Author: logocentric

richard wolff on radio and unemployed negativity on affect and spinoza

Here is a piece put out on one of my favourite blogs

Of course any answer of contemporary political affects would have to look at the various institutions, specifically the media, which work to focus and channel the affects, providing its images and organizations. The right is particularly good at this; in fact, we could argue that the right prefers to keep all political discussion on the level of pure affects, as in the case of those who “hate America,” making it possible to lump together Muslims, communists, and NPR in conspiracy of hate and fear. The usual response to this on the part of progressives or the left is to insist on how ridiculous this is, to use the common notions of history, economics, and politics to argue that such strange bedfellows are simply not made.

The affects, however, have a different logic, one that relates less to the actual relations between things than to the relation of their images. After all, anything can become the cause of hatred or love, all it needs to do is to is become attached to a cause of sadness or joy, hope or fear.

The question remains, however, as to why it is difficult to make capital itself an object of indignation. The immediate answer has to do with its impersonality, its inability to appear less as an object, than as the milieu in which we thrive. As Spinoza argues, hatred towards a thing will be greater if we imagine the thing to be free than necessary. Combine this point with Marx’s argument about commodity fetishism, about the reification of the economy into its law-like and necessary character, and it is easy to understand how difficult it is to generate indignation at capitalism itself. It is like being angry at the weather. The recent bouts of left-ish indignation at Scott Walker in Wisconsin and even Paul LePage in Maine has stemmed from the fact that they have emerged as a face of the present political conjuncture’s absolute indifference towards the life of the working class, their decisions appear to be arbitrary and personal (all too personal).

Richard Wolff on radio

Richard Wolff Video Clip at the Guardian

Countries doing well: Germany, Scadanavian countries, the countries that provide the greatest safety net, over the last 4 years unemployment in Germany has actually shrunk

Countries without safetynets, their economies are sucking: American Unemployment: 5%, mid 2007 before crisis, 8.3 – 8.5 %  now.

Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy: They have a less generous safety net than the countries doing well.

 

critchley occupy

Occupy and the Arab spring will continue to revitalise political protest

The Arab spring, notably in Egypt and Syria, seems to be running out of steam. The vivacious drive of the Occupy movement has faltered and it is not clear what new life will appear. Can popular protest regain its energy and inspiration, or is that it?

Rather than retreating into the comfort of despair or cynicism, perhaps this is a moment in which we can try and gain a broader view of matters.

Power is the ability to get things done. Politics is the means to get those things done. Democracy is the name for regimes that believe that power and politics coincide and that power lies with the people. The problem, as Zygmunt Bauman has reminded us, is that power and politics have become divorced. What we call democracy has become a sham. Power has evaporated into the supra-national spaces of finance, trade and information platforms, but also the spaces of drug trafficking, human trafficking and immigration – the many boats that cross the Mediterranean and other seas.

But the space of politics has remained the same as it has for centuries, localised in the nation state with its prosaic variations of representative, liberal democracy. Politics still feels local – we might feel British or Greek or whatever – but it isn’t. Normal state politics simply serves the interests of supra-national power. Sovereignty has been outsourced.

The premise of western representative democracy is the following: citizens exercise political power through voting; representatives are elected; governments are formed and these governments have power to get things done, a power identical to the will of the people.

The belief that many of us had (or perhaps still have) is that if we work for a certain party, then we can win an election, form a government, and have the power to change things. But every day this is proven to be wrong.

Take Greece, where last November the former prime minister George Papandreou had the idea of holding a referendum to ratify a eurozone bailout deal negotiated at an EU summit in Nice. It was a democratic gesture of a rather old-fashioned kind. Of course, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy were appalled because they knew that such a popular referendum showed a deep misunderstanding of the nature of contemporary political reality. Contemporary power is not the people and is not located in local or national governments. It lies elsewhere, with the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the interests of various financial institutions that the European states serve. How could Papandreou be so naive?

Now we have unelected governments of technocrats in Greece and Italy, and elected technocrats elsewhere. At this point in history, representative liberal democracy is no more than a kind of ideological birdsong. Politics does not have power. It serves power. And power is supra-political and out of the reach of common citizens.

