Category: agency

Verhaeghe pre-ontological non-entity

Verhaeghe, Paul. (1998). Causation and Destitution of a Pre-ontological Non-entity: On the Lacanian Subject.  Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Ed. Dany Nobus. 1999. 164-189.

Until  the  early  1960 ‘s,  Lacan focused  upon this opposition between the imaginary and the symbolic.

Yet there is a shift in attention: instead of the opposition and division between ego and subject, the division and splitting  within the subject itself comes to the fore. Instead of the term  ‘subject,’  the expression ‘divided  subject’ appears — that  is, divided by language.

With the conceptualisation of the category of the real, another major shift occurs. From the 1964 Seminar Xl onwards, the real becomes a genuine Lacanian concept, within a strictly Lacanian theory, and changes the theory of the subject in a very fundamental way.

In the first part, we will study the  causal background of the subject: how does it come into being? It will be demonstrated that the causation of the subject has everything to do with the drive, and that it has strong links with the status of the unconscious.

In the second part, we will discuss the ontological status of the subject, which is radically different from the traditional conceptions. Lacan ‘s ontology is an ‘alterology,’  alienation being the  grounding mechanism and identity always coming from the Other

Moreover, the subject has a mere pre-ontological status, which is again closely linked to the status of the unconscious. The ever divided subject is a fading, a vacillation, without any substantiality.

In the third and final part, we will discuss the link between Lacan’s theory of the  subject and his theory of the aims and goals of  psychoanalysis. Here, the central mechanism is separation,  as first formalized by Lacan in Seminar Xl and further developed during the 1960’s.  165

BorromeanKnot3Rings

Freud assumed that there is an original state of primary satisfaction, which he considered to be a state of homeostasis .

The inevitable loss of this state sets the development in motion and provides us with the
basic characteristic of every drive: the tendency to return to an original state.

Thus, the entire development is motivated by a central loss,around which the ego is constituted.  The lack is irrevocable. Freud’s key denomination for this lack is castration.

Freud’s key denomination for this lack is castration, which is his attempt at formulating the link between the original, pregenital loss and the oedipal elaboration thereof. For several reasons, the Freudian castration theory itself will never be fully satisfying. Freud’s focus on the real, that is to say the biological basis of castration, did not help him any further either, and inevitably brought him to the pessimistic conclusion of 1 937, concerning the ‘biological bedrock’ as the limit of psychoanalysis .

Freud’s theory is quite unidimensional and Freud himself remained remarkably obstinate in this respect. He refused to take other losses than the loss of a penis into account – with one exception, as becomes clear from his affirmation of Aristophanes’ fable about the search for the originally lost counterpart. This one-sidedness was directed by his conviction regarding the universality of the pleasure principle, i .e. of the desire to restore the original homeostasis. Things became more complicated once he discovered that there is a ‘beyond’ to the pleasure principle, in which yet another kind of drive is at work, also striving to restore an original condition, ·albeit a totally different one.

Things became more complicated once he discovered that there is a ‘beyond’ to the pleasure principle, in which yet another kind of drive is at work, also striving to restore an original condition, ·albeit a totally different one.

The duality of life versus death drives opened up a dimension beyond the one-sidedness of neurosis, castration and desire.

It is this dimension that is taken into account by Lacan. Indeed, Lacan’s starting-point is also the very idea of lack and loss, but he will recognize a double loss and a double lack.

Moreover, the interaction between those two losses will determine the constitution of the subject. 165

(to be continued Sept 17 2014)

zizek on malabou descartes malabranche autism

Žižek. S. “Descartes and the Post-Traumatic Subject.” Filozofski vestnik. 29. 2 (2008): 9-29.
Žižek. S. “Descartes and the Post-Traumatic Subject: On Catherine Malabou’s Les Nouveaux Blessés.” Qui Parle. 17.2 (2009): 123–147.
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Catherine Malabou Replies to Žižek

In the new form of subjectivity (autistic, indifferent, without affective engagement), the old personality is not “sublated” or replaced by a compensatory formation, but thoroughly destroyed — destruction itself acquires a form, becomes a (relatively stable) “form of life” – what we get is not simply the absence of form, but the form of (the) absence (of the erasure of the previous personality, which is not replaced by a new one).

