logocentric – Page 61

Žižek in London July 2011

For the video lecture look on the side panel under Žižek London 2011

King’s Speech: the cause of his stuttering is his inability to identify with his symbolic function. The movie is how to make this intelligent guy, stupid enough so that he is able to become King.
Black Swan: while a man, even if he becomes stupid, can still retain his title and have a private life, but a woman needs to make a choice, if you withdraw from a public career you will die.

– Can I please have a coffee without cream.

– Sorry we have run out of cream, we only have milk, can I bring you a coffee without milk?

A customer enters a store and asks, “You probably don’t have butter or do you?” The clerk replies, “Sorry we are not the store that doesn’t have butter, we’re the store that doesn’t have toilet paper. The store that doesn’t have butter is down the street.”

Catastrophic but serious: we know about the impending catastrophe, but don’t take it seriously, this is what psychoanalysis calls the fetishist split. I know very well, but nevertheless.

We believe much more than we know that we believe. I am a totally cynical person I don’t care, but in your actions, in what you do, we see your beliefs. Niels Borg and the horse shoe.

The first one to provide the right direction: GK Chesteron, The Man Who was Thursday.

It is not enough to say, “Communism was a noble idea, it was just a contingent distortion of Stalin that ruined it.” No, the misinterpretation, is grounded in the idea itself. I’m not anti-capitalist in a naive sense, but in the sense that when you talk about taoday’s global capitalism, don’t just mention Western countries in the G8 doing bad stuff, mention the Congo, that doesn’t function as a state, its a basket case. The Republic of Congo is not a deviation but is precisely a part of today’s totality of capitalism. TOTALITY this is one of the crucial critical notions we should rehabilitate today.

The Hegelian notion of totality, to observie it in its totality, you should include its antagonism, inconsistencies, in other words you cannot say that Congo and China are inconsistencies that don’t count, no these have to be included in the notion.

Necessary Inner Distortions: Things go wrong for necessary reasons. Public use of reason subtracted from authority etc. We are witnessing an attempt on public use of reason, in University institutions, the space of freedom is being convereted into production of expert knowledge, factory for producing experts.

begin

1+1=3 Not just a Hegelian thing.

The opposition between liberal democracy and religious fundamentalism is a false one.

One need put this section in context. We’re talking about the subject. But the subject where, when, how? It comes about yes. From birth? How? In a magical moment of self-realization? Of maturity into a total person, socialized into a functioning adult? None of the above. The true subject is the subject of an event. What must concern us most here is the question put forth by Žižek,

What bothers a materialist is: Am I really alive here and now, or am I just vegetating, as a mere human animal bent on survival? In Defence of Lost Causes 512 note 4.

And then there is Fight Club. Released in 1999, a scene in which Ed Norton’s character beats himself up in front of his boss. Žižek makes the point that this is an example of traversing the fantasy of being the object, as if saying to the boss, “To you, I’m a vaguely anonymous person, worth nothing to you except as somebody who outputs dispensible intellectual/creative labour units that enhance the corporation’s bottom line.

[obscene superego fantasy Enjoy! that keeps us beholden to Other]

Again why the subject? Recent events post-financial crisis seem to display the emergence of a new type of political post-individualism, that combines neo-liberalism with an authoritarian ruling structure. The model here is China, a capitalism combined with authoritarian state structure.

precarity question (8)

Question:

If preserving the life of the other is a precondition of the self, are we not still arguing out of self preservation?

Judith Butler: (at 6:33)

If it’s the case that I only am obligated to preserve the life of the other because I must preserve my own life and if my own life is the final reason why I preserve the life of the other then you’re absolutely right (I’m a modernist egological Bush right-winger RT).

But if in preserving the life of the other I am articulating my social and political existence in the relation to the other then I have left an egological framework for a relational one and I have lost my bounded I, or rather recast it as a certain kind of relational practice, so I would be preserving my ‘self’ my new self my recast self as a secondary effect of preserving the life of the other since it would turn out that I am bound. But it would not be for myself rather than the other or on the basis of any other distinction between self and other that that act of preservation would occur.

precarity (7)

Butler, Judith. “Precarious Life and the Obligations of Cohabitation” The Neale Wheeler Watson Lecture 2011 Nobel Museum Stockholm Sweden, May 24 2011.

