event – objet (a)

Ed Pluth

On Adrian Johnston’s Materialist Psychoanalysis: Some Questions The Southern Journal of Philosophy Volume 51, Spindel Supplement 2013

Psychoanalysis can be seen as a science for a specific set of what I would call practical-historical objects, as opposed to natural objects, and one distinctive feature of it is its peculiar relationship to these objects: it is a science that is as dialectical as it is materialist, in that its theories and its effects have real consequences for the objects they are about, in ways that the natural sciences never do and never can for their objects.

What I mean here is that in the case of the natural sciences, the objects do not change with our knowledge of them; it is hard to avoid an asymptotic view of the natural real in such sciences, the assumption that nature is as it always was, and that theory and science approach it more or less well. Whether one is a realist or not concerning the sciences, I think it is hard to avoid such a view of the natural real.

Consider, by contrast, Freud’s remarks about how the unconscious found new ways to hide itself after psychoanalysis was popularized. Consider ongoing discussions about the status of Oedipus in contemporary life; consider feminine sexuality and a host of other topics

All of these controversies are unlike disagreements in the natural sciences, not because there is no basis for determining which theory about them is correct or better—there is, and it is the practice of psychoanalysis itself—but because the changes these controversies introduce into psychoanalytic theory arise in part from effects that psychoanalysis itself has had on its objects. Thus, on my conception, psychoanalysis is not at all an odd dogmatic fetishization of the works of either Freud or Lacan or take your pick, but something that is in constant motion, in need of constant revision, because that is what is happening to its objects as well.

So, these are some reasons as to why the status of psychoanalysis is still
problematic. To be clear, I think much of the difficulty psychoanalysis has,
status-wise, is due to the fact that its objects are not identical to naturalscientific objects; so what makes it distinct, one of its defining features, is also what, for many, calls into question its possible status as a science. Moreover, the fact that it is in a dialectical relationship with its objects probably raises the suspicions of many scientists too, making it seem more like the stuff of mythology and folk wisdom.

If my view is correct, it can be asked whether the natural-scientific method is appropriate to, or even informative for, psychoanalytic theory and practice at all. If natural-scientific objects, unlike psychoanalytic ones, do not change with our theories of them—if the natural sciences are necessarily undialectical—then each deals not only with different objects, but each can be considered an entirely different type of science as well.

In light of this, what I am curious about is figuring out what should be said about the relationship between psychoanalysis and the neurosciences, or any other science for that matter. Is there even a relationship? And this is why Johnston’s work is so important, because it is addressing this issue directly and taking the position that there is, or should be, a relationship.

If natural-scientific objects, unlike psychoanalytic ones, do not change with our theories of them—if the natural sciences are necessarily undialectical—then each deals not only with different objects, but each can be considered an entirely different type of science as well.

First of all, on my model, notice that there is no need for sciences like physics, chemistry, biology, neurobiology, on the one hand, and psychoanalysis on the other, to even conflict with each other—they may be just noncomparable, maybe not even parallel—in a manner similar to the way in which no one would think that the ups and downs of the stock market can be reduced to or explained by physical laws. Economics has nothing to learn from physics, and no one takes them to be about the same kinds of things.

But, when engaging with the sciences, it is difficult not to open the door to
verificationism—by which I mean a view according to which if the sciences say there is no basis, no material correlate for X, then philosophers are obliged to say there is not really any such thing as X either. Now, Johnston is in the happy position of finding sciences that confirm the existence and possibility of psychoanalytic objects and phenomena—the structure and position of the thalamus, for example, he writes, is potentially “a leading candidate for the neurobiological ground of the splitting of the drive” (62). And earlier he wrote “like Freud before him, [Lacan] presciently anticipates with a welcoming attitude future empirical confirmations of core components of psychoanalytic theory via studies of the brain” (emphasis added).

If we were not to find any neurobiological correlates for psychoanalytic objects I suspect that Johnston would find this to be a serious problem. But putting the neurosciences in the position of confirming psychoanalytic theory (or is it just in that they are in a position to confirm its objects?) almost certainly must degrade the status of psychoanalysis, for does it not make psychoanalysis dependent on another discipline for a large share of its validity?

And even if the neurosciences do not explain anything that really goes on in psychoanalysis, it seems that on this view psychoanalysis is still ontologically dependent on what the neurosciences are finding.

So, it is the reference to confirmation that makes me want to ask some
questions about the scope or extent of Johnston’s nonreductionism as well. For, should it not be true that if what psychoanalysis works on is not reducible to neurobiological objects and events, then there is also no sort of confirmation that the neurosciences can offer psychoanalysis at all?

But putting the neurosciences in the position of confirming psychoanalytic theory… almost certainly must degrade the status of psychoanalysis, for does it not make psychoanalysis dependent on another discipline for a large share of its validity?

Alenka Zupančič interview

2014

Alenka Zupančič : The Lacanian concept of the Real allows for a problematization of this opposition which had become paralysing and unproductive philosophically. We must of course be wary of the tendency to see in this Lacanian move a simple affirmation of a naive realism – the Real understood in this objectivist fashion. The ‘Real’ for Lacan is not reducible to the discursive but neither is it simply an advocation of an ontological realism, understood unproblematically. Especially since Lacan introduces a key difference between the notion of the Real and that of being. They are related via a ‘third dimension’, that of the ‘signifier’, but they do not coincide.

What Lacan wants to tell us is that the signifier has ontological significance, the signifier tells us about ontology in a way that the notion of the signified is unable to (this latter being the usual realist referent; the object as the signified).

The signifier is interesting not because we could reduce everything to it and to different signifying operations (this reductionist question is completely false), but because there is something in the signifier and its operations that cannot be reduced back to the signifier and its operations.

This is the crucial point, and not some mythical or original outside of the signifier, irreducible to it. This is also what the ‘materialism of the signifier’ amounts to. Not simply to the fact that the signifier can have material consequences, but rather that the materialist position needs to do more than to pronounce matter the original principle. It has to account for a split or contradiction that is the matter. It has to grasp the concept of the matter beyond that imaginary notion of ‘something thick and hard’. I’m not saying: ‘For Lacan, the signifieris the real matter’, not at all.

I’m saying that, for Lacan, the signifier is what enables us to perceive the non-coincidence between being and the Real, and that this is what eventually leads to a new kind of materialism.

From this point of view, we can say that Lacan develops the modern moment in philosophy, but as Žižek says, ‘he develops it with a twist’. Then there is the new concept of the subject – another Lacanian ‘revolution’ in philosophy, retroactively relating the subject of the unconscious to the Cartesian cogito. This is often one of the great misunderstandings of Lacan (and psychoanalysis), that it jettisons the cogito, that it is anti-Cartesian pure and simple. This is a significant misunderstanding of the psychoanalytical concept of the ‘subject’ which was one of the main concepts for the delineation of a specific Lacanian orientation in the first place. This concept of ‘subject’ distinguished Lacan from the wider structuralist movement and their notion of a ‘subjectless structure’.

But somehow this conception of ‘subject’ is interpreted as anti-cogito, as the ‘subject’ is the unconscious subject. Therefore, it was important to clarify the connection between cogito and the unconscious and for example, there is an important anthology from the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, where we explore this problematic in detail (Cogito and the Unconscious edited by Žižek [1998a] and including essays by all three thinkers as well as others in the Slovenian wider group of theorists). There is also the question of the radical break with premodern metaphysics involved in the Cartesian gesture, which Lacan judges crucial for the emergence of the subject of the unconscious.

This theme is crucial also for his understanding of ethics. In his important early seminar, Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Lacan 1992), he is discussing the history of ethical thought as it related for example to the metaphysical tradition. His specific example is Aristotle and there is obviously a debt here on one level to Aristotle’s Ethics as a text and conceptual scheme. However, there is also a clear and radical parting of the ways.

In my own work on ethics, in The Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (Zupančič 2000), I draw out some of these themes. For example, I put forward a critique of what I term ‘bio-morality’ and which, in its contemporary developments, represents an allegiance (albeit in rather reduced ways) to Aristotle’s eudaimonistic ethics and metaphysics of being. This is not simply a criticism of Aristotle, but rather of what a revival of his conceptual paradigm today amounts to.

