Author: logocentric

Ž Less Than Nothing review by john gray

The Violent Visions of Slavoj Žižek
New York Review of Books June 12, 2012
John Gray

Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism
by Slavoj Žižek
Verso, 1,038 pp., $69.95

Living in the End Times
by Slavoj Žižek
Verso, 504 pp., $22.95 (paper)

Few thinkers illustrate the contradictions of contemporary capitalism better than the Slovenian philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek. The financial and economic crisis has demonstrated the fragility of the free market system that its defenders believed had triumphed in the cold war; but there is no sign of anything resembling the socialist project that in the past was seen by many as embodying capitalism’s successor. Žižek’s work, which reflects this paradoxical situation in a number of ways, has made him one of the world’s best-known public intellectuals.

Born and educated in Ljubljana, the capital of the People’s Republic of Slovenia in the former Yugoslav federation until the federal state began to break up and Slovenia declared independence in 1990, Žižek has held academic positions in Britain, America, and Western Europe as well as in Slovenia. His prodigious output (over sixty volumes since his first book in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology, was published in 1989), innumerable articles and interviews, together with films such as Žižek! (2005) and The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006), have given him a presence that extends far beyond the academy. Well attuned to popular culture, particularly film, he has a following among young people in many countries, including those of post-Communist Europe. He has a journal dedicated to his work—International Journal of Žižek Studies, founded in 2007—whose readership is registered via Facebook, and in October 2011 he addressed members of the Occupy movement in Zuccotti Park in New York, an event that was widely reported and can be viewed on YouTube.

Žižek’s wide influence does not mean that his philosophical and political standpoint can be easily defined. A member of the Communist Party of Slovenia until he resigned in 1988, Žižek had difficult relations with the Party authorities for many years owing to his interest in what they viewed as heterodox ideas. In 1990 he stood as a presidential candidate for Liberal Democracy of Slovenia, a party of the center left that was the dominant political force in the country for the rest of the decade; but liberal ideas, aside from serving as a reference point for positions he rejects, have never shaped his thinking.

Žižek was dismissed from his first university teaching post in the early 1970s, when the Slovenian authorities judged a thesis he had written on French structuralism—then an influential movement in anthropology, linguistics, psychoanalysis, and philosophy claiming that human thought and behavior exemplify a universal system of interrelated principles—to be “non-Marxist.” The episode demonstrated the limited nature of the intellectual liberalization that was being promoted in the country at the time, but Žižek’s later work suggests that the authorities were right in judging that his intellectual orientation was not Marxian. Throughout the enormous corpus of work he has since built up, Marx is criticized for being insufficiently radical in his rejection of existing modes of thought, while Hegel—a much greater influence on Žižek—is praised for being willing to lay aside classical logic in order to develop a more dialectical way of thinking. But Hegel is also criticized for having too great an attachment to traditional modes of reasoning, and a central theme of Žižek’s writings is the need to shed the commitment to intellectual objectivity that has guided radical thinkers in the past.

Žižek’s work sets itself in opposition to Marx on many issues. For all he owed to Hegelian metaphysics, Marx was also an empirical thinker who tried to frame theories about the actual course of historical development. It was not the abstract idea of revolution with which he was primarily concerned, but a revolutionary project involving specific and radical alterations in economic institutions and power relations.

Žižek shows little interest in these aspects of Marx’s thinking. Aiming “to repeat the Marxist ‘critique of political economy’ without the utopian-ideological notion of communism as its inherent standard,” he believes that “the twentieth-century communist project was utopian precisely insofar as it was not radical enough.” As Žižek sees it, Marx’s understanding of communism was partly responsible for this failure: “Marx’s notion of the communist society is itself the inherent capitalist fantasy; that is, a fantasmatic scenario for resolving the capitalist antagonisms he so aptly described.”

While he rejects Marx’s conception of communism, Žižek devotes none of the over one thousand pages of Less Than Nothing to specifying the economic system or institutions of government that would feature in a communist society of the kind he favors. In effect a compendium of Žižek’s work to date, Less Than Nothing is devoted instead to reinterpreting Marx by way of Hegel—one of the book’s sections is called “Marx as a Reader of Hegel, Hegel as a Reader of Marx”—and reformulating Hegelian philosophy by reference to the thought of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.

A “post-structuralist” who rejected the belief that reality can be captured in language, Lacan also rejected the standard interpretation of Hegel’s idea of “the cunning of reason,” according to which world history is the realization by oblique and indirect means of reason in human life. For Lacan as Žižek summarizes him, “The Cunning of Reason…in no way involves a faith in a secret guiding hand guaranteeing that all the apparent contingency of unreason will somehow contribute to the harmony of the Totality of Reason: if anything, it involves a trust in un-Reason.” On this Lacanian reading, the message of Hegel’s philosophy is not the progressive unfolding of rationality in history but instead the impotence of reason.

The Hegel that emerges in Žižek’s writings thus bears little resemblance to the idealist philosopher who features in standard histories of thought. Hegel is commonly associated with the idea that history has an inherent logic in which ideas are embodied in practice and then left behind in a dialectical process in which they are transcended by their opposites. Drawing on the contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou, Žižek radicalizes this idea of dialectic to mean the rejection of the logical principle of noncontradiction, so that rather than seeing rationality at work in history, Hegel rejects reason itself as it has been understood in the past. Implicit in Hegel (according to Žižek) is a new kind of “paraconsistent logic” in which a proposition “is not really suppressed by its negation.” This new logic, Žižek suggests, is well suited to understanding capitalism today. “Is not ‘postmodern’ capitalism an increasingly paraconsistent system,” he asks rhetorically, “in which, in a variety of modes, P is non-P: the order is its own transgression, capitalism can thrive under communist rule, and so on?”

Living in the End Times is presented by Žižek as being concerned with this situation. Summarizing the book’s central theme, he writes:

The underlying premise of the present book is a simple one: the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point. Its “four riders of the apocalypse” are comprised by the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself (problems with intellectual property; forthcoming struggles over raw materials, food and water), and the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions.

With its sweeping claims and magniloquent rhetoric, this passage is typical of much in Žižek’s work. What he describes as the premise of the book is simple only because it passes over historical facts. Reading it, no one would suspect that, putting aside the killings of many millions for ideological reasons, some of the last century’s worst ecological disasters—the destruction of nature in the former Soviet Union and the devastation of the countryside during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, for example—occurred in centrally planned economies. Ecological devastation is not a result only of the economic system that exists in much of the world at the present time; while it may be true that the prevailing version of capitalism is unsustainable in environmental terms, there is nothing in the history of the past century that suggests the environment will be better protected if a socialist system is installed.

But to criticize Žižek for neglecting these facts is to misunderstand his intent, for unlike Marx he does not aim to ground his theorizing in a reading of history that is based in facts. “Today’s historical juncture does not compel us to drop the notion of the proletariat, or of the proletarian position—on the contrary, it compels us to radicalize it to an existential level beyond even Marx’s imagination,” he writes. “We need a more radical notion of the proletarian subject [i.e., the thinking and acting human being], a subject reduced to the evanescent point of the Cartesian cogito, deprived of its substantial content.” In Žižek’s hands, Marxian ideas—which in Marx’s materialist view were meant to designate objective social facts—become subjective expressions of revolutionary commitment. Whether such ideas correspond to anything in the world is irrelevant.

There is a problem at this point, however: Why should anyone adopt Žižek’s ideas rather than any others? The answer cannot be that Žižek’s are true in any traditional sense. “The truth we are dealing with here is not ‘objective’ truth,” Žižek writes, “but the self-relating truth about one’s own subjective position; as such, it is an engaged truth, measured not by its factual accuracy but by the way it affects the subjective position of enunciation.”

If this means anything, it is that truth is determined by reference to how an idea accords with the projects to which the speaker is committed—in Žižek’s case, a project of revolution. But this only poses the problem at another level: Why should anyone adopt Žižek’s project? The question cannot be answered in any simple way, since it is far from clear what Žižek’s revolutionary project consists in. He shows no signs of doubting that a society in which communism was realized would be better than any that has ever existed. On the other hand, he is unable to envision any circumstances in which communism might be realized: “Capitalism is not just a historical epoch among others…. Francis Fukuyama was right: global capitalism is ‘the end of history.’”1 Communism is not for Žižek—as it was for Marx—a realizable condition, but what Badiou describes as a “hypothesis,” a conception with little positive content but that enables radical resistance against prevailing institutions. Žižek is insistent that such resistance must include the use of terror:

Badiou’s provocative idea that one should reinvent emancipatory terror today is one of his most profound insights…. Recall Badiou’s exalted defense of Terror in the French Revolution, in which he quotes the justification of the guillotine for Lavoisier: “The Republic has no need for scientists.”

Along with Badiou, Žižek celebrates Mao’s Cultural Revolution as “the last truly great revolutionary explosion of the twentieth century.” But he also regards the Cultural Revolution as a failure, citing Badiou’s conclusion that “the Cultural Revolution, even in its very impasse, bears witness to the impossibility truly and globally to free politics from the framework of the party-State.”3 Mao in encouraging the Cultural Revolution evidently should have found a way to break the power of the party-state. Again, Žižek praises the Khmer Rouge for attempting a total break with the past. The attempt involved mass killing and torture on a colossal scale; but in his view that is not why it failed: “The Khmer Rouge were, in a way, not radical enough: while they took the abstract negation of the past to the limit, they did not invent any new form of collectivity.” (Here and elsewhere the italics are Žižek’s.) A genuine revolution may be impossible in present circumstances, or any that can be currently imagined. Even so, revolutionary violence should be celebrated as “redemptive,” even “divine.”