The casualty of this separation of politics and power is the state. The state has become eviscerated, discredited, its credit rating has been slashed. Greece is only a slightly more extreme example of the situation here in the US, where I live, and elsewhere, in Britain, say. The state is in a state.

So what do we do? The answer is surprisingly simple. We have to take politics back from the political class through confrontation with the power of finance capital and the international status quo – the people who, little more than a year ago, were insisting the Egyptian government was stable. What was so admirable about the various social movements that we all too glibly called “the Arab spring” was their courageous intention to reclaim autonomy and political self-determination.

The protestors in Tahrir Square refused to live in dictatorships propped up to serve the interests of western capital and corrupt local elites. They wanted to reclaim ownership of the means of production, for example through the nationalisation of major state industries. The various movements in north Africa and the Middle East still aim at one thing: autonomy. They demand collective ownership of the places where one lives, works, thinks and plays. This is the most classical and basic goal of politics.

The Occupy movement is fascinating from the standpoint of the separation of politics and power. To be with the Occupy protestors when the chant went up, “this is what democracy looks like”, was really powerful, as was the way in which they conducted general assemblies peacefully, horizontally and non-coercively.

The movement tried to remake direct democracy, with a mixture of the old – concepts such as assembly, consensus and autonomy – and the new, with Twitter feeds and mobile demonstrations organised through messenger services. It has yielded a period of massive political creativity.

It is important to remember that the separation between politics and power did not happen by chance or through the quasi-automatic movement of capitalism. It happened with the connivance of generations of politicians, such as Tony Blair, who embraced free-market capitalism as the engine of growth and personal gain. It has led to a situation where the state, and the entire political class, are discredited.

Occupy is the becoming-conscious of a deep disaffection with normal politics, particularly among the young. And perhaps it is the phenomenon of politicised, radicalised youth that – after two decades of postmodern irony and posturing hipster knowingness – is so striking and exciting.

True politics requires at least two elements: first, a demand, what I call an infinite demand that flows from the perception of an injustice; second, a location where that demand is articulated. There is no politics without location.

If the nation state or the supra-national sphere is not a location for politics, then the task is to create a location. This is the logic of occupation. The Occupy Wall Street protest in Zuccotti Park taught us that much. Otherwise, we are doomed to the abstraction of demonstration and protest. The other thing it taught us is the unpredictable character of location.

It is unclear how the different elements of the Occupy movement will develop. But they certainly will – this genie of popular protest cannot be put back in its bottle. But what it requires is a location or, better, a network of interconnected sites.

So what is the next location? Where to occupy next? It is not for old men like me to offer advice, but a massive occupation of Olympic sites in London in order to stop the dreadful, sad jingoism of the whole tiresome spectacle would be nice.

ž on love

Žižek on Love

What would be my spontaneous attitude towards the universe?  It’s a very dark one.  The first thesis would be one of total vanity: there is nothing basically. I mean it quite literally. Ultimately there are just some fragments some vanishing things, if you look at the universe its one big void.  But then how do things emerge? Here I feel a kind of spontaneous affinity with Quantum physics.  Where the idea is the universe is void. But a postively charged void. And then particular things appear when the balance of the void is disturbed.

It’s not just nothing. Things are out there. It means something went terribly wrong. What we call creation is just some cosmic imbalance, cosmic catastrophe. That things exist by mistake.  I’m even ready to go to the end and to claim that the only way to counteract it, is to assume the mistake and go to the end. And we have a name for this.  It’s called LOVE.

Isn’t Love precisely this cosmic imbalance.  I was always disgusted with this notion of I love the world, universal love. I don’t like the world. I’m basically somewhere in-between: I hate the world, or I’m indifferent towards it. But the whole of reality is just it, it’s stupid, it is out there, I don’t care about it.

Love for me is an extremely violent act. Love is not “I love you all.” Love means I pick out something. It’s this structure of imbalance. Even if this something is just a small detail, a fragile individual person. I say “I love you more than anything else.” In this quite formal sense, Love is evil.

