logocentric – Page 50

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive 2004

Impervious to analysis and beyond interpretation, the sinthome — as stupid enjoyment, as the node of senseless compulsion on which the subject’s singularity depends — connects us to something Real beyond the “discourse” of the symptom, connects us to the unsymbolizable Thing over which we constantly stumble, and so in turn, to the death drive … 38

Thus, homosexuality is thought as a threat to the logic of thought itself insofar as it figures the availability of an unthinkable jouissance that would put an end to fantasy — and, with it, to futurity — by reducing the assurance of meaning in fantasy’s promise of continuity to the meaningless circulation and repetitions of the drive.

Scrooge [in Dickens novel The Christmas Carol], as sinthomosexual, denies, by virtue of his unwillingness to contribute to the communal realization of futurity, the fantasy structure, the aesthetic frame, supporting reality itself. He realizes, that is, the jouissance that derealizes sociality and thereby threatens, in Zizek’s words, “the total destruction of the symbolic universe.” 44

Scrooge,the self-denying miser — living alone, and in darkness, on gruel — extends to his neighbors, however unneighborly it no doubt makes him appear, the same self-denying enjoyment to which he readily submits as well.

In this he enacts the negativity both Freud and Lacan discerned in the commandment to love one’s neighbor as oneself; he unleashes,that is,as the love of his neighbor, the force of a primal masochism like that of the superego asserting its singular imperative, “Enjoy!”

What might seem to bespeak narcissistic isolation from everyone around him — his self-delighting stinginess, his solipsistic rejection of comforts, no less for others than for himself instantiates, then, a death drive opposed to the ego and the world of desire. It expresses, that is, the will-to-enjoyment perversely obedient to the superego’s insatiable and masochistic demands.

Scrooge’s persistence, therefore, as Scrooge, as the child-refusing sinthomosexual whom the spirit of Christmas Yet to Come exposes as a life-denying black hole, must be understood as determining that there can be no future at all.

Only by thus renouncing ourselves can queers escape the charge of embracing and promoting a “culture of death,” earning the right to be viewed as “something far greater than what we do with our genitals.”

A Christmas Carol, with astonishing clarity, spells out just how we gain that “right” when we learn that Scrooge, now family-friendly and blissfully pro-natalist, subsequently had (alas, poor Marley) “no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived upon the Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards”. By accepting this peter-less principle, we might eventually gain acceptance as the “social equals and responsible citizens” that Larry Kramer and others have demanded we become; we might find ourselves, like Scrooge, reborn, made over as “second father[s] “to the future, permitted to perform our part in the collective adoration of the Child and so to reinforce the fantasy always figured by Tiny Tim. 47

the sinthome refers to the mode of jouissance constitutive of the subject, which defines it no longer as subject of desire, but rather as subject of the drive

Where the symptom sustains the subject’s relation to the reproduction of meaning, sustains, that is, the fantasy of meaning that futurism constantly weaves, the those fantasies by and within which the subject means. And because, as Bruce Fink puts it, “the drives always seek a form of satisfaction that, from a Freudian or traditional moralistic standpoint, is considered perverse,” the those fantasies by and within which the subject means.

And because, as Bruce Fink puts it, “the drives always seek a form of satisfaction that, from a Freudian or traditional moralistic standpoint, is considered perverse,” the sinthome that drives the subject, that renders him subject of the drive, thus engages, on a figural level, a discourse of what, because incapable of assimilation to heterosexual genitality, gets read, as if by default, as a version of homosexuality, itself conceived as a mode of enjoyment at the social order’s expense. As Fink goes on to observe: “What the drives seek is not heterosexual genital reproductive sexuality, but a partial object that provides jouissance.”

Sinthomosexuality, then, only means by figuring a threat to meaning, which depends on the promise of coming, in a future continuously deferred, into the presence that reconciles meaning with being in a fantasy of completion — a fantasy on which every subject’s cathexis of the signifying system depends. As the shadow of death that would put out the light of heterosexual reproduction, however, sinthomosexuality provides familial ideology, and the futurity whose cause it serves, with a paradoxical life support system by providing the occasion for both family and future to solicit our compassionate intervention insofar as they seem, like Tiny Tim, to be always on their last legs. 113

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2004.

Impossibly, against all reason, my project stakes its claim to the very space that “politics” makes unthinkable: the space outside the framework within which politics as we know it appears and so outside the conflict of visions that share as their presupposition that the body politic must survive. Indeed, at the heart of my polemical engagement … lies a simple provocation: that queerness names the sideof those not “fighting for the children,” the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism.

The embrace of queer negativity, then, can have no justification if justification requires it to reinforce some positive social value; its value, instead, resides in its challenge to value as defined by the social, and thus in its radical challenge to the very value of the social itself. 6

cohabitation

15 September 2012 Jüdischen Museum Berlin

Butler on the contemporary reduction of Zionism

Butler begins stating that when people ask her are you a Zionist they mean, “Do you believe that the State of Israel has the right to exist?”