While Žižek has described himself as a Leninist,4 there can be no doubt that this position would be anathema to the Bolshevik leader. Lenin had no qualms in using terror in order to promote the cause of communism (for him, a practically attainable objective). Always deployed as part of a political strategy, violence was instrumental in nature. In contrast, though Žižek accepts that violence has failed to achieve its communist goals and has no prospect of doing so, he insists that revolutionary violence has intrinsic value as a symbolic expression of rebellion—a position that has no parallel in either Marx or Lenin. A precedent may be seen in the work of the French psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, who defended the use of violence against colonialism as an assertion of the identity of subjects of colonial power; but Fanon viewed this violence as part of a struggle for national independence, an objective that was in fact achieved.

A clearer precedent can be found in the work of the early-twentieth-century French theorist of syndicalism Georges Sorel. In Reflections on Violence (1908), Sorel argued that communism was a utopian myth—but a myth that had value in inspiring a morally regenerative revolt against the corruption of bourgeois society. The parallels between this view and Žižek’s account of “redemptive violence” inspired by the “communist hypothesis” are telling.

A celebration of violence is one of the most prominent strands in Žižek’s work. He finds fault with Marx for thinking that violence can be justified as part of the conflict between objectively defined social classes. Class war must not be understood as “a conflict between particular agents within social reality: it is not a difference between agents (which can be described by means of a detailed social analysis), but an antagonism (‘struggle’) which constitutes these agents.” Applying this view when discussing Stalin’s assault on the peasantry, Žižek describes how the distinction between kulaks (rich peasants) and others became “blurred and unworkable: in a situation of generalized poverty, clear criteria no longer applied, and the other two classes of peasants often joined the kulaks in their resistance to forced collectivization.” In response to this situation the Soviet authorities introduced a new category, the sub-kulak, a peasant too poor to be classified as a kulak but who shared kulak values:

The art of identifying a kulak was thus no longer a matter of objective social analysis; it became a kind of complex “hermeneutics of suspicion,” of identifying an individual’s “true political attitudes” hidden beneath his or her deceptive public proclamations.

Describing mass murder in this way as an exercise in hermeneutics is repugnant and grotesque; it is also characteristic of Žižek’s work. He criticizes Stalin’s policy of collectivization, but not on account of the millions of human lives that were violently truncated or broken in its course. What Žižek criticizes is Stalin’s lingering attachment (however inconsistent or hypocritical) to “‘scientific’ Marxist terms.” Relying on “objective social analysis” for guidance in revolutionary situations is an error: “at some point, the process has to be cut short with a massive and brutal intervention of subjectivity: class belonging is never a purely objective social fact, but is always also the result of struggle and social engagement.” Rather than Stalin’s relentless use of torture and lethal force, it is the fact that he tried to justify the systematic use of violence by reference to Marxian theory that Žižek condemns.

Žižek’s rejection of anything that might be described as social fact comes together with his admiration of violence in his interpretation of Nazism. Commenting on the German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s much-discussed involvement with the Nazi regime, Žižek writes: “His involvement with the Nazis was not a simple mistake, but rather a ‘right step in the wrong direction.’” Contrary to many interpretations, Heidegger was not a radical reactionary. “Reading Heidegger against the grain, one discovers a thinker who was, at some points, strangely close to communism”—indeed, during the mid-Thirties, Heidegger might be described as “a future communist.”

If Heidegger mistakenly chose to back Hitler, the mistake was not in underestimating the violence that Hitler would unleash:

The problem with Hitler was that he was “not violent enough,” his violence was not “essential” enough. Hitler did not really act, all his actions were fundamentally reactions, for he acted so that nothing would really change, staging a gigantic spectacle of pseudo-Revolution so that the capitalist order would survive…. The true problem of Nazism is not that it “went too far” in its subjectivist-nihilist hubris of exercising total power, but that it did not go far enough, that its violence was an impotent acting-out which, ultimately, remained in the service of the very order it despised.

What was wrong with Nazism, it seems, is that—like the later experiment in total revolution of the Khmer Rouge—it failed to create any new kind of collective life. Žižek says little regarding the nature of the form of life that might have come into being had Germany been governed by a regime less reactive and powerless than he judges Hitler’s to have been. He does make plain that there would be no room in this new life for one particular form of human identity:

The fantasmatic status of anti- Semitism is clearly revealed by a statement attributed to Hitler: “We have to kill the Jew within us.” …Hitler’s statement says more than it wants to say: against his intentions, it confirms that the Gentiles need the anti-Semitic figure of the “Jew” in order to maintain their identity. It is thus not only that “the Jew is within us”—what Hitler fatefully forgot to add is that he, the anti-Semite, is also in the Jew. What does this paradoxical entwinement mean for the destiny of anti-Semitism?

Žižek is explicit in censuring “certain elements of the radical Left” for “their uneasiness when it comes to unambiguously condemning anti-Semitism.” But it is difficult to understand the claim that the identities of anti-Semites and Jewish people are in some way mutually reinforcing—which is repeated, word for word, in Less Than Nothing—except as suggesting that the only world in which anti-Semitism can cease to exist is one in which there are no longer any Jews.

Interpreting Žižek on this or any issue is not without difficulties. There is his inordinate prolixity, the stream of texts that no one could read in their entirety, if only because the torrent never ceases flowing. There is his use of a type of academic jargon featuring allusive references to other thinkers, which has the effect of enabling him to use language in an artful, hermetic way. As he acknowledges, Žižek borrows the term “divine violence” from Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” (1921). It is doubtful whether Benjamin—a thinker who had important affinities with the Frankfurt School of humanistic Marxism—would have described the destructive frenzy of Mao’s Cultural Revolution or the Khmer Rouge as divine.

But this is beside the point, for by using Benjamin’s construction Žižek is able to praise violence and at the same time claim that he is speaking of violence in a special, recondite sense—a sense in which Gandhi can be described as being more violent than Hitler.5 And there is Žižek’s regular recourse to a laborious kind of clowning wordplay:

The…virtualization of capitalism is ultimately the same as that of the electron in particle physics. The mass of each elementary particle is composed of its mass at rest plus the surplus provided by the acceleration of its movement; however, an electron’s mass at rest is zero, its mass consists only of the surplus generated by the acceleration, as if we are dealing with a nothing which acquires some deceptive substance only by magically spinning itself into an excess of itself.

It is impossible to read this without recalling the Sokal affair in which Alan Sokal, a professor of physics, submitted a spoof article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” to a journal of postmodern cultural studies. Equally, it is hard to read this and many similar passages in Žižek without suspecting that he is engaged—wittingly or otherwise—in a kind of auto-parody.

There may be some who are tempted to condemn Žižek as a philosopher of irrationalism whose praise of violence is more reminiscent of the far right than the radical left. His writings are often offensive and at times (as when he writes of Hitler being present “in the Jew”) obscene. There is a mocking frivolity in Žižek’s paeans to terror that recalls the Italian Futurist and ultra-nationalist Gabriele D’Annunzio and the Fascist (and later Maoist) fellow traveler Curzio Malaparte more than any thinker in the Marxian tradition. But there is another reading of Žižek, which may be more plausible, in which he is no more an epigone of the right than he is a disciple of Marx or Lenin.

Whether or not Marx’s vision of communism is “the inherent capitalist fantasy,” Žižek’s vision—which apart from rejecting earlier conceptions lacks any definite content—is well adapted to an economy based on the continuous production of novel commodities and experiences, each supposed to be different from any that has gone before. With the prevailing capitalist order aware that it is in trouble but unable to conceive of practicable alternatives, Žižek’s formless radicalism is ideally suited to a culture transfixed by the spectacle of its own fragility. That there should be this isomorphism between Žižek’s thinking and contemporary capitalism is not surprising. After all, it is only an economy of the kind that exists today that could produce a thinker such as Žižek. The role of global public intellectual Žižek performs has emerged along with a media apparatus and a culture of celebrity that are integral to the current model of capitalist expansion.

In a stupendous feat of intellectual overproduction Žižek has created a fantasmatic critique of the present order, a critique that claims to repudiate practically everything that currently exists and in some sense actually does, but that at the same time reproduces the compulsive, purposeless dynamism that he perceives in the operations of capitalism. Achieving a deceptive substance by endlessly reiterating an essentially empty vision, Žižek’s work—nicely illustrating the principles of paraconsistent logic—amounts in the end to less than nothing.

Slavoj Žižek, “Have Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Rewritten the Communist Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century?,” Rethinking Marxism: a Journal of Economics, Culture and Society , Vol. 13, No. 3–4 (2001), p. 190.

I am a Leninist. Lenin wasn’t afraid to dirty his hands. If you can get power, grab it.” Quoted by Jonathan Derbyshire, New Statesman , October 29, 2009.

“It’s crucial to see violence which is done repeatedly to keep the things the way they are. In that sense, Gandhi was more violent than Hitler.” See Shobhan Saxena’s interview with Žižek, “ First they called me a joker, now I am a dangerous thinker ,”

Ž agrees with Butler and ideology

Žižek audio of his talk given in June 2012 and there is a video of Žižek in conversation with Jonathan Derbyshire June 12 2012

This following is based on his talk June 15.

On Butler’s Performativity

Yes I agree, but this precisely IS the reality of the Cartesian subject.  We experience ourselves as an abstract subjectivity where all our concrete embodiments are perceived as something ultimately contingent.  Marx was very clear about this which is why he always emphasized the ambiguous character of the bourgeois order: which is of course the order of alienation and so on but at the same time an order creating the conditions for liberation.  Namely, let’s take Descartes with his Cogito: It is precisely because Descartes saw the CORE OF THE SUBJECT abstraction I think therefore I am, in abstraction from all my particular features he was able in a wonderful way I know a formula of radical multicultural openness.  It’s not enough just to be patronizingly open to others every arrogant Eurocentric can do this.  Descartes says something else: he says when I was young, when I encountered people from other cultures I perceived their  manners as stupid ridiculous and so on, but then I started to ask myself a question, what if from their standpoint our own particular are no less stupid and ridiculous and so on.  This is quite a redemptive feature of modernity.  YOU ACCEPT the relativity, historical contingency of YOUR OWN CULTURE. Of course, things are not as simple as that.  This UNIVERSALITY is not a pure universality, it is a universality grounded in a concrete bourgeois constellation.  But we must remember nevertheless for Marx it is this, the reduction of the subject to UNIVERSALITY and for Marx this is what defines PROLETARIAT.  The Proletarian position is SUBJECTIVITY WITHOUT SUBSTANCE.  As a worker all the result of your work is taken, you are reduced to abstract labour force,

This abstraction is at the same time a medium for freedom, it creates this position outside of substantial determinations you know, you are created by this and by that.

