dia mat – Page 3 – objet (a)

review of johnston

2013.12.13
Adrian Johnston, Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism, Volume One: The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy Northwestern University Press, 2013, 257pp., $45.00 (pbk), ISBN 9780810129122.

Reviewed by Jeffrey A. Bell, Southeastern Louisiana University

In this first of a projected three-volume Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism, Adrian Johnston places his materialist philosophy into the lineage of contemporary French philosophy. The French philosophers Johnston has most in mind are Jacques Lacan, Alain Badiou, and Quentin Meillassoux, and each of them fails, on Johnston’s reading, despite professed intentions to the contrary, to develop a thoroughly materialist philosophy. In one way or another, each ultimately “backslides” into a form of religious thinking that is also coupled with an under-appreciation of, if not outright hostility to, the life sciences. It is precisely by developing the philosophical implications of recent developments in the life sciences, and in particular the neurosciences (on this point Johnston follows Catherine Malabou), that a proper materialist philosophy can be established without backsliding into quasi-religious explanations.

Johnston’s focus upon the work of Lacan and his disciples is not simply to lay out a critical exegesis but rather to fulfill the promise of a materialist philosophy that can only be accomplished, Johnston argues, if one properly harnesses Lacan’s central insight — namely, the idea that the real entails an irreducible gap or rupture. By contrast, a common metaphysical assumption that is shared by both naïve scientific materialism and religious theism, Johnston argues, is the notion that Nature/God is an inviolable “One-All.” As he puts it, “It is not much of a leap to propose that the scientism accompanying modern natural science as a whole . . . tends to be inclined to embrace the nonempirical supposition of the ultimate cohesion of the material universe as a self-consistent One-All.” (16) From here Johnston seconds Lacan’s “assertion that science, even in the current era, relies upon ‘the idea of God’”. (16).

If one aligns one’s metaphysical views of materialism with contemporary life sciences, however, Johnston claims that we no longer have the “big Other,” the “self-consistent One-All” that provides the metaphysical foundation for science; to the contrary, “what remains,” Johnston argues, “lacks any guarantee of consistency right down to the bedrock of ontological fundaments.” (23).

Instead of a material being that is a consistent One-All and a continuation of the “idea of God,” we have “antagonisms and oppositions at the very heart of material being.” (24). It is only by way of such “antagonisms and oppositions,” Johnston claims, that we are able to offer a nonreductive yet materialist account of the emergence of conscious subjectivity.

Key to this effort is the development of the concept of weak nature, a concept that Johnston derives from Hume’s project (of which more below) and which will become the central topic of the second volume of Johnston’s Prolegomena, titled Weak Nature.

To set the stage for the necessity of formulating the concept of weak nature, Johnston first lays out the inadequacies of Lacan’s, Badiou’s, and Meillassoux’s efforts to follow through on their intention to establish a materialist philosophy. Due to the constraints of space, I will simply sketch the problems Johnston has with these efforts, highlighting along the way some potential problems and oversights with Johnston’s own approach.

Despite what Johnston takes to be Lacan’s correct insight regarding the common metaphysical assumptions regarding the “One-All” in both science and religion, Lacan’s thought itself, Johnston argues, is “clouded by occasional bouts of backsliding into dangerous flirtations with Catholicism and a virulent hostility to the life sciences.” (4).

There are two places where this clouding becomes especially evident. The first occurs with respect to what Johnston sees as Lacan’s outdated view of science. He claims that Lacan’s understanding of science relies upon an “odd materialism” that rules out on principle any account of how the natural body may be “exogenously impacted and subjectified by the denaturalizing signifiers of the sociosymbolic orders.” (50)

This then leads to Lacan’s claim that “language is there before man . . . Not only is man born in language, exactly as he is born into the world, but he is born by language,” (63) and as a result Lacan admits to having no interest in “prehistory” (63), for such a history would entail moving beyond the symbolic order, a move that would have to occur by way of the symbolic order.

This is the second place where Lacan encounters difficulties according to Johnston, for he falls into what Meillassoux will call the correlational circle — namely, the circle whereby the real is always the real as correlated with a subject for whom it is given, and hence we are never given the real as it is in itself.

In the case of Lacan we have what Johnston calls “a structural linguistic correlationist for whom the pre-Symbolic . . . Real exists solely in and through a (co)constituting correlation with the Symbolic.” (69). It is here where the “One-All” and the “idea of God” resurfaces in Lacan’s thought, for the “One-All” is the Symbolic order of language itself.

Lacan, in other words, did not remain true to his initial insight regarding the need for discontinuities, gaps, and ruptures at the heart of the real. Johnston then turns to Lacan’s disciples to see if they fare any better in developing a materialist philosophy.

Before turning to Badiou a brief comment is in order. It is certainly natural to see Badiou, Meillassoux, and others (most notably, Žižek) as Lacan’s primary disciples carrying forward the master’s central insights, and yet Johnston pays little attention to the work of Gilles Deleuze in his book. As Daniel Smith reminds us in his essay on Lacan, when Deleuze recounted a meeting he had with Lacan not long after the publication of Anti-Oedipus, he claimed that after having gone through “a list of all his disciples,” whom Lacan said were all “worthless,” Lacan concluded that when it came to disciples he needed “someone like you [Deleuze].”[1]

In particular, in Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari explicitly wonder “How many interpretations of Lacanianism [are] overtly or secretly pious, [and] have in this manner invoked . . . a gap in the Symbolic? . . .

Despite some fine books by certain disciples of Lacan, we wonder if Lacan’s thought really goes in this direction.”[2]

The reason for Lacan’s hesitation to move in this direction, as Deleuze and Guattari put it in What is Philosophy?, is precisely Lacan’s effort to develop an immanent materialism and avoid a transcendence of the gap or rupture whereby “immanence is [taken to be] a prison from which the Transcendent [breach or rupture] will save us.”[3] In other words, remaining true to Lacan’s efforts to avoid a return of the “secretly pious” and theological would entail avoiding this form of transcendence.

I will return to this theme below, but for Žižek and Badiou, at least, developing Lacan’s thought does entail affirming the breach or rupture and a rejection of Deleuze, who is mistakenly assumed to be continuing with the very metaphysics of the One-All that has been a hindrance to developing a proper materialism.

Johnston’s view, however, is more sophisticated, and one of the great strengths of his book is the attention he draws to the premise that motivates Badiou’s turn to formal mathematics in developing an ontology of events.