If you say, Well no I’m not a Zionist, that seems to imply on destruction of State of Israel. destruction of state meant to protect jewish people, you are in favour of destruction of Jews … the debate is impossible here.

Is Zionism the best political form to protect Jewish people,and for governing jews and palestinians?

You could be a Zionist prior to 1948, a cultural Zionist, renewal of jewish spirituality, renewal of people, understand Israel as a land but not necessarily as a state. Federated solution, commonwealth solution … It seems to me now, if you take the position of cultural zionism, you are considered an anti-zionist. Zionism has become: “Do you believe in the right of Israel to exist? This is what zionism has been reduced to. And it is a trap. Reduction of Zionism to this question. And this is an impoverished situation. Israel through 1967 you could be a left Zionism, cultural Zionist and debate about different solutions. Now if you make these arguments you are considered a threat to the people.

This question of whether there is a Palestinian partner, belongs to a discourse I don’t fully understand, implies Israel is already willing to be a partner. I think there are resistances to partnership on both sides and for different reasons.

There are different models of bi-nationalism already at work in the region, some are strange and sad. Settlers in West Bank depend on Palestinian labour. Occupier and occupied, lived near one another, depend on one another. What would bi-nationaism look like after the occupation, and after the entire project of settler colonialism comes to a halt. You need the end of occupation, so you can meet as EQUALS. Otherwise you ratify the colonial structure, yes we’ll be good colonial subjects etc.

We don’t know what the Palestinian political positions would look like post – Occupation. It would be a new political configuration.

Disaspora/Cohabitation

Diaspora: jews have scattered, lost their home, wait, long and struggle for return to home. That home has been understood as the nation of Zion, of Israel. But there is another strain in Judaism that accepts the diasporic, most of the Kabbalah, which means that we are not just as Jews scattered throughout the world, but we by necessity live with the non-jew in this scattered place. The diasporic affect is how jew and non-jew live together, in a common world that is neither Jewish nor non-Jewish, a meeting place, of various faiths, traditions, cultural formations. There is an Affects of cohabitation emerges from the diasporic condition becomes the actual ethos of Israel-Palestinine. A foundation of a new political ethos for Israel-Palestine. A Jewish affects of cohabitation that would be non-nationalist.

Jewish ethics of cohabitation, the experience of exile is precisely a condition in which one has a heightened sensitivity to others who are dispossessed, lost their homes, lost their homeland, who are speaking in a language not their own, without their basic rights. From the position of the exilic, that an ethics has emerged that has resulted in forms of Jewish socialism, Jewish internationalism, cultural zionism that have expressed an ethical commitment not just to Jews who are dispossessed, but to ALL THOSE who are dispossed This is a UNIVERSALISING gesture that emerges from the Jewish tradition, and historical tradition of EXHILE, including forced exhile from Spain, Russia. There is an ethics that emerges from expulsion and it is not necessarily a nationalist one.

How to live in the diaspora, how to live in this scattered way, how to live with others who are not necessarily Jewish. What kinds of obligation do we owe to those whom we share the earth.

1947-1948: Necessary cohabitation, not necessarily chosen, or ideal, but to have a border or link with another polity within a single state or 2 states, meant there had to be some sort of commitment to cohabitation. Arendt did not believe that Jews should have the demographic majority, there had to be equal rights for all inhabitants. The real question is whether a Zionism of cohabitation can re-emerge, or whether those in favour of cohabitation need to distance themselves from Zionism. It’s not about producing a perfect State, 2 state solution, bi-nationalism with 1 state or 2 states, etc. Its not about trying to produce an IDEAL state, its about accepting the necessity of living with others and having that unchosen proximity being the basis of ethical obligations to one another. THis is not just a problem with Israel-Palestine, but those who share borders, and history of conflict, the unchosen necessary character of living with others. I’m not talking about everyone loving each other.

When we think of Palestinian resistance to Israel, we could say that its anti-semitism, or destruction of state of Israel. But there other forms of resistance is seeking the end to colonial oppression, not to existence of Jewish population. The anti-colonial struggle is pledged to co-habitation and openly refutes anti-Semitism.

If the Occupation came to an end, and conditions of equal co-habitation were established, there would be greater possibilities for living in peace and security. Strengthening the Occupation, the Wall, the Palestinian people will resist these conditions. There are non-violent resistance which is what BSD is. I don’t think occupying other groups, or depriving other groups of their rights has ever made the occupier more safe.

The state of Israel, claims to be a state for Jewish refugees, especially after the WWII. It establishes a right of refugees for itself. The state of Israel at its founding produced close to 800,000 refugees. So if it believes in Right of Refugees the right of return and sanctuary, one wants to be able to stay, we need an int’l jurisprudence that will be internally consistent and be a solution to Palestinian refugees which now numbers 5 million. Acknowledge a serious dispossession took place in the name of producing a homeland for another group of refugees. This is a contradiction at the founding of Israel. This is not to say that Israel can’t right this wrong. There is an organization in Israel, made plans where would the Palestinians re-settle, made maps of all Palestinian villages destroyed, built monuments and memorials to those villages, and trying to reconstruct that history and produce an archive and trying to think what the practical dimensions of return will be.

