logocentric – Page 51

LTN conclusion pt 2

This is why the human being is not a “rational animal,” not defined by a dimension or quality which adds itself to substantial animality: in order for such an addition to occur, a space for it, its possibility, has to be first opened up by a distortion of animality itself. The Lacanian name for this distortion or excess is the objet a (surplus-enjoyment), and, as Lacan convincingly demonstrated, even Hegel here falls short, missing this dimension of surplus-enjoyment in the struggle for recognition and its outcome.

According to the standard view (propagated by, among others, Kojève), what is at stake in the Hegelian struggle between the (future) master and servant is the separation of the subject from its body: through its readiness to sacrifice its biological body (life), the subject asserts the life of the spirit as higher and as independent of its biological life. This other (higher) dimension is embodied in language, which is, in a way, the negativity of death transposed into a new positive order: the word is the murderer of the thing it designates, it extracts the concept of the thing in its independence from the empirical thing. From the Freudian-Lacanian standpoint, however, such a description of the passage from the biological body to its symbolization, to the spiritual life of language, misses something crucial: namely, how the symbolization of the body retroactively generates a fantasmatic inexistent organ which stands for what is lost in the process of symbolization:

“This lamella, this organ, whose characteristic is not to exist, but which is nevertheless an organ … is the libido. It is the libido, qua pure life instinct, that is to say, immortal life, irrepressible life, life that has need of no organ, simplified, indestructible life. It is precisely what is subtracted from the living being by virtue of the fact that it is subject to the cycle of sexed reproduction. And it is of this that all the forms of the objet a that can be enumerated are the representatives, the equivalents.”

This forever lost excess of pure or indestructible life is―in the guise of the objet a, the object-cause of desire ― also what “eternalizes” human desire, making it infinitely plastic and unsatisfiable (in contrast to instinctual needs). It is therefore wrong to claim that, since the master does not work, he remains stuck at the natural level: what the servant’s products satisfy are not merely the master’s natural needs, but his needs transformed into an infinite desire for excessive luxuries displayed in competition with the luxuries of other masters―the servant brings the master rare delicacies, luxury furniture, expensive jewelry, and so on. This is why the master becomes the servant of his servant: he depends on the servant not for the satisfaction of his natural needs, but for the satisfaction of his highly cultivated artificial needs.

LTN conclusion pt 1

For the earlier Lacan, both the ethics of symbolic realization and the ethics of confronting the Real Thing call for the heroic stance of pushing things to the limit in order to leave behind our everyday Verfallenheit, our fallen existence (one must “subjectivize one’s own death” by casting off the wealth of imaginary identifications, thereby attaining the limit-position of a pure subject without an ego; one must violently transgress the very limit of the symbolic order, heroically confronting the dangerous Beyond of the Real Thing).

a Utopia of misfits and oddballs, in which the constraints for uniformization and conformity have been removed, and human beings grow wild like plants in a state of nature … no longer fettered by the constraints of a now oppressive sociality, [they] blossom into the neurotics, compulsives, obsessives, paranoids and schizophrenics, whom our society considers sick but who, in a world of true freedom, may make up the flora and fauna of “human nature” itself. (Fredric Jameson The Seeds of Time 1994 p.99)

the universal encounters itself among its species in the guise of its “oppositional determination.”

“Good is a mask of Evil,” the way for Evil to be re-normalized or domesticated.

Agamben defines our contemporary post-political or bio-political era as a society in which multiple dispositifs desubjectivize individuals without producing a new subjectivity, without subjectivizing them:

Agamben quote:
From here comes the eclipse of politics which supposed real subjects or identities (workers’ movement, bourgeoisie, etc.) and the triumph of economy, that is to say, of the pure activity of governing which pursues only its own reproduction. The Right and the Left which today follow each other in managing power have thus very little to do with the political context from which the terms which designate them originate. Today these terms simply name the two poles (the one which targets without any scruples the desubjectivation and the one which wants to cover it up with the hypocritical mask of the good citizen of democracy) of the same machine of government.

“Bio-politics” designates this constellation in which dispositifs no longer generate subjects (“interpellate individuals into subjects”), but merely administer and regulate individuals’ bare life―in bio-politics, we are all potentially reduced to homini sacri.

The outcome of this reduction, however, involves an unexpected twist―Agamben draws attention to the fact that the inoffensive desubjectivized citizen of post-industrial democracies, who in no way opposes the hegemonic dispositifs but zealously executes all their injunctions and is thus controlled by them even in the most intimate details of his or her life, is “nonetheless (and perhaps for this very reason) considered as a potential terrorist”

“In the eyes of the authority (and, perhaps, the authority is right in this), nothing resembles a terrorist more than an ordinary man.” The more the ordinary man is controlled by cameras, by digital scanning, by data collection, the more he appears as an inscrutable, un-governable X which subtracts itself from the dispositifs the more it obeys them with docility.

It is not that it poses a threat to the machine of government by actively resisting it: its very passivity suspends the performative efficacy of the dispositifs, making their machine “run on empty,” turning it into a self-parody which serves nothing.

How can this happen? What is the exact status of this X?

To eradicate the profound ambiguity of Agamben’s account, we should apply here the Lacanian distinction between the subject ($) and subjectivation:

the X that emerges when a dispositif totally desubjectivizes an individual is that of the subject itself, the unfathomable void that ontologically precedes subjectivization (the rise of the “inner life” of self-experience).