As Johnston puts it, “Badiou depicts naturalism-organicism-vitalism, on the one hand, and formalism-mathematicism, on the other hand, as mutually exclusive ontological options.” (85)

Badiou adopts the latter approach and rejects the former; and since Deleuze is associated with the former approach, his thought is rejected as well. Johnston, however, will call into question Badiou’s “reasons for rejecting the naturalism-organicism-vitalism option.” (85)

Put briefly, for Johnston the choice is not between formalism and vitalism but rather “between spiritualist obscurantism and scientific clarity,” (98) and Johnston argues that, unfortunately for Badiou’s project, Badiou falls decidedly on the side of “spiritualist obscurantism.”

Badiou’s slip into “spiritualist obscurantism” occurs when he attempts to account for the process whereby an “inconsistent multiplicity” becomes a “consistent multiplicity.”

An inconsistent multiplicity is a consequence of Cantor’s theory of transfinite numbers, which entails, as Johnston puts it, an uncountable, nondenumerable “infinite infinities of inconsistent multiplicities-without-oneness.” (111)

The “counting-for-one” operation “imposes certain constraints and limitations on thought’s relation to (inconsistent) multiplicities of being per se,” (115) and renders them into countable, consistent multiplicities.

The problem for Badiou, however, is to account for this operation itself. Who or what performs the operation? Johnston claims that ultimately this “counting-for-one” remains unaccounted for, and is “a unity-producing synthesizing function or process as an ephemeral non-being arising from God-knows-where.” (128) Despite his efforts to avoid Kantian idealism, it “remains just around the corner” (128) in Badiou’s own thought.

Johnston next turns to Meillassoux, a move that is crucial, for not only was Meillassoux Badiou’s student, but Badiou himself calls upon Meillassoux’s book, After Finitude, to do the heavy lifting in decoupling a transcendental philosophy from Kantian transcendental idealism. Since Badiou was unsuccessful in carrying out this decoupling, the turn to Meillassoux becomes all the more important, or as Johnston argues, “whether Badiou succeeds in entirely stepping out from under Kant’s long shadow arguably depends on whether Meillassoux succeeds in thoroughly debunking Kantian and post-Kantian correlationism.” (132)

Central to Meillassoux’s effort to establish what he calls a speculative materialism is an appropriation and transformation of Hume’s philosophy, or more precisely the “core maneuver,” Johnston argues, “lying at the very heart of Meillassoux’s project is an ontologization of Hume’s epistemology.” (150).

Johnston argues quite convincingly that this maneuver fails. In particular, he disputes Meillassoux’s use of the chance/contingency distinction. Chance refers to the calculation of probabilities relative to a One-All set of possibilities, and thus for instance the chance a flipped coin will show up heads approaches 50% as the number of throws approaches infinity, the infinite One-All set of throws.

Contingency, on the other hand, is what one has when one adopts Cantor’s “unbounded infinite of multiplicities-without-limits”, for then one undoes the very One-All totality “upon which the probabilistic aleatory reasoning of chance allegedly depends, namely, the presumed existence of a totality of possible outcomes.” (163).

The problem for this view, however, is to account for stability at all, a stability Meillassoux himself relies upon when he calls upon the findings of science (e.g., carbon dating) to argue for what he calls arche-facts, or the fact that there were realities that pre-date being given to any consciousness (and hence a reality beyond and irreducible to any form of correlationism).

If anything, Johnston argues, the ontology Meillassoux draws from Cantor, what Meillassoux calls “hyper-chaos,” makes it less rather than more likely that stability would emerge at all.

“Why,” Johnston asks, “should the detotalization of the totality posited in connection with chance . . . make the flux of inconstancy less rather than more likely?” (163)

If there are infinite infinities of hyper-chaos, and if anything can emerge at any time without any reason or explanation (for such a reason or explanation depends upon a stability of relationships), then Meillassoux himself ultimately ends up falling into “spiritualist obscurantism” rather than offering, as Johnston seeks to do, a position grounded in “scientific clarity.”

For instance, Johnston points out that Meillassoux simply accepts without explanation or reasons a conscious subjectivity. In other words, Meillassoux is completely immune to the “hard problem” as has been formulated in the work of David Chalmers. This immunity is not a virtue, however, but rather a crippling vice that infects Meillassoux’s entire project. If anything can emerge at any time without reason or explanation, then what Meillassoux leaves us with, Johnston claims, “amounts to an antiscientific sophistical sleight-of-hand that places Meillassoux in undeniable proximity to the same Christian creationists he mocks in After Finitude.” (152-3).

In the final section, the Postface, Johnston sets the stage for the two volumes that will follow through on the promise to offer a materialism that does not reproduce the “idea of God” in any form. As with Meillassoux, Hume looms large in Johnston’s efforts. Instead of offering an ontologization of Hume’s epistemology that leads to a Cantorian metaphysics of hyper-chaos, Johnston offers an ontologization of Hume’s skepticism that lays the basis for the concept of weak nature. With this concept in hand, Johnston believes he will be able to offer, in subsequent volumes, a proper materialist philosophy, what he calls “transcendental materialism” and takes to be the position that “affirms the immanence to material nature of subjects nonetheless irreducible to such natural materialities.” (178)

Integral to transcendental materialism is the idea that “splits [are] real and ineliminable.” (180) Transcendental materialism is to be contrasted with “Hegelian-Marxian dialectical materialism” in that whereas the former sees splits as “real and ineliminable,” dialectical materialism “favors emphasizing eventual unifying syntheses of such apparent splits as that between, simply put, mind and matter.” (180).

The concept of weak nature provides a way of incorporating the ineliminability of splits in that it assumes Hume’s skeptical arguments have successfully weakened “the appearance of humans as free, as capriciously spontaneous” and weakened “the appearance of nature as determined, as ruled without exception.” (207)

What this “ontological weakening of nature” leaves us with, Johnston concludes, is an “opening within being qua being an sich [of] the possibility of a gap,” a gap that makes possible “a subjectivity fully within but nonetheless free at certain levels from material nature.” (209)

In closing I return to my earlier point regarding Deleuze’s claim that a proper Lacanian metaphysics would not embrace ineliminable splits, for in doing so one ineluctably brings the transcendent in through the back door, and this in turn threatens to undermine the transcendental materialism Johnston hopes to establish.