I think the structure of Settler Colonialism needs to be changed. The boycott three principles 1) End the Occupation 2) Equal rights for non-Jewish Palestinian Israelis that make up 30% of Israeli citizens don’t have equal rights 3) Right of Return, it is an open question. it is a refugee problem. It should be put on the table and discussed. What can be done there?

What Edward Said thought which I find IMPORTANT, and made clear in his book on Moses and critique of Palestinian nationalism.

– The RETURN, not a return from the diaspora to homeland, but bring the principles of diaspora to the homeland, and ETHIC OF CO-HABITATION this is what he understood the return to be. There is a tradition of Zionism that confirms this, but have to bring the history of Zionism forward into a more contemporary debate.

– RETURN means binationalism outside the structure of settler colonialism

Question: Relation cohabitation and Zionism, which one is solution anti-Zionism or redefining Zionism back to its cultural form and federated state

59 minutes in video Answer: Kafka letter to Felice Bauer: What I really can’t stand are the Zionists, what I really can’t stand are the anti-Zionists.

I know there is a worry that the boycott singles out Israel, for its violation of human rights, and non-compliance with int’l law, and then there is another argument that says: Why is Israel always treated as exception to int’l law and human rights. I don’t want to enter that argument. For me it’s hard for Israel to claim that it represents the Jewish people. No, not all the Jewish people, not all the diaspora, not even all the Jewish Israelis, its a complicated situation. I do think what the boycott does, it produces an int’l community that demands that the state of Israel complies with int’l law and does not hold itself above the law. Pressures manufactures and cultural institutions, the boycott becomes the means by which an int’l movement is formed. IT is the largest non-violent movement seeking to hold Israel to int’l law. I don’t support targeting individual Israelis.

For those who believe that the only way to fight anti-semitism is to support the state of Israel. Then any critique of Israel is to embrace anti-semitism. This is a prison house, and there is no way out. They are many different kind of Jewish people, they are not singly and exclusively represented by the state of Israel, we are complex creatures with a diverse set of viewpoints. The presumption that the state of Israel represents the Jewish life, viewpoint. A great number of Jews accept its role, are fundamentally committed to Israel. But we must let the Jews be complex. Even diasporic Jews that support Israel, have disagreements with its politics. If anything comes out of these discussions, I would hope that it is the insight that the Jewish people have internal differences and are a complexity.

1:22 minutes

That said, it would be an entire mistake if entire conversation of Palestine or Co-habitation took place within an intra-Jewish context. Because that would mean that Jewish framework becomes the dominant framework for thinking the problem of Palestine. That framework has to be displaced not effaced or erased, but a decentering of Jewish perspective has to happen for Co-habitation to be thinkable. So I speak awkwardly as a Jew, at the same time I can’t allow that identity to be the only way to think ethically and politically, I have to allow myself to become decentered to have an ethical relationship to others and to participate in a democratic way of life.

This requires a decentering of my identity so there is an absolute necessity for an intra-Jewish discussion and there is also a limit to what its usefulness can be.

It matters to me that the commandments are spoken, and they are delivered through a mode of Address. THOU SHALT NOT KILL. is something one can only hear or obey if the conditions for hearing are first established. Even the commandment Thou shalt not kill, demands either that I understand the language in which the commandment is given or that the conditions of audability are established. WHat the commandment comes in a language I don’t understand, or I don’t hear it, or if there is no media to relay the commandment to me. It doesn’ t have to be a spoken voice, a picture or a sound (Levinas thought it could be a sound). What it means is that a certain problem of translation, of media, of establishing the conditions of audibility is there for the reception of the commandment and the struggle to comply with the commandment.

We are all called upon in certain ways, that there are ethical obligations that are addressed to us, this is an important Levinasian way of thinking the commandment, then I’m also saying that there is a theological/political struggle to figure out my responsibility and how do I respond to such a call. It is not that I am called at the expense of others, We are all called. And yet it seems to me that there is a great deal of noise that keeps us from hearing, and fear that keeps us from acting and responding, but it’ll be a great loss of if we lose our responsiveness and our responsibility. So yes there is a theological dimension to my thinking of ethics.

avenir futur

Slavoj Žižek, The Year of Living Dangerously 2012

There are in French two words for “future” which cannot be adequately rendered in English: futur and avenir. Futur stands for “future” as the continuation of the present, as the full actualization of tendencies already in existence; while avenir points more towards a radical break, a discontinuity with the present—avenir is what is to come (a venir), not just what will be. Say, in today’s apocalyptic global situation, the ultimate horizon of the future is what Jean-Pierre Dupuy calls the dystopian “fixed point,” the zero-point of the ecological breakdown, of global economic and social chaos—even if it is indefinitely postponed, this zero-point is the virtual “attractor” towards which our reality, left to itself, tends. The way to combat the catastrophe is through acts that interrupt this drifting towards the catastrophic “fixed point” and take upon themselves the risk of giving birth to some radical Otherness “to come.” We can see here how ambiguous the slogan “no future” is: at a deeper level, it does not designate the closure, the impossibility of change, but what we should be striving for—to break the hold of the catastrophic “future” and thereby open up a space for something New “to come.”

