the universal is NOTHING BUT the inadequacy, the non-identity, of the particular to/with itself 539
Category: badiou
badiou the subject
Badiou, Alain. Infinite Thought. Justin Clemens (Editor), Oliver Feltham (Editor) Continuum, 2004.
How can a modern doctrine of the subject be reconciled with an ontology?
When poststructuralists do engage with the problemof agency they again meet with difficulties, and again precisely because they merge their theory of the subject with their general ontology. For example, in his middleperiod Foucault argued that networks of disciplinary power not only reach into the most intimate spaces of the subject, but actually produce what we call subjects. However, Foucault also said that power produces resistance. His problem then became that of accounting for the source of such resistance.
If the subject – right down to its most intimate desires, actions and thoughts – is constituted by power, then how can it be the source of independent resistance? For such a point of agency to exist, Foucault needs some space which has not been completely constituted by power, or a complex doctrine on the relationship between resistance and independence. However, he has neither. In his later works he deals withthis problem by assigning agency to those subjects who resist powerbymeans of anaesthetic project of self-authoring. Again, the source of such privileged agency — why do some subjects shape themselves against the grain and not others? — is not explained. 5-6
For Badiou, the question of agency is not so much a question of how a subject can INITIATE an action in an autonomous manner but rather how a subject EMERGES through an autonomous chain of actions within a changing situation.
That is, it is not everyday actions or decisions that provide evidence of agency for Badiou. It is rather those extraordinary decisions and actions which ISOLATE an actor from their context, those actions which show that a human can actually be a free agent that supports new chains of actions and reactions. For this reason, not every human being is always a subject, yet some human beings BECOME subjects; those who act in FIDELITY to a chance encounter with an EVENT which disrupts the SITUATION they find themselves in. 6
The consequence of such a definition of the subject seems to be that only brilliant scientists, modern masters, seasoned militants and committed lovers are admitted into the fold. A little unfair perhaps? Is Badiou’s definition of the subject exclusive or elitist? On the one side, you have human beings, nothing much distinguishing them from animals in their pursuit of their interests, and then, on the other side, you have the new elect, the new elite of faithful subjects. This has a dangerous ring, and one could be forgiven for comparing it at first glance to Mormon doctrine. 7
However — and this is crucial — there is no predestination in Badiou’s account. There is nothing other than chance encounters between particular humans and particular events; and subjects MAY be born out of such encounters. There is no higher order which prescribes who will encounter an event and decide to act in relation to it. Thereis only chance. Furthermore, there is no simple distinction between subjects and humans. Some humans become subjects, but only some of the time, and often they break their fidelity to an event and thus lose their subjecthood.
Thus, Badiou displaces the problem of agency from the level of the human to the level of being. That is, his problem is no longer that of how an individual subject initiates a new chain of actions, since for him the subject only emerges in the course of such a chain of actions.
His problem is accounting for how an existing situation — given that BEING, for Badiou, is nothing other than multiple situations — can be disrupted and transformed by such a chain of actions. This displacement of the problem of agency allows Badiou to avoid positing some mysterious autonomous agent within each human such as ‘free will’. However, the direct and unavoidable consequence of the displacement is that the problem of agency becomes the ancient philosophical problem of how the new occurs in being. 8
In L’Etre et l’événement, Badiou’s solution IS SIMPLY TO ASSERT THAT ‘EVENTS HAPPEN’, events without directly assignable causes which disrupt the order of established situations. IF decisions are taken by subjects to work out the consequences of such events, NEW SITUATIONS emerge as the result of their work. 9
zupancic fifth condition
Zupancic, Alenka. “The Fifth Condition.” in Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy. Ed. Peter Hallward, New York: Continuum. 2004. 191-201.
Most modern philosophers are ready to subscribe (and thus to abandon) ‘their’ philosophy to one of its conditions. One could say that in this case they are, strictly
speaking, no longer philosophers, but thinkers.
four generic procedures are being systematically replaced by other names which aim at effacing the procedures of truth involved in them: culture instead of art, technique instead of science, management instead of politics, sexuality instead of love.
One could add to this list: thinkers instead of philosophers. Except that thinkers, in the above-defined sense, are precisely those who usually fight against such re-nominations, especially those concerning the generic procedures to which they themselves subscribe their thought.
In this sense ‘scientific thinkers’ would be the last to fail to distinguish between science and technology, ‘poetic thinkers’ the last to confuse culture and art, engaged ‘political thinkers’ the last to abandon the name politics in favour of management . . . On the other hand, more than a few of those who, in recent decades, were happy to be called ‘philosophers’ have indeed embraced these re-nominations as signs of modernity, progress and the ongoing secularization of society.
This is probably why Badiou maintains, more or less explicitly, that modern anti-philosophy (and its ‘thinkers’) have been for quite some time the only guardians of the philosophical flame, so to speak. If philosophy did not die, but has continued to live in the element of its own suspension, this is largely the merit of anti-philosophy, i.e. of thinkers. 194
The relation of philosophy to its conditions is not simply that of certain conditions that have to be satisfied in order for philosophy to be possible. Although this is also true to a certain extent, the main accent of Badiou’s proposal is elsewhere: it is the thinking within (the dimension of truth produced by) its conditions that constitutes the condition of philosophy. Philosophy is work that takes place at a distance from its conditions, yet within the realm of these conditions. 194
One way of understanding more precisely the conceptual stakes of this ‘fifth condition’ leads to an interesting question that we have so far left unanswered. We saw that Badiou himself maintains that something did happen in the nineteenth century, ‘just after Hegel’ (MP49), something that changed the course (as well as the ‘nature’) of philosophy. But what? Could one try to determine what exactly happened? Badiou does not address this question directly. He often hints, however, that it has to do with a destitution of the One, i.e. with the replacement of the ‘authority of the One’ with the ‘authority of the multiple’.
He also hints that (the development of) capitalism had an important role in this: ‘It is obviously the only thing we can and must welcome within Capital: it exposes the pure multiple as the foundation of presentation; it denounces every effect of One as a simple, precarious configuration; it dismisses the symbolic representations in which the bond [lien] found a semblance of being’ (MP37/56).
One could say that what happened in the nineteenth century is that a slow but massive shift took place from one dominant social bond to another. Yet what is at stake in this shift of the social bond is not simply the alternative between or the replacement of One with multiple. 194-5
In order to appreciate this properly it is important to determine what exactly the expression ‘authority of the One’ refers to. There is, first of all, an important difference between what Badiou calls the ‘authority of the One’ and what he calls the ‘count for one’.
The latter is simply the condition of any thinkable situation or thing: whereas the purely multiple is inconsistent and is a pure ‘excess beyond itself’, all consistent thought supposes a structure, a counting-for-one, such that every presented or presentable multiple is consistent. Every presentable multiple is presented, in other words, precisely as a set or consistent being-together of a certain collection of elements.
In this respect, the counting-for-one (and with it the notion of ‘one’) is perfectly compatible with the notion of pure multiplicity. However, excess beyond itself, which is the very being of Being as purely multiple, also takes place on the level of what is already counted for one, i.e. on the level of presentation, within a set, or within what Badiou calls a ‘situation’ (which is just another word for ‘set’): it takes place as the excess of the parts of a given multiple or set over its elements: if we have a multiple of, say, five elements, the possible combination of these elements – i.e. the number of the ‘parts’ – exceeds by far the number of elements (more precisely, this number amounts to two to the power of five).
This excess, that Badiou also calls l’excès errant, a ‘wandering excess’, is one of the crucial notions of his ontology, for he holds ‘the wandering [errance] of the excess to be the real of being’ (MP61/81).
What he calls the ‘state’ of a situation (playing on the double meaning of this word) involves the operation whereby this excess itself is counted-for-one, and thus fixed (or made consistent). The count-for-one itself, which takes place on the level of presentation, is thus counted-for-one. This is what Badiou also calls representation, or meta-structure. 195
Now, what is involved in the expression the ‘authority of the One’ is something quite different than the count-for-one which makes any multiplicity presentable or intelligible, as well as something other than a ‘state’. Badiou usually employs the statement ‘the One is not’ as synonymous with ‘God is not’, or else as directly synonymous with the ‘death of God’. Yet at the same time he also identifies this statement with what is involved in his own fundamental ontological stance:
a multiple is always a multiple of multiples (of multiples, of multiples . . .),
and the eventual ‘stopping point’ can in no way be a ‘one’ but only a void.