In relationship to the theme of ethics, I want to stress that what I develop out of Kant’s ethics must not be opposed or seen as completely distinct from politics. As Žižek very rightly pointed out, the contemporary fashion of playing (‘good’) ethics against (‘bad’) politics is more often than not a direct pendant of the ideology of late capitalism and its conception of democracy. Any rigorous political thought is conceived as potentially dangerous and leading to a possible ‘disaster’ (that is to say to a more fundamental change in how the present order functions), whereas ethics seems to be much safer, and centred mostly on our individual responsibility, rather than any kind of collective engagement. My own work on Kant and ethics already went against this tendency, pointing both at an unsettling dimension of Kantian ethics, as well as at its emphasis on the universal, rather than simply individual.

It is similar with psychoanalysis which supposedly also focuses on individual destinies and problems. Here, am I allowed to tell my joke about the grain of seed, or the man who thinks he is one?

He gets cured by the psychoanalysts and then he comes running back, crying that he has just been chased by a chicken. Don’t you know you are a human being, they say? Yes, I am cured. I know that I am a human being, and not a grain of seed. But, please, does the chicken know this? This is the crux of the politics (which is also an ethics) in the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis. It is not enough simply to deal with the plight of the ‘subject’ and fantasy, through psychoanalysis.

Rather, we must seek to transform the structures of the symbolic which sustain a given order, determine the Impossible-Real that they grapple with.

Sexuality

Alenka Zupančič: Yes, when we understand the question ‘why Freud and Lacan?’, or the question ‘why psychoanalysis?’, we come close to an understanding of the paradigmatic role which a revised notion of ‘sexuality’ must play in this discussion. Joan Copjec succinctly pointed out how, for example, in the term ‘sexual difference’ the term ‘sex’ has been replaced by the more neutered category of ‘gender’. As Joan – an allied member of the ‘Ljubljana School’ – put it: Gender theory performed one major feat: it removed the sex from sex. For awhile, gender theorists continued to speak of sexual practices, they ceased to question what sex or sexuality is; sex was no longer the subject of an ontological inquiry and reverted instead to being what it was in common parlance: some vague sort of distinction, but basically a secondary characteristic (when applied to the subject), a qualifier added to others, or (when applied to an act) something a bit naughty.

This is very far from what both Freud (from his early, 1905 text Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality [Freud 1977]) and Lacan have been saying. For Freud, the notion of the ‘sexual’ is significantly broader than contemporary notions of sex. It is not a substance to be properly described and understood (by psychoanalysis), but more like an impasse that generates and structures different discursive edifices trying to respond to it. It is linked to a notion of a fundamental ontological impasse; this impasse is irreducible for Freud.

But we also see here all the accusations against psychoanalysis, that ‘Freud reduces everything to sex’. In one sense, this accusation is true but what it misses is the complexification and radicalization of what we mean by ‘sexuality’. Freud discovered human sexuality as a problem (in need of explanation), and not as something with which one could eventually explain every (other) problem. He ‘discovered’ sexuality as intrinsically meaningless, and not as the ultimate horizon of all humanly produced meaning. A clarification of this point is one of my ‘interventions’ in Why Psychoanalysis? Three Interventions (Zupančič 2008b). Lately, I dedicated a whole book to these questions – it came out in 2011 in Slovenia, but I’m still working on its English version.

On Materialism

The materialism of psychoanalysis is not simply materialism of the body;
and Lacan has learnt the philosophical lesson that is essential in this
respect: in order to be ‘materialist’ it is not enough to refer to the matter
as the first principle from which everything develops.

For, in this, we easily succumb to a rather idealistic notion of a somehow always-already spirited (‘vibrant’) matter. In recent debates, psychoanalysis – in the same package with all of the so-called post-structuralist thought – is often accused of relying on the formula ‘always-already’ as its magical formula. But this accusation misses the whole point: for psychoanalysis, ‘always-already’ is a retroactive effect of some radical contingency that changes given symbolic coordinates.

What a materialism worthy of this name has to do today is to propose a conceptualization of contingency (a break that comes from nowhere, ‘ex-nihilo’ so to say) in its complex relation to the structuring of the world.

Also, thinking is not simply opposed to things (and to matter), it is part of the thing it thinks, without being fully reducible to it. To advocate materialism and the ‘Real’ is not to advocate anti-thought. Quite the contrary, we might say – it calls for more and more thinking. And this is a problem that I sometimes detect in the recent flourishing of ‘new materialisms’ – a kind of abdication of thinking when it comes to more complex structures and arguments, as if common sense simplicities were inherently more ‘materialist’ than something
which is more complex and perhaps paradox ridden.

On Nietzsche

Alenka Zupančič: A key part of the Nietzschean legacy is I think working against the ‘moralisation’ of the symbolic, which Nietzsche describes so well in The Genealogy of Morals, for example, and which for example is also a key theme in relation to the thematic of the ‘moralisation of politics’, which I mentioned earlier.

Concerning nihilism and to quote Ray Brassier, from his text Nihil Unbound, there are things to be said for nihilism. It depends, of course, on what we mean by nihilism. If we mean by it a certain materialist position which recognizes contingency of, for example, our being in the world, and which points to a limit of ‘making sense of (all) things’, then we must say that to a great extent we cannot go beyond nihilism.

Yet this does not imply for Nietzsche that we sink in the depressive feelings of ‘worthlessness of all things’. On the contrary, it rather implies what he calls ‘gay science’. But, we must simultaneously avoid what Nietzsche calls ‘reactive nihilism’ and this is, of course, bound up with his whole critique of ressentiment (or ‘acting against’, reactiveness). To say that there is no ultimate cause of things is not to say that nothing itself is the ultimate cause of things, which amounts to putting the Nothing in the office of the Absolute.

Describing the difference between active and passive nihilism, Nietzsche famously says that man would ‘rather will nothingness than not will’ (On the Genealogy of Morals). And we could say that what defines (contemporary) passive nihilism is precisely that man would rather not will than will anything too strongly (because the latter supposedly inevitably leads to some kind of ‘nihilist’ catastrophe). And this seems to become synonymous with what ‘ethics’ now is in contemporary culture and society and the wider ‘moralisation of politics’, ‘biomorality’ etc. (to which I strongly oppose an ‘ethics of the Real’). There is a ‘deactivation’ of the will, which is also a deactivation of the ‘political will’, of the political as such as a paradigmatic space and temporality of antagonism, of the ‘Real’.

In my view, the genuinely new Nietzschean notion of nothingor n egativity is not simply that of ‘active nihilism’ as opposed to ‘passive nihilism’, but rather a transfiguration of nothing. Nothing/negativity is not a kind of ultimate absolute, but rather the smallest yet irreducible difference that is inscribed in being qua being. This is what I argue in my book. I use Nietzsche’s own metaphor of ‘the shortest shadow’. When speaking of going beyond the opposition real world/apparent world, Nietzsche describes this moment as ‘Midday; moment of the shortest shadow’ (Twilight of Idols).

Midday is thus not for him the moment when the sun embraces everything,
makes all shadows and all negativity disappear, and constitutes an undivided Unity of the world; it is the moment of the shortest shadow. And, what is the shortest shadow of a thing, if not this thing itself? Yet, for Nietzsche, this does not mean that the two becomes one, but, rather, that one becomes two. Why?

The thing (as one) no longer throws its shadow upon another thing; instead, it throws its shadow upon itself, thus becoming, at the same time, the thing and
its shadow, the real and its appearance. When the sun is at its zenith, things are not simply exposed (‘naked’, as it were); they are, so to speak, dressed in their own shadows. In other words: it is not simply that our representations do not coincide with things, it is rather that things do not simply coincide with themselves. There is thus an imperative to ‘think through’ this negativity. We
need to philosophize, as Žižek has said, philosophy is now more important than ever. It is not a game of textualism as some postmodernists would like to suggest perhaps.

The Subject

Alenka Zupančič: We can say that subject is ‘the answer of the Real’, as Lacan puts it somewhere, or that it is the effect of the rift/inconsistency of the structure. And we can indeed contrast this with the structuralist notion that there is a ‘structure without a subject’, a subjectless structure.

But what is at stake is above all a profound reconfiguration of what both ‘structure’ and ‘subject’ mean, refer to. We can begin with the notion of the structure which differs in Lacan from the classical structuralist notion. Very simply put: for Lacan, structure is ‘not-all’ (or ‘not whole’), which is what he articulates with the concept of the ‘barred Other’. This implies a lack, a contradiction as – so to say – ‘structuring principle of the structure’. Structure is always and at the same time more and less than structure. And this is where the new notion of the subject comes in. Subject is not the opposite of the structure, it is not some intentionality which uses structure to express itself, or which tries to get its more or less authentic voice heard through it.