Based on this distinction, we can see a problem with Marx (as well as with the twentieth-century Left): it was not that Marx was too utopian in his Communist dreams, but that his Communism was too “futural.” What Marx wrote about Plato (Plato’s Republic was not a utopia, but an idealized image of the existing Ancient Greek society) holds for Marx himself:

what Marx conceived as Communism remained an idealized image of capitalism, capitalism without capitalism, that is, expanded self-reproduction without profit and exploitation.

This is why we should return from Marx to Hegel, to Hegel’s “tragic” vision of the social process where no hidden teleology is guiding us, where every intervention is a jump into the unknown, where the result always thwarts our expectations. All we can be certain of is that the existing system cannot reproduce itself indefinitely: whatever will come after will not be “our future.” A new war in the Middle East or an economic chaos or an extraordinary environmental catastrophe can swiftly change the basic coordinates of our predicament. We should fully accept this openness, guiding ourselves on nothing more than ambiguous signs from the future.

deadlock antagonism in social reality

From Žižek’s The Year of Living Dangerously 2012

As Marx already recognized, the “objective” determinations of social reality are at the same time “subjective” thought-determinations (of the subjects caught up in this reality), and, at this point of indistinction (at which the limits of our thought, its deadlocks and contradictions, are at the same time the antagonisms of objective social reality itself ), “the diagnosis is also its own symptom.” Our diagnosis (our “objective” rendering of the system of all possible positions which determines the scope of our activity) is itself “subjective,” it is a scheme of subjective reactions to a deadlock we confront in our practice and, in that sense, is symptomatic of this unresolved deadlock itself.

Where we should nonetheless disagree with Jameson is in his designation of this indistinction of subjective and objective as “ideological”: it is ideological only if we naively define “non-ideological” in terms of a purely “objective” description, a description free of all subjective involvement.

But would it not be more appropriate to characterize as “ideological” any view that ignores not some “objective” reality undistorted by our subjective investment but the very cause of this unavoidable distortion, the real of that deadlock to which we react in our projects and engagements? [3]

Ž on Levinas Butler pt2

But, again, cannot this fidelity be understood precisely as a fidelity to the call of the vulnerable Other in all its precariousness? 🙂 This is Critchley’s argument that Ž disagrees with:)

The answer is not that the ethical agent should also experience his or her own fragility ― the temptation to be resisted here is the ethical domestication of the neighbor, or what Levinas effectively did with his notion of the neighbor as the abyssal point from which the call of ethical responsibility emanates.

Levinas deploys the notion of the subject as constituted by its recognition of an unconditional ethical Call engendered by the experience of injustices and wrongs: the subject emerges as a reaction to the traumatic encounter with the helpless suffering Other (the Neighbor).

This is why it is constitutively decentered, not autonomous, but split by the ethical Call, a subject defined by the experience of an internalized demand that it can never meet, a demand that exceeds it.

The paradox constitutive of the subject is thus that the demand that the subject cannot meet is what makes the subject, so that the subject is constitutively divided, its autonomy “always usurped by the heteronomous experience of the other’s demand”: “my relation to the other is not some benign benevolence, compassionate care or respect for the other’s autonomy, but is the obsessive experience of a responsibility that persecutes me with its sheer weight. I am the other’s hostage.”37

My elementary situation is thus that of an eternal struggle against myself: I am forever split between egotistic rootedness in a particular familiar world around which my life gravitates, and the unconditional call of responsibility for the Other: “The I which arises in enjoyment as a separate being having apart in itself the centre around which its existence gravitates, is confirmed in its singularity by purging itself of this gravitation, and purges itself interminably.” [Critchley Infinitely Demanding]

Levinas likes to quote Dostoyevsky here: “We are all responsible for everything and guilty in front of everyone, but I am that more than all others.” The underlying cruelty is that of the superego, of course.

What is the superego? In a Motel One, close to Alexanderplatz in Berlin, the do-not-disturb signs read: “I am enjoying my Motel One room … please don’t disturb!” Not only is this message obscene insofar as it compels the hotel guest who wants peace and quiet to declare that he is enjoying his room, the deeper obscenity resides in the fact that his desire not to be disturbed is implicitly characterized as a desire to enjoy himself in peace (and not, for example, to sleep or to work).

Recall the strange fact, regularly evoked by Primo Levi and other Holocaust survivors, about how their intimate reaction to their survival was marked by a deep split: consciously, they were fully aware that their survival was the result of a meaningless accident, that they were not in any way guilty for it, that the only guilty perpetrators were their Nazi torturers. At the same time, they were (more than merely) haunted by an “irrational” feeling of guilt, as if they had survived at the expense of others and were thus somehow responsible for their deaths ― as is well known, this unbearable feeling of guilt drove many of them to suicide. This displays the agency of the superego at its purest: as the obscene agency which manipulates us into a spiraling movement of self-destruction.

