logocentric – Page 59

Kant phenomena noumena

These terms mean literally ‘things that appear’ and ‘things that are thought.’ … [In Kant’s thought, the] intelligible world of noumena is known by pure reason, which gives us knowledge of things as they are.

Things in the sensible world (phenomena) are known through our senses and known only as they appear. To know noumena we must abstract from and exclude sensible concepts such as space and time.

Kant called the determination of noumena and phenomena the ‘noblest enterprise of antiquity’, but in the Critique of Pure Reason he denied that noumena as objects of pure reason are objects of knowledge, since reason gives knowledge only of objects of sensible intuition (phenomena) . Noumena ‘in the negative sense’ are objects of which we have no sensible intuition and hence no knowledge at all; these are things-in-themselves. Noumena ‘in the positive sense’ (e.g. the soul and God) are conceived of as objects of intellectual intuition, a mode of knowledge which man does not possess. In neither sense, therefore, can noumena be known. For both Plato and Kant, nevertheless, conceptions of noumena and the intelligible world are foundational for ethical theory. [The Oxford Companion to Philosophy]

Kant theory of knowledge

All our knowledge begins with experience and it can be either:

— Analytic (e.g. “All bodies are extended”).
— Synthetic (e.g. “All bodies are heavy”)

Judgements based on experience (a posteriori judgements) are always synthetic.

However, there is such a thing as pure a priori knowledge. Even though it begins with experience, it does not come from it: these are ideas that our “faculty of knowledge provides out of itself, with sensible impressions merely prompting it to do this.”

There are analytic a priori judgements, but is it possible to have synthetic a priori judgements?

What [Kant] is suggesting is that we cannot know things, that they cannot be objects of knowledge for us, except in so far as they are subjected to certain a priori conditions of knowledge on the part of the subject. If we assume that the human mind is purely passive in knowledge, we cannot explain the a priori knowledge which we undoubtedly possess. Let us assume, therefore, that the mind is active. This activity does not mean creation of beings out of nothing. It means rather that the mind imposes, as it were, on the ultimate material of experience its own forms of cognition, determined by the structure of human sensibility and understanding, and that things cannot be known except through the medium of these forms. [Frederic Copleston, A History of Philosophy, Vol. VI]

Kant antinomies of pure reason

A paradox. In Kant’s first Critique the antinomies of pure reason show that contradictory conclusions about the world as a whole can be drawn with equal propriety. Each antinomy has a thesis and a contradictory antithesis.

The first antinomy has as thesis that the world has a beginning in time and is limited in space, and as antithesis that it has no beginning and no limits.

— the second proves both the infinite divisibility of space and the contrary;

— the third shows the necessity, but also the impossibility of human freedom, and

— the fourth proves the existence of a necessary being and the lack of existence of such a being.

The solution to this conflict of reason with itself is that the principles of reasoning used are not ‘constitutive,’ showing us how the world is, but ‘regulative,’ or embodying injunctions about how we are to think of it.

When regulative principles are taken outside their proper sphere of employment, as they are when theorizing about the world as a whole, contradiction results.

Kant’s 4th Antinomy

Thesis: “There belongs to the world, either as its part or as its cause, a being that is absolutely necessary.”
Demea’s a priori proof of God’s existence.

Antithesis: “An absolutely necessary being nowhere exists in the world, nor does it exist outside the world as its cause.”
Cleanthes’s counter-argument.

dean revolutionary desire vs. democratic drive 2

By Jodi Dean draft version that is not to be cited

I’ve argued that the sublimation of the drive captures the subject in the repetitive circuits of communicative capitalism. What’s left? A new, shifted, desire, one that recognizes the impossibility of reaching or achieving its object and holds on, refusing to cede it. … Zizek links this new desire to Lacan’s notion of the “desire of the analyst.” [Ticklish Subject 296 and Ecrits, ‘From the Freudian Trieb to the Desire of the Analyst”]

Such a desire is collective, sustaining a community even as it has moved past the need for some kind of phantasmic support. Collective, built around a lack, provides a common desire capable of breaking through the self-enclosed circuit of drive.

The part-of-no-part doesn’t designate a subset of persons, a “we” or a “concrete identity” that can be empirically indicated. It names the gap, division, or antagonism that marks the non-identity of any ordering with its own components. The Lacanian term for the part-of-no-part would then be objet petite a, an impossible, formal object produced as the excess of a process or relation, a kind of gap that incites or annoys, the missingness or not-quite-rightness that calls out to us.

So we have a rupture or a gap and the subjectification of this gap. But subjectification in what sense? There are different politicizations, different mobilizations and subjectifications that call out to and organize different convictions and interests.

The emphasis on the gap necessary for communist desire indexes the non-coincidence of communism with its setting, echoing Marxist themes of negation and affirming the communist legacy of revolution. Nonetheless, communism is not the only political ideology that mobilizes negation and revolution. In fact, it shares such a revolutionary mobilization of negation with capitalism itself, hence communism as the negation of the negation.

