Author: logocentric

pluth on signifiers and subject of lacan the real

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: freedom in Lacan’s theory of the subject, New York: SUNY Press, 2007.  Print.

🙂 Lacan who not only subverts the subject but then he RETHOUGHT the subject but his critics are out there: Borch-Jacobson is saying that although Lacan’s subject is not EXTERNAL to language (that would be too Cartesian), so he says that Lacan’s subject is the same as language.

A persistent theme in Lacan’s discussions of the subject is the view that the subject is an effect of signifiers, and so B-J is right to wonder whether the subject is anything other than language. B-J does not consider, however, that thinking of the subject as an effect does not have to mean that the subject is somehow immanent in, rather than external to, language . I will be arguing that Lacan’s subject is an effect of language, but an effect that remains external to, and not reducible to, language.  This is because the subject is not simply an effect of signifiers but an effect of signifiers themselves interacting with something nonlinguistic: sexuality (12).

The subject is in part “in” the Other but is also not in the Other: in other words, the subject has an important relation to language, but it is also external to language in some way. … the subject is not identitcal to language (14).

[T]he subject is portrayed [by Lacan] as something articulated between two poles. One of the poles is language, while the other pole remains a bit vague (15).

It will turn out that the subject is produced not only by an interaction of signifiers but by an interaction of signfiers with something nonlinguistic. Although the subject is not identical to either of the poles Lacan considers here, each pole designates something that is involved in the production of a subject — and language alone does not suffice (15-16).

[T]he production of the subject by signifiers needs to be complemented with an appreciation of a particular type of obstacle to signification.  … it would be not erroneous to understand this second pole in terms of sexuality … (16).

One way to get at this second pole, nevertheless, is to consider the idea that there is something of the body that does not fit with the “socialized” body, the body that is overwritten with signifiers.

Saying that a body is overwritten with signifiers suggests that ther is something prior to signifiers on which the writing occurs, something that gets besieged by signfiers at some moment of its existence. This could be thought of as a body prior to the body that is linguistically and socially carved up, thus a body that is presymbolic and perhaps to be thought of in terms of what Lacan called the real (16-17).

Whatever term is settled upon, the category under which this organism or body is to be thought is the real, and not the symbolic (17).

pluth Other

Renata Salecl suggests that our historical moment is characterized both by the the collapse of … an Other, of a subject-supposed-to-know, and by a variety of attempts to reestablish some kind of full, “premodern” Other …is it possible to accept somehow that the Other does not know, while avoiding the temptation to “save” the Other from this fate.

Is it at all possible for us to act socially and individually in such a way that we do not either implicitly rely on a notion of an Other who knows, or implicitly expect the reestablishment of such an Other?

rhizomes deleuze

rhizomes are plants that tend to grow horizontally rather than vertically.  Rather than sending their roots dep into the ground, and rather than being clearly unified and distinct entities, rhizomes spread out, climbing up and all over things that are in their way, getting tangled up with other rhizomes.  Think of grass, or of ivy climbing up and over what ever it comes acrss. If philosophers approach things as rhizomes (instead of trees), they will come up with a very different picture of how things are.

copjec butler sexuation

Dyess, Cynthia and Tim Dean, “Gender: The Impossibility of Meaning.” Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 10:5 (2000): 735 – 56.  Web. Oct 5, 2009.

For Lacan, as for Freud, the unconscious has no understanding of sexual difference. This is still a radical notion; it must count among the central insights of psychoanalysis most frequently in danger of disappearing when psychoanalytic theory discards Freud’s earliest discoveries. It is also a tremendously difficult idea, and there are different ways of grasping it. One way would be to hypothesize that the first sight of anatomical, genital difference is traumatic for a child in that this difference cannot be fully assimilated by the ego — assimilated, that is, to one’s sense of his or her own bodily self. Although we would not want to suggest that this moment is an empirically verifiable event in every subject’s history, nevertheless each person’s first encounter with the morphological difference of the other sex presents him or her with a failure of recognition. It is this inaugural collapse of sense with respect to sexual difference that makes gender traumatic and justifies aligning it with the Lacanian real (752).

