jebe?]”

138-9 plea ethical violence Ž summary of B’s position

Slavoj, Žižek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence.” The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard. 2006. 134-190.

Here is Žižek’s interpretation of Butler’s ethics

The impossibility of fully accounting for oneself is conditioned by the irreducible intersubjective context of every narrative reconstitution: when I reconstruct my life in a narrative, I always do it within a certain intersubjective context, answering the Other’s call-injunction, addressing the Other in a certain way.

This background, including the (unconscious) motivations and libidinal investments of my narrative, cannot ever be rendered fully transparent within the narrative. To fully account for oneself in a symbolic narrative is a priori impossible; the Socratic injunction, “know thyself,” is impossible to fulfill for a priori structural reasons.

My very status as a subject depends on its links to the substantial Other: not only the regulative-symbolic Other of the tradition in which I am embedded, but also the bodily-desiring substance of the Other, the fact that, in the core of my being, I am irreducibly vulnerable, exposed to the Other(s). And far from limiting my ethical status (autonomy), this primordial vulnerability due to my constitutive exposure to the Other grounds it: what makes an individual human and thus something for which we are responsible, toward whom we have a duty to help, is his/her very finitude and vulnerability.

Far from undermining ethics (in the sense of rendering me ultimately nonresponsible: “I am not a master of myself, what I do is conditioned by forces that overwhelm me.”), this primordial exposure /dependency opens up the properly ethical relation of individuals who accept and respect each other’s vulnerability and limitation.

Crucial here is the link between the impenetrability of the Other and my own impenetrability to myself: they are linked because my own being is grounded in the primordial exposure to the Other. Confronted with the Other, I never can fully account for myself. And when Butler emphasizes how one should not close oneself off to this exposure to the Other, how one should not try to transpose the unwilled into something willed, is she not thereby opposing the very core of Nietzsche’s thought, the stance of willing the eternal return of the Same, which involves precisely the transposition of everything unwilled, everything we are thrown into as given, into something Willed?

The first ethical gesture is thus to abandon the position of absolute self-positing subjectivity and to acknowledge one’s exposure / thrownness, being overwhelmed by Other(ness): far from limiting our humanity, this limitation is its positive condition. This awareness of limitation implies a stance of fundamental forgiveness and a tolerant “live and let live” attitude: I will never be able to account for myself in front of the Other, because I am already nontransparent to myself, and I will never get from the Other a full answer to “who are you?” because the Other is a mystery also for him /herself.

To recognize the Other is thus not primarily or ultimately to recognize the Other in a certain well-defined capacity (“I recognize you as . . . rational, good, lovable”), but to recognize you in the abyss of your very impenetrability and opacity. This mutual recognition of limitation thus opens up a space of sociality that is the solidarity of the vulnerable.  🙂 Žižek is looking for an opening to insert something of his monstrous neighbor.

Page 139: Butler’s central “Hegelian” reflexive turn here is that it is not only that the subject has to adopt a stance toward the norms that regulate his activity — these norms in their turn determine who and what is or is not recognized as subject.

Relying on Foucault, Butler thus formulates the basic feature of critical tradition: when one criticizes and judges phenomena on behalf of norms, one should in the same gesture question the status of these norms. Say, when one holds something to be (un)true, one should at the same time question the criteria of “holding something to be true,” which are never abstract and ahistorical, but always part of a concrete context into which we are thrown.

This move, of course, is the elementary Hegelian move formulated in the introduction to the Phenomenology: testing is always minimally self-relating and reflexive, in other words, when I am testing the truth of a statement or an act, I am always also testing the standard of testing, so that if the test fails, the standard of success or failure should also be problematized. This reference to Hegel is mediated by Adorno’s critique of Hegel’s idealism, a critique which Butler submits to critical reading.

When Adorno claims that “the true injustice is always located at the place from which one blindly posits oneself as just and the other as unjust”, does he thereby not basically repeat Hegel’s old argument about the Beautiful Soul: “The true Evil is the very gaze which sees evil all around itself”? Recall the arrogance of many West Germans in 1990, when they condemned the majority of East Germans as moral weaklings corrupted by the Communist police regime — this very gaze which saw in East Germans moral corruption was corruption itself.

(Symptomatically, although many DDR files were opened to the public, the ones that remained secret are the files recording contact between East German and West German politicians — too much West sycophancy would be revealed here.)

[There is a double paradox in Butler’s establishing the link between Adorno’s critique of the ethical violence of the abstract universality imposed from outside upon a concrete life-world and Hegel’s critique of revolutionary terror as the supreme reign of the abstract universality.

First, one should bear in mind that Hegel here relies on the standard conservative motif (elaborated before him by Edmund Burke) of organic traditional ties which a revolution violently disrupts and that Hegel’s rejection of universal democracy is part of the same line of thought. So we have here Butler praising the “conservative” Hegel!

