badiou – Page 9 – objet (a)

Johnston Interview

“Materialism, Subjectivity and the Outcome of French Philosophy” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, 7:1 2011, 167-181.

Interview with Adrian Johnston by Michael Burns & Brian Smith (University of Dundee)

[…]

Now, this is not a criticism that’s unique to me. Both Žižek and Badiou have complained about this as well, and I think that there’s a middle path here that needs to be staked out. You have, for instance, the anti-scientism of much of 20th-century continental philosophy, especially with orientations like post-Marxist critical theory where a whole number of epistemological and ontological babies are thrown out with the bath water. The sciences are complicit with these very problematic, lamentable developments in the political and social registers, and therefore they have to be thoroughly critiqued, or we should find a way of sidelining them due to their complicity with a number of socio-political developments in the past century that are indeed to be bemoaned. I think that’s too ‘all or nothing.’

Our options seem to be either:

– an excessive over emphasis on the political that leads to a lot of very contentious, if not outright false, claims about disciplines like the sciences;

– or, at the other extreme, what I see in some of speculative realism, where issues in epistemology and ontology are dealt with in a vacuum.

Again, I come back to Hegel, with his manner of looking at all these things as interlinked moments of each other. He is not necessarily committed to some sort of organic system on the basis of that, but, nonetheless, one very much has the sense of the conjunctual status of these things, how they are co-articulated with each other; or, as Badiou would put it, philosophy as looking at the