What is the Lesson: Marx emphasizes this: IT is NOT enough when creating bourgeois ideology … no no no idealism is wrong, we are always in material reality, suffering people working hard, exploiting NO! this is a form of ideology.  I did take my son, to stock exchange and showed him what ideology is, you get free leaflets, people wrongly think stock exchange is abstract, but its really about concrete people exchange and so on … Marx says NO. We should avoid this DIRECT MATERIALISM.

On Commodity Fetishism:  A commodity appears at the first glance as a simple object out there, nothing mysterious, it is ONLY THE THEORETICAL analysis which discovers THEOLOGICAL SPIRITUAL mysteries of a commodity.  MARX IS NOT saying in ordinary life we are dealing with mystifications etc.  Marx says almost the opposite, in our ordinary experience we think we are dealing with

In other words, that the world of commodities is a Hegelian world, he is not describing our wrong perception he is describing social reality. When Marx proposes as a formula of ideology:

They don’t know what they are doing but they are doing it.

It’s not that we are doing one thing and we misperceive it

NO. Marx knew very well, a concrete bourgeois subject is not a Hegelian, but but British nominalist, only concrete objects, no abstraction, it is only in his market action that he acts in a theological way.  Your theological presuppositions, theology of the market, commodity fetishism, it is not in your awareness, but in your social interaction.

Lacan says the true formula of atheism is not “God is dead” but “God is unconscious.”

even if we are subjects of capitalism, we don’t believe, we are cynical. But BELIEF IS EMBODIED in our very SOCIAL PRACTICES.

You see a teenager, he think his father is a stupid jerk.  He is right. But nonetheless, when you see this same teenager interacting with his father you will see a mixture of fear, respect, even love and so on. One thing is what he thinks, “My father is a jerk” but unconsciously he has a much more traumatized affectionate relationship with his father.

On the one hand our reality is cynical, nominalist on the other ideology and financial speculations, even if we experience ourselves as cynical atheists, we practice religion, TRUST IN THE MARKET. Did you notice how we can make fun of prosopopoeia, when objects can speak.  In the early operas, you still have abstract concepts appearing as persons, poetry appears and sings, with psychological realism this becomes impossible. In Bertolt Brecht this prosopopoeia returns.  This prosopopoeia returns with a vengeance, although we all know MARKET does NOT EXIST, it is not a subject, all there is we concrete individuals interacting, but this is NOT what we are saying, MARKETS expressed their doubt about these measures, MARKETS are not satisified, they will demand more sacrifice, what you effectively say is more important than what you want to say.

It is not that you say something, but you mean something else.  The true SYMBOLIC cheating, you think you are just pretending to do something ha ha, I’m just pretending, but you don’t know that what you experience as a mask is the truth, and the inner distance you have towards it is a lie.

When you do something, this is the usual way we dupe ourselves through hypocrisy, no your inner life is a joke, what you think is a mask, the truth is what you do, the truth is out there. Marx and Freud, the unconscious truth is not, I go deep in myself, no the TRUTH IS OUT THERE, in the social relations and so on.

COMMODITY FETISHISM:  An ideological formation, perverted spiritualism.  An ideology that is the very core of the economic infrastructure.  An objectively necessary illusion.  It is an illusion that is embodied in social relations themselves.  So even if you don’t believe in it subjectively, you still practice it.

It strangely persists even after you denounce it, you may grasp it as an illusion but it still persists.  The mystery of the mask, then I pulled the mask off, look its still your stupid dad, then I put the mask on again and he was afraid, he knew it was me behind, a mask is never simply a mask,  There is more truth in the mask.

Individual capitalists are the carriers of social roles, we can play the game, this humanist idea, we should not be reduced to our social roles, there is so much more depth in me, I love flowers etc.  I can’t be reduced to a mask. THIS IS IDEOLOGY.

We are not monsters Israel soldiers, we are ordinary people, we have fear like you, we have ordinary feelings.  This abstract pacifism.  War is horrible, nonsensical killing.  Yeah we are all human.  Ok.  Brecht precisely in a vulgar anti-psychological way, to reduce figures to masks, abstract social roles.  A guy comes on stage, Hi I am a journalist, I am corrupted by bourgeoisie to exploit worker etc.   There is a truth in it. In your personal experience all your psychological depth trauma is not your truth.   YOUR TRUTH IS WHAT YOUR DOING OUT THERE

Lesson of Hegel: The structural necessity of illusion.  Illusion constitutes reality.  IF YOU TAKE AWAY THE ILLUSION REALITY ITSELF DISINTEGRATES.

The reality is the opposite one.  Male chauvanist bonding, screw, get laid, but then in our cloud, one guy I like to do it on the forest, or on the beach, or reading a book and getting it from behind, I’ don’t care I’m reading my book.  Freud is not vulgar pan-sexualism, what we are thinking about when we are doing that.  There is no sexual relationship, even in the most passionate love, there is still NO complete coincidence or identity.  You always need a fantasy, you are never alone, a certain fantasy scenario must be present.  THIS WAS CLEAR TO MARX.  This is why commodity fetishism is not an ideology.  Commodity fetishm is not something in superstructure, an effect of the economic, it is something that makes consistent and livable the production process.

More ideas from Slavoj Žižek

More than ever we need philosophy today.  Even the most speculative (in the sense of reflecting on itself) science has to rely on a set of automatic  presuppositions, like a scientist simply presupposes in his or her very approach to nature a set of implications of how the nature functions, what’s the causality in nature and so on and so on.  And philosophy teaches us that.  Philosophy teaches us what we have to know without knowing it in order to function, even in science — the silent presuppositions.

I claim that what is happening, for example, in quantum physics in the last 100 of years — these things which are so daring, incredible, that we cannot include into our conscious view of reality — that Hegel’s philosophy, with all it’s dialectical paradoxes, can be of some help here.  I claim that reading quantum physics through Hegel and vice versa is very productive.

What I really want do is rehabilitate classical philosophy today.  That is to say, Hegel was a child of his time.  We are 200 years later.  How to repeat Hegel, not to do the same things as he did but repeat in new circumstances the same gesture?  And even here more for Hegel than for Marx.  I think we should even return from Marx back to Hegel.  So this is the focus of my work.  Then come all the things for which I’m unfortunately better known, for example, my dealings with critique of capitalism, analysis of popular culture and so on and so on.  But frankly, to use the not very appropriate metaphor known from today’s military adventures, all this, my writings on politics, on analysis of Hollywood and so on, is more or less collateral damage of my basic work.

I think this is also what has to be done today.  The danger today is precisely a kind of a bland, pragmatic activism.  You know, like when people tell you, oh my God, children in Africa are starving and you have time for your stupid philosophical debates.  Let’s do something.  I always hear in this call there are people starving.  Let’s do something.  I always discern in this a more ominous injunction.  Do it and don’t think too much.  Today, we need thinking.

fredric jameson on Ž

First Impressions Fredric Jameson reviews The Parallax View by Slavoj Žižek  September 7, 2006.

As every schoolchild knows by now, a new book by Žižek is supposed to include, in no special order, discussions of Hegel, Marx and Kant; various pre- and post-socialist anecdotes and reflections; notes on Kafka as well as on mass-cultural writers like Stephen King or Patricia Highsmith; references to opera (Wagner, Mozart); jokes from the Marx Brothers; outbursts of obscenity, scatological as well as sexual; interventions in the history of philosophy, from Spinoza and Kierkegaard to Kripke and Dennett; analyses of Hitchcock films and other Hollywood products; references to current events; disquisitions on obscure points of Lacanian doctrine; polemics with various contemporary theorists (Derrida, Deleuze); comparative theology; and, most recently, reports on cognitive philosophy and neuroscientific ‘advances’. These are lined up in what Eisenstein liked to call ‘a montage of attractions’, a kind of theoretical variety show, in which a series of ‘numbers’ succeed each other and hold the audience in rapt fascination. It is a wonderful show; the only drawback is that at the end the reader is perplexed as to the ideas that have been presented, or at least as to the major ones to be retained. One would think that reading all Žižek’s books in succession would only compound this problem: on the contrary, it simplifies it somewhat, as the larger concepts begin to emerge from the mist. Still, one would not have it any other way, which is why the current volume – which, with its companion The Ticklish Subject (1999), purports to outline the ‘system’ as a whole (if it is one), or at least to make a single monumental statement – inspires some apprehension.

It will be dialectical to say that this apprehension is and is not confirmed. The first chapter, which explains the title and seeks to ground Žižek’s philosophy in some definitive method, is tough going indeed; I’ll come back to it. But later chapters – on Heidegger and politics, on cognitive philosophy and its impasses, on anti-semitism, on politics today – are luminous and eloquent, and will surely stand as major statements, with enough to provoke and irritate people from one end of the ideological spectrum to another (I am myself attacked in passing as some kind of gullible practitioner of commodification theory). Nor are they lacking in jokes, as tasteless as you might wish, and in passing remarks on current films (Žižek seems to have got Hitchcock out of his system, if not out of his unconscious – one never does that).

As for what has persisted through this now considerable oeuvre, I will start with the dialectic, of which Žižek is one of the great contemporary practitioners. The old stereotype is that Hegel works according to a cut-and-dried progression from thesis, through antithesis, to synthesis. This, Žižek explains, is completely erroneous: there are no real syntheses in Hegel and the dialectical operation is to be seen in an utterly different way; a variety of examples are adduced. Still, that stupid stereotype was not altogether wrong. There is a tripartite movement in the Hegelian dialectic, and in fact, Žižek goes on, he has just illustrated it: stupid stereotype, or the ‘appearance’; ingenious correction, the underlying reality or ‘essence’; finally, after all, the return to the reality of the appearance, so that it was the appearance that was ‘true’ after all.