X = subject

lendl

Andy Murray was one of only two men in the professional era, which began in 1968, to have lost his first four Grand Slam finals — against Djokovic in the 2011 Australian Open, and against Federer three times. The other guy who began 0-4? Ivan Lendl, who just so happens to be Murray’s coach nowadays. Murray’s added aggressiveness is one of the improvements he’s made under the tutelage of Lendl, who sat still for much of the match, eyeglasses perched atop his white baseball hat and crossed arms resting on his red sweater — in sum, betraying about as much emotion as he ever did during his playing days.

“All you can do is keep putting yourself in the position, and keep giving it all you have. If somebody’s that much better than you, that’s too bad, and you go again and try again,” said Lendl, who wound up with eight major titles. “You sit back, try to figure out where you can improve, what you have to improve to beat certain players, and then you go and work on it.”

kotsko on Ž

How to Read Žižek by Adam Kotsko
September 2nd, 2012

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK, a philosopher and psychoanalyst from Slovenia, is one of the few academics to have achieved a degree of genuine popularity among general readers. He regularly lectures to overflow crowds, is the subject of a documentary film (called simply Žižek!), and surely counts as one of the world’s most visible advocates of left-wing ideas. When Žižek first broke into the English-speaking academic scene, however, few would likely have predicted such success. For one thing, his research focused on an unpromising topic: the long-neglected field of “ideology critique,” a staple of Marxist cultural criticism that had fallen into eclipse as Marxism became less central to Western intellectual life in the second half of the twentieth century. Continue reading “kotsko on Ž”

alienation separation buddhism

The core of Lacan’s atheism is best discerned in the conceptual couple of “alienation” and “separation” which he develops in his Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. [See Chapter 11 The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis]

ALIENATION

In a first approach, the big Other stands for the subject’s alienation in the symbolic order: the big Other pulls the strings; the subject does not speak, he is “spoken” by the symbolic structure. In short, this “big Other” is the name for the social substance, for all that on account of which the subject never fully controls the effects of his acts, so that their final outcome is always other than what he aimed at or anticipated.

SEPARATION

Separation takes place when the subject takes note of how the big Other is in itself inconsistent, lacking (“barred;’ as Lacan liked to put it) : the big Other does not possess what the subject lacks. In separation, the subject experiences how his own lack with regard to the big Other is already the lack that affects the big Other itself. To recall Hegel’s immortal dictum concerning the Sphinx: “The enigmas of the Ancient Egyptians were enigmas also for the Egyptians themselves.”

Separation stands for redoubled alienation: the subject enacts separation when his lack coincides with the lack in the Other, that is, when he recognizes that the Other also does not have what he is missing. 129

In the Gnostic mode, for Buddhism, ethics is ultimately a question of knowledge and ignorance: our craving (desire), our attachment to terrestrial goods, is conditioned by our ignorance, so that deliverance comes with proper knowing. (What Christian love means, on the contrary, is that there is a decision not grounded in knowledge — Christianity thus breaks with the entire tradition of the primacy of Knowledge which runs from Buddhism through Gnosticism to Spinoza.) 130

Here, however, we should remain faithful to the Western “Oedipal” tradition: of course every object of desire is an illusory lure; of course the full jouissance of incest is not only prohibited, but in itself impossible; nevertheless, Lacan’s les non-dupes errent must still be asserted. Even if the object of desire is illusory, there is a real in this illusion: the object of desire in its positive content is vain, but not the place it occupies, the place of the Real; which is why there is more truth in the unconditional fidelity to one’s desire than in the resigned insight into the vanity of one’s striving.

As we have seen, at the core of this paradox is a formal structure homologous to that of the Higgs field in quantum physics: what, in the Higgs field, is called the double vacuum, appears here in the guise of the irreducible gap between ethics (understood as the care of the self, as striving towards authentic being) and morality (understood as the care for others, responding to their call). Insofar as the authenticity of the Self is taken to tne extreme in Buddhist meditation, whose goal is precisely to enable the subject to overcome (or, rather, snspend) its Self and enter the vacuum of nirvana, one should remember the Zen Buddhist claim that “Zen and the sword are one and the same,” a principle grounded in the opposition between the reflexive attitude of our ordinary daily lives (in which we cling to life and fear death, strive for egotistic pleasures and profits, hesitate instead of acting directly) and the enlightened stance in which the difference between life and death no longer matters, in which we regain the original self-less unity and become directly our acts.

The point here is not to criticize Buddhism, but merely to emphasize the irreducible gap between subjective authenticity and moral goodness (in the sense of social responsibility): the difficult thing to accept is that one can be totally authentic in overcoming one’s false Self and yet still commit horrible crimes-and vice versa, of course: one can be a caring subject, morally committed to the full, while existing in an inauthentic world of illusion with regard to oneself. 135

ethics Lacan

Have you acted in conformity with the desire that is in you? Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 314.

This is Lacan’s maxim of the ethics of psychoanalysis: “the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one’s desire. Ibid., p. 319.

The first thing to state categorically is that Lacanian ethics is not an ethics of hedonism: whatever “do not compromise your desire” means, it does not mean the unrestrained rule of what Freud called “the pleasure principle,” the functioning of the psychic apparatus that aims at achieving pleasure.