This point raises an issue on which we part company with Copjec’s account. Attempting to specify the distinctness of sexual difference vis-à-vis other categories of difference, Copjec (1994) argued that “sexual difference is unlike racial, class, or ethnic differences. Whereas these differences are inscribed in the symbolic, sexual difference is not: only the failure of its inscription is marked in the symbolic. Sexual difference, in other words, is a real and not a symbolic difference” (p. 207). Yet once sexual difference is understood as real in the sense that it is experienced originally as traumatic, then we can start to appreciate how racial difference also operates as a real, not merely a symbolic, difference. One’s first encounter with another human whose skin is colored very differently than his or her own also prompts a failure of recognition; to the extent that one cannot make sense of this difference, racial difference too remains in the real. The distinction between sexual difference and racial difference lies in the fact that every human encounters the trauma of sexual difference very early in life, whereas an encounter with racial difference may be deferred far longer, especially in racially homogeneous cultures. (note 4: 752)

There is a certain driven quality to these projects—to Freud’s essentialist stories as well as to the current dogma of gender’s plasticity. This may reflect the inevitable downfall of narrative, its failure to let itself fail in making sense. Perhaps the most obvious way in which Butler’s theory of gender attempts to make too much sense is in its concept of gender identification as loss resolved by melancholic identification (Butler, 1995a). Butler and Copjec agree that the symbolic order is founded on what exceeds its grasp. But Butler takes the additional step of theorizing this absence of meaning as a set of culturally foreclosed identifications. By presuming she knows what is already missing, Butler follows in Freud’s footsteps when he set about providing us with his infamous developmental narratives of gender. In this respect, the resolutely abstract quality of Copjec’s argument is particularly refreshing. She offers no account of why sexual difference should be traumatic for the individual, but only attempts to show us in logical terms how this is necessarily so. Culturally contingent explanations of gender will inevitably vary, but, as she puts it, “sex does not budge” (Copjec, 1994, p. 211) (753).

Gender is the prime example not only of the impossibility of meaning, but also of the structural impossibility of full relationality. This implies that our theory of gender must describe not only the limit conditions of signification, but also those of relationality. The essentialist, heterosexist alternative refuses to admit any such limitations. In this view, gender is something substantial that one acquires and that lends meaning to one’s relations. Men and women find their counterpart in each other. The social constructivist alternative also eschews limits; as discourse determines subjectivity, subjectivity can be manipulated via the rhetorical device of deconstruction. In other words, it’s all in our hands, and a potentially endless number of possibilities for full relationship may prevail. Yet no analysis of external limits, be they biological or social, ultimately accounts for the impossibility of completely knowing ourselves or one another. Psychoanalysis, when it attempts to theorize this internally imposed impossibility, positions itself to address how the connection between the individual subject and the social is continually mediated by factors outside our awareness. In so doing, it can help us fail better.

critique of butler from copjec perspective using real

Dyess, Cynthia and Tim Dean, “Gender: The Impossibility of Meaning.” Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 10:5 (2000): 735 – 56.  Web. Oct 5, 2009.

So when Lacan points out that “the signifier can’t signify itself,” he is drawing our attention not only to what has yet to be signified, but more fundamentally to the negative effects of the real, to what is outside the symbolic. Furthermore, once we agree with Lacan that the formal properties of discourse are determined by factors outside our grasp, we can consider a dimension of subjectivity that cannot be placed in the harness of language, that is not manipulable in rhetorical terms.  … Lacan’s concept of the real is intended to designate just this impossibility, the internal fissure or constraint that we are constitutively unable to grasp. (743).

Like Butler, Copjec is also aware of gender’s radical contingency, but whereas for Butler this is an effect of its social construction, for Copjec it is an effect of its location in the real. Although Butler leaves herself open to the charge of voluntarism, the idea that gender can be performed at will, Copjec emphasizes that, by virtue of its position in the Lacanian real, gender is no more subject to our manipulation than is the unconscious itself.