The function of the superego is precisely to obfuscate the cause of the terror constitutive of our being-human, the inhuman core of being-human, the dimension of what the German Idealists called negativity and Freud called the death drive. Far from being the traumatic hard core of the Real from which sublimations protect us, the superego is itself a mask screening off the Real.

For Levinas, the traumatic intrusion of the radically heterogeneous Real Thing which decenters the subject is identical with the ethical Call of the Good, while, for Lacan, on the contrary, it is the primordial “evil Thing,” something that can never be sublated into a version of the Good, something which forever remains a disturbing cut. Therein lies the revenge of Evil for our domestication of the Neighbor as the source of the ethical call: the “repressed Evil” returns in the guise of the superego’s distortion of the ethical call itself.

But there is a further question to be raised here: is the opposition between fellow-man and Neighbor the ultimate horizon of our experience of others?

It is clear that for Levinas the “face” is not the name for my fellow-man with whom I can empathize, who is “like me,” my semblant, but the name for a radical facelessness, for the Real of the abyss of an Otherness whose intrusion destabilizes every homeostatic exchange with others.

However, does not the very fact that Levinas can use the term “face” to designate its opposite, the faceless abyss of the other, point to the link between the two, to the fact that they belong to the same field? Is not the faceless abyss of the Neighbor a faceless Beyond engendered by the face itself, the face’s inherent overcoming, like the terrifying image (vortex, maelstrom, Medusa’s head, Irma’s throat …) which is too strong for our eyes, which closes down the very dimension of what can be seen?

Insofar as, for Lacan, the face functions as an imaginary lure, the Real of the faceless Neighbor is the imaginary Real; the question is thus whether there is another, symbolic, Real. What emerges if, in a vague homology, we push the symbolic as far as the same self-canceling into which the face is pushed to give rise to the faceless abyss of the Neighbor?

What would be the status of the human individual as a symbolic Real?

What emerges at this point is the subject, the Cartesian cogito which, according to Lacan, is none other than the subject of the unconscious. No wonder that Lacan refers to this subject as an “answer of the real”: it emerges when the symbolic is pushed to the limit of its impossibility, of its immanent Real. This subject is totally de-substantialized; coinciding with its own failure-to-be, it is a mere cut, a gap, in the order of being.

If the axis fellow-man/Neighbor remains our ultimate horizon, we have to abandon the dimension of universality: the Neighbor is a singular abyss which resists universality.

But is it then the case that the non-universalizable Neighbor is the ultimate horizon of our ethico-political activity? Is the highest norm the injunction to respect the neighbor’s Otherness?

No wonder Levinas is so popular today among leftist-multiculturalist liberals who improvise endlessly on the motif of impossible universality―every universality is exclusive, it imposes a particular standard as universal.

The question to be posed here is whether every ethical universality is really based on the exclusion of the abyss of the Neighbor, or whether there is a universality which does not exclude the Neighbor.

The answer is: yes, the universality grounded in the “part of no-part,” the singular universality exemplified in those who lack a determined place in the social totality, who are “out of place” in it and as such directly stand for the universal dimension.

Ž on Levinas Butler pt1

Leszek Kolakowski once wrote that man can be a moral being only insofar as he is weak, limited, fragile, and with a “broken heart” ― this is the liberal core of Levinas’s thought, a core to which Butler also subscribes when she focuses on the fragile symbolic status of a human subject, caught in the abyss of decentered symbolic representation, and whose very identity hinges on an external, inconsistent network. Precarious Life, London: Verso Books 2006.

It is this precarious status of subjectivity which functions as the zero-level of all ethics: the absolute call, the injunction, emanating from the vulnerable neighbor’s face. To be an ethical subject means to experience oneself, in one’s singularity, as the addressee of that unconditional call, as responsible and responding to it even when one chooses to ignore it.

[From a Christian perspective, we should go to the end here: if man is created in God’s image, the becoming-man-of-God means that the same goes for God: in Christ, God becomes a fragile absolute, precarious, vulnerable, and impotent.]

The first thing to note here is the basic asymmetry of the situation: the other’s face makes an unconditional demand on us; we did not ask for it, and we are not allowed to refuse it. (And, of course, what Levinas means by “the face” is not directly the physical face: a face can also be a mask for the face, there is no direct representation of the face.)

This demand is the Real which cannot be captured by any words; it marks the limit of language, every translation of it into language already distorts it. It is not simply external to discourse―it is its inner limit, as the encounter with the other which opens up the space for discourse, since there can be no discourse without the other. It is the real of a violent encounter that (as Badiou would put it) throws me out of my existence as a human animal. 827

[The irony here is that, with Butler, the encounter with the Other in its precariousness and fragility (finitude, mortality) has exactly the same structure as the Badiouian encounter of the Event which opens up the dimension of immortality or eternity.]