Subject is a singular torsion produced by the inconsistency of the structure.

Take the simple example of the slips of the tongue: for Freud and Lacan, they do not bear witness to a hidden(unconscious) force repressed by the structure, which nevertheless betrays its presence by these slips.

Rather, they are singular existences of structure’s own inherent negativity. This is also the argument that I want to make in the context of the contemporary debates concerning realism, which often disqualify thought or thinking as something merely subjective (facing external reality). Put in a couple of formulas: Instead of taking it as something situated vis-à-vis being, we should conceive of thought as an objectivized (and necessarily dislocated) instance of the non-relation (contradiction, inconsistency) and rift inherent in being (in ‘objective reality’). Thinking is a necessarily displaced objectification (‘objective existence’) of this rift, that is, of the relation of being to its own
‘non-’, to its own negativity.

Although being is indeed independent of thinking, the rift that structures it only objectively exists as thought, and this perspective opens a new way of conceiving realism and/or materialism. This is precisely how I would also read the Lacanian subject. And this is why if we remove subject from the structure, we do not get closer to objective reality, but rather further away from it.

We can also say that the subject for Lacan is ‘objectively subjective’, there is an asymmetry in the subject, something in the subject which is not just subjective but which is also inaccessible to the subject.

We can see the connection back to Kant. The Kantian subject I would endorse is that ‘pure something, X, which thinks’, the transcendental unity of apperception. The point where subjectivity is not fully assumable and the point where the object is not reducible to or is ‘not yet’ objectivity (this is Lacan’s notion of objet petit a). Here, we see also that the Lacanian subject radicalizes the traditional ‘object’. The concept of the ‘object a’ is perhaps the most significant Lacanian conceptual invention.

Ethics

Alenka Zupančič: No, the notions of good and evil are not simply irrelevant to ethics, I would say, although they are indiscernible in advance. The responsibility we have is to decide what is good. It is difficult to overstate Kant’s significance in this respect. He did two things which may look incompatible: first, he founded ethics exclusively in human reason: no God or any other pre-established Good can serve as basis of morality. But instead of this leading to a kind of ‘relativised’, finitude-bound morality, it led to the birth of the modern thought of the absolute, the unconditional, and of the infinite as the possible, even imperative dimension of the finite.

Whatever objections we may raise to the Kantian ethics –for example, and already, from Hegel’s perspective – it was with Kant that the standing oppositions like absolute/contingent, lawful/unconditional, finite/infinite broke down, and the path was opened for a truly modern reconfiguration of these terms.

In the twentieth century, Kantian ethics has been largely domesticated to serve as an important ideological foundation of the contemporary democratic liberalism and of the gradual replacement of an emancipatory politics with the discourse of human rights or simply ethics.

I’ve always been astonished by the fact that a really radical, uncompromising and excess-ridden writing like Kant’s could be referred to in order to pacify the excess (of the political or something else). When the Nazi criminal Eichmann infamously defended himself by saying that in his doing he has been simply following the Kantian categorical imperative, this was of course an obscene perversion of Kant’s thought.

As Žižek succinctly formulated: what follows from Kant is not that we can use moral law as an excuse for our actions (‘oh, I wouldn’t do it, but the moral law commanded so’), we are absolutely responsible for the very law we are ‘executing’.

But Eichmann’s perverse defence did point at the unsettling core exposed by Kant: the unconditional law is one with (the excess of) freedom.

Lacan was probably the first to properly recognize this unsettling, excessive moment that Kant discovered at the very core of ethics.

When he wrote his famous essay ‘Kant with Sade’ (Lacan 2002b), the point was not that Kant is in truth as excessive as Sade, but rather that Sade is already a ‘taming’, a pacification – in terms perversion – of the impossible/real circumscribed by Kant. This is the thread I tried to follow in my book: Kant’s discovery of this unsettling, excessive negativity at the very core of Reason. I was not interested so much in ethics as ethics, as in this thing that Kant has formulated through his considerations of ethics.

Helena Motoh and Jones Irwin: Does this mean that the ‘ethics of psychoanalysis’ simply pits the Real against the symbolic or is there something else going on here? Also, how does the concept of ‘drive’ and especially the concept of ‘death drive’, which Žižek emphasizes,relate to an ethical dimension? Finally, what does the Lacanian concept of ‘desire’ (as he describes it in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis) have to do with this? Is ‘desire’ simply jettisoned in the later work?

Alenka Zupančič: In respect to the relation between symbolic and the Real, there are certainly oscillations and shifts at work already in Lacan, as well as in the work of the three of us (together and separately). The idea that the Real is a kind of unbearable, repulsive thickness beyond the symbolic, left out of it and inaccessible to it, may have had some presence in our work at some point. But I think it is fair to say that for many years now we are all struggling precisely with the problem of a different way of relating them as absolutely crucial. There are some differences in the way we go about it,

but the main and shared shift of perspective that orientates our work could be perhaps summed up as follows: the Real is not any kind of substance or being. It pertains to being (and to the symbolic) as its inherent contradiction/antagonism.

I started working on this issue first by getting a bit more into Nietzsche (the first, Slovene version of the Nietzsche book was published in 2001). Borrowing from Badiou his notion of the ‘minimal difference’ and relating it to Nietzsche’s notion of the ‘shortest shadow’, I tried to develop the notion of the Real as not that of some Thing, but of the fundamental non-coincidence of things with themselves. This non-coincidence is not caused by the symbolic; rather, the symbolic is already a response to it: it is discursivity as necessarily biased by the constraints of the contradiction in being.

Parallel to this work on Nietzsche was also my working on the theme of love, and later on comedy as possible ways of articulating what is at stake in the relation between the symbolic and the real. Lately, and for some time now, I have been working on this through the question of the ontological implications of the psychoanalytic notion of the sexual. I could perhaps put it in one formula: The real is part of being which is not being (or which is not qua being), but which as such dictates the (symbolic) logic of its appearance.

The real is part of being which is not being (or which
is not qua being), but which as such dictates the (symbolic) logic of
its appearance.
the Real is not any kind of substance or being. It pertains to being (and to the symbolic) as its inherent contradiction/antagonism.

Helena Motoh and Jones Irwin: Can you say a bit more about the two key Lacanian concepts (not without political ramifications of course) of ‘desire’ and ‘drive’. You have already explicated these, to some extent, but can you develop some of the tensions between them? Also, how do these concepts develop in your work, as they seem to have a paradigmatic status while undergoing some transformation for example from the ‘Ethics of the Real’ book to the book on ‘comedy’. Finally, are there philosophical tensions between your work and the other members of the troika on this fraught relationship between ‘desire’ and ‘drive’?

Alenka Zupančič: Certainly, you are right to point to these concepts as paradigmatic, and they are also crucial when it comes to the articulation of the relationship of the symbolic, the imaginary and the Real You are also correct that there are some differences here – one would expect nothing less in a philosophical movement worth its salt.

In my own work, I take up the themes of desire and drive throughout. In Ethics of the Real I focused mostly, although not exclusively, on Lacan from The Ethics of Psychoanalysis and The Transference (Seminars VII and VIII). The concept of desire is in the foreground in both, but there is also a shift that starts taking place there, a conceptual move from das Ding as the impossible/Real as the focal point of desire, to the introduction of the object a. This shift then gets a further and very complex elaboration in Lacan’s subsequent seminars. But to formulate what is at stake very briefly and simply, we could say that what is involved here is a move from the Real as the abyssal beyond of the symbolic,

to a concept (of the object a) which undermines the very logic and nature of the difference on which the previous conception of the Real was based.

Object a is neither symbolic nor Real (in the previous sense of the term). It refers to the very impossibility to sustain this kind of difference between the symbolic and the Real, and it is this impossibility that is now the Real.

This also opens the door for a more systematic introduction of the concept of the drive. The notion of the object a is crucial both for desire and drive, they are different ways of relating this impossible non-ontological dimension (a) to what is, to being. In the Seminar X (Anxiety) Lacan provides a formula that I think is absolutely crucial and which I also took as the guiding line of my work after Ethics: he says that love is a sublimation, and then defines sublimation in a very surprising way, namely that sublimation is what makes it possible for jouissance to condescend to desire. If one remembers the famous definition of sublimation from Lacan’s seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (‘sublimation is what elevates an object to the dignity of the Thing’) then the shift is indeed dramatic and surprising. This new notion of sublimation becomes directly associated with the question of the drive, for sublimation is also defined as a ‘nonrepressive satisfaction of the drive’.