For Lacan, hedonism is in fact the model of postponing desire on behalf of “realistic compromises”: it is not only that, in order to attain the greatest amount of pleasure, I have to calculate and economize, sacrificing short-term pleasures for more intense longterm ones; what is even more important is that jouissance hurts. 123

An ethical act is one that does not comprise or express the entire person, but is a moment of grace, a “miracle” which can occur also in a non-virtuous individual. This is why such acts are diffcult to imagine, and why, when they do occur, one often tends to invent a narrative which normalizes them. 122

For Western observers in particular, such stories may also have served to provide a rational explanation for behavior that was otherwise totally inexplicable. The story about the recreated paradise was thus a fantasy concocted to rationalize the traumatically “incomprehensible” fact that the the Ismaiii followers were ready to function as perfect killing machines, willing to sacrifice their own lives in the accomplishment of the task — a fantasy, in short, that enabled Westerners to re-translate a pure “ethical” act into an act determined “pathologically” (in the Kantian sense of the term). How, then, does such an ethics stand with regard to the panoply of today’s ethical options? It seems to fit three of its main versions: 1) liberal hedonism, 2) immoralism 3) “Western Buddhism'”

The larger problem here is that psychoanalysis seems able to accommodate itself to all today’s predominant ethical stances-the three mentioned above plus a further two: the Levinasian-Derridean ethics of responsibility to Otherness; and the conservative advocacy of the need to reassert the symbolic law (in the guise of paternal authority) as the only way to resolve the deadlock of hedonistic permissiveness.

So what is wrong with the rule of the pleasure principle? In Kant’s description, ethical duty functions like a foreign intruder that disturbs the subject’s homeostatic balance, its unbearable pressure forcing the subject to act “beyond the pleasure principle,” ignoring the pursuit of pleasures. For Lacan, exactly the same description holds for desire, which is why enjoyment is not something that comes naturally to the subject, as a realization of his or her inner potential, but is the content of a traumatic superegoic injunction.

George Bizet’s Carmen. Carmen is, of course, immoral (ruthlessly promiscuous, ruining men’s lives, destroying families), but nonetheless thoroughly ethical (faithful to her chosen path to the end, even when this means certain death). Along these lines, Lee Edelman has developed the notion of homosexuality as involving an ethics of “now;’ of unconditional fidelity to jouissance, of following the death drive by totally ignoring any reference to the future or engagement with the practical complex of worldly affairs. Homosexuality thus stands for the thorough assumption of the negativity of the death drive, of withdrawing from reality into the real of the “night of the world.”

Along these lines, Edelman opposes the radical ethics of homosexuality to the predominant obsession with posterity (i.e., children): children are the “pathological” moment which binds us to pragmatic considerations and thus compels us to betray the radical ethics of jouissance. (Incidentally, does this line of thought — the idea that homosexuality at its most fundamental involves the rejection of children — not justify those who argue that gay couples should not be allowed to adopt children.

The figure of an innocent and helpless child is the ultimate ethical trap, the emblem-fetish of betraying the ethics of jouissance. 124

Friedrich Nietzsche (a great admirer of Carmen) was the great philosopher of immoral ethics, and we should always remember that the title of Nietzsche’s masterpiece is “genealogy of morals;’ not “of ethics”: the two are not the same. Morality is concerned with the symmetry of my relations to other humans; its zero-level rule is “do not do to me what you do not want me to do to you.” Ethics, in contrast, deals with my consistency in relation to myself, my fidelity to my own desire.

We can see now why Lacan’s motto “il n’y a pas de grand Autre” (there is no big Other) takes us to the very core of the ethical problematic: what it excludes is precisely this “perspective of the Last Judgment:’ the idea that somewhere even if as a thoroughly virtual reference point, even if we concede that we can never occupy its place and pass the actual judgment-there must be a standard which would allow us to take the measure of our acts and pronounce on their “true meaning:’ their true ethical status. Even Derrida’s notion of “deconstruction as justice” seems to rely on a utopian hope which sustains the specter of “infinite justice:’ forever postponed, always to come, but nonetheless here as the ultimate horizon of our activity.

The harshness of Lacanian ethics lies in its demand that we thoroughly relinquish this reference to the big Other-and its further wager is that not only does this renunciation not plunge us into ethical insecurity or relativism (or even sap the very fundamentals of ethical activity), but that renouncing the guarantee of some big Otheris the very condition of a truly autonomous ethics.

Recall that the exemplary dream Freud used to illustrate his procedure of dream analysis was a dream about responsibility (Freud’s own responsibility for the failure of his treatment of Irma)-this fact alone indicates that responsibility is a crucial Freudian notion. But how are we to conceive of this responsibility? How are we to avoid the common misperception that the basic ethical message of psychoanalysis is, precisely, that we should relieve ourselves of responsibility and instead place the blame on the Other (“since the Unconscious is the discourse of the Other, I am not responsible for its formations, it is the big Other who speaks through me, I am merely its instrument”) ? Lacan himself pointed the way out of this deadlock by referring to Kant’s philosophy as the crucial antecedent of psychoanalytic ethics. 127

According to the standard critique, the limitation of the Kantian universalistic ethic of the “categorical imperative” (the unconditional injunction to do one’s duty) resides in its formal indeterminacy: the moral Law does not tell me WHAT my duty is, it merely tells me THAT I should accomplish my duty, and so leaves room for an empty voluntarism (whatever I decide will be my duty is my duty). However, far from being a limitation, this very feature brings us to the core of Kantian ethical autonomy: it is not possible to derive the concrete obligations pertaining to one’s specific situation from the moral Law itself — which means that the subject himself must assume the responsibility of translating the abstract injunction into a series of concrete obligations.