These questions may be addressed in the second volume, Weak Nature, and Johnston may well take on some of the Deleuzian questions raised here. To do so would make sense, for in many ways Deleuze and Johnston are fellow travelers in that their interest in Hume was motivated precisely by the problematic that leads Johnston to propose the concept of weak nature — that is, it provides for an account of a subjectivity that is “fully within but nonetheless free at certain levels from material nature.” (209)

As Deleuze states the Humean problematic in Empiricism and Subjectivity, it is, as for Johnston, to show how a “subject transcending the given [can] be constituted in the given?”[4] Much of the rest of Empiricism and Subjectivity, and much of Deleuze’s subsequent work, can be understood in the light of this problematic. Whether or not Johnston addresses these questions in the next volume, he has certainly shown that a Humean metaphysics of weak nature offers a promising way forward in establishing a materialist philosophy. Johnston’s subsequent volumes promise to offer a significant contribution to debates in contemporary philosophy and will be eagerly anticipated.

[1] Daniel Smith, “The Inverse Side of the Structure: Žižek on Deleuze on Lacan,” in Essays on Deleuze (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), p. 312.

[2] Ibid. p. 317.

[3] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 47.

[4] Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, translated by Constantin Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 83.

Ž on badiou Think Again

Žižek. “From Purification to Subtraction: Badiou and the Real.” [Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy. 2004 ]

Also Žižek’s new Preface to For They Know Not What They Do. 2008

The basic problem remains unsolved by Kant as well as by Badiou: how does the gap between the pure multiplicity of being and its appearance in the multitude of worlds arise?

How does being appear to itself?

Or, to put it in ‘Leninist’ terms: the problem is not whether there is some reality beneath the phenomenal world of our experience.

The true problem is exactly the opposite one — how does the gap open up within the absolute closure of the Real, within which elements of the Real can appear? 174-175

Why the need for the pure multiplicity to be re-presented in a state? When Bosteels writes that the state of a situation is “an imposing defence mechanism set up to guard against the perils of the void”, one should therefore raise a naive, but nonetheless crucial, question: where does this need for defence come from? Why are we not able simply to dwell in the void? Is it not that there already has to be some tension/antagonism operative within the pure multiplicity of Being itself. 175

[The following appears also in the New Preface to For They Know Not What They Do. 2008]

Nowhere is the gap which separates Badiou from Lacan more clearly evident than apropos of the four discourses (the hysteric’s discourse, the master’s discourse, the pervert’s discourse, and the mystic’s discourse); through a criticism of Lacan, Badiou recently (in his latest seminars) proposed his own version of these discourses.

At the beginning, there is the hysteric’s discourse: in the hysterical subject, the new truth explodes in an event, it is articulated in the guise of an inconsistent provocation, and the subject itself is blind to the true dimension of what it stumbled upon – think of the proverbial unexpected outburst to the beloved: “I love you!”, which surprises even the one who utters it.

It is the master’s task properly to elaborate the truth into a consistent discourse, to work out its sequence.

The pervert, on the contrary, works as if there was no truth-event, categorizes the effects of this event as if they can be accounted for in the order of knowledge (for example, a historian of the French Revolution like Francois Furet, who explains it as the outcome of the complexity of the French situation in the late eighteenth century, depriving it of its universal scope). To these three one should add the mystic’s discourse, the position of clinging to the pure In-Itself of the truth that is beyond the grasp of any discourse.(lxxxvii)

There is a series of interconnected differences between this notion of four discourses and Lacan’s matrix of four discourses; the two principal ones concern the opposition of Master and Analyst.

First, in Lacan, it is not the hysteric but the Master who performs the act of nomination: he pronounces the new Master-Signifier which restructures the entire field; the Master’s intervention is momentary, unique, singular, like the magic touch which shifts the perspective and, all of a sudden, transforms chaos into the New Order – in contrast to the discourse of the University which elaborates the sequence from the new Master-Signifier (the new system of knowledge).

The second difference is that in Badiou’s account there is no place for the discourse of the analyst – its place is held by the mystical discourse fixated on the unnameable Event, resisting its discursive elaboration as inauthentic.

For Lacan, there is no place for an additional mystical discourse, for the simple reason that such a mystical stance is not a discourse (a social link) – and the discourse of the analyst is precisely a discourse which takes as its “agent”, its structuring principle, the traumatic kernel of the Real which acts as an insurmountable obstacle to the discursive link, introducing into it an indelible antagonism, an impossibility, a destabilizing gap.

That is the true difference between Badiou and Lacan: what Badiou precludes is the possibility of devising a discourse which has as its Structuring principle the unnameable “indivisible remainder” that eludes the discursive grasp – that is to say, for Badiou, when we are confronted with this remainder, we should name it, transpose it into the master’s discourse, or stare at it in mystified awe.

This means that we should turn Badiou’s criticism of Lacan back against Badiou himself: it is Badiou who is unable to expand the encounter with the Real into a discourse, Badiou for whom this encounter, if it is to start to function as a discourse, has to be transposed into a Master’s discourse.

The ultimate difference between Badiou and Lacan, therefore, concerns the relationship between the shattering encounter with the Real and the ensuing arduous work of transforming this explosion of negativity into a new order:

for Badiou, this new order “sublates” the exploding negativity into a new consistent truth;

while for Lacan, every Truth displays the structure of a (symbolic) fiction, that is, it is unable to touch the Real.

Does this mean that Badiou is right when he says that Lacan, in a paradigmatic gesture of what Badiou calls “anti-philosophy”, relativizes truth to just another narrative/symbolic fiction which forever fails to grasp the “irrational” hard kernel of the Real?

Here we should recall the three dimensions of the Lacanian Real: far from being reduced to the traumatic Void of the Thing which resists symbolization, it also designates the senseless symbolic consistency (of the “matheme”), as well as the pure appearance that is irreducible to its causes (“the real of an illusion”).

So Lacan not only does supplement the Real as the void of the absent cause with the Real as consistency; he adds a third term, that of the Real as pure appearing, which is also operative for Badiou in the guise of what he calls the “minimal difference” which arises when we subtract all fake particular difference – from the minimal “pure” difference between figure and background in Malevich’s White Square on White Surface, up to the unfathomable minimal difference between Christ and other men.

2B Continued

self-difference Žižek

Žižek reality of the Virtual 2004

UNIVERSAL and PARTICULAR
The category of the REAL is a purely formal category. REAL is not formless content disturbing order, it is a pure structural GAP. It is ENTIRELY NONSUBSTANTIAL category.

Minimal self-difference

It is a difference but a pure difference. A difference which is paradoxically prior to what it is the difference between.

