badiou – Page 5 – objet (a)

Žižek december 2011 Berlin

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

Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

Žižek poetry Midsummer nights dream 2009 and 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Žižek in New York city lacan.com

liberal immigration is in interests of ruling class

capitalism has reinvented itself after 1968 with this pomo dynamic, with no left alternative

only original idea of the left return to Keynes, short-term hmm ok. But only global model seriously presented would have been the so-called “basic income” model and Negri-Hardt support it.

Žižek starts his criticism of Badiou according to Badiou: We no longer have a global social theory, just fragmented, all we can do is intervene locally, anti-capitalism has no meaning, capitalism is the air we breathe, historical reality is exerienced as symbolic fiction, he is more Kantian, advocates necessary fictions a very Kantian notion. No history with capital H, the only real is the real of a political act, you need symbolic a story to provide the illusory background to make meaningful the real of political engagment. You need a story to move you to political action, the idea of Communism, for him this is the necessary illusion, you need a story for the REAL of the political engagment. Z rejects this entirely. You need a leader like Lenin, Stalin, the cult of personality. You need to locate the Real is some narrative

criticism of Badiou pt 2 What Ž doesn’t like is Badiou’s idea that you need a symbolic illusion to propgate the real of an ethical committment. you have to tell a mythical story for the Real of ethical committment to work. Badiou wants dialectical materialism without historical materialism. This new stage of capitalism where cultural ideology and poltiical are intermixed, if we don’t confront this we are lost. We NEED more than ever a theory of what goes on today, where are we today, what is happening. We don’t know. It is still capitalism, its an open question: what is happening now in China. I don’t buy Badiou’s abstract ethics of the purity of the idea. He opposes, Dare to Win. The lesson of 21st century to win is to lose in a more radical way. All 3 defeats happened, because you dared to win. No subtraction, we should withdrawal. Žižek disagrees. Cultural production is part of the base today. If we will not do it, in 50 years we will live in a society I might prefer not to live in. Ž says, Dare to win!

I don’t think radical leftists today really want a change

Symbolic Castration So thank you for the castrating experience, less is more. You are much more than your title, you are also a warm human being.

dean communist horizon

Jodi Dean interview on 13 Oct. 2012 here

In Žižek’s account, ideology is not a matter of what we know but what we do. So “false consciousness” isn’t the problem. The problem is what you’re doing, and how your actions repeat. We all know capitalism is a system that exploits the many for the benefit of the very few, and yet we continue in it. It’s not like we are deluded about it. Our contemporary problem is not that we are unaware that capitalism is unjust and wrecking the lives of billions. The problem is that we either don’t have the will to get out, or aren’t quite sure how to do so. It’s not a matter of changing people’s minds. It’s about changing their actions.

We need to ask ourselves: What is the attachment to democracy? What does that mean in left-wing discussions these days? I think it’s a failure of will, and even an attachment to the form of our subjection. Why do we keep arguing in terms of democracy when we live in a democracy that is the source of unbelievable inequality and capitalist exploitation? Why are we so attached to this? It makes no sense. Of course, it’s not like we should have a system where nobody votes.

The most fundamental things—namely, control over the economy—should be for the common, in the name of the common, and by the common (without being determined by something like voting). It should be known that there is no private property. Everything we own and produce is for the common good, and that is not up for grabs, it is a condition for the possibility of democracy.

It shouldn’t itself be subject to democracy, the same way that any kind of revolutionary moment or transition to communism can’t be understood as a democratic move. If we can get twenty percent of the people, we could do it. But it’s not democratic. Eighty percent of people don’t care.

Badiou is brilliant when he asks, “Why are people so intrigued by the so-called ‘independent voters?’ Why are people without a political opinion even allowed to decide, when they don’t even care?”

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.

bosteels logic of capital

Traversing the Heresies: Interview with Bruno Bosteels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alain Badiou, Jacques-Alain Miller

Cher Jacques-Alain,

Merci de m’avoir fait parvenir ta lettre à Peter Hallward et ta “confession d’un renégat”.

“Renégat” n’est pas une insulte, c’est une description. Il est évident pour n’importe qui que celui qui vivait et pensait comme toi entre 1969 et 1972, et qui aujourd’hui fricote avec la clique de Sarkozy, poussant les choses jusqu’à engager une école lacanienne dans un dégoûtant et paradoxal soutien à l’expédition en Libye et à son chantre BHL est un renégat du gauchisme, pour ne rien dire du maoïsme.

Thank you for having sent me your letter to Peter Hallward and your ‘confession of a renegade’.

‘Renegade’ is not an insult, it’s a description. It is quite clear to anyone that a person who lived and thought as you did between 1969 and 1972, and today is hand in glove with the Sarkozy clique, even going so far as to commit a Lacanian school to a disgusting and paradoxical support for the Libyan expedition and its eulogist Bernard-Henri Lévy, is a renegade from leftism, to say nothing of Maoism.

Pourquoi du reste t’offenser de cette description ? Tu me sembles plutôt devoir assumer et défendre ta renégation comme étant celle du Mal au profit du Bien. Tu peux en somme l’appeler une Conversion morale.