Another way of putting this is to say that, at the most basic level, Butler’s account of gender doesn’t leave room for the unconscious. Butler’s theory encourages us to rethink gender in terms of its possibilities; Copjec responds by pointing to a fundamental impossibility that inheres to gender. This doesn’t mean that Copjec is defeatist, but rather that she is familiar with the limit conditions imposed upon us by the unconscious and believes that a psychoanalytic theory of gender should account for these (745-6).

However, by locating gender in the real, Copjec is insisting that sexual difference resists meaning, rather than gives rise to competing meanings. …

For Butler … there is no viable distinction between the concept or discourse of gender and gender itself. On this point, Copjec lays bare the core difficulty in Butler’s argument. Referring to Butler’s conflation of concept and thing, Copjec (1994) wrote, “To speak of the deconstruction of sex makes about as much sense as speaking about foreclosing a door; action and object do not belong to the same discursive space”(p. 210). And this is precisely the position Butler occupies when, after noting that signification is always in process, she assumes that there is no stability of gender.

Deconstruction applies only to discourse, or in this case to the concept of gender. Although agreeing with Butler that the conceptual dimension of gender (i.e., its meaning) is always unstable, Copjec aims to argue further. Indeed, Copjec allows us to take the desubstantialization of gender one radical step further by describing how gender’s meaning is necessarily incomplete, not because of its unstable linguistic properties, but rather because it involves an inherent impossibility that arises as a consequence of its nonlinguistic dimension (746).

Copjec’s interpretation of the impossibility that Lacan presents us with nonetheless encourages us to think about the nonsymbolic, nonimaginary aspect of gender—in other words, she helps us to think gender in the real. Copjec’s use of Lacan’s sexuation graphs has some intuitive appeal. In talking about the limits of reason and about the real as a limit internal to language, Copjec shifts our attention away from what is imposed from the outside, whether it be the effects of an oppressive social regime, on one hand, or of brute materiality, on the other. Copjec is interested less in the external limits proffered by social constructivism or biological determinism than in a limit internal to language itself — the Lacanian real and the impasse in meaning that it creates. Being situated in the real, which is itself a negative instance, gender has no positive content. In this schema, gender is not an incomplete entity, but a totally empty one. Facing off with Butler, who by joining gender and signification makes gender something which communicates itself to others, Copjec (1994) argued:

When, on the contrary, sex is disjoined from the signifier, it becomes that which does not communicate itself, that which marks the subject as unknowable. To say that the subject is sexed is to say that it is no longer possible to have any knowledge of him or her. Sex serves no other function than to limit reason, to remove the subject from the realm of possible experience or pure understanding. This is the meaning, when all is said and done, of Lacan’s notorious assertion that “there is no sexual relation”: sex, in opposing itself to sense, is also, by definition, opposed to relation, to communication [p. 207].

Copjec is taking us much further than perhaps Lacan himself intended. It’s not merely that “there is no relation” (i.e., no symmetrical or complementary relation between men and women), but that sexual difference itself has no signifier, that it is not fully representable. Imaginary constructions of the difference between the sexes are fantasies—ways in which we provide ourselves with answers to impossible questions. In aligning sexual difference with the structural incompleteness of language—the impossibility of articulating this difference — Copjec puts her finger on its traumatic dimension, and this component of experience is something for which deconstruction has no vocabulary. According to Copjec, this is fundamentally what sexual difference is—a difference that cannot be determined. From this perspective, essentialism and social constructivism are efforts to negate this impossibility, this impasse of reason.

copjec sexuation mathematical

Copject, Joan. Supposing the Subject. 1994. New York: Verso, 1996.  Print.

We surrender our access to jouissance upon entering language.

It is the impasses of language that create the experience of the inexperiencable, the unsayable … Each side of the table describes a different impasse by means of which this question of the outside of language is raised, a different manner of revealing the essential powerlessness of speech.

But while the phallic function produces on each side a failure, it does not produce a symmetry between the sides (28).

What is a mathematical antinomy? How would we describe the conflict that defines it? (29)

Reason aims at the unconditional whole, THE ABSOLUTE OF ALL PHENOMENA.  This attempt produces two conflicting propositions regarding the nature of this all —

  • a thesis: the world has a beginning in time and is limited in space
  • an antithesis: the world has no beginning and no limits in space, but is, in relation both to time and space, infinite.

