Author: logocentric

abyss of the Other’s desire 2

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

.. the unique strength of Kant’s ethics lies in this very formal indeterminacy: moral Law does not tell me what my duty is, it merely tells me that I should accomplish my duty. That is to say, it is not possilbe to derive the concrete norms I have to follow in my specific siutation from the moral Law itself —

which means that the subject himself has to assume the responsibility of ‘translating’ the abstract injunction of the moral Law into a series of concrete obligations. 221

The fact that the Subject is a Universal Being means that, precisely, he cannot simply rely on some determinate substantial content (‘universal’ as it may be) which would fix the co-ordinates of his ethical activity in advance, but that the only way for him to arrive at Universality is to accept the objective indeterminacy of his situation — I become ‘universal’ only through the violent effort of disengaging myself from the particularity of my situation: through conceiving this situation as contingent and limiting, through opening up in it the gap of indeterminacy filled in by my act. 222

Subjectivity and universality are thus strictly correlative: the dimension of universality becomes ‘for itself’ only through the ‘individualist’ negation of the particular context which forms the subject’s specific background.

… compels us to reject any reference to ‘duty’ as an excuse: “I know this is difficult, and might be painful, but what can I do? It’s my duty…” … The reference to duty as the excuse for doing our duty should be rejected a hypocritical … The obscene jouissance of this situation is generated by the fact that I conceive of myself as exculpated from what I am doing: isn’t it nice to be able to inflict pain on others in the full awareness that I’m not responsible for it, that I am merely fulfilling the Other’s Will … this is what Kantian ethics prohibits. 221-222

The Kantian law is thus not merely an empty form applied to a random empirical content in order to ascertain if this content meets the critieria of ethical adequacy— rather, the empty form of the Law functions as the promise of an absent content (never) to come. … the form is not only a kind of neutral universal mould of the pluality of different empirical contents; the autonomy of the Form, rather, bears witness to the uncertainty which persists with regard to the content of our acts — we never know if the determinate content which accounts for the specificity of our acts is the right one: that is, if we have really acted in accordance with the Law and have not been guided by some hidden pathological motive. … the subject finds himself in a situation in which, although he knows there is a Law, he never knows (and a priori cannot know) what this Law is — a gap forever separates the Law from its positive incarnations. The subject is thus a priori, by virtue of his very existence, guilty: guilty without knowing what he is guilty of (and for that very reason guilty), infringing the law without knowing its exact regulations.

What we have here is, for the first time in the history of philosophy, the assertion of the Law as unconscious: the experience of Form without content is always the index of a repressed content — the more intensely the subject sticks to the empty form, the more traumatic the repressed content becomes. 226

abyss of the Other’s desire 1

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

An ethics grounded in reference to the traumatic Real which resists symbolization, the Real which is experienced in the encounter with the abyss of the Other’s desire

Che Vuoi? What do you want [from me]?

… the trauma qua real is not the ultimate external referent of the symbolic process, but precisely that X which forever hinders any neutral representation of external referential reality. … the Real qua traumatic antagonism is, as it were, the objective factor of subjectivization itself; it is the object which accounts for the failure of every neutral-objective representation, the object which ‘pathologizes’ the subject’s gaze or approach, makes it biased, pulls it askew. … the very stain or spot which disturbs and blurs our ‘direct’ perception of reality — which ‘bends’ the direct straight line from our eyes to the perceived object. (Plague of Fantasies 214)

sexual difference is not some mysterious inaccessible X which can never by symbolized but, rather, the very obstacle to this symbolization, the stain which forever keeps the Real apart from the modes of its symbolization. Crucial to the notion fo the Real is this coincidence of the inaccessible X with the obstacle which makes it inaccessible — as in Heidegger, who emphasizes again and again how Being is not simply ‘withdrawn’: Being ‘is ‘nothing but its own withdrawal…’ 216-217

… the unique strength of Kant’s ethics lies in this very formal indeterminacy: moral Law does not tell me what my duty is, it merely tells me that I should accomplish my duty. that is to say, it is not possible to derive the concrete norms I have to follow in my specific situation from the moral Law itself — which means that the subject himself has to assume the responsibility of ‘translating’ the abstract injunction of the moral Law into a series of concrete obligations. In this precise sense, the point of Kant’s ethics is (to paraphrase Hegel) ‘to conceive the moral Absolute not only as Substance, but also as Subject’: the ethical subject bears full responsibility for the concrete universal norms he follows — that is to say, the only guarantor of the universality of positive moral norms is the subject’s own contingent act of performatively assuming these norms. (221)

It is therefore Kant’s very ‘formalism’ which opens up the decisive gap in the self-enclosed ethic and/or religious Substance of a particular life-world: I can no longer simply rely on the determinate content provided by the ethical tradition in which I am embeded; this tradition is always already ‘mediated’ by the subject; it ‘remains alive’ only in so far as I effectively assume it. The way to undermine ethical particularism (the notion that a subject can find his or her ethical Substance only in the particular tradition outof which he grew) is thus not via reference to some more universal positive content (like the unfortunate ‘universal values shared by all humanity’), but only by accepting that the ethical Universal is in itself indeterminate, empty, and that it can be translated into a set of positive explicit norms only by means of my active engagement, for which I take full responsibility … thus there is no determinate ethical universality without the contingency of the subject’s act of positing it as such.    221

Ž on butler laclau badiou emphasis on locality

Žižek, Slovoj. In Defence of Lost Causes. (2008) London: Verso, 2009. page 403.

Badiou reads this failure [of the Chinese Cultural Revolution] — and, more generally, the demise of Communism — as signaling  the end of the epoch in which, in politics, it was possible to generate truth at the universal level, as a global (revolutionary) project: today, in the aftermath of this historical defeat, a political truth can only be generated as (the fidelity to) a local event, a local struggle, an intervention into a specific constellation. However, does he not thereby subscribe to his own version of postmodernism, of the notion that, today, only local acts of “resistance” are possible? What Badiou (Like Laclau and Butler) seems to lack is a meta-theory of history that would provide a clear answer to the alternative that haunts “postmodern” theorizations of the political: is the passage from “large” to “small” (hi)stories, from essentialism to contingency, from global to local politics, and so forth, itself a historical shift, so that, prior to it, universal politics was possible, or is the insight into the local character of political interventions an insight into the very essence of poltics, so that the previous belief in the possiblity of universal political intervention was an ideological illusion?

Bartlebian Act: Saragmago’s Seeing: voters en masse refuse to vote instead casting invalid ballots.  It is the dialectical difference between not-voting (cynical indifference) and not not voting, (they instead un-vote).  As Ž explains the difference is a focus on the big Other, “the majority of those who do not vote do t not as an active gesture of protest, but in the mode of relying on others — “I do not vote, but I count on others to vote in my place …” Non-voting becomes an act whe it affects the big Other.” (In Defence 410)  

One needs to add here, when one no longer relies on a big Other,

z at middlesex hegel totality

to observe a structure in its totality: we have usually an ideal structure, in contingent in empirical reality, contradictions, it goes wrong.  Hegelian totality means, when we speak of something, we talk of all these consistencies as part of the whole.  When Hegel speaks of a totality it means including all its inconsistencies with it.  For Plato every example is imperfect, becuase there is this ideal, same for Hegel, but the surplus is on the side of the example.

Cunning of reason: whenever you want to impose a project on reality, you can be sure that something will go wrong.  Things will go wrong necessarily, and at the end you get a theory of how things necessarily go wrong.

Something traumatic happens in Hegel: in the moment of passage you see something in the old order that you didn’t see.
Zizek: 20 years ago the dissolution of commie regimes, one capitalism established itself it became invisible.  The passage from silent to talkies, the truly great artists Chaplin, Eisenstein, they knew the moment the talkies became hegemonic, extension of realism.  No the voice is not natural, what we get is this deep insight, in its most radical dimension the voice is a foreign intruder that disrupts our identity.

Alenka Zupancic: in Think Again edited by Hallward.

superstructure which is not superstructure but in the very core of material production.  It is not an illusion, we’re good British empiricists.  You think that its only concrete people, but in capitalist society, in order to be a person you need theological mystifications.

How is it that reality is flat reality, but is re-doubled in itself?

trieb death drive post-Hegel radical evil condition of goodness jean dupuy

An Interview with Slavoj Žižek “On Divine Self-Limitation and Revolutionary Love” Journal of Philosophy and Scripture, Volume 1, Issue 2, Spring 2004 ” Joshua Delpech-Ramey

And here is Ž man strictly talking to Trieb in Berlin March 6, 2009 at the ICI which is where the journal Cultural Inquiry originates.

But the paradox for me, as I try to develop in my work, is that death drive is a very paradoxical notion if you read Freud closely.  Death drive is basically, I claim, the Freudian term for immortality.  Death drive has nothing to do, as Lacan points out, convincingly, with this so-called nirvana principle where everything wants to disappear, and so on. If anything (and because of this I like to read Richard Wagner’s operas where you have this), death drive is that which prevents you from dying.  Death drive is that which persists beyond life and death. Again, it’s precisely what, in my beloved Stephen King’s horror/science fiction terminology he calls the “undead”: this terrifying insistence beneath death, which is why Freud links death drive to the compulsion to repeat. You know, it can be dead, but it goes on. This terrifying insistence of an undead object.

Death Drive insists beyond life and death: Immortality

Undead [From Berlin lecture March 2009]

Negative Judgements –> Negate a predicate: He is not dead.  He is alive.

Infinite Judgements –> Assert a non-predicate: He is undead (doesn’t mean alive).  He’s alive as dead, living dead, a 3rd domain, an endless undead, an immortal domain emerges.  This is the domain of drive.

The object of drive is not getting rid of tension but the reproduction of tension as such. What brings you satisfaction is not getting rid of tension but endless repetition of tension. A strange bad infinity.

The post-Hegelian moment: is this weird repetition for which in a way there is no place in Hegel.  It is not the progressive circularity or bad spurious infinity.  Kierkargard and Freud meet at the topic of repetition.  Repetition that generates precisely NO AUFHEBUNG.

On the one hand Mature Marx refers to Hegel. in Grundrisse, is a postive one, Marx claims Hegel process is mystefied, but a formulation of emancipatory revolutionary process.