If you really love a women or man, you don’t idealize him/her.  Love means you accept a person with all their failures, stupidities.  You see perfection in imperfection itself, and that’s how we should learn to love the world.

butler on Odradek

Here is Kafka’s short story The Cares of a Family Man written between 1914 and 1917, the link is to Butler’s lecture.

SOME SAY the word Odradek is of Slavonic origin, and try to account for it on that basis. Others again believe it to be of German origin, only influenced by Slavonic. The uncertainty of both interpretations allows one to assume with justice that neither is accurate, especially as neither of them provides an intelligent meaning of the word.

No one, of course, would occupy himself with such studies if there were not a creature called Odradek. At first glance it looks like a flat star-shaped spool for thread, and indeed it does seem to have thread wound upon it; to be sure, they are only old, broken-off bits of thread, knotted and tangled together, of the most varied sorts and colors. But it is not only a spool, for a small wooden crossbar sticks out of the middle of the star, and another small rod is joined to that at a right angle. By means of this latter rod on one side and one of the points of the star on the other, the whole thing can stand upright as if on two legs.

One is tempted to believe that the creature once had some sort of intelligible shape and is now only a broken-down remnant. Yet this does not seem to be the case; at least there is no sign of it; nowhere is there an unfinished or unbroken surface to suggest anything of the kind; the whole thing looks senseless enough, but in its own way perfectly finished. In any case, closer scrutiny is impossible, since Odradek is extraordinarily nimble and can never be laid hold of.

He lurks by turns in the garret, the stairway, the lobbies, the entrance hall. Often for months on end he is not to be seen; then he has presumably moved into other houses; but he always comes faithfully back to our house again. Many a time when you go out of the door and he happens just to be leaning directly beneath you against the banisters you feel inclined to speak to him. Of course, you put no difficult questions to him, you treat him — he is so diminutive that you cannot help it — rather like a child. “Well, what’s your name?” you ask him. “Odradek,” he says. “And where do you live?” “No fixed abode,” he says and laughs; but it is only the kind of laughter that has no lungs behind it. It sounds rather like the rustling of fallen leaves. And that is usually the end of the conversation. Even these answers are not always forthcoming; often he stays mute for a long time, as wooden as his appearance.

I ask myself, to no purpose, what is likely to happen to him? Can he possibly die? Anything that dies has had some kind of aim in life, s6me kind of activity, which has worn out; but that does not apply to Odradek. Am I to suppose, then, that he will always be rolling down the stairs, with ends of thread trailing after him, right before the feet of my children, and my children’s children? He does no harm to anyone that one can see; but the idea that he is likely to survive me I find almost painful.

Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir

Butler’s Lecture

Geneva University Switzerland

What is coalition? Reflections on the conditions of alliance formation with Judith Butler’s work

In her groundbreaking book, Gender Trouble (1990), Judith Butler inaugurates and develops her critique of foundational reasoning – of identity categories such as (biological) sex, or of a transcendental subject such as “the woman” or even “women” (in the plural) – as a critique of  identity politics in general, and of a women’s identity-based feminism in particular.

For this reason, her antifoundationalism appears as a critical practice that seeks not only to rethink the political – along with genders, bodies, subjects and agency – in terms of performativity rather than of representation, but also, and most importantly, to theorize alternatives to identity politics in terms of coalition building. Since then, we can consider that Butler has insistently returned to the action-oriented question of “what is coalition?” and further elaborated on the conditions of possibility of alliance formation – at least, as much as on the conditions of subversion – in order to move effectively toward what she calls a “progressive” or “radical democratic politics.”

This concern has become increasingly explicit in her responses to the 9/11 events – from Precarious Life (2004) and Giving an Account of Oneself (2005) to Frames of War (2010) in which she suggests that the Left consider shared human precarity as “an existing and promising site for coalition exchange” and for rights-claiming. Interestingly, this proposal centered on the yet existing inequalities in the distribution and recognition of precarity – and vulnerability – brings into new critical focus major political themes that have been running throughout her entire work, such as the relations between power, desire, norms for subject formation, and a non-naturalized conception of agency (e.g. Subjects of Desire, 1987; The Psychic Life of Power, 1997), or the question of violence, in particular state violence and public injury, as well as the issue of grieving in relation to the State, the law, war, to sovereignty and kinship arrangements (e.g. Excitable Speech, 1997; Antigone’s Claim, 2002).