More precisely, the new form is not a form of life, but, rather, a form of death – not an expression of the Freudian death drive, but, more directly, the death drive. 15

does she not forget to include herself, her own desire, into the observed phenomenon (of autistic subjects)? in an ironic reversal of her claim that the autistic subject is unable to enact transference, it is her own transference she does not take into account when she portrays the autistic subject’s immense suffering. This subject is primordially an enigmatic impenetrable thing, totally ambiguous, where one cannot but oscillate between attributing to it immense suffering and blessed ignorance.

What characterizes it is the lack of recognition in the double sense of the term: we do not recognize ourselves in it, there is no empathy possible, AND the autistic subject, on account of its withdrawal, does not enact recognition (it doesn’t recognize US, its partner in communication). 17

bosteels logic of capital

Traversing the Heresies: Interview with Bruno Bosteels

On October 14, 2012, Alec Niedenthal and Ross Wolfe interviewed Bruno Bosteels, Professor of Romance Studies at Cornell University

The events of 1968 were definitely pivotal globally for the Left. The reason why 1968 in France was a key moment was because the so-called theories, what people now call “French theory” and the philosophical elaborations and politics stemming from it, all share this interest in “the event.”

Whereas Foucault, Derrida, Badiou, and Deleuze were once read as philosophers of “difference,” now it is common to read them as philosophers of the event—that is, 1968. So, we might ask, “Why is it an important moment or event in the history of France or Mexico or other places where, in the same year, there were riots, uprisings, popular movements, rebellions, and so on?” But also, “What does it mean to think about ‘the event’ philosophically?”

The theoretical traditions that led to this pivotal moment have a longer history in France than in other places where one must search obscure sources to get to the same theoretical problem.

Within the French context, for institutional, historical, and genealogical reasons we have a well-defined debate that can be summed up, as what Badiou himself called “The last great philosophical battle”: the battle between Althusser and Sartre, between structuralism and humanism, or between structure and subject.

Ross Wolfe: Much of this French theory centers on a struggle between structure and subject and the idea that events do not necessarily happen autonomously. The question you seem to be asking is,

How do we understand the given circumstances that are not of our own making, but in which historical action takes place? Is it possible for a political subject to intervene in history?

In a recent, highly philosophical book on Marx, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval propose that there are two major logics in Marx that are at loggerheads: There is the logic of capital, which is a logic of systematic constraints and turnover, and there is the logic of struggle.  [Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, Marx, prénom Karl  2012]

They apply Hegelian logic to the way that capitalism posits its own presuppositions, claiming that something that enables capitalism is in fact already the product of capitalism, logically if not historically. There is this kind of spiraling movement in which it seems the logic of capital is unbreakable and that human subjects are only bearers of these functions coming out of the immanent logic of capital’s own self-positing.

On the other hand, there is what Dardot and Laval call the historical logic or a logic of class struggle that is contingent, working upon the gaps or moments of breakdown within the economic logic of capital itself. They claim that it all comes down to the question of whether Marx himself (they deal far less with Marxism) was able to reconcile the logic of struggle and the logic of capitalism.

They believe that “communism” is almost like an imaginary kind of glue that (even though it is impossible) pretends that these two things can be held together.

One of the interesting things about Dardot and Laval’s philosophical reconstruction of the French debate over the competing logics in Marx is their return to the legacy of Hegel and the Young Hegelians. They see two major paths: there is either a more idealist, Fichtean approach or a more materialist, Feuerbachian approach.

One path, which is the path of someone like Bruno Bauer or Max Stirner, is to insist upon the subject’s capacity for self-positing. The subject can, in a sense, almost posit itself into existence; it can posit its own presuppositions almost boundlessly. On the other hand there is the more materialist school, which insists on the givenness of external factors that are not the result of the subject’s own positing, but instead precede the subject. Marx, in their account, tries to hold these things together. It is in that particular moment, when Marx seeks to articulate and overcome the idealist and materialist readings of the Hegelian notion of positing the presuppositions, that a certain logic and a certain history is productively combined.

