Author: logocentric

Less Than Nothing

Oct 14, 2012

This brings us back to our original question: in what does the difference between animal and human habits consist? Only humans, spiritual beings, are haunted by spirits―why? Not simply because, in contrast to animals, they have access to universality, but because this universality is for them simultaneously necessary and impossible; that is, it is a problem. In other words, while for human subjects the place of universality is prescribed, it has to remain empty, it can never be filled in with its “proper” content. Continue reading “Less Than Nothing”

Ž on Kant undead

Nov 17, 2012

A quote from Zizek (Tarrying with the Negative, pp.113-4):

Invoking the “living dead” is no accident here: in our ordinary language, we resort to indefinite judgments precisely when we endeavor to comprehend those borderline phenomena which undermine established differences, such as those between living and being dead. In the texts of popular culture, the uncanny creatures which are neither alive nor dead, the “living dead” (vampires, etc.), are referred to as “the undead”; although they are not dead, they are clearly not alive like us, ordinary mortals. The judgment “he is undead” is therefore an indefinite-limiting judgment in the precise sense of a purely negative gesture of excluding vampires from the domain of the dead, without for that reason locating them in the domain of the living (as in the case of the simple negation “he is not dead”). The fact that vampires and other “living dead” are usually referred to as “things” has to be rendered with its full Kantian meaning: a vampire is a Thing which looks and acts like us, yet it is not one of us. Continue reading “Ž on Kant undead”

Less than nothing

Nov 30, 2012

Page 467

Hegel is the ultimate thinker of the process of the emergence of necessary features out of chaotic contingency of contingency’s gradual self-organization of the gradual rise of order out of chaos

How, then, can necessity arise out of contingency? The only way to avoid the obscurantism of “emergent properties” is to bring into play negativity: at its most radical, necessity is not a positive principle of regularity that overcomes contingency, but the negative obverse of contingency: what is “necessary” above all is that every contingent particular entity find its truth in its self-cancellation, disintegration, death. Continue reading “Less than nothing”

Zupančič Interview

Alenka Zupančič interviewed by Los Angeles Review of Books, March 9, 2018

CASSANDRA B. SELTMAN: The aim of What IS Sex? is to return to and preserve the idea of sexuality as a subject of philosophical investigation. How do you understand the proliferation of new ontologies in “the times we live in”? Do you see this as a “return” to ontological questions?

ALENKA ZUPANČIČ: I see this as a symptom. There are two levels or aspects of this question. On the one hand, there is a truth, or conceptual necessity, in what you rightfully call the return to ontology. Philosophy should not be ashamed of serious ontological inquiry, and the interrogation here is vital and needed. There is, however, something slightly comical when this need is asserted as an abstract or normative necessity — “one should do this,” and then everybody feels that he or she needs to have their own ontology. “I am John Doe, and here’s my ontology.” There is much arbitrariness here, rather than conceptual necessity and rigor. This is not how philosophy works.

Also, there is this rather bafflingly simplifying claim according to which Kant and the “transcendental turn” to epistemology was just a big mistake, error, diversion — which we have to dismiss and “return” to ontology, to talking about things as they are in themselves. Kant’s transcendental turn was an answer to a real impasse of philosophical ontology. We can agree that his answer is perhaps not the ultimate or philosophically the only viable answer, but this does not mean that the impasse or difficulty that it addresses was not real and that we can pretend it doesn’t exist.

My attempt to “return to” the idea of sexuality as a subject of ontological investigation is rooted in my conviction that psychoanalysis (i.e., Freud and Lacan) and its singular concept of the subject are of great pertinence for the impasse of ontology that Kant was tackling. So my claim is not simply that sexuality is important and should be taken seriously; in a sense, it is spectacularly more ambitious. My claim is that the Freudo-Lacanian theory of sexuality, in its inherent relation to the unconscious, dislocates and transposes the philosophical question of ontology and its impasse in a most interesting way. I’m not interested in sexuality as a case of “local ontology,” but as possibly providing some key conceptual elements for the ontological interrogation as such.

Continue reading “Zupančič Interview”

12 Questions ALENKA ZUPANČIČ

Alenka’s Answers

I – As a philosopher, what is it that interests you in psychoanalysis, and why?

Psychoanalysis is not simply a therapeutic practice.  It is – perhaps above all – a stunning conceptual invention that made this new practice possible.  In this sense, psychoanalysis is also something that “happened” to philosophy and that philosophy cannot remain indifferent to, as if nothing happened there.  But this implies of course that – as Lacan put it somewhere –  “psychoanalysis is not psychology”.  For me this means that psychoanalysis is not a regional science of human being, but concerns, and has something to say about, the very constitution of subjectivity, also in its profound philosophical sense.  Lacan’s “return to Freud” involved an extremely serious engagement with philosophy, the whole history of philosophy, as a means of showing and conceptualizing what is so new, or different about Freud.  Psychoanalysis is not simply a move “beyond” philosophy; in many ways, philosophy itself has always been a move beyond (previous) philosophy… Continue reading “12 Questions ALENKA ZUPANČIČ”

Badiou

Here are some interesting articles

The Event

Truth, Subjectivity and Fidelity

Exploitation of Nature From Theoryleaks dot org.