But later in Capital something changes, it’s more Capital itself that is formulated in terms of subject itself. With “capital” money passes from substance to subject. it becomes self-reproducing.  It is endlessly repetitive as a drive. The whole goal of circulation is the reproduction/expansion of circulation itself.  Marx says “capital works as an automatic subject.”  It is a Hegelian subject but caught in this endlessly reproductive repetition. Thus Marx might have moved beyond Hegel here.

Another line of thought: Elevate Todestrieb into a key to understand German idealist “self-relating negativity”.   Todestrieb has to be elevated to this kind of transcedental principle.

Hegel’s dialectics: The dialectic of necessity and contingency. The way Hegel is usually read according to usual doxa, Hegel admits of contingency but only as a moment of necessity, it externalizes itself in nature but then this contingency is aufhebung into necessity.  Negative and contingency are allowed but as a tactical retreat. The Absolute is playing a game with itself.  Ž says the reversal, it is not only necessity of contingency, global necessity realizes itself through multiple contingencies, but there is also Contingency of Necessity.

There is a contingent process of how necessity emerges out of contingency.  The French, rational-choice theorist Jean-Pierre Dupuy.  Drew attention to “something contingently becomes necessary”. It’s contingent whether a thing happens or not, but once it happens, it happens necessarily. 

A new event retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility. An impossible event takes place, once it happens it is instantly domesticated and retroactively appears as possible and is naturalized.

First I saw the film, Billy Bathgate I was disappointed by the film. After I saw the film, I saw how the film missed the novel, the film was a bad copy.  Then I read the novel, the novel was even worse.  The very repetition creates the 3rd point of reference. 1+1=3.  First you have a shitty novel, then a shitty film, the bad copy of the novel retroactively creates the possibility of how it could have been a good film or novel.

Deleuze’s Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition: Deleuze gives the best explanation to death drive that Žižek has ever read. Paradox of Freud: the renunciation of enjoyment generates enjoyment in the very act of renunciation.  You renounce desire, but then you get libidinally attached to the very rituals of renouncing desire.

Death drive in Deleuze’s reading is not a specific drive, it does this self-sabotaging thing.   The space of desire is curved.  You don’t go directly at it.  Death drive is nothing but the transcendental principle of “lust principe”  What is human sexuality formally?  It is not simple pleasure.  But pleasure got in the postponement and return and repetition … for example if I keep repeating the shaking of your hand I don’t let go, the very repetition eroticizes it in an obscene way. Death drive doesn’t have an autonomous reality, it is not, “I want pleasure but secretly I want to torture,” Death drive is this transcendental distortion which complicates my access to pleasure.

Ž disagrees strongly with Freud here on eros/thanatos and says Freud really backed away from his discovery.  Žižek says this good constructive Eros versus bad destructive death drive (Todestrieb) is total bunk.   Love is a catastrophe, it’s totally destructive. One point of obsession and everything is ruined, literally out of joint.  Love is totally paradoxical focusing all of your life, the whole world is thrown out of balance, love is radically destabilizing.  I’m passionately in love and ready to risk everything for it.   Insistence on a particularity, you are ready to go to the end.

Antigone is pure death drive: I insist on this particular point I am ready to put at stake everything for it.  Death drive is the ethics at its zero level.  It resides in this paradoxical domain where good coincides with radical evil.  A detailed reading of Kant and Schelling later work on religion.  Kant proposes there the notion of radical evil.  He steps back though.  First he proposes to read radical evil as diabolical evil.  If for Kant you can be good out of principle.  Then why cannot you be evil out of principle?  Not just good, but evil as well.  But then the whole distinction between good and evil falls apart.  You are evil without any pathological possibility, you are just evil.

Mozart’s Don Giovanni: Commandatore, tells Giovanni, repent.  Giovanni knows he will die, Commandatore tries to save Giovanni, if yo urepent you will be saved in after life.  From standpoint of rational calculus Giovanni should agree. But Giovanni says no.  He acts out of pure fidelity to Evil.  It’s not pathological, no personal gain.  This is the greatness of Kant, he goes very far in this direction.

Death drive is the radical non-pathological evil, which is transcendental apriori of every possible form of goodness.

Kant withdraws, says we don’t have diabolical evil only radical evil which is simply a tendency of human nature which is not fulfilling your duty.  But Lacan reads Kant with Sade.  The point of Lacan, Sade is a Kantian.  The Sadian imperative of unconditional jouissance, it goes beyond the pleasure principle.  It’s non-pathological.

Sade proposes purely Kantian idea of ‘radical crime’ that doesn’t simply follow natural impulses, but a crime which breaks with the chain of natural causality, a crime literally against nature itself.  Freedom that breaks the phenomenal chain of natural causality. The paradox that Kant and Schelling struggle with is this obscure domain where radical evil is apriori condition of goodness.

Antigone: you must have this radical excess of evil if you want to go to the end. From the sympathetic human point it is Ismene who is human warm, Antigone is an aggressive bitch.  Creon is right, he basically says, if we publicly do the funeral old hatreds will explode again, we’ll fall into civil war.  Antigone’s counter-argument is so what? It is pure insistance. It is just pure insistence, “I want, I want“.

Žižek wants to present another Antigone, where she succeeds and Creon lets her bury her brother, the whole city is ruined, the last scene Antigone “I was created for love not for hatred” where blood and death is now all around her.

Stalinist version: Antigone and Creon are fighting and Chorus intervenes like a committee for public safety and proclaims a popular dictatorship.

Death Drive as radical evil as a condition of goodness.

Shraing Illusions: We make fun of soemthing, denounce illusions as illusions, but nonetheless they work.

Ž mentions Logic of Capital School at beginning of part II.

******

Point two: The big breakthrough of Heidegger is to totally reconceptualize the notion of finitude. Already we have this in the early Heidegger with special reference to Kant. Already you see precisely how the other of finitude, the big stuff—infinity, eternity, and so on—is a category, modality, horizon of finitude. This was, for Heidegger, Kant’s big breakthrough: transcendental as opposed to transcendent is a category of finitude. All this somehow gets lost, in Badiou.

[But] the whole category of “event” works only from the category of finitude. There are events only in finite situations. You can prove it only from his own position. Only for a finite being do you have this infinite work, what he likes to describe, in Christian terms, this trinity of faith, hope, love. Faith that the event did take place, hope in the final state (in Christianity universal redemption, in Marxism I don’t know, communism at the end) and love as work, as what is between the two, fidelity to the event and so on.

But . . . when in his last work, Badiou tries to articulate the structure of totalitarian danger, he calls “forcing the event,” which means simply to ontologize the event, as if the event were not an infinite process whose place you have to discern in reality, as if the event totally permits its irrealities.

But the gap between event and reality, that which is covered up by totalitarianism, is precisely the gap of finitude—so there is something missing at this level in Badiou.

[…] there is a certain dimension of Christianity which … is missed, I think, by Badiou, because of his overall view that there is no place for finitude, as for example in his critique of Heidegger where he misses the point. He even goes into this mode where being-toward-death is just the animal level of being threatened . . . although I don’t identify Heidegger’s being-toward death with death drive, Badiou is also missing that, because he cannot elevate finitude to its transcendental a priori dignity. He remains precisely, at a certain level, a pre-kantian metaphysician.

Hegel and Žižek

Žižek seminar Hegel Now? Workshop Philosophy Department, Middlesex University. Thursday May 5, 2011.

Žižek’s Hegel Lecture put on by Dahlem Humanities Center (DHC), Freie Universität Berlin, on March 31, 2011, in the Henry Ford Building in Dahlem.

Post-Hegel: A move to a positivity of Being and on the other hand, formalist pure repetition, Kierkargard and Freud (death drive) two strange bedfellows.
You can’t be a Hegelian after this break.  Before there were communitarian Hegelians, and radical Hegelians.  the Pittsburgh Hegelians have rejuvenated Hegel for Liberals.  Their point is ‘recognition’.  This is Zizek’s problem with them.

Catherine Malabou in her debate with Judith Butler There is an co-written article in Houlgate’s recent edited collection on Hegel

For Malabou, she says, no intersubjectivity is not the ulitmate horizon of Hegel

Master — Servant

Phenomenology of Spirit: you should be attentive to the beginning of Master-Servant

Self-consciousness, a subject which perceives among the objects in the world, another object that claims “fuck you” I’m also a subject.

This is an absolute ontological standard.  The original situation is not, I’m a subject and you’re a subject.  “This is not the 69 position, lick and recognize each other.”  No there is an absolute antagonism, I am as a subject singular and absolute, now there is another guy there that says I am also like you, there is only room for one and there is two now competing for the only place.  This Other is not the Levinasian other, nor the (Butler) Other, I recognize you, you recognize me.  The Other is an absolutely shattering intrusion.

The Pittsburgh Hegelians deflate Hegel, no metaphysical commitment, just a transcendental forms of a priori rational forms of argumentation.
Suspension of big ontological questions always implies the worst historicism, which opens up the path of violent return of realist metaphysics, neo-Darwinism

Avoiding or suspending the big ontological questions never works, the big radical questions return.

The break is between post-Hegelian thought and the pre-Hegelian metaphysics.  My thesis is that precisely Hegel disappears in this passage.  Hegel is a vanishing mediator between the two: traditional philosophy and post-metaphysical thought.   Hegel something that is neither is one nor the other.  If you are in-between you can see something which afterwards becomes invisible.  Nice example, the beginning of sound, for a brief moment, the apparent reactionaries like Chaplin, knew something about the ghastly dimension of voice, he saw a potentially ominous spectral dimension of voice, that voice is never a self-transparent means of self-expression but a foreign intruder that can haunt us.  But this became invisible.  This unbearable excess in Hegel becomes invisible.

The ultra-totalitarian Hegel: GK Chesterton “The Man Who was Thursday” the work of the philosophical policeman.  Popper, Adorno, Levinas, Glucksman, would they also subscribe, totalitarianism, the philosophical crime is totality.  Totality = Totalitarianism.  The task of philosophical police, is to find a political crime, gulag, totalitarianism, reading Rousseau etc that a philosophical crime will be committed.  They search out for proponents of totality.  But Ž wants to defend totality.