However, I would maintain that the ‘One is not’ (in the sense of ‘God is not’) cannot be situated on the same level as the positing of a void as ‘the stuff that being is made of’. The reason for this is that – as Badiou himself points out – ‘God is dead’ is not an ontological statement but a statement that belongs to an evental horizon or, more precisely, to its closure.
In other words, I would suggest that we take the formulation ‘authority of the One’ to refer to a structurally as well as historically determinable social bond, and not as primarily referring to a conceptual choice between One and multiple.
The ‘authority of the One’ is a social bond which roughly corresponds to what Lacan conceptualized as the discourse of the Master. The Master’s discourse is not exactly a ‘state’ in Badiou’s sense. In it, the wandering excess is fixed, not by being counted as one, but by being subjected and attached, as Other, to the agency of the One.
The authority of the One is not based upon a totalization of a multiple, it is not a ‘forcing’ of the multiple by the One. It is based upon relating the One and Other in the element of their pure disjunction.
The Master’s discourse functioned so well and so long because it succeeded in transforming the ‘weakest’ point of a given multiple (the point of its very inconsistency) into the strongest lever, as well as the source, of its own power.
What was entirely mobilized or absorbed in the One was not the colourful multiplicity of Being, but the point of its potential generic power: its loose end, the point on account of which no multiplicity can be intrinsically ‘counted as One’.
The important thing to remember in relation to the Master’s discourse (or the authority of the One) is that the agent of this social bond is not the excessive multiplicity counted-for-one, it is not a unified totality of the excessive multiplicity, but an (empty) signifier of its impossible totalization.
In other words, the way multiplicity is attached (and fixed) to the One is that the One gives body to, or incarnates, the constitutive void of the multiple. This is how the master signifier, as agent of this social bond, fixates the excess, assigns it its place and keeps it there.
What happens with the destitution of the authority of the One is that the bond between the One and multiple, the bond that was there in their very disjunction, dissolves. The result is that the excess, as the very real of Being, emerges as a free-floating element and appears in a form of a ‘passionate
detachment’.
For what happens is not that excess loses its signifier or representation (since it never really had one), what it loses is its attachment to the One. One could say that a spectre of excess starts haunting the society, in its different spheres; and its ‘spectral’ form is in no way insignificant.
The Master’s discourse (or, if one prefers, the authority of the One) is a social bond in which this excessive element is, if one may say so, in the ‘ideal’ place, in the service of the hegemonic power of the One, which reigns by assumingthe very excessiveness of excess.
What happens with the destitution of this bond is, so to speak, that the ghost of excess escapes from the bottle.
This process could be said to have started with the French Revolution, to have reached its full extent in the nineteenth century, and to have continued through a part of the twentieth century.
The nineteenth century in particular was deeply haunted by this excessive element in all possible forms, from the conceptual to the phantasmagoric.
Perhaps no single phrase can capture, so to speak, the spirit of the thought of this period (regardless of different schools and orientations) better than this:there is something rotten in the State of Things.
Some thinkers of the time attributed this rot to the still-remaining pockets of the authority of the One,
believing that redemption would come only with their definitive elimination.
Others, on the contrary, saw the origin of discontent in the very destitution of the authority of the One.
But we can say, without oversimplifying things, that virtually all serious thinkers sought to think at a maximal proximity to, if not in a direct confrontation with, this excess. A ‘tarrying with the excess’ thus became the most prominent figure of thought. Utopias, designed to eliminate social and other injustice, mostly proposed to achieve this by eliminating this very excess. To a certain extent, even Marx was tempted by the possibility of eliminating, once and for all, the excessive, disharmonious element of society – the element in which he himself recognized its truth, its real and its symptom.
As for Nietzsche, one could say that a ‘tarrying with the excess’ constituted the very core of his writings, although he certainly did not seek to eliminate it. In his recent book,On the Psychotheology of Everyday life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig, Eric Santner develops a reading of these two authors around the central notion of a ‘constitutive ‘‘too muchness’’ ’
which corresponds perfectly to the notion of ‘wandering excess’. In literature, the explosion of a ‘wandering excess’ is even more directly perceptible: the undead dead, spectral, unplaceable
figures and ‘Things’, fromFrankensteintoDracula, passing through all kinds of phenomena that Freud treated under the title ofDas Unheumliche, the uncanny. Not to mention that one of the most popular serials of the middle of the nineteenth century was Eugène Sue’s The Wandering Jew (Le Juif errant– another name forl’exce`s errant?).
And at the same time this (wandering) excess was increasingly becoming recognized as, precisely, the real of being, and also as the locus if its truth. If, for modern (anti-)philosophy, Hegel became one of the most criticized (if not directly loathed) of philosophers it is precisely since it seems that, in his
speculative edifice, everything adds up: there are no loose ends, no scars (‘the wounds of the spirit heal without scars’), no cracks. In short: no wandering excess.
Philosophy in general did not escape this mocking contempt: there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in (our) philosophy. Or, in another version of this objection: instead of disclosing it, philosophy conceals the real of being, its cracks and its critical points.
The post-Hegelian philosophy (or, if one prefers, anti-philosophy) started off with this fundamental claim: symbolic representations which were traditionally considered as access to the truth and to the real of Being in fact alienate us from Being and deform it (or our perception of it). And classical philosophy (or ‘metaphysics’) was suddenly recognized as the queen of this representative
misrepresentation.
Indeed, if one were to name one central issue that distinguishes the rise of modern thought it is perhaps none other than precisely the issue of representation (and the question of the One and/or Multiple is part of this issue), its profound interrogation, and the whole consequent turn against (the logic of) representation. This is perhaps most perceptible in (modern) art, which frontally attacked the notion of art as representation. Gérard Wajcman was right when he defined the central problem of modern art as follows: ‘How to find access to the world in some other way than through image? How to aim at the world, at the real, without at the same time interposing the screen of repre-sentation?’
In politics, this also was a central issue: who represents people and how they can be properly represented? Why are some represented and some not? And what if the very idea of representation is the source of society’s evils and its alienation? The realm of politics is especially interesting in this respect since the introduction of a ‘representative’ system coincided with the very questioning of its pertinence. Something similar took place in respect to the generic procedure of love: a simultaneous demand that love be properly represented by the institution of marriage (the new imperative that one should marry out of love), and a massive ‘observation’ that this is in fact impossible, i.e. that marriage can never truly represent the real of love.
It was this general interrogation of representation and, to put it simply, the conviction that the real of being escapes representation (or else is falsified, distorted by it), which drew philosophy towards embracing the immediacy of one or another of its conditions. Paradoxically, Badiou emphatically shares this view of representation, although he is as emphatic in rejecting the consequences
that philosophy drew from it.
Philosophy embraced the immediacy of its conditions since this immediacy seemed to be the only bond remaining between thought and being. It is not so much that philosophy was seized by a passion for a direct access to the production of truths (as I suggested earlier) as it is that this direct access seemed to remain the only possible bond between philosophy and the ontological layer of its conditions. The either/or of modern (anti-)philosophy sprang from what appeared as the very impossibility of a position that could satisfy Badiou’s ‘fifth condition’ (again, that philosophy has to pull itself away from the immediate grip of its conditions, while nevertheless remaining under these conditions).
Before, the scene for such composing of truths was provided by the faith in representation. I use the word ‘faith’ deliberately, since the correlation of an object and its representation presupposed an Other vouching for this correlation and its unchangeableness.
This Other (or, perhaps better, this other One), by fixingthe relationship between, for instance, words and things, corresponds to what Badiou calls representation as meta-structure. For this is exactly one of the ways we could resume Badiou’s distinction between presentation and representation: presentation involves naming the things (or ‘elements’), whereas representation involves fixing the relationship between things (or elements) and ‘their’ names.
For Badiou, representation also constitutes the crucial operation of the institution of a state, and as such he views it as repudiation of a truth procedure.
Hence Badiou’s principled position against representation and the state – a position he adopts while remaining, at the time, well aware of the difficulty of simply putting an end to all representation (or all state). Badiou acknowledges that the state is co-original to any situation, which is to say that ‘there is always both presentation and representation’ (EE110).