The full acceptance of this paradox compels us to reject any reference to duty as an excuse: “I know this is heavy and can be painful, but what can I do, this is my duty . . .” Kant’s ethics is often taken as justifying such an attitude-no wonder Adolf Eichmann himself referred to Kant when trying to justify his role in planning and executing the Holocaust: he was just doing his duty and obeying the Fiihrer’s orders. However, the aim of Kant’s emphasis on the subject’s full moral autonomy and responsibility was precisely to prevent any such maneuver of putting the blame on some figure of the big Other. 128

there is no big Other

Imagine experiencing oneself abandoned by God, left to one’s own devices, with no big Other secretly watching over one and guaranteeing a happy outcome — is this not another name for the abyss of freedom? 111

What to make, then, of the standard reproach that Hegel transposes Christianity-a religion of love and passion, of total subjective engagement into a narrative representation of “abstract” speculative truth? Although Christianity is the “true” religion, in it the truth still appears in the medium of representation (and not in its own conceptual medium), so that speculative philosophy is the truth (the true-adequate form) of the Christian truth (content); the passion and pain of subjective engagement are thus dismissed as a secondary narrative husk to be discarded if we want to reach the truth in its own conceptual element. What this critique misses is that the casting off of the pathetic-narrative existential experience-the transubstantiation of the subject from a “concrete” self immersed in its life world into the subject of pure thought — is itself a process of ”abstraction” which has to be accomplished in the individual’s “concrete” experience, and which as such involves the supreme pain of renunciation. 111

Precisely by the fact that Christianity is, at its deepest core, already atheistic, a paradoxically atheistic religion. When Christ says to his followers deceived after his death on the Cross that, whenever there is love between them, he will be there, alive among them, this should not be read as a guarantee that Christ-Love is a Third term in the relationship of love, its guarantee and foundation, but, on the contrary, as another way of proclaiming the death of God: there is no big Other which guarantees our fate; all we have is the self-grounded abyss
of our love.

What this means is also that Hegel really is the ultimate Christian philosopher: no wonder he often uses the term “love” to designate the play of the dialectical mediation of opposites. What makes him a Christian philosopher and a philosopher of love is the fact that, contrary to the common misunderstanding, in the arena of dialectical struggle there is no Third which unites and reconciles the two struggling opposites. 112

THE ATHEIST WAGER

In Lacan’s formulae of sexuation, “non-All” designates the feminine position, a field which is not totalized because it lacks the exception, the Master-Signifier. Applied to Christianity, this means that the Holy Spirit is feminine, a community not based on a leader. The shift to the feminine occurs already in Christ: Christ is not a male figure; as many subtle readers have noted, his strangely passive stance is that of feminization, not of male intervention.

Christ’s impassivity thus points towards the feminization of God: his sacrifice follows the same logic as that of the heroine of Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady, or of Sygne de Colifontaine in Claudel’s L’Otage. Christ is not a Master figure, but the objet a, occupying the position of the analyst: an embarrassing excess, answering questions with jokes and riddles that only confound his listeners further, already acting as his own blasphemy. 112

First, I conceive my position NOT as being somewhere in between atheism and religious belief, but as the only true radical atheism, that is, an atheism which draws all the consequences from the inexistence of the big Other. Therein resides the lesson of Christianity: as we have seen, it is not only that we do not believe in God, but that God himself does not believe in himself, so that he also cannot survive as the non-substantial symbolic order, the virtual big Other who continues to believe in our stead, on our behalf. Second, only a belief which survives such a disappearance of the big Other is belief at its most radical … the atheist subject engages itself in a (political, artistic, etc.) project, “believes” in it, without any guarantee. 116

My thesis is thus double: not only is Christianity (at its core, if disavowed by its institutional practice) the only truly consistent atheism, it is also that atheists are the only true believers. 116

In true ethics, one acts from the position of the inexistence of the big Other, assuming the abyss of the act deprived of any guarantee or support.

Authentic belief is to be opposed to the reliance on (or reference to) a(nother) subject supposed to believe: in an authentic act of belief, I myself fully assume my belief and thus have no need for any figure of the Other to guarantee that belief; to paraphrase Lacan, an authentic belief ne s’authorise que de lui-meme. In this precise sense, authentic belief not only does not presuppose any big Other (is not a belief in a big Other), but, on the contrary, presupposes the destitution of the big Other, the full acceptance of its inexistence. 118

A profoundly religious friend once commented on the subtitle of a book of mine, “the perverse core of Christianity”: “I fully agree with you there! I believe in God, but I find repulsive and deeply disturbing all the twists celebrating sacrifice and humiliation, redemption through suffering, God organizing his own son’s killing by men. Can’t we have Christianity without this perverse core?” I could not bring myself to answer him: “But that is precisely the point of my book: what I want is all those perverse twists of redemption through suffering, the death of God, etc., but without God!”