RW: Marx captures the differences between the more Fichtean Hegelians and the Feuerbachian Hegelians inThe Eighteenth Brumaire, where he writes, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past

These two logics, which are still at play in trying to think about the event, go back to this legacy of German Idealism. I am interested in seeing what happens when this encounter occurs (or again, in a sense, when this encounter fails to occur) between the logic of capital and the logic of political struggle. They clash precisely at the point where the logic of capital is inconsistent, in the sense that it cannot, strictly speaking, claim to have posited all its own presuppositions. Nor is the logic of the subject here one of spontaneous freedom or autonomy.

But, it is precisely just as the structure shows inherent moments of breakdown, where the subject reveals itself to be structurally dependent on what Sartre called “the practico-inert.”

What came out of 1968 was, especially in the Althusserian and Lacanian schools, an attempt to formalize the inconsistencies of the structure.  That is what we call post-structuralism. This is then tied to a new theory of subjectivity. So all these ex-Althusserians—Rancière, Žižek, and also Laclau—are, in fact, trying to hold these two logics together.

badiou the subject

Badiou, Alain. Infinite Thought. Justin Clemens (Editor), Oliver Feltham (Editor) Continuum, 2004.

How can a modern doctrine of the subject be reconciled with an ontology?

When poststructuralists do engage with the problemof agency they again meet with difficulties, and again precisely because they merge their theory of the subject with their general ontology.  For example, in his middleperiod Foucault argued that networks of disciplinary power not only reach into the most intimate spaces of the subject, but actually produce what we call subjects. However, Foucault also said that power produces resistance. His problem then became that of accounting for the source of such resistance.

If the subject – right down to its most intimate desires, actions and thoughts – is constituted by power, then how can it be the source of independent resistance? For such a point of agency to exist, Foucault needs some space which has not been completely constituted by power, or a complex doctrine on the relationship between resistance and independence. However, he has neither. In his later works he deals withthis problem by assigning agency to those subjects who resist powerbymeans of anaesthetic project of self-authoring.  Again, the source of such privileged agency — why do some subjects shape themselves against the grain and not others? — is not explained.  5-6

For Badiou, the question of agency is not so much a question of how a subject can INITIATE an action in an autonomous manner but rather how a subject EMERGES through an autonomous chain of actions within a changing situation.

That is, it is not everyday actions or decisions that provide evidence of agency for Badiou. It is rather those extraordinary decisions and actions which ISOLATE an actor from their context, those actions which show that a human can actually be a free agent that supports new chains of actions and reactions. For this reason, not every human being is always a subject, yet some human beings BECOME subjects; those who act in FIDELITY to a chance encounter with an EVENT which disrupts the SITUATION they find themselves in. 6

The consequence of such a definition of the subject seems to be that only brilliant scientists, modern masters, seasoned militants and committed lovers are admitted into the fold. A little unfair perhaps? Is Badiou’s definition of the subject exclusive or elitist? On the one side, you have human beings, nothing much distinguishing them from animals in their pursuit of their interests, and then, on the other side, you have the new elect, the new elite of faithful subjects. This has a dangerous ring, and one could be forgiven for comparing it at first glance to Mormon doctrine.  7

However — and this is crucial — there is no predestination in Badiou’s account. There is nothing other than chance encounters between particular humans and particular events; and subjects MAY be born out of such encounters. There is no higher order which prescribes who will encounter an event and decide to act in relation to it. Thereis only chance. Furthermore, there is no simple distinction between subjects and humans. Some humans become subjects, but only some of the time, and often they break their fidelity to an event and thus lose their subjecthood.

Thus, Badiou displaces the problem of agency from the level of the human to the level of being. That is, his problem is no longer that of how an individual subject initiates a new chain of actions, since for him the subject only emerges in the course of such a chain of actions.