Finally, I want to say that sometimes these bonds are wretched ones, that one population is up against another in ways that feel unliveable, and the modes of interdependency are characterized as exploitative or colonizing. This is surely the case in Israel/Palestine where the notions of a national home and homeland are inevitably implicated in relations of internal heterogeneity and adjacency which bring up the issue of unchosen co-habitation in yet a different way.

Israel and Palestine are joined; they overlap, and through the settlements and the military presence, Israel invades and pervades Palestinian lands. Even if they sought a full-scale separation from each other, the two would still be bound to one another by the separation wall, by the border, by the military powers that control the border. The relationship would only be extended in its wretched form.

There are settlements now in the West Bank populated with right wing Israelis who nevertheless depend on local Palestinians for conveying food or menial jobs. And we might point out as well that the soldiers at the checkpoint are in constant contact with Palestinians who are waiting there or passing through. These are forms of contact, adjacency, unwilled modes of co-habitation that are not only clearly inegalitarian, but where the military presence is hostile, threatening, and destructive.

I would include among these the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which now has an Israeli version, which stipulates that co-existence requires equality and cannot take place under conditions where one party is subjected to colonial subjugation and disenfranchisement – an Arendtian view, to be sure. These are but a few of the many insistent and important ways of practicing and thinking about alliance, modes of working together, but sometimes working in separate venues against the illegal occupation and for Palestinian dignity and self-determination.

Over and against these instances of co-habitation, there are, as we know, antagonistic ties, wretched bonds, raging and mournful modes of connectedness. In those cases where living with others on adjacent lands or on contested or colonized lands produces aggression and hostility in the midst of that co-habitation.

Colonial subjugation and occupation is surely one way to live without choice next to and under a colonizing population. The mode of unchosen co-habitation that belongs to the colonized is surely not the same as the notion of a democratic plurality established on grounds of equality.

And this is why only those forms of alliance that struggle to overcome colonial subjugation carry the trace of any future possibility of co-habitation between the inhabitants of that piece of earth. Otherwise, Palestinians remain disproportionately exposed to precarity, and Israelis act to shore up their territory and majority-rule through extending colonial control and heightening their modes of military aggression.

It seems to me that even in situations of antagonistic and unchosen modes of cohabitation, certain ethical obligations emerge.

Since we do not choose with whom to cohabit the earth, we have to honor those obligations to preserve the lives of those we may not love, we may never love, we do not know, and did not choose.

Second, these obligations emerge from the social conditions of political life, not from any agreement we have made, nor from any deliberate choice. And yet, these very social conditions of liveable life are precisely those that have to be achieved. We cannot rely on them as presuppositions that will guarantee our good life together. On the contrary, they supply the ideals toward which we must struggle.

Because we are bound to realize these conditions, we are also bound to one another, in passionate and fearful alliance, often in spite of ourselves, but ultimately for ourselves, for a “we” who is constantly in the making.

Thirdly, these conditions imply equality, as Arendt tells us, but also an exposure to precarity (a point derived from Levinas) which leads us to understand as a

global obligation imposed upon us to find political and economic forms that to minimize precarity and establish economic political equality.

Those forms of cohabitation characterized by equality and minimized precarity become the goal to be achieved by any struggle against subjugation and exploitation, but also the goals that start to be achieved in the practices of alliance that assemble across distances to achieve those very goals.

We struggle in, from, and against precarity. Thus, it is not from pervasive love for humanity or a pure desire for peace that we strive to live together.