The end of representation and the ‘universality of simple presentation’ (an egalitarian counting-for-one) remains a goal that bears some resemblance to the Kantian notion of a ‘regulative idea’, i.e. an idea that cannot be realized but in view of which one orientates one’s engagement in reality.
This question of presentation and representation (and their distinction) is indeed a very difficult one, and constitutes a perhaps not yet entirely worked-out aspect of Badiou’s conceptual edifice.
At the same time, it is undoubtedly one of its central aspects. If nothing else, it is essential for the very possibility of philosophy (its ‘fifth condition’), for it seems that philosophy as composition and configuration of truths (produced elsewhere) cannot exactly be said to be a ‘simple presentation’.
More: could one not say that what comes the closest to philosophy as simple presentation is
precisely what Badiou calls modern anti-philosophy?
Philosophy as presentation is nothing other than philosophy abandoning itself to its conditions, philosophy as an immediate part of procedure(s) of truth (or else as a sophistic game of endlessly surfing on the waves of the ‘wandering excess’).
So are we then supposed instead to embrace representation as the meta-structure which alone could guarantee a space or scene for philosophy proper? Of course not; this would be falling back to the essentially premodern (or pre-Hegelian) position.
The answer – which I will only try to sketch or roughly indicate here – rather lies in acknowledging something that Badiou strangely refuses to acknowledge or at least to adopt. Something that happened in linguistics and gained a definite form in psychoanalysis (more precisely, in the Lacanian ‘use’ of linguistics). Something that can in no way be dismissed as yet another expression of the ‘linguistic turn’ and even less as a ‘poetic turn’. Something that is as important for contemporary philosophy as is Cantor’s secularization of the infinite: an entirely new conception of representation.
A conception which is not that of representation as meta-structure, and does not involve the idea of the signifier (or ‘name’) representing an object for the subject. A conception which strikingly meets Badiou’s own demand of ‘destitution of the category of object’ while preserving the category of the subject (cf.MP72–3/91–2). A conception that finds its most concise formulation in Lacan’s statement: ‘a signifier represents a subject for another signifier’.
This was a major breakthrough of contemporary thought, a breakthrough that could in fact provide philosophy with its ‘fifth condition’, i.e. its own distinctive conceptual space.
For in this conception, representation is not a ‘presentation of presentation’ or the state of a situation but rather a ‘presentation within presentation’ or a state within a situation.
In this conception, representation is itself infinite and constitutively not-all (or non-conclusive), it represents no object and does not prevent a continuous un-relating of its own terms (which is how Badiou defines the mechanism of truth).
Here, representation as such is a wandering excess over itself; representation is the infinite tarrying with the excess that springs not simply from what is or is not represented (its ‘object’), but from this act of representation itself, from its own inherent ‘crack’ or inconsistency.
The Real is not something outside or beyond representation, but is the very crack of representation.
Page 200
The problem of representation as meta-structure, and the consequent imperative to restrain oneself from representation or to pull oneself away from the ‘state’, is something that belongs to a different ontology than the ontology of the purely multiple, of infinity and of contingency.
It could only concern a universe in which the evental statement ‘God is dead’ for whatever reason does not hold true. In an infinite contingent universe (or ‘situation’), by contrast, there is no necessity for the ‘counting of the count itself’ to be situated on a meta-level.
It can very well be situated on the same level as the counting-for-one itself, only separated from it by an irreducible interval (and it is this interval that Lacan calls the Real).
Moreover, this is precisely what makesa situation ‘infinite’. What makes it infinite is not the exclusion of any operation of representation (which would ‘want’ to count it for one and thus to close it upon itself) but its inclusion.
What makes any particular ‘presentation’ infinite is precisely that it already includes representation.
This conception also allows for an effect of unification (or fixation) taking place, yet a different one from what Badiou calls ‘state’. Lacan links it to his notion of the ‘quilting point’ (point de capiton).
This unification of a (potentially) infinite set is not the same as in the case of meta-structure. S1as ‘point de capiton’ is not a meta-signifier in relation to S2, to the virtually infinite battery of signifiers and their combinations that Lacan also calls ‘knowledge’.
S1 quilts this set not by counting the count itself, but by ‘presenting’ the very impossibility of an immediate coincidence of the two counts, i.e. by presenting the very gap between them.
In other words, S1is the signifier of the impossibility of the two (counting and counting the count itself) to be One.
It is the signifier of the very gap or interval or void that separates them in any process of representation: a void that is precisely the cause of the infinite layering of repre-sentation.
For Lacan, the Real of being is this void or interval or gap, this very non-coincidence, whereas the wandering excess is already its result.
S1presents this void by naming it, it does not represent it.
Lacan’s S1, the (in)famous ‘master signifier’ or ‘phallic signifier’ is, paradoxically, the only way to write that ‘the One is not’ and that what ‘is’ is the void that constitutes the original disjunction in the midst of every count-for-one.
The count-for-one is always already two. S1is the matheme of what one can describe as ‘the One is not’.
It writes that ‘the One is not’ by presenting the very thing that prevents it from being One.
This is what S1 says: the One is not; yet what is is not a pure multiple, but two.
This is perhaps Lacan’s crucial insight: if there is something on which one could lean in order to leave the ‘ontology of the One’ behind, this something is not simply the multiple, but a Two.
This, of course, is directly related to the point in which Badiou recognizes a major contribution of psychoanalysis to the conditions of philosophy: psychoanalysis is the first (consistent) thought of the generic procedure of love.
Which is to say that it is the first thinkable articulation of ‘a Two that would neither be counted for one nor would it be the sum of one + one.
A Two that would be counted for two in an immanent way (. . .), where Two is neither a fusion nor a
sum; and where Two is thus in excess over that what constitutes it, without there being a Third [term] to join it.’
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This singular notion of the Two is very much related to the question of representation, i.e. of the possibility for the ‘counting the count itself’ to be situated on the same level as the count (and not on a meta-level), yet dislocated in relation to it.
For this is precisely what it implies to think a ‘Two that would be counted for two in an immanent way’.
Badiou was not only the first philosopher explicitly to conceptualize this singular notion of the Two in philosophy, he also reminded psychoanalysis of the production of this truth that it sometimes tends to forget.
By conceptualizing it within philosophy, i.e. within the space of a ‘general compossibility’ of truths, he gave contemporary philosophy one of its most precious concepts which, although it comes from a singular generic procedure, has its universal value and is in no way limited to that procedure.
I would also add that with this concept, Badiou addresses the question of representation from a new
and different angle, an angle which avoids the difficulties sketched out above and which, at the same time, directly concerns the conditions of philosophy.
If philosophy is to take place within the space of the infinite process of truth without itself being a process of truth, if it is to be situated on the same level as generic procedures yet at a certain distance from them (i.e. dislocated in relation to them), then it has to rely precisely on such an ‘immanent count-for-two’ as is at work in a Badiouian conception of the Two.
This would imply, of course, that one of the four conditions of philosophy (love, with its immanent count-for-two) is also its ‘fifth condition’, the condition that defines the very relationship of philosophy with its conditions and keeps it from merging with them, as well as from appearing as their independent sum.
As a thought that operates within the field of four generic procedures of truth, without simply merging with this field and becoming indistinguishable from it, philosophy presupposes ascène du Deux, a ‘stage/scene of the Two’.
In other words, in the configuration of conditions of philosophy, one of its conditions – the immanent count-for-two, which Badiou recognizes in the figure of love – has itself to be counted-for-two.
Ž EGS 2012 There is no original One Act evental enthusiasm
Slavoj Being and Subjectivity: Act and Evental Enthusiasm
I would like a coffee, no cream. Sorry we have run out of cream. Can I bring you a coffee without milk?
For Badiou, 1 comes secondary, 1 is an operation, 1 is the effect of counting, multiplicity is there from the beginning.
For Alenka and me, of course there is no original 1, but this absence is inscribed in the multiplicity from the very beginning. It does NOT mean “we are multiple fuck the ONE” It means the 1 as absence is already here. Ontologically the zero level is a barred 1, there is no ONE. There is multiplicity because 1 cannot be 1.
Freud says somewhere “multiplicity in dreams is always a sign of CASTRATION” If you dream of many phalluses it means you don’t have one. Multiplicity is always the blocked sabotaged impossibility of the ONE.