Furthermore, Hegel is not simply rejecting revolutionary terror. He is in the same gesture asserting its necessity: we do not have a choice between the abstract universality of terror and the traditional organic unity — the choice is here forced, the first gesture is necessarily that of asserting abstract universality.

136-7 neighbor plea for ethical violence butler Ž

Slavoj, Žižek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence.” The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard. 2006. 134-190.

To play this game to the end, when the Wolf Man “regressed” to the traumatic scene that determined his further psychic development—witnessing the parental coitus a tergo — the solution would be to rewrite this scene, so that what the Wolf Man effectively saw was merely his parents lying on the bed, father reading a newspaper and mother a sentimental novel?

Ridiculous as this procedure may appear, let us not forget that it also has its politically correct version, that of the ethnic, sexual, and so on minorities rewriting their past in a more positive, self-asserting vein (African-Americans claiming that long be-fore European modernity, ancient African empires already had highly developed science and technology, etc.). … What disappears in this total availability of the past to its subsequent retroactive rewriting are not primarily the “hard facts,” but the Real of a traumatic encounter whose structuring role in the subject’s psychic economy forever resists its symbolic rewriting.

The ultimate irony is that this “critique of ethical violence” is some-times even linked to the Nietzschean motif of moral norms as imposed by the weak on the strong, thwarting their life-assertiveness: moral sensitivity, bad conscience, and guilt feeling are internalized resistances to the heroic assertion of Life. For Nietzsche, such “moral sensitivity” culminates in the contemporary Last Man who fears excessive intensity of life as something that may disturb his search for “happiness” without stress, and who, for this very reason, rejects “cruel” imposed moral norms as a threat to his fragile balance.

No wonder, then, that the latest version of the critique of ethical violence was proposed by Judith Butler, whose last book, although it does not mention Badiou, is de facto a kind of anti-Badiou manifesto: hers is an ethics of finitude, of making a virtue out of our very weakness, in other words, of elevating into the highest ethical value the respect for our very inability to act with full responsibility. The question one should ask concerns the limits of this operation.

Butler describes how, in every narrative account of myself, I have to submit myself to the foreign temporality of my language tradition and thus have to accept my radical decenterment. The irony of this description is that Butler, the sharp critic of Lacan, renders here (a somewhat simplified version of) what Lacan calls “symbolic castration,” the subject’s constitutive alienation in the decentered symbolic order.

Is, then, the subject totally determined by the signifying structure, or does it dispose of a margin of freedom? In order to account for this resistance to the rule of symbolic norms, Butler turns to Foucault: norms rule only insofar as they are practiced by subjects, and the subject disposes here of a minimum of freedom to arrange itself with these norms, to subvert them, to (re)inscribe them in different modes, and so on.

Lacan, on the contrary, allows for a much stronger subjective autonomy: insofar as the subject occupies the place of the lack in the Other (symbolic order), it can perform separation (the operation which is the opposite of alienation), and suspend the reign of the big Other, in other words, separate itself from it. 137

🙂 Ž doesn’t go anywhere with this last point. He says Lacan, contra Butler, allows for a strong subjective autonomy.  Ok.  So?  This is the one and only time he speaks of separation.

pluth lalangue 4/4

Pluth, Ed. An Adventure in the Order of Things: Jean-Claude Milner on lalangue and Lacan’s Incomplete Materialism

Lalangue, Milner argues, is not unstructured and without reason. It is structured and, according to Milner in L’amour de la langue, its structure marks the presence of a kind of “knowledge in the real.” This is what “dooms” language “to equivocity” (L’amour22). The structure or “reason” intrinsic to lalangue can even be considered extra-linguistic since it involves things like resemblances among sounds, or, in writing, the physical arrangement of letters. It is “extra-linguistic,” therefore, on the condition that language is thought of along the lines of Saussurean linguistic structure.  Milner writes that “homophonies, homosemies, palindromes, anagrams, tropes, and all the imaginable figures of association” are the effects of lalangue, and are due to nothing other than the materiality or physicality of languages, and not to that in languages which is involved in the creation of meanings — such as relations and differences among signs (L’amour104). On Milner’s reading, lalangue is, therefore, also a term for what it is of language that escapes and exceeds formalization, and it therefore presents a challenge to the science of linguistics.

The way back to dialectical materialism?

Can a materialism that would not be eliminative or reductionist, but instead dialec-tical (because it posits a real transformation of being by something like thinking), and, in turn, a real influence on thought from being (if not in the domain of the hard sciences then in that of the old “human” sciences) … can such a project do anything with the idea of a “knowledge in the real,” as odd as this sounds, and as outré as such a thing would be for most types of materialism? If Hegelian idealism is to be avoided — if there is to be no super-subject who knows, no spirit or mind who is driving things—and yet thinking and being are to be aligned in a way that is more vig-orous than what occurs in the natural sciences or in mathematics itself, should this relation be put in such a way that there can be said to be a “knowledge in the real”?