The difference in the way they subjectivize the gap, then, is crucial. Capitalist subjectification, the desire it structures and incites, is individual, (even as it tends to sublimate desire in drive, or, differently put, even as individuated desires get caught up in and give way to drive’s powerfully repetitive circuits). To invert Althusser, capitalism interpellates subjects as individuals. A communism that does likewise fails to effect a rupture or install a gap. Communist desire can only be collective.

In a setting of capitalism’s distractions and compulsions, one may very well feel like something is wrong, something is missing, something is deeply unfair. Then one might complicate this idea, or contextualize it, or forget about it and check email. Or one might try to make a difference—signing petitions, blogging, voting, doing one’s own part as an individual. And here is the problem, one continues to think and act individualistically. Under capitalist conditions, communist desire entails “the renunciation of individual freedom,” the deliberate and conscious subordination of self in and to a collective communist will. This subordination requires discipline, work, and organization. It is a process carried out over time and through collective struggle.
Indeed, it’s active collective struggle that changes and reshapes desire from its individual (and for Lukacs bourgeois and reified form) into a common, collective one.

In this provisional sketch of a theory of communist desire, I’ve emphasized the lack (the openness of desire) and its subjectification. I’ve argued that communist desire is the collective subjectification of the lack. It is a collective assumption of the division or antagonism constitutive of the political, an assumption that takes collectivity as the form of desire in two senses: our desire and our desire for us; or, communist desire is the collective desire for collective desiring.

Oh, demographers and statisticians! What have you unleashed?As capital demolishes all previous social ties, the counting on which it depends provides a new figure of belonging! Capital has to measure itself, count its profits, its rate of profit, its share of profit, its capacity to leverage its profit, its confidence or anxiety in its capacity for future profit. Capital counts and analyzes who has what, representing to itself the measures of its success. These very numbers can be, and in the slogan “We are the 99%” they are, put to use. They aren’t resignified—they are claimed as the subjectification of the gap separating the top one percent from the rest of us. With this claim, the gap becomes a vehicle for the expression of communist desire, that is, for a politics that asserts the people as divisive force in the interest of over-turning present society and making a new one anchored in collectivity and the common.

In a close engagement with Catherine Malabou’s discussion of severe brain injuries, Zizek discusses the logic of dialectical transitions, “after negation/alienation/loss, the subject ‘returns to itself,’ but this subject is not the same as the substance that underwent the alienation—it is constituted in the very movement of returning to itself.”[i] Zizek concludes, “the subject is as such the survivor of its own death, a shell which remains after it is deprived of its substance.” Proletarianization is a name for the process of this deprivation under capital (as I discuss in chapter three). The deprivation of substance—common, social, substance—leaves collectivity as its shell, as the form that remains for communist desire.

This collective form overlaps with the object-cause of communist desire, the people understood as the part-of-no-part. As I argue above, the part-of-no-part names the gap or antagonism that marks the non-identity of any ordering with its own components. It can thus be designated with Lacan’s objet petit a, an impossible formal object produced as the excess of a process, a missingness or off-ness that calls out to us.

Zizek notes that for Lacan, the object of desire always remains at a distance from the subject; no matter how close the subject gets to the object, the object remains elusive.[ii]

The distinction between object and object-cause is not the same as any old object to which it attaches.

The object-cause of communist desire is the people and, again, the people not as a name for the social whole but as a name for the exploited, producing majority.

[i] Living in the End Times, 307
[ii] See Living in the End Times 303

Conclusion

I [Jodi Dean] have attempted to set out an idea of communist desire in the space marked by the end of a certain left melancholy and by an alternative to the way of the drive. Whereas some have viewed drive’s sublimation as the alternative to a desire configured in terms of law and its transgression, I’ve sketched an alternative notion of desire, one that, via collectivity, breaks from drive’s repetitive circuits. Instead of trapped in failure, getting off on failing to reach the goal, communist desire subjectivizes its own impossibility, its constitutive lack and openness.

dean revolutionary desire vs. democratic drive 1

By Jodi Dean draft version that is not to be cited

As is well-known, Freud distinguishes melancholia from mourning. Mourning responds to the loss of an object of love, whether that object is a person, country, freedom, or ideal. Reality confronts the subject with its loss and piecemeal, painfully, and over time, the subject withdraws its attachment from the lost object until the work of mourning is complete and the ego is again free, uninhibited, and capable of love. Although similar to mourning with respect to the absence of interest in the outside world and the general inhibition of activity, melancholia evinces a crucial difference: a lowering of self-regard that is manifest in self-reproach and self-reviling to the point not only of self-punishment but of the very “over-coming of the instinct which compels every living thing to cling to life.” Freud writes:

The melancholic displays something else besides which is lacking in mourning — an extraordinary diminution in his self-regard, an impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale. In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself. The patient represents his ego to us as worthless, incapable of any achievement and morally despicable; he reproaches himself, vilifies himself and expects to be cast out and punished. He abases himself before everyone and commiserates with his own relatives for being connected with anyone so unworthy [Freud cited in Dean 2011].