Indeed, and according to Butler, a precarity-oriented politics involves not only a new ontology and social theory of the body-in-society in terms of radical interdependency (a claim that extends her discussion in Bodies that Matter, 1993), but also strong normative commitments:

  • first, to a politics of equality, responsibility, sustainability, and protection (to name just a few), so that individual and collective subjects can come into full existence, and live a livable and grievable life (Frames of War; Precarious Life);
  • second, to an epistemology of relative self-unknowability (Giving An Account of Oneself); hence,
  • third, to a critical ethics of naturalized norms and their supporting exclusions, i.e. to (self-)critique as ethics (Giving an Account of Oneself).

This one-day conference aims to reflect – historically, sociologically, philosophically – on the conditions of possibility, on the objects, means and purposes of alliance formation – between minorities, with the State, political parties, and other public actors, or between disciplines, or even across species (e.g. animal-human), etc. –, of political transformation, and thus of a collective agency, in both domestic and international contexts, through the concrete and generic question of “What is coalition?” – with special interest for the ways in which critical perspectives inspired from feminist and queer theory can be made into productive tools to theorize the political at various levels, at different times and locations, but also to intervene and do better democratic work.

We encourage submissions from all research fields that present original material and engage, with creativity and precision, with both the theoretical and practical dimensions of the conference question with insights from – rather than directly on – Butler’s “political theory.

Žižek Interview

Žižek Interview

Apartheid logic: People who are in, People who are out. We are approaching a zero level.

  • Democracy will have to be reinvented or else it will become obsolete
  • OWS doesn’t go far enough. It’s too easy to put blame on greedy bankers, don’t change people, change the system.
  • We should have no illusions, isn’t it nice we are in solidarity etc… I never liked these big enthusiastic moments, what interests me is the day after.
  • Eygpt: Lets be clear, the army is till in pact with Muslim Brotherhood.  There was an incredible fermenting of life, re-organizing civil society.

metonymy

A figure of speech that replaces the name of one thing with the name of something else closely associated with it, e.g.

  • the bottle for alcoholic drink,
  • the press for journalism,
  • skirt for woman,
  • Mozart for Mozart’s music,
  • the Oval Office for the US presidency.

A well‐known metonymic saying is the pen is mightier than the sword (i.e. writing is more powerful than warfare).

A word used in such metonymic expressions is sometimes called a metonym. … An important kind of metonymy is synecdoche , in which the name of a part is substituted for that of a whole (e.g. hand for worker), or vice versa. Modern literary theory has often used ‘metonymy’ in a wider sense, to designate the process of association by which metonymies are produced and understood: this involves establishing relationships of contiguity between two things, whereas metaphor establishes relationships of similarity between them.

hallward on logics of worlds badiou

Hallward, Peter.On Badiou’s Logics of Worlds New Left Review 53 sept oct 2008 97-122.

French philosophy in the twentieth century was marked above all by two projects.1 For the sake of simplicity we might distinguish them with the labels of ‘subject’ and ‘science’. On the one hand, thinkers influenced by phenomenology and existentialism—Sartre, Fanon, de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty—embraced more or less radical notions of individual human freedom, and on that basis sought to formulate models of militant collective commitment that might engage with the forms of oppression or domination that constrain the subjects of a given situation. On the other hand, thinkers marked by new approaches in mathematics and logic, and by the emergence of new human sciences such as linguistics or anthropology, attempted to develop more adequate methods to analyse the fundamental ways in which a situation might be ‘structured in dominance’. In the 1960s in particular,many thinkers came to the conclusion that a concern for the subject or for individual freedom was itself one of the main mechanisms serving to obscure the deeper workings of impersonal and ‘inhuman’ structure, be it unconscious, ideological, economic, ontological, or otherwise.