The “knowledge in the real” allegedly contained in lalangue, according to Milner’s reading in L’amour de la langue, involved an ordered appearance of phonemes; an appearance that is not guided according to the dictates of sense and classical Saussurean differential relations among signs, and thus also not in accordance with a language-user’s intent, or with what a language-user wants to say. This order is guided simply by resemblances among sounds, by homophonies, or by other physical factors. Structuralist linguistics did much to teach us that a speaker says more (or less) than what she wants to say: a linguistic system generates a surplus of meaning. There is, in language use, a production of meaning that occurs in indifference to anything like the conscious intent of a speaker. This perspective affects how the relation between thinking and language should be conceived, and it helps to refute the idea that there is a clearly articulated thought that precedes its expression in language.

Rather, it is the case that being put into a form of expression gives a thought or an intention a clarity it did not previously have. This is why we continue to work with and alter the form of expression, and is why we feel that our thoughts have sometimes not been adequately expressed: not because the form of expression (language) fails to portray them accurately, but because what is expressed is itself, if not inexhaustible, then at least vague enough and indeterminate enough to allow for repeated and multiple expressions. Here, linguistic form not only forms content (meaning) but indeed makes (much of) it.

It is no wonder then that structuralist approaches to language were of interest to psychoanalysis. Lalangue shows us instead a kind of stupidity proper to language, something that concerns not the relation between thinking and language, and not the generation of unintended meanings, but rather a level of no meaning at all. A zombie-like level of language, the level of language’s materiality itself, the phoneme or grapheme; a level responsible for homophonic insistences (one sound influencing the sounds that appear elsewhere), resemblances, etc., which insist within or alongside what is meant, running parallel to what is said. As we have seen, Milner at one point  wanted to call the structure that guides such articulations in lalangue a “knowledge in the real” (as opposed to the knowledge in/of the symbolic that classical linguistic structure would be). In L’Œuvre clairehe reconsiders this, because what goes on in the real no longer deserves the name of thinking. I will go over his case for this in a moment.

What Milner overlooks, however, is the fact that the dimension of lalangue can, of course, serve as a basis for the development of potential linguistic content, and for thinking. But here it is not a matter of there being, first, a relatively undetermined, vague thought that is the seed for continuing formation, precision, in words, as is the case for the relation between language and thinking.

In lalangue we see how the matter of language itself can inspire further adventures in thought. If Saussure is right about Saturnian poetry, we would have an entire genre based on this dimension. But, as I will explain in a moment, something as simple as punning shows us the same thing. And beyond punning, everyday language use contains aspects of the same thing. What I am getting at, then, is the idea that lalangue is a positive factor in, and a genuine contributor to, the creation of thought. Lalangue shows us how an adventure at the level of things can feed an adventure at the level of thought—exactly the sort of relation between thinking and being that a dialectical materialism is about.

What is going on in lalangue can be described as a zombie-like non-thinking. But punning is something else, and the punning during the silent seminars is like a folding in of lalangue into sense, an exploitation of it for sense, for thinking . . . or a  forcing of sense from lalangue, such that any purity in the domain of the real is not respected at all. (And isn’t this one of the lessons of the knots anyway — the interweaving of all three orders, the abolition of the distinctness of any one of them from the others?)

We are back to what was always Lacan’s violation of Wittgenstein’s prohibition. The purity of the ineffable is rejected. Milner might take this assertion to be, in fact, a negative conclusion about theory and language — because it would seem to sanction saying whatever, presumably. Yet Milner’s interpretation of lalangue in Lacanian theory points to just what a philosophical materialism needs.

Lalangue shows us a de-individualized “knowledge in the real,” and a link between thinking and being that is more vigorous than what Quentin Meillassoux’s interesting and important project gives us.

One needs to look outside the hard sciences to find this, to what used to be called the “human sciences.” Not only linguistics, but economics and, of course, psychoanalysis need to be considered by such a project as well, as cases in which an interaction between thinking and being indeed takes place.

 

pluth Badiou theory of the subject 3/4

A table from Alain Badiou’s Theory of the Subject is very helpful for gaining clar-ity on the nature of this debate and where I wish to take it—toward a position that I would describe as some variant of dialectical materialism. [Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Continuum, 2009) 117.]

Nor is it the point of a dialectical materialism to claim that being and thinking are really one (à la Parmenides). Rather, what is desired is a theory in which the actual reciprocity and strong mutual influence between thinking and being, theory and practice, at least in some domains of human life, is accounted for; a theory in which there is no absolute barrier between thinking and being (and also not between saying and showing) that would require us to adopt silence as the most appropriate philosophical attitude (and therefore devaluing thought itself).

As Georg Lukàcs put it in History and Class Consciousness, when contrasting dialectics to what he called metaphysics, “in all metaphysics the object remains untouched and unaltered so that thought remains contemplative and fails to become practical; while for the dialectical method the central problem is to change reality.” Obviously, the merely contemplative status that thinking must have in mathematics is one of the things that concerns me about Meillassoux’s attempt to refute correlationism. Much better, it seems to me, is to reconsider what a dialectical materialism can do.