To account for this difference in self-regard, Freud distinguishes between mourning’s consciousness of loss and the unknown and unconscious dimension of object loss in melancholia. Something about the melancholic’s loss remains unconscious.

Even when the melancholic knows that he lost, he does not know what he has lost, in what his loss consists for him. Psychoanalysis addresses this unconscious element of melancholic loss.

Freud’s gesture to the melancholic’s loss of self-respect points in a similar direction. To be sure, he isn’t explicit here. His discussion evades, somewhat, the reason for the loss of self-respect (to which I said I would return). Nonetheless, the example he takes from the clinic hints at why the subject loses self-respect. Describing a woman who “loudly pities her husband for being tied to such an incapable wife,” Freud observes that she is really accusing her husband of incapacity. Her self-reproaches, some of which are genuine, “are allowed to obtrude themselves, since they help to mask the others and make recognition of the true state of affairs impossible.”

Moreover, these reproaches “derive from the pros and cons of the conflict of love that has led to the loss of love” (247). Might it not be the case, then, that the woman is quite rightly recognizing her own incapacity in finding a capable husband, one capable of sustaining her desire?

Might she not be punishing herself for compromising, for making due, for allowing the pros and cons of the conflict of love to constrain her desire as she acquiesces to a reality of acceptance and moderation to which there seems to be no alternative?

If the answer to these questions is yes, then the woman’s loss of self-respect is an indication of the guilt she feels at having ceded her desire.

To use the terms given to us by Lacan, “the only thing one can be guilty of is giving ground relative to one’s desire.” [Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 321]

The woman’s identification with her husband is a compromise, the way she sublimates her desire so as to make him the object of it. The ferocity of her super-ego and the unrelenting punishment to which it subjects her indicates that she has given up on the impossibility of desire, desire’s own constitutive dissatisfaction, to accommodate herself to everyday life.

The enjoyment, jouissance, that desire can’t attain, drive can’t avoid. Unable to satisfy or maintain desire, the subject enjoys in another way, the way of the drive.

If desire is always a desire to desire, a desire that can never be filled, a desire for a jouissance or enjoyment that can never be attained, drive functions as a way to enjoy through failure. In drive, one doesn’t have to reach the goal to enjoy. The activities one undertakes to achieve a goal become satisfying own their own. Because they provide a little kick of enjoyment, they come themselves to take the place of the goal. Attaching to the process, enjoyment captures the subject. Further, as Slavoj Zizek argues, the shift from desire to drive effects a change in the status of the object. Whereas the object of desire is originally lost, “which emerges as lost,” in drive loss itself is an object [Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London, Verso: 2008) 328]. In other words, drive isn’t a quest for a lost object; it’s the enactment of loss or the force loss exerts on the field of desire. So drives don’t circulate around a space that was once occupied by an ideal, impossible object. Rather, drive is the sublimation of desire as it turns back in on itself, this turning thereby producing the loop of drive and providing its own special charge.

An emphasis on the drive dimension of melancholia, on Freud’s attention to the way sadism in melancholia is “turned round upon the subject’s own self,” leads to an interpretation of the general contours shaping the left that differs from Brown’s. Instead of a left attached to an unacknowledged orthodoxy, we have one that has given way on the desire for communism, betrayed its historical commitment to the proletariat, and sublimated revolutionary energies into restorationist practices that strengthen the hold of the capitalism. This left has replaced commitments to the emancipatory, egalitarian struggles of working people against capitalism, commitments that were never fully orthodox, but always ruptured, conflicted, and contested, with incessant activity (not unlike the mania Freud also associates with melancholia) and so now satisfies itself with criticism and interpretation, small projects and local actions, particular issues and legislative victories, art, technology, procedures, and process.

It sublimates revolutionary desire to democratic drive,

to the repetitious practices offered up as democracy (whether representative, deliberative, or radical), having already conceded to the inevitably of capitalism, “noticeably abandoning any striking power against the big bourgeoisie,” to return to Benjamin’s language. For such a left enjoyment comes from its withdrawal from power and responsibility, its sublimation of goals and responsibilities into the branching, fragmented practices of micro-politics, self-care, and issue awareness. Perpetually slighted, harmed, and undone, this left remains stuck in repetition, unable to break out of the circuits of drive in which it is caught, unable because it enjoys.

Žižek on Idea of communism

Slavoj Žižek in Lacanian Ink

The Left is facing the difficult task of emphasizing that … there is nothing “natural” in the present crisis, that the existing global economic system relies on a series of political decisions—while simultaneously acknowledging that … the system obeys a pseudo-natural logic of its own … this is not the result of an evil plot by capitalists … For this reason, what is now required is not a moralizing critique of capitalism, but the full re-affirmation of the Idea of communism.