When Lacan primordial repression is the repression of the binary signifier. Lacan’s theory of sexual differentiation is not Ying Yang bullshit. There is only one signifier, Male, but this does not make woman, more but LESS. Why?
Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a parody of Tolstoy. Dostoevsky is missing. A scene in the movie, as if this absence of D. returns. The 2 guys talk and bring in all the D. titles. Did you meet the Idiot. Ah you mean the Brother K.
We are tempted to insist on the primacy of the barred ONE, the impossible ONE. There are ONEs of course, but the existing ONEs are an echo of their own impossibility. What there is is always originally multiplicity. But why do we then always start to count to 1? Because multiplicity is always marked from the beginning by the lack or impossibility of the ONE.
In Badiou there is no ontology of the EVENT. When Badiou announced program for Logics of the Worlds. In previous book Being and Event he didn’t really account for how a World emerges out of BEING. In this book he also does NOT do it.
23:00 He says there is multiplicity, then I don’t know from where, but ALL OF A SUDDEN THERE ARE WORLDS.
23:15 WHY DOES BEING QUA BEING (THIS PRE-REPRESENTATIVE MULTIPLICITY) WHY DOES IT ORGANIZE ITSELF INTO WORLDS?
WORLDS ARE MODES OF TRANSCENDENTAL APPEARANCE. Each of the worlds is characterized by its transcendental a priori.
Alenka’s solution
Already the multiplicity from the very beginning is multiplicity because the ONE is impossible. This is the answer to why multiplicity, precisely to fill in this gap, has to appear to itself. WORLDS happen precisely to fill in this gap, to appear to itself.
BORING KANTIAN PROBLEM: We live in appearances but can we reach the THING-IN-ITSELF? THE REAL? For Hegel the problem IS EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE. The True enigma is OK there is BEING MULTIPLICITY OUT THERE BUT WHY DOES BEING START TO APPEAR TO ITSELF? The true enigma is NOT how to see reality behind appearance. But why does the real begin to appear to itself?
THE TRUE FIGHT WITH BADIOU
Z remains a old-fashion transendentalist and Badiou is a dialectical materialist.
Žižek: When Badiou mentions World, the POINT as minimum of yes/no, I claim that all the coordinates are already the coordinates of symbolic universe with subjectivity included. There is NO WORLD OUTSIDE LANGUAGE AND SUBJECT.
Badiou FANATICALLY insists that WORLD is dialectics in NATURE. Animals, even rocks, a group of stars, can be a WORLD. Ž thinks this is totally illegitimate.
28:00 More Lacan than Badiou:
Lacan: Existence is absolutely NOT the same as BEING. Existence is for Badiou, is a transcendental determination. Things exist within a transcendental world, you exist the more you are recognized within this transcendental space.
Even Hegel has this distinction in a nice way in Hegel’s LOGIC. In Hegel, existence is a category of ESSENCE. Existence is BEING which is the APPEARANCE of some ESSENCE. What does NOT have an ESSENCE, IS, but does not EXIST.
FOR LACAN Neither the subject exists NOR the WOMAN. Lacan does NOT say: Il n’ya pas de femme. But he says La Femme n’existe pas.
30:45 BRUCE FINK
IL N’YA PAS is much more radical than IL N”EXISTE PAS.
Lacan says Il n’ya pas de grand Autre. There is no big Other. He doesn’t say the big Other doesn’t exist.
The Lacanian distinction between existence, and INSISTENCE What doesn’t exist, INSISTS for LACAN: Subject doesn’t exist it just leaves TRACES in existence
DRIVE doesn’t exist it INSISTS
32:30 APPEARANCE AND PHENOMENON
the distinction is that appearance is an appearance of something. You look behind, what is appearing.
A phenomenon is an appearance behind which there is nothing
An appearance of something AND An appearance that just fills in the lack, that there is NOTHING behind it.
The two greek painters, who will do a more realistic painting the winner paints a curtain, ok pull apart the curtain to see what you painted
PHENOMENON evokes/raises the desire for something behind but there is nothing behind, it is appearance in the abyss
I would locate here the status of the subject.
Subject is for me an APPEARANCE BUT NO SUBSTANCE
The mystery of the SUBJECT: Appearance is not a simple appearance that can be SUBTRACTED. IT is NOT as if you can take away appearance and get things as they really are.
What if there is an apparance precisely as appearance is crucial for the consistency of that which appears. So that you take away appearance and you lose the thing-itself. The whole FREUD turns on this.
35:30 ENDS
36:00 The ultimate ambiguity, is Kant’s Transcendental appearance.
Kant can not accept appearance THAT ITS APPEARANCE AGAINST THE ABYSS OF NOTHING.
He still thinks there must be something substantial behind appearance which appears.
The Hegelian step is NO! Conclusion of first part of Phenomenology of Spirit, of course appearance is like a curtain we look behind, behind appearance is just a VOID, what we find there is what we put there. THIS DOES NOT MEAN THAT IN THE USUAL SENSE THAT EVERYTHING IS JUST AN APPEARANCE. EVERYTHING IS REAL BUT THIS IS NOT RELATIVISM.
38:15 BEST BOOK IS THEORY OF SUBJECT the breakthrough is there the rest of Badiou’s work is trying to catch up.
38:30 the best friendly shot at a friend (Bosteels) the best! from Belgians are well know for 2 things
He opposes Sophocles terror/anxiety ORestia courage/justice
subjective attitudes doesn’t JUSTICE stick out, replace JUSTICE WITH enthusiasm.
For reasons of consistency.
What does Terror mean here? He oscillates between 2 meanings. Bad superego terror represented by CREON. Fuck you we also need our own TERROR. THere is always a terrorist aspect in SUBTRACTION
ENTHUSIASM WILL BE CENTRAL CATEGORY OF HIS IMMANENCE OF TRUTH.
41:00 Question on ACT
44:00 Žižek replies
The problem of EVENT is Badiou seems to struggle about the relationship between Event and its nomination.
Sometimes he claims more radically, transcendentally, nomination is part of the EVENT, event becomes event only through its nomination,
Sometimes he adapts a pomo attitude, the event is traumatic excess and we try to but fail to find a proper name.
A communist struggle is going on but the Marxian names for it are not good names. We didn’t nominate the event in a correct way.
There is the danger of this pomo pseudo-Nietzche b.s. the real is the event/horror we try to nominate it, but it always fails on the other hand Badiou celebrating the Master Signifier.
46:00 Theoretical couple Badiou/Barbara Kassam
The Master Signifier, Badiou who is the Badiou of Master SIgnifier, is masculine Badiou. We have the event of Chrisianity, but Christ himeself was a feminine hysterical guy, the master who provides the NAME is ST. PAUL. It is Paul who provided the MASTER SIGNIFIER that created Christianity.
47:50 Badiou made a book with Roudinesco (Ž yikes!!!) He says: without a MASTER (Kant a human being is animal who needs master) to become a subject you need a master, Badiou goes very far here.
Here I agree with him, with a precise political stake, to rehabilitate the marxist tradition of cult of PERSONALITY. Che GUAvara, Mao, Stalin, Fidel, we need a name a MASTER. Neutral theory is not enough we need a NAME a master that introduces a NEW ORDER.
Sometimes Badiou links Psychoanalysis with LOVE. At the same time, His best example of evental structure is RELIGION, St. Paul We live in secular era, religion is not evental, I just use Paul as example of formal evental structure. But how was it possible to happen there? Z believes category of LOVE is much more mysterious.
Kant = Science
Fichte = Politics
Schelling = Art supreme medium of truth is art
Hegel = LOVE category of life is central
51:50 NIGHT OF WORLD
Alenka accepts Badiou’s claim that event as real in its brutality is not enough, you need to nominate the EVENT.
She does something he doesn’t do. She introduces distinction between master signifier and signifier of the barred other. Signifier of barred other.
when you present the signifier of the inconsistent Other
when you name properly the antagonism, the real the defines a certain field: class struggle, when this turns into a Master signifier you already de-eventalize it, you lose it.
CHIESA: fuck it there will always be Master signifier obscene super ego fantasy etc.
Communist Hypothesis, the link to a master is not the ultimate social link there is a possibility of being together collectively that is not sustained by a MASTER.