🙂 Kant argues that both of these can prove the falsity of the other, but have a hard time proving their own truth value.  He then says, rather than having to decide between these two alternatives we need not despair, because we do NOT have to choose either one because THEY ARE BOTH FALSE.

  • bodies smell good
  • bodies smell bad

Both are false, because they don’t take into consideration a third possibility: bodies are odourless.

“Are you still beating your wife” Whether one answers ‘yes’ or ‘no’, it is implied in the very question that one beat one’s wife in the past.

The form of the question, while seeming to allow the addressee to supply any answer he chooses, in fact allows him only to choose among contraries. It does not allow him to negate the accusation implicit in the question.

Kant avoids the skeptical impasse by refusing to answer the question ‘Is the world finite or infinite?’ and by negating instead the assumption implicit in the question: the world is.  (30)

🙂 The assumption that the world exists is ill founded.

When [Lacan] says “the woman is not-all”, he demands that we read this statement as an INDEFINITE JUDGEMENT.

  • a thesis: the world has a beginning in time and is limited in space

There is no phenomenon that is not an object of possible experience (or not subject to the rule of regress).

  • an antithesis: the world has no beginning and no limits in space, but is, in relation both to time and space, infinite.

Our acknowledgment of the absence of a limit to the set of phenomena does not oblige us to maintain the antithetical position — that they are INFINITE — rather, it obliges us to recognize the basic FINITUDE of all phenomena, the fact that they are inescapably subject to conditions of time and space and must therefore be encountered one by one, indefinitely, without the possibility of reaching an end, a point where all phenomena would be known. (31)

[According to Kant] our reason is limited because the procedures of our knowledge have no term, no limit.  What limits reason is a lack of limit.


Žižek hegel lacan

Slavoj Žižek – Lacan: at What Point is He Hegelian? from jodi dean

The answer has been here all along. Zizek writes:

One is thus able to conceive of Ungeschehenmachen, the highest manifestation of negativity, as the Hegelian version of ‘death drive’: it is not an accidental or marginal element in the Hegelian edifice, but rather designates the crucial moment of the dialectical process, the so-called moment of the ‘negation of negation’, the inversion of the ‘antithesis’ into the ‘synthesis’: the ‘reconciliation’ proper to synthesis is not a surpassing or suspension (whether it be ‘dialectical’) of scission on some higher plane, but a retroactive reversal which means that there never was any scission to begin with – ‘synthesis’ retroactively annuls this scission. This is how the enigmatic but crucial passage from Hegel’s Encyclopaedia must be understood:

The accomplishing of the infinite purpose consists therefore in sublating the illusion that it has not yet been accomplished.

One does not accomplish the end by attaining it, but by proving that one has already attained it, even when the way to its realization is hidden from view. While advancing, one was not yet there, but all of a sudden, one has been there all along – ‘too soon’ changes suddenly into ‘too late’ without detecting the exact moment of their transformation. The whole affair thus has the structure of the missed encounter: along the way, the truth, which we have not yet attained, pushes us forward like a phantom, promising that it awaits us at the end of the road; but all of a sudden we perceive that we were always already in the truth. The paradoxical surplus which slips away, which reveals itself as ‘impossible’ in this missed encounter of the ‘opportune moment’, is of course objet a: the pure semblance which pushes us toward the truth, right up to the moment when it suddenly appears behind us and that we have already arrived ahead of it, a chimerical being that does not have its ‘proper time’, only ever persisting in the interval between ‘too soon’ and ‘too late’.

via www.lacan.com

copjec antinomies of reason

Copjec, Joan., ed. Supposing the Subject. 1994. New York: Verso, 1996.  Print.

… sexual difference is unlike racial, class or ethnic differences. While these differences are inscribed in the symbolic, sexual difference is not: only the failure of its inscription is marked in the symbolic. Sexual difference, in other words is a real, not a symbolic difference.  This distinction does not disparage the importance of race, class or ethnicity; it simply contests the current doxa that sexual difference offers the same kind of description of the subject as these others do. Nor should this distinction be used to isolate considerations of sex from considerations of other differences. It is always a sexed subject who assumes each racial, class or ethnic identity (emphasis original 21).