The Idea of communism, as elaborated by Badiou, remains a Kantian regulative idea lacking any mediation with historical reality. Badiou emphatically rejects any such mediation as a regression to an historicist evolutionism which betrays the purity of the Idea, reducing it to a positive order of Being (the Revolution conceived as a moment of the positive historical process). This Kantian mode of reference effectively allows us to characterize Badiou’s deployment of the “communist hypothesis” … As such, it invites us to repeat the passage from Kant to Hegel—to re-conceive the Idea of communism as an Idea in the Hegelian sense, that is, as an Idea which is in the process of its own actualization. The Idea that “makes itself what it is” is thus no longer a concept opposed to reality as its lifeless shadow, but one which gives reality and existence to itself. Recall Hegel’s infamous “idealist” formula according to which Spirit is its own result, the product of itself. Such statements usually provoke sarcastic “materialist” comments (“so it is not actual people who think and realize ideas, but Spirit itself, which, like Baron Munchhausen, pulls itself up by its own hair . . .”). But consider, for example, a religious Idea which catches the spirit of the masses and becomes a major historical force? In a way, is this not a case of an Idea actualizing itself, becoming a “product of itself”? Does it not, in a kind of closed loop, motivate people to fight for it and to realize it?

What the notion of the Idea as a product of itself makes visible is thus not a process of idealist self-engendering, but the materialist fact that an Idea exists only in and through the activity of the individuals engaged with it and motivated by it. What we have here is emphatically not the kind of historicist/evolutionist position that Badiou rejects, but something much more radical: an insight into how historical reality itself is not a positive order, but a “not-all” which points towards its own future. It is this inclusion of the future as the gap in the present order that renders the latter “not- all,” ontologically incomplete, and thus explodes the self-enclosure of the historicist/evolutionary process. In short, it is this gap which enables us to distinguish historicity proper from historicism.

Why, then, the Idea of communism? For three reasons, which echo the Lacanian triad of the I-S-R:

— at the Imaginary level, because it is necessary to maintain continuity with the long tradition of radical millenarian and egalitarian rebellions;

— at the Symbolic level, because we need to determine the precise conditions under which, in each historical epoch, the space for communism may be opened up;

— finally, at the level of the Real, because we must assume the harshness of what Badiou calls the eternal communist invariants (egalitarian justice, voluntarism, terror, “trust in the people”).

Such an Idea of communism is clearly opposed to socialism, which is precisely not an Idea, but a vague communitarian notion applicable to all kinds of organic social bonds, from spiritualized ideas of solidarity (“we are all part of the same body”) right up to fascist corporatism. The Really Existing Socialist states were precisely that: positively existing states, whereas communism is in its very notion anti-statist.

Where does this eternal communist Idea come from? Is it part of human nature, or, as Habermasians propose, an ethical premise (of equality or reciprocal recognition) inscribed into the universal symbolic order? Its eternal character cannot, after all, be accounted for by specific historical conditions. The key to resolving this problem is to focus on that against which the communist Idea rebels: namely, the hierarchical social body whose ideology was first formulated in great sacred texts such as The Book of Manu. As was demonstrated by Louis Dumont in his Homo hierarchicus, social hierarchy is always inconsistent, that is, its very structure relies on a paradoxical reversal (the higher sphere is, of course, higher than the lower, but, within the lower order, the lower is higher than the higher) on account of which the social hierarchy can never fully encompass all its elements. It is this constitutive inconsistency that gives birth to what Rancière calls “the part of no-part,” that singular element which remains out of place in the hierarchical order, and, as such, functions as a singular universal, giving body to the universality of the society in question.

The communist Idea, then, is the eternal demand co-substantial with this element that lacks its proper place in the social hierarchy (“we are nothing, and we want to be all”).

Our task is thus to remain faithful to this eternal Idea of communism: to the egalitarian spirit kept alive over thousands of years in revolts and utopian dreams, in radical movements from Spartacus to Thomas Müntzer, including within the great religions (Buddhism versus Hinduism, Daoism or Legalism versus Confucianism, etc.). The problem is how to avoid the choice between radical social uprisings which end in defeat, unable to stabilize themselves in a new order, and the retreat into an ideal displaced to a domain outside social reality (for Buddhism we are all equal—in nirvana).

It is here that the originality of Western thought becomes clear, particularly in its three great historical ruptures: Greek philosophy’s break with the mythical universe; Christianity’s break with the pagan universe; and modern democracy’s break with traditional authority. In each case, the egalitarian spirit is transposed into a new positive order (limited, but nonetheless actual).