It is not that you have two terms and difference is the difference between the two terms. Paradoxically the two positive terms appear afterwards as attempts to dominate/cover-up this difference.

If you ask a right-winger how the entire social field is structured you will get a totally different answer from a centrist and a left-winger. There is no neutral way to define the difference between left and right, in itself it is just a VOID. The point is that there is no neutral way to define the difference between left and right, you either approach it from the left or right.

Crucial philosophically is this ‘pure formalism’ and we should precisely insist on purely formal materialism, the minimal feature of materialism is that there is pure difference, an antagonism within the ONE, a primordial fact is pure self-difference. Self-Difference and not mythological polar opposites ying-yang man-woman light-dark

Deleuze asserts some kind of primordial multitude as ontological fact. NO!

Multitude is already an effect of th inconsistency of the ONE with itself. THE ONE CANNOT COINCIDE WITH ITSELF. We don’t have primordial polarity between male-female etc.

No its more radical, as Lacan puts it, the binary signifier is primordially repressed, the second element is always missing. We have one but not the accompanying other. This original imbalance sets in motion the generation of multiplicity.

Woody Allen
Tolstoy where is Dostoevsky (the other of Tolstoy) In one short scene, all the big titles of Dostoevsky’s novels appear.

ONE cannot coincide with itself, because of pure difference the multitude explodes.

Today’s idealism/spiritualism no wonder the greatest spiritual movie director Tarkovsky, was at the same time practically obsessed with matter in decay. When heroes pray, the litteraly immerse their heads in mud. Oppose spiritual materialism, the pure formalism of true radical materialism. Quantum physics, you don’t need positivity of matter you can do it all with theorems.

How to think difference which is prior to the elements which it is the difference of.

KANT: Negative Judgement/Infinite Judgement.

excess over humanity which is inherent to humanity itself.
UNDEAD: You are alive precisely as dead. Human freedom has exactly status, it is neither NATURE, NOR CULTURE. Culture is already symbolic laws, and symbolic regulation. The conclusion to be drawn cultural symbolic prohibitions try to regulate is not directly nature, but this EXTIMATE KERNEL OF HUMANITY, the inhuman, the undead, not external to humanity, some MONSTROUS EXCESS WHICH IS INHERENT TO HUMANITY ITSELF.

POLITICS OF PURE DIFFERENCE
it won’t be what emerges today, the so-called identity politics, recognizing tolerating differences. Recognizing differences

Žižek december 2011 Berlin

Slavoj Žižek: “The Animal Doesn’t Exist” (respondent: Lorenzo Chiesa) The Human Animal in Politics, Science, and Psychoanalysis
Organised by: Lorenzo Chiesa (Reader in Modern European Thought, University of Kent) and Mladen Dolar (Professor of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana; Advising Researcher, Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht) KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 16 — 17 December 2011

Part 2

New Guinea Tribe
Rejection of binary logic is a cover-up of a central antagonism Retroactive totalization, a violent cut, a violent impostition of a totality, there is a truth in it. What emerges through the animal, it is only through this minimal distance of speech that retroactively we can formulate not an eternal essence of animality but the deadlock of animality. Redefine the notion of essence, do not reject it.

UNIVERSAL and PARTICULAR: the first antagonism is not between particularities, but universality and particular are deal with this antagonism.
Corporate capitalism, liberal capitalism, capitalism with Asian values. There are only different capitalism, but they all try to obfuscate control a central deadlock.

Big Rule of Hegelian Dialectics
In each Hegelian totality or concrete universality, universality is one of its own species, it encounters itself as one of its own species. RABBLE, sticks out the only point of universality. In Rabble human as a social being exists, as an outcast universality comes to exist as such. A species which relates to itself as a universal being. What if this animal as such does exist and this is we humans. and this is the HORROR animals see in us. We are the ANIMAL for other animals.
Animals are immediately caught in their environment, speechless instinct NO! this is wrong. This is retroactive projection … I think that the true mystification in this standard opposition between human-animal, what effectively disappears here, what we miss is the most radical dimension of what WE humans are.
Becoming — Being. We are already constituted reason, speech and then measure animals. WHat this can’t think is HUMAN IN ITS BECOMING, it can’t think human from animal standpoint.

Psychoanalysis: Zupancic Freudian DRIVE which is NOT YET CULTURE BUT NO LONGER ANIMAL INSTINCT.
Not animal life but not yet human culture. Meillassoux After Finitude. Alenka elaborated a nice Lacanian answer to Meillassoux. NON-ALL Meillassoux reads in the masculine logic. You get a more provocative result if you read contingency along the FEMININE LOGIC OF SEXUATION. Contingency is non-all, precisely because you can’t totalize it through exception.

Fossils: Transcendental Kantian legacy can’t provide clear answer to status of FOSSILS. If you take this ontologically seriously, it refers before transcendental horizon. Meillassoux demonstrates transcendental tricks don’t work here. If we want to isolate the dimension Darwin didn’t see, I would like to rehabilitate, who said regarding fossils, that God planted those fossils. And Ž wants to dialectically incorporate this story
The true problem brings us to object (a). The true problem is not the fossil out there, was there life on earth before human beings, the true fossil are human beings, we are UNABLE TO SEE OURSELVES IN BECOMING. The problem is we cannot see ourselves as in-itself as it were. Its easy to claim tha we Christians can’t read pagan religions we reduce them to our perspective, you miss what Judaism is … what we miss even more what was Christ before he became a Christian, are we aware what a MONSTROSITY JESUS CHRIST WAS FOR THE JEWS. We have to see the past in its BECOMING. What was Christ before he became a Christian.

Part 2

The whole of Christianity as an instution is not a fight against paganism but its own excess, the struggle of being human is not fight against animal nature, but fight against EXCESS that marks our break with NATURE. There is a wonderful text in Kant about education and humans, to control their excess. Man is an ANIMAL WHO NEEDS A MASTER. Only humans have a certain WILD UNRULINESS.
The BRUTALITY IS THE FREUDIAN DRIVE, not animal nature. We are not fighting animal nature, we are fighting the Freudian Drive.

The excess that needs to be explained is the OTHER SIDE of what we humans are in ourselves, what was lost the moment we got caught in our ideological self-perception.
I diagree with vulgar Darwinians when they look for solution in what human mind can do its complexities, talk, infinitesimal mathametics. No begin with Badiou, what defines a WORLD, are not its positive features, but the way a structure of a world relates to its OWN INHERENT POINT OF IMPOSSIBILITY. the true changes in world, are changes in the status of this impossibility.