Žižek’s definition of the Hegelian Totality: [I should go back to the audio to fill in this definition a bit more]

Totality is not an ideal of an organic whole. But a critical notion. To locate a phenomenon in it’s totality is not to locate hidden harmony of its whole. antagonism, self-contradictory antagonistic.  The whole which is the true is the whole plus its symptoms, It’s unintended consequences which betrays its untruth. Today’s global capitalism means speak of the Congo. This is why again the anti-Hegelian rhetorics, which … the space of the Hegelian totality is the space of the abstract harmonious whole, and the excess which undermine it.

Whenever you have a project to something, you can expect it to go wrong, every project is undermined by its inconsistency.

extrnal negtion becomes self-negation.

Only the abstract terror of the French Revolution creates the conditions for liberal freedom. The first choice has to be the wrong choice, it is only the wrong choice that opens the space for concrete freedom.

You arrive at the highest only thruogh the radical contradiction of the lowest. This is the basic temporality of the dialectical process.

Book of Job
Each of 3 theologists try to convince JOb that his suffering must have a deeper meaning.

Why did you do all these things to me? God there commits a blasphemy, the true answer is, you think you are something special but I screwed up everything.

What dies on the cross is God of beyond itself. Holy Spirit is totally unique, what dies on the cross is this disgusting idea that God is up there as a guarantee of meaning. As in when something appears to us as evil, you are looking too close it is a stain, but if you stand back, you can look at it as a part of global harmony. The sacrifice of Jesus Christ, there is no big Other, no guarantee of meaning, the Holy Ghost is that we are here alone without a guarantee. The true message of Christianity is not Trust God, but God Trusts Us. Holy Spirit is the first radical egalitarian institution.

Hate your mother and father, as parts of hierarchy of social order, god is dead, the only hope after this break is an egalitarian community.  But there is in Hegel a teleological movement. Not so according to Ž.

June 23, 1789: King says scram. Mirabeau, “Go and tell your king that we shall leave our places here except when forced by bayonets” the invention of the new surprises you. A prophet from chance, you say too much, you try to integrate the excess, and you suceed.

Christ died. It was a shock. They didn’t know what. Somebody says, why don’t we see it as a triumph.

Contingency, is a deeper necessity that articulates itself through contingency. Julius Cesar crossing the Rubicon. At that point it was totally open. Once he crossed the Rubicon, he created his destiny, so that in retrospect it appeared necessary.

Baladour 1995, Le Monde wrote, “if B will be elected, then we can say his election was necessary” something happens and once it happens it retroactively appears necessary.

The time is come to do a materialist reversal of Marx back to Hegel. This opening towards contingency, Hegel is radical thinker of contingency. marx is you as a historical agent can look into history, see where history is going, and then posit yourself as an agent of progress. Hegel no way. there is no big Other. The conservative poet T.S. Eliot. Every really new work of art, it retroactively changes the whole history of art. This is the Hegelian theory of totality. With every new break the whole past is re-written.

Borges wrote about Kafka, every writer has his predesccors, Kafka can be said to create his forerunners. No. We are not simply retroactively projecting things into the past. No what if history is open, events are retroactively constituted.

Can we think this incompleteness of reality without God thinking of it, in a materialist way. We cannot simply become Hegelians. We should admit that there are things Hegel didn’t know. The topic of REPETITION. Deleuze made it clear, what characterizes post-Hegelian space, it is a notion of REPETITION, in contrast to Hegel involves no Aufhebung.

Kierkargard and Freud: A pure repetition. It’s not that Hegel didn’t see it, but there are signs that point to the unthought of Hegel. There are points that you can see where Hegel wasn’t Hegelian enough. This is what Marx was saying. Hegel’s theory of economy, didn’t yet capture the whole speculative madness of economy. The ideal of captial as abstraction that rules concrete life, Hegel wasn’t Hegelian enough, passage from money to capital subject to substance. Marx in Grundrisse, capital is an AUTOMATIC SUBJECT. Captial wouldh ave been an horror for Hegel, because it is actually infinity and bad repetitive infinity.

hegel’s theory of madness where Hegel develops the rise of human spirit out of animal life, which is more radical than Foucault. The passage through radical madness, is a permanent background to being human. What Hegel missed, its not simple as passing directly from nature to culture, our cultural rituals of love is not a defence against a naturalism, but against a deadly force, once we pass from nature to culture RETROACTIVELY a third domain of radical negativity arises.
Kant: Man is an animal who needs a master, not because of any natural unruliness, but metaphysical unruliness.
Hegel would have been against the Catholic church, Hegel would have said, animals only do it for procreation, to take something that serves a biological aim, and autonomize it with regard to that aim,

Lacan is right. the horror of sexuality for Christianity, is not vulgar biological life, but metaphysical competitor. Sexuality is the very domain where at its most elementary, wher ethe passage fro manimal to human emerges.

In todays crazy world, offers itself to a Hegelian in-between … and for us too, a certain epock is coming to an end.

Mobilizing Hegelian potentials in today’s world, the time has come to return to Hegel against post-Hegelians against Marx. For example his stuff on the rabble, isnt it today precisely, is that the main form of class struggle isn’t just working class-bourgeouisie, but many forms of rabble, illegal immigrants, landless, etc.

Today isn’t that we are living in a time, maybe in the 20th century we tried too quick to change the world, and that we should reflect on it radically. A brutal fasciest counter-revolution Bologna educational reform. Change intellectuals into experts, change higher education to make it useful. Demonstration in suburbs call psychologists, sociologists. ecology should also ask how did it come to that, do we perceive it correctly.

We are aproaching a time where thinking is absolutely needed Ecology, biogenetics, the limit between inside from outside, we can control mind from outside, chairs moving by your thoughts. This changes the very definition of being human. Be careful to resist the pseud-state of emergency talk. Bill Gates talks like that, Why are we still caught in these ideological debates while children are starving in Africa. The message is do, don’t think about it. Consumption, but I almost become tempted when I pass a Starbucks, they do a wonderful job of ideology, 1% goes to Guatamala children. In the old times citizens/consumers. Now buying the coffee the consumer, your citizenship will be also done by others. Don’t be afraid to be intellectuals today The BOlogna reforms show that those in power know that we are dangerous.

Eagleton in praise of Marx

By Terry Eagleton

Praising Karl Marx might seem as perverse as putting in a good word for the Boston Strangler. Were not Marx’s ideas responsible for despotism, mass murder, labor camps, economic catastrophe, and the loss of liberty for millions of men and women? Was not one of his devoted disciples a paranoid Georgian peasant by the name of Stalin, and another a brutal Chinese dictator who may well have had the blood of some 30 million of his people on his hands?

The truth is that Marx was no more responsible for the monstrous oppression of the communist world than Jesus was responsible for the Inquisition. For one thing, Marx would have scorned the idea that socialism could take root in desperately impoverished, chronically backward societies like Russia and China. If it did, then the result would simply be what he called “generalized scarcity,” by which he means that everyone would now be deprived, not just the poor. It would mean a recycling of “the old filthy business”—or, in less tasteful translation, “the same old crap.”

Marxism is a theory of how well-heeled capitalist nations might use their immense resources to achieve justice and prosperity for their people.

It is not a program by which nations bereft of material resources, a flourishing civic culture, a democratic heritage, a well-evolved technology, enlightened liberal traditions, and a skilled, educated work force might catapult themselves into the modern age.

Marx certainly wanted to see justice and prosperity thrive in such forsaken spots. He wrote angrily and eloquently about several of Britain’s downtrodden colonies, not least Ireland and India. And the political movement which his work set in motion has done more to help small nations throw off their imperialist masters than any other political current. Yet Marx was not foolish enough to imagine that socialism could be built in such countries without more-advanced nations flying to their aid. And that meant that the common people of those advanced nations had to wrest the means of production from their rulers and place them at the service of the wretched of the earth. If this had happened in 19th-century Ireland, there would have been no famine to send a million men and women to their graves and another two or three million to the far corners of the earth.

There is a sense in which the whole of Marx’s writing boils down to several embarrassing questions:

  • Why is it that the capitalist West has accumulated more resources than human history has ever witnessed, yet appears powerless to overcome poverty, starvation, exploitation, and inequality?
  • What are the mechanisms by which affluence for a minority seems to breed hardship and indignity for the many?
  • Why does private wealth seem to go hand in hand with public squalor?

Is it, as the good-hearted liberal reformist suggests, that we have simply not got around to mopping up these pockets of human misery, but shall do so in the fullness of time? Or is it more plausible to maintain that there is something in the nature of capitalism itself which generates deprivation and inequality, as surely as Charlie Sheen generates gossip?

Marx was the first thinker to talk in those terms. This down-at-heel émigré Jew, a man who once remarked that nobody else had written so much about money and had so little, bequeathed us the language in which the system under which we live could be grasped as a whole. Its contradictions were analyzed, its inner dynamics laid bare, its historical origins examined, and its potential demise foreshadowed. This is not to suggest for a moment that Marx considered capitalism as simply a Bad Thing, like admiring Sarah Palin or blowing tobacco smoke in your children’s faces. On the contrary, he was extravagant in his praise for the class that created it, a fact that both his critics and his disciples have conveniently suppressed. No other social system in history, he wrote, had proved so revolutionary. In a mere handful of centuries, the capitalist middle classes had erased almost every trace of their feudal foes from the face of the earth. They had piled up cultural and material treasures, invented human rights, emancipated slaves, toppled autocrats, dismantled empires, fought and died for human freedom, and laid the basis for a truly global civilization. No document lavishes such florid compliments on this mighty historical achievement as The Communist Manifesto, not even The Wall Street Journal.

That, however, was only part of the story. There are those who see modern history as an enthralling tale of progress, and those who view it as one long nightmare. Marx, with his usual perversity, thought it was both. Every advance in civilization had brought with it new possibilities of barbarism. The great slogans of the middle-class revolution—”Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”—were his watchwords, too. He simply inquired why those ideas could never be put into practice without violence, poverty, and exploitation. Capitalism had developed human powers and capacities beyond all previous measure. Yet it had not used those capacities to set men and women free of fruitless toil. On the contrary, it had forced them to labor harder than ever. The richest civilizations on earth sweated every bit as hard as their Neolithic ancestors.