Thus, as we have said, God has to die twice, first as real, then as symbolic; first in Judaism, then in Christianity. In Judaism, the God of the real survives as Word, as the virtual-dead Other whose specter is kept alive by the ritual performance of his subjects; in Christianity, this virtual Other itself dies. In Judaism, the God perceived directly as real dies; in Christianity, the God who is unconscious dies. The passage from paganism to Judaism is one of sublimation (the dead god survives as the symbolic Other) ; the death of Christ is not sublimation, in other words it is not the death of the real God who is resurrected in the Holy Ghost as the symbolic Other, like Julius Caesar who returns as sublimated in the symbolic title “Caesar.” 119

In strict parallel with this double move from paganism to Judaism and from Judaism to Christianity is the move from traditional authoritarian power to democracy and from democracy to revolutionary power: it is only in revolutionary power that the big Other really dies. In democracy, the place of power is empty, but the electoral procedure functions as a kind of ersatz-Other providing the legitimacy for power. That is to say, democracy-in the way this term is used today-concerns above all formal legality: its minimal requirement is the unconditional adherence to a certain set of formal rules which guarantee that antagonisms are fully absorbed into the agonistic game. “Democracy” means that, whatever electoral manipulation takes place, every political agent will unconditionally respect the results. … there nevertheless is a “big Other” which continues to exist in democracy: the procedural “big Other” of electoral rules which must be obeyed whatever the result-and this “big Other,” this unconditional reliance on rules, is what a more radical politics threatens to suspend. 119

death drive

What, then, is that which does not die, the material support of the Holy Spirit? When Robeson sang “Joe Hill” at the legendary Peace Arch concert in 1952, he changed the key line from “What they forgot to kill” into: “What they can never kill went on to organize.” The immortal dimension in man, that in man which it “takes more than guns to kill;’ the Spirit, is what went on to organize itself.

This should not be dismissed as an obscurantist-spiritualist metaphor — there is a subjective truth in it: when emancipatory subjects organize themselves, it is the “spirit” itself which organizes itself through them. One should add to the series of what the impersonal “it” (das Es, ça) does (in the unconscious, “it talks,” “it enjoys”): it organizes itself (ça s’organise — therein resides the core of the “eternal Idea” of a revolutionary party). One should also shamelessly evoke the standard scene from science-fiction horror movies in which the alien who has taken on human appearance (or invaded and colonized a human being) is exposed, its human form destroyed, so that all that remains is a formless slime, like a pool of melted metal . . . the hero leaves the scene, satisfied that the threat has been dealt with — and then the formless slime that the hero forgot to kill (or could not kill) starts to move, slowly organizing itself, and the old menacing figure is reconstituted.

Is not what we believers consnme in the Eucharist, Christ’s flesh (bread) and blood (wine), precisely the same formless remainder, “what they [the Roman soldiers who crucified him] can never kill,” which then goes on to organize itself as a community of believers? From this standpoint we should reread Oedipus himself as a precursor of Christ: against those-including Lacan himself — who perceive Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone as figures driven by the uncompromisingly suicidal death drive, “unyielding right to the end, demanding everything, giving up nothing, absolutely unreconciled.”

Does this not recall a later beggar king, Christ himself, who, by his death as a nobody, an outcast abandoned even by his disciples, grounds a new community of believers? They both re-emerge by way of passing through the zero-level of being reduced to an excremental remainder. The notion of the Christian collective of believers (and its later versions, from emancipatory political movements to psychoanalytic societies) is an answer to a precise materialist question: how to assert materialism not as a teaching, but as a form of collective life? Therein resides the failure of Stalinism: no matter how “materialist” its teaching was, its form of organization-the Party, which is an instrument of the historical big Other-remained idealist. Only a collective of the Holy Spirit founded on the “death of God;’ on accepting the inexistence of the big Other, is materialist in its very form of social organization.

Once upon a time there was a child who was willful and did not do what his mother wanted. For this reason God was displeased with him and caused him to become ill, and no doctor could help him, and in a short time he lay on his deathbed. He was lowered into a grave and covered with earth, but his little arm suddenly came forth and reached up, and it didn’t help when they put it back in and put fresh earth over it, for the little arm always came out again. So the mother herself had to go to the grave and beat the little arm with a switch, and as soon as she had done that, it withdrew, and the child finally came to rest beneath the earth.

Is not this obstinacy that persists even beyond death freedom — the death drive at its most elementary? Instead of condemning it, should we not rather celebrate it as the last resort of our resistance? The death of Christ is also the death/end of human mortality, the “death of death,” the negation of negation: the death of God is the rise of the undead drive (the undead partial object). 101

Here, however, Hegel is not radical enough: since he is not able to think objet a, he also ignores bodily immortality (“undeadness”) — both Spinoza and Hegel share this blindness for the proper dimension of the objet a. How can a Christian believer come to terms with this obscene excess of immortality? Is the answer, once again, love? Can one love this excess? 101

big Other

The big Other is a virtual order which exists only through subjects “believing” in it; if, however, a subject were to suspend its belief in the big Other, the subject itself, its “reality;’ would disappear. The paradox is that symbolic fiction is constitutive of reality: if we take away the fiction, we lose reality itself. This loop is what Hegel called “positing the presuppositions.” This big Other should not be reduced to an anonymous symbolic field-there are many interesting cases where an individual stands for the big Other. One should think not primarily of leader-figures who directly embody their communities (king, president, master), but rather of the more mysterious protectors of appearances-such as otherwise corrupted parents who desperately try to keep their child ignorant of their depraved lives, or, if it is a leader, then one for whom Potemkin villages are built.” 92

When, in David Lean’s Brief Encounter, the lovers meet for the last time at the desolate train station, their solitude is immediately disturbed by Celia Johnson’s noisy and inquisitive friend who, unaware of the underlying tension between the couple, goes prattling on about ridiculously insignificant everyday incidents. Unable to communicate directly, the couple can only stare desperately.