His problem is accounting for how an existing situation — given that BEING, for Badiou, is nothing other than multiple situations — can be disrupted and transformed by such a chain of actions. This displacement of the problem of agency allows Badiou to avoid positing some mysterious autonomous agent within each human such as ‘free will’. However, the direct and unavoidable consequence of the displacement is that the problem of agency becomes the ancient philosophical problem of how the new occurs in being. 8

In L’Etre et l’événement, Badiou’s solution IS SIMPLY TO ASSERT THAT ‘EVENTS HAPPEN’, events without directly assignable causes which disrupt the order of established situations. IF decisions are taken by subjects to work out the consequences of such events, NEW SITUATIONS emerge as the result of their work. 9

Cartesian subject emptied of all symbolic content

Žižek. “How to Begin from the Beginning.” NLR May/June 2009

The predominant liberal notion of democracy also deals with those excluded, but in a radically different mode: it focuses on their inclusion, as minority voices. All positions should be heard, all interests taken into account, the human rights of everyone guaranteed, all ways of life, cultures and practices respected, and so on. The obsession of this democracy is the protection of all kinds of minorities: cultural, religious, sexual, etc. The formula of democracy here consists of patient negotiation and compromise. What gets lost in this is the position of universality embodied in the excluded.

The new emancipatory politics will no longer be the act of a particular social agent, but an explosive combination of different agents. What unites us is that, in contrast to the classic image of proletarians who have ‘nothing to lose but their chains’, we are in danger of losing everything. The threat is that we will be reduced to an abstract, empty Cartesian subject dispossessed of all our symbolic content, with our genetic base manipulated, vegetating in an unliveable environment. This triple threat makes us all proletarians, reduced to ‘substanceless subjectivity’, as Marx put it in the Grundrisse. The figure of the “part of no part”confronts us with the truth of our own position; and the ethico-political challenge is to recognize ourselves in this figure. In a way, we are all excluded, from nature as well as from our symbolic substance. Today, we are all potentially homo sacer, and the only way to avoid actually becoming so is to act preventively.

badiou forcing event

Johnston, Adrian. Badiou, Zizek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change. Northwestern University Press, 2009.

The Zizekian interpretation of Lenin’s writings suggests something already proposed here: in certain circumstances, forcing must precede,rather than simply follow, an event. A forcing prior to the actual event itself must seize an opportunity arising by chance for disruption (i.e.,some sort of structural flaw or historical vulnerability, the “weakest link”as a proverbial chink in the armor of the status quo) inadvertently presented by the reigning state-of-the situation. This point of weakness within a state’s constellation must be grasped firmly beforehand (steered by the discerning gaze of one not fooled, not taken in, by the preexistent distribution of relations and roles as influenced by statist ideologies) in order to spark an event’s occurrence.

Badiou, by contrast, describes the labor of forcing as trans­piring only after the fact of an evental occurrence; the already-past event is identified following its having appeared and disappeared, and exclu­sively in the aftermath of this vanished winking can the work of stretching out the effects of its truth-consequences through forcing move forward  under the guidance of subjects-of-the-event.

Badiou treats events (including political ones)as anonymous and mysterious happenings. Badiouian events can not be forced into occurring; as others have justifiably described them, such moments just pop up within the current scene as out-of-nowhere miracles. This sort of purposive refusal to think through in precise details the preconditions for the genesis of events is incompatible with Lenin’s insistence that, in initiating a revolution, one must “prematurely” force an event before it actually transpires spontaneously (in the mode of organically emerging out of the defiles of sociohistorical trends) by deliberately and nimbly exploiting whatever small chances there are in a situation despite the overall absence of the “proper condi­tions” for this event’s blooming.

In short, Badiou’s adamant insistence on there being a theoretically unbridgeable divide between an event and its pre-evental background (including his position that all subjects, with their capacities for forcing, are post-evental) forecloses considering how concrete forms of engaged praxis might, in certain instances, participate in precipitating in advance an ensuing evental sequence. 133-134

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive 2004

Impervious to analysis and beyond interpretation, the sinthome — as stupid enjoyment, as the node of senseless compulsion on which the subject’s singularity depends — connects us to something Real beyond the “discourse” of the symptom, connects us to the unsymbolizable Thing over which we constantly stumble, and so in turn, to the death drive …  38

Thus, homosexuality is thought as a threat to the logic of  thought itself insofar as it figures the availability of an unthinkable jouissance that would put an end to fantasy — and, with it, to futurity — by reducing the  assurance of  meaning in fantasy’s promise of continuity to the meaningless circulation and repetitions of the drive.