This, Marx considered, was not because of natural scarcity. It was because of the peculiarly contradictory way in which the capitalist system generated its fabulous wealth. Equality for some meant inequality for others, and freedom for some brought oppression and unhappiness for many. The system’s voracious pursuit of power and profit had turned foreign nations into enslaved colonies, and human beings into the playthings of economic forces beyond their control. It had blighted the planet with pollution and mass starvation, and scarred it with atrocious wars. Some critics of Marx point with proper outrage to the mass murders in Communist Russia and China. They do not usually recall with equal indignation the genocidal crimes of capitalism: the late-19th-century famines in Asia and Africa in which untold millions perished; the carnage of the First World War, in which imperialist nations massacred one another’s working men in the struggle for global resources; and the horrors of fascism, a regime to which capitalism tends to resort when its back is to the wall. Without the self-sacrifice of the Soviet Union, among other nations, the Nazi regime might still be in place.

Marxists were warning of the perils of fascism while the politicians of the so-called free world were still wondering aloud whether Hitler was quite such a nasty guy as he was painted. Almost all followers of Marx today reject the villainies of Stalin and Mao, while many non-Marxists would still vigorously defend the destruction of Dresden or Hiroshima. Modern capitalist nations are for the most part the fruit of a history of genocide, violence, and extermination every bit as abhorrent as the crimes of Communism. Capitalism, too, was forged in blood and tears, and Marx was around to witness it. It is just that the system has been in business long enough for most of us to be oblivious of that fact.

The selectiveness of political memory takes some curious forms. Take, for example, 9/11. I mean the first 9/11, not the second. I am referring to the 9/11 that took place exactly 30 years before the fall of the World Trade Center, when the United States helped to violently overthrow the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende of Chile, and installed in its place an odious dictator who went on to murder far more people than died on that dreadful day in New York and Washington. How many Americans are aware of that? How many times has it been mentioned on Fox News?

Marx was not some dreamy utopianist. On the contrary, he began his political career in fierce contention with the dreamy utopianists who surrounded him. He has about as much interest in a perfect human society as a Clint Eastwood character would, and never once speaks in such absurd terms. He did not believe that men and women could surpass the Archangel Gabriel in sanctity. Rather, he believed that the world could feasibly be made a considerably better place. In this he was a realist, not an idealist. Those truly with their heads stuck in the sand—the moral ostriches of this world—are those who deny that there can be any radical change. They behave as though Family Guy and multicolored toothpaste will still be around in the year 4000. The whole of human history disproves this viewpoint.

Radical change, to be sure, may not be for the better. Perhaps the only socialism we shall ever witness is one forced upon the handful of human beings who might crawl out the other side of some nuclear holocaust or ecological disaster. Marx even speaks dourly of the possible “mutual ruin of all parties.” A man who witnessed the horrors of industrial-capitalist England was unlikely to be starry-eyed about his fellow humans.

All he meant was that there are more than enough resources on the planet to resolve most of our material problems, just as there was more than enough food in Britain in the 1840s to feed the famished Irish population several times over. It is the way we organize our production that is crucial. Notoriously, Marx did not provide us with blueprints for how we should do things differently. He has famously little to say about the future. The only image of the future is the failure of the present. He is not a prophet in the sense of peering into a crystal ball. He is a prophet in the authentic biblical sense of one who warns us that unless we change our unjust ways, the future is likely to be deeply unpleasant. Or that there will be no future at all.

Socialism, then, does not depend on some miraculous change in human nature. Some of those who defended feudalism against capitalist values in the late Middle Ages preached that capitalism would never work because it was contrary to human nature. Some capitalists now say the same about socialism. No doubt there is a tribe somewhere in the Amazon Basin that believes no social order can survive in which a man is allowed to marry his deceased brother’s wife. We all tend to absolutize our own conditions.

Socialism would not banish rivalry, envy, aggression, possessiveness, domination, and competition. The world would still have its share of bullies, cheats, freeloaders, free riders, and occasional psychopaths. It is just that rivalry, aggression, and competition would no longer take the form of some bankers complaining that their bonuses had been reduced to a miserly $5-million, while millions of others in the world struggled to survive on less than $2 a day.

Marx was a profoundly moral thinker. He speaks in The Communist Manifesto of a world in which “the free self-development of each would be the condition of the free self-development of all.” This is an ideal to guide us, not a condition we could ever entirely achieve. But its language is nonetheless significant. As a good Romantic humanist, Marx believed in the uniqueness of the individual. The idea permeates his writings from end to end. He had a passion for the sensuously specific and a marked aversion to abstract ideas, however occasionally necessary he thought they might be. His so-called materialism is at root about the human body. Again and again, he speaks of the just society as one in which men and women will be able to realize their distinctive powers and capacities in their own distinctive ways. His moral goal is pleasurable self-fulfillment. In this he is at one with his great mentor Aristotle, who understood that morality is about how to flourish most richly and enjoyably, not in the first place (as the modern age disastrously imagines) about laws, duties, obligations, and responsibilities.

How does this moral goal differ from liberal individualism?

The difference is that to achieve true self-fulfillment, human beings for Marx must find it in and through one another. It is not just a question of each doing his or her own thing in grand isolation from others.

That would not even be possible. The other must become the ground of one’s own self-realization, at the same time as he or she provides the condition for one’s own. At the interpersonal level, this is known as love. At the political level, it is known as socialism. Socialism for Marx would be simply whatever set of institutions would allow this reciprocity to happen to the greatest possible extent. Think of the difference between a capitalist company, in which the majority work for the benefit of the few, and a socialist cooperative, in which my own participation in the project augments the welfare of all the others, and vice versa. This is not a question of some saintly self-sacrifice. The process is built into the structure of the institution.

Marx’s goal is leisure, not labor. The best reason for being a socialist, apart from annoying people you happen to dislike, is that you detest having to work. Marx thought that capitalism had developed the forces of production to the point at which, under different social relations, they could be used to emancipate the majority of men and women from the most degrading forms of labor. What did he think we would do then? Whatever we wanted. If, like the great Irish socialist Oscar Wilde, we chose simply to lie around all day in loose crimson garments, sipping absinthe and reading the odd page of Homer to each other, then so be it. The point, however, was that this kind of free activity had to be available to all. We would no longer tolerate a situation in which the minority had leisure because the majority had labor.

What interested Marx, in other words, was what one might somewhat misleadingly call the spiritual, not the material. If material conditions had to be changed, it was to set us free from the tyranny of the economic. He himself was staggeringly well read in world literature, delighted in art, culture, and civilized conversation, reveled in wit, humor, and high spirits, and was once chased by a policeman for breaking a street lamp in the course of a pub crawl. He was, of course, an atheist, but you do not have to be religious to be spiritual. He was one of the many great Jewish heretics, and his work is saturated with the great themes of Judaism—justice, emancipation, the Day of Reckoning, the reign of peace and plenty, the redemption of the poor.

What, though, of the fearful Day of Reckoning? Would not Marx’s vision for humanity require a bloody revolution? Not necessarily. He himself thought that some nations, like Britain, Holland, and the United States, might achieve socialism peacefully. If he was a revolutionary, he was also a robust champion of reform. In any case, people who claim that they are opposed to revolution usually mean that they dislike certain revolutions and not others. Are antirevolutionary Americans hostile to the American Revolution as well as the Cuban one? Are they wringing their hands over the recent insurrections in Egypt and Libya, or the ones that toppled colonial powers in Asia and Africa? We ourselves are products of revolutionary upheavals in the past. Some processes of reform have been far more bloodstained than some acts of revolution. There are velvet revolutions as well as violent ones. The Bolshevik Revolution itself took place with remarkably little loss of life. The Soviet Union to which it gave birth fell some 70 years later, with scarcely any bloodshed.

Some critics of Marx reject a state-dominated society. But so did he. He detested the political state quite as much as the Tea Party does, if for rather less redneck reasons. Was he, feminists might ask, a Victorian patriarch? To be sure. But as some (non-Marxist) modern commentators have pointed out, it was men from the socialist and communist camps who, up to the resurgence of the women’s movement, in the 1960s, regarded the issue of women’s equality as vital to other forms of political liberation. The word “proletarian” means those who in ancient society were too poor to serve the state with anything but the fruit of their wombs. “Proles” means “offspring.” Today, in the sweatshops and on the small farms of the third world, the typical proletarian is still a woman.

Much the same goes for ethnic matters. In the 1920s and 30s, practically the only men and women to be found preaching racial equality were communists. Most anticolonial movements were inspired by Marxism. The antisocialist thinker Ludwig von Mises described socialism as “the most powerful reform movement that history has ever known, the first ideological trend not limited to a section of mankind but supported by people of all races, nations, religions, and civilizations.” Marx, who knew his history rather better, might have reminded von Mises of Christianity, but the point remains forceful. As for the environment, Marx astonishingly prefigured our own Green politics. Nature, and the need to regard it as an ally rather than an antagonist, was one of his constant preoccupations.

Why might Marx be back on the agenda? The answer, ironically, is because of capitalism. Whenever you hear capitalists talking about capitalism, you know the system is in trouble. Usually they prefer a more anodyne term, like “free enterprise.” The recent financial crashes have forced us once again to think of the setup under which we live as a whole, and it was Marx who first made it possible to do so. It was The Communist Manifesto which predicted that capitalism would become global, and that its inequalities would severely sharpen. Has his work any defects? Hundreds of them. But he is too creative and original a thinker to be surrendered to the vulgar stereotypes of his enemies.

psychopedagogy

Cho, Daniel. Psychopedagogy. London: Ashgate, 2009.

The force that keeps the unconscious from being heard is the imaginary relation that the analysand constructs between their ego and the analyst’s. To state it differently, the analysand enters into a mirror-relation with the analyst’s ego. The analysand identifies with the analyst by grasping onto the ways they are similar. In a way, the analysand is saying to the analysts, “You are like me!” The analysand will even go so far as to be alienated by the analyst’s ego: “After all,” as the analysand seems to say, “the analyst is the trained professional, the expert.” By regarding the analyst as a mirror-image of one’s self results in attempts to master that image, the analyst. Returning for a moment to Dora – all of her resistance stems from her desire for mastery over Freud, which means the ego is at the bottom of the conflict. Dora is trying to maintain the integrity of her ego by mastering the image qua Freud.