In response to my points here, Meillassoux may be able to assert that mathematics does have effects on being too. The natural sciences have assisted, after all, in the creation of new material beings, as well as new types of beings, and have certainly given us an effective “know how” with the real. While this is certainly practical, and suggests that mathematics is something other than merely contemplative, it does not allow us to assert that any change in the nature of being itself has come from mathematics (or from any of the hard sciences). In fact, it is difficult to see how the hard sciences could offer us any examples of the kind asserted by a dialectical theory in which being and thinking would be mutually influencing each other (unless one adopts an undesirable “quantum mysticism”). And therefore it is difficult to see how the hard sciences can offer a model for how thinking and being are actually unified, along the lines of the Parmenidean thesis Meillassoux himself wishes to rehabilitate. It would seem that Meillassoux’s position is, by Lukàcs’ standard, metaphysical rather than dialectical, even though it does qualify as a philosophical materialism.

My study of Milner’s interpretation of the notion of lalangue in Lacanian theory in the next section will give us an example of what is desired: something like a dialectical materialism on the question of the relation between thinking and being. Yet lalangue also plays a key role in what Milner considers to be the impasse in Lacan’s materialism, because Milner ultimately concludes that what is going on in lalangue cannot be called a thinking at all. Thus, it functions as a “silent” real, and the barrier between thinking and being is reinstated. This is the point I will question in my conclusion.

Lacan introduced the term lalangue in the 1970s to address what there is of the real in language — something like the very sound of a language, such as phonemes considered apart from the creation of sense. The phrase lalangue is itself written in a way that is supposed to get us to pay attention to the sound of language under or alongside its meaning, which is the very thing the term is about. Bruce Fink uses “llanguage” as an English translation for this, in which the graphically repeated,and in speech a bit elongated “l” gets us to hear the word differently, having basically the same effect— calling our attention to the thing the concept is supposed to designate.

pluth correlationism thinking being meillassoux 2/4

correlationism“the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other” (Meillassoux 5)—that is, we never have access to being as it really is, except through the medium of thought, which, precisely as a medium, distorts what it targets.

One way to oppose correlationism would be with a naïve realism, which supposes that access to what is other than thought is possible and even relatively unprob-lematic—that the relation of being to thought can be immediate. Meillassoux, by contrast, wants to hang on to the idea that there is something problematic about this relation.

Naïve realism, according to him, does not sufficiently appreciate the weirdness presented by our ability to make meaningful claims about, for example, what preceded the emergence of any conscious being whatsoever, as we do when we make meaningful statements about the nature of the universe before the existence of humanity.

Meillassoux claims that it is being’s ability to be “mathematized” that gives us a way out of correlationism, and this also requires us to reconsider the Kantian turn in philosophy, whose essence can be described as follows: “being and thinking must be thought as capable of being wholly other”—as good a definition of what Meillas-soux understands as correlationism as there is (Meillassoux 44). Yet a strong correlationism goes further than this, positing a strong separation of thinking from being, making thought into something radically other than being—not superior to it, not a cause of it, but typically more of a sub-being, a mere epiphenomenon, appearance, fiction, or illusion, as it would be for a Nietzschean as well as for an eliminative or reductionist materialist.

In this case, thinking would have access only to what it produces, while being would continue on, independent of and indifferent to what is (rightly or wrongly—it hardly matters) thought about it.

What I want to show next is how Meillassoux’s project, precisely in its most compelling gesture—its reconsideration of a kind of mathematical realism, its evocation of the Galilean mathematization of nature as a continued inspiration for thought—over-looks an opportunity to make a more vigorous materialist claim about the union of thinking and being.

Consider more closely the relationship between thinking and being that is asserted in Meillassoux’s work. Being is said to be mathematizable, and so correlationism is wrong, because mathematics shows us how the “Parmenidean postulate” can be returned to: it shows us where “being and thinking are the same” (Meillassoux 44).

Yet this does not mean that mathematics is, or is even part of, the really real. Mathematics is a thinking. It is through mathematics that being and thinking are sup-posed to be joined together. Yet this still amounts to an imbalanced union, because Meillassoux’s way out of correlationism does not allow for anything like a “knowledge in the real”—an idea I will discuss via the notion of lalangue in the next section. It is doubtful that Meillassoux wants to say that being itself knows anything about mathematics. It would be erroneous to say that the real knows the laws of physics and chemistry. And there is also no need to posit a subject in the real who knows these laws. The formal languages we use for such laws are not at all etched into the heart of things either. Must it then be said that such formal expressions of laws “correlate” to the real? Yet this cannot be what Meillassoux wants to say!