And Butler is fully justified in emphasizing that this ethical injunction, at its most basic level, is a reaction to the quasi-automatic reaction to get rid of the other-neighbor, to kill him (this urge can easily be accounted for in Freudo-Lacanian terms as the basic reaction to the encounter with the intrusive Neighbor-Thing)

But for Freud and Lacan (as was convincingly elaborated by Jean Laplanche), the traumatic encounter with the Other as a desiring which “interrupts the narcissistic circuit” is precisely the basic experience constitutive of desiring subjectivity―which is why, for Lacan, desire is a “desire of the Other.”

Thus Lacan’s “ethics of psychoanalysis” stands for his attempt to demonstrate that there is an ethical dimension discovered in the psychoanalytic experience, … Lacan’s option involves neither the aggressive thrust to annihilate the Other – Neighbor-Thing, nor its reversal into accepting the Other as the source of an unconditional ethical injunction. But why not?

🙂 constitutive of desiring subjectivity, is this initial approach what do you want. the enigma of the desire of the other which is mind blowing and throws us totally out of joint, we react as one would violently, or indifference, but the ethical call is to not forego hiding away, and to do something. This something as we have seen is within the 4 discourses 🙂

We should note that, in Levinas’s account, it is not me who experiences myself as precarious, but the Other who addresses me. This is why, in my very asymmetric subordination to the Other’s call, in my unconditional responsibility, in my being taken hostage by the Other, I assume supremacy over the Other.

Do we not encounter this wounded-precarious Other almost daily, in advertisements for charity which bombard us with images of starving or disfigured children crying in agony? Far from undermining the hegemonic ideology, such adverts are one of its exemplary manifestations. 828

Butler shows how the face itself can function as an instrument of dehumanization, like the faces of evil fundamentalists or despots (bin Laden, Saddam Hussein), and how the power regime also decides which faces we are allowed to see as worthy of grief and mourning and which not — it was pictures of children burning from napalm that generated ethical outrage in the US public over Vietnam. Today, the very fragility of the suffering Other is part of the humanitarian ideological offensive. 828

***

What must be added to the precariousness and vulnerability of the ethical subject is the notion of absolute fidelity, the reference to an absolute point of infinity, in accordance with Pascal’s well-known thought that man is a tiny speck of dust in the universe, but at the same time infinite spirit. 828

***

Fragility alone does not account for ethics ― the gaze of a tortured or wounded animal does not in itself make it an ethical subject. The two minimal components of the ethical subject are its precarious vulnerability and its fidelity to an “immortal Truth” (a principle for which, in clear and sometimes ridiculous contrast to its vulnerability and limitations, the subject is ready to put everything at stake)―it is only this presence of an “immortal Truth” that makes human vulnerability different from that of a wounded animal. Furthermore, to these two, we should also add the “demonic” immortality whose Freudian name is the (death) drive, the very core of the Neighbor-Thing. 829

[This is why, in psychoanalytic treatment, there is no face-to-face, neither the analyst nor his analysand sees the other’s face: only in this way can the dimension of the Neighbor-Thing emerge.]

4 basic existential positions

Four basic existential positions:

the individual (what Badiou calls the “human animal,” the ordinary human being oriented by utilitarian motives and engaged in “servicing the goods”);
the human (the individual aware of the precariousness and mortality of its position);
the subject (a human being that overcomes its subordination to the “pleasure principle” by way of a heroic fidelity to a Truth-Event);
the neighbor (not the Levinasian version, which is closer to the second position, but the Freudo-Lacanian one, the abyssal inhuman Ding whose proximity causes anxiety).

The individual is a positively attuned human (living an ordinary life),in contrast to the negatively attuned human (aware of the precariousness and mortality of its condition);

the subject is a positively attuned agent engaged in an over-human truth-process, in contrast to the neighbor attuned to the negative stance of anxiety.

Different figures can be located along these lines―for example, Christ is a “human subject,” combining precarious mortality with a fidelity to Truth. 826

Night of the World LTN

Our hypothesis is that it is only with reference to this abyss (Night of the World) that one can answer the question “How can an Event explode in the midst of Being? How must the domain of Being be structured so that an Event is possible within it?”

Hegelian one: one can and should fully assert creation ex nihilo in a materialist (non-obscurantist) way if one asserts the non-All (ontological incompleteness) of reality. From this standpoint, an Event is irreducible to the order of Being (or to a situation with regard to which it is Event); it is also In-itself not just a “fragment of being,” not because it is grounded in some “higher” spiritual reality, but because it emerges out of the void in the order of being. 823

The only solution here is to admit that the couple Being/Event is not exhaustive, that there must be a third level.

Insofar as an Event is a distortion or twist of Being, is it not possible to think this distortion independently of (or as prior to) the Event,

so that the “Event” ultimately names a minimal “fetishization” of the immanent distortion of the texture of Being into its virtual object-cause?

And is not the Freudo-Lacanian name for this distortion the drive, the death drive?

Badiou distinguishes man qua mortal “human animal” from the “inhuman” subject as the agent of a truth-procedure: as an animal endowed with intelligence and able to develop instruments to reach its goals, man pursues happiness and pleasure, worries about death, and so on; but only as a subject faithful to a Truth-Event does man truly rise above animality.