This common prattler is the big Other at its purest: while it appears as an accidental and unfortunate intrusion, its role is structurally necessary. When, towards the end of the film, we see this scene a second time, accompanied by Celia Johnson’s voice over, she tells us that she was not listening to what her friend was saying, indeed she had not understood a word; however, precisely as such , her prattling provided the necessary support, as a kind of safety-cushion, for the lover s’ last meeting, preventing its self-destructive explosion or, worse, its decline into banality. That is to say, on the one hand, the very presence of the naive prattler who “understands nothing” of the situation enables the lovers to maintain a minimum of control over their predicament, since they feel compelled to “maintain proper appearances” in front of this gaze. On the other hand, in the few words privately exchanged before the big Other’s interruption, they had come to the brink of confronting the unpleasant question: if they’re really so passionately in love that they can’t live without each other, why don’t they simply divorce their spouses and get together? The prattler then arrives at exactly the right moment, enabling the lovers to maintain the tragic grandeur of their predicament. Without the intrusion, they would have had to confront the banality and vulgar compromise of their situation. The shift to be made in a proper dialectical analysis thus goes from the condition of impossibility to the condition of possibility: what appears as the “condition of impossibility;’ or the obstacle, is in fact the condition that enables what it appears to threaten to exist. 93

Is God then the big Other? The answer is not as simple as it may appear. One can say that he is the big Other at the level of the enunciated, but not at the level of the enunciation (the level which really matters). Saint Augustine was already fully aware of this problem, when he asked the naive but crucial question: if God sees into the innermost depths of our hearts, knowing what we really think and want better than we do ourselves, why then is a confession to God necessary? Are we not telling him what he already knows? Is God then not like the tax authorities in some countries who already know all about our income, yet still ask us to report it, just so they can compare the two lists and establish who is lying? The answer, of course, lies in the position of enunciation. In a group of people, even if everyone knows my dirty secret (and even if everyone knows that everyone else knows it) , it is still crucial for me to say it openly, the moment I do, everything changes. But what is this “everything”? The moment I say it, the big Other, the instance of appearance, knows it; my secret is thereby inscribed into the big Other. Here we encounter the two opposite aspects of the big Other: the big Other as the “subject supposed to know,” as the Master who sees everything and secretly pulls the strings, and the big Other as the agent of pure appearance, the agent supposed to not know, the agent for whose benefit appearances are to be maintained.

Prior to my confession, God in the first aspect of the big Other already knows everything [Level of ENUNCIATION], but God in the second aspect [Level of ENUNCIATED] does not. This difference can also be expressed in terms of subjective assmnption: insofar as I merely know it, I do not really assume it subjectively, in other words, I can continne to act as if I do not know it; only when I confess to it in public can I no longer pretend not to know.

The theological problem is the following: does not this distinction between the two Gods introduce finitude into God himself? Should not God as the absolute Subject be precisely the one for whom the enunciated and its enunciation totally overlap, so that whatever we intimately know has already been confessed to him? The problem is that such a God is the God of a psychotic, the God to whom I am totally transparent also at the level of enunciation. 95

of course there is no Spirit as a substantial entity above and beyond individuals, but this does not make Hegel a nominalist there is “something more” than the reality of individuals, and this “more” is the virtual Real which always supplements reality, “more than
nothing, but less than something.”

Sygne de Coufontaine

In pure love, I freely consent to my own damnation or disappearance, I ecstatically assume it, while in tragedy, I (also) accept my Fate, but I accept it as an external force without consenting to it — the tragic hero rejects it absolutely, protesting against it to the end (Oedipus at Colonus — the case of Antigone is here more ambiguous). In other words, in contrast to the notion of amor fati, there is no love in the tragic hero’s acceptance of his damnation by Fate.

Therein resides the tragic hero’s uncompromising fidelity to his desire: not in the acceptance of Fate, but in holding on to his desire against Fate, in a situation where everything is lost.

Is there, then, no properly Christian tragedy? Here, Antigone is to be opposed to Sygne de Coufontaine from Paul Claudel’s Otage: if Oedipus and Antigone are the exemplary cases of Ancient tragedy, Sygne stands for the Christian tragedy. 81

Sygne lives in the modern world where God is dead: there is no objective Fate, our fate is our own choice, we are fully responsible for it. Sygne first follows the path of ecstatic love to the end, sacrificing her good, her ethical substance for God, for his pure Otherness; and she does it not on account of some external pressure, but out of the innermost freedom of her being — hence she cannot blame Fate when she finds herself totally humiliated, deprived of all ethical substance. This, however, is why her tragedy is much more radical than that of either Oedipus or Antigone: when, mortally wounded after taking the bullet meant for her despicable and hated husband, she refuses to confer any deeper sacrificial meaning on her suicidal intervention, there is no tragic beauty in this refusal — her “No” is signaled merely by a repellent grimace, a compulsive facial tic.

There is no tragic beauty because her total sacrifice has deprived her of all inner beauty and ethical grandeur, so that all that remains is a disgusting excremental stain, a living shell deprived of life.