Now, in Lacan, as well as in our reading of him, there is indeed perceptible a turn from the logic of desire to that of the drive as somehow truer. But this is not simply a turn (of interest) from the symbolic to the Real, as it sometimes seems. What is at stake is rather the recognition of the fact that the status of the Real as the impossible Beyond of the symbolic is actually an effect of desire and its logic. Desire casts the internal contradiction that drives it in terms of the inaccessible Beyond to which it can only approach asymptomatically. With drive, the contradiction remains internal, and the impossible remains accessible as the impossible. This, I think, is absolutely crucial, and this is what

I tried to formulate with the formula the ‘Real happens’: the point of Lacan’s identification of the Real with the impossible is not simply that the Real is some Thing that is impossible to happen. On the contrary, and in this reading, the whole point of the Lacanian concept of the Real is that the impossible happens. This is what is so surprising, traumatic, disturbing, shattering – or funny – about the Real. The Real happens precisely as the impossible. It is not something that happens when we want it, or try to make it happen, or expect it, or are ready for it. It is always something that doesn’t fit the (established or the anticipated) picture, or fits it all too well. The Real as impossible means that there is no ‘right’ time or place for it, and not that it is impossible for it to happen (‘On love as comedy’, Zupančič 2000).

The Real happens precisely as the impossible. It is not something that happens when we want it, or try to make it happen, or expect it, or are ready for it.

So what is important to stress in this whole ‘turn’ to the logic of the drive is the following: this is not simply a turn to the drive on account of its supposedly being closer, truer to the Real (as established independently), but rather a turn toward a different conception of the Real as such.

With drive, the Real is no longer a relational notion (sustaining questions like ‘what is our attitude toward the Real?’). It rather suggests something like: our relation to the Real is already in the Real. This is why questions like ‘How to get outside to the Real?’ seem to be the wrong kind of questions.

This is because there is no outside of the Real from which one would approach the Real.

Philosophy and the Event Alain Badiou 2010

First published in French as La philosophie et l’evenement
Editions Germina, 2010. This English edition Polity Press, 2013

The political field today: the Left/Right opposition and consensus

Alain Badiou, politics has an essential place in your life and work. You view it, moreover, as one of what you call philosophy’s conditions. It is, then, a good place for us to begin tackling your philosophy. First, hasn’t it become difficult today to be involved in politics? I’d also like to hear how you define it. What is politics, the truth of politics?

– We really have to take into account the system of constraints in which people find themselves today. What is their margin of manoeuvre? What freedom do they have? For there to be true politics, the framework within
which things take place has to be both clear and held in common. For example, if society is a society of classes with conflicting interests, then politics will lie within this framework. If the established order rests upon
a collective organization totally at odds with equality, politics will have to deal, locally and globally, with this issue. Politics always has to do with what one knows, and experiences, regarding the nature of contradictions.
I think that in the great political tradition we’ve inherited – a heritage that, moreover, disconcerts us and puts us ill at ease – the fundamental point is that there are enemies. There are not just adversaries, but enemies. There are people whose worldview and what they inflict upon, and expect of, us is something we deem completely unacceptable. Bringing the notion of the enemy into focus like this has always been the perspective of the great tradition of politics, particularly its revolutionary tradition – with ‘revolutionary’ understood in a fairly vague sense, extending from the French Revolution up to the 1980s. Continue reading “Philosophy and the Event Alain Badiou 2010”

badiou encounter

Interview with Alain Badiou: ‘People cling onto identities… it is a world opposed to the encounter’ By Clement Petitjean, 14 April 2014

What is an encounter?

It is a contingent, chance element of existence. Something happens to you that nothing among your existing world’s points of reference made likely or necessary. You encounter someone who you do not know and yet who strikes you, attracts you, enters into your life.

In your book In Praise of Love, you say, in substance, that there is no encounter without risk…

For it to be a genuine encounter, we must always be able to assume that it is the beginning of a possible adventure. You cannot demand an insurance contract with whomever it is that you have encountered.

Since the encounter is incalculable, if you try to reduce this insecurity then you destroy the encounter itself, that is to say, accepting someone entering into your life as a complete person. It is precisely this that distinguishes the encounter from libertinism.

And the encounter, you always say, supposes construction

I say that with regard to what follows from the encounter. It must, indeed, give rise to shared consequences, shared innovations. And this construction cannot be left to pure chance, because it is formed of a whole series of decisions.

‘The encounter is a beginning. But the beginning of what? It is at the point of acceptance: Accepting or refusing what is happening to you’

But right from the outset, the encounter is not, for you, an experience…

Improbability distinguishes it from an ordinary experience. When the encounter happens to you, when you have the very strong feeling that it is happening to you, there is a phenomenon of attraction or repulsion – sometimes the two are mixed – toward what has disturbed the rhythm of your existence.

Experience, for its part, can perfectly well fit within your work or family activities, whereas the encounter is a beginning. But the beginning of what? It is at the point of acceptance: accepting or refusing what is happening to you.

To take the example of an amorous encounter, the whole problem lies in knowing whether to declare it or not. People speak of a declaration of love. The encounter has to be declared, that is, accepted.

That being the condition for its real existence?

Yes. A person found themselves there at the same time as you were, you exchanged glances, something happened. But unless it is uttered, declared, ratified, the encounter remains in suspense.

Why is philosophy not so concerned with the encounter?

There is a deep historical reason for that. To simplify things, we could say that since its origins philosophy has been divided into two main orientations. The rationalist one, based on the development of the sciences, which proposes that there is an explanation for everything. And the empiricist one, which proposes that everything relates to some experience.

So we find ourselves caught between a logic of necessity and a logic of experiences. But the encounter is reducible neither to rationality, nor experience, but represents an element of contingency, and philosophy has no love for contingency. We must, therefore, accept that some things occur within existence that are neither calculable nor experienced. That something happens…

Yes, what is it that happens?

The need to choose. You are constrained, you must accept what happens or else you will alienate, obscure and refuse it.

Kierkegaard, the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher and the first existentialist, saw this link between chance and the need to choose. The miracle of the encounter is this paradoxical conjunction between the pure exterior – a person whom I encounter – and pure interiority – the consequences that I must draw by myself…

Is it really a miracle? Is there not a savoir-faire of the encounter: that is, some people are better at it than others?

That is its ‘rationalisable’ side, where the sites of encounter tend to make up a sort of popular savoir-faire. You only engage in the encounter with the right person, with the person who will reduce the margin of insecurity to the minimum. But are these encounters?

The pick-up artist who knows how to attract attention to himself probably only takes on the most minimal consequences of the encounter, which risks just being an experience, indeed an asymmetrical one. A person who has savoir-faire is in control; whereas the person who believes it is an encounter, but then realises that it is an experience, suffers.

‘There must be some disposition towards openness, the virtue of accepting that something is happening that you had not foreseen’

But if such ‘savoir-faire’ is placed to one side, then does that not mean that we need special qualities to be happy in the encounter?

There must be some disposition towards openness, thus a fundamental relation of confidence. And moreover, bizarrely, a passive faculty, a sort of virtue – to use an old-fashioned word – the virtue of accepting that something is happening that you had not foreseen.

Today it is interest in the amorous encounter that predominates. Was this always the case?

It has often been said that the Greek world was the world of friendship… I am a little troubled by this retrospective vision according to which the ancient Greeks had the serene world of friendship and the Christian West the impassioned world of love. It is an intellectual construct, elaborated by Denis de Rougement in his late 1930s work L’Amour et l’Occident. In reality, there was love even in Homer’s Iliad: Hector and Andromache are a magnificent couple.

Do the different types of encounter – be they amorous, political or artistic – obey the same rules?

There are some important differences. For example, my main political encounter is probably more an encounter with collective situations rather than with individuals. Similarly, the artistic encounter is the hold that some type of organised imaginary exerts on you. But the common element is always this feeling that ‘this is happening to you’. A novel that changes you, is something that you have to deal with, even if later your taste changes and you ask yourself ‘why did I like this book when I was younger?’, exactly as Proust’s hero asks himself why he loved a woman who ‘wasn’t his type’…

Are we in an epoch favourable to the encounter, or not?