Scrooge [in Dickens novel The Christmas Carol], as sinthomosexual, denies, by virtue of his unwillingness to contribute to the communal realization of futurity, the fantasy structure, the aesthetic frame, supporting reality itself. He realizes, that is, the jouissance that derealizes sociality and thereby threatens, in Zizek’s words, “the total destruction of the symbolic universe.” 44

Scrooge,the self-denying miser — living alone, and in darkness, on gruel — extends to his neighbors, however un­neighborly it no doubt makes him appear, the same self-denying enjoyment to which he readily submits as well.

In this he enacts the nega­tivity both Freud and Lacan discerned in the commandment to love one’s neighbor as oneself; he unleashes,that is,as the love of his neighbor, the force of a primal masochism like that of the superego asserting its sin­gular imperative, “Enjoy!”

What might seem to bespeak narcissistic isolation from everyone around him — his self-delighting stinginess, his solipsistic rejection of comforts, no less for others than for himself­ instantiates, then, a death drive opposed to the ego and the world of desire. It expresses, that is, the will-to-enjoyment perversely obedient to the superego’s insatiable and masochistic demands.

Scrooge’s persistence, therefore, as Scrooge, as the child-refusing sinthomosexual whom the spirit of Christmas Yet to Come exposes as a life-denying black hole, must be under­stood as determining that there can be no future at all.

Only by thus renouncing ourselves can queers escape the charge of embracing and promoting a “culture of death,” earning the right to be viewed as “something far greater than what we do with our genitals.”

A Christmas Carol, with astonishing clarity, spells out just how we gain that “right” when we learn that Scrooge, now family-friendly and bliss­fully pro-natalist, subsequently had (alas, poor Marley) “no further inter­course with Spirits, but lived upon the Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards”.  By accepting this peter-less principle, we might even­tually gain acceptance as the “social equals and responsible citizens” that Larry Kramer and others have demanded we become; we might find ourselves, like Scrooge, reborn, made over as “second father[s] “to the future, permitted to perform our part in the collective adoration of the Child and so to reinforce the fantasy always figured by Tiny Tim. 47

the sinthome refers to the mode of jouissance constitutive of the subject, which defines it no longer as subject of desire, but rather as subject of the drive

Where the symptom sustains the sub­ject’s relation to the reproduction of meaning, sustains, that is, the fan­tasy of meaning that futurism constantly weaves, the those fantasies by and within which the subject means.  And because, as Bruce Fink puts it, “the drives always seek a form of satisfaction that, from a Freudian or traditional moralistic standpoint, is considered per­verse,” the those fantasies by and within which the subject means.

And because, as Bruce Fink puts it, “the drives always seek a form of satisfaction that, from a Freudian or traditional moralistic standpoint, is considered per­verse,” the sinthome that drives the subject, that renders him subject of the drive, thus engages, on a figural level, a discourse of what, be­cause incapable of assimilation to heterosexual genitality, gets read, as if by default, as a version of homosexuality, itself conceived as a mode of enjoyment at the social order’s expense. As Fink goes on to observe: “What the drives seek is not heterosexual genital reproductive sexuality, but a partial object that provides jouissance.”

Sinthomosexuality, then, only means by figuring a threat to meaning, which depends on the promise of coming, in a future continuously deferred, into the presence that recon­ciles meaning with being in a fantasy of completion — a fantasy on which every subject’s cathexis of the signifying system depends.  As the shadow of death that would put out the light of heterosexual reproduction, how­ever, sinthomosexuality provides familial ideology, and the futurity whose cause it serves, with a paradoxical life support system by providing the occasion for both family and future to solicit our compassionate inter­vention insofar as they seem, like Tiny Tim, to be always on their last legs. 113

Kotsko sociopaths

Kotsko, Adam. Why We Love Sociopaths. Washington: Zero Books 2012

Fantasy sociopath characterized by a lack of moral intuition, human empathy, and emotional connection. Yet uses these traits to his advantage, unlike in real life these traits do not prevent him from acting, from accomplishing tasks and realizing goals.

My hypothesis is that the sociopaths we watch on TV allow us to indulge in a kind of thought experiment, based on the question: “What if I really and truly did not give a fuck about anyone?” And the answer they provide? “Then I would be powerful and free.”