In short, the wager of Western thought is that radical negativity (whose first and immediate expression is egalitarian terror) is not condemned to being expressed in short ecstatic outbursts after which things are returned to normal. On the contrary, radical negativity, as the undermining of every traditional hierarchy, has the potential to articulate itself in a positive order within which it acquires the stability of a new form of life.

Such is the meaning of the Holy Spirit in Christianity: faith can not only be expressed in, but also exists as, the collective of believers. And this faith is itself based on “terror,” as indicated by Christ’s insistence that he brings a sword, not peace, that whoever does not hate his father and mother is not a true follower, and so on. The content of this terror thus involves the rejection of all traditional hierarchical and community ties, with the wager that a different collective link is possible—an egalitarian bond between believers connected by agape as political love.

Democracy itself provides another example of such an egalitarian link based on terror. As Claude Lefort notes, the democratic axiom is that the place of power is empty, that there is no one directly qualified for the vacancy, either by tradition, charisma, or leadership qualities. This is why, before democracy can enter the stage, terror has to do its work, forever dissociating the place of power from any natural or directly qualified pretender: the gap between this place and those who temporarily occupy it must be maintained at all costs.

This is also why Hegel’s deduction of the monarchy can be given a democratic supplement: Hegel insists on the monarch as the “irrational” (i.e. contingent) head of state precisely in order to keep the summit of state power apart from the expertise embodied in the state bureaucracy. While the bureaucrats are chosen on account of their abilities and qualifications, the king is the king by birth— that is, ultimately, he is chosen by lot, on account of natural contingency. The danger Hegel was trying to avoid here exploded a century later in Stalinist bureaucracy, which was precisely the rule of (Communist) experts: Stalin is not a figure of a master, but the one who “really knows,” an expert in all imaginable fields, from economy to linguistics, from biology to philosophy.

We can well imagine a democratic procedure maintaining the same gap on account of the irreducible moment of contingency in every electoral result: far from being a limitation, the fact that elections do not pretend to select the most qualified person is what protects them from the totalitarian temptation (which is why, as was already clear to the Ancient Greeks, choosing rulers by lot is the most democratic form of selection). That is to say, as Lefort has again demonstrated, the achievement of democracy is to turn what for traditional authoritarian power is the moment of greatest crisis—the moment of transition from one master to another, the panic- inducing instant at which “the throne is empty”—into the very source of its strength: democratic elections thus represent the passage through that zero-point at which the complex network of social links is dissolved into a purely quantitative multiplicity of individuals whose votes are mechanically counted. The moment of terror, of the dissolution of all hierarchical links, is thereby re-enacted and transformed into the foundation of a new and stable political order.

Measured by his own standards of what a rational state should be, Hegel was thus perhaps wrong to fear universal democratic suffrage (see his nervous rejection of the English Reform Bill in 1832. It is precisely democracy (universal suffrage) which, much more appropriately than Hegel’s own State of estates, performs the “magic” trick of converting radical negativity into a new political order: in democracy, the negativity of terror (the destruction of everyone who pretends to identify with the place of power), is aufgehoben and turned into the positive form of the democratic procedure.

The question today, now that we know the limitations of that formal procedure, is whether we can imagine a step further in this process whereby egalitarian negativity reverts into a new positive order.

We should look for traces of such an order in different domains, including in scientific communities. The way the CERN community functions is indicative here: in an almost utopian manner, individual efforts are undertaken in a collective non-hierarchical spirit, and dedication to the scientific cause (to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang) far outweighs any material considerations. But are such traces, no matter how sublime, merely that —— marginal traces?

… Two years before his death, when it became clear that there would be no immediate European revolution, and that the idea of building socialism in one country was nonsense, Lenin wrote: “What if the complete hopelessness of the situation, by stimulating the efforts of the workers and peasants tenfold, offered us the opportunity to create the fundamental requisites of civilization in a different way from that of the West European countries?”[1]

Is this not the predicament of the Morales government in Bolivia, of the (former) Aristide government in Haiti, of the Maoist government in Nepal? They came to power through “fair” democratic elections, rather than insurrection, but having gained power, they exerted it in a way which was (partially, at least) “non-statist”: directly mobilizing their grassroots supporters, by-passing the Party-State network. Their situation is “objectively” hopeless: the whole drift of history is against them, they cannot rely on any “objective tendencies” pushing in their direction, all they can do is to improvise, do what they can in a desperate situation.

Nevertheless, does this not give them a unique freedom? (And are we—the contemporary Left—not in exactly the same situation?) It is tempting to apply here the old distinction between “freedom from” and “freedom for”: does their freedom from History (with its laws and objective tendencies) not sustain their freedom for creative experimenting? In their activity, they can rely only on the collective will of their supporters.

According to Badiou, “The model of the centralized party made possible a new form of power that was nothing less than the power of the party itself. We are now at what I call a ‘distance from the State.’ This is first of all because the question of power is no longer ‘immediate’: nowhere does a ‘taking power’ in the insurrectional sense seem possible today.”[2] But does this not rely on an all too simple alternative? What about heroically assuming whatever power may be available—in the full awareness that the “objective conditions” are not “mature” enough for radical change— and, against the grain, do what one can?