What can this possibly have to do with popular culture? Let’s take a Hollywood product, say, Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Window (1944). (Maybe now Fritz Lang belongs to high culture rather than mass culture, but anyway . . .) Edward G. Robinson is a mild-mannered professor who, leaving his peaceful club one night, gets caught up in a web of love and murder. We think we are watching a thriller. At length, he takes refuge in his club again, falls asleep from exhaustion, and wakes up: it was all a dream. The movie has done the interpretation for us, by way of Lang’s capitulation to the cheap Hollywood insistence on happy endings. But in reality – which is to say in the true appearance – Edward G. Robinson ‘is not a quiet, kind, decent, bourgeois professor dreaming that he is a murderer, but a murderer dreaming, in his everyday life, that he is a quiet, kind, decent, bourgeois professor’. Hollywood’s censorship is therefore not some puritanical, uptight middle-class mechanism for repressing the obscene, nasty, antisocial, violent underside of life: it is, rather, the technique for revealing it.

Žižek’s interpretative work, from page to page, seems to revel in these paradoxes: but that is itself only some ‘stupid first impression’ (one of his favourite phrases). In reality, the paradox-effect is designed to undo that second moment of ingenuity, which is that of interpretation (it looks like this to you, but in reality what is going on is this . . .): the paradox is of the second order, so that what looks like a paradox is in reality simply a return to the first impression itself.

Or perhaps we might rather say: this is not a paradox, this is perversity. And indeed, the dialectic is just that inveterate, infuriating perversity whereby a commonsense empiricist view of reality is repudiated and undermined. But it is undermined together with its own accompanying interpretations of that reality, which look so much more astute and ingenious than the commonsense empiricist reality itself, until we understand that the interpretations are themselves also part of precisely that ‘first impression’. This is why the dialectic belongs to theory rather than philosophy: the latter is always haunted by the dream of some foolproof self-sufficient system, a set of interlocking concepts which are their own cause. This dream is of course the after-image of philosophy as an institution in the world, as a profession complicit with everything else in the status quo, in the fallen ontic realm of ‘what is’. Theory, on the other hand, has no vested interests inasmuch as it never lays claim to an absolute system, a non-ideological formulation of itself and its ‘truths’; indeed, always itself complicit in the being of current language, it has only the vocation and never-finished task of undermining philosophy as such, by unravelling affirmative statements and propositions of all kinds. We may put this another way by saying that the two great bodies of post-philosophical thought, marked by the names of Marx and Freud, are better characterised as unities of theory and practice: that is to say that their practical component always interrupts the ‘unity of theory’ and prevents it from coming together in some satisfying philosophical system. Alain Badiou has recently coined the expression ‘anti-philosophy’ for these new and constitutively scandalous modes of intervening conceptually in the world; it is a term that Žižek has been very willing to revindicate for himself.

Still, what can be the theoretical, if not indeed the philosophical content of Žižek’s little interpretative tricks? Let’s first take on the supremely unclassifiable figure who somehow, in ways that remain to be defined, presides over all Žižek’s work. One of Jacques Lacan’s late seminars has the title Les Non-Dupes errent. The joke lies in the homophony of this enigmatic proposition (‘the undeceived are mistaken’) with the oldest formula in the Lacanian book, ‘le nom du Père’, the name of the Father or, in other words, the Oedipus complex. However, Lacan’s later variant has nothing to do with the Father, but rather with the structure of deception. As everyone knows, the truth is itself the best disguise, as when the spy, asked what he does in life, answers, ‘Why, I’m a spy,’ only to be greeted with laughter. This peculiarity of truth, to express itself most fully in deception or falsehood, plays a crucial role in analysis, as one might expect. And as one might also expect, it is in that great non- or anti-philosopher Hegel that we find the most elaborate deployment of the dialectic of the necessity of error and of what he called appearance and essence, as well as the most thoroughgoing affirmation of the objectivity of appearance (one of the deeper subjects of The Parallax View). The other great modern dialectician, Theodor Adorno (whose generic tone compares with Žižek’s, perhaps, as tragedy to comedy), was fond of observing that nowhere was Hegel closer to his heroic contemporary Beethoven than in the great thunderchord of the Logic, the assertion that ‘Essence must appear!’

Yet this insistence on appearance now seems to bring us around unexpectedly to the whole vexed question of postmodernism and postmodernity, which is surely nothing if it is not a wholesale repudiation of essences in the name of surface, of truth in the name of fiction, of depth (past, present or future) in the name of the Nietzschean eternally recurring here-and-now. Žižek seems to identify postmodernism with ‘postmodern philosophy’ and relativism (an identification he shares with other enemies of these developments, some of them antediluvian, some resistant to the reification of the label), while on the other hand he endorses the proposition of an epochal change, provided we don’t call it that and provided we insist that it is still, on whatever scale, capitalism – something with which I imagine everyone will nowadays be prepared to agree. Indeed, some of his basic propositions are unthinkable except within the framework of the epochal, and of some new moment of capitalism itself; Lacan is occasionally enlisted in the theorisation of these changes, which have taken place since Freud made his major discoveries.

Take the new definition of the superego. No longer the instance of repression and judgment, of taboo and guilt, the superego has today become something obscene, whose perpetual injunction is: ‘Enjoy!’ Of course, the inner-directed Victorian must equally have been directed to enjoy his own specific historical repressions and sublimations; but that jouissance was probably not the same kind of enjoyment as that taken by the subject of consumer society and of obligatory permissiveness (Marcuse called it ‘repressive desublimation’), the subject of a desperate obligation to ‘liberate’ one’s desires and to ‘fulfil oneself’ by satisfying them. Yet psychoanalysis always involves a tricky and unstable balance between the theorisation of an eternal human psyche and the historical singularity of culture and mores: the latter tilts you back into periodisation, while the ‘eternal’ model is secured by the simple reminder that desire is never satisfied, whether you are a Victorian in thrall to duty or a postmodern intent on pleasure.

This is the point at which we reach the most persistent of all Žižek’s fundamental themes: namely, the death wish, the Thanatos, or what he prefers to call the ‘death drive’. Modern theory is indeed haunted by Freud’s death wish, that better mousetrap which any self-respecting intellectual owes it to himself or herself to invent a theory of (Freud’s own version having satisfied nobody). But we also owe it to ourselves to retain everything that is paradoxical (or perverse) in Žižek’s (or in Lacan’s) version of the matter; for here the Thanatos has nothing to do with death at all. Its horror lies in its embodiment as life itself, sheer life, indeed, as immortality, and as a curse from which only death mercifully relieves us (all the operatic overtones of The Flying Dutchman are relevant here, all the mythic connotations of the Wandering Jew, or indeed the vampire, the undead, those condemned to live for ever). The death drive is what lives inside us by virtue of our existence as living organisms, a fate that has little enough to do with our biographical destinies or even our existential experience: the Thanatos lives through us (‘in us what is more than us’); it is our species-being; and this is why it is preferable (following the later Lacan) to call it a drive rather than a desire, and to distinguish the impossible jouissance it dangles before us from the humdrum desires and velleities we constantly invent and then either satisfy or substitute.

As for jouissance, it is perhaps the central or at least the most powerful category in Žižek’s explanatory resources, a phenomenon capable of projecting a new theory of political and collective dynamics as much as a new way of looking at individual subjectivity. But to grasp the implications it is best to see jouissance as a relational concept rather than some isolated ‘ultimately determining instance’ or named force. In fact, it is the concept of the envy of jouissance that accounts for collective violence, racism, nationalism and the like, as much as for the singularities of individual investments, choices and obsessions: it offers a new way of building in the whole dimension of the Other (by now a well-worn concept which, when not merely added mechanically onto some individual psychology, evaporates into Levinassian sentimentalism). The power of this conception of envy may also be judged from the crisis into which it puts merely consensual and liberal ideals like those of Rawls or Habermas, which seem to include none of the negativity we experience in everyday life and politics. Žižek, indeed, includes powerful critiques of other current forms of bien-pensant political idealism such as multiculturalism and the rhetoric of human rights – admirable liberal ideals calculated to sap the energies of any serious movement intent on radical reconstruction.

All these ideals presuppose the possibility of some ultimate collective harmony and reconciliation as the operative goal or end of political action. It would be wrong to identify these ultimate aims with utopian thinking, which on the contrary presupposes a violent rupture with the current social system. Rather, they are associated, for Žižek, with that quite different absence of antagonism denounced in his very first book, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), a target also identified by Lacan and which has always been central in Žižek’s tireless explanations and propagation of Lacanian doctrine. This is the conviction that human subjectivity is permanently split and bears a gap within itself, a wound, an inner distance that can never be overcome: something Lacan demonstrated over and over again in an extraordinarily complex (and dialectical) articulation of the original Freudian models. But taken at this level of generality it is a view that might easily lead to social pessimism and conservatism, to a view of original sin and the incorrigibility of some permanent human nature.

It is to forestall and exclude just such a disastrous misunderstanding of the social and political consequences of the Lacanian ‘gap’ that is the task of The Parallax View. The book does so, however, not by any immediate extrapolation of the gap or constitutive distance from individual to collective; but rather by juxtaposing the theoretical consequences of split subjectivity on a variety of disciplinary levels (whence the difficulty of the opening chapter).

A parallax, Webster’s says, is ‘the apparent displacement of an observed object due to a change in the position of the observer’; but it is best to put the emphasis not on the change or shift, so much as on the multiplicity of observational sites, for in my opinion it is the absolute incommensurability of the resultant descriptions or theories of the object that Žižek is after, rather than some mere symptomal displacement. The idea thus brings us back to that old bugbear of postmodern relativism, to which it is certainly related. (Popular locution mutes this scandal by way of narrative: X tells the story of quantum theory, or modern dictatorship, this way; Y tells a different story. These convenient and widely accepted turns of phrase efface all the serious philosophical debates about causality, historical agency, the Event, philosophies of history, and even the status of narrative itself, which is probably why Žižek, assimilating the problems themselves to ‘postmodern philosophy’, has often been dismissive of narrative as such.)