This leads me to conclude that the way in which Meillassoux articulates the relation of mathematics to thinking poses a problem for his speculative materialism. While he says of his work that it refutes correlationismby bringing thinking and being back into a union with each other (via mathematics), this relation turns out to be one-directional and therefore not as far from correlationism as it is possible to go.

Let’s agree that being is mathematizable. This still leaves being ultimately unaffectedby its mathematization—and therefore, mathematics does not show us where there is an interactionand interrelation—not to mention union—of thinking and being. (If there is not even a strong interaction between thinking and being, it is hard to see how there could be a meaningful union . . . unless Meillassoux really meant to go all-out Parmenidean on us, by claiming that thinking is being, and vice versa: the monist direction, in other words. But I see no evidence for this in what I’ve read of him.)

The hard sciences, and mathematics, can only take us from one kind of correlationism to another, it seems. What is needed, for a different sort of materialism, one of human practice, is a reconsideration of the status of the so-called “human” sciences.

pluth on milner meillassoux 1/4

One of the great merits of Milner’s reading of Lacan is not only the fact that he places Lacan within the materialist tradition in philosophy, but that, by bringing Lacan into relation to Wittgenstein, he gets us to pay attention to a topic that any materialist project now should attempt to clarify: the relation between thinking and being. It is perhaps obvious why materialisms avoid this topic, since it seems to be the very stuff of idealism.

A common point shared by most contemporary materialisms is their degradation of the status of thinking, which is usually considered to be epiphenomenal and non-real, reducible to and constituted by brain activity. Why bother accounting for its status? Therefore, many contemporary philosophical materialisms do not at all require that thinking, or anything like it, be considered a part of the real.

The real, for these materialisms, can well be considered silent, and its silence is an unproblematic one — all the more reason why the “showing” of the real would be better than any possible “speaking” about it, which will always be off the mark. The real’s silence does not cause any difficulties for the sciences that study it, since these sciences circumvent ordinary human language and linguistic meaning in the first place, precisely by relying on a mathematization of nature.

It is not ordinary human language that hits the real at all, but a more formalized “language” that does so. None of this stops natural scientists from trying to convey in ordinary language
something about their discoveries sometimes but we know that, when they do this, their writing approximates the status of poetry, as Merleau-Ponty pointed out, and that such written texts are not really the conveyors of scientific knowledge anyway.

Such knowledge is in the formulas, the math (if it can be said to “be” anywhere), and not in the ordinary language descriptions of those formulas, which are always metaphorical.

Whatever is going on at the atomic or sub-atomic constitutive level of nature defies our ability to think, imagine, or intuit. Furthermore, our ability to manipulate the constitutive level of nature does not require that we think anything particularly clearly about it either. It simply requires a technical know-how, based on proper formalizations; not on the creation of correct linguistic expressions about it, and not on having proper intuitions about it either.

The sciences show us a way, then, in which knowledge is transmitted through mathemes, and what is said about them is basically superfluous.

According to Milner’s reading, Lacan embraces the Borromean knots because they are “saying” even less about the real than the mathemes do, and are therefore respecting even more ably what is supposed to be an inviolable barrier between the shown and the spoken. For that reason, Lacan’s is a failed or unachieved materialism: in fact, less a materialism than a mysticism.

trauma and lacan

Belau, Linda. Trauma and the Material Signifier. George Washington University  lbelau@gwu.edu

Abstract: Through an analysis of the signifier and its relation to traumatic repetition, this essay explores the necessity of psychoanalytic theory for an analysis of trauma. Arguing that deconstructive approaches, which have come to form the center of what is currently known as “trauma theory,” ignore the structure of the subject and, consequently, the significance of the psychoanalytic primal scene for the analysis of trauma, the essay argues for a more psychoanalytically-inflected understanding of trauma and the missed event. Inhabiting a time before time, an impossible time, the primal scene — which, for Freud is the most significant missed event — marks the inaugurating moment of society, repression, and the law. Because analytic practices themselves open onto the space of trauma, enacting a missed encounter, they are necessary to begin the arduous process of understanding, or of what Freud calls “remembering, repeating, and working through.” Because psychoanalysis is able to commemorate the traumatic missed encounter as the forgotten event, it is able to attend to the structural force of trauma without giving way to the temptation to idealize the experience as something untouchable or inaccessible. Such idealization, the essay claims, has been the tendency of some deconstructive theories of trauma that maintain tha trauma is beyond the limits of representation and our symbolic periphery. Through an analysis of the role of the signifier in the traumatic event, the essay argues that trauma, like Lacan’s notion of the real, is very much a part of the symbolic, even though it only makes its mark negatively.

Adorno Prize

Can one lead a good life in a bad life?
Judith Butler September 11 2012 Adorno Prize Lecture download

JB starts her talk with a quote from Theodore Adorno: Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen (Wrong life cannot be lived rightly).

She uses this quote to structure her talk firstly as a question of morality and ethics, what is it to live a good life?  And secondly, “what form does this question take for us now? Or, how does the historical time in which we live condition and permeate the form of the question itself?”