Deleuze, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida—all sought to develop forms of thinking that might integrate or at least accommodate aspects of both these projects; and that, conditioned by a broadly ‘scientific’ anti-humanism, might decentre but not simply exclude the role of an active subject. What is immediately distinctive about Alain Badiou’s contribution to this endeavour is the trenchant radicalism of his own peculiar subject-science synthesis. Badiou formulates this synthesis in the uncompromising and unfashionable language of truth. Badiou’s chief concern has been to propose a notion of truth that holds equally true in both a ‘scientific’ and a ‘subjective’ sense. A truth must be universally and even ‘eternally’ true, while relying on nothing more, ultimately, than the militant determination of the subjects who affirm it.

By ‘holding true’ to their consequences, the militant partisans of such truths enable them to persist, and to evade the existing norms of knowledge and authority that otherwise serve to differentiate, order and stabilize the elements of their situation. The discoveries of Galileo or Darwin, the principles defended by the French or Haitian revolutionaries, the innovations associated with Cézanne or Schoenberg—these are the sorts of sequences that Badiou has in mind: disruptive and transformative, divisive yet inclusive, as punctual in their occurrence as they are far-reaching in their implications.

Within a situation, a truth is the immanent production of a generic and egalitarian indifference to the differences that (previously) structured that situation.

The two most important general notions that underlie this philosophy of truth are fidelity and inconsistency. However varied the circumstances of its production, a truth always involves a fidelity to inconsistency. The semantic tension between these terms is only apparent. Fidelity : a principled commitment, variously maintained, to the infinite and universalizable implications of a disruptive event. Inconsistency: the presumption, variously occasioned, that such disruption touches on the very being of being.

Inconsistency is the ontological basis, so to speak, of a determined wager on the infinitely revolutionary orientation and destiny of thought. Fidelity is the subjective discipline required to sustain this destiny and thus to affirm an ‘immortality’ that Badiou readily associates with the legacy of Saint Paul and Pascal. Inconsistency is what there is and fidelity is a response to what happens, but it is only by being faithful to the consequences of what happens that we can think the truth of what there is. In every case, ‘the truth of the situation is its inconsistency’, and ‘a truth does not draw its support from consistency but from inconsistency’.

To think the being of a situation as inconsistent rather than consistent is to think it as anarchic and literally unpresentable multiplicity. Badiou posits being as the proliferation of infinite multiplicity or difference, rather than as the orderly manifestation of stable and self-identical beings.

As far as the discourse of being is concerned, the multiple having priority over the one means that any figure of unity or identity, any conception of a being as a being, is itself secondary. Unity is the derivative result of a unifying or identifying operation performed upon a being that is itself without unity or identity, i.e. that in-consists. Badiou admits that we can only ever experience or know what is presented to us as consistent or unified, but it can sometimes happen, in the wake of an ephemeral and exceptional event, that we have an opportunity to think, and hold true to, the inconsistency of what there is. page 99

This means that unity or consistency is not itself a primordial ontological quality, and it implies that the unifying or structuring operation specific to each situation applies to material that in itself is not unified or structured, i.e. that is inconsistent. All that can be presented of such inconsistent being, however, from within the limits of the situation, is that which counts for nothing according to the criteria of the situation. What figures as nothing or ‘void’ will thus present inconsistency ‘according to a situation’.

In the situation of set theory (the situation that presents or counts instances of counting as such), inconsistency takes the form of a literally empty set, a null- or void-set — one that counts as zero. By analogy, in the situation of capitalism, a situation that counts only profits and property, what counts for nothing would be a proletarian humanity.

Now although it is an intrinsic determination of being that it be there, or that it appear (locally), nevertheless it is not exactly pure being-qua-being as such that appears: what appears of pure being is a particular quality of being, namely existence. Thanks to the equation of ontology and set theory, pure being-qua-being is essentially a matter of quantity and univocal determination: something either is or is not, with no intermediary degree. Existence, by contrast, is precisely a ‘quality’ of being, a matter of relative ‘intensity’ or degree.