How, then, does the Freudian unconscious fit into this duality of the human animal and the subject (defined by its relation to the Truth-Event)? 823

the “human animal,” a living being bent on survival, a being whose life follows “pathological” interests (in the Kantian sense): the “human animal” leads a life regulated by the pleasure principle, a life unperturbed by the shocking intrusion of a Real which introduces a point of fixation that persists “beyond the pleasure principle.” What distinguishes humans from animals (the “human animal” included) is not consciousness―one can easily concede that animals do have some kind of self-awareness―but the unconscious: animals do not have the Unconscious. One should thus say that the Unconscious, or, rather, the domain of the “death drive,” this distortion or destabilization of animal instinctual life, is what renders a life capable of transforming itself into a subject of Truth: only a living being with an Unconscious can become the receptacle of a Truth-Event.

The problem with Badiou’s dualism is thus that it ignores Freud’s basic lesson:

there is no “human animal,” a human being is from its birth (and even before) torn away from its animal constraints, its instincts are “denaturalized,” caught up in the circularity of the (death) drive, functioning “beyond the pleasure principle,” marked by the stigma of what Eric Santner called “undeadness” or the excess of life.

This is why there is no place for the “death drive” in Badiou’s theory, for that “distortion” of human animality which precedes the fidelity to an Event.

Truth in LTN

This couple is, however, clearly not “strong enough” to provide the coordinates for Badiou’s notion of a Truth-Event: a Truth-Event is not only the “revenge” of the inconsistency upon a consistent situation;

fidelity to a Truth-Event is a work of imposing a new order onto the multiplicity of Being, for Truth is a “project” which is enforced upon the unnamable of a situation.

In a way, Truth is itself even more forcefully imposing than a World: there is no pre-established harmony between Being and Event, for the enforcing of a Truth onto the multiple reality in no way “expresses” the “inner truth” of reality itself. 814

sexual difference from LTN

“There is no sexual relationship” does not mean that there is a multiplicity of unbound or unrelated sexual positions, i.e., that there is no common measure between the masculine and the feminine positions; sexual difference is rather “impossible” because it is, in a sense, prior to both positions: masculine and feminine are the two ways to symbolize the deadlock of sexual difference. Ž LTN

How, then, does the Badiouian Event stand with regard to formulae of sexuation?

Some Lacanian feminist critics claim that the exceptional status of the Event with regard to ordinary “human-animal” life, its status as the exception to universality, compels us to locate it on the male side of the formulae―and, indeed, is not this logic of exception to universality confirmed by Badiou’s own formulations, such as when he says: “There is nothing but bodies and languages …,” to which materialist dialectics adds “…with the exception of truths” (Alain Badiou, Logiques des mondes, Paris: Seuil 2006, p. 9)?

Furthermore, does not the heroic-phallic connotation of the fidelity to an Event (the idea of “enforcing” the truth) also bear witness to its masculine nature?

There is nonetheless a key feature which renders such a reading problematic, convincing as it may appear: on the male side of Lacan’s formulae of sexuation, the exception is the exception to universality (all but x are …) which, as such, grounds this universality, while in the case of the Badiouian Truth-Event, the evental Truth is universal; i.e., here, exception does not ground universality (with regard to which it is an exception), the exception (an evental Truth) is universality.

Or, to put it in another way, universality is here singular, it is what Hegel called a universality “for itself,” a universality posited as such in a singular point. Or, to put yet another way,

universality is here not the outcome of a neutral view to which we gain access after elevating ourselves above particular or partial engaged positions; universality is, on the contrary, something which is accessible only to an engaged subjective position.

The supreme case here is the Marxian proletariat which stands for the exception, the “part of no-part,” of the social body, and is precisely as such the “universal class.” Ž LTN 812

Ž on Badiou ch. world truth 12 LTN

Here is Ž from his latest book:

My ongoing debate with Badiou could be read as a series of variations on the motif of how to redeem Hegel, how to reclaim him for the contemporary universe of radical contingency. In terms of the most elementary ontological coordinates, my difference with Badiou is threefold, with regard to the triad Being/World/Event.

1. At the level of being, the multiplicity of multiples has to be supplemented by the “barred One,” the Void as the impossibility of the One becoming One.

2. At the level of appearance, the world has to be conceived of as language-bound: each world is sustained by a Master-Signifier (the true reference of what Badiou calls a “point”).

3. At the level of the Event, the “negativity” of anxiety and the (death) drive has to be posited as prior to the affirmative enthusiasm for the Event, as its condition of possibility.