Good life cannot be separted from the question of whose life?  Life must be seen as that something which many who follow outside of the parameters that define life as such, do not even register.  So what would this question mean for those who lives do not count properly as lives.

Taking the term as it stands: “good life” ambiguity surrounding this term.  Those who claim to be living the good life may be living off the profits made off the back of workers, thus in relations of exploitation.  The phrase “has become a vector for competing schemes of value.”

So where does JB go.  She rejects Aristotelian formulation as too individualistic and on the other that ‘the good life’ has been too “contaminated by commercial discourse to be useful to those who want to think about the relationship between morality, or ethics more broadly, and social and economic theory.”

Ok so JB has cleared her slate to begin her theoretical investigation from perspective that as hinted earlier, begins from a perspective of the relationship between morality/ethics and social theory, as she quotes Adorno from his Problems of Moral Philosophy, that the individual “who exists pure for himself is an empty abstraction.”  Butler thus is angling towards looking at how the broader “operations of power and domination enter into, or disrupt, our individual reflections on how best to live.”

Are we surprised?  Of course not.  Butler really does not waste any time in underscoring the importance of embedding the question “what is the good life” into a wider sociality.  She intends to address the fact that a “good life” is dependent upon a wider social configuration of forces.

“And And so it makes sense to ask: which social configuration of ‘life’ enters into the question, how best to live? If I ask how best to live, or how to lead a good life, I seem to draw upon not only ideas of what is good, but also of what is living, and what is life. I must have a
sense of my life in order to ask what kind of life to lead, and my life must appear to me as something I might lead, something that does not just lead me. And yet it is clear that I cannot ‘lead’ all aspects of the living organism that I am, even though I am compelled to ask: how might I lead my life? How does one lead a life when not all life processes that make up a life can be led, or when only certain aspects of a life can be directed or formed in a deliberate or reflective way, and others clearly not?

Here Butler touches on all the themes that she will follow in her discussion: Life is something I must have a sense of, of something I can lead but at the same time, it is something that “leads me.”  What are we to make of this?

Morality and Biopolitics
Biopolitics Butler broadly defines as management of life, “powers that differentially dispose lives to precarity as part of a broader management of populations.” 10

How am I to lead a good life?

1. lives are disposed to differential precarity
2. Whose lives matter? Whose lives do not matter, lives not recognizable as living or count only ambiguously as alive?

WE cannot take for granted that all living human beings bear the status of a subject who is worthy of rights and protections, with freedom and a sense of political belonging; on the contrary, such a status must be secured through political means, and where it is denied that deprivation must be made manifest. 10

Whose lives are grievable, and whose are not?

The biopolitical management of the ungrievable proves crucial to approaching the question, how do I lead this life? And how do I live this life within the life, the conditions of living, that structure us now?

At stake is the following sort of inquiry: whose lives are already considered not lives, or only partially living, or already dead and gone, prior to any explicit destruction or abandonment?

Grievability leads Butler to argue for the necessary structure of support that goes to sustaining a life.

Not worth protecting, or seen as worth under the “dominant schemes of value.”
Only a grievable life can be valued, and thus eligible for
– social and economic support
– housing
– health care
– employment
– rights of political expression
– forms of social recognition
– conditions for political agency

“… and one must be able to live a life knowing that the loss of this life that I am would be mourned and so every measure will be taken to forestall this loss.” 11

Do I establish myself in the terms that would make my life valuable, or do I offer a critique of the reigning order of values?

Modalities of social death

… the term ‘precarity’ can distinguish between modes of ‘unliveability’: those who, for instance,

– belong to imprisonment without recourse to due process;

– those living in war zones or under occupation, exposed to violence and destruction without recourse to safety or exit;

– those who undergo forced emigration and live in liminal zones, waiting for borders to open, food to arrive, and the prospect of living with documentation;

– those that mark the condition of being part of a dispensable or expendable workforce for whom the prospect of a stable livelihood seems increasingly remote, and who live in a daily way within a collapsed temporal horizon, suffering a sense of a damaged future in the stomach and in the bones, trying to feel but fearing more what might be felt.

How can one ask how best to lead a life when one feels no power to direct life, when one is uncertain that one is alive, or when one is struggling to feel the sense that one is alive, but also fearing that feeling, and the pain of living in this way? Under contemporary conditions of forced emigration, vast populations now live with no sense of a secure future, no sense of continuing political belonging, living a sense of damaged life as part of the daily experience of neoliberalism. 12

universal bartleby

Daly, Glyn. “Politics of the political: psychoanalytic theory and the Left(s).” Journal of Political Ideologies (October 2009), 14(3), 279–300

In this sense our autonomy is at once more precarious and more radical. Today we are bombarded with all sorts of choices (consumption, lifestyles, customization of computers, cell-phones, iPods, MySpace, Facebook, etc.) that identify us as ‘free individuals’. Yet we also possess the capacity to refuse the field of choosing and freedom; to reject the very modality of making changes to our lives and to break with the terms and conditions that are implicit in the latter.