The fantasy sociopath is a way to escape the “inescapably social nature of human experience.”

The typical sociopath is someone who could butt-in line, and then make the person that calls them out look silly for it.

The big transition to fantasy sociopathology: When we move from “I hate that guy” to “I wish I were that guy.” 6  This happen because our moral superiority no longer suffices, “Oh isn’t it good that I’m not an asshole like that guy,” but then it appears with the breakdown of the social that assholes are getting away with lots of stuff, here Kotsko cites the bankers on Wall St. walking away with millions in bonuses, while the average Joe is forced to bail out the banks. 7

“What  our cultural fascination with the fantasy sociopath points toward, however, is the fact that the social order … might also deliver some form of justice of fairness. The failure to deliver on that front is much more serious and consequential than the failure to allay our social anxieties, though the pattern is similar in both cases. in a society that is breaking down, the no-win situation of someone flagrantly cutting in line repeats itself over and over, on an ever grander scale, until the people who destroyed the world economy walk away with hundreds of millions of dollars in “bonuses” and we’re all reduced to the pathetic stance of fuming about how much we hate that asshole — and the asshole also has the help of a worldwide media empire (not to mention an increasingly militarized police force) to shout us down if we gather up the courage to complain.”7

“At that point the compensation of moral superiority no longer suffices. WE recognize our weakness and patheticness and project its opposite onto our conquerors. If we feel very acutely the force of social pressure, they feel nothing. if we are bound by guilt and obligation, they are completely amoral.  And if we don’t have any idea what to do about the situation, they always know exactly what to do.  If only I didn’t give a fuck about anyone or anything, we think — then I would be powerful and free.  Then I would be the one with millions of dollars, with the powerful and prestigious job, with the more sexual opportunities than I know what to do with.  In short order, it even comes to seem that only such people can get ahead.” 7

Kotsko claims that the guy that thinks to himself, “I’d love to be Tony Soprano” and the guy working in the bank that thinks he IS Tony Soprano, is that in both cases they overlook the social nature of their predicament:

“What both fail to recognize is that Tony Soprano’s actions are no more admirable or necessary than the decision to exclude some poor schlub from the in-group on the playground. More fundamentally, both fail to recognize that what is going on is a social phenomenon, a dynamic that exceeds and largely determines the actions of the individuals involved — not a matter of some people simply being more callous or amoral (though some people certainly are) or being more clear-eyed and realistic (as few of us really are in any serious way).”9

The fantasy of the sociopath, then, represents an attempt to escape from the inescapably social nature of human experience. The sociopath is an individual who transcends the social, who is not bound by it in  any gut-level way and who can therefore use it purely as a tool.  The two elements of the fantasy sociopath may not make for a psychologically plausible human being, but they are related in a rigorously consistent way. 9

Sociopaths, or the fantasy of sociopaths that appear in various television shows, represent our attempt to escape the social, or the breakdown of the social.  That is,

breakdown of the social

How ideology of family buttresses the fantasy of the sociopath

Altruism, caring for others can be our greatest weakness as sociality breaks down, interns, volunteerism, used as free exploitative labour. As opposed to the sociopath whose ability to manipulate social norms through various ruses, cheating and lying, may be denounced from a standpoint of morality, but the fact is, that it works.  “In a broken society, it seems, only a broken person can succeed.” 14

Wimps or timid individuals, so busy thinking if they play by the rules, their hard work will get recognized are deluded.  Society really is broken.  And this is what Kotsko argues fuels the fantasy of the sociopath 14

“In addition to pointing to the problem, then, the fantasy of the sociopath may be pointing toward a solution. If relating to social norms as tools is the mark of a sociopath, then perhaps we could all benefit from being more sociopathic. it may not be a matter of choosing between cynically manipulating social norms and faithfully following them, but of choosing the goals towards which we cynically manipulate them — meaning first of all that we need to abandon the path of manipulating them toward self-undermining ends. Indeed, the problem with fantasy sociopaths may be that they are not sociopathic enough, that their end goals wind up serving the system they have supposedly transcended and mastered.” 15-16