How we pass from being to appearing, how and why does being start to appear to itself? Ray Brassier is thus right to insist on Badiou’s “failure to clarify the connection between ontological inconsistency and ontical consistency,” that is, the passage from Being to a World

In the history of philosophy, the most consistent answer to this question (in a certain sense one could say the only true answer) was provided by the German Idealists, especially Schelling and Hegel. In his Weltalter manuscripts, Schelling outlined the birth of logos (the articulated World) out of the pre-ontological antagonism of drives, while Hegel, in his Logic, tries to demonstrate how “appearing” (correlative to Essence) emerges out of the immanent inconsistencies (“contradictions”) of Being. In spite of the insurmountable differences between Schelling and Hegel, the two share a key feature: they try to account for the emergence of appearing with reference to some kind of tension or antagonism or contradiction in the preceding order of being. LTN 809

🙂 Being to appearing, the stuff of being is sheer multiplicity, what Ž is arguing is that there has to be something to organize this chaos. But the push from being to appearing first happens as drive 🙂

This route, however, is excluded a priori by Badiou, since his axiom is that “being as being is absolutely homogeneous: a mathematically thinkable pure multiplicity.” This is why all Badiou can do is offer obscure hints about “a kind of push” of being towards appearing which belongs more to the Schopenhauerian Gnostic notion of how the abyssal Ground of Being harbors an obscure inexplicable will to appear.

The key axiom of Badiou’s “logics of worlds” concerns the concept of the “inexistent” of a world: “If a multiplicity appears in a world, one element of this multiplicity and only one is an inexistent of this world.”

A “non-existent” is an element which is part of a world but participates in it with the minimal degree of intensity; that is, the transcendental structure of this world renders it “invisible”: “The thing is in the world, but its appearing in the world is the destruction of its identity.”

The classical example is, of course, Marx’s notion of the proletariat which belongs to the existing society but within its horizon is invisible in its specific function. Such an inexistent is, of course, the “evental site” of a world: when the Event occurs, the inexistent passes from minimal to maximal existence, or, to quote the well-known line from the “Internationale”: “We were nothing, we shall be all.”

As Badiou makes clear, this inexistence is not ontological (at the level of being, workers are massively present in capitalist society), but phenomenological: they are here, but invisible in their specific mode of existence. The philosophical question here is: why, exactly, does every world contain a “non-existent”?

In short, precisely because of the gap between being (irreducible multiplicity) and appearing (atoms or Ones), the unity (overlapping) of being and appearing (existence) can only appear within the (transcendental) space of appearance in a negative way, in the guise of an inexistent, a One which is (from within the transcendental frame that regulates appearing) not-One, an atom which, while part of the world of appearing, is not properly covered by it, participates minimally in it.

This inexistent is the point of symptomal torsion of a world: it functions as a “universal singular,” a singular element which directly participates in the universal (belongs to its world), but lacks a determinate place in it.

At the formal level of the logic of the signifier, this inexistent is the empty “signifier without a signified,” the zero-signifier which, deprived of all determinate meaning, stands only for the presence of meaning as such, in contrast to its absence, to non-meaning: its meaning is tautological, it means only that things have meaning, without saying what this meaning is. 810

What Badiou calls “subtraction” is thus another name, his name, for negativity in its affirmative dimension, for a negativity which is not just a destructive gesture, but gives, opens up a new dimension. LTN 811

The question to be raised here is this: why should an Event not designate a modification of the very internal rules of the transcendental of a world? Why do we not actually pass from one to another world? Is it not that, for a non-existent to change into a being with the maximum intensity of existence, the very rules which measure the intensity of being have to change?

🙂 Žižek’s Butler moment

If proletarians are to count as “being-human as such,” does not the very measure of what counts as “being-human” have to be modified? In other words, is it not that an inexistent which is the point of symptomal torsion of a world can only be made fully existent if we pass into another world? 812

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…reality is, at its most elementary ontological level, an inconsistent multiplicity that no One can totalize into a consistent unity. Of course, reality always appears to us within a determinate situation, as a particular world whose consistency is regulated by its transcendental features. LTN 813

The term “inconsistency” is used here in two senses that are not clearly distinguished. First, there is inconsistency as the “true ontological foundation of any multiple-being,” namely “a multiple-deployment that no unity can gather”―inconsistency is here the starting point, the zero-level of pure presence, that which is subsequently counted-as-one, organized into a world, that which subsequently appears within a given transcendental horizon.

Then, there is inconsistency as the symptomal knot of a world, the excess which cannot be accounted for in its terms. (Exactly the same ambiguity characterizes the Lacanian Real.)

a World is historical, a transcendental-historical organization of a sphere of Being, while―as Badiou repeatedly emphasizes in his unabashedly Platonic way―Truth is eternal, in enforcing it one enforces onto reality an eternal Idea. We are thus dealing with two radically different levels: a World is a formation of human finitude, “hermeneutic” (a horizon of meaning); the evental Truth is eternal, the trans-historical persistence of an eternal Idea which continues to haunt us “in all possible worlds.” 815

Both World and Truth-Event are modes of appearing: a World consists of the transcendental coordinates of appearing, while a Truth-Event (or an immortal Idea) is something that, rather than appearing, “shines through,” transpires in reality. The status of the World is hermeneutic, it provides the horizon of meaning that determines our experience of reality, while the status of the Idea is Real, it is a virtual-immovable X whose traces are discernible in reality. In other words, the universality of a World is always “false” in the Marxist critico-ideological sense: every World is based upon an exclusion or “repression” which can be detected through its points of symptomal torsion, while the universality of Truth is unconditional, for it is not based upon a constitutive exception, it does not generate its point of symptomal torsion.