Along the lines of the famous monologue from Trainspotting, we are in a position in which we can choose ‘not to choose life’.  This involves a more radical ethical freedom in which one can assume a certain position of ‘being impossible’: i.e. a position of refusing the terms of socio-political engagement and identitarian inscription; of refusing the terms of existing possibility.

In other words, what is needed is the development of forms of political subjectivity that do not embrace the conventions and protocol of existing hegemonic engagement.

Both Žižek’s Bartleybyan politics and Badiou’s politics of subtraction—i.e. the effective withdrawal from official political/participatory structures in such a way that it undermines simultaneously their symbolic purchase and constitutive logics—point in a different direction. Thus it is not so much a question of siding with the underdog in the game of existing democracy, but rather rejecting the very terms of the latter. In other words, it involves a critique of how democracy, through its mythologization of the idea that all underdogs are potential winners provided they play the game effectively, can become drawn into, and start to function on behalf of, the dominant politico-economic forces.

Second, and related, the political focus is placed not so much on marginalized groups/identities in general but rather on those whose position (or perhaps, more accurately, lack of position) embody the symptomal truths of our age — i.e. those whose situation appears naturalized as irresolvable, inert and beyond any feasible or direct solution.

These are the displaced and the destitute, the poverty-trapped, the vagrants, homeless and slum-dwellers. They are the radically excluded who are constitutively excessive, who cannot be accommodated and who present a kind of dysfunctional resistance that is nevertheless necessary to the functioning of the whole. They are the nameless ‘unfortunate’ who are passed over, treated with gentrified deliquescence and kept at a non-threatening distance through the ‘ethical’ concerns of charity and aid. What is needed is a politics that strives to overcome this distancing and to confront directly the primordial repressions that are central to the operation of capitalism as a global economic and socio-cultural system.

It is against this background that distinct approaches to the Lacanian traversing the fantasy emerge.

In radical democratic thought, the lesson of the traversal is one that tends to imply that we should assume a proper distancing in order to avoid getting caught up in the ‘cataclysmic desire of fantasy’. The problem therefore is one of adopting the right predisposition: to detach ourselves from objet (a) and to thereby affect a condition where we can ‘really enjoy our partial enjoyment’.

– Radical politics should consequently restrict itself to revolutionary-reform rather than revolution as such. In general, political engagement should not be excessive but should avoid substantial projects of overhaul in favour of the finite, provisional and pragmatic.

– Yet it is precisely in these terms that radical democracy appears to remain stuck in the register of desire: real emancipation is postponed eternally; we should be enthusiastic in the chase but never believe that we hold it in our grasp. This is a politics of desire, of infinite deferral. It becomes effectively ‘a constant search for something else… (with) no specifiable object that is capable of satisfying it’.

– Radical democratic desire, in this sense, is sustained by not having the ‘object’ of democracy. Democracy is always finally elsewhere. In this context, political subjectivity becomes one of establishing a kind of homoeostatic predisposition or proper distancing: one avoids excess in order to avoid disappointment in never attaining the real Thing.

Yet for Žižek traversing the fantasy does not mean to proceed to a non-fantasmatic or even a post-fantasmatic universe defined simply in terms of a containment and/or domestication of excess (this in itself would be something of a fantasy). There is no transcendence of the fantasmatic (the structuring of desire) as such.

Traversal in this sense is the opposite of exorcism. The point is not simply to expel excess but rather to inflect/assume the latter: to take responsibility for the inherency of excess that is integral to human drive.

Traversal, in this sense, puts one in touch with the object of drive — the hole presupposed by all demand and around which Being revolves.

To put it in the terms of Star Wars, the problem is not to bring balance to the force but to recognize that the force itself is the result of a certain (tilted) excess — a Real intervention/structuring — and that it is only through contingence with the latter that alternative possibilities (a different kind of force, or indeed political) can be shown.

The freedom which is gained here, which can be called post-fantasmatic, is thus not one of overcoming alienation but precisely a freedom through alienation in its most radical sense: i.e. the acceptance of the fact that imbalance/excess is our most basic condition towards which we cannot exercise any pre-given partiality or disposition.

Ž’s Lacanian radicalism can be thought of as something that tries to break out of the endless cycle of desire and to move towards a certain logic of love (involving both desire and drive).

While this may sound hopelessly sentimental, we should recall that in Lacan love is distinguished from desire in coming to terms with the non-ideal and the non-all and with accepting precisely the lack in the Other. Love is its own excess, an uncompromising ‘violence’ that goes beyond mere antagonism (i.e. it does not externalize blockage/failure but accepts this as the very condition of being). Through love one finds, and indeed makes, the universal-divine in all its contingent fragility and failing.