Why insist, then, on the distinction. The answer is that the very sovereignty of the subject depends on it, and it is only the conception of the subject’s sovereignty that stands any chance of protecting difference in general. It is only when we begin to define the subject as self-governing, as subject to its own laws, that we cease to consider her as calculable, as subject to laws already known, and thus manipulable. It is only when the sovereign incalculability of the subject is acknowledged that perceptions of difference will no longer nourish demands for the surrender of difference to processes of ‘homogenization’, ‘purification’ or any of the other crimes against otherness with which the rise of racism has begun to acquaint us (emphasis original 21).

Žižek death drive, Neighbour

Žižek on death drive: the name for infinity, death drive has nothing to do with “nirvana”, what Freud calls death drive is a PERSISTENCE which insists beyond LIFE and DEATH.  One of the figures of this obscene immortality is vampires.  This is the Freudian death drive

The Montrosity of Christ talk at Harvard Book Store on July 2009.

Neighbour: I experience someone as neighbour, I know all my life, then all of a sudden they do something that totally shatters my impression of him, he kicks a child, at that precise moment he becomes my neighbour. the abyss beyond the fellow man.

Good manners are needed to keep the neighbour at a distance.  Decency, manners.  Politeness.  Maintain a distance towards a toxic subject.

Žižek Tilton Gallery NYC nov 2006

Can one really tolerate a neighbour

the symptom pre-exists what it is a symptom of

If a woman is a symptom, she is walking around, do you want me to be your symptom
Pure symptom: a nun, a radical feminine position, I will be a pure symptom
Man need a symptom to be
Film DaVinci Code: The girl is frigid, totally de-sexualized. She witnessed the primordial sin, saw her grandfather in some pagan sin.  So jesus has to copulate to cover up that she doesn’t.
Solution: She accepts her role as leader of group who believe in her.  A passage from eros to agape, from eros to political love.
Abyss of subjectivity: elementary reaction is FEAR, especially today, the inexistence of the big Other is more apparent than ever, not only language, but also ecology, is disappearing.  The moment through genome and bio manipulations, the moment you can manipulate nature this way, it is no l onger nature in the sense of dense impenatrability.
If somone fucks with your inner nature, they violate your freedom, no its much more radical … the ultimate horror, modern science can produce new forms of monstors, not just observe.
Nonetheless behind all this is fear of the neigbour.  The big problem today is to control this dimension of the neighbour.

The neighbour INTRUDES. Unlike Sam Harris who can happily promote torture because the dimension of the neighbour gets LOST. So Sam can just go ahead and treat humans as just a calculus of ok I toruture you here to prevent greater suffering.  the dimension of the neighbour gets lost.

All outbursts get lost, is outburst against the neighbour.  Since we are still neighbours within our own symbolic universes, own ways of enjoyment.  So what we need today is not more communication but more distance, a new code of discretion, to ignore others more.
Our solution to deal with proximity of the neighbour is Tolerance which Zizek HATES.
He criticizes Wendy Brown, but likes her book, Regulating Aversion.
He talks about Martin Luther King who didn’t use ‘tolerance’ as a category, same with feminism, they don’t ask to be ‘tolerated’.  Tolerance is a depoliticized politics.  MLK was inequality, poverty which demands political solutions.
Brown develops the culturalization of political differences, political differences translated into cultural differences, into different ways of life.
Fukuyama and Huntington Clash of Civilizations, are same don’t contribute, class of civilizations is politics at the ‘end of history’.  politics is rational administration, the only true passionate conflicts are conflicts of culture.

Critique of Brown: They remain caught in too primitive critique of ideology: denouncing the false universality
What appears to be a neutral notion, privledges a certain culture, human rights are not real human rights they privledge male straight males.  Zizek doesn’t subscribe to this.

Of course there is a gap, universal human rights and hwo they function.  this gap has POSITIVE aspects, we can REWRITE IT, mary wollstencraft rewrote it, the blacks in Haiti after the French Rev.