If we drop this we are back to J.A. Miller
54:20 Let’s say a political system is in a crisis. If we take this crisis in a pre-evental way: It means we inscribe it, the system fails blah blah, the crucial pt. is NO! This failure, is not simply failure of the system, in this FAILURE THE TRUTH OF THE SYSTEM APPEARS.
For Freud/Marx crises, the basic antagonism of capitalism appears, symptoms are the truth of normality
To provide the name for this NECESSITY, why failures are structurally necessary, the big other itself is Barred. this is the politics of NOMINATION
55:50 Laclau
populist politics is always the politics of failure, things are basically ok, but jews traitors foreigners always fuck it up. scapegoats. corrupted the old order, the crack, the failure is not in the order as such, its an accidental corruption, you need to re-establish the proper order. NO
The EVENT IS TO FIND A NAME social antagonism, class struggle, which clearly locates the failure in the ORDER ITSELF.
58:20 Foucault
Big shift History Sex vol 1 is different from vol 2 and 3. This tension is already in his early works on Madness. Already described in Derrida.
Even in early works on madness.
The oscillation in early Foucault, on one hand he says I want to describe till now MADNESS was described by the external standpoint of science/power. I want madness itself to SPEAK. At the same time he makes it clear, that madness, substantially in-itself, is not an in-itself which is described differently, madness is an affect of mechanisms of madness. Madmen prior to modernity, was located in hermeneutics, you were devil, or divine that spoke through you. Madness was hermeneutics, a madman is that which a higher truth speaks through you. With moderinity it become POSITIVIST science. Something is wrong with brain, we incarcerate them.
In Vol 1. accent is power generates resistence to itself, resistance to power is way for power to reproduce itself more effectively
Beware, if a girl pretends to be shameful, she rejects you, but this rejection is already … they give you an entire classification of techniques
so again Foucault goes fo far as to say, power itself generates the man to be liberated. Resistance is part of power, the circle is closed.
NO LIBERATION, no space for liberation. resistance in advance is incorporated.
IN vol 2 and vol 3, he is looking for islands of resistance. He has here also rehabilitates the subject, the idea through some kind of self-education, self-relating you can acquire a distance, a resistance. No longer this co-optive pessimism.
1:04 BUTLER
This is my problem with Judith Butler. She always speaks the language of resistance. We can just occupy spaces and resist, the big OTHER OF POWER is here, but there are spaces of resistance. What if we play off the early and late Foucault. How can we have resistances which are not just caught up in counter-power. Sexuality is not the expression of sex, real sex is an effect of the discourses we have on sexuality. With these discourses, disciplinary discourses. Discourses, disciplinary discourses, a Paulian theory of transgression, every discourse of power generates the transgression it fights.
For Ž, he disagrees with all this FOUCAULT. I don’t like RESISTANCE the term. It has all this marginalist connotation, ooh the big Other is there, we can just screw it a bit, irony, displacement, performative fun, repetitiveness.
1:06 Adrian Johnson critique of Badiou where latter just focuses on Event and reactions to event.
There is a whole pre-evental strategy.
1:09 Tahir sq. Occupy wall st.
I don’t share his naive optimism. It’s still open. There are things which I am ready to extend retroative logic here. Something happens and retroactively we decide if it is an Event or not.
When Badiou was explaining FORCING event, for him forcing an event, is to impose the logic of event as immediately logic of Being. THIS IS STALINISM.
What Z doesn’t like, this is the “totalitarian temptation” says Badiou. I think there is something totally wrong in saying Stalin instead of treating communist vision as Evental, this idea, don’t translate the Event immediately into Being this is KANT.
Regulative use of idea, stalinst arrogant mistake, to take something as regulative as CONSTITUTIVE as making up reality. THIS IS KANT. Badiou makes an explicit reference to Kant’s REGULATIVE IDEA.
Here I”m more Hegelian, to explain horrors of Stalin, its’ too simply to claim that Stalin was too faithful to commie idea. No the problem is not Stalin wanted to impose to immediately Communist idea as order of being. NO THE IDEA itself was not correct. What’s the problem with forcing if you have a GOOD idea, fuck it force it if you want. But Stalin had a bad idea.
1:14 Master signifier which introduces a NEW ORDER, but there was no point de capiton. RESTRUCTURES THE WHOLE FIELD
Occupied Mexico City, they had power, they debated and talked for week or two then they said let’s go home.
1:18 HARDT NEGRI
Maybe events function in a different way, authentic political events. TJ Clark, he says this doesn’t mean system is powerful is going to go on, what he is saying is that there will not be a magic moment, where terracotta armies will emerge. Maybe we should change here the field.
badiou 2007
Critical Inquiry 2008 interview with Alain Badiou conducted in Los Angeles 7 Feb. 2007. (the pdf has been uploaded)
Question: What, today, on the eve of the presidential election, is the “postcolonial” situation of the French banlieues? More generally, how do you see the relationship between politics and violence in the “banlieue – monde”— what Mike Davis has recently called a “planet of slums”—that is in the process of globalizing itself in the twenty-first century?
BADIOU: Here we encounter a problem that we might call, in the Leninist tradition, the problem of the masses. That is, how can the political come to really organize or be present among the great masses of the planet? The fundamental problem is how we might enter into relations with this gigantic mass, with a population that is disorganized and chaotic, poor and deprived of everything, and often prey to criminal organizations, religious messianisms, and unchecked destructive violence. This is the calling and task of every contemporary emancipatory politics. After all, we are speaking of billions of people; address this problem or our horizon will remain too narrow.
In the nineteenth century, the problem was the arrival of the new proletarian masses on the political scene; in the twentieth century, it was the political emancipation of colonized peoples. In the first case we have the workers’ movement, the Paris Commune, and, finally, the revolution of1917; in the second, the wars of national liberation, Algeria, Vietnam, and the Chinese popular war. But today we can no longer speak either of the working masses, forged in the discipline of the factory, or of the peasant masses, localized and orga-nized on the basis of agrarian relations. The masses we speak of are profoundly atomized by capitalism. They are, for the most part, delivered over to conditions of existence that are precarious and chaotic.
They are a collective figure that still has no name. The category of the subproletariat doesn’t work in this case, since that category still presupposes the existence of an organized proletariat — which, in this case, does not exist. These masses are not organized according to the traditional categories of class, and so for the moment they are more or less entirely abandoned to the nihilism of capitalism.
Here the link with the French banlieues becomes clear. The distinc-tion between the Third World and the developed countries is increasingly less important. We have our Third World within the developed states. This is why the so-called question of immigration has become so important for us. The United States, for example, this nation of immigrants, is today constructing a wall and reinforcing its border security system against immigration, an action largely agreed upon by the Democrats — not necessarily concerning the wall but the need for a substantial increase in the border patrol.
In France, this rhetoric has poisoned political life for some time now. It feeds the extreme Right, but, ultimately, the Left always aligns itself with this rhetoric. It’s a very interesting phenomenon because it shows that these destructured masses, poor and deprived of everything, situated in a nonproletarianized urban environment, constitute one of the principal horizons of the politics to come. These masses, therefore, are an important factor in the phenomenon of globalization. The true globalization, today, would be found in the organization of these masses — on a worldwide scale, if possible — whose conditions of existence are essentially the same. Whoever lives in the banlieues of Bamako or Shanghai is not essentially different from someone who lives in the banlieues of Paris or the ghettos of Chicago. They might be poorer and in worse conditions, but they are not essentially different. Their political existence is characterized by a distance from the state — from the state and its clients, the dominant classes but also the middle classes, all of whom strive to maintain this distance. On this political problem, I have only fragmentary ideas. It’s a question that is as difficult as the problem of organizing workers in the nineteenth century. I am convinced it is the fundamental problem today.
There have been important political experiments in this field — with the sans papiers in France, for example. But this is only one part of a problem that is extremely vast. We have no relations with the young people in revolt in the banlieues. It is once again a dimension of the crisis of negation. We should absolutely be able to think a subtractive form, however minimal, for this type of population. The sans papiers, for example, should have some form of minimal workers’ organization, since they often work in restaurants or in construction. This is why it is possible to make some progress in their struggle.
badiou 2008 subtraction distance from the state
Question: Can you explain a bit more what you mean by “distance from the state”?