Perhaps a more appropriate way of thinking about this shift is in terms of opening the possibility of a politics of excess; a politics that effectively chooses ‘something else’ — i.e. something other than the current mode of choosing.

It refuses to embrace today’s alibis where social ‘problems’ are displaced onto charities, ethical committees, focus groups and all the institutions of political deferral up to and including existing democracy. In this way it places ‘us’ in the scene and refuses not to take responsibility for the contemporary totality and its symptoms. Such a politics is distinguished from radical democratic hegemony in that it does not give up on the real thing or view concrete projects as merely the ersatz fillers of the empty place.

The point is rather to see how this very division between the universal (as empty place) and particular (contingent filler) is inherent to the latter.

In other words, the universal-divine is manifested … through substantial engagement; through finding and making the universal in the particular and through ‘excessive’ commitment, without excuses or dependency on the Other.   It is a politics that affirms that the only way out is the way in.

class part no-part democracy

Daly, Glyn. “Politics of the political: psychoanalytic theory and the Left(s).” Journal of Political Ideologies (October 2009), 14(3), 279–300

From a Žižekian perspective, class should not be thought so much as a positive agency (the bearer of a historic mission) but more as a kind of non-position: the outcast, the drudges, the detainees and all those who do not ‘count’; all those who are resistant to capitalist logics. Class struggle does not function as an infrastructure of the social order (as in the sociological tradition) but precisely the opposite: the inwrought negativity that cannot be resolved by the social order and which forever blocks the latter’s completion as a full identity. Class struggle cannot be represented directly (it is everywhere and nowhere), rather it emerges as an ‘effect which exists only in order to efface the causes of its existence’. 284

Here class struggle may be said to reflect the logic of the Freudian unconscious. That is to say, it functions through primordial repression as something that is inaccessible to, and yet constitutive of, capitalism. In this way, class struggle constantly re-marks its presence through social symptoms — breakdown, failure, conflict, etc. — whose cause is obscured by the very structuring of the capitalist system itself. The question of identifying, and confronting, today’s social symptoms is a critical one for Lacanian theory and for the development of Left politics.

The stereotype of civil society is groups resisting corporations, and that is true as outlined in previous chapters. What is also true, however, is that nonprofit groups have formed productive relationships with corporations to help them develop in more benign ways.

Thus, we have a similar kind of makeover discourse at play. As an agent of the big Other, this ‘unnamed movement’ acts not only as the custodian of humanity but as a conveyor of ancient and practical wisdom/know-how whose expertise needs to be properly sourced and applied in order to achieve a harmonious reconciliation between our socio-economic and ecological systems.

In other words, it is a movement that acts on behalf of the dominant paradigm and seeks critically to reinforce it. This is where the Hegelian form of the liberal-capitalist totality is reached proper: i.e. through an engagement with its own subversion and negativity. A totality is not defined simply in relation to what it excludes as threat-negativity but rather through symbolizing, and making sense of, this very division within itself.

A totality truly succeeds through the constitutive recognition of its failures and through providing a certain grammar for its transformation. Put differently, a totality is at its strongest when it is able to circumscribe the very terms of its own subversion. It becomes an anonymous horizon that defines our responsibilities and the limits of our action. 291-92

Here we might say that democratic discourse presents us with the ultimate makeover fantasy. Where there is marginalization there is the possibility of mobilization (drawing upon the appropriate resources, expertise, etc.). Through standard references to widening antagonisms and increasing numbers of social movements, resistance appears as something that is already contained within democracy and its declared potential for infinite adaptability. The failures of democracy are taken as indicators of its success and the themes of impossibility, undecidability and so on, become part of the mythic appeal of democracy as a kind of systematicity without a system.

It feeds off itself precisely in this chrematistic fashion. If there is no credible alternative (‘all the others are worse’, as Churchill put it) then democracy and humanity are seen to comprise a single destiny as parts of a naturalistic state of affairs. In a more pervasive way than any totalitarianism, closure can be achieved through the very culture of democratic openness. 293

substance and subject

In order to grasp the radical link between the subject and nothingness (the Void), one should be very precise in reading Hegel’s famous statement on substance and the subject: it is not enough to emphasize that the subject is not a positively existing self-identical entity, that it stands for the incompleteness of substance, for its inner antagonism and movement,

for the Nothingness which thwarts the substance from within, destroying its unity, and thus dynamizes it―the notion best rendered by Hegel’s remark, apropos the “unrest” of substantial unity, that the Self is this very unrest (“eben diese Unruhe ist das Selbst”).

This notion of the subject still presupposes the substantial One as a starting point, even if this One is always already distorted, split, and so on. And it is this very presupposition that should be abandoned: at the beginning (even if it is a mythical one),

there is no substantial One, but Nothingness itself; every One comes second, emerges through the self-relating of this Nothingness. In other words, Nothing as negation is not primarily the negation of something, of a positive entity, but the negation of itself. 379