We live together because we have no choice, and yet we must struggle to affirm the ultimate value of that unchosen social world, and that struggle makes itself known and felt precisely when we exercise freedom in a way that is necessarily committed to the equal value of lives. We can be alive or dead to the sufferings of others, – they can be dead or alive to us, depending on how they appear, and whether they appear at all;

but only when we understand that what happens there also happens here, and that “here” is already an elsewhere, and necessarily so, that we stand a chance of grasping the difficult and shifting global connections in which we live, which make our lives possible – and sometimes, too often, impossible.

precarity (6)

Butler, Judith. “Precarious Life and the Obligations of Cohabitation” The Neale Wheeler Watson Lecture 2011 Nobel Museum Stockholm Sweden, May 24 2011.

In my view, ethical claims emerge from bodily life itself, a bodily life that is not always unambiguously human. After all, the life that is worth preserving, and safeguarding, who should be protected from murder (Levinas) and genocide (Arendt) is connected to, and dependent upon, non-human life in essential ways; this follows from the idea of the human animal, a different point of departure for thinking about politics.

If we try to understand in concrete terms what it means to commit ourselves to preserving the life of the other, we are invariably confronted with the bodily conditions of life, and so a commitment not only to the other’s corporeal persistence, but to all those environmental conditions that make life liveable.

The possibility of whole populations being annihilated either through genocidal policies or systemic negligence follows not only from the fact that there are those who believe they can decide among whom they will inhabit the earth, but because such thinking presupposes a disavowal of an irreducible fact of politics:

the vulnerability to destruction by others that follows from a condition of precarity in all modes of political and social interdependency.

We can make this into a broad existential claim, namely, that everyone is precarious, and this follows from our social existence as bodily beings who depend upon one another for shelter and sustenance and who, therefore, are at risk of statelessness, homelessness and destitution under unjust and unequal political conditions.

As much as I am making such a claim, I am also making another, namely, that our precarity is to a large extent dependent upon the organization of economic and social relationships, the presence or absence of sustaining infrastructures and social and political institutions. In this sense, precarity is indissociable from that dimension of politics that addresses the organization and protection of bodily needs. Precarity exposes our sociality, the fragile and necessary dimensions of our interdependency.

Whether explicitly stated or not, every political effort to manage populations involves a tactical distribution of precarity, more often than not articulated through an unequal distribution of precarity, one that depends on dominant norms regarding whose life is grievable, and worth protecting, and whose life is ungrievable, or marginally or episodically grievable and so, in that sense, already lost in part or in whole, and thus less worthy of protection and sustenance. In my own view, then, a different social ontology would have to start from this shared condition of precarity in order to refute those normative operations, pervasively racist, that decide in advance who counts as human and who does not. My point is not to rehabilitate humanism, but rather to struggle for a conception of ethical obligation that is grounded in precarity.

No one escapes the precarious dimension of social life – it is, we might say, our common non-foundation. And we cannot understand co-habitation without understanding that a generalized precarity obligates us to oppose genocide and to sustain life on egalitarian terms. Perhaps this feature of our lives can serve as the basis for the rights of protection against genocide, whether through deliberate or negligent means. After all, even though our interdependency constitutes us as more than thinking beings, indeed as social and embodied, vulnerable and passionate, our thinking gets nowhere without the presupposition of the interdependent and sustaining conditions of life.

It is, of course, one thing to claim this in the abstract, but quite another to understand what the difficulties are in struggling for social and political forms that are committed to fostering a sustainable interdependency on egalitarian terms. When any of us are affected by the sufferings of others, we recognize and affirm an interconnection with them, even when we do not know their names or speak their language.

At its best, some media representations of suffering at a distance compel us to give up our more narrow communitarian ties, and to respond, sometimes in spite of ourselves, sometimes even against our will, to a perceived injustice. Such presentations can bring the fate of others near or make it seem very far away, and yet, the kind of ethical demands that emerge through the media in these times depend on this reversibility of the proximity and distance.

Indeed, I want to suggest that certain bonds are actually wrought through this very reversibility.

And we might find ways of understanding the interdependency that characterizes co-habitation precisely as these bonds.

Arendt (5)

Butler, Judith. “Precarious Life and the Obligations of Cohabitation” The Neale Wheeler Watson Lecture 2011 Nobel Museum Stockholm Sweden, May 24 2011.