Something is if it belongs to a situation, but it exists (in a world that manifests something of that situation) always more or less, depending on how intensely or distinctively it appears in that world. We might say for instance that while a great many things belong to the world of the US, it is normally arranged such that certain distinctively ‘American’ things—free speech, pioneers, private property, baseball, freeways, fast food, mobile homes, self-made men—appear or exist more intensely than other, dubiously ‘un-American’ things: ‘unassimilated’ immigrants, communists, supporters of Hezbollah or Hamas, for example.

zupancic

2001 interview with Zupancic

Within reality as it is constituted via what Lacan calls the Imaginary and the Symbolic mechanisms, there is a “place of the lack of the Image,” which is symbolically designated as such. That is to say that the very mechanism of representation posits its own limits and designates a certain beyond which it refers to as “unrepresentable.” In this case, we can say that the place of something that has no image is designated symbolically; and it is this very designation that endows whatever finds itself in this place with the special power of fascination. Since this unrepresentable is usually associated with the transgression of the given limits of the Symbolic, it is spontaneously perceived as “evil,” or at least as disturbing.

In To Be or Not To Be, Lubitsch provides a very good example of “the image that occupies the very place of the lack of the Image.” At the beginning of the film, there is a brilliant scene in which a group of actors is rehearsing a play that features Hitler. The director is complaining about the appearance of the actor who plays Hitler, saying that his make-up is bad and that he doesn’t look like Hitler at all. He also says that what he sees in front of him is just an ordinary man. The scene continues, and the director is trying desperately to name the mysterious “something more” that distinguishes the appearance of Hitler from the appearance of the actor in front of him. One could say that he is trying to name the “evil” that distinguishes Hitler from this man who actually looks a lot like Hitler. He is searching and searching, and finally he notices a photograph of Hitler on the wall, and triumphantly cries out: “That’s it! This is what Hitler looks like!” “But sir,” replies the actor, “this picture was taken of me.” Needless to say, we as spectators were very much taken in by the enthusiasm of the director who saw in the picture something quite different from this poor actor. Now, I would say that there is probably no better “image” of the lack of the Image than this “thing” that the director (but also ourselves) has “seen” in the picture on the wall and that made all the difference between the photograph and the actor. One should stress, however, that this phenomenon is not linked exclusively to the question of evil, but to the question of the “unrepresentable” in general.

butler antigone lacan real

The Act as Feminine: Antigone Between Lacan and Butler
Author: A. Hugill. Goldsmiths College London.

Lacan insists throughout his lectures on Antigone that the tragic heroine should be taken as exemplary of the beautiful, in the Kantian sense.

… the relation of the beautiful to death and desire in Lacan – would gain nuance if the concept of the beautiful from which Lacan is working, namely as it appears in Kant’s Critique of Judgement, were further elaborated.

Echoing Kant’s own definition of the beautiful, Lacan frames it in terms of the pure ‘there is’ (il y a); that which is beautiful “communicate[s] a sign of understanding that is situated precisely at equal distance from the power of the imagination and that of the signifier.” Similarly, Kant’s crucial insight in the Critique of Judgement is to radicalize any exclamation that a thing is beautiful, by pointing to the indeterminate character of the object in question.

Beauty, rather than being a property of an object, describes a sensation of pleasure arising from an overwhelming feeling of life (Lebensgefühl) engendered by the free play of the cognitive powers, imagination (Einbildungskraft) and understanding (Verstand), insofar as they are not restricted by any determinate concept.

Beauty is distinguished from the good and the agreeable inasmuch as it is, for Kant, the only free liking. This free liking to which Kant refers is called favour (Gunst) and it is marked by a “letting-be” of the object, a disinterested interest. Interest in the Critique of Judgement refers to a certain use-value, desire or concern with the existence of the object that, in order for a pure aesthetic judgement to arise, should not be taken into consideration.

Lacan’s own definition of the structure of desire is in fact precisely in tune with this definition of beauty as disinterested interest: the object cause of desire (the objet petit a), for Lacan, can never be attained and so too causes desire to function as a means without end. In the same paradoxical manner, one’s desire resists conceptual rationalization and is sustained by the tension of its unfulfillment. Something remains beautiful so long as it resists being fully conceptualized.

The feeling of the sublime describes those “moments when something entrances us so much that we are ready to forget (and to renounce) everything, our own well-being and all that is associated with it; moments when we are convinced that our existence is worth something only in so far as we are capable of sacrificing it.”  In the case of Antigone, we see a subject who identifies entirely with the Thing, the limit, without a protective distance and in so doing meets her demise.