Let us return to the situation in Greece in the summer of 2010, when popular discontent brought about the delegitimization of the entire political class and the country approached a power vacuum. Had there been any chance for the Left to take over state power, what could it have done in such a situation of “complete hopelessness”? Of course (if we may permit ourselves this personification), the capitalist system would have gleefully allowed the Left to take over, if only to ensure that Greece ended up in a state of economic chaos which would then serve as a severe lesson to others.

Nevertheless, despite such dangers, wherever an opening for taking power does arise, the Left should seize the opportunity and confront the problems head-on, making the best of a bad situation (in the case of Greece: renegotiating the debt, mobilizing European solidarity and popular support for its predicament).

The tragedy of politics is that there will never be a “good” moment to seize power: the opportunity will always offer itself at the worst possible moment (characterized by economic fiasco, ecological catastrophe, civil unrest, etc.), when the ruling political class has lost its legitimacy and the fascist-populist threat lurks in the background.

For example, the Scandinavian countries, while continuing to maintain high levels of social equality and a powerful Welfare State, also score very well on global competitiveness: proof that “generous, relatively egalitarian welfare states should not be seen as utopias or protected enclaves, but can also be highly competitive participants in the world market. In other words, even within the parameters of global capitalism there are many degrees of freedom for radical social alternatives.”[3]

Perhaps the most succinct characterization of the epoch which began with the First World War is the well-known phrase attributed to Gramsci: “The old world is dying away, and the new world struggles to come forth: now is the time of monsters.” Were Fascism and Stalinism not the twin monsters of the twentieth century, the one emerging out of the old world’s desperate attempts to survive, the other out of a misbegotten endeavor to build a new one? And what about the monsters we are engendering now, propelled by techno-gnostic dreams of a biogenetically controlled society? All the consequences should be drawn from this paradox: perhaps there is no direct passage to the New, at least not in the way we imagined it, and monsters necessarily emerge in any attempt to force that passage.

One sign of a new rise of this monstrosity is that the ruling classes seem less and less able to rule, even in their own interests. Take the fate of Christians in the Middle East. Over the last two millennia, they have survived a series of calamities, from the end of the Roman Empire through defeat in crusades, the decolonization of the Arab countries, the Khomeini revolution in Iran, etc.—with the notable exception of Saudi Arabia, the main US ally in this region, where there are no autochthonous Christians. In Iraq, there were approximately one million of them under Saddam, leading exactly the same lives as other Iraqi subjects, with one of them, Tariq Aziz, even occupying the high post of foreign minister and becoming Saddam’s confidante. But then, something weird happened to Iraqi Christians, a true catastrophe — a Christian army occupied (or liberated, if you want) Iraq.

The Christian occupation army dissolved the secular Iraqi army and thus left the streets open to Muslim fundamentalist militias to terrorize both each other and the Christians. No wonder roughly half of Iraq’s Christians soon left the country, preferring even the terrorist-supporting Syria to a liberated Iraq under Christian military control. In 2010, things took a turn for the worse. Tariq Aziz, who had survived the previous trials, was condemned by a Shia court to death by hanging for his “persecution of Muslim parties” (i.e., his fight against Muslim fundamentalism) under Saddam.

Bomb attacks on Christians and their churches followed one after the other, leaving dozens dead, so that finally, in early November 2010, the Baghdad archbishop Atanasios Davud appealed to his flock to leave Iraq: “Christians have to leave the beloved country of our ancestors and escape the intended ethnic cleansing. This is still better than getting killed one after the other.” And to dot the i, as it were, that same month it was reported that al Maliki had been confirmed as Iraqi prime minister thanks to Iranian support. So the result of the US intervention is that Iran, the prime agent of the axis of Evil, is edging closer to dominating Iraq politically.

US policy is thus definitively approaching a stage of madness, and not only in terms of domestic policy (as the Tea Party proposes to fight the national debt by lowering taxes, i.e., by raising the debt—one cannot but recall here Stalin’s well-known thesis that, in the Soviet Union, the state was withering away through the strengthening of its organs, especially its organs of police repression). In foreign policy also, the spread of Western Judeo-Christian values is organized by creating conditions which lead to the expulsion of Christians (who, maybe, could move to Iran . . .). This is definitely not a clash of civilizations, but a true dialogue and cooperation between the US and the Muslim fundamentalists.[4]

Our situation is thus the very opposite of the classical twentieth-century predicament in which the Left knew what it had to do (establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, etc.), but simply had to wait patiently for the opportunity to offer itself.