[Arendt] could not have predicted the 1.7 million who now have that refugee status within the West Bank and Gaza alone, but she did predict that nation-states that seek to regulate the racial or religious composition of their populations invariably produce new classes of refugees, and call into question their own legitimacy by expelling populations who do not conform to the national norm. Her call for co-habitation was meant quite clearly to counter not only the genocidal politics of National Socialism but the recurrent production of the stateless by any and all nations that purging themselves of heterogeneity. And though she would have never argued that Israel is like Nazi Germany, and she would have opposed all such analogies, she was clear that Israel was continuing a project of settler colonialism in the name of a national liberation project, producing hundreds of thousands of refugees that would not only delegitimate any claims to democracy made by that state, but keep the state embroiled in conflict for decades to come. 17

And this condition, paradoxically, yields the radical potential for new modes of sociality and politics beyond the avid and wretched bonds formed through settler colonialism and expulsion. We are all, in this sense, the unchosen, but we are nevertheless unchosen together. It is not uninteresting to note that Arendt, herself a Jew and refugee, understood her obligation not to belong to the “chosen people” but rather to the unchosen, and to make mixed community precisely among those whose existence implies a right to exist and to lead a liveable life.

Precarity only makes sense if we are able to identify as clearly political issues bodily dependency and need, hunger and the need for shelter, the vulnerability to injury and destruction, forms of social trust that let us live and thrive, and the passions linked to our very persistence.

If Arendt thought that such matters had to be relegated to the private realm, Levinas understood the importance of vulnerability, but failed to really link vulnerability to a politics of the body. Although Levinas seems to presuppose a body impinged upon, he does not give it an explicit place in his ethical philosophy. And though Arendt theorizes the problem of the body, of the located body, the speaking body emerging into the “space of appearance” as part of any account of political action, she is not quite willing to affirm a politics that struggles to overcome inequalities in food distribution, that affirms rights of housing, and which targets inequalities in the sphere of reproductive labor.

Arendt (4)

Butler, Judith. “Precarious Life and the Obligations of Cohabitation” The Neale Wheeler Watson Lecture 2011 Nobel Museum Stockholm Sweden, May 24 2011.

Both Levinas and Arendt take issue with the classically liberal conception of individualism, that is, the idea that individuals knowingly enter into certain contracts, and their obligation follows from having deliberately and volitionally entered into agreements with one another. This view assumes that we are only responsible for those relations, codified by agreements, into which we have knowingly and volitionally entered. 11

And Arendt disputes this view. Indeed, it was the substance of the argument that she made against Eichmann. He thought he could choose which populations should live and die, and in this sense he thought he could choose with whom to co-habit the earth. What he failed to understand, according to Arendt, is that no one has the prerogative to choose with whom to co-habit the earth. We can choose in some ways how to live and where, and in local ways we can choose with whom to live. But if we were to decide with whom to co-habit the earth, we would be deciding which portion of humanity may live, and which may die.

If that choice is barred to us, that means that we are under an obligation to live with those who already exist, and that any choice about who may or may not live is always a genocidal practice, and
though we cannot dispute that genocide has happened, and happens still, we are wrong to think freedom in any ethical sense is ever compatible with the freedom to commit genocide.

The unchosen character of earthly co-habitation is, for Arendt, the condition of our very existence as ethical and political beings. 13

Arendt stands for this plurality when he argues that none of us may choose with whom to co-habit the earth; we can surely choose with whom to share a household and perhaps also with whom to share a neighborhood or a region, or where to draw the boundary of a state, but we are not in such instances deciding against the right to live for those who are outside of those communities.

But when people decide that they will not share the earth, that means that they are committed to
eradicating a population from the face of the earth. Not only is this choice an attack on co-habitation as a precondition of political life in Arendt’s view, but it commits us to the following proposition:

we must devise institutions and policies that actively preserve and affirm the non-chosen character of open-ended and plural co-habitation.