On the one hand, the field of possibility for the encounter is widening, because of our means of transport and communication. On the other hand, as always, this enlargement comes at the cost of a ‘loss of intensity’. Encounters are so easy and numerous that the intensity of the change that we could accept as a result is no longer the same as it once was. We introduce a set of precautions: I will take someone sufficiently similar to me that I can hope to go along with this person while myself remaining exactly the same. This is a tendency of the contemporary world, to introduce a false variety within a vast sameness.

‘I dream of a world where encounters are less coded by the social, professional, cultural and linguistic universes’

Are these not encounters?

No, these are mere consumption. Since the hidden model of all this is the market. You are offered a range of products that change all the time, but always remain the same. Consumption is, in its very essence, repetitive. You can change your ‘type’ of woman, without necessarily needing an encounter.

And the encounter that stays at the virtual stage?

The distinction between the virtual and the real never struck me as being of capital importance. After all, we can have great encounters in the forms of absence, abstinence or virtuality. We can have a love that remains even at a great distance. Heloise and Abelard or Tristan and Isolde are myths, but they indicate that the instances of loving fidelity are extremely varied. We have considerable loyalty for the absent just as we have considerable dishonesty toward the present.

Is it true that we more and more ‘stick to our own kind’?

There are very rigid social divisions that are not of recent vintage. In the nineteenth century, a young daughter of the bourgeoisie did not encounter the worker in the street: she never even saw him. But transgressions are always possible. The most beautiful of Conrad’s novels revolve around this, an English adventurer’s love for a Malayan, and its novelistic substance is to show the intensity of this, even though faced with a slim chance of success. I dream of a world where encounters are less coded by the social, professional, cultural and linguistic universes. If I can allow myself to use a word that is no longer in fashion: less coded by class barriers.

‘The current regression is spectacular. Its tendency is to create micro-milieux, in the image of American society, namely as a collection of ghettoes’

Are they not in fact being accentuated?

Yes. I lived through the late ‘60s to mid-‘70s period, we met a huge number of people whom we would never have met beforehand; and, alas, nor would we do so afterwards. To speak to people who did not have the same culture as us absolutely did not prevent us doing projects together, back then. The current regression is spectacular. Its tendency is not to create mass, class solidarity, but micro-milieux, a type of marquetry, in the image of American society, namely as a collection of ghettoes.

Are we threatened by this in France?

Since commodities are the principal motor of society, each person is called to appear before the market as a subject-consumer. In correlation with this, people fall back on identities, since to be drowned in this abstract world as an individual is a nightmare, wandering without end. So we cling onto family, provincial, national, linguistic and religious identities. Identities that are available to us because they refer back to the dawn of time. It is a world opposed to the encounter, a world of defensive retreat.

A world of the Right, whereas the world of the encounter would be a world of the Left?

I fear that the audacity of the Left does not go very far… It makes so many concessions to the identitarian retreat, to the privatisation of everything. For the people of the nineteenth century, Marx first among them, internationalism was a key notion, one that they opposed to wars and national egoism.

‘Internationalism seems, to me, a value of capital importance if we do not want to be devoured by aggressive identities…’

But this internationalism is constructed against an enemy, the class enemy…

Of course! I am not fanatical about the idea of class that once had a considerable rigidity about it; but internationalism seems, to me, even more than in the nineteenth century, a value of capital importance if we do not want to be devoured by aggressive identities…

So what, ultimately, is an enemy?

Someone who thinks that the world is excellent just as it is now, and that it must continue down the same road.

Is the encounter with an enemy interesting?

It is always interesting to make the contradictions public – as rationally as possible. Above all if your adversary is prepared to debate them without relying on invective. It is like theatre, which has a didactic role…

Was encountering Alain Finkielkraut, as you did in your book L’Explication, an encounter with an enemy?

No, because he does not think that the world is excellent just as it is now and that it must continue down the same road. On the contrary, he is passionately attached to Third Republic-era [1870-1940] schooling. He has this passion, it is honourable, I do not blame him for it: my four grandparents were teachers! So our head-to-head was something of a piece of theatre, with each of us playing his role as a presumed adversary.

And I was really struck, I must admit, through the twists and turns of our dialogue, by two points that attest to the truth of our encounter. The first was a form of patriotism that, in the last analysis, I share with him: I love France, its history – the Revolution, the Paris Commune, the Resistance, May ’68 – in sum, the famous France of the rights of man, such as it continues to be viewed abroad.

And I suffer its actual state, defensive and tired, its lack of political inventiveness, which I can clearly see that Finkielkraut also suffers, though in my view for mistaken reasons…

The second point of mutual understanding was our common recognition that we exist in a world where there are many factors to make intellectuals melancholic. The difference between us is that while Alain Finkielkraut never stops looking for these factors, I for my part try to combat them.

How so?

In directing my attention toward amorous encounters, small political experiences, people of whose existence I am glad, and new works of art. It is not true that society is sterile and empty, even if I am not content with the turn that things have taken. It is a question of encounters. I have always had the impression that Finkielkraut exaggeratedly limits the possible terrain of his encounters.

‘Contrary to what Finkielkraut says, you have an encounter based on what you are, not by making a void within yourself’

Alain Finkielkraut says, in your regard, that ‘As not to exclude anyone, you would have to make a void within yourself, pluck out any substance of your own, and be nothing else, in the last analysis, than the very gesture of opening out to others’…

But I never said that no one should be excluded: and we do have enemies! Contrary to what Finkielkraut says, you have an encounter based on what you are, not by making a void within yourself.

He has at least convinced me of one thing: the ideological-political front dividing humanity today does not lie between those who have a melancholic vision of the country (like him) and those who try to have a more creative vision of it (like me). But rather, between those who consider the present state of things excellent, feeling perfectly at ease with it and making propaganda for it, and everyone else…

Is there not also another form of ‘front line’, connected to each person’s intellectual laziness?

We are talking about the ‘external’ enemy, but if you want also to address the ‘internal’ enemy, then yes, of course! Many people barricade themselves within their ignorance of a number of matters, not wanting to have to know – they have a ‘passion for ignorance’, as one of my teachers, Lacan, put it.

In Jean-Luc Godard’s Film socialisme you give a talk in front of… no one!

It is an allegory… Jean-Luc Godard spent a long time telling me that he planned to film me like that. He wanted this sequence to express the idea that on this ship symbolising consumer society, I was a dissident, solitary figure…

Can an author or a philosopher transform your existence?

Of course! The person who most altered my existence was Sartre, to whom I was subsequently very disloyal. In final year high school science class my intention was to become an inspector of forests and lakes – my future was very clear and planned-out. And then I read L’Imaginaire, then Esquisse d’une théorie des émotions, then Being and Nothingness. And I reoriented myself, from the sciences towards letters: it was an overwhelming encounter.

Which artists were decisive encounters, for you?

In the field of poetry, Mallarmé taught me that the power of art hangs on the notion of the event: to think and formalise what happens as it happens, and not as it is. As for music, I learnt from Haydn that you can create extraordinary effects from very little material, using limited and almost banal ‘cells’ of music. This made me used to seeking the extraordinary within the ordinary. As for the visual arts, Tintoretto showed me how a painter can grasp the boldest monumentality of something coming to being, as it is happening.

Different epochs privilege certain types of encounters. For example, we hardly ever speak of mystical encounters. What do you think of these?

Saint Teresa of Avila or Saint John of the Cross had a profound conviction – substituting for the real – of an amorous fusion and an absolute encounter. And I think that these were authentic encounters, even if I think that maybe God does not exist.

Then again, to introduce such a conception within worldly love – wanting it to fuse with some ideal archetype – seems dangerous and negative, to me. This leads to something that I do not like much at all: the cult of a supposed feminine transcendence, which we find in German romanticism and was propagated right up until the Surrealists. The last sentence of Goethe’s Faust, ‘The eternal feminine/Draws us on high’ is, for me, a very problematic sentiment. It transposes the mystical order within a terrestrial order that is in part a rebellion against it.

‘Everything is pushing toward an atomisation of society, composed of free consumers who above all else seek the objects that interest them on the world market’

What do you think of a recent study by the Fondation de France reporting that four million French people suffer from loneliness?

The paradigm of the contemporary world is the consumer. Its target, as they say… And objects do not bring you out of loneliness.

But the market has not destroyed the encounter – it is not as powerful as that!