It has become common today to announce, for various reasons, the end of the human species as we know it. In the typically messianic direction that a certain ecology proceeds, the predatory excesses of this bad animal that is the human will soon lead to the end of the living world. In the direction of the technological surge, we are promised, pell-mell, the robotization of all work, sumptuous digitization, automatic art, the plasticized killer, and the perils of superhuman intelligence.

As a result, threatening categories, such as transhumanism and the posthuman, rise to the surface; or, symmetrically, a return to animalism – depending on whether one prophesies on the basis of technical creation or laments on the basis of the attacks on Mother Nature. I hold all these prophecies as so many ideological rattles intended to obscure the real danger to which humanity is exposed today, namely the impasse into which globalized capitalism is leading us. It is in reality this social form, and it alone, which authorizes the destructive exploitation of natural resources, linking it to the pure notion of private profit. Continue reading “Badiou”

Sigi Jöttkandt on Badiou

This lecture addresses an apparent shift in Alain Badiou’s thinking on sex and the universal. Previously Badiou had maintained that sex was a particularity that requires subtraction from the universal, together with the other predicative descriptions of identity such as nation, race and class. However in a recent paper, “Figures of Femininity in the Contemporary World”, Badiou contends that the sexuation of philosophical and symbolic thought is “inevitable”. Taking Badiou’s readings of Samuel Beckett as its guide, and addressing Badiou’s discussions of change in Logics of Worlds and Subject of Change, this lecture works through the implications of this new claim. It asks whether Badiou’s thought allows the possibility of a real change in his philosophy, including thereby the potential to change one’s sex.

What is a true change?

Johnston A.

Johnston, A. (2013). Drive Between Brain And Subject: An Immanent Critique Of Lacanian Neuropsychoanalysis.  The Southern Journal of Philosophy. Vol. 51, Spindel Supplement

I am convinced that the life sciences, in order to do real justice to the richly and unpredictably weird sorts of subjects humans are, must supplement the framing worldview of their spontaneous organicism with the notion that (phrased in Lacanian fashion) there is something in the organic more than the organic itself.

In other words, a nonorganicity is immanent to the most complex forms of the organic. This is by virtue of the reality that, above certain thresholds, complexity of various sorts (be it biological, computational, institutional, social, or whatever) tends, within its given domain(s),to generate inner antagonisms, bugs, glitches, loopholes, short circuits, and tensions (a fact to which any experienced computer programmer, tax lawyer, or government bureaucrat readily would testify).

A. Zupančič St. Petersberg Feb 2018

Alenka Zupančič (The Institute of Philosophy of the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts) The report will explore the encounter between psychoanalysis and philosophy at the point where the two seem to be the most incompatible.

Sex (and psychoanalytic theory of sexuality) is something that philosophy usually doesn’t know what to do with; sex is the question usually left out in even the most friendly philosophical appropriations of Lacan and his concepts.

And ontology (as since of pure being) is something that psychoanalysis doesn’t know what to do with, or is highly critical about.

The report will take these two notions and cast them, so to say, in the opposite camps. It will argue that sex is the properly philosophical (ontological) question of psychoanalysis, and present some consequences that this shift of perspective has for philosophy.

 

European University at St. Petersberg Russia

Philosophy and Psychoanalysis
Philosophers in postmodern fashion gave up on traditional concepts: subject, truth, real, and put in metaphysical past. Then along came Lacan, who said the concepts are not problematic in themselves, but the way we use them.

Limits on Free Speech?

academeblog.org/2017/12/07/free-expression-or-harassment/

by Judith Butler

Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley and a member of the Berkeley Faculty Association and the AAUP.  The following is the slightly edited text of remarks she delivered December 4 at a forum sponsored by the Berkeley Academic Senate, “Perspectives on Freedom of Expression on Campus.” 

Thank you for this opportunity to pose some questions that might prove useful for our discussion today.  In most courses dedicated to the study of constitutional principles, it makes sense to start with cases that produce a problem for the law.  What if we also start by identifying a set of quandaries not because this is a law school course, but rather because one reason the applicability of the First Amendment is not always clearly understood is precisely because it is sometimes found to be in conflict with other constitutional principles or legal statutes.  In such cases, it becomes possible to ask why one constitutional principle takes precedence over another, or to ask whether there are some rather abiding dilemmas in the law that demand a certain kind of judgment.  We can more easily claim what the law is than how best to judge in light of the law in any given case.  And if we are part of a larger public trying to make sense of a First Amendment claim as it comes into conflict with other constitutional principles, or other basic values, then knowing what the law is does not immediately tell us how best to form a judgment of the situation at hand.

I put the issue this way not to relativize the First Amendment, but only to note that its importance sometimes only becomes clear to us when it comes into a clash with other basic values.  For instance, we can state that all ideas may be expressed, and that any curtailment on the expression of ideas is constitutionally unacceptable, as [Berkeley Law] Dean [Erwin] Chemerinsky asks us to do.  We can agree on that in principle at the same time that we might find that certain forms of expression are ambiguous: are they, in fact, expressive activity?  Are they forms of harm?  Are they verbal threats?  There is no way around the fact that we have to form an interpretation of what we mean by expressive activity if we want to identify expressive activity with confidence and make good on our claim that all expressive activity is permissible. Continue reading “Limits on Free Speech?”