Not only do we live with those we never chose and to whom we may feel no immediate sense of social belonging, but we are also obligated to preserve those lives and the open-ended plurality that is the global population. 13

Arendt … has offered … an ethical view of co-habitation that serves as a guideline for particular forms of politics. In this sense, concrete political norms and policies emerge from the unchosen character of these modes of co-habitation. The necessity of co-habiting the earth is a principle that … must guide the actions and policies of any neighborhood, community, or nation. The decision to live in one community or another is surely justified as long as it does not imply that those who live outside the community do not deserve to live.

In other words, every communitarian ground for belonging is only justifiable on the condition that it is subordinate to a noncommunitarian opposition to genocide.

The way I read this, every inhabitant who belongs to a community belongs also to the earth, and this implies a commitment not only to every other inhabitant of that earth, but we can surely add, to sustaining the earth itself. And with this last proviso, I seek to offer an ecological supplement
Arendt’s anthropocentrism.

it appears that “belonging” must actually no know bounds and exceed every particular nationalist and communitarian limit. Both the arguments against genocide and the arguments for the rights of the stateless depend upon underscoring the limits of communitarianism. 15

This means that unwilled proximity and unchosen cohabitation are preconditions of our political existence, the basis of her critique of nationalism, the obligation to live on the earth and in a polity that establishes mode of equality for a necessarily and irreversibly heterogenous population. Indeed, unwilled proximity and unchosen cohabitation serve as well as the basis of our obligations not to destroy any part of the human population, and to outlaw genocide as a crime against humanity, but also to invest institutions with the demand to seek to make all lives liveable. Thus, from unchosen co-habitation, Arendt derives notions of universality an equality that commit us to institutions that seek to sustain human lives without regarding some part of the population as socially dead, as redundant, or as intrinsically unworthy of life and therefore ungrievable. 15-16

Although it is so often taught that Israel became an historical and ethical necessity for the Jews during and after the Nazi genocide, and that anyone who questions the founding principles of the Jewish state shows an extraordinary insensitivity to the plight of the Jews, there were Jewish thinkers and political activists at the time, including Arendt, Martin Buber, Hans Kohn, and Judah Magnus, who thought among the most important lessons of the Holocaust was an opposition to illegitimate state violence, to any state formation that sought to give electoral priority and citizenship to one race or religion, and that nation-states ought to be internationally barred from dispossessing whole populations who fail to fit the purified idea of the nation. 16

Butler on Levinas (3)

Butler, Judith. “Precarious Life and the Obligations of Cohabitation” The Neale Wheeler Watson Lecture 2011 Nobel Museum Stockholm Sweden, May 24 2011.

It is surely hard to feel at once vulnerable to destruction by the other and yet responsible for the other, and readers of Levinas object all the time to his formulation that we are, all of us, in some sense responsible for that which persecutes us.

Rather, “persecution” is the strange and disconcerting name that Levinas gives for an ethical demand that imposes itself upon us against our will.

We are, despite ourselves, open to this imposition, and though it overrides our will, its shows us that the claims that others make upon us are part of our very sensibility, our receptivity, and our answerability. We are, in other words, called upon, and this is only possible because we are in some sense vulnerable to claims that we cannot anticipate in advance, and for which there is no adequate preparation. For Levinas, there is no other way to understand the ethical reality; ethical obligation not only depends upon our vulnerability to the claims of others, but establishes us as creatures who are fundamentally defined by that ethical relation.

This ethical relation is not a virtue that I have or exercise; it is prior to any individual sense of self.

It is not as a discrete individual that we honor this ethical relation. I am already bound to you, and this is what it means to be the self I am, receptive to you in ways that I cannot fully predict or control.

This is also, clearly, the condition of my injurability as well, and in this way my answerability and my injurability are bound up with one another. In other words, you may frighten me and threaten me, but my obligation to you must remain firm.

This relation precedes individuation, and when I act ethically, I am undone as a bounded being. I come apart. I find that I am my relation to the “you” whose life I seek to preserve, and without that relation, this “I” makes no sense, and has lost its mooring in this ethics that is always prior to the ontology of the ego.

Another way to put this point is that the “I” becomes undone in its ethical relation to the “you” which means that there is a very specific mode of being dispossessed that makes ethical relationality possible.