Square root of minus one, before it was dismissed as nonsense. Even Marx said this, dismisses this. But revolution of math, even if square root of minus one, even if nonsensical you can integrate it and it functions. What is great about democracy, it takes traumatic impossibility, my God throne is EMPTY …Leader dies, VOID must be filled immediately, Democracy integrates it, and makes it the instrument of its relative stability. Capitalism, the impossibility of stability, makes it the very mode of its functioning. WHAT IF WE SHOULD LOOK for what makes us Humans, at this level, not at what we can do, but a changed status of what we can’t do, the changed status of impossibility.

How is it we humans obsessively care again and again about something with NO ADAPTIVE VALUE?

Objective reality is ontologically not-all I’m totally materialist. Quantum physics, reality in-itself is not fully ontologically constituted, there are gaps in reality. I would like to supplement Alain Badiou, his quote is problematic, his english theoretical writings. Where does Event come from if all there is is the order of Being?

An event is nothing but the part of a given situation, a fragment of Being. If an event is nothing but a fragment of Being, why asks Ž can we not describe it as such. Here is Badiou’s Kantianism. We are only free from our finitude, Kant tries to imagine what would happen to us if we gained full access to thing-in-itself. We would turn into puppets. So our freedom and ethical activity only emerges from standpoint of our finitude. That’s Kant. If event is nothing but fragment of being, why can’t we then reduce it to Being. Badiou says because of our finitude. Z says no, its because Being in incomplete, you must introduce the non-all of BEING.

Žižek poetry Midsummer nights dream 2009 and 2012

Madman, Lover and the Poet Midsummer’s Night Dream Act 5

THESEUS
A gap between ordinary reality and some ethereal dimension, but this gap is gradually reduced starting with madman, then lover and then finally closed?? with the Poet.

The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman:
[A madman simply sees madmen, devils everywhere. He misperceives a bush for a bear]

the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt:
[Transubstantiated into appearance of sublime dimension, the face appears as it is, but still the lover its sees beauty as you are as such, at the same time you are something sublime, true love doesn’t idealize. Lover sees beauty in an ordinary face.]

The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

[Transcendence is reduced to zero. Empirical reality is not transubstantiated into a materialization of a higher reality, but into materialization of nothing. In ordinary life appearance means the appearance of something behind. Poetry is appearance against the background of nothing, the moment you are looking for something behind as it were, you lose the point. ]

Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

Ž in Iran 2012
Talks about Shakespeare’s Midsummer here
We have a gap between ordinary reality and some transcendent ethereal dimension. But in all 3 cases this distance is reduced.

Madman false realty misperceived as reality, bush misperceived as bear.
Lover retains the transubstantiated appearance into a sublime dimension. This imperfect frail being is the absolute.
The Poet we also get appearance, but we don’t misperceive it, its not transcendence in ordinary as in love, it is a MATERIALIZATION OF NOTHING. You have an appearance, it is not some substantial X that appears, its nothing, nothing appears. This is a nice formula for political revolution. To give shape to nothing. The opening of the new.

Ž responds to his critics

February 28 2013 A Reply to My Critics.

Room B01
Clore Management Centre
Birkbeck, University of London
Torrington Square
London WC1E 7HX

If we cannot imagine a society which is not held together by a Master figure but in a different way then we can pack our luggage and just say ok let’s play pragmatic politics. The challenges are great here. I think that in this debate Badiou versus postmodern fluid plural multitude figures of authority I think that both poles are wrong. The structure of a Master as well as this polymorphous multitude structure doesn’t function. There are some hints in Lacan or somewhere you can have a social link which is not founded on the figure of the Master.

large want to be passive, permanent participation, engagement, I much perfer to be passive citizen, I want a state that does its work. I don’t despise ordinary people. Engaged people don’t know what they want

Rehabilitate an ‘elite’ A good politician tells the people what they want, if he’s good, people have this “oh my god, yes now I know what I want.”

Molecular self-organizing multitude against hierarchical order:

adrian johnston meillassoux badiou

Johnston, Adrian. “Phantom of consistency: Alain Badiou and Kantian Transcendental Idealism.” Continental Philosophy Review. 41 (2008): 345–366.

There are three fundamental reasons why Kant functions as one of the main nemeses for Badiouian philosophy.

First, Badiou blames him for having invented the motif of finitude, a motif present nowadays in various guises. Badiou’s tirades against this motif recur throughout his writings in the form of attacks upon not only epistemologies of finite subjective knowledge, but also upon promotions of mortality, of death-bound being, as philosophically foundational and ultimate.

Second, Badiou balks at Kant’s invocation of the ostensible ‘‘limits of possible experience’’ insofar as this boundary-line partitioning noumena from phenomena entails the prohibition of constructing a rational ontology. The Kantian critical-transcendental apparatus insists that only a de-ontologized epistemology is philosophically valid and defensible, which, in light of Badiou’s post-Heideggerian ontological ambitions, is a position that must be eradicated.

Third, for Badiou as a committed materialist, the idealism of Kantian transcendental idealism is simply unacceptable. Badiou’s transcendental is both asubjective and (materially) immanent to the world of which it is, at one and the same time, both a structuring scaffolding as well as an internal component. 348

With implicit reference to the Kantian gesture of enclosing subjects within the prison-houses and shadow-theaters of their own cognition, Badiou sneeringly dubs Kant ‘‘our first professor,’’ the initiator of a sterile academic orientation in philosophy whose very theoretical content reflects the alleged practical fact of its lack of substantial connections to any sort of (so to speak) real world.

What accounts for the genesis of the relative coherence and organization of “worlds” (i.e., structured domains of relations between presentable entities) out of the incoherence and disorganization of pure being an sich?

One might anticipate that it is in response to precisely this query that Badiou re-deploys the notion of the transcendental. However, such is not the case. Badiou’s transcendental is co-extensive with what he calls “worlds”.

More specifically, each Badiouian world, as a regional sphere within which multiple-being is made to appear in the form of localized/situated existences according to the relational logic of this same sphere, is ordered by its own “transcendental regime”.

Additionally, he contends that there are indefinite numbers of worlds both possible and actual. Hence, the Badiouian transcendental isn’t a concept-term denoting delineable (pre)conditions for the emergence of phenomenal being-there (i.e., the appearances and presentations of transcendentally structured worlds) out of ontological being qua being (as distinct from any and every phenomenology).