BADIOU: “At a distance from the state” signifies that a politics is not structured or polarized along the agenda and timelines fixed by the state. Those dates, for example, when the state decides to call an election, or to intervene in some conflict, declare war on another state. Or when the state claims that an economic crisis makes this or that course of action impossible. These are all examples of what I call convocations by the state, where the state sets the agenda and controls the timing of political events. Distance from the state means you act with a sufficient independence from the state and what it deems to be important or not, who it decides should or should not be addressed. This distance protects political practices from being oriented, structured, and polarized by the state. This is why, moreover, I do not think it is particularly important to participate in the electoral process. It has nothing to do with what Lenin called left-wing communism. This process is simply not interesting.
First of all because it represents, for now at least, no veritable perspective on the future—there is no way, in this framework and by these means, that fundamental orientations can be modified. But, more importantly, this process organizes a reorientation toward the state and its decisions. It restricts political independence. Distance from the state therefore means that the political process and its decisions should be undertaken in full independence from the state and what it deems important, what it decides to impose as the framework of the political. I understand state here in the large sense, including the government, the media, and even
those who make economic decisions. When you allow the political process to be dominated by the state, you’ve already lost the game because you’ve abdicated in advance your own political independence.
In your recent book,Le Sie`cle, you seem to indicate the necessity to make a transition from what you call a politics of “destruction” (which you identify with “fraternal violence” and “terror-ist nihilism”) to a politics of “subtraction.” Can you explain the nature of this distinction in your work?
BADIOU: Here, again, the question is at once philosophical and political, strictly linked to the problem of critique and negation. From a philosophical point of view, the symbol for all this was for a long time the relation between Hegel and Marx. For Marx, the dialectical conception of negation defined the relation between philosophy and politics—what used to be called the problem of dialectical materialism. Just as the party, which was once the victorious form of insurrection, is today out-dated, so too is the dialectical theory of negation. It can no longer artic-ulate a living link between philosophy and politics. In trying to clarify the political situation, we also need to search for a new formulation of the problem of critique and negation. I think that it is necessary, above all in the field of political action, to go beyond the concept of a negation taken solely in its destructive and properly negative aspect. Contrary to Hegel, for whom the negation of the negation produces a new affirma-tion, I think we must assert that today negativity, properly speaking, does not create anything new. It destroys the old, of course, but does not give rise to a new creation.
BADIOU: The distinction between negation and affirmation in my discourse can, in a certain sense, be traced back to Spinoza. The encounter with Spinoza takes place because of our contemporary need to produce a non-Hegelian category of negation. But my problem with Spinoza is with the ontological foundation of his thought, in which there is still an excessive potency of the One. He is an author whose magnificent propositions I often cite: for example, that a free man thinks of nothing less
than death or that the wisest man is the one most recognizant of others. These are magnificent formulations. But at the ontological level—Spinoza’s ontology is one of the great non-Hegelian constructions—I think the play between the multiple and the One leans a bit too much to the side of the One. The schema of the infinite plurality of attributes and the expressivity of the multiplicity of modes is, as far as I am concerned, not enough to account for contemporary multiplicity.
Question: You’ve spoken about the philosophical implications of this distinction between destruction and subtraction. But how do these articulations function at the political level, in terms of political practice?
BADIOU: On the political side, every revolutionary or emancipatory politics will have to be a certain adjustment or calibration between the properly negative part of negation and the part I call subtractive. A subtraction that is no longer dependent on the dominant laws of the political reality of a situation. It is irreducible, however, to the destruction of these laws as well. A subtraction might well leave the laws of the situation intact. What subtraction does is bring about a point of autonomy. It’s a negation, but it cannot be identified with the properly destructive part of negation. Throughout the Marxist and Leninist revolutionary tradition of the twentieth century, the prevailing idea was that destruction alone was capable of opening a new history, founding a new man, and so on. Mao himself said: “No construction without destruction.”
Our problem today is that the destructive part of negation is no longer, in and of itself, capable of producing the new. We need an originary subtraction capable of creating a new space of independence and autonomy from the dominant laws of the situation.
A subtraction, therefore, is neither derived from nor a consequence of destruction as such. If we are to propose a new articulation between destruction and subtraction, we have to develop a new type of negation or critique, one that differs from the dialectical model of class struggle in its historical signification. I think it is possible to observe important symptoms of this crisis of negation today. What I call a weak negation, the reduction of politics to democratic opposition, can be understood as a subtraction that has become so detached from destructive negation that it can no longer be distinguished from what Habermas calls consensus.
On the other hand, we are also witnessing a desperate attempt to maintain destruction as a pure figure of creation and the new. This symptom often has a religious and nihilistic dimension. In fact, the internal disjunction of negation — the severing of destruction from subtraction — has resulted in a war that in the West is referred to as the war on terrorism and, on the side of the terrorists themselves, a war on the West, the infidels, and so on.
subjective destitution 514
The status of prosopopoeia in Lacan changes radically with the shift in the status of the analyst from being the stand-in for the “big Other” (the symbolic order) to being the “small other” (the obstacle which stands for the inconsistency, failure, of the big Other).
The analyst who occupies the place of the big Other is himself the medium of prosopopoeia: when he speaks, it is the big Other who speaks (or, rather, keeps silence) through him; in the intersubjective economy of the analytic process, he is not just another subject, he occupies the empty place of death.
The patient talks, and the analyst’s silence stands for the absent meaning of the patient’s talk, the meaning supposed to be contained in the big Other. The process ends when the patient can himself assume the meaning of his speech.
The analyst as the “small other,” on the contrary, magically transforms the words of the analysand into prosopopoeia, de-subjectivizing his words, depriving them of the quality of being an expression of the consistent subject and his intention-to-mean.
The goal is no longer for the analysand to assume the meaning of his speech, but for him to assume its non-meaning, its nonsensical inconsistency, which implies, with regard to his own status, his de-subjectivization, or what Lacan calls “subjective destitution.”
Prosopopoeia is defined as “a figure of speech in which an absent or imaginary person is represented as speaking or acting.” The attribution of speech to an entity commonly perceived to be unable to speak (nature, the commodity, truth itself …) is for Lacan the condition of speech as such, not only its secondary complication.
Does not Lacan’s distinction between the “subject of enunciation” and the “subject of enunciated”point in this direction?
When I speak, it is never directly “myself” who speaks ― I have to have recourse to a fiction which is my symbolic identity.
In this sense, all speech is “indirect”: “I love you” has the structure of: “my identity as lover is telling you that it loves you.”
The implication of prosopopoeia is thus a weird split of which Robert Musil was aware: the “man without properties” (der Mann ohne Eigenschaften) has to be supplemented with properties without man (Eigenschaften ohne Mann), without a subject to whom they are attributed.
There are two correlative traps to be avoided here, the rightist and the leftist deviations. The first, of course, is the pseudo-Hegelian notion that this gap stands for a “self-alienation” which I should strive to abolish ideally and then fully assume my speech as directly my own.
Against this version, one should insist that there is no I which can, even ideally, assume its speech “directly,” by-passing the detour of prosopopoeia.
Wearing a mask can thus be a strange thing: sometimes, more often than we tend to believe, there is more truth in the mask than in what we assume to be our “real self.”
Think of the proverbial shy and impotent man who, while playing an interactive video game, adopts the screen identity of a sadistic murderer and irresistible seducer―it is all too simple to say that this identity is just an imaginary supplement, a temporary escape from his real-life impotence.
The point is rather that, since he knows that the video game is “just a game,” he can “reveal his true self,” do things he would never do in real-life interactions―in the guise of a fiction, the truth about himself is articulated.
Therein lies the truth of a charming story like Alexandre Dumas’s The Man in the Iron Mask: what if we invert the topic according to which, in our social interactions, we wear masks to cover our true face?
What if, on the contrary, in order for us to interact in public with our true face, we have to have a mask hidden somewhere, a mask which renders our unbearable excess, what is in us more than ourselves, a mask which we can put on only exceptionally, in those carnivalesque moments when the standard rules of interaction are suspended? In short, what if the true function of the mask is not to be worn, but to be kept hidden?
from repetition to drive p.496 lost object to loss itself as object
What does the drive mean from a philosophical standpoint? In a vague general sense, there is a homology between the shift from Kant to Hegel and the shift from desire to drive: the Kantian universe is that of desire (structured around the lack, the inaccessible Thing-in-itself), of endlessly approaching the goal, which is why, in order to guarantee the meaningfulness of our ethical activity, Kant has to postulate the immortality of the soul (since we cannot reach the goal in our terrestrial life, we must be allowed to go on ad infinitum).