Thank God! You are speaking to an optimist, I have never thought that the market destroyed sociability. Such a catastrophist vision belonged far more to my colleague Jean Baudrillard. There do exist solidarities, encounters, artistic productions: I do not at all have a nihilist vision. But I do see that everything is pushing toward an atomisation of society, composed of free consumers who above all else seek the objects that interest them on the world market.

So the encounter is under threat?

Absolutely. On the cruise ship in Godard’s Film socialisme, there were three thousand people. And I can tell you, they were very lonely.

Badiou on truth and the event and politics

“A Discussion of and around Incident at Antioch: An Interview with Alain Badiou.” by Ward Blanton and Susan Spitzer Art and Research A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods. Vol 3. No. 2 Summer 2010.

This interview took place at the Western Infirmary Lecture Theatre, University of Glasgow on 13 February 2009 and was conducted as part of ‘Paul, Political Fidelity and the Philosophy of Alain Badiou: a Discussion of Incident at Antioch’ a conference at the University of Glasgow, 13 – 14 February 2009.

The conference was organized in response to the forthcoming translation by Susan Spitzer of Badiou’s Incident at Antioch, a play completed in the mid-1980s and described by the conference organizers as ‘a work of political theatre which stages the “turn” of an ancient apostle in the context of haunting contemporary questions about revolutionary creativity and political violence’.

The interview was immediately preceded by the first public reading of scenes of the play in English.

What I say is that we can find in Paul a very complete theory of the construction of a new truth.

Allors! Why so, the theory of the construction of a new truth.

The beginning of the truth is not the structure of a fact but it’s an event. So something which is not predictable, something without calculation, something which is not reducible to specificity. At the beginning of all new creation we have something like that that I name an event.

After that we have a subjective process, the process of creation, of construction, which is defined by faithfulness to the event itself. Or, if you want, the subjective construction is to organise consequences of the event in the world, the concept world.

The event is like a rupture and after that we must organise consequences of this rupture, and that is the subjective process of the creation of a new truth.

And finally the result is a new form of universality.

So we can summarise that arrangement in a very simple manner: The beginning of the construction of a new truth is an event. The subjective process of that sort of construction is the organisation of consequences of the event. And the production, the final production is something which is universal in a precise sense that I won’t explain exactly but we can define really in what sense the result is universal.

The three points are explained in a very pure manner by Paul. First an event: the resurrection of Christ. After that a subjective process: faith, faith in that sort of event. And organisation of the consequences of the event, which is a subjective construction that is a debate, maybe an objective one in the form of the Church.

So it’s all a bit deficient in the field of Christianty. And universality of the results, very fundamental in Paul, that is the new faith is for everybody: it’s not for Jews, it’s not for Romans, it’s not for Greeks, it’s not for males, it’s not for females, it’s really for everybody.

The very famous advance that: ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female’ (Gal. 3.28).

All categories, social differences are dissolved from the point of view of the construction of the truth. So we can understand this theory as a particular new religious thought, certainly we can. But we also can understand this theory as an abstract formalisation of what is the process of the truth, with religious words naturally, but the general formalisation is good enough for any truth. […]

And so the same idea, the same abstract or formal idea concerning what is the new truth. And it is not the opposition between Catholic interpretation and Protestant interpretation, it’s a difference between an interpretation which assumes the signification of the words themselves, the iteration ‘God’, ‘the son’, and so on, and an interpretation which is a purely formal label and we say that Paul is not only the apostle of a new religion but is also the philosopher of the new formal construction of what is a universal truth.

*****
So for the readers of this text, or for the audience of this text’s future performance, what do you hope the performance of Paulinism can incite today?

That’s a political question, directly: What is the new grouping of today? I’ll tell you something about that concerning maybe the situation in France, of the political situation. You know I think that in our societies, the societies of the Western word, the rich societies – they become poor today, more and more. They are exposed to disaster. But in their general existence, I think there exist four groups – I don’t use the word class because it’s too classical now – four components, if you want, of power societies, which can support some possibilities of revolt.

There exist four groups which are able in some circumstances which are able to play a role in the direction of real change, the form of a movement of revolt.

First, the educated youth of today in universities, in campuses, in high schools and so on.

Two, the popular youth in the banlieues in French, the popular suburbs.

Third what I shall name the ordinary workers, the big mass of people which are not absolutely poor, not at all rich, with hard work, precarity sometimes, and so on.

And four the workers coming from other countries, immigrants, including undocumented workers and so on.

In France we can say that there exist different movements concerning these four groups, for example mainly demonstrations of students concerning many points, riots in the banlieues of the popular youths, with many cars burned and so on, a sort of violent revolt without community, we have the big demonstrations of ordinary workers, in France in December 1995, for example, with millions of people during many weeks.

And we have also organisations and important demonstrations of immigrants in the workforce. So all these four groups are capable of revolt. But the point is that that sort of revolt is always practically the revolt of one of these four components. And so I can say something like that is your idea of a new grouping.

I name revolt of movement simply when we have demonstrations, riots and so on, of one of these groups. And politics begins when we have something which is not reducible to revolt of movement because there are two, three or four components engaged in the movement.

So politics is really the construction of the new grouping which is not reducible to the four groups. And politics is always to create a passage, a passage between one group and another group. So ‘surprising grouping’ is a mixture of two, three or four because that involves components of our society.

One-by-one we have only revolt of movements when we have beyond one-by-one we are in a political possibility. And a very important part of the action of the state is to create the impossibility of something like that, to create impossibility of union between two or more components of the social organisation.

On this point I have a proof. I have the proof that many laws, many decisions of the state, many activities of the police and so on are entirely organised not only by the possibility to escape movement and so on but more, it’s much more important to create the impossibility of politics, if we name politics the creation of the passage between two different groups. And so the situation today is again that sort of activity of the state.

Sometimes politics engaging two components exists. For example a union, limited but real, between some students and some workers coming from other countries. The movement of undocumented workers in France, which is a significant movement, with normal difficulty, is really a movement which is a mixture, a union between some intellectuals, some young students and some workers coming from Africa and it is something which has existed now for practically more than ten years, it’s not something which vanished.

You know also sometimes the relationship between a part of the students and ordinary workers, that being the case during the strike last year. So the relationship between two groups, which is the beginning of a new grouping, so the beginning of politics, exists in the limited sense. The union of four groups would be the revolution, which is why the state is the absolute impossibility of union.

And I don’t know any circumstances which is really the union of the four components. And maybe it’s only in extraordinary circumstance that something like that is possible I think, for example war. For example war.

And in any case it’s also a lesson of the last century, because the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, the movement of liberation of people and so on, have all been in the form of a war. So the question is also, what is revolutionary politics when it’s not war but peace? And we don’t know, really. We do not have an example of a complete union of the different popular components of the situation without that sort of terrible circumstances, exceptional circumstance like war.

So the political problem of today is really first, I agree with you, one of a new grouping, and is probably the problem to pass from two to three, something like that. Because two exists in some limited manner, but then the passage from two to three, and three creates maybe the possibility of four, the possibility of global change.

So my answer, my complete answer, we can define precisely not only what is the beginning of politics which is always to create maybe a small passage from a group to another group, and so a small, real novelty in the organisation of politics.

But we know also what is the present stage of all that, which is in my position the passage from two to three. Four is an event. Four is the number of an event. And three, the number of new forms of organisation. One is nothing, movement and revolt. Two is the beginning of politics. Three is beginning of new forms of organisation. And four is change.

So we can hope.

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

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.

bosteels event seminar on Derrida

Bosteels What is an Event? and Derrida

A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event by Jacques Derrida 2007 PDF

Structure of a certain impossible impossibility: what are the implications of this structure, what it enables/closes down, presupposes,

aporia: an impasse, a dead-end street, there is no way out. Derrida tries to dwell in this impossibility.