AGAIN  “If relating to social norms as tools is the mark of a sociopath, then perhaps we could all benefit from being more sociopathic.” 15-16

Schemers Short-sighted, bumblers, seek only to take advantage of others, plans are mis-managed, but all about winning. This is zero or base level sociopathy.
– Homer Simpson (The Simpsons)
– Eric Cartman (South Park)

Climbers Seducers, skillful manipulators in very clearly-defined ways
– Don Draper (Mad Men)
– Peggy Olson (Mad Men)
– Stringer Bell (The Wire)

Enforcers sociopathically devoted to their jobs, violation of the law is committed for the sake of the law, “to achieve the goals that the law cannot achieve when enforced literally.” These characters represent the ultimate “necessary evil,” whose anti-social tendencies keep the social order from collapsing.

– Jimmy McNulty (The Wire)  Rogue police officer where its necessary to violate the law in order to maintain the law, to keep social order from collapsing.
– Jack Bauer (24)
– Dexter (Dexter)
– Dr. Gregory House (House)

richard wolff on radio and unemployed negativity on affect and spinoza

Here is a piece put out on one of my favourite blogs

Of course any answer of contemporary political affects would have to look at the various institutions, specifically the media, which work to focus and channel the affects, providing its images and organizations. The right is particularly good at this; in fact, we could argue that the right prefers to keep all political discussion on the level of pure affects, as in the case of those who “hate America,” making it possible to lump together Muslims, communists, and NPR in conspiracy of hate and fear. The usual response to this on the part of progressives or the left is to insist on how ridiculous this is, to use the common notions of history, economics, and politics to argue that such strange bedfellows are simply not made.

The affects, however, have a different logic, one that relates less to the actual relations between things than to the relation of their images. After all, anything can become the cause of hatred or love, all it needs to do is to is become attached to a cause of sadness or joy, hope or fear.

The question remains, however, as to why it is difficult to make capital itself an object of indignation. The immediate answer has to do with its impersonality, its inability to appear less as an object, than as the milieu in which we thrive. As Spinoza argues, hatred towards a thing will be greater if we imagine the thing to be free than necessary. Combine this point with Marx’s argument about commodity fetishism, about the reification of the economy into its law-like and necessary character, and it is easy to understand how difficult it is to generate indignation at capitalism itself. It is like being angry at the weather. The recent bouts of left-ish indignation at Scott Walker in Wisconsin and even Paul LePage in Maine has stemmed from the fact that they have emerged as a face of the present political conjuncture’s absolute indifference towards the life of the working class, their decisions appear to be arbitrary and personal (all too personal).

Richard Wolff on radio

Richard Wolff Video Clip at the Guardian

Countries doing well: Germany, Scadanavian countries, the countries that provide the greatest safety net, over the last 4 years unemployment in Germany has actually shrunk

Countries without safetynets, their economies are sucking: American Unemployment: 5%, mid 2007 before crisis, 8.3 – 8.5 %  now.

Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy: They have a less generous safety net than the countries doing well.

 

johnston 2006 Schelling

Johnston, Adrian. “Ghosts of Substance Past: Schelling, Lacan and the Denaturalization of Nature ” in Lacan: The Silent Partners ed. Slavoj Žižek 2006.

… one could think of this as the exact inverse of Althusserian interpellation. Whereas, for Althusser, ‘interpellation’ designates a process wherein the positive, functional dimensions of ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’ (or facets of Lacan’s big Other as the symbolic order) imprint/impress themselves upon themselves upon the individual and thereby subjugate him or her – subjectivity here amounts to subjection, to anything but autonomy – this analysis now underway points to a similar yet different process, the process of ‘inverse interpellation‘, wherein the negative, dysfunctional dimensions of the big Other as the symbolic order (that is, the necessary structural incompleteness and inconsistency of this Other/order, denoted by its ‘barring’) sometimes, due to various factors, ‘hail’ the individual and thereby force him or her to (temporarily) become an autonomous subject, to be jarred out of the comfortable non-conscious habits of the automaton of quotidian individuality and plunged into an abyss of freedom devoid of the solid ground of unproblematic, taken-for-granted socio-normative directives and guarantees. When it is not plagued by snags in the threads of its fabric, the symbolic order forms an implicit backdrop, a sort of second nature, quietly yet effectively governing the flow of the individual’s life in socially and linguistically mediated reality; it tacitly steers both cognition and comportment. However, in becoming temporarily dysfunctional owing to loopholes in its programmes (that is, the inconsistencies subsisting within the structures of the symbolic order), the barred big Other’s inherent incompleteness, activated by crises or unforeseen occurrences, offers the sudden opening/opportunity for a transient transcendence qua momentary, transitory break with this Other’s deterministic nexus.