For the unconscious to be heard, the ego must be muted. But one does not mute the ego by debasing, insulting, or shaming it; for indeed the ego will simply redouble itself against such efforts at traumatisation. Rather one disarms the ego by breaking the imaginary identification that alienates the analysand`s subjectivity in the analyst`s, that is, by causing separation. For this reason, Lacan says that the analyst must be ‘not a living mirror, but an empty mirror’ (SII 246). The analyst must be a mirror that reflects an empty image, that is, an image with which the patient cannot identify. The analyst does so by functioning as object a, that obscure object which sullies a perfect picture. And the analyst functions this way by speaking on behalf of the unconscious – the true subject of psychoanalysis. 42

Thus the lesson of the Ratman: we always possess more knowledge than we should like to admit – sometimes more than we ourselves are consciously aware. Learning therefore does not always mean acquiring absolutely new knowledge; it sometimes requires relearning the traumatic knowledge we do “not-want-to-know” but possess all the same. 81

Class consciousness is thus the knowledge of the mode of production contained, or as Lukacs has it, “imputed,” to a particular structural class position within the total system, its thrust is that it places knowledge on the side of the system itself. It no longer much matters what individuals actually think or know about the system. The system functions regardless; and by functioning, the system literally “thinks” the appropriate thoughts for the individuals. For example, the individual worker need not imagine extracting living labor power from the body in order to sell it as a commodity on the market in order for capitalism to function. This knowledge – that is, of classes and their particular functions – is possessed by the system of capital production itself, and as it operates, the system literally thinks about the extraction, sale, and consumption of labor power so that the individual does not have to. In other words, while empirical individuals may not care about the economy or politics, the economy and politics care about empirical individuals. Class consciousness, in other words, on Lukacs’s account, exists on a similar formal level as does the psychoanalytic unconscious. 84

But as suggestive and provocative Lukacs’s unadulterated Marxian variation on consciousness may be, even he does not take into account the various resistances, in the psychoanalytic sense of the word, individuals will produce in order not to know the traumatic knowledge yielded by certain standpoints. We must therefore follow through with the

Just as Lukacs correlates class consciousness to the system itself, effectively rubbing out the individual’s relevance, so Lacan and psychoanalysis also correlate the unconscious to a kind of nonindividual subject: “if there is an image which could represent for us the Freudian notion of the unconscious, it is indeed that of the acephalic subject, of a subject who no longer has an ego, who doesn’t belong to the ego” (S II: 167).

Lacan describes his notion of the subject as acephalic (that is, headless) because its thought is no longer tided to the consciousness of the ego but is now taken over by the unconscious itself. Because of its ties to the ego, consciousness is considered by Lacan as an obstacle or resistance to the knowledge of the unconscious. In dividing thought and being between the unconscious and the subject, Lacan introduces a fundamental division into his variation on the subject, that is to say, the Lacanian subject is a split-subject , which he conveys in his nomenclature: $. 87

Lukacs, similarly, introduces a split into the subject of the proletariat with class consciousness, as we saw, on the side of the system itself, separated from the individual’s being. In both Lukacs and Lacan, the acephalic subject becomes the image to which we must hold on.

The overcoming of the ego leaves a clearing in which the subject of the unconscious can emerge. This is why, for Lacan, the subject can only be described negatively. Only when conscious thought or positive identity (i.e., I am a man, I am a teacher, I am able-bodied, etc.) – in short, the ego – is subtracted from individuals, that is, only when they are transformed into the negativity that is the Lacanian subject, can they learn the unconscious. 87

If class consciousness corresponds to the unconscious in that they are both forms of repressed knowledge, then trauma would be the sign of class consciousness’s emergence. Therefore the criticism that Marx issues his political economist contemporaries on the basis of their not having learned the miserable truth of capitalist accumulation is a bit off the mark. For Marx grants them too much benefit of the doubt. More correct would have been to make the psychoanalytic critique, namely, that the bourgeois political economists knew this truth quite well but nonetheless did “not want to know” about it. They felt the trauma of capitalism and attempted to rationalize it away. 88

Ž in CUNY

Žižek at CUNY given on Monday April 4, 2011.

I don’t believe in authentic events.  Authenticity for me is what happens after.  The disintegration of communist regimes was not an event because nothing new came about. Adorno said “in today’s consumerist society we are so much caught in pseudo-activity”

We are hyper-active.  When we go to a art gallery nobody really is looking at the pictures.  The idea is that the curator does the viewing for them, so that we can just make comments and so on and so on.

Hegel

Totality: not organic whole, but a critical notion.  To locate a phenomenon in its totality is not to see the hidden harmony of the whole, but to include into a system its antagonism, symptoms, inconsistencies as necessary integral parts.  The Hegelian totality is self-contradictory and antagonistic.

The whole which is true, is the whole with its symptoms.  For Marx the totality of capitalism includes crisis.  For Freud the totality of subject is its symptoms.  The whole is never truly whole.  Every notion of whole LEAVES SOMETHING OUT.  The dialectical method means to include this excess, to account for it.  Symptoms are not signs that something is wrong that can be fixed but signs that the whole is rotton.

 

What is out totality today?

Fetishist disavowal

I know very well but … I don’t really believe it

The very material force of ideology that makes us refuse what we know

Zero point: we are being confronted by something so outside our collective experience that we really don’t see it, the biological and physical disturbances in world that sustains it

Global warming: the arctic sea ice is melting faster than predicted.  Before this meant ominous calls to act … lately however we hear voice enjoin us to warm to global warming.  The pessimistic predictions should be put in more context, more optimistic.  How right Naomi Klein was that global capitalism exploits catastrophes to get rid of the old to use the clean slate to impose its order.  Perhaps global warming will provide the same.

Dipesh Chakrabaty: human and natural histories … humans are able to effect the very balance of life on earth … anthropocene the lesson of global warming is that our freedom was only possible against stable natural parameters, we can do what we want be don’t peturb the parameters.  Global warming is the paradoxical outcome of our growing freedom up to destabilizing the parameters of life on earth.

Geo-engineering recognizes tipping points.  Ge represents a lesser risk than not pursuing such strategies.

27 minutes Žižek talks about JAPAN

Natual disasters are useful reminders that ecological troubles cannot be just caused by human hubris, NATURE itself is to blame, we are mercilessly exposed to nature’s cruel whims.  We have no where to withdraw to, no Mother Earth or balanced state to return.

Deceptively self-assuring by saying we are guilty.

Passive role of impotent observer, who can only sit back and watch what his fate will be so to avoid situation, we engage in frantic obsessive activities, recycling paper, buying organic food etc, just so we can think we are doing, just like a soccer fan in front of the television, shouting thinking he will impact the outcome.

Fetishistic disavowal apropos ecology, I know very well, but I won’t change my life.

Opposite form of disavowal: I know very well I can’t really influence the process that will lead to my ruin do anything, but I can’t just stand here and not do anything, so I’ll buy organic apples, we are demonstrating our capacity for noble large collective project.  There is something of this order, no longer just marginal, but assuming a central role in capitalism functions, i.e., the Starbucks thing.  In the old days we were consumerists and we felt bad so you had to do something to counteract it. True our coffee is expensive but some of our profits go to Guatemala, etc.  You can remain a consumerist because solidarity with the poor is included in the price.

This is the horror of ETHICAL CAPITALISM.  It presents itself as anti-ideology.  I remember when I was young it was usually leftists who speak of urgency, now it is Bill Gates, let’s stop the talk, let’s DO something. Don’t think do!  Do so that you will not have to think.  Humanitarianism in all forms, charity, is absolutely integral in capitalism’s reproduction.

Capitalism exploitation of nature, tries to fix it by making ecological and social responsibility profitable.  Postmodern ethical capitalism, Peter Hawkin, new revolution in production, comparable to the first industrial revolution.  To counteract this tendency we have to change our approach.  Our prosperity was illusory, by exploiting natural resources, water, trees soil air all this natural goods, are non-renewable, they also perform services indispensable for our survival.  We should act economic value of nature as a system.  For this definition to become possible, would require regulations, but also a change in form of commodity and market exchange.

With hawkin new ecological content is squeezed into capitalist form.  So that everything becomes a commodity.  The basic capitalist matrix pursuit of profit through expanded reproduction, he save this matrix.  No matter how far we expand the notion of capital.  But capital contains use-value and exchange-value.

Resist temptation of human meaning.  Jerry falwell and Pat Robertson, 911 was a sign that god had lifted his protection because of homosexual…

We must save Judeo-Christian legacy, the Book of Job.  Your suffering has a deeper meaning.  The meaning of job ‘s protest, is not that I’M innocent it’s just that I don’t think my suffering has  a deeper meaning, then God comes, agrees with Job, then Job asks, ok ok, why did I lose my house my calf, my goats, my wife.  God gives the famous answer: but where were you when I created those monsters, this is read as the infinite gap between god and mortals, but GK Chesteron suggests: You think you have the right to complain, but look at the universe it covered in shit.

Žižek in CUNY March, 2011.

Only through Christianity you can become a true atheist.  Don’t worry there’s a guy overlook and caring for us, this dies on the cross. This is why we then get the Holy Spirit. Hate them in their function of mother and father, in their function of hierarchic social order.

Fighting emanicipatory collective, it’s not trust God, god says I’m impotent, I trust you.  You the egalitarian spirit of believers, is all there is.

Ecological catastrophes can be solved science and also mythologizes it by reference to spirit and spirituality.

What it leaves out is basic socio-political analysis.  We must reject a serious of solutions, it is not enough to treat ecological threats as ones for science must deal with or holistic wisdom.

What we need is to look at the uniqueness of our situation.  The destruction of nature itself, the natural enviorment.

1906 william james glee at the vividness and admiration of earthquake, pure delight.  How far are we here from the way the Japanese experienced their earthquake.

Plastic nomadic way :  large-scale social transformations.  Should people of japan be dispersed throughout the world … how would the movement of populations be organized.  National sovereignty will have to be redefined and new global forms of cooperation will have to be invented.