To the extent that Badiou’s transcendental is internal to and entirely entangled with the circumscribed domain of être-la it cannot simultaneously operate in a mediating transitional role between this domain and l’être en tant qu’être.

Badiou seems to be left with the unanswered questions of how and why being(s) give rise to worlds (the latter involving the transcendental as each world’s organizing state/regime). In isolation from Kant’s idealism, the broadest sense of his notion of the transcendental has to do with conditions of possibility. In this sense, Badiou’s transcendental begs the question of the conditions of possibility for its own surfacing out of the Real of being.

Who or what catalyzes the coming into existence of the being-there of appearances? Badiouian transcendentalism, if there is such a thing, would thus require supplementation by a meta-transcendentalism, an explanation of that which makes possible this very catalyzing.

Again and again, Badiou opposes the crucial move at the heart of the Kantian critical “Copernican revolution,” namely, the insistence that knowable reality conforms to the mediating templates of subjective cognition (rather than this cognition directly apprehending real being in and of itself).

As regards the former (i.e., a direct knowledge of l’être en tant qu’être), he claims, against Kant’s maintenance of the limits of possible experience, that cognition indeed can transgress these purported limits so as to seize being qua being in an unmediated fashion.

For Badiou, being-in-itself, unlike das Ding an sich, is “entirely knowable” (for this same reason, he disagrees with readings of Lacan in which the register of the Real is treated as akin or equivalent to Kant’s realm of noumena. In Logiques des mondes, he speaks of thought’s ability to operate “beyond the limits of sensibility” so as to “synthetically think the noumenal and the phenomenal” (Hegel’s post-Kantian aspirations are mentioned here too)

Compter pour Un Counting For One

One of the core concepts entangled with the ontology elaborated inBeing and Event is that of ‘‘counting-for-one’’ (compter-pour-un).

This unifying operation, as an operation, isn’t itself a being in the strict ontological sense (i.e., something inhering within l’être en tant qu’être).

Instead, Badiou defines this ‘‘count’’ as distinct from being, although (supposedly) always-already having acted upon it so as to render being-in-itself presentable (as Fabien Tarby explains, “the unity of something is operational and not substantial”, and, “Unity is transitory, evanescent, operational”).

Any “situation,” as a locality within which unified entities can and do appear, is structured by a situation-specific operation of counting-for-one. Furthermore, from within any situation arising as an outcome of such a count, one can, after-the-fact of this operation, infer something (i.e., being qua being as pure multiplicities-without-one) retroactively presupposed as prior to this process of counting.

This leads Badiou to propose a distinction between “inconsistent multiplicity” and “consistent multiplicity”; the former is what presumably precedes the consistency-producing intervention of counting-for-one and the latter is what is created as a result of this unifying operation.

A situation structured by a count contains many ones (i.e., consistent multiplicities), while being as such, posited as anterior to this situational structuring and organization, “in-consists” of multiplicities without one-ness or unity (hence, “being qua being, strictly speaking, is neither one nor multiple” — with “multiple” here meaning many unified ones).

With respect to this matter, Badiou oscillates between two incompatible stances: On the one hand, when railing against Kantian epistemological finitude with its limits of possible experience denying direct access to noumena, he claims that the noumenal realm of Real being an sich indeed can be grasped cognitively in ways forbidden by Kant’s de-ontologizing epistemology;

On the other hand, he sometimes seems to reinstate essential features of the Kantian divide between the phenomenal and the noumenal when speaking of unsayble being-in-itself as inconsistent multiplicities-without-one inaccessible to all discourse and thought (even that of pure mathematics). 353

The phenomenal appearances of being-there (i.e., existence at the phenomenological level) are said to be constituted by virtue of the transcendental regime” of a “world” (monde) configuring given multiplicities (i.e., being at the ontological level). Real beings appear in a world, a domain of organized, inter-related phenomena, thanks to the structuring intervention of a transcendental architecture responsible for distributing varying degrees of “visibility” across the multiplicities of which a particular situation consists. (W)

The “logics of worlds” spoken of by the title of this 2006 book are none other than the ordering networks and webs allegedly making possible the localized appearings that compose the tableaus of varying phenomenological regions of situated, differentially co-determining manifestations. (W)

jodi dean communist desire democratic drive

A better way to conceive the division within the people, one capable of expressing the power of the people in and as a collectivity but not as a whole and not as a unity, makes use of the psychoanalytic distinction between desire and drive . While Freud’s vicissitudes of the drive are generally known (reversal in to its opposite, turn ing ro und upon the subject’s own self, repression, and sublimation), two features of the perhaps less familiar Lacanian notion of drive bear emphasizing. The first concerns the difference between drive and desire as relations of jouissance, in other words, as economies through which the subject structures her enjoyment. Desire is always a desire to desire, a desire that can never be filled, a desire for a jouissance or enjoyment that can never be attained.

In contrast, drive attains jouissance in the repetitive process process of not reaching it. One doesn’t have to reach the goal to enjoy. Enjoyment attaches to the process, thereby capturing the subject. Enjoyment, no matter how small, fleeting, or partial, is why one persists in the loop of drive. The second feature concerns the different status of objet petit a in desire and drive.

Zizek In Defense of Lost Causes pg 328: Although, in both cases, the link between object and loss is crucial, in the case of the objet a as the object of desire, we have an object which was originally lost, which coincides with its own loss, which emerges as lost, while, in the case of the objet a as the object of drive, , the “object ” is directly the loss itself — in the shift from desire to drive we pass from the lost object to loss itself as an object.

That is to say, the weird movement called “drive”. is not driven by the “impossible” quest for the lost object; it is a push to directly enact the “loss ” — the gap, cut, distance-itself.

🙂 And here is Dean’s point:

The people as desiring have needs, needs they can only address together, collectively, active and in common. Their sovereignty can be reduced neither to their majority nor to their procedures. Rather, it names the cause and reason for government: the collective people in their desire for a common good. The people as caught in drive are fragmented, dispersed into networks and tributaries. Stuck in drive’s repetitive loops, they pursue their separate enterprises even as they are governmentalized objects, a population.

analyst discourse

Bryant, Levi R. “Žižek’s New Universe of Discourse: Politics and the Discourse of the Capitalist” International Journal of Žižek Studies (Vol 2, no. 4) 1-48.