If I possess myself too firmly or too rigidly, I cannot be in an ethical relation.

The ethical relation means ceding a certain egological perspective for one which is structured fundamentally by a mode of address: you call upon me, and I answer. But if I answer, it was only because I was already answerable; that is, this susceptibility and vulnerability constitutes me at the most fundamental level, and is there, we might say, prior to any deliberate decision to answer the call. In other words, one has to be already capable of receiving the call before actually answering it. In this sense, ethical responsibility presupposes ethical responsiveness.

Butler on Levinas (2)

Butler, Judith. “Precarious Life and the Obligations of Cohabitation” The Neale Wheeler Watson Lecture 2011 Nobel Museum Stockholm Sweden, May 24 2011.

In his work, the Other has priority over me. What does that concretely mean?

Does the other not have the same obligation toward me? Why should I be obligated toward another who does not reciprocate in the same way toward me?

For Levinas, reciprocity cannot be the basis of ethics, since ethics is not a bargain: it cannot be the case that my ethical relation to another is contingent on their ethical relation to me, since that would make that ethical relation less than absolute and binding; and it would establish my self-preservation as a distinct and bounded sort of being as more primary than any relation I have to another. For Levinas, no ethics can be derived from egoism; indeed, egoism is the defeat of ethics itself. 8

I take distance from Levinas here, since though I agree in the refutation of the primacy of self-preservation for ethical thinking, I want to insist upon a certain interwinement (sic) between that other life, all those other lives, and my own – one that is irreducible to national belonging or communitarian affiliation.

In my view … the life of the other, the life that is not our own, is also our life, since whatever sense “our” life has is derived precisely from this sociality, this being already, and from the start, dependent on a world of others, constituted in and by a social world.

In this way there are surely others distinct from me whose ethical claim upon me is irreducible to an egoistic calculation on my part. But that is because we are, however distinct, also bound to one another. And this is not always a happy or felicitous experience. To find that one’s life is also the life of others, even as this life is distinct, and must be distinct, means that one’s boundary is at once a limit and a site of adjacency, a mode of spatial and temporal nearness and even boundedness.

Moreover, the bounded and living appearance of the body is the condition of being exposed to the other, exposed to solicitation, seduction, passion, injury, exposed in ways that sustain us but also in ways that can destroy us.

In this sense the exposure of the body points to its precariousness. At the same time, for Levinas, this precarious and corporeal being is responsible for the life of the other, which means that no matter how much one fears for one’s own life, preserving the life of the other is paramount.

If only the Israeli army felt this way! Indeed, this is a form of responsibility that is not easy while undergoing a felt sense of precarity. Precarity names both the necessity and difficulty of ethics.

Can we use Levinas against himself? (1)

Butler, Judith. “Precarious Life and the Obligations of Cohabitation” The Neale Wheeler Watson Lecture 2011 Nobel Museum Stockholm Sweden, May 24 2011.

Butler’s Thesis

I am trying to underscore that something impinges upon us, … from the outside, as an imposition, but also as an ethical demand. I want to suggest that these are ethical obligations which do not require our consent, and neither are they the result of contracts or agreements into which any of us have deliberately entered. 2

– Is what is happening so far from me that I can bear no responsibility for it?

– Is what is happening so close to me that I cannot bear having to take responsibility for it? If I myself did not make this suffering, am I still in some other sense responsible to it?

How do we approach these questions? … I want to suggest that the ethical solicitation that we encounter in, say, the photograph of war suffering brings up larger questions about ethical obligation.

… ethical obligation imposes itself upon us without our consent, suggesting that consent is not a sufficient ground for delimiting the global obligations which form our responsibility. 4

[What does it mean] to register an ethical demand during these times that is reducible neither to consent nor to established agreement and that takes place outside of established community bonds? 5

I hope it will become possible to understand an alternative set of Jewish views on co-habitation, ones that not only demand a departure from communitarianism but that may serve as a critical alternative to the views and practices of the state of Israel, especially its version of political Zionism and settler colonialism.