The more fundamental difference at issue can be measured by comparing the parallax idea with the old Heisenberg principle, which asserted that the object can never be known, owing to the interference of our own observational system, the insertion of our own point of view and related equipment between ourselves and the reality in question. Heisenberg is then truly ‘postmodern’ in the assertion of an absolute indeterminacy of the real or the object, which withdraws into the status of a Kantian noumenon. In parallax thinking, however, the object can certainly be determined, but only indirectly, by way of a triangulation based on the incommensurability of the observations.

The object thus is unrepresentable: it constitutes precisely that gap or inner distance which Lacan theorised for the psyche, and which renders personal identity for ever problematic (‘man’s radical and fundamental dis-adaptation, mal-adaptation, to his environs’). The great binary oppositions – subject v. object, materialism v. idealism, economics v. politics – are all ways of naming this fundamental parallax gap: their tensions and incommensurabilities are indispensable to productive thinking (itself just such a gap), provided we do not lapse into some complacent agnosticism or Aristotelian moderation in which ‘the truth lies somewhere in between’; provided, in other words, we perpetuate the tension and the incommensurability rather than palliating or concealing it.

The reader will judge from the case-studies in this volume whether parallax theory has been fruitful. In particular, the chapter on the dilemmas of cognitive science – the material brain and the data of consciousness – is a superb achievement which transcends Spinozan parallelism towards the ultimate Hegelian paradox: ‘Spirit is a bone.’ As far as politics is concerned, it seems to me that Žižek’s lesson is as indispensable as it is energising. He believes (as I do) that Marxism is an economic rather than a political doctrine, which must tirelessly insist on the primacy of the economic system and on capitalism itself as the ultimate horizon of the political situation (as well as of all the other ones – social, cultural, psychic and so forth). Yet it was always a fundamental mistake to think that Marxism was a ‘philosophy’ which aimed at substituting the ‘ultimately determining instance’ of the economic for that of the political. Karl Korsch taught us eighty years ago that for Marxism the economic and the political are two distinct and incommensurable codes which say the same thing in radically different languages.

So how to think about the concrete combinations they present in real life and real history? At this point, we glimpse what is clearly Žižek’s basic Lacanian model for parallax: it is the Master’s scandalous and paradoxical idea that between the sexes ‘il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel’ (Seminar XX). ‘If, for Lacan, there is no sexual relationship,’ Žižek writes, ‘then, for Marxism proper, there is no relationship between economy and politics, no “meta-language” enabling us to grasp the two levels from the same neutral standpoint.’ The practical consequences are startling:

To put it in terms of the good old Marxist couple infrastructure/superstructure: we should take into account the irreducible duality of, on the one hand, the ‘objective’ material socioeconomic processes taking place in reality as well as, on the other, the politico-ideological process proper. What if the domain of politics is inherently ‘sterile’, a theatre of shadows, but nonetheless crucial in transforming reality? So, although economy is the real site and politics is a theatre of shadows, the main fight is to be fought in politics and ideology.

This is a far better starting point for the left than the current interminable debates about identity v. social class (it also seems to me a more appropriate climax than the enigmatic reflections on ‘Bartleby’ that actually close the book).

But it is appropriate, in the light of the earlier discussion, to ask just how dialectical this now turns out to be. I think an argument would run something like this: that third moment of the dialectic which returned to appearance as such is sometimes described (in Hegelian jargon) as returning to ‘appearance qua appearance’, to appearance with the understanding both that it is appearance and that nonetheless as appearance it has its own objectivity, its own reality as such. This is precisely what happens, I believe, with the two alternatives of the parallax, let us say the subjective and the objective one. To discover that neither the code of the subject nor the code of the object offers in itself an adequate representation of the unrepresentable object it designates means to rediscover each of these codes as sheer representation, to come to the conviction that each is both necessary and incomplete, that each is so to speak a necessary error, an indispensable appearance. I would only want to wonder whether there are not more complex forms of the parallax situation which posit more than two alternatives (on the order of subject and object), but which rather confront us with multiple, yet equally indispensable codes.

I cannot conclude without explaining my hesitant apprehensions about Žižek’s project. Clearly, the parallax position is an anti-philosophical one, for it not only eludes philosophical systemisation, but takes as its central thesis the latter’s impossibility. What we have here is theory, rather than philosophy: and its elaboration is itself parallaxical. It knows no master code (not even Lacan’s) and no definitive formulation; but must be rearticulated in the local terms of all the figurations into which it can be extrapolated, from ethics to neurosurgery, from religious fundamentalism to The Matrix, from Abu Ghraib to German Idealism.

Yet theory was always itself ‘grounded’ on a fundamental (and insoluble) dilemma: namely, that the provisional terms in which it does its work inevitably over time get ‘thematised’ (to use Paul de Man’s expression); they get reified (and even commodified, if I may say so), and eventually turn into systems in their own right. The self-consuming movement of the theoretical process gets slowed down and arrested, its provisional words turn into names and thence into concepts, the anti-philosophy becomes a philosophy in its own right. My occasional fear is, then, that by theorising and conceptualising the impossibilities designated by the parallax view, Žižek may turn out to have produced a new concept and a new theory after all, simply by naming what it is probably better not to call the unnameable.

 

Ž LTN part 1

http://www.youtube.com/user/TheEthanwashere?feature=watch

This is from the Word Document of LTN.  All page references are to this doc. Where indicated I’ll try to cross ref to the book as well.

Is It Still Possible to be a Hegelian Today, (Chapter 4 pp. 193-240)

I want to succinctly summarize the main arguments of this important section of the book.

 

On page 223 Ž quotes Asad responding to Butler’s query regarding where his theoretical critque of liberalism is leading. btw, I back in the day, read this book Is Critique Secular?

“there can be no abstract answer to this question because it is precisely the implications of things said and done in different circumstances that one tries to understand … one should be prepared for the fact that what one aims at in one’s thinking may be less significant than where one ends up … in the process of thinking one should be open to ending up in unanticipated places―whether these produce satisfaction or desire, discomfort or horror.” [Ž quoting Asad]

Is Ž here simply making the point that we can’t predict the consequences of our actions?   I act freely when I know I’m following my inner necessity, is bunk for Ž because he’s trying to establish retroactive hegelian thing.

 

 

 

on Ž act and Real superego

McSweeney, John. “Finitude and Violence: Žižek versus Derrida on Politics” KRITIKE 5:2 (December 2011) 41-58

Any act which would bear upon this Real could only be “tragic”:  either one ultimately succeeds in acting only within the Symbolic order, leaving the transcendental Real and its deep circumscription of socio-political possibilities unchanged (so that one’s acts are always already futile from the outset), or one succeeds in acting upon the Real, but at the cost of a radical destruction of the existing social order, realized in a radical annihilation of the self (Lacan’s passage à l’acte).

Indeed, just two years earlier, Žižek had realized that Lacan’s model of such an act, Antigone, is insufficient to the uncompromising violence of such an act. Her sacrifice of her place within the Symbolic order is only apparent, because her treasonous burial of her brother remains at the service of, and inscribes her existence within, a deeper law of the gods. In her stead, Žižek proposes the figure of Medea, whose murder of her children, means that there can be no recuperation of her act of vengeance against her husband.

Faced with this disturbing logic, Žižek would soon come to the conclusion that the construction of the Real as transcendental Thing is not only flawed but, in fact, may be a key element of capitalist ideology, misdirecting political acts toward an impossible capitalism as phantom Thing (and thus toward an impossible act), and away from actually existing capitalism and its rather more mundane vulnerabilities to change.

Instead, Žižek turned to an immanent conception of the Real as the internal limit of the Symbolic, such that the “not-All” of the Symbolic order, the encounter with its aporias and limits, is an encounter with the Real that exceeds, conditions, and precedes it. And this encounter with the SymbolicReal limit immanent to things is the encounter with their self-difference: with the excess of the thing over its signification, symbolized by the excess of the  materiality of the letter over its signifying force.

Act in turn is modeled on St. Paul’s notion of overcoming the Sisyphean cycle of law, transgression and guilt via naive identification with elements of the law, attending to the SymbolicReal letter of the law, in order to expose and undermine the operation of its  superego supplement, “the Law”, which would grant it pure Symbolic coherence.

In Žižek’s reading, Paul’s act mirrors the later Lacan’s notion of feminine subjectivation, in which woman identifies with elements of the Symbolic order, apart from the social-superego supplement that would constitute them as elements of a perfectly complete signifying system. By thus identifying with the Symbolic as a “not-All” traversed by multiple Symbolic-Real limits, the feminine subject exposes and undermines the operation of these superego injunctions.

The crucial point for the current discussion is that Žižek thus conceives of act as fundamentally within the Symbolic order, but without support from it: its significance does not depend upon the Symbolic order (and it can be justified only retrospectively in terms of the new situation it brings about). By contrast, masculine subjectivation involves identification with one’s individual “little bit of the Real” left over from one’s castrating insertion within the Symbolic order, such that a subjective act must both be entangled with and be destructive of that order. Arguably, this complex relation increases the vulnerability of the masculine subject to the subtle inversions of ideological interpellation. Thus, unlike Derridean messianicity (as Žižek conceives it), the Pauline-feminine act pays attention to the concrete self-difference of things, placing faith in the liberatory force of identification with a given element of the Symbolic order and its specific Symbolic-Real difference.

zupančič sexual difference and real pt 2 of 4

Video of this presentation March 2011

Here is the paper online without works cited page

Freud in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) he insists on the original nonexistence of any germ of two sexes (or two sexualities) in preadolescent time.

The auto-erotic activity of the erotogenic zones is, however, the same in both sexes, and owing to this uniformity there is no possibility of a distinction between the two sexes such as arises after puberty … Indeed, if we were able to give a more definite connotation to the concepts of “masculine” and “feminine,” it would even be possible to maintain that libido is invariably and necessary of a masculine nature, whether it occurs in men or in women and irrespectively of whether its object is a man or a woman.