Discourse of Critical Theory

a –> S1
S2 $

As Žižek writes in the introduction to The Sublime Object of Ideology,

In contrast to [the] Althusserian ethics of alienation in the symbolic ‘process without a subject’, we may denote the ethics implied by Lacanian psychoanalysis as that of separation. The famous Lacanian motto not to give way on one’s desire [ne pas céder sur son desir]– is aimed at the fact that we must not obliterate the distance separating the Real from its symbolization: it is this surplus of the Real over every symbolization that functions as the object-cause of desire. To come to terms with this surplus (or, more precisely, leftover) means to acknowledge the fundamental deadlock (‘antagonism’), a kernel resisting symbolic integration-dissolution (Žižek 1989: 3). 34

Are analysis and engaged political activity consistent with one another? As Lacan remarks at the end of The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, “[t]he analyst’s desire is not a pure desire. It is a desire to obtain absolute difference, a desire which intervenes when, confronted with the primary signifier, the subject is, for the first time, in a position to subject himself to it” (Lacan 1998: 276).

The analysand begins analysis in the dimension of the imaginary, treating everything and everyone as the Same. Over the course of analysis what emerges is an absolutely singular constellation of signifiers, specific to this subject and this subject alone as determinants of his unconscious (hence Lacan’s reference to
the subject being in a position to subject himself to this primary signifier).

Lacan goes so far as to suggest that the primary signifiers uncovered in analysis are pure non-sense. “…[T]he effect of interpretation is to isolate in the subject a kernel, a kern, to use Freud’s own term, of non-sense…” (Ibid: 250). If this primary signifier has the status of non-sense, then this is precisely because it is not common but particular to the subject and no other.

It is thus difficult to see how it is possible to get a politics out of the discourse of the analyst, for the discourse of the analyst does not aim at collective engagement or the common– which is necessary for politics –but the precise opposite.

Nonetheless, there is a kernal of truth in Žižek’s characterization of his own position in terms of the discourse of the analyst. Unlike the politics of the discourse of the master premised on the fantasy of imaginary organic totality, any revolutionary politics must speak not from the position of totality, but from the standpoint of the Real, of antagonism, of the remainder, or of that which the other social ties function to veil or hide from view.

In other words, revolutionary political engagement differs from the politics of the State and master in that it approaches the social from the perspective of the Real, treating this as the truth of social formations.

As Žižek remarks, All ‘culture’ is in a way a reaction-formation, an attempt to limit, canalize — to cultivate this imbalance, this traumatic kernel, this radical antagonism through which man cuts his umbilical cord with nature, with animal homeostasis.

It is not only that the aim is no longer to abolish this drive antagonism, but the aspiration to abolish it is precisely the source of totalitarian temptation: the greatest mass murders and holocausts have always been perpetrated in the name of man as harmonious being, of a New Man without antagonistic tension (Žižek 1989: 5).

Where the politics of the master treats this imbalance or traumatic kernel of radical antagonism as an accident to be eradicated and overcome, the critical-revolutionary politics treats the tension as the truth that allows a whole set of social symptoms to be discerned and engaged.

For example, Marx does not treat discontent among the proletariat as an anomalous deviation disrupting the social to be summarily dismissed, but rather as the key to the systematic organization of capitalism and the perspective from which capitalist production is to be understood, and as the potential for revolutionary transformation.

The mark of any critical-revolutionary political theory will thus be that objet a, the remainder, the gap, the traumatic kernel, occupies the position of the agent in the social relation.

subject of truth death drive

Peter Karlsen The Grace of Materialism Theology with Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. Københavns Universitet 2010

In sum, according to Žižek (and Santner) the Freudian notion of death drive, and more generally Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis, would provide Badiou with an anti-humanist anthropology that, as a necessary supplement to his purely formal theory of the subject, would allow him to explain more precisely what it is about the human animal that makes it capable, in contrast to all other animals, of breaking with its immediate needs and desires in order to dedicate itself to a Cause beyond its own self-interests, in short, to become a subject of truth.

difference between Ž and Badiou on subject

Peter Karlsen The Grace of Materialism Theology with Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. Københavns Universitet 2010

What does the freedom that the death drive enables look like?

Žižek (FTKN 206; CWZ 94, 135; PV 202, 210, 231) clearly links death drive with freedom. The death drive as a ‘self-sabotaging structure’ is what enables a break with the determinism of both our natural instincts and our ‘second nature’ in terms of the cultural dialectic of law and desire in service of the pleasure principle. This rupture with the normal run of things made possible by the death drive represents, as Žižek (PV 231) puts it, ‘the minimum of freedom’. So, according to Žižek, freedom in its most elementary form is a rupture, a break with determinism.

“I am determined by causes (be it direct brute natural causes or motivations), and the space of freedom is not a magic gap in this first-level causal chain but my ability retroactively to choose/determine which causes will determine me.” Thus, a free act is not simply what sets off a new causal sequence; rather it is the retroactive act of endorsing which causal sequence will determine me. 207

Žižek explains the retroactive character of this ‘second level reflexive causality’ through a useful opposition between what he terms the ‘ordinary historical notion of time’ and the notion of time displayed in a passage in Henri Bergson’s Two Sources of Morality and Religion.

In the ‘ordinary historical notion of time’, possibilities precede their realization, whereas the Bergsonian notion of time is characterized by the assertion that an act (realization) retrospectively opens up its own possibility.

Rather than thinking of times as succeeding moments all loaded with multiple possibilities just waiting to be realized, according to the Bergsonian notion of time, an event only even becomes possible after it has happened, and so it is not determined by its past, rather it changes the past retrospectively by now appearing as a (realized) possibility. 207

In a brief excurse in his 2008 book In Defense of Lost Causes, Žižek offers two explanations for Badiou’s (mistaken) opposition to the notion of death drive. The first reason for Badiou’s reluctance is, according to Žižek, due to the fact that he relates the death drive to the ‘religious’ motif of finitude.

But, as we have just seen in the above, in Žižek’s view the death drive has nothing to do with the pathos of finitude and obsession with mortality, on the contrary. So, as Žižek (IDLC 395) puts it, “What Badiou misses here is the fact that ‘death drive’ is, paradoxically, the Freudian name for its very opposite, for the way immortality appears within psychoanalysis: for an uncanny excess of life, for an ‘undead’ urge which persists beyond the (biological) cycle of life and death, of generation and corruption.”