In the confession, there is a saying of the event, of what happened, that produces a transformation. It produces another event and is not simply a saying of knowledge. Every time that saying the event exceeds this dimension of information, knowledge, and cognition, it enters the night —you spoke a great deal of the night— the “night of non-knowing,” something that’s not merely ignorance, but that no longer pertains to the realm of knowledge. A non-knowing that is not lack, not sheer obscurantism, ignorance, or non-science, but simply something that is not of the same nature as knowing. A saying the event that produces the event beyond the confines of knowledge. This kind of saying is found in many experiences where, ultimately, the possibility that such and such an event will happen appears impossible. 448

Bosteels recites from Derrida:
The event, if there is one, consists in doing the impossible. But when someone does the impossible, if someone does the impossible, no one, above all not the doer of the deed, is in a position to adjust a self-assured, theoretical statement to the event and say, “this happened” or “forgiveness has taken place” or “I’ve forgiven.” A statement such as “I forgive” or “I’ve forgiven” is absurd, and, moreover, it’s obscene. How can I be sure that I have the right to forgive and that I’ve effectively forgiven rather than forgotten, or over-looked, or reduced the offense to something forgivable? I can no more say, “I forgive” than “I give.” These are impossible statements.

“Be realistic demand the impossible.” do the i mpossible, a true event would make possible in a normal circumstance, what would appear impossible. If there is one, it must do the impossible. Not “you can do anything if you put your mind to it,” for Derrida the impossible must continue to haunt every doing that makes something impossible.

There are no gifts. What makes a gift less than a gift, destroys it as a gift. Giving creates a structure of reciprocity, a social act … its not simply the going back and forth, its a specific kind of calculation, an equal return, a comparable return, its even further than this, there can be NO knowledge, somebody asks for money, are you giving, why are you giving, because you’re helping out a poor, feeling good for it, or are you giving for no reason. If I expect a return, then there is no giving either.

NO expectation of any return, (not heaven etc for being good Samaritan, a friendship for a loving return etc) does this mean the original hospitality was not possible. Extreme limit, it is inevitably caught in a structure of return and calculation.

Asking the Question

A question like “Is saying the event possible?”puts us into a truly philosophical stance. We are speaking as philosophers. Only a philosopher, regardless ofwhether he or she is a philosopher by profession or not, can ask such a question and hope that someone will be attentive to it. 442

Synonymous: is the event possible? We are speaking as philosophers. 🙂 Bosteels is not so sure. Can we only ask these questions as philosophers. The attitude of the philosopher is to keep these questions forever suspended in their APORETIC TENSION. He doesn’t want to interrupt the suspension, but what are the political/ethical consequences. Suspension is a state of hyper-responsibility. True gift and true hospitality is a unconditional demand and can never be met. A true gift must be a singularity not caught up in any circuit of return.

Bosteels interpreting Derrida’s take on the event

Capital logic, it can overcome many of its limits by crisis, intermittent destruction of human resources (labour power) and natural resources, colonialism. But there are certain limits beyond which capital cannot reproduce itself. By studying the machine, we could uncover latent inconsistencies by which we can push. On the inconsistencies LEAN! But that means there are cracks already in the machine/structure, but for Derrida if there is a disruption, it cannot be the realization of possibilities already within them, cause that would mean its predictable. A communist movement to lean on inconsistencies, a latent possibility, potentiality, but Derrida does not go there.

Here’s Derrida

In the same way, if I invent what I can invent, what is possible for me to invent, I’m not inventing. Similarly, when you conduct an epistemological analysis or an analysis in the historyof science and technology, you examine a field in which a theoretical, mathematical, or technological invention is possible, a field that may be called a paradigm in one case, an episteme in another, or yet again a configuration; now, if the structure of the field makes an invention possible (at a given point in time a given architectural inven-tion is possible because the state of society, architectural history, and architectural theory make it possible), then this invention is not an invention. Precisely because it’s possible. It merely develops and unfolds a possibility, a potentiality that is already present and therefore it is not an event. For there to be an invention event, the invention must appear impossible. 450

It can not be the realization of a potential already latent, Marx said society is pregnant with latent possibilities, the actualization of something merely virtually possible, latent potentiality, that is also raising a philosophical question

The history of philosophy is the history of reflections on the meaning of the possible,on the meaning of being or being possible. This great tradition of the dynamis, of potentiality, from Aristotle to Bergson, these reflections in transcendental philosophy on the conditions of possibility, are affected by the experience of the event insofar as it upsets the distinction between the possible and the impossible, the opposition between the possible and the impossible. 454.

Myth of metals

If you have iron you will be worker, silver you will be Guardian, if you have gold you’ll be a philosopher. Realization of your potential, actualization of something in you. It is not the imposition of an external purpose on the materials.

bosteels event pt 2

Bruno Bosteels: What is an Event? 02 Jul 2012

32:30 Two examples: are ability to think specific events as they unfold, in art or politics

Badiou: preface to B&E, philsophers are presenting concepts, event, singularity, as tools to think event as its unfolding in the moment. Applying taking these tools at their word.

Derrida: these problems turn into aporia, not so self-evident that we can ever think an event, if that is even possible to think the EVENT.

Badiou; THINK AN EVENT

Work of Art: A poem by Mallarme (Meditation 17 in the book B&E)

M’s poem, offers an absolute symbol of the EVENT, of the very nature of the event, a dice throw on the waves of the ocean, the hand is vanishing on the flow of the waves.

Explifying illustration of what he understands by an event?

NOT is this work of art an event. But interpret the nature of an event through the reading of works of ART. An event is like the sinking of ship in the flow of the sea. It leaves behing a constellation, the effect it leaves behind after the vanishing. A poetic summary of what the event consists of. M is a poet thinker of the evental nature of the event.

The relation between events that happen in art and the way philosophers appropriate it to study the event-like nature of an event.

M. is an event in 19th century french poetry. it is almost as though the philosophers work cannot avoid folding the artwork into his own philosophical system. One reads M and Beckett, but really we’re reading theories of the event though the art of M and Beckett. Badiou dedicates a section to Valery, a marine cemetery is perfect symbol of the pure event, it is not a poem as event, but poetic theory as an event, what it means to see an event take place through poetry.

Boundless confidence of philosopher to formally think the nature of event.

Derrida: The event is aporetic impossibility. Is 9/11 a major event? Derrida hesitates, he seems to want to agree with general impression that there will be before and after of 9/11, but at same time he hesitates in more systematic manner he says: we have to know what it is to think the nature of an event? If we know that this and that is required to know an event, isn’t that a horizon of expectations so that very unpredictability is ruled out. Is there a concept of the event, if event escapes conceptual generality. IF we know what is a true event, then we can’t say x or y is an event, because it would then be generalizable in advance. But if there is a HORIZON OF EXPECTATION there will be no event. We need a horizon of non-knowledge.

Derrida sees a paradox in the event, but not Badiou. Derrida says, a major event, if all events have to be unpredictable then a major event has to be more so, it has to disturb the horizon of concepts. This moment marks the point of breakdown of philosophy as such in its ability to think What is an EVENT.

What is thinking runs aground on thinking What is An Event? If I walk in a room and point to a painting and say this is an ‘event’ What does that mean? Does it add to our understanding of the work of art in question? Does it add something to our capacity in thinking place of art in contemporary society.

Thinking the event means one is always doing philosophy. Own weight, situatedness, does thinking require one does philosophy, are there alternatives to the philosophical systemitization, What is an Event? slippery slopt to philosophical systemitization of events, that loses specificity of event

49:00 singularity of events exceeds capacity of thought to … instantiation. One of the traits of the events is unpredictable, it is singular, the thinking of the event, what is an event, misses apriori of the singularity of the event, because it comes afterwards

Discipline of philosophy will never be on par with singularity of Event.

Find ways of thinking the event, that will hold a middle ground between practical events taking place … and ways they are being thought, conceptualized. This space is THEORY. THEORY unlike philosophy does not have a Disciplinary status, like in the University system.

Events as so many illustrations, as rehashing of philosophers apparatus, “in the sense of Foucault, Spinoza etc” doesn’t teach us anything of the occurence but just philosophers particular apparatus.

CRITICAL THEORY: not simply be euphemism for Marxism, not ancillary position to philosophy, but proper articulation of criticism and theory. To do so, may require that we betray the systematic work of the philosopher. That we take them at their word, use their tools to think, but resist the temptation to put it back into circulation of the philosopher’s proper name, Brand name.

In the end this plea for Critical Theory, historical unfolding of eternal Truths, to THINK under condition of certain historical events, the truth that may be eternal.

processes, becomings events, fluxes flows, singularity, randomness, contingency and chance, not fatality of same logic, radical transformation rather than perpetuation of status quo. But this could also be seen as a PRODUCT of late capitalism. Capitalism: Event Planners, major corporations have techniques of controlling predicting events and happenings, isn’t this what drives Logic of Capital. Emphasis on events rather stable identities might be complicitous of status quo.