There is no love here either, all her love was consumed in her previous renunciations. In a way, Sygne is here crucified, her “No” akin to Christ’s “Father, why have you forsaken me?” — which is also a gesture of defiance, a kind of “Up yours! ” directed at the God-Father. Balmes is right to point out that this properly Christian “No” in all its forms is the “unthinkable” traumatic core of pure love, a scandal which undermines it from within. …

The problem with Antigone is not the suicidal purity of her death drive but, quite the opposite, that the monstrosity of her act is covered up by its aestheticization: the moment she is excluded from the community of humans, she turns into a sublime apparition evoking our sympathy by complaining about her plight. This is one of the key dimensions of Lacan’s move from Antigone to Sygne de Coufontaine: there is no sublime beauty in Sygne at the play’s end-all that marks her as different from common mortals is the tic that momentarily disfigures her face. This feature which spoils the harmony of her beautiful face, the detail that sticks out and renders it ugly, is the material trace of her resistance to being co-opted into the universe of symbolic debt and guilt. This, then, should be the first step in a consistent reading of Christianity: the dying Christ is on the side of Sygne, not of Antigone; Christ on the Cross is not a sublime apparition but an embarrassing monstrosity.

undecidability

Does this then mean that Lacan himself effectively was a sophist, in this sense, when he asserted that “there is no Other of the Other;’ no ultimate guarantee of Truth exempted from the circular (self-referential) play of language? If every such line of separation is “undecidable,” does this mean that Badiou’s desperate struggle against postmodernist — deconstructionist “sophists,” and his heroic Platonic insistence on Truth as independent of historical language games, amounts to an empty gesture with no foundation? Badiou can nonetheless be defended here: the opposition between Truth and doxa occurs within the “undecidable” self-referential field of language, so when Badiou emphasizes the undecidability of a Truth-Event, his conception is radically different from the standard deconstructionist notion of undecidability.

For Badiou, undecidability means that there are no neutral “objective” criteria for an Event: an Event appears as such only to those who recognize themselves in its call, or, as Badiou puts it, an Event is self-relating, including itself — its own nomination-among its components. While this does mean that one has to decide about an Event, such an ultimately groundless decision is not “undecidable” in the standard sense. It is, rather, uncannily similar to the Hegelian dialectical process in which — as Hegel had already made clear in the Introduction to his Phenomenology — a “figure of consciousness” is not measured by any external standard of truth but in an absolutely immanent way, through the gap between itself and its own exemplification/staging. An Event is thus “non-All” in the precise Lacanian sense of the term: it is never fully verified precisely because it is infinite, that is, because there is no external limit to it. The conclusion t o be drawn is that, for the very same reason, the Hegelian “totality” is also “non-All.” 76-77

The element of truth in this reproach is that, for Hegel, the truth of a proposition is inherently notional, determined by the immanent notional content, not a matter of c01nparison between notion and reality — in Lacanian terms, there is a non-All (pas-tout) of truth. It may sound strange to invoke Hegel with regard to the non-All — is he not the philosopher of All par excellence? The Hegelian truth, however, is precisely without an external limitation/exception that would serve as its measure or standard, which is why its criterion is absolutely immanent: a statement is compared with itself, with its own process of enunciation. 77

Badiou and Barbara Cassin are engaged in an ongoing dialogue which can best be characterized as a new version of the ancient dialogue between Plato and the sophists: the Platonist Badiou against Cassin’s insistence on the irreducibility of the sophists’ rupture. The fact that Badiou is a man and Cassin a woman takes on a special Significance here: the opposition between the Platonist’s trust in the firm foundation of truth and the sophists’ groundless play of speech is connoted by sexual difference. So, from the strict Hegelian standpoint, perhaps Cassin is right to insist on the irreducible character of the sophist’s position: the self-referential play of the symbolic process has no external support which would allow us to draw a line, within the language game, between truth and falsity. Sophists are the irreducible “vanishing mediators” between mythos and logos, between the traditional mythic universe and philosophical rationality, and, as such, they are a permanent threat to philosophy. Why is this the case?

The sophists broke down the mythic unity of words and things, playfully insisting on the gap that separates words from things; and philosophy proper can only be understood as a reaction to this, as an attempt to close the gap the sophists opened up, to provide a foundation of truth for words, to return to mythos but under the new conditions of rationality. This is where one should locate Plato: he first tried to provide this foundation with his teaching on Ideas, and when, in Parmenides, he was forced to admit the fragility of that foundation, he engaged in a long struggle to re-establish a clear line of separation between sophistics and truth.”*

The irony of the history of philosophy is that the line of philosophers who struggle against the sophistic temptation ends with Hegel, the “last philosopher;’ who, in a way, is also the ultimate sophist, embracing the self-referential play of the symbolic with no external support of its truth. For Hegel, there is truth, but it is immanent to the symbolic process — the truth is measured not by an external standard, but by the “pragmatic contradiction,” the inner (in)consistency of the discursive process, the gap between the enunciated content and its position of enunciation.

*The opposition between the sophists and Plato is also linked to the opposition between democracy and corporate organic order: the sophists are dearly democratic, teaching the art of seducing and convincing the crowd, while Plato outlines a hierarchic corporate order in which every individual has his or her proper place, allowing for no position of singular universality.

non-being in LTN Parmenides

Non-being is thunk by Plato between 2 extremes, Parmenides Unconditional ONE, and the sophist Gorgias who talks about the multiplicity of non-being.