The example of Antigone highlights the link between the barring of the Symbolic and autonomous subjectivity. However. these cracks and gaps in the big Other, as the barring of the Symbolic, can he exploited as openings/opportunities for the exercise of a transcendental freedom only by an entity preconfigured with a constitution that is itself barred: namely, an entity lacking a homogeneous, unified nature whose programme would be activated automatically in instances where the big Other’s determining function breaks down (in other words, a natural fallback position, a certain default steering direction for individual action reverted to when clear socio-normative mandates are inoperative). What is required is again a barred Real: ‘human nature’ as an inconsistent and conflict-ridden corpo-Real, a libidinal economy intrinsically lacking in balanced cohesiveness and co-ordination. The transient transcendence of freedom is sparked into being when the cracks and gaps of the Real overlap with those subsisting within the Symbolic. This explosive combination of antagonisms ignites the bursting forth of exceptional subjectivity out of mundane individuality.

Another crucial difference with Kant deserves mention. Whereas Kant’s practical philosophy maintains that autonomy is an attribute or property possessed by rational beings at the level of their inalienable noumenal essence, the analysis offered here treats autonomy as an insubstantial phenomenon bound up with the faltering or failure of this essence. In other words, freedom does not arise from a special faculty with an innate capacity for autonomy hard-wired into the individual’s constitution; instead, the capacity for autonomy is a consequence of the deficient and incomplete harmonization of the various faculties forming the individual’s constitution. This represents a ‘negative’ account of human freedom – an account based on the absence, rather than the presence, of certain attributes and properties (by contrast, Kant could be said to pursue a ‘positive’ account in which a noumenal faculty for subjective autonomy is added to the otherwise overdetermined phenomenal individual). The surplus of autonomy is made possible by the deficit of heteronomy. Freedom emerges from the dysfunctioning of determinism. 49-50

Žižek Birkbeck college

Žižek Birkbeck College, The Silent Voice of a New Beginning November 20, 2011

What is now here has emancipatory potentials. Certain forms of religion: radical Islam has a radical potential? That’s an open debate.

My problem with Ranciere, his re-aestheticization of politics, too much anti-representational, developed in his Disagreements, Police (policing the ordinary run of things) and Politics proper.  But is all Police (positive social order) is it one big homogeneous mass, or is thre a gap there?  That is to say what I find problematic in Raciere and Badiou, of Authentic politics as an exceptional moment, things follow their inertia, non-authentic representation and there are magic moments of the event when people demonstrate a new aesthetic spectacle.  My big problem : Freedom is not just this exceptional moment.

That part of these exceptional moments then reinscribes itself into the new positive order.  That is a politics which changes at least minimally the policing.

The ecstatic moment of direct democracy, non-representational freedom, how do you translate this into everyday rituals? 

Chantal Mouffe, she oscillates, she sounds as if from antagonism to agonism, we have pure antagonism, and the point of successful democracy is not just neutral technocratic rule, but you translate your antagonism which would otherwise have been destructive into minimally regulated agonism. My answer here: No castes without outcastes.  The very transposition of antagonism into political agonism, strengthens antagonism in the sense that “yes we can compete on condition we that exclude that jerk.” Some bad guys must be out so the field of agonism sustains itself.  Agonism relies on a certain field, set of rules and this set of rules of agonism is never neutral.

The true struggle for hegemony is not the struggle of who will win withing the given set of democractic rules, from Marx, the true struggle is the struggle for the set of rules itself.  We dont just fight within a regulated field, we alsways at the same time fight for the regulations itself. Continue reading “Žižek Birkbeck college”