It is against this backdrop that Antigone’s act is radically re-thought by the Lacanian school, as a case of pure means. For Lacan, Antigone is precisely driven by a certain jouissance and not – as is the case with Creon – by any adherence to a concept of an ethical good (representing family or divine law, as some other commentators suggest). As Butler explains, “Antigone will emerge, then, for Lacan as a problem of beauty, fascination, and death as precisely what intervenes between the desire for the good, the desire to conform to the ethical norm, and thereby derails it, enigmatically, from its path.” Antigone’s act could not be judged beautiful in the Kantian sense if it were merely an external embodiment of a moral good. It is precisely the non-conceptual element of her act that fascinates Lacan and propels his interpretation forward in his later consideration of feminine sexuality in Seminar XX.

Zupancic’s description of the sublime as the ‘jouissance of the Other’ in the above-cited passage provides a key to understanding why it is that Antigone’s act is formulated as a ‘feminine act.’ In Seminar XX: Encore,, feminine jouissance is defined precisely as the ‘jouissance of the Other.’ In this lecture, Lacan discusses the particularity of feminine jouissance in contrast to phallic jouissance. The title of the seminar, meaning “again”, signifies the manner in which enjoyment (jouissance) is never satisfied. There is always a gap or remainder left over and desire is sustained through this impossibility of satisfaction in the sexual relationship. In his lesson “On jouissance,” Lacan famously says that “to man insofar as he is endowed with the organ said to be phallic – I said, ‘said to be’ – the corporal sex or sexual organ of woman – I said ‘of woman,’ whereas in fact woman does not exist, woman is not whole – woman’s sexual organ is of no interest except via the body’s jouissance.”

He is here describing what he calls ‘phallic’ jouissance or the jouissance of the organ – which should not be misconstrued as concerning a biological category. There are phallic women and non-phallic men. It rather denotes to what extent a person identifies with the phallic function. Phallic or “sexual” jouissance, for Lacan, is “the obstacle owing to which man does not come (n’arrive pas)… to enjoy woman’s body, precisely because what he enjoys is the jouissance of the organ.”

Feminine jouissance, on the other hand, is “beyond the phallus” by virtue of its non-subsumption in the phallic order. Impossible to know anything about it other than that some women (and men) experience it, Lacan explains it using an example of mystical ecstasy.  In his invocation of God and the mystics, Lacan’s ‘explanation’ of feminine jouissance points to a pure jouissance of being, a being that is at the very limit of language. With recourse to (post)-Lacanian thinkers like Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, it is possible to conceive of this feminine jouissance as relating to the primary relationship with the m(O)ther and the pre- or extra-symbolic inscription of language on the body. In Kristeva, we find a model of this in her concept of the semiotic, the unnamable within the symbolic, what she calls the “transsymbolic, transpaternal function of poetic language.”

Returning to Antigone, we find in Lacan’s Ethics a clear alignment of Antigone’s act – her unwavering love for the pure ‘there is’ of her brother – with this experience of the limits of language. Antigone’s act is fixed to the singularity of her brother’s being, without reference to any particular content:

“The unique value involved is essentially that of language. Outside of language it is inconceivable, and the being of him who has lived cannot be detached from all he bears with him in the nature of good and evil, of destiny, of consequences for others, or of feelings for himself. That purity, that separation of being from the characteristics of the historical drama he has lived through, is precisely the limit or the ex nihilo to which Antigone is attached. It is nothing more than the break that the very presence of language inaugurates in the life of man. That break is manifested at every moment in the fact that language punctuates everything that occurs in the movement of life.”  [Lacan, Ethics, 279]

The purity of Antigone’s act is at the limits of the means-ends logic constituting the symbolic order. The work to which Antigone commits herself, insofar as it can be called a ‘work,’ is marked by a ceaseless ‘unworking.’  She quite literally goes to the limit – to her own death – and as the multiple and never-ending interpretations of Sophocles’ play suggest, Antigone’s insistence is ultimately ambiguous with regard to any positive conceptualization and offers no determinate program in advance. Though her explicit action is to bestow Polyneices with a proper burial, it is uncertain in which name she insists upon doing so (whether divine or family law, or defiance of the state, or something entirely else).