“Plato defines Not-Being not as the opposite of Being (i.e., not as excluded hom the domain of Being), but as a Difference within the domain of Being: negative predication indicates something different hom the predicate (when I say “this is not black;’ I thereby imply that it is a color other than black). Plato’s basic strategy is thus to relativize non-being, that is, to treat it not as an absolute negation of being but as a relational negation of a predicate.” 43

Even when a fiction is a fiction, it still works

“… even when an (ideological) fiction is clearly recognized as a fiction, it still works: “it is possible to use fictions in order to attain the real
without believing in them:'” This is the paradox of which Marx was already aware when he painted out that “commodity fetishism” persists even after its illusory nature has become transparent. Niels Bohr provided its perfect formulation in response to a friend who asked if he really believed that the horseshoe above his door would bring him good luck: “Of course not, but I’ve been told it works even if one doesn’t believe in it!” 44 🙂 Okay, this is an old Joke. What is Ž up to here?

There are many worlds because Being cannot be One, because a gap persists between the two. 52

For Aristotle, the concept of oneness is only an aspect of the particular. Every particular is “one;’ insofar as it is indivisible and individual. “Oneness;’ in this view, basically depends on the meaning of “Being.” In Platonism, the reverse is true: the concept of the One is self-sufficient, so to speak, preceding the domain of particulars. Accordingly, the One accounts for the existence of particulars in a manifold that is somehow unified, structured, and determinate. It is a variant of the One. All these basic predicates of the particular can be interpreted in terms of the One that precedes all being [note 39 Dieter Henrich, Between Kant and Hegel]

Y a d’l’Un : There is (something of the ) One

being-a-One adds nothing to the content of an object; its only content is the form of self-identity itself. 55

1) There is One

if the result of hypothesis 1 was that the One, taken solely in virtue of itself, apart from everything else, is nothing at all (or totally undescribable), 61

2) One is

and if the result of hypothesis 2 was that the One, taken in virtue of others, is everything indiscriminately (large and slnall, similar and dissimilar, in movement and at rest . . . ), the appendix tries to resolve this antinomy by introducing the temporal dimension. A One which exists in time can without any contradiction change in time from one state to another (it can move, say, and then be at
rest).

But the interest of this otherwise commonsensical solution is that it again arrives at a paradoxical result when Pannenides focuses on the simple question: when does the One in question change? “If it is in motion, it has not yet changed. If it is at rest, it has already changed. When it changes must it not be neither in motion nor at rest? But there can be no time when a thing is neither in motion nor at rest.” 61

In this middle space, many weird things can take place-how can we not think of Gramsci’s remark: “the crisis lies precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In the interregnum, a variety of morbid symptoms appear”? 61

3) One is [One with Being does not preclude Others with Being: there can be Others with predicates. 55]

Hypothesis 3 proper, which then follows (“if one is, what are the consequences for the others”), … outlining a common-sense, realistic ontology: although the others are not the One, they can have some relation to the One, they can partake of the form of the One: when they are combined into a Whole, this Whole is One; as parts of this Whole, each of them is also One, etc. The form of One thus delimits the parts in relation to each other and to the whole; it “accounts for the organization of parts in a unified whole,” that is, it acts as the “principle of structure for the entities it combines.” If we take the form of the One away from the others, we get a chaotic unlimited multitude. 64

4) There is One [One without Being precludes Others and thus also their predication. 55]

5) One is not

It concerns a One, something that is an entity, but which does not exist, i.e., does not have Being. Even if One is not, we can still predicate it, i.e., negative predication is possible, we know what we are saying when we negate a predicate. 55

– the One of hypothesis 5, the One that does not exist, but which we can talk about, is the symbolic fiction;

6) There is no One [The One is here not only deprived of Being, but deprived of its very character of One: it is no longer a non-existent entity, but a nonentity — and, as such, cannot be predicated. 55]

Hypotheses 5 and 6 explore the consequences for the One if “One is not”; 5 reads “is not” as the assertion of a non-predicate, while 6 reads “is not” as a direct outright negation. In other words, in 5, “One is not” means that the One partakes of many characteristics (is unlike the others, like itself, and so on), among them non-being. The consequences of this triplicity are far-reaching: when we say “x is large;’ this does not mean that the object x is large because it directly participates in the Idea of largeness; it rather means that x partakes of being in relation to largeness. This triplicity holds not only for the predicative use of the verb “being”: if we say that Socrates and Plato are similar in that they are both Greek, they are not similar because they both partake of the Idea of Greek — they are similar because they both partake of the Idea of Similarity in relation to being-Greek. 64

7) One is not

What does the fact that the One is a non-existing entityrnean for Others? As in the case of the hypothesis 5, Others can be predicated. 55

– the dispersed not-One of hypothesis 7 is that of imaginary illusion

8) There is no One

If however, One is not only a non-existent entity, but a nonentity, then there are also no Others, existing or non- existing — there is nothing at all. 55

– the One that is not One of hypothesis 8 is the Real as impossible.

CONCLUSION

Ideas do not exist … That is to say, the only appropriate conclusion is that eternal Ideas are Ones and Others which do not participate in (spatio-temporal) Being (which is the only actual being there is): their status is purely virtual 68