In other words, at the level of the libido there are no two sexes. And if we were able to say what exactly is “masculine” and “feminine,” we would describe it as “masculine” — but we are precisely not able to do this, as Freud further emphases in the footnote attached to the quoted passage. 7

So, when confronted with the question of sexual difference, the first answer of psychoanalysis is: From the strictly analytical point of view, there is in fact only one sex, or sexuality.

Moreover, sexuality is not something that springs from difference (between sexes); it is not propelled by any longing for our lost other half, but is originally self-propelling (and “autoerotic”). Freud writes, “The sexual drive is in the first instance independent of its object; nor is its origin likely to be due to its object’s attractions.”

Does this mean that sexual difference is only and purely a symbolic construction? Here waits the other surprise (not unrelated to the first, of course) of the psychoanalytic stance: Sexual difference doesn’t exist in the symbolic either, or, more precisely, there is no symbolic account of this difference as sexual. “In the psyche, there is nothing by which the subject may situate himself as male or female being.”

That is to say, although the production of meaning of what it is to be a “man” or a “woman” is certainly symbolic—and massive—it doesn’t amount to producing sexual difference as signifying difference. In other words, sexual difference is a different kind of difference; it doesn’t follow the differential logic.

Mladen Dolar quote: “There is a widespread criticism going around that aims at the binary oppositions as the locus of enforced sexuality, its règlementation, its imposed mould, its compulsory stricture. By the imposition of the binary code of two sexes we are subjected to the basic social constraint. But the problem is perhaps rather the opposite: the sexual difference poses the problem of the two precisely because it cannot be reduced to the binary opposition or accounted for in terms of the binary numerical two. It is not a signifying difference, such that it defines the elements of structure. It is not to be described in terms of opposing features, or as a relation of given entities preexisting the difference One could say: bodies can be counted, sexes cannot. Sex presents a limit to the count of bodies; it cuts them from inside rather than grouping them together under common headings.”

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

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

We should instead start from the claim that nothing about (human) sexuality is natural, least of all sexual activity with the exclusive aim of reproduction. There is no “sexual nature” of man (and no “sexual being”). The problem with sexuality is not that it is a remainder of nature that resists any definite taming; rather, there is no nature here — it all starts with a surplus of signification.

If we now return to the question of what this implies in relation to ontology in general, and, more specifically, to the performative ontology of contemporary gender studies, we must start from the following, crucial implication: Lacan is led to establish a difference between being and the Real.   The real is not a being, or a substance, but its deadlock. It is inseparable from being, yet it is not being. One could say that for psychoanalysis, there is no being independent of language (or discourse)—which is why it often seems compatible with contemporary forms of nominalism.

All being is symbolic; it is being in the Other. But with a crucial addition, which could be formulated as follows: there is only being in the symbolic — except that there is real.  There “is” real, but this real is no being. Yet it is not simply the outside of being; it is not something besides being, it is — as I put it earlier — the very curving of the space of being. It only exists as the inherent contradiction of being.

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

That is to say, the real is that which the traditional ontology had to cut off in order to be able to speak of “being qua being.”

We only arrive to being qua being by subtracting something from it — and this something is precisely that which, while included in being, prevents it from being fully constituted as being.

The real, as that additional something that magnetizes and curves the (symbolic) space of being, introduces in it another dynamics, which infects the dynamics of the symbolic, makes it “not all.”

Now, a very good way of getting closer to the relationship between sexuality as such (its real) and sexual difference is via an excerpt from a lecture by Joan Copjec, in which she made the following crucial observation:

“The psychoanalytic category of sexual difference was from this date [the mid-1980s] deemed suspect and largely forsaken in favor of the neutered category of gender. Yes, neutered. I insist on this because it is specifically the sex of sexual difference that dropped out when this term was replaced by gender.

Gender theory performed one major feat: it removed the sex from sex.

For while gender theorists continued to speak of sexual practices, they ceased to question what sex or sexuality is; in brief, sex was no longer the subject of an ontological inquiry and reverted instead to being what it was in common parlance: some vague sort of distinction, but basically a secondary characteristic (when applied to the subject), a qualifier added to others, or (when applied to an act) something a bit naughty.” [Copjec The Sexual Compact]

Goto Part 3

Zupančič sexual difference pt 1 of 2

Alenka Zupančič Sexual Difference and Ontology This paper was originally presented at the 2011 Summer School EGS

And here is a general discussion of ontology and realism: “One Divides Into Two: Negativity, Dialectics, and Clinamen,” held at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin in March 2011.

July 4, 2012 both Zupančič and Copjec particpated in a forum in Spain.  Audio is here.

Traditional ontologies and traditional cosmologies were strongly reliant on sexual difference, taking it as their very founding, or structuring, principle. Ying-yang, water-fire, earth-sun, matter-form, active-passive—this kind of (often explicitly sexualized) opposition was used as the organizing principle of these ontologies and/or cosmologies, as well as of the sciences—astronomy, for example—based on them.

And this is how Lacan could say,“primitive science is a sort of sexual technique.”

At some point in history, one generally associated with the Galilean revolution in science and its aftermath, both science and philosophy broke with this tradition. And if there is a simple and most general way of saying what characterizes modern science and modern philosophy, it could be phrased precisely in terms of the “desexualisation” of reality, of abandoning sexual difference, in more or less explicit form, as the organizing principle of reality, providing the latter’s coherence and intelligibility.

The reasons why feminism and gender studies find these ontologizations of sexual difference highly problematic are obvious. Fortified on the ontological level, sexual difference is strongly anchored in essentialism—it becomes a combinatory game of the essences of masculinity and femininity. Such that, to put it in the contemporary gender-studies parlance, the social production of norms and their subsequent descriptions finds a ready-made ontological division, ready to essentialize “masculinity” and “femininity” immediately. Traditional ontology was thus always also a machine for producing “masculine” and “feminine” essences, or, more precisely, for grounding these essences in being.

When modern science broke with this ontology it also mostly broke with ontology tout court. (Modern) science is not ontology; it neither pretends to make ontological claims nor, from a critical perspective on science, recognizes that it is nevertheless making them. Science does what it does and leaves to others to worry about the (ontological) presuppositions and the (ethical, political, etc.) consequences of what it is doing; it also leaves to others to put what it is doing to use.

Rather, the sexual in psychoanalysis is something very different from the sense-making combinatory game—it is precisely something that disrupts the latter and makes it impossible. What one needs to see and grasp, to begin with, is where the real divide runs here.

Psychoanalysis is both coextensive with this desexualisation, in the sense of breaking with ontology and science as sexual technique or sexual combinatory, and absolutely uncompromising when it comes to the sexual as the irreducible real (not substance). There is no contradiction here.

The lesson and the imperative of psychoanalysis is not, “Let us devote all of our attention to the sexual (meaning) as our ultimate horizon”; it is instead a reduction of the sex and the sexual … to the point of ontological inconsistency, which, as such, is irreducible.

Here is her start on Judith Butler:

One of the conceptual deadlocks in simply emphasizing that gender is an entirely social, or cultural, construction is that it remains within the dichotomy nature/culture.

Judith Butler saw this very well, which is why her project radicalizes this theory by linking it to the theory of performativity. As opposed to expressivity, indicating a preexistence and independence of that which is being expressed, performativity refers to actions that create, so to speak, the essences that they express. Nothing here preexists: Sociosymbolic practices of different discourses and their antagonisms create the very “essences,” or phenomena, that they regulate.

The time and the dynamics of repetition that this creation requires open up the only margin of freedom (to possibly change or influence this process in which sociosymbolic constructions, by way of repetition and reiteration, are becoming nature — “only natural,” it is said.

What is referred to as natural is the sedimentation of the discursive, and in this view the dialectics of nature and culture becomes the internal dialectics of culture. Culture both produces and regulates (what is referred to as) nature.  We are no longer dealing with two terms: sociosymbolic activity, and something on which it is performed; but instead, we are dealing with something like an internal dialectics of the One (the discursive) that not only models things but also creates the things it models, which opens up a certain depth of field. Performativity is thus a kind of onto-logy of the discursive, responsible for both the logos and the being of things.

To a large extent, Lacanian psychoanalysis seems compatible with this account, and it is often presented as such. The primacy of the signifier and of the field of the Other, language as constitutive of reality and of the unconscious (including the dialectics of desire), the creationist aspect of the symbolic and its dialectics (with notions such as symbolic causality, symbolic efficiency, materiality of the signifier) …

All of these (undisputed) claims notwithstanding, Lacan’s position is irreducibly different from the above performative ontology. In what way exactly? And what is the status of the real that Lacan insists upon when speaking of sexuality?

Lacan also starts with a One (not with two, which he would try to compose and articulate together in his theory).

He starts with the One of the signifier. But his point is that, while this One creates its own space and beings that populate it (which roughly corresponds to the space of performativity described above), something else gets added to it. It could be said that this something is parasitic of performative productivity; it is not produced by the signifying gesture but together with and “on top of” it.

It is inseparable from this gesture, but, unlike how we speak of discursive creations/beings, it is not created by it. It is neither a symbolic entity nor one constituted by the symbolic; rather, it is collateral to the symbolic. Moreover, it is not a being: It is discernable only as a (disruptive) effect within the symbolic field, yet it is not an effect of this field, (it is NOT) an effect of the signifier; the emergence of the signifier is not reducible to, or exhausted by the symbolic.

The signifier does not only produce a new, symbolic reality (including its own materiality, causality, and laws); it also “produces,” or opens up, the dimension that Lacan calls the Real. This is what irredeemably stains the symbolic, spoils its supposed purity, and accounts for the fact that the symbolic game of pure differentiality is always a game with loaded dice. This is the very space, or dimension, that sustains the previously mentioned “vital” phenomena (the libido or jouissance, the drive, sexualized body) in their out-of-jointness with the symbolic.