Lacan suggests that Antigone acts in relation to the pure ‘there is,’ the singularity of her brother independent of any particular content, in the ineffaceable character of what is. Lacan regards this unshakeable yet indeterminate stance as the crucial issue of Sophocles’ text, and the reason for its ceaseless fascination:

“What is, is, and it is to this, to this surface, that the unshakeable, unyielding position of Antigone is fixed. She rejects everything else. The stance of the-race-is-run is nowhere better illustrated than here. And whatever else one relates it to, is only a way of causing uncertainty or disguising the absolutely radical character of the position of the problem in the text.” [Lacan, Ethics, 279]

In his book Enjoy Your Symptom!, Zizek draws on this insight with regard to Antigone, in order to put forward a model of a political subjectivity that might be called ‘anarcho-communist.’ He recounts a historical event: Tito’s ‘No!’ to Stalin in 1948, or the split of Yugoslav Communists from the international communist movement. Zizek argues that the importance of this act was to deny Stalin’s hegemony outside of any pre-determined positive ideological project, and to do so from the very situated position of communism itself; to resist Stalin as a communist, to create a rupture in the communist monolith from within, and to subject it to renewed critical consideration. Zizek remarks that a typical liberal reproach to this Lacanian ethic is to depict it as incompatible with a notion of community, as a suicidal ecstasy that suspends the social dimension. Instead, Zizek wants to suggest that a ‘suicidal gesture’ –as Antigone comes to exemplify it – is at the very foundation of every new social link: “with an act, stricto sensu, we can therefore never fully foresee its consequences, i.e., the way it will transform the existing symbolic space: the act is a rupture after which ‘nothing remains the same.’”  Antigone’s No! to Creon is presented as the real feminine act, the real ethical act as such, because it is situated at the limit of being, the very birthplace of the social itself, a place of pure potentiality from which real change can emerge.

[…] However, at the heart of Mendieta’s artistic action is a commitment to a certain identity, charged with a kind of naïve essentialism. And it is this fixed notion of community that both Butler and Lacan are working against in their writing on Antigone, though from very different poles.  On the one hand,

Butler wants to posit a multiplicity of meaning that is never fixed beyond the performance of a deed. In this sense, Butler’s notion of ‘performativity’ is not so different from the Lacanian ethical idea; but only to the extent that it puts into question the notion of a ‘doer behind the deed’ – a fixed subjecthood – just as the Lacanian ethical act destabilizes the subject.

[…] Rather than pursuing the destabilized subject to the point of rupture, extreme danger and risk, the point where new possibilities truly emerge, Butler believes in the possibility to gradually dismantle what already exists by parodically using the tools already given, without the act of destruction.

Converging on the body of Antigone, we can see two political stances emerge: death-driven insistence on the singularity of being in contrast to a vitalist view of the limitless plasticity or multiplicity of being. In this sense, Antigone’s legacy concerns, fundamentally, no less than the state of our social order itself. Antigone brings to the fore the question of resistance today. Is it any longer possible to resist capitalist-patriarchal heteronormativity by means of parody? Or is it not, rather, that notions of parody and performance have themselves been subsumed within that very order itself and thus exposed to their own impotency?

Sophocles’ Antigone has been repeatedly resurrected over the last centuries as a result of the fascinating, timeless and unresolved problematics that it presents.  In Lacan’s account, mobilized to support his ethics, the radical non-instrumentality of Antigone’s act is brought to the fore. In this way, it becomes for Lacan the site of similarly constituted ideas: the beautiful and the sublime in Kant’s aesthetics, and feminine jouissance. I have added to this list désoeuvrement and radical passivity. What each of these thoughts holds in common is a paradoxical active-passivity, an ‘unworking’ that pursues the limits of experience. In the pursuit of the limit – the Lacanian Real – the subject is in a position of extreme risk and death-driven instability without recourse to any pre-determined conceptual aim. For Zizek, this is the act par excellence, the act that puts into crisis the stability of any order. Indeed, Antigone’s act “most forcefully exposes the utter injustice and contingency of the Law, the fact that the Law functions precisely to ‘actively’…cover over the fact that it is constructed across a void.”