Today, we do not know what we have to do, but we have to act now, because the consequences of inaction could be catastrophic. We will have to risk taking steps into the abyss of the New in totally inappropriate situations; we will have to reinvent aspects of the New just in order to maintain what was good in the Old (education, healthcare, etc.) … In short, our times can be characterized as none other than Stalin characterized the atom bomb: not for those with weak nerves.

Communism is today not the name of a solution but the name of a problem: the problem of the commons in all its dimensions —— the commons of nature as the substance of our life, the problem of our biogenetic commons, the problem of our cultural commons (“intellectual property”), and, last but not least, the problem of the commons as that universal space of humanity from which no one should be excluded. Whatever the solution might be, it will have to solve this problem.

McNay on Butler pt 1

McNay, Lois “Subject, Psyche and Agency : The Work of Judith Butler” Theory, Culture & Society 16.2 (1999) : 175-93. McNay document download here
McNay’s article is a thorough examination of Butler’s conception of performativity and agency. McNay then proceeds to compliment Butler with the work of Bordieu and Castoriadis. I should really follow up with notes but I don’t have the time right now.

Fink’s take on Bollas

Bruce Fink’s take on Christopher Bollas (it isn’t pretty)
Note that Bollas (1983), who is referenced by many relationalists, tried to co-opt Lacan’s term Other by situating the Other in himself as analyst. He wrote, “It is a feature of our present day understanding of the transference, that the Other source of the analysand’s free association is the psychoanalyst’s countertranference” (p.3). This reduces the triad Lacan presented as crucial to the analytic situation — the analysand’s ego, the Other (as the analysand’s unconscious), and the analyst’s ego — to a dyad, which amounts to a collapse of the symbolic dimension into the imaginary. For example, rather than simply ask his analysand “Helen” why she thought she often lapsed into silence (or what was going through her mind at such times, to see if anything had occurred to her from the Freudian “Other scene” known as the unconscious — the “anderer Schauplatz” that Freud 1900/1958 pp. 48 and 536, borrows from Fechner — or if anyone had ever lapsed into silence like that with her in the past, to see if the pauses were related to her history) Bollas responded to her by saying that it must be difficult for her “to speak to this stranger (the analyst) and … to entrust the simplest things to him” (p. 13). This total presumption on his part is based on his own sense of what it must be like to talk to someone new (many of my analysands, for example, have no such trouble at the outset). Moreover, this interpretation, like several others he made based on his countertransference, had little if any effect, and Helen’s silences only seemed to stop when they were connected the experience of her mother — that is, her history with her mother. Note that this is probably what she would have told him at the outset ( that is, approximately a year earlier) had he simply asked if anyone had ever lapsed into silence like that with her in the past, since it was her mother who had done so. The detour he took via his own subjectivity — that is, his attempt to understand her experience through his own experience of himself with her in the analytic setting — seems quite sterile, requiring him to make a series of guesses based on his own personality and countertranference, none of which really seem to hit the mark. And this detour (this attempt to fathom her subjectivity on the bases of his own subjectivity) is necessitated by his failure to ask one of the most elementary questions imaginable. [Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique: A Lacanian Approach for Practitioners. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007. Page 149. note 26.]

Butler take on Bollas

The analyst is, in her own way, dispossessed in the moment of acting as its site of transfer for me, and for reason that I cannot know. What am I calling on her to be? And how does she take up that call? GA 55

… Bollas makes the case that the analyst must not only allow himself to become used but even “be prepared on occasion to become situationally ill” (Bollas 204). The analyst allows hims to be deployed in the environmental idiom of the analysand at the same time as he develops a reflective and deliberate capacity for analysis within that difficult situation. … One patient speaks and then falls silent, leaving Bollas with a sense of aloneness and disorientation. When he finally gives voice to this sense within the session, it is to suggest that for and with him the patient has effectively recreated the environment in which she had felt suddenly isolated and lost as a young child. He asks whether she has asked him to inhabit this experience through her long pauses so that he can know what it was she then felt. What she offers, then, is less a narrative than a recreated scene of suddenly abandoned communication and a disorienting loss of contact.

There is a narrative dimension to his subsequent intervention since he asks whether this experience belongs to her past. The point, however, is less to reconstruct the precise details of the story than to establish another possibility for communication within the transference.

When he suggests that she has given him the position of re-experiencing her own experience of loss and absence, he communicates to her in a way that has not been done before, and the conversation that follows, explicitly thematizing this broken form of communication, constitutes a more connected mode of communication, working to alter the default scene of address.

The model of psychoanalytic intervention that Bollas affirms constitutes a significant departure from the classical notion of the cold and distant analyst who keeps every counter-transferential issue to himself. For Bollas, “the analyst will need to become lost in the patient’s world, lost in the sense of not knowing what his feelings and states of mind are in any one moment” (qtd in Butler 57).

Later he remarks that only when the analyst presents himself to be used by the patient is there any hope that the counter-transference can facilitate a new set of object relations:

“Only by making a good object (the analyst) go somewhat mad can such a patient believe in his analysis and know that the analyst has been where he has been and has survived and emerged intact” (qtd in Butler 57).