Immanuel Kant: egalitarian universality of thought – public use of reason – no man or women, no Greeks

Immature invidiudals – private use of reason

Universal singularity – directly participates in the universal, if a couple of friends meet in apt and debate philosophy its public use of reason, if you work for the state and talk philosophy its private use of reason.  The EU a mega-catastrophe, the Bologna reform of higher education, the urge to subordinate higher educ to the needs of society – useful to concrete problems, — expert opinion, the idea is if you have car burning in suburb of paris, you call security specialists and sociologists, but what you need is to reflect, to discern a problem in the very way we perceive such problems.  The way we perceive of a problem is part of the problem

Our struggle should focus on threat to world civil society.  Cloud computing, no more floppy discs, we are internet based, users access through browsers.  In this way we can access information from anywehere, the access is in our pocket.  Users are accessing files and programs kept in far away place in climate controlled rooms, in order to manage a cloud there needs to be a controlling system, the more the small item small phone is personalized, easy to use and transparent, the more the entire set-up needs to be done elsewhere. But content is also controlled. Vertical integration, a single company is more and more controlling all levels of web.  Apple Inc.  Made a deal with Murdoch news to make it that access to news on their stuff must go through Murdoch.

Wiki leaks: citizen right to know, investigative journalism, liberal freedom-fighters.  This is ideology.  Even if corruption is shown to reach the top,

Wikileaks went beyond free flow of info, what WL threatened was the formal mode of functioning of power, the true target were not just dirty details, those in power, but power itself.

Sari challenging power, by challenging the normal avenues of challenging power,not about dirty secrets, not embarrass those in power, they sought a different functioning of power.

Marx’s General Intellect: forms of wealth are more and more are out of proportion to directly labour time spent on their production, the result is not self-dissolution of capital, but transition of profit into rent.

Bill Gates is richest man, his wealth had nothing to do with the production costs. Gate’s weall is not result of his higher exploitation of his workers.  Why then are milliosn still buying MS. Because MS monopolized the field as direct embodiment by privatized the GI.

Deregulatory, but the state is more and more all present.  Personal libertarianism and hedonism co-exist with a complex web of state regulatory mechanisms.  Apropos neo-liberalism, we should always be aware that it is an ideology, the more the economists are successful is Singapore, capitalist investments are done through state-corporate investments.

Is this our fate? This offensive of privatised GI, although we participate in a public space, this public space is privatized.  We are slowly witnessing a series of events that are SUBLIME.

Is there a true ethical progress in history? 20th century brought democracy but also the holocaust.

Kant interpreted the French revolution which pointed towards the possibility of freedom. A whole people asserted their freedom and equality.  Spectators a taking of sides which borders on enthusiasm, can only be caused by a moral diposition within the human race.  Do these words not fit perfectly the Egyptian uprising. The universal freedom of humanity. It was immediately possible for all of us to identify with it, we didn’t need particularist interpretations, here the frame is universal secular call for freedom and justice.  Muslim and Coptic Chritians joined in a prayer, we are 1, was a SUBLIME moment.

The rise of radical Islamism is the opposite side of the coin of failed leftist revolutions in muslim countries.  Afghanistan was caught in larger global countries, there are no backward people whose 1000 year tradition etc.  That is simply not true.  Thomas Frank What’s the Matter with Kansas.

Western Europe violent return of anti-immigrant populism, to combat centrist liberalism LePen is only politician who refers to working class.

The struggle for who will appropriate the struggles of Egyptian revolution.  The demand for social justice.  What happens the day after.  How will emancipatory explosions be translated into new social order.  Democracy but poverty remains. Look at South Africa, Hollywood Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela.  If anything the black majority is even a little bit worse than under apartheid, with its police brutality, it brought a minimum of safety, now crime is out of control, black elite replaces the white elite.

At different levels we are facing a series of problems which are literally problems of the commons.  They all concern the ‘commons’ of nature, intellectual property, biogenetics and new walls and new exclusions.

We should not abandon the notion of proletariat, redefine it under new conditions.  Proletarian is a worker, reduced to pure subjectivity, when all substantical content is taken from him (marx). In a way ecological crisis is making us proletarian, natural environment is taken from us, intellectual property means general intellect is taken from us  we should radicalize the category of proletarian…

Saroy Giri: we have an overload of false moralistic anti-capitalism, corrupt banks, the catch is that in all these cases it is the ‘bad guy’ corruption, the situation in other words is moralized.  The big question is how the system itself generates this.  A defence of Bernard Madoff: anti-semtic, look that greedy guy, he was a model of charitable capitalism, he just went to the end in the direction the system was going. At all levels we should do it, in ecology its the same, I wanted to write a text to defend BP.  Wasn’t it suspicious that they all focused on they BP were inefficient, but they were only doing what every other oil company was doing.

I’m not a guy we need a “Leninist Party”.  The old style commies in power, when people ask me, you want the old style commies, you are taking to the wrong guy, look at China they are ruthless capitalists, they are on your side.  Even when they celebrated Stalin and Mao, they never proclaimed Stalin did miracles, but they do so in North Korea.

No sympathy for Stalin, but my reproach to standard Anti-communism, if anything it is too soft.  Did you see the movie Life of the Others.  It’s supposed to be anti-communist.  Communist minister wants to sleep with the wife of a writer.  But my east german friends this is ridiculous, where behind evil act there must be some private vice.

The tragedy of East Germany was that writer would been under total surveillance forget about a guy wanting to screw his wife.

People whose basic disposition is good are made to do bad things.

I am saying communism disappears but the problems of COMMONS remains.  And we will have somehow to solve it.

I have no problems with markets, but markets need time, but when you have a catastrophe,large social acts are needed, neither market nor the state but when a nuclear reactor explains transnational large mobilization will have to emerge.

The problems of communism are here, the alternative is either some kind of re-invention of this large scale social movement, or its also quite possible something between Berlusconi and China.  I have nothing against the Chinese, you give to the devil what belongs to the devil, capitalism needed dictatorship for 10 years, Chile, South Korea, but now Singapoer, China, a dynamic capitalism, productive, but no tendency for democracy.  This marriage between capitalism and democracy is slowing disintegrating.  Nothing against democracy, in England, the last elections won by Tony Blair, 1 week there was a t.v. show the most hated person in the U.K. and Blair won. There is a level of social discontent that can’t be captured by multi-party democractic mechanisms,  what about brazil and Bolivia, an inter-action and organized movements, indigenous, workers, social movements.  You get this additional push beyond this purely representational function. If we really care about democracy, in the long term only a new more radical left can save it.  Left to itself, …

Did you notice in what a strange way, the word “impossible” functions, at the level of tech possibilities and private pleasures anything possible, can be an astronaut, go to space, everyting is possible, but the moment you touch the economy, you way raise a little more money for health care NO NO that’s impossible.

Neo-liberalism doesn’t exist in reality.  We have a space.to change things.

stavrakakis 8 of 8

Stavrakakis, Yannis. Subjectivity and the Organized Other: Between Symbolic Authority and Fantasmatic Enjoyment Organization Studies 2008 29: 1037

This is not to say that resistance is impossible. It is merely to imply that our dependence on the organized Other is not reproduced merely at the level of knowledge and conscious consent, and thus a shift in consciousness through knowledge transmission is not enough to effect change. What is much more important is the formal (symbolic) structure of power relations that social ordering presupposes. The subject very often prefers not to realize the performative function of the symbolic command — the fact that what promises to deal with subjective lack is what reproduces this lack perpetuating the subject’s desire for subjection. Most crucially, the reproduction of this formal structure relies on a libidinal, affective support that binds subjects to the conditions of their symbolic subordination. What makes the lack in the Other ‘invisible’ — and thus sustains the credibility of the organized Other — is a fantasmatic dialectic manipulating our relation to a lost/impossible enjoyment. It is impossible to unblock and displace identifications and passionate attachments without paying attention to this important dimension.

[A]ny analysis that purports to capture the complex relation between subject and structure cannot remain at the level of signification, although the role of the symbolic command remains extremely important. But, then, how exactly should one theorize the ‘material’ irreducible to signification?

The importance of this question appears to be elevated in a context in which passion and affect are given increasingly prominent roles in the study of society and politics. Here, contrary to what is widely believed, Lacan does not limit his insights within the level of representation and signification.

One needs to stress the productivity of the Lacanian distinction between the ‘subject of the signifier’ and the ‘subject of enjoyment/jouissance’ in addressing this question, and to develop its implications for how we can or should consider the relation between subject and organized Other.

… Lacanian theory accounts for the … lack in the Other, the lack that splits subjective and objective reality, as a lack of jouissance … This lack is always posited as something lost, as a lost fullness, the part of ourselves that is sacrificed — castrated — when we enter the symbolic system of language and social relations. As we have already seen, however, this lack of jouissance should not be viewed as a nihilistic conclusion. It is, rather, what constitutes and sustains human desire: the prohibition of jouissance — the nodal point of the Oedipal drama — is exactly what permits the emergence of desire, a desire structured around the unending quest for the lost, impossible jouissance.

Even after symbolic castration — or, rather, because of it — jouissance remains the catalyst of inter-subjective interaction, a potent political factor.

According to this schema, it is only by sacrificing her pre-symbolic enjoyment that the social subject can develop her desire (including the desire to identify with particular political projects, ideologies and discourses).

The fact, however, that this enjoyment is excised during the process of socialization does not mean that it stops affecting the politics of subjectivity and identification. On the contrary; first of all, it is the imaginary promise of recapturing our lost/impossible enjoyment which provides the fantasy support for many of our political projects and social choices. Almost all political discourse focuses on the delivery of the ‘good life’ or a ‘just society’, both fictions (imaginarizations) of a future state in which current limitations thwarting our enjoyment will be overcome.

… During this imaginary period, which we could call ‘original state’, the nation was prosperous and happy. However, this original state of innocence was somehow destroyed and national(ist) narratives are based on the assumption that the desire of each generation is to try and heal this (metaphoric) castration in order to give back to the nation its lost full enjoyment.

But this is not the full story. Apart from the promise of fantasy, what sustains desire, what drives our identification acts at the level of affectivity/jouissance, is also our ability to go through limit-experiences related to a jouissance of the body.

Otherwise, without any such experience, our faith in fantasmatic political projects — projects which never manage to deliver the fullness they promise — would gradually vanish. A national war victory or the successes of the national football team are examples of such experiences of enjoyment at the national level. However impressive, this jouissance remains partial:

That’s not it

‘“That’s not it” is the very cry by which the jouissance obtained is distinguished from the jouissance expected’ (Lacan 1998: 111); its momentary character, unable to fully satisfy desire, fuels dissatisfaction. It reinscribes lack in the subjective economy, the lack of another jouissance, of the sacrificed jouissance qua fullness, and thus reproduces the fantasmatic promise of its recapturing, the kernel of human desire.