For Hegel, on the contrary, the Thing-in-itself is not inaccessible, the impossible does happen here and now―not, of course, in the naïve pre-critical sense of gaining access to the transcendent order of things, but in the properly dialectical sense of shifting the perspective and conceiving the gap (that separates us from the Thing) as the Real. With regard to satisfaction, this does not mean that, in contrast to desire which is constitutively non-satisfied, the drive achieves satisfaction by way of reaching the object which eludes desire. True, in contrast to desire, the drive is by definition satisfied, but this is because, in it, satisfaction is achieved in the repeated failure to reach the object, in repeatedly circling around the object. Following Jacques-Alain Miller, a distinction has to be introduced here between a lack and a hole: a lack is spatial, designating a void within a space, while a hole is more radical, it designates the point at which this spatial order itself breaks down (as in the “black hole” in physics).
Therein lies the difference between desire and drive: desire is grounded in its constitutive lack, while the drive circulates around a hole, a gap in the order of being. In other words, the circular movement of the drive obeys the weird logic of the curved space in which the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line, but a curve: the drive “knows” that the quickest way to realize its aim is to circulate around its goal-object. At the immediate level of addressing individuals, capitalism of course interpellates them as consumers, as subjects of desire, soliciting in them ever new perverse and excessive desires (for which it offers products to satisfy them); furthermore, it obviously also manipulates the “desire to desire,” celebrating the very desire to desire ever new objects and modes of pleasure. However, even if it already manipulates desire in a way which takes into account the fact that the most elementary desire is the desire to reproduce itself as desire (and not to find satisfaction), at this level, we do not yet reach the drive.
The drive inheres in capitalism at a more fundamental, systemic, level: the drive is that which propels forward the entire capitalist machinery, it is the impersonal compulsion to engage in the endless circular movement of expanded self-reproduction.
We enter the mode of the drive the moment the circulation of money as capital becomes an end in itself, since the expansion of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. (One should bear in mind here Lacan’s well-known distinction between the aim and the goal of drive: while the goal is the object around which the drive circulates, its true aim is the endless continuation of this circulation as such.)
The capitalist drive thus belongs to no particular individual―it is rather that those individuals who act as the direct “agents” of capital (capitalists themselves, top managers) have to display it.
Miller recently proposed a Benjaminian distinction between “constituted anxiety” and “constituent anxiety,” which is crucial with regard to the shift from desire to drive: while the first designates the standard notion of the terrifying and fascinating abyss of anxiety which haunts us, its infernal circle which threatens to draw us in, the second stands for the “pure” confrontation with the : objet petit a as constituted in its very loss.
Miller is right to emphasize here two features: the difference which separates constituted from constituent anxiety concerns the status of the object with regard to fantasy. In a case of constituted anxiety, the object dwells within the confines of a fantasy, while we get only the constituent anxiety when the subject “traverses the fantasy” and confronts the void, the gap, filled up by the fantasmatic object. Clear and convincing as it is, Miller’s formula misses the true paradox or, rather, ambiguity of the objet a, the ambiguity which concerns the question: does the objet a function as the object of desire or of the drive?
That is to say, when Miller defines the objet a as the object which overlaps with its loss, which emerges at the very moment of its loss (so that all its fantasmatic incarnations, from breast to voice to gaze, are metonymic figurations of the void, of nothing), he remains within the horizon of desire―the true object-cause of desire is the void filled in by its fantasmatic incarnations. While, as Lacan emphasizes, the objet a is also the object of the drive, the relationship is here thoroughly different: although in both cases the link between object and loss is crucial, in the case of the objet a as the object-cause of desire, we have an object which is originally lost, which coincides with its own loss, which emerges as lost, while, in the case of the objet a as the object of the drive, the “object” is directly the loss itself―in the shift from desire to drive, we pass from the lost object to loss itself as an object.
That is to say, the weird movement called “drive” is not driven by the “impossible” quest for the lost object; it is a drive to directly enact the “loss”― the gap, cut, distance ― itself. There is thus a double distinction to be drawn here: not only between the objet a in its fantasmatic and post-fantasmatic status, but also, within this post-fantasmatic domain itself, between the lost object-cause of desire and the object-loss of the drive. 497
objet a death drive negativity
But there is a paradox which complicates this critique of Hegel: is not absolute negativity, this central notion of Hegelian thought, precisely a philosophical figure of what Freud called the “death drive”? Insofar as ― following Lacan ― the core of Kant’s thought can be defined as the “critique of pure desire,” is not the passage from Kant to Hegel then precisely the passage from desire to drive? The very concluding lines of Hegel’s Encyclopedia (on the Idea which enjoys repeatedly transversing its circle) point in this direction, suggesting that the answer to the standard critical question ― “Why does the dialectical process always go on? Why does dialectical mediation always continue its work?” ― is precisely the eppur si muove of the pure drive. 495
This structure of negativity also accounts for the quasi-“automatic” character of the dialectical process, for the common reproach concerning its “mechanical” character: belying all the assurances that dialectics is open to the true life of reality, the Hegelian dialectic is like a processing machine which indifferently swallows up and processes all possible contents, from nature to history, from politics to art, delivering them packaged in the same triadic form. 492
What further complicates the scheme are objects and signifiers which somehow overlap with their own lack: for Lacan, the phallus is itself the signifier of castration (this introduces all the paradoxes of the signifier of the lack of signifier, of how the lack of a signifier is itself “remarked” in a signifier of this lack), not to mention l’objet petit a,;the object-cause of desire which is nothing but the embodiment of lack, its place-holder. The relationship between object and lack is here turned around: far from lack being reducible to the lack of an object, the object itself is a spectral positivization of a lack. And one has to extrapolate this mechanism into the very (pre-)ontological foundation of all being: the primordial gesture of creation is not that of an excessive giving, of assertion, but a negative gesture of withdrawal, of subtracting, which alone opens up the space for the creation of positive entities. This is how “there is something rather than nothing”: in order to arrive at something, one has to subtract from nothing its nothing(ness) itself, that is, one has to posit the primordial pre-ontological Abyss “as such,” as nothing, so that, in contrast to (or against the background of) nothing, something can appear.
What precedes Nothing is less than nothing, the pre-ontological multiplicity whose names range from Democritus’s den to Lacan’s objet a,. The space of this pre-ontological multiplicity is not between Nothing and Something (more than nothing but less than something); den is, on the contrary, more than Something but less than Nothing. The relationship between these three basic ontological terms―Nothing, Something, den―thus takes the form of a paradoxical circle, like Escher’s famous drawing of the interconnected waterfalls forming a circular perpetuum mobile: Something is more than Nothing, den is more than Something (the objet a is in excess with regard to the consistency of Something, the surplus-element which sticks out), and Nothing is more than den (which is “less than nothing”). 495
The underlying problem here is to determine which of the Freudian negations is the primordial one―which one opens up the space for all the others. From the Lacanian perspective, the most obvious candidate may appear to be the notorious “symbolic castration,” the loss which opens up and sustains the space of symbolization―recall, in relation to the Name-of-the-Father as the bearer of symbolic castration, how Lacan, as we have seen, plays on the French homophony between le Nom-du-Père and le Non-du-Père. But it seems more productive to follow a more radical path of thinking beyond the father (père) to what is even worse (pire). Again, the most obvious candidate for this “worse” is the (death) drive, a kind of Freudian correlate of what Schelling called the primordial “contraction,” an obstinate repetitive fixation on a contingent object which subtracts the subject from its direct immersion in reality. 495
Ž and Badiou
This essay is located here However I think this is basically his essay in Hallward’s Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy 2004
Insofar as, for Badiou, the science of love – this fourth, excessive, truth-procedure – is psychoanalysis, one should not be surprised to find that Badiou’s relationship with Lacan is the nodal point of his thought. How, exactly, does Badiou’s philosophy relate to Lacan’s theory? One should begin by unequivocally stating that Badiou is right in rejecting Lacan’s “anti-philosophy.” In fact, when Lacan endlessly varies the motif of how philosophy tries to “fill in the holes,” to present a totalizing view of the universe, to cover up all the gaps, ruptures and inconsistencies (say, in the total self-transparency of self-consciousness), and how, against philosophy, psychoanalysis asserts the constitutive gap/rupture/inconsistency, etc.etc., he simply misses the point of what the most fundamental philosophical gesture is: not to close the gap, but, on the contrary, to OPEN UP a radical gap in the very edifice of the universe, the “ontological difference,” the gap between the empirical and the transcendental, where none of the two levels can be reduced to the other (as we know from Kant, transcendental constitution is a mark of our – human – finitude and has nothing to do with “creating reality”; on the other hand, reality only appears to us within the transcendental horizon, so we cannot generate the emergence of the transcendental horizon from the ontic self-development of reality). 3
This general statement does not allow us to dispense with the work of a more detailed confrontation. It was Bruno Bosteels who provided the hitherto most detailed account of the difference between Badiou’s and the Lacanian approach. What the two approaches share is the focus on the shattering encounter of the Real: on the “symptomal torsion” at which the given symbolic situation breaks down. What, then, happens at this point of the intrusion of utmost negativity?