2. If you read closely Hegel it’s that this is only 1 side of the story, of denouncing universality as false universality, blah blah

– We also have the opposite mystification which is more interesting: something you percieve is only your particular interest is already universal dimension.

The cunning of reason, you think you are just following your narrow interests, you don’t see the universal dimension of your acts.

As capitalist subject, you are universal in your own individual self experience, you relate to yourself as self as universal.

My profession is being a knight or a serf, this is absurd they didn’t see themselves as a profession

you yourself experience yourself in the core of your being as universal, whenever capitalism spreads, from within it undermines each culture.  Chinese discovered this and now are using capitalism to destroy their culture instead of the primitive way of using guns that didn’t work.

Foreign cultures appear stupid to me, what from

Experience your own identity as ultimately contingent.  there is no authentic liberation, there is no feminism,

the way to break out of neighbour, abbyss otherness, should we tolerate it or not

EMBRACE this radical universality … in the form of a struggle.  Not that I’m in my culture and you in yours, it’s that what I want to share with you is our shared intolerances, the only universality I share with you is universality of struggle.  My own particular identity, I am not fully myself, in the very core of my identity is a universality that surpasses me, that’s what gives us some hope, that we are not only more particular than we think, even when you think you are immersed in your culture you are UNIVERSAL

SOLIPSISM is FALSE.

THE UNIVERSAL ETHICS IS KANTIAN ETHICS

IMMORAL ETHICS: It doesn’t matter what you do, by fully engaged. No that’s not Zizek.

Kantian Ethics is for Zizek.  there is no BIg other, you cant put on big other to tell you your duty, YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR IT.  A Good Kantian cannot say, what can I do I just obeyed my duty, you are NOT ALLOWED to use duty as excuse to do your duty.  No you have to fully stand behind your duty.  You can’t say I was only doing my duty.

Problem of tolerance:

TERROR!
Abandon that what you are afraid to lose, Accept the loss become UNIVERSAL

You are afraid to lose your particular identity, maybe what you are protecting is in itself worthless, ABANDON THAT

So what a minor disturbance in the solar system.

Don’t fear be calm, things will get better: NO it’s not this, there is no BIG OTHER, it doesn’t exist, we are in the abyss there are no guarantees.

ABC good radical ecology; there is no natural balance, there is no way to return.  Nature as balanced homeostasis HA, Nature is one big catastrophe, what is oil, one big catastrophe of unimaginable proportions.

If all human industry to stop, earth is so adapted to it, it would cause a catastrophe.

Violent Imposition of Universal Will: ecological crisis, other crisis, the way to beat phenomena like Bush, is not through local resistances, don’t buy the pomo poetry, no longer capitalism from top down, but decentralized, multiple agents, multiple sites of resistance.

NO we must reassert BIG COLLECTIVE decisions.  we have a struggle, you have a struggle, lets see if we can join our struggles, our universality is universality of struggles.
We will need to assert big collective decisions.  The capitalist state is getting bigger and stronger.  State mechanisms military spending, economy these are all state interventions.  More than ever the state is crucial.

If I were to choose American or Chinese model of capitalism,

Žižek concrete universality

I’m interested in this Hegelian concept because I believe now that it is the key that will help me unlock how Žižek will explain Lacanian critique of Laclau (Populism) and Butler (Performativity)

Go here to get the extended critique of Laclau, but I think this is also in his book Parallax View

Book on Žižek by Rex Butler

From Žižek’s article on Lacan.com

The Universal is not the encompassing container of the particular content, the peaceful medium-background of the conflict of particularities; the Universal “as such” is the site of an unbearable antagonism, self-contradiction, and (the multitude of) its particular species are ultimately nothing but so many attempts to obfuscate/reconcile/master this antagonism. In other words, the Universal names the site of a Problem-Deadlock, of a burning Question, and the Particulars are the attempted but failed Answers to this Problem.  The concept of State, for instance, names a certain problem: how to contain the class antagonism of a society? All particular forms of State are so many (failed) attempts to propose a solution to this problem.

Parallax View 34-35, Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic 49, Less Than Nothing 782