Bollas clearly suggests that the analyst must allow him- or herself to be impinged upon by the client, even undergo a kind of dispossession of self, as well as to maintain a reflective psychoanalytic distance and attitude.

His interpretations were meant to be played with — kicked around, mulled over, torn to pieces — rather than regarded as the official version of the truth. [Bollas qtd in Butler 57].

Butler structure of address

If I give an account, and give it to you, then my narrative depends upon a structure of address. But if I can address you, I must first have been addressed, brought into the structure of address as a possibility of language before I was able to find my own way to make use of it. This follows, not only from the fact that language first belongs to the other and I acquire it through a complicated form of mimesis, but also because the very possibility of linguistic agency is derived from the situation in which one finds oneself addressed by a language one never chose. GA 53

I would suggest that the structure of address is not a feature of narrative, one of its many and variable attributes, but an interruption of narrative. The moment the story is addressed to someone, it assumes a rhetorical dimension that is not reducible to a narrative function. It presumes that someone, and it seeks to recruit and act upon that someone. Something is being done with language when the account that I give begins: it is invariably interlocutory, ghosted, laden, persuasive, and tactical. It may well seek to communicate a truth, but it can do this, if it can, only by exercising a relational dimension of language. GA 63

This view has implications for the making of moral judgements as well: namely, that the structure of address conditions the making of judgements about someone or his or her actions; that it is not reducible to the judgement; and that the judgement, unbeholden to the ethics implied by the structure of address, tends toward violence. … To hold a person accountable for his or her life in narrative form may even be to require a falsification of that life in order to satisfy the criterion of a certain kind of ethics, one that tends to break with relationality. GA 63

.. we must think of a susceptibility to others that is unwilled , unchosen, that is a condition of our responsiveness to others, even a condition of our responsibility for them. It means, among other things, that this susceptibility designates a nonfreedom and, paradoxically, it is on the basis of this susceptaibility over which we have no choice that we become responsible for others. GA 87-88

Žižek on democracy, Berlusconi, bologna

Žižek on Youtube

As in Eygpt and Tunisia the thinking goes, we get rid of corrupt people and we get thriving democracy and economy. The same formula is repeated in european countries where we do have thriving democracy. the multi-party democratic system can’t capture the level of social discontent. Zizek cites Blair in England, he was declared most hated person in UK and 2 weeks later he won general elections. People felt a dissatisifaction, but it can’t be represented in their political choice. then we get car burnings, and riots. what is happening now in China and Singapore should give us pause for thought … till now even if capitalism need 20 yrs of dictatorship, but when things strated to move capitalism did engender a demand for freedom/democracy. but events now this eternal marriage between democracy and capitalism are heading for a divorce: Singapore, Malaysia, China, 3 strong capitalist economy, but no sign of democracy. this is something very ominous at work. We see signs in the West. It won’t be old fascist authoritarianism, but one direction is Berlusconi, an openly obscene functioning of power, the truth of Berlusconi, the point is what is happening in the power structure, forget who he slept with … Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, painted this new type of authoritarian regime, half obscene hedonist regime, like Groucho Marx in power. It’s clear that with new types of economic crisis, all of a sudden it explodes, and to save yourself you need fast radical state actions. Formal democracy doesn’t work like this … Bush proposed 750 billion dollars of aid to banks. First Congress rejected it, but then Bush, Obama,McCain, got together and told Congress this is important quit f****ng around. And Congress passed the bill. [On the Bologna educational reforms] A concerted attack on Immanuel Kant’s public use of reason, Universities now become factories to produce experts, to solve problems, problems defined by thos in power. But this is not a true critical thinking.

Bosteels on Žižek

Bosteels, Bruno. The Actuality of Communism. New York: Verso, 2011.

To envision a new positive order beyond the present horizon thus requires that we take a step back to grasp the moment of genesis of order out of disorder. “In the end, teh alternative here is between idealism and materialism: is the ‘big Other’ (the ideal symbolic order) always already here as a kind of insurmountable horizon, or is it possible to deploy ts ‘genesis’ out of the dispersed ‘non-all’ network of contingent material singularities?” Žižek also asks, before answering his own question in the positive: “The answer is a definite ‘yes’ — it is contained in Lacan’s unexpected vindication of the notion of creativity at its most radical, that is, as creatio ex nihilo: by means of reference to the void of the Thing in the midst of the symbolic structure, the subject is able to ‘bend’ the symbolic space she inhabits, and thus to define his/her desire in its idiosyncrasy.”

To justify his belief in the possibility of a transformative act that would open up a new order not limited to the alternative of either the pure lack of desire or else the pure positivity of drives, Žižek thus raises the question of the originary act that brings order out of disorder and breaks with the constraints of the always already existing state of affairs. 204