According to Badiou, the opposition is here the one between impasse and passe.
For Lacan, the ultimate authentic experience (the “traversing of fantasy”) is that of fully confronting the fundamental impasse of the symbolic order; this tragic encounter of the impossible Real is the limit-experience of a human being: one can only sustain it, one cannot force a passage through it. The political implications of this stance are easily discernible: while Lacan enables us to gain an insight into the falsity of the existing State, this insight is already “it,” there is no way to pass through it, every attempt to impose a new order is denounced as illusory: “From the point of the real as absent cause, indeed, any ordered consistency must necessarily appear to be imaginary insofar as it conceals this fundamental lack itself.” Is this not the arch-conservative vision according to which, the ultimate truth of being is the nullity of every Truth, the primordial vortex which threatens to draw us into its abyss? All we can do, after this shattering insight, is to return to the semblance, to the texture of illusions which allow us to temporarily avoid the view of the terrifying abyss, humbly aware of the fragility of this texture… While, for Lacan, Truth is this shattering experience of the Void – a sudden insight into the abyss of Being, “not a process so much as a brief traumatic encounter, or illuminating shock, in the midst of common reality” -, for Badiou, Truth is what comes afterward: the long arduous work of fidelity, of enforcing a new law onto the situation. 5 The choice is thus: “whether a vanishing apparition of the real as absent cause (for Lacan) or a forceful transformation of the real into a consistent truth (for Badiou)”:
is Lacan really unable to think a procedure which gives being to the very lack? Is this not the work of sublimation? Does sublimation not precisely “give being to this very lack,” to the lack as/of the impossible Thing, insofar as sublimation is “an object elevated to the dignity of a Thing” (Lacan’s standard definition of sublimation from his Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis)? This is why Lacan links death drive and creative sublimation: death drive does the negative work of destruction, of suspending the existing order of Law, thereby as it were clearing the table, opening up the space for sublimation which can (re)starts the work of creation. Both Lacan and Badiou thus share the notion of a radical cut/rupture, “event,” encounter of the Real, which opens up the space for the work of sublimation, of creating the new order
taking deleuze from behind destitution concrete universal
Žižek. Organs without Bodies. Deleuze and Consequences. Routledge. 2004. (50-51)
Taking Deleuze from Behind
And, what is the Hegelian Begriff as opposed to the nominalist “notion,” the result of abstracting shared features from a series of particular objects?
Often, we stumble on a particular case that does not fully “fit” its universal species, that is “atypical”; the next step is to acknowledge that every particular is “atypical;’ that the universal species exists only in exceptions, that there is a structural tension between the Universal and the Particular.
At this point, we become aware that the Universal is no longer just an empty neutral container of its subspecies but an entity in tension with each and every one of its species. The universal Notion thus acquires a dynamics of its own. More precisely, the true Universal is this very antagonistic dynamics between the Universal and the Particular.
It is at this point that we pass from “abstract” to “concrete” Universal — at the point when we acknowledge that every Particular is an “exception,” and, consequently, that the Universal, far from “containing” its particular content, excludes it (or is excluded by it).
This exclusion renders the Universal itself particular (it is not truly universal, since it cannot grasp or contain the particular content), yet this very failure is its strength: the Universal is thus simultaneously posited as the Particular.
The supreme political case of such a gesture is the moment of revolutionary “councils” taking over – the moment of “ahistorical” collective freedom, of “eternity in time;’ of what Benjamin called “dialectic in suspense. ” Or, as Alain Badiou would have put it in his Platonic terms, in such historical moments, the eternal Idea of Freedom appears/transpires.
Even if its realization is always “impure,” one should stick to the eternal Idea, which is not just a “generalization” of particular experiences of freedom but their inherent Measure.
(To which, of course, Hegel would have retorted that the Thermidor occurs because such a direct actualization of freedom has to appear as Terror.)
One should insert this appearance of Freedom into the series of exceptional temporalities, together with the Messianic time first formulated by Paul — the time when “the end is near: the time of the end of time (as Giorgio Agamben puts it) when, in an ontological “state of emergency;’ one should suspend one’s full identification with one’s sociosymbolic identity and act as if this identity is unimportant, a matter of indifference.
(This exceptional temporality is to be strictly distinguished from the ecstatic-carnivalesque suspension of Order in which things are turned upside-down in a generalized orgy.)
136-7 neighbor plea for ethical violence butler Ž
Slavoj, Žižek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence.” The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard. 2006. 134-190.
To play this game to the end, when the Wolf Man “regressed” to the traumatic scene that determined his further psychic development—witnessing the parental coitus a tergo — the solution would be to rewrite this scene, so that what the Wolf Man effectively saw was merely his parents lying on the bed, father reading a newspaper and mother a sentimental novel?
Ridiculous as this procedure may appear, let us not forget that it also has its politically correct version, that of the ethnic, sexual, and so on minorities rewriting their past in a more positive, self-asserting vein (African-Americans claiming that long be-fore European modernity, ancient African empires already had highly developed science and technology, etc.). … What disappears in this total availability of the past to its subsequent retroactive rewriting are not primarily the “hard facts,” but the Real of a traumatic encounter whose structuring role in the subject’s psychic economy forever resists its symbolic rewriting.
The ultimate irony is that this “critique of ethical violence” is some-times even linked to the Nietzschean motif of moral norms as imposed by the weak on the strong, thwarting their life-assertiveness: moral sensitivity, bad conscience, and guilt feeling are internalized resistances to the heroic assertion of Life. For Nietzsche, such “moral sensitivity” culminates in the contemporary Last Man who fears excessive intensity of life as something that may disturb his search for “happiness” without stress, and who, for this very reason, rejects “cruel” imposed moral norms as a threat to his fragile balance.
No wonder, then, that the latest version of the critique of ethical violence was proposed by Judith Butler, whose last book, although it does not mention Badiou, is de facto a kind of anti-Badiou manifesto: hers is an ethics of finitude, of making a virtue out of our very weakness, in other words, of elevating into the highest ethical value the respect for our very inability to act with full responsibility. The question one should ask concerns the limits of this operation.
Butler describes how, in every narrative account of myself, I have to submit myself to the foreign temporality of my language tradition and thus have to accept my radical decenterment. The irony of this description is that Butler, the sharp critic of Lacan, renders here (a somewhat simplified version of) what Lacan calls “symbolic castration,” the subject’s constitutive alienation in the decentered symbolic order.
Is, then, the subject totally determined by the signifying structure, or does it dispose of a margin of freedom? In order to account for this resistance to the rule of symbolic norms, Butler turns to Foucault: norms rule only insofar as they are practiced by subjects, and the subject disposes here of a minimum of freedom to arrange itself with these norms, to subvert them, to (re)inscribe them in different modes, and so on.
Lacan, on the contrary, allows for a much stronger subjective autonomy: insofar as the subject occupies the place of the lack in the Other (symbolic order), it can perform separation (the operation which is the opposite of alienation), and suspend the reign of the big Other, in other words, separate itself from it. 137
🙂 Ž doesn’t go anywhere with this last point. He says Lacan, contra Butler, allows for a strong subjective autonomy. Ok. So? This is the one and only time he speaks of separation.