Capitalism breaks down all idyllic bonds an hierarchies, capitalism self-revolutionizing Event. Is difference/multiplicty, primacy of events and becomings, actually defines our given state of affairs and its attendant cultural logic.

70:00 CONCEPT OF EVENT can not be so easily DE-LINKED from Logic of Capital.

What does it mean to think about events? What place do events have in the domain of corporate culture?

82:00 Question asks regarding Heidegger if all of Being is event, then there is no exceptionality that would escape the event. Bosteels says we should historicize, it is no longer visible that being is event, there has been a break within the history of being, Left Heideggerians, as part of history of metaphysics, capitalism is closure, and we need a new beginning, of thinking of being as event. But this still asks question of relation of OUR epoch to the other beginning. Whether we projected back onto pre-Socratic times. What is it about obsession with events- radically transformative singular etc, but they’re happening all over the place, ? The presence of numerous events within corporate culture, the re-functionalization of capitalism within crisis can not be de-linked from question of EVENT.

Question: co-opted by capitalism but that does not exhaust the total experience. This desire to theorize the event, is desire to create a space that is not then produced by capitalism.

Bosteels: I’m not trying to take away such openings, rather than keeping them suspended, but there is a dead-end within the theorizing going on w/r/t events in politics and art: i.e., autonomy/heteronomy, distance from gap. We are discussing same concepts we talked about in 1960s. There was no less over-coding happening then than now.

Let’s suspend even the talk about the EVENT, the desire to theorize the event, is desire to keep open the possibilities, but we know the logics, how they are being formulated, I wanted to insinuate a bit of discomfort in that, maybe its not the event that will open up new possibilities, what about the MECHANISMS, capitalism is capable of extra-ordinary creativity including in catastrophically destructive sense, WARS, are wars not events. The limitation of our ways of framing events, and how they have become philosophized in our contemporary constellation.

The Left Turn: Periodizing the 1990s, the basic opposition of being/becoming , identity/flux, is a hangover from the 1960s, a conceptual hangover. This has been re-captured, re-coded, re-territorialized from corporate culture to Israeli military forces since they are using 1000 Plateaus.

Have we figured out the valence of those conceptual categories, multiplicity, becoming, flux, event … I want to go a bit against the grain about the valence of these categories.

bosteels event pt 1

Bruno Bosteels: What is an Event? 02 Jul 2012

After 1968 not only in France: Events of the late 1960s referred to as events. What is it that happened. In what way were these events? What is the nature of the event? What happened what were the events of 1968? Requires different disciplinary forms of thinking than disciplines available at the University, Michel de Certeau started talking this way back in 1968. The event-like nature of the event. Can we think something that is of the nature of the event. New forms needed to capture the event.

What is it that makes something that happens (politics, personal relationship) what makes it into an EVENT? Eventality/eventfulness of the event. The task of thinking consists in thinking the evental nature of an event. Foucault: asked for an evental re-writing of history. To think means to think the nature of an event.

9:10 Atomists like Lucretius: CLINAMEN slight inclination when atoms fall like raindrops and then clash and form a world. Machiavelli FORTUNA: a chance that Prince can exploit in order to impose his will. Nietzche spoke of himself as dynamite, he saw himself as an event.

11:30 These notions are now seen as precursors as an event are being re-read to give us an inkling, retrospectively, we can now read literature written before Kafka and read Kafakaesque elements, philosophers of the event, in the late 1960s started to create their own precursors.

12:40 Theoretical constellation at the end of the 1960s and where does Event intervene?

Event: brings together 2 traditions of thinking that were at loggerheads: STRUCTURALISM, what keeps a structure together? the action of the structure, taking away agency of more subject-centred theories, many structuralists started investigating nature of the structure. The truly masterful structural analysis of work of art is not one that reduces structure to a flat grid of understanding of the different laws that hold together a work of art but the one that sees the inner excess, the structure seems to escape itself, inncer excess that it cannot control. All good structuralist thinking was already a form of post-structuralist thinking. A structure could not keep itself together, ultiimately based on a form of nonsense. A dysfunctionality that was already a part of the functiioning of structure. To understand the structure is to pinpoint when the structure starts to break-down, a disruption within the logical functioning of structural machinery. These dysfunctions are gradually labelled the EVENT. Heuristically concentrate on those moments of dysfunctionality. The moments of truth through which we can understand the logic of the normal functioning

The Aberration, focus on pricipal of aberation where things get wrong, because that is the only way you can get inside and see the way things usually operate.

These moments EVENTS; are not simply structural givens, not simply aberation of machinery but requires SUB JECTIVE INTERVENTION. People are already at work on those gaps, dysfuntion only comes visible in retrospect only when subjects working on this dysfunction.

Where or how can there be a subjective intervention into our structural frames of reference and is there a way to change the very structures in whic we operate

20:00 ex and post-Althusserians: focusing on evental moments within a structure which should be a focus of structural analysis. A notion of SUBJECT AS INTERVENING in the GAP.

structural legacy combined with subjectivity and subjectivation. This is what the notion of the event allows. EVENT sits at the crossroads of Structure/subject, State/moments, System/Action

When events take place to shake up status status quo: understand the connections and changes they introduce in the current state of affairs

Event:

element of contingency, it is not the realization of a pre-determined set of events, or the birthing of a potential already latent in history
unpredictable
singular: singularity, ??? A genuine event is always a certain singularity
a radical transformative capacity, a break with status quo

Beyond this common consensus there is a wide range of differences, radically divergent. Is there ONE event or are there MANY events? Heidegger: there is only ONE event, the event of BEING itself. BEING IS THE EVENT

BADIOU: the event is not Being as Being, it exceeds or breaks with being as being. Is it Being as such as essential ontological question, or do EVENTS happen OUTSIDE philosophy: art, science, politics, love These are the events that are not philosophical, they happen behind the back of the philosopher, so what is the relation between thinking and event, philosopher and event.

Relation of event to the situation in which it occurs. Does event happen within the situation, immanent to the situation, is it already in the situation. or does it mark a radical break?? Former is Deluze: think how to actualize that which is virtually present within the situation, things as processes, multiple events that point at a general process of becoming. To attack everything that happens not from stability but from flux and becoming, and capture and actualize the virtual presences within it. Event as immanent within the situation.

Badiou: Event is a BREAK or a CUT, exceeds transcends the SITUATION.

Question of METHODOLOGY:

Deleuze: events are virtually present: questio of re-reading/teasing out, so everyting that happens can be read twice, once at level of stable identities and once at level of processes and becoming.

Badiou: Think a RUPTURE within the situation, yet not already contained virtually within it. A dialectic between the situation and the BREAK.

animal to subject

Žižek “Notes on a Debate ” Criticism. 46:4 (2004) 661-666.

On Badiou and Deleuze:

However, what unites them above this difference is that both perform the same paradoxical philosophical gesture of defending, as materialists, the autonomy of the “immaterial” order of the Event. As a materialist, and in order to be thoroughly materialist, Badiou focuses on the idealist topos par excellence: How can a human animal forsake its animality and put its life in the service of a transcendent Truth? How can the “transubstantiation” from the pleasure-oriented life of an individual to the life of a subject dedicated to a Cause occur?

In other words, how is a free act possible? How can one break (out of) the network of the causal connections of positive reality and conceive of an act that begins by and in itself?

In short, Badiou repeats within the materialist frame the elementary gesture of idealist anti-reductionism: human Reason cannot be reduced to the result of evolutionary adaptation; art is not just a heightened procedure of providing sensual pleasures, but a medium of Truth; and so on. Additionally, against the false appearance that this gesture is also aimed at psychoanalysis (is not the point of the notion of “sublimation” that the allegedly “higher” human activities are just a roundabout “sublimated” way to realize a “lower” goal?), therein resides already the significant achievement of psychoanalysis: its claim is that sexuality itself, sexual drives pertaining to the human animal, cannot be accounted for in evolutionary terms.

This makes clear the true stakes of Badiou’s gesture: in order for materialism to truly win over idealism, it is not enough to succeed in the “reductionist” approach and demonstrate how mind, consciousness, and so forth can nonetheless somehow be accounted for within the evolutionary-positivist frame of materialism. On the contrary, the materialist claim should be much stronger: it is only materialism that can accurately explain the very phenomena of mind, consciousness, and so forth; and, conversely, it is idealism that is “vulgar,” that always already “reifies” these phenomena. 665