It is interesting that Levinas insisted that we are bound to those we do not know, and even those we did not choose, could never have chosen, and that these obligations are, strictly speaking, pre-contractual. And yet, he was of the one who claimed in an interview that the Palestinian had no face, and that he only meant to extend ethical obligations to those who were bound together by his version of Judeo-Christian and classical Greek origins. In some ways, he gave us the very principle that he betrayed. And this means that anyone and everyone are not only free, but obligated, to extend that principle to the Palestinian people, precisely because he could not. His failure directly contradicts his formulation of the demand to be ethically responsive to those who exceed our immediate sphere of belonging, but to whom we nevertheless belong, regardless of any question of what we choose or by what contracts we are bound, or what established forms of cultural belonging are available.

Of course, this raises a question of how there can be an ethical relation to those who cannot appear within the horizon of ethics, who are not persons, or are not considered to be the kind of beings with whom one can or must enter into an ethical relation. Here is where a most painful division within Levinas’s work continues to haunt those of us who seek ethical resources there. On the one hand, he tells us that we are claimed by others, including those we have never known, those we still don’t know, and that we are born into this situation of being compelled to honor the life of the other, every other, whose claim on life comes before our own. On the other hand, he claims that this very ethical relation depends upon a specific set of religious and cultural conditions, Judaeo-Christian, and that those who are not formed within this tradition are not prepared for ethical life, and are not included as those who can make a claim upon those who belong to a narrow conception of the West. 7-8

Can we, in other words, use Levinas against himself to help in the articulation of a global ethics that would extend beyond the religious and cultural communities that he saw as its necessary limit?

Ž the abyss of the Other desire 4

Žižek, S. The Plague of Fantasies. New York: Verso, 1997.
Fiat iustitia, pereat mundus is a Latin phrase. It means: “Let there be justice, though the world perish.”

Hegel’s (and Lacan’s, incidentally) point is that it is possible to move ‘beyond Good and Evil’, beyond the horizon of the Law and constitutive guilt, into drive …

Hegel’s implicit thesis is that

diabolical Evil is another name for the Good itself; for the concept ‘in itself’, the two are indistinguishable, the difference is purely formal, and concerns only the point of view of the perceiving subject.

In short ‘diabolical evil’ is simply Kant’s name for what Freud [calls] the death drive.

I become aware of my freedom only through the experience of how, on behalf of the moral law, I am able to withstand the pressure of the pathological motivations which tie me to innerworldly phenomenal causality.

the pure moral act is impossible, of how one can never be sure that one is acting solely out of consideration for duty, is the far more uncanny fact that the moral act, precisely as impossible, is simultaneously unavoidable, that which is in a way impossible to transgress.

it is only my failure to act ethically which guarantees that I remain an ethical subject, since were I to accomplish a pure ethical act, I would change into a being of diabolical Evil (in a Sadeian Supreme-Being-of-Evilness). 230

true evil involves precisely the blurring of distinctions between Good and Evil — that is, the elevation of Evil into a consistent ethical Principle. A revolutionary terrorist, for example, is of aesthetic interest if he is not merely a bloodthirsty executioner killing and torturing out of pure egotistical baseness, but a sincere idealist ready to sacrifice everything for his Cause, convinced that he is doing a service to humanity, and thus caught in the tragic deadlock of his predicament. … … such an ‘ethical evil’ is the true diabolical Evil, much worse than the evil of simple egotistical baseness: the cleaner you are (the more your motives are selfless-humanitarian), the greater your evil. 234-235

abyss of the Other’s desire 3

Žižek, S. The Plague of Fantasies. New York: Verso, 1997.

The standard subject’s reaction to the act is that of aphanasis, of his/her self-obliteration, not of heroically assuming it: when the awareness of the full consequences of ‘what I have just done’ hits me, I want to disappear. At this precise point Lacan (and already Freud’s notion fo the death drive) parts with the Romantic ideology of a ‘demonic’ self-destructive Will: the death drive is not a ‘will to die’, radical Evil is not a ‘diabolical’ intention that seeks pleasure in inflicting pain on one’s neighbour …