Disons cela: ce qui est pour toi une Conversion est pour moi une Renégation. Ton point-ce-vue est du reste celui d’une majorité de tes contemporains, du moins en ce qui concerne les intellectuels. L’archi-minoritaire, et celui qui fut et est insulté — pour avoir refusé d’être un renégat —, c’est moi, et non toi. Je fais avec depuis bien longtemps.

Why then do you take offence at this description? It seems to me you should rather be proud of it, and defend yourself as having reneged on the Bad in favour of the Good. You could even call it a moral Conversion.

Let’s say it: what is Conversion for you is Renegacy for me. Your point of view, moreover, is that of the majority of your contemporaries, at least as far as intellectuals are concerned. The extreme minority, which was and is insulted – for having refused to renege – is me and not you. I’ve lived with this for a long time already.

Tu te doutes que la lecture des confessions d’un renégat n’est pas pour moi une lecture prioritaire. Je lirai cependant ton factum un de ces jours, sans doute même avec intérêt.

Quant au duel, n’y songe pas! Bien évidemment, je ne me bats pas en duel avec un renégat.

You doubt whether the confessions of a renegade would be priority reading for me. But I shall read your pamphlet one day, even with interest.
As for a debate, don’t think of it! I certainly wouldn’t debate with a renegade.

Bien à toi,
Alain
Regards

Ž responds to his critics

February 28 2013 A Reply to My Critics.

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

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

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

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

Molecular self-organizing multitude against hierarchical order:

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

riha sumic Bartleby

Jelica šumič (2011): “Giorgio Agamben’s Godless Saints.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. 16:3 (2011). 137-147.

Institute of Philosophy
Novi trg 2
1000 Ljubljana
Slovenia
E-mail: jsumr AT zrc-sazu.si

It is the simple fact of one’s own existence as possibility or potentiality. Agamben The Coming Community 40

Put otherwise, instead of seeking to accomplish some definite task or goal, the subject must be nullified. Indeed, it is only through the destitution of the subject that man’s capacity to be pure potentiality can be restored.

Attributing all transformative force to sovereign power alone, Agamben’s solution, whose ultimate aim is to restore contingency at the heart of necessity, consists in directly valorising the ‘‘not happening’’ or rather the “nothing of happening” in order to consign change to a radical transformation in the subjective status, achieved by means of an operation of disidentification that aims, to use Agamben’s vocabulary, at revoking all vocations.

Agamben can recognise resistance only in terms of potentiality, which is to say, as passivity or inoperativeness, since, for him, ‘‘the potential welcomes non-Being, and this welcoming of non-Being is potentiality, the fundamental passivity’’ (P 182). To the extent that the potentiality that characterises human beings is primarily the potentiality of not doing something, the subject, here, is conceived as a place where the ceaseless operation of declassification, disidentification, is effected – Bartleby being the model or paradigm of such a subjective stance in so far as the latter allows the subject to become nothing other than the pure potentiality to be or not to be.

The characterisations of the subjective stance in terms of inoperativeness can be seen as an attempt to move beyond the deadlocks of the end of time in so far as such a stance involves ‘‘a suspension of time’’ achieved through the only possible action at the disposal of contemporary subjectivity, an action à la Bartleby, an anticipatory figure: to opt for non-being, or more exactly, for the potentiality not to be.

His act (“I would prefer not to”…), in effect, consists in a mere taking place of the place. He turns himself into a place, an empty place, this being the only place which sovereign power cannot recapture.

However, for this place to be preserved, maintained as a place, nothing should take place therein. His act, instead of constituting an event, in its subversive force, prevents all events from happening. Indeed, Agamben’s Bartleby can be seen as a guardian of the non-event. Ultimately, rather than risking the danger of falling prey to a bad infinity, Agamben seeks to think a final event.

Thus, in contrast to Badiou, who thinks events as time-breaking and/or inaugurating ruptures, Agamben’s main preoccupation is with the event of the end. In light of this, one can also understand why the politico-ethical solution advocated by Agamben essentially consists in saving the past: not something particularly worthy of being remembered, but the past in its whatever character, as it were.

The world can only be saved if its being-thus in the smallest details is preserved. What is saved, then, is not some break-inaugurating moment, a moment of “eternity,” as Badiou would have it, but the banality of the being-thus.

It is precisely for this reason that the world can only be “saved” as irreparable, which is to say, ultimately, as absolutely unsaveable. The salvation and therefore the change of the world consist, in the final analysis, only in assuming its radical contingency.

A true change consists simply in a parallax view, a shift of perception: to see the world as including its potentiality not to be. Yet this change, Agamben insists, minimal as it may appear, is nevertheless extremely difficult to accomplish. In some radical sense, humankind is incapable of achieving it; hence, in order to attain this perspective, the Messiah must come or, at least, Bartleby.