Sexuality (as the Real) is not some being that exists beyond the symbolic; it “exists” solely as the curving of the symbolic space that takes place because of the additional something produced with the signifying gesture.

This, and nothing else, is how sexuality is the Real.

Starting from sexuality’s inherent contradictions — from its paradoxical ontological status, which precisely prevents us from taking it as any kind of simple fact — psychoanalysis came to articulate its very concept of the Real as something new.

The Real is not predicated on sexuality; it is not that “sexuality is the real” in the sense of the latter defining the ontological status of the former. On the contrary, the psychoanalytic discoveries regarding the nature of sexuality (and of its accomplice, the unconscious) have led to the discovery and conceptualization of a singularly curved topological space, which it named the Real.

The antagonism conceptualized by psychoanalysis is not related to any original double, or original multiple, but to the fact that a One introduced by the signifier is always a “One plus” — it is this unassignable plus that is neither another One nor nothing that causes the basic asymmetry and divide of the very field of the One .

The most general, and at the same time precise, Lacanian name for this plus is jouissance, defined by its surplus character. …

The Other is not the Other of the One ; it is the Lacanian name for the “One plus,” which is to say, for the One in which this plus is included and for which it thus has considerable consequences. This, by the way, is also why the Other referred to by Lacan is both the symbolic Other (the treasury of signifiers) and the Other of jouissance, of sexuality.

The first and perhaps most striking consequence of this is that human sexuality is not sexual simply because of its including the sexual organs (or organs of reproduction). Rather, the surplus (caused by signification) of jouissance is what sexualizes the sexual activity itself, endows it with a surplus investment (one could also say that it sexualizes the activity of reproduction).

This point might seem paradoxical, but if one thinks of what distinguishes human sexuality from, let’s say, animal or vegetal sexualities, is it not precisely because of the fact that human sexuality is sexualized in the strong meaning of the word (which could also be put in a slogan like, “sex is sexy”)? It is never “just sex.” Or, perhaps more precisely, the closer it gets to “just sex,” the further it is from any kind of “animality” (animals don’t practice recreational sex).

This constitutive redoubling of sexuality is what makes it not only always already dislocated in respect to its reproductive purpose but also and foremost in respect to itself. The moment we try to provide a clear definition of what sexual activity is, we get into trouble. We get into trouble because human sexuality is ridden with this paradox: The further the sex departs from the “pure” copulating movement (i.e., the wider the range of elements it includes in its activity), the more “sexual” it can become. Sexuality gets sexualized precisely in this constitutive interval that separates it from itself.

Zupančič verneinung pt 1 A deep hegelian point

Alenka Zupančič Not-Mother: On Freud’s Verneinung

A guy goes into a restaurant and says to the waiter: “Coffee without cream, please.”  The waiter replies: “I am sorry sir, but we are out of cream. Could it be without milk?”

This joke carries a certain real, even a certain truth about the real, which has to do precisely with the singular negativity introduced or discovered by psychoanalysis.

A negation of something that is neither pure absence nor pure nothing nor simply the complementary of what it negates.

At the moment it is spoken there remains a trace of that which is not.

This is a dimension that is introduced (and made possible) by the signifier yet is irreducible to it.

It has (or can have) a positive, albeit spectral, quality, which can be formulated in the precise terms of “with without (cream)” as irreducible to both alternatives (cream/no cream).

Hegel says, “Negation is part of the positive identity of an object.” An object is not only what it is, you have to include what it is not.

zizek April 24 2012 Los Angeles

Žižek is in Los Angeles 3 days before I met him in Brockport

Why did God have to die on the cross?

– pay price of our sins , to whom?  Another guy, the devil??

– because justice must be done, this is paganism, God is not really the top, there is some kind of cosmic destiny in which god is subordinated

– we wouldn’t be grateful to god, like he’s a narcissist, PR, lets make god look good

Malbranche: god wanted to be admired, w/o Jesus sacrifice we wouldn’t all be lost, we would be redeemed automaticlly, god through us all into sin so he could save some of us. — a perverse God. There is something a little impenetrable today, which is covered over by the usual dogma today. When Napoleon took the crown and put it himself on the head, the Pope said to Napoleon, you try to ruin the church, but catholics have been trying for 2000 years

How exactly do you read those statements : I don’t bring peace and love I bring sword and fire, if you don’t love your parents … there is a system of de-traumatizing these statements – don’t read them too seriously, don’t get too attached to earthly objects obei wan kenobi philosophy.  The best answer: my god, I wasn’t prepared for this question … But you had 2000 years to prepare for this question!

Žižek solution:  when in the bible if you don’t hate your father, mother, it stands for entire power edifice social hierarchy, that is Christian message an egalitarian community outside of the power hierarchy. In Pagan religions you can only attain this in death … Christian an egalitarian collective is the Holy Ghost.

Book of Job: First great critique of ideology. why?  Things go terribly wrong for Job.  Each of his friends try to convince Job that there is a deeper meaning to his suffering.  The greatnest of Job he doesn’t say I’m innocent, only that these catastrophes have NO MEANING.  God comes and agrees with JOB.  GK CHESTERTON: Why did all this happen to me??  God’s reply is usually read as arrogance of god, the gap that separates us from God. Chesteron turns this around God’s answer: You think you are in trouble, look at the entire universe I created it’s one big mess.  God expresses his perplexity at his own creation.  This is an incredible ETHICAL REVOLUTION.  First step out of Pagan justice means: do your particular duty … this withdrawal culminates in the death of Christ: What dies on the cross: not God’s messenger, what dies on the cross is GOD of BEYOND himself, God as that TRANSCENDENT power that secretly pulls the strings.  Precisely god can no longer be conceived as we are in shit, but there’s a guy up there who secretly pulls the strings, NO this is no longer.  Something tremedous happens in Christianity.  After death of Christ we have not the Father but the HOLY SPIRIT.  where there is love between the two of you I AM THERE.

Paul Claudel:  Not we can trust God, but God has to trust us.  This is an important message of freedom.  In all other religions you have atheists, people who don’t believe in God, only in Christianity, God himself becomes for a moment an atheist.  Far from fashionable talk i.e.,  we are in neo-pagan era, NO we should stick to this tremendous explosive impact of what Christianity is telling us.

Not Dennett or Hitchens (DITCHKINS), to be an atheist, this AUTHENTIC atheism, in the sense of experiencing the radical absence of any transcendental guarantee, you have to go through Christianity.

Only through the Christian experience can you REACH THE ABYSS OF ATHEISM.  Ditchkins is some stupid sense there is some truth, but it doesn’t work, there is no insight of how a religion effectively works.  A whole dimension is missing in Ditchkins.  The status of BELIEF is very mysterious, do we really believe?  We don’t live in an era of hedonism, but in strictly controlled hedonism … celebrating sex, explaining it in pragmatic terms, like Dr. Ruth, yes sex, but healthy sex, beer without alcohol  The only hedonists today are those who take drugs and those who smoke.  This obsession with the danger of smoking … distinguished black guy smoking, “I’m from the South, and when I was young I remember racism, but it isn’t as bad as now as being oppressed for smoking.”

WE BELIEVE MORE THAN EVER.  beliefs in order to function, don’t have to be FIRST person beliefs, you can BELIEVE THROUGH OTHERS.  We are Atheists, but in order not to hurt our children we believe, and then you ask the children … you have a belief that no one believes in the FIRST person.   CANNED LAUGHTER  Prayer wheels

We need to believe that there is someone who believes, even if that someone is hypothetical

CHRISTIAN GESTURE: ABANDON OBJECTIFIED BELIEF.  Life is Beautiful movie: to make it a much better film, the father discovers at the end that THE SON KNEW THIS ALL THE TIME HE PRETENDED TO BELIEVE HIS FATHER TO PROTECT HIM. this is the christian reversal.

🙂 I don’t see what the difference here is between the Objectifying belief in prayer wheel or canned laughter. Okay. But he goes on to say that equally, belief occurs through 3rd parties, we don’t necessarily believe, as long as somebody believes for us.  I don’t really believe in Christmas, I do it for the kids. But he claims that the boy in Life is Beautiful  in an alternate ending, should all along have pretended to believe his father, rather than sincerely believing in his father’s stories about how it’s just an extended vacation etc.  That is, I think he is arguing that instead of disavowal, of claiming we don’t believe but as long as others believe for us, we turn it around, we avow our belief in something, though still pretend.  Why did the boy still need to pretend, even though he know his dad was full of crap?  It’s the fetishist disavowal.

fetishist disavowal: “I know very well that things are the way I see them /that this person is a corrupt weakling, but I nonetheless treat him respectfully, since he wears the insignia of a judge, so that when he speaks, it is the Law itself which speaks through him”. So, in a way, I effectively believe his words, not my eyes, i.e. I believe in Another Space (the domain of pure symbolic authority) which matters more than the reality of its spokesmen.

The cynical reduction to reality thus falls short: when a judge speaks, there is in a way more truth in his words (the words of the Institution of law) than in the direct reality of the person of judge – if one limits oneself to what one sees, one simply misses the point. This paradox is what Lacan aims at with his les non-dupes errent: those who do not let themselves be caught in the symbolic deception/fiction and continue to believe their eyes are the ones who err most.

What a cynic who “believes only his eyes” misses is the efficiency of the symbolic fiction, the way this fiction structures our experience of reality. The same gap is at work in our most intimate relationship to our neighbors: we behave AS IF we do not know that they also smell badly, secrete excrement, etc. – a minimum of idealization, of fetishising disavowal, is the basis of our co-existence.

And doesn’t the same disavowal account for the sublime beauty of the idealizing gesture discernible from Anna Frank to American Communists who believed in the Soviet Union? Although we know that Stalinist Communism was an appalling thing, we nonetheless admire the victims of the McCarthy witch hunt who heroically persisted in their belief in Communism and support for the Soviet Union.