Precisely because the partiality of this second type of enjoyment threatens to reveal the illusory character of our fantasies of fullness, the credibility and salience of any object of identification — and of the organized Other offering it — relies on the ability of providing a convincing explanation for the lack of total enjoyment.

It is here that the idea of a ‘theft of enjoyment’ is introduced (Zizek 1993). If we seem unable to access our lost/impossible enjoyment this is not because castration is constitutive of our symbolic reality, it is not because fullness is impossible, it is only because somebody else is obstructing our access; what we are lacking has been stolen by this satanic other. It may be a foreign occupier, the ‘national enemy’, those who ‘always plot to rule the world’, some dark powers and their local sympathizers ‘who want to enslave our proud nation’, immigrants ‘who steal our jobs’, etc.

The obstacle to full enjoyment shifts depending on the specificity of the fantasmatic narrative at stake, but the logic operating here remains the same.

Conclusion

I have tried in this paper to outline the ways in which Lacanian theory moves beyond subjectivism and objectivism in illuminating the dialectic between subject and organized Other. By understanding the subject as a subject of lack,

Lacan’s negative ontology provides a solution to the paradox of a desire for subjection. There is no desire without lack. And the Other — embodied in the symbolic command — is both what consolidates this lack in the symbolic and what promises to ‘manage’ this lack. At the same time, by understanding the Other as an equally lacking domain Lacan helps us to explain the failure of subjection, the possibility of escaping a full determination of the subject by the socio-symbolic structure.

Why is it then that this option only rarely enacts itself?

To the extent that the lack marking both subject and Other is always a lack of real jouissance, forms of identification offered by the organized Other are obliged to operate at this level also, adding the dimension of a positive incentive to the formal force of the symbolic command. We have thus seen how Lacanian theory illuminates the dialectic between subject and organized Other not only by focusing on the symbolic presuppositions of authority (the irresistibility of the Other’s command), but also by exploring the fantasmatic administration of real enjoyment and its lack, which sustains the credibility of the lacking Other and defers resistance.

Only by taking into account both these dimensions, lack and enjoyment, symbolic command and fantasy, can we start envisaging a comprehensive explanation of what drives identification acts sustaining structures of subjection and, simultaneously, allows a margin of freedom, which, however, can only be enacted with difficulty.

And, of course, the reason for this difficulty is that the symbolic and fantasmatic force of orders of subjection is so overwhelming that resistance or non-compliance itself (when it manages to occur) is usually guided by and ends up instituting a new order of subjection and rarely engages in attempts to encircle lack in a radically democratic ethico-political direction.

Lacan’s reaction to May 1968 is absolutely relevant here (and not only because of the 40th anniversary of the May events). I will very briefly refer to it by way of concluding this essay. During the May events, Lacan observed the French teachers’ strike and suspended his seminar; it seems that he even met Daniel Cohn-Bendit, one of the student leaders (Roudinesco 1997: 336). One way or the other, his name became linked to the events. However, the relation was not an easy one. In 1969, for instance, Lacan was invited to speak at Vincennes, but obviously he and the students operated at different wavelengths. The discussion ended as follows:

‘The aspiration to revolution has but one conceivable issue, always, the discourse of the master. That is what experience has proved. What you, as revolutionaries, aspire to is a Master. You will have one… for you fulfil the role of helots of this regime. You don’t know what that means either? This regime puts you on display; it says: “Watch them fuck”.’ (Lacan 1990: 126)

A similar experience marks his lecture at the Université Catholique de Louvain on 13 October 1973, when he is interrupted and eventually attacked by a student who seizes the opportunity to transmit his (situationist) revolutionary message. The episode, which has been filmed by Françoise Wolff, concludes with Lacan making the following comment:

‘As he was just saying, we should all be part of it, we should close ranks together to achieve, well, what exactly? What does organization mean if not a new order? A new order is the return of something which — if you remember the premise from which I started — it is the order of the discourse of the Master … It’s the one word which hasn’t been mentioned, but it’s the very term organization implies.’ A grim picture, but one that has to be seriously taken into account in reflecting our current theoretico-political predicament.

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Stavrakakis, Yannis. Subjectivity and the Organized Other: Between Symbolic Authority and Fantasmatic Enjoyment Organization Studies 2008 29: 1037

Beyond Identification,Yet Internal to It: The Subject of Enjoyment

If this structural and structuring role of the command provides the ontological nexus within which the subject learns to interact with their social environment — the symbolic preconditions of subjection and obedience — it cannot explain, however, why some commands produce obedient behaviour and others are ignored. It cannot account for the occurrence of disobedience and for instances of resistance. In fact, if we were to stay at this level, it would be impossible to account both for the failure of certain commands and for the complex ‘extrasymbolic’ means through which the organized Other supports and/or attempts to reinstitute its authority. Here, the Lacanian answer is simple. On the one hand, the real exceeds the subject and the lack this inscribes within subjective identity is what stimulates desire (for subjection to the Other).

On the other hand, the real also exceeds the Other and the lack this inscribes in the Other explains the ultimate failure of fully determining subjectivity. It is this second failure that makes resistance possible, at least in principle. It is in the traumatic fact that the Other cannot fully determine the subject that a space for freedom starts to emerge. But this is a freedom that the subject has learned to fear.

As Judith Butler has formulated it, this predicament of the subject is usually resolved with the adoption of the following stance: ‘I would rather exist in subordination than not exist’ (Butler 1997b: 7).

Both the Other and the subject prefer to repress or disavow, to defer this realization of the lack in the Other.

But in order to attempt that in a persuasive manner, the symbolic command is not enough. Something more positive is needed, given the fact that the lack marking subject and Other is a lack of jouissance. This is what fantasy attempts to offer. Let us examine in some more detail the basis of this argument. In order to sustain its hegemony, the performative, formal aspect of the command has to be supported by a fantasy scenario investing it with some supreme value at the level of enjoyment. We have seen in the previous section how Lacanian theory conceives of the different planes operating in identity formation at the intersection of subject and organized Other. We have also seen how Lacan’s negative ontology of lack leads to an attempt to encircle the real of enjoyment, a real which provides the (absent) cause of the dialectic of (failed) identifications partially constituting subjective and social reality.

Here is where Lacan’s originality — in relation to the general field of poststructuralism — is most clearly located. Why? Precisely because poststructuralism remains largely attached to what Harpham has described as ‘the critical fetish of modernity’: Language. … As a result of the linguistic turn … Language has become ‘the critical fetish of modernity’.

However, focusing on the symbolic aspects of identity … is not sufficient in order to reach a rigorous understanding of the drive behind identification acts, to explain why certain identifications prove to be more forceful and alluring than others, and to realize why none can be totally successful. In fact, poststructuralism has often employed models of subjectivity reducing it to a mere linguistic structure (reproducing a rationalist idea that control of talk and discourse means control of political belief) (Alcorn 2002: 97):

‘When poststructuralist theory imagines a subject structured by discourse, it has great difficulty making sense of subjects caught in patterns of repetition unresponsive to dialectic. To understand discourse fully is to understand the limitations of discourse … its inability to persuade the anorexic to eat, and its inability to intervene in those mechanisms of subjectivity that drive actions inaccessible to dialectic.’ (Alcorn 2002: 101)

‘Because of a kind of adhesive attachment that subjects have to certain instances of discourse, some discourse structures are characteristic of subjects and have a temporal stability. These modes of discourse serve as symptoms of subjectivity: they work repetitively and defensively to represent identity … some modes of discourse, because they are libidinally invested, repeatedly and predictably function to constitute the subject’s sense of identity.’ (Alcorn 2002: 17)

The libidinal, fantasmatic character of these attachments is also deeply implicated in processes of social change, which, under this light, can only be described in terms of a dialectic of dis-investment and re-investment … ‘to disinvest social constructions, one must do more than use language or be rational, one must do the work of withdrawing desire from representations.

This work is the work of mourning’ (Alcorn 2002: 117). Discursive shifts presuppose the ‘unbinding of libido’ and the re-investment of jouissance (Alcorn 2002: 118).

When Milgram perceptively writes that the experimenter fills a gap experienced by the subject, the association with Lacan’s formula of fantasy is unavoidable, since fantasy entails a link between the split (castrated) subject of the signifier and his objet-cause of desire, an object purporting to cover over its lack and ‘heal’ or, at least, domesticate castration.

The obvious question thus becomes: is there a fantasmatic frame that supports the symbolic command and binds the subject to the elementary structure of obedience revealed in Milgram’s experiment?

It is far from surprising that Milgram does isolate such a fantasmatic frame; he even highlights its ideological nature. This frame is science itself. What guarantees that the command of the experimenter will be taken seriously, what defers resistance, is that it is presented as part of a scientific experiment. Whatever happens in the experiment is commanded and justified by Science. As Milgram puts it, ‘the idea of science and its acceptance provide the overarching ideological justification for the experiment’ (Milgram 2005: 143).

Of course such a justification is always culturally specific: ‘if the experiment were carried out in a culture very different from our own — say, among Trobrianders — it would be necessary to find a functional equivalent of science in order to obtain psychologically comparable results’ (Milgram 2005: 144). It is also socially and politically specific: when the Yes Men, for example, make an outrageous WTO presentation to a group of students in New York they are met with hostility and not with acceptance (The Yes Men 2004: 146–7).

However, what is most important here is that this fantasmatic frame adds a positive support to the negative/formal character of the symbolic command since science is obviously invested with a positive value: ‘Ideological justification is vital in obtaining willing obedience, for it permits the person to see his behaviour as serving a desirable end’ (Milgram 2005: 144).

What seems to be implied is a particular form of attachment that can only be thought of in terms of positive investment. Thus, the experiment can function only because in the experimenter’s face the empty gesture of symbolic power and the fullness of its fantasmatic support seem to unite.

The other side of the negative force of castration implicit in the command is the fantasy channelling and sustaining in a much more positive and productive way the desire stimulated by this castration itself.