If Deleuze, as Agamben observes, is right in calling Bartleby “a new Christ,” this is not because his aim is to ‘‘abolish the old Law and to inaugurate a new mandate.’’ Rather, “if Bartleby is a new Messiah, he comes not, like Jesus, to redeem what was, but to save what was not” (P 270). If there is something Christ-like in Bartleby, if he can, despite everything, be compared to a saviour, this is because he descends to the deepest level of Leibniz’s ‘‘Palace of Destinies,’’ in order to reveal “the world in which nothing is compossible with anything else, where ‘nothing exists rather than something'” (P 270).

In Badiou’s vocabulary, we could say that Bartleby reveals the inconsistency of being-multiple, an impossible point of the real before Being is localised in any being-there whatsoever, before any world whatsoever can take shape.

Whereas this impossible-real, according to Badiou, can only irrupt to the surface of a world through a rare, unpredictable event, Agamben, on his part, presents it as a result of the subjective destitution. 144

It is precisely because it cannot be situated within a linear temporality of past, present, and future that this time of the now is, as such, the location in which action, the hollowing out of the assigned identities, functions, or symbolic mandates take place. This also explains why the messianic subject, Bartleby, is arrested, blocked, as it were, in the “time of the now,” i.e., at the point of the suspension of time, in order to be able to effect his act, that of the de-activation of identifications assigned to him by the socio-symbolic Other.

The result of the messianic act is not a new creation – it is rather a decreation.

From such a perspective, Bartleby can be seen as someone who turns himself into an utterly irreducible remnant, the sole guardian and guarantor of the empty place destined for ‘‘the experience of taking place in whatever singularity’’ (CC 24). But the price to be paid for this operation of exposure of every singularity to its being-thus, its being whatever, is that the subject himself remains blocked, suspended on the sole act he can effect: I would prefer not to, an act which, in so far as it must be repeated again and again, imprisons the subject in a kind of tense-less space created by this very act.

Hence, it could be said that it is only through a true act of decreation, a subtractive act, to be sure, that the mark of contingency in every creature is revealed. If decreation, as Agamben tells us, “takes place where Bartleby stands” (P 271), we must ask: what exactly is this place where “the actual world is led back to its right not to be; [where] all possible worlds are led back to their right to existence”?

Here, Lacan’s famous formula, “The word is the murder of the Thing,” can help us to illuminate this singular position of the subject: if the signifier “creates” by breaking the biunivocal correlation of the word and the thing, if the word does not represent the thing but can only attain a meaning by being articulated to another word, this means that the signifier already de-realises or un-realises the world.

The act of the signifier is precisely an act of decreation, rendering indistinguishable that which exists from that which does not exist. If the signifier itself empties all reference, what could then be Bartleby’s decreation?

Consider Bartleby’s formula: “I would prefer not to.” As Deleuze correctly observed in his reading of “Bartleby,” Bartleby may well use signifiers, yet he does it in a very peculiar way since his formula is destined primarily to cut the link between words and things, between S1 and S2, leaving S1 all alone, in sufferance, in eternal anticipation of the other signifier that would give it a meaning.

But this formula is itself possible because Bartleby occupies the place of an internal exclusion in relation to language. Put otherwise, only for a subject that is outside discourse, discourse, which for Lacan is precisely the social bond, is nothing but a fraud, a make-believe.

Bartleby’s decreation, in short, can only be effected from the autistic position of the subject who refuses to be caught in any social bond whatsoever, who wants nothing, yet prefers not to, who treats signifiers as fragmented bodies, without any reference whatsoever to a symbolic order.

It is here that we can see what is subversive, really revolutionary, in the act of decreation.

Accomplished by the subject for whom there is no distinction between the real and the symbolic, indeed, by a subject for whom the symbolic is, as such, the real, the act of decreation brings into question the Other, the guarantor of the link between words and their references.

If Deleuze is right in claiming that Bartleby, “even in his catatonic or anorexic state” is not the “sick man” but rather the “Medicine-Man, the new Christ or the brother to us all,” this is because only from the position of the inexistence of the Other – this being, according to Deleuze, the position of the schizophrenic – the symbolic can appear, for other speaking beings, those who believe in the Other and live by its laws, and who use the symbolic as a defence against the real, as mere semblance.

From such a perspective, Bartleby’s act can be viewed less as an act that decreates the created (i.e., the symbolised universe) than as one that decreates the decreation, a decreation to the second power, as it were, because such an act of decreation aims at revealing the generalised semblantification at work in the symbolic order itself.

If the schizophrenic position, a position outside discourse, suits well the revolutionary who strives to unbind the existing social bond in order to postulate a different basis for a community, beyond identifications, beyond functions and places, this is because it embodies the liberating potential, as well as its risks.

For Lacan, as is well known, “not only can man’s being not be understood without madness, but it would not be man’s being if it did not bear madness within itself as the limit of his freedom.”

Indeed, it is only from such a position of extimacy in relation to the social link that “the law of our becoming” can be formulated: “The unsoundable decision of being in which human beings understand or fail to recognize their liberation, in the snare of fate that deceives them about a freedom they have not in the least conquered.”

Lacan. “Presentation on Psychical Causality” Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink 145