🙂 And Žižek says this ending to A Beautiful Life is preferable? In what sense?  The Christian reversal, is this fetishist disavowal, take it upon ourselves as our belief, know that what we are relying on belief not relying on somebody else to believe for us, we don’t sub-contract our belief, we do it ourselves, we believe in order to believe.

Žižek continues: For me Church is today at a CROSSROADS: it could be authentic liberation, an authentic subjective experience, at the same time it can be terribly misused.

Good people do bad things: we are relatively decent people, we do need some strong mythopoetic structure to serve as a screen to convince us thta the horrors we do can be transubstantiated into a higher meaning: POETRY. No ethnic cleansing without POETRY. you must be de-sensitized, to rape ethnic cleansing, it is preciesly this ethnic founding mythic, sacred text religions that can do the job.  Rwanda massacre, a great poet was laying the foundations for the slaughter.   This is the MEGA MEGA dilemma, how to find the way here.  For me, the message of Christiantity is the opposite of this need for TRANSCENDENCE.  Modern world is not a world with too much freedom, I can’t speak dirty, I can’t beat my wife, by becoming ethnic fundamentalists, opens up a space of freedom.  I am ethnically cleansing for my country I can rape, I can kill.  If there is God, I am an instrument of god, then everything is permitted.

conferences

Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy

The Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy will hold its annual conference from October 11-13, 2012, in Ottawa, at the University of Ottawa.

We invite papers or panels on any theme relevant to the broad concerns of continental philosophy. Please submit complete papers (no more than 4000 words), along with a brief abstract (150 words).

In either case, please prepare your paper(s) for blind review, with personally identifying information appearing only in your submission e-mail. Only attachments readable in Word will be considered. Papers written in English or French will be considered.

All submissions (in French or English) must be sent electronically by June 1, 2012, to: 2012@c-scp.org

If you are a graduate student, please identify yourself as such in order to be eligible for the graduate student essay prize. The winner will be announced at the annual conference and considered for publication in the following spring issue of Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy.

////

International Network for Alternative Academia
(Extends a general invitation to participate)

Monday 29th to Wednesday 31st of October, 2012
Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Call for Papers

This trans-disciplinary research project is interested in identifying the conflicting forces and political realities of multiculturalism and of identity formations in diverse political, societal and cultural contexts.

Identity claims and social identity formations have become more prevalent, fluid and less fixed throughout societies. People in their local, regional, national and even international contexts are systematically making claims about group identities, which have consequences for politics, social relations and a cultural sense of belonging. In the past decades, important changes have been witnessed in legal procedures, constitutions and cultural normative frameworks that have produced formal legitimation for recognition claims based on identity, as well as political backlashes against these initiatives. What are the lessons to be learned from these complex processes and the considerations to be had for envisioning and contributing to a future politics of recognition?

We invite colleagues from all disciplines and professions interested in exploring and explaining these issues in a collective, deliberative and dialogical environment to send presentation proposals which address these general questions or the following themes:

If you are interested in participating in this Annual Symposium, submit a 400 to 500 word abstract by Friday 8th of June, 2012. Please use the following template for your submission:

First: Author(s);
Second: Affiliation, if any;
Third: Email Address;
Fourth: Title of Abstract and Proposal;
Fifth: The 400 to 500 Word Abstract.

To facilitate the processing of abstracts, we ask that you use Word, WordPerfect or RTF formats only and that you use plain text, resisting the temptation of using special formatting, such as bold, italics or underline.

Please send emails with your proposals to the Annual Symposium Coordination address (imp-6@alternative-academia.net) with the following subject line: Identity & Multicultural Politics Abstract Proposal.

For every abstract proposal sent, we acknowledge receipt. If you do not receive a reply from us within one week you should assume we did not receive it. Please resend from your account and from an alternative one, to make sure your proposal does get to us.

All presentation and paper proposals that address these questions and issues will be fully considered and evaluated. Accepted abstracts will require a full draft paper by Friday 31st of August, 2012. Papers presented at the symposium are eligible for publication as part of a digital or paperback book.

 

Otherness, Agency and Belonging 4th International Symposium

Part of the Research Program on:
Recognition, Agency and the Politics of Otherness

Tuesday 6th to Thursday 8th of November, 2012
Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Call for Papers

This trans-disciplinary research project explores the unfolding dynamic of the relationship between self and other as it is enacted in our experiences of being strangers, aliens and foreigners. Examining the history of this relationship, reflecting upon its ideological and psychological foundations, and bearing witness to its manifestation in the lived experiences of migrants, refugees and the displaced, this symposium offers the opportunity to consider at the level of both theory and practice, new means for establishing a sense of belonging and new methods for engaging the other.

We invite colleagues from all disciplines and professions interested in exploring and explaining these issues in a collective, deliberative and dialogical environment to send presentation proposals that address these general questions or the following themes:

1. Practice, Logic and Dialogue

=> Being and Belonging
– How is belonging conceptualized? How is it lived?
– What are the psychological and the ideological foundations for the need to belong?
– How do ideals of belonging shape and inform the practice of recognition?
– How is the need to belong politicized?
– In what ways are notions of belonging being reconfigured in response to the rise of new technologies and new media? In what ways is the need to belong shaping these developments?

=> Language Lessons
– Can we speak of the self without the other? Can there be a language of ‘we-ness’? What terms would it employ? How would the grammar for such a language be constructed?
– What metaphors can be employed in the construction of alternatives to binary representations of self and other?
– How are new languages -new terminologies and new structures- being lived? That is, how are they already shaping experience through and in the development of idioms and rhetoric, signs and symbols?
– What alternatives might dialogical acts of speaking provide for addressing the other and the self? How might referential acts be used as a model for rethinking self-other relations?
– What role might embodiment and location play in rethinking difference?

2. Shifting Planes and Contexts

=> Monetary Values
– What is the role of labour migration for economic growth and prosperity? How are the contributions of labour migration being recognized? How are they being measured?
– How is migrant labour commodified? What are the effects of this commodification?
– What is the political value of migrants and foreigners, strangers and aliens, refugees and the displaced? How are they made ‘invisible’ within nations and states? At what moments are they made visible? How is this dialectic of visibility played out, experienced and conceived?
– What new models of economic/political inclusion/exclusion are we witnessing?

=> Environment and the Link to Nature
– How are self and other interweaved with nature? What norms, orientations and models prevail? Are there alternatives that are being collectively enacted? How might these bonds be reconceptualised?
– What indigenous worldviews might foster the construction of new models of diversity and plurality?
– How is the new class of environmental migrants being constructed and conceived?

=> A Whole New World
– Who are the new migrants? How are new migratory flows and massive movements mapping out, both literally and figuratively?
– How are trans-national and post-national ideologies reconfiguring our conceptions of the other?
– Who is our neighbour? Do we owe our neighbour hospitality and respect? Why?
– How is responsibility to be attributed in a world that is on the move?

3. Enquiry and Legitimacy

=> Representations
– How are representations of difference created and disseminated through the arts and media?
– By what means and through what measures do art and media instil and embed images of otherness? How might these avenues of production be used to transform and deconstruct such representations?
– How are new technologies and new media framing our ideas of otherness?
– What are the stories of strangers, the allegories of aliens, the fictions of foreigners and the discourses of the displaced being told? How are such narratives constructed? With what affect?

=> Acts of Legitimation: On Law
– How do nation states exclude juridically? How do laws protect and/or exclude the other?
– How do citizens and non-citizens relate within juridical practices and discourse?
– What place do human rights occupy in facilitating inclusionary and/or exclusionary practices?
– How are trans-national and post-national ideologies configuring conceptions of self and other?

4. Challenging Ideals

=> Productive Possibilities
– How do our encounters with strangers, aliens and foreigners enrich our lives?
– What are the productive advantages of being deemed ‘the other’?
– What of our experiences of ‘othering’ ourselves? When and why do we choose to be foreigners? How do these experiences differ from those in which we are ascribed this condition and status?

=> The Spaces In-Between: Beyond Self and Other
– In what ways are self and other interdependent? What is the history of this interlacing?
– How are the layerings and overlappings of our identifications as self and other, self or other lived?
– What new models of/for exchange and engagement are developing in theory and in practice?
– How might new models of cultural contact based on ideals of fusion, entanglement, doubleness, syncretism, amalgamation, creolization, interlacing, hybridization and interdependence, destabilize the logic of a binary system of self and other? How might they re-enforce this logic?

If you are interested in participating in this Annual Symposium, submit a 400 to 500 word abstract by Friday 8th of June, 2012.  Please use the following template for your submission:

First: Author(s);
Second: Affiliation, if any;
Third: Email Address;
Fourth: Title of Abstract and Proposal;
Fifth: The 400 to 500 Word Abstract.

To facilitate the processing of abstracts, we ask that you use Word, WordPerfect or RTF formats only and that you use plain text, resisting the temptation of using special formatting, such as bold, italics or underline.

Please send emails with your proposals to the Annual Symposium Coordination address (oab-4@alternative-academia.net) with the following subject line: Otherness, Agency & Belonging Abstract Proposal. 

For every abstract proposal sent, we acknowledge receipt. If you do not receive a reply from us within one week you should assume we did not receive it. Please resend from your account and from an alternative one, to make sure your proposal does get to us.

All presentation and paper proposals that address these questions and issues will be fully considered and evaluated. Accepted abstracts will require a full draft paper by Friday 31st of August, 2012. Papers presented at the symposium are eligible for publication as part of a digital or paperback book.

We invite colleagues and people interested in participating to disseminate this call for papers. Thank you for sharing and cross-listing where and whenever appropriate.

Hope to meet you in Montreal!

Symposium Coordinators:

Wendy O’Brien
Professor of Social and Political Theory
School of Liberal Studies
Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Email: w-obrien@alternative-academia.net

Oana Stugaru
Faculty of Letters and Communication Sciences
Stefan cel Mare University
Suceava, Romania
Email: o-strugaru@alternative-academia.net

Alejandro Cervantes-Carson
General Coordinator
International Network for Alternative Academia
Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
Email: acc@alternative-academia.net