The second reason for Badiou’s dismissal of the death drive is, according to Žižek (IDLC 394), an all too crude opposition in Badiou’s (e.g. IT 62; D 91-92) philosophy between the rupture of the event as the introduction of genuine novelty and repetition as an obstacle for the rise of anything truly new.

As demonstrated by Adrian Johnston (2007d, 165) in an article on Žižek’s reading of Badiou, the heart of the matter in Žižek’s critique of Badiou’s hostility to the notion of death drive is not this hostility as such, but a more fundamental matter concerning the very core of Badiou’s theory of the subject, namely the question of how Badiou explains what makes a mere human animal, caught up in a life dictated entirely by its self-interests and desire, capable of suddenly taking the decision to be true to an event and thus becomes a subject of truth. Or, to put it in terms of Badiou’s Pauline formula of ‘not…but’:

What is it that enables the individual under the law to withdraw from (‘not’) the law, from the path of the flesh, in order to affirm (‘but’) the exception of the gracious event and thus becomes a subject, entering the path of the spirit? Žižek touches upon this matter in his extensive discussion in The Ticklish Subject of the differences between Badiou’s philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis. In the section entitled ‘The Lacanian Subject’, Žižek (TTS 159) outlines what he takes to be the core of the matter:

“That is the difference between Lacan and Badiou: Lacan insists on the primacy of the (negative) act over the positive establishment of a ‘new harmony’ […] while for Badiou, the different facets of negativity […] are
reduced to so many versions of ‘betrayal’ of (or infidelity to, or denial of) the positive Truth-event.” It is undoubtedly correct that Badiou, at least prior to Logics of Worlds, seems to describe any negative mode of relationship to an event as a disqualification for being a subject; that is, anyone who denies an event can of course never become a subject, and anyone who betrays his fidelity to an event is no longer a subject.

But, the question is, whether Badiou, as Žižek seems to imply, refuses negativity as such in regard to the subject. Nevertheless, Žižek (TTS 159) is completely right, when he in the succeeding paragraph states that: “This difference between Badiou and Lacan concerns the precise statusof the subject: Badiou’s main point is to avoid identifying the subject with the constitutive void of the structure […].” (BE 432; C 202-203; IT 86) Badiou has himself on more than one occasion declared this as the crucial difference between Lacanian psychoanalysis and his own philosophy.

Žižek (TTS 159-160) elaborates further on this difference between Lacan and Badiou concerning the subject in the following way:

For Badiou […] the subject is consubstantial with a contingent act of Decision; while Lacan introduces the distinction between the subject and the gesture of subjectivization: what Badiou […] describe[s] is the process of subjectivization – the emphatic engagement, the assumption of fidelity to the Event […] while the subject is the negative gesture of breaking out of the constraints of Being that opens up the space of possible subjectivization.

In Lacanese, the subject prior to subjectivization is the pure negativity of the death drive […]

In other words, according to Žižek, Badiou wrongly equates the subject with the process of subjectivization, that is, to put it in Badiou’s terms, with the ‘operation’ of decision, fidelity and forcing by means of which we pass from being a mere human animal to becoming a subject of truth. What Badiou misses here is … the negative moment or dimension that grounds the decision to affirm the event, the dimension that makes it possible to engage in a fidelity to an event in the first place. And this dimension is precisely the self-sabotaging dimension of the death drive. (TTS 160)

moment of madness between nature and culture death drive

Peter Karlsen The Grace of Materialism Theology with Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. Københavns Universitet 2010.

Freud formulated his thesis on the death drive precisely in response to phenomena which could not be explained on the basis of the ‘pleasure principle’, phenomena that were ‘beyond the pleasure principle’, and its directive of self-preservation. In Žižek’s (CWZ 61) words:

“In trying to explain the functioning of the human psyche in terms of the pleasure principle, reality principle and so on, Freud became increasingly aware of a radical non-functional element, a basic destructiveness and excess of negativity, that couldn’t be accounted for. And thatis why Freud posed the hypothesis of death drive.”

How did man go from being a mere animal to a being of language bound by the symbolic order? How was the passage from a natural into a civil or cultural state brought about? The answer given by classical Political Philosophy is of course the famous narrative of the ‘social contract’.

But in Žižek’s (FTKN 205) view this is an inconsistent explanation insofar that “[…] the fiction of a ‘social contract’ presupposes in advancewhat is or should be its result, its final outcome – the presence of individuals who act according to rules of a civilized rational order […].” According to Žižek (TTS 36; FTKN 206), the passage from a natural to a cultural state cannot be accounted for in terms of a smooth continuous transition, something has to intervene between these two states. What the evolutionary narratives of social contract silently presuppose is, according to Žižek (TTS 36), a kind of ‘vanishing mediator’ which is neither nature nor culture. So, what is this vanishing mediator? 193

Man did not become what he is through a “[…] spark of logos magically conferred on Homo sapiens[…].” Instead, Žižek’s (CWZ 80) claim is that the transition from nature to culture is enabled by a ‘malfunction’, a failure, in nature itself. As he (CWZ 65) puts it in one of his conversations with Glyn Daly: “We cannot pass directly from nature to culture. Something goes terribly wrong innature: nature produces an unnatural monstrosity and I claim that it is in order to cope with, to domesticate, this monstrosity that we symbolize.”

As the last part of the quote suggests, and as Žižek (TTS 37) explicitly underlines in his discussion in The Ticklish Subject, the symbolic order of law (culture) is thus not, as it is usually asserted, aimed at controlling our natural instincts and inclination (nature) but, rather directed against something in us which is not natural, namely this moment of thoroughly derailed, malfunctioning, denaturalized ‘nature’.

Indeed in the effort to domesticate this malfunctioning (de)nature “[…] man’s natural propensities are, rather, on the side of moral law against the excess of ‘unruliness’ that threatens his well-being” (TTS 37). As Žižek (TTS 289) emphasizes later in the same book, one should never forget that the law is ultimately in the service of the ‘pleasure principle’ which dictates our daily functioning in accordance with the upholding of our welfare; that is to say, the law is not opposed to our natural instincts as it is claimed in the standard story of ‘nature versus culture’, rather the law and the natural instincts are united in their attempt to constrain the derailed (de)nature of man endangering his self-preservation.

This mediating moment of malfunction, this intersection between nature and culture, which made possible the transition between these two states, only to ‘vanish’ under the domesticating reign of symbolic law and the ‘pleasure principle’, is, according to Žižek (TTS 36; FTKN 207; CWZ 65), nothing less than the emergence of the (death) drive.