In Milgram’s words, ‘once people are brought into a social hierarchy, there must be some cementing mechanism to endow the structure with at least minimal stability’ (Milgram 2005: 149), and this mechanism involves a certain reward structure (Milgram 2005: 139), which can obviously be conceptualized in ways far more sophisticated than the ones Milgram himself could envisage. Only now can one begin to make real sense of the bond developed between experimenter and subject.

The subject of the experiment submits to the command not merely because it is a symbolic command but also because it is supported by an (imaginarized) supreme knowledge projected onto the person of the experimenter; in this case the experimenter is accepted as an agent of Science.

This projection, however, does not depend exclusively on the particular fantasy present here: it also reveals a more general condition relating to the nature of the bond between authority and subject. In Milgram’s own words, ‘Because the experimenter issues orders within a context he is presumed to know something about, his power is increased. Generally, authorities are felt to know more than the person they are commanding; whether they do or not, the occasion is defined as if they do’ (Milgram 2005: 143).

My reading may be guided by my Lacanian bias, but isn’t Milgram implying that the relation between experimenter and subject is a relation of transference? Isn’t he demonstrating that the experimenter functions as a subject supposed to know?

And, as we know from psychoanalysis, a transferential relation is never purely cognitive: it is primarily affective and libidinal; it also involves a certain enjoyment. Without such an emotional tie obedience would easily break down and disobedience would occur. Besides, how else can we explain the ‘curious’ feelings of compassion towards the experimenter, who issues the commands, and not so much towards the (supposedly) suffering person who receives the (fake) electric shocks, that Milgram detects in his subjects? The ‘unwillingness to “hurt” the experimenter’s feelings, are part of those binding forces inhibiting disobedience’ (Milgram 2005: 152).

In that sense, Milgram can contribute two major points to our inquiry.

1. obedience to authority has a lot to do with the symbolic source of the command and very little with its concrete (rational or irrational, factual or fictional) content.

2. our attachment to this symbolic source is, to a large extent, extimate to the symbolic itself.

Beyond the formal force of the symbolic command, Milgram reveals a lot about the more positive aspects of attachment and obedience to power structures. Not only are these formal structures supported by a fantasy frame manipulating our desire, but the nature of this attachment itself is also of a libidinal, transferential nature.

Symbolic power presupposes a particular type of relation between those who exercise power and those who are subjected to it, a relation of belief which results in complicity.

Such a belief cannot be cultivated and sustained without the mobilization and fantasmatic manipulation of affect and enjoyment; it is clearly located in an extimate position with regard to symbolic structure: ‘What creates the power of words and slogans, a power capable of maintaining or subverting the social order, is the belief in the legitimacy of words and of those who utter them. And words alone cannot create this belief’ (Bourdieu 1991: 170).

This is why it is so difficult — although, fortunately, not impossible — for subjects to withdraw from the experiment: ‘Though many subjects make the intellectual decision that they should not give any more shocks to the learner, they are frequently unable to transform this conviction into action’ (Milgram 2005: 150).

In other words, resistance cannot rely on a shift in consciousness and knowledge. Resistance is not an intellectual issue precisely because obedience is also not sustained at an intellectual level.

Even those who decide to ignore the command cannot do so without enormous emotional strain: ‘As the subject contemplates this break, anxiety is generated, signalling him to step back from the forbidden action and thereby creating an emotional barrier through which he must pass in order to defy authority’ (Milgram 2005: 154).

It is here, I believe, that one encounters the most disturbing aspect of Milgram’s experiment. It is clearly located in the difficulties in passing from acceptance to dissent and from dissent to disobedience. In other words, the subject has to overcome two emotional barriers in order to resist the violent command.

The first barrier leads to the expression of dissent. But dissent does not necessarily lead to disobedience: ‘Many dissenting individuals who are capable of expressing disagreement with authority still respect authority’s right to overrule their expressed opinion. While disagreeing, they are not prepared to act on this conviction’ (Milgram 2005: 163).

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Stavrakakis, Yannis. Subjectivity and the Organized Other: Between Symbolic Authority and Fantasmatic Enjoyment Organization Studies 2008 29: 1037

Very often, however, experiencing such alienation is not enough to effect a lessening of the bonds attaching us to the socio-symbolic Other. In other words, subjects are willing to do whatever may be necessary in order to repress or disavow the lack in the Other.

This insight is crucial in understanding power relations. Moving beyond the banal level of raw coercion, which (although not unimportant) cannot form the basis of sustainable hegemony, everyone seeking to understand how certain power structures manage to institute themselves as objects of long-term identification and how people get attached to them is sooner or later led to a variety of phenomena associated with what, since de la Boetie, has been called ‘voluntary servitude’. The central question here is simple:

Why are people so willing and often enthusiastic — or at least relieved — to submit themselves to conditions of subordination, to the forces of hierarchical order? Why are they so keen to comply with the commands of authority often irrespective of their content?

The famous words of Rousseau from the second chapter of The Social Contract are heard echoing here: ‘A slave in fetters loses everything — even the desire to be freed from them. He grows to love his slavery …’   Obviously, the Oedipal structure implicit in the social ordering of our societies, the role of what Lacan calls ‘the Name-of-the-Father’ in structuring reality through the (castrating) imposition of the Law, predisposes social subjects to accept and obey what seems to be emanating from the big Other, from socially sedimented points of reference invested with the gloss of authority and presented as embodying and sustaining the symbolic order, organizing (subjective and objective) reality.  This central Freudian-Lacanian insight can indeed explain a lot. And this can be very well demonstrated through some empirical examples.

Consider, for instance, the story of The Yes Men, two anti-corporate activistpranksters who have set up a fake ‘World Trade Organisation’ website. Believing that the site is the official WTO site, many visitors have sent them speaking invitations addressed to the real WTO. Mike and Andy decided to accept some of the invitations and soon started attending business meetings and conferences throughout the world as WTO representatives. Although intending to shock and ridicule they soon discovered that their ludicrous interventions generated other types of reaction. This is how they describe their experience themselves:

Neither Andy nor Mike studied economics at school. We know very little about the subject, and we won’t attempt to convince you otherwise; if you are of sound mind, you would see through us immediately. Yet, to our surprise, at every meeting we addressed, we found we had absolutely no trouble fooling the experts — those same experts who are ramming the panaceas of ‘free trade’ and ‘globalization’ down the throats of the world’s population. Worse: we couldn’t get them to disbelieve us.

Some of our presentations were based on official theories and policies, but presented with far more candour than usual, making them look like the absurdities that they actually are. At other times we simply ranted nonsensically. Each time, we expected to be jailed, kicked out, silenced, or at the very least interrupted. But no one batted an eye. In fact, they applauded. (The Yes Men 2005)

Simply put, people seem to be ready to accept anything insofar as it is perceived to be transmitted from a source invested with authority: for businessmen and many academics the WTO is obviously such a source. In other words, the content of a message is not as important as the source from which it emanates. Likewise, the subject’s autonomy in filtering and consciously managing its beliefs seems to be undermined by a dependence on symbolic authority per se.

We saw in the activities staged by the Yes Men how easily people are prepared to accept whatever is perceived as coming from an authority. Obviously, what is at stake here is not only acceptance but also compliance and obedience.

Most people, as is shown in their activities, are indeed prepared to accept and obey anything coming from a source of authority irrespective of the actual content of the command. In fact, this structure of authority seems to be a frame presupposed in every social experience.

As Milgram points out, already before the experiment starts, ‘the subject enters the situation with the expectation that someone will be in charge’. Now, and this is the most crucial point, the role of this someone is structurally necessary, without him the identity of the subject itself remains suspended and no functional social interaction can take place: ‘the experimenter, upon first presenting himself, fills a gap experienced by the subject’.  This quasi-Lacanian formulation reveals something essential. First of all, it lends support to the Lacanian understanding of the Name-of-the-Father, the signifier representing authority and order, as instituting the reality of the subject. In his brief Lacanian analysis of the Milgram experiment, David Corfield is right to point out that it ‘reveals something of the super-egoical consequences of the establishment of the paternal metaphor in a clear, albeit brutal fashion’ (Corfield 2002: 200).

The founding moment of subjectivity proper, the moment linguistic/social subjects come to being, has to be associated with symbolic castration, with the prohibition of incest that resolves imaginary alienation and permits our functional insertion into the social world of language.

In other words, the command embodied in the Name-of-the-Father offers the prototype of symbolic power that structures our social reality in patriarchal societies. This is a power both negative and positive, both prohibitive and productive (à la Foucault). The performative prohibition of the paternal function is exactly what makes possible the development of (sexual) desire. Furthermore, it is a power that presupposes our complicity or rather our acceptance; only this acceptance is ‘forced’ since without it no social subject can emerge and psychosis seems to be the only alternative.

And this is a dialectic which is bound to affect our whole life: ‘A power exerted on a subject, subjection is nevertheless a power assumed by the subject, an assumption that constitutes the instrument of that subject’s becoming’ (Butler 1997b: 11).

Without the assumption of castration no desire can emerge. In that sense, if Giorgio Agamben links biopolitics (a characteristically modern phenomenon according to Foucault) with sovereignty per se (Agamben 1998), Lacan seems to be highlighting the inextricable bond between repressive and productive (symbolic) power. Hence, symbolic castration marks a point of no return for the subject.

It is the command of prohibition and our subjection to it that institutes our social world as a structured meaningful order. Without someone in command reality disintegrates.

What Lacan, in his ‘Agency of the Letter’, describes as the ‘elementary structures of culture’ (Lacan 1977: 148), meaning a linguistically determined sense of ordering, are now also revealed as elementary structures of obedience and symbolic power. The intersubjective effects of this logic are immense: ‘It is not only the subject, but the subjects, caught in their intersubjectivity, who line up … and who, more docile than sheep, model their very being on the moment of the signifying chain that runs through them’ (Lacan 2006: 21).

Without such an elementary structure of obedience — instituted and reproduced in what Milgram calls ‘antecedent conditions’: the individual’s familial experience, the general societal setting built on impersonal relations of authority — the experiment would collapse. And these antecedent conditions have to be understood in their proper Lacanian perspective: they refer primarily to the whole symbolic structure within which the subject is born: ‘the subject … if he can appear to be the slave of language is all the more so of a discourse in the universal movement of which his place is already inscribed at birth, if only by virtue of his proper name’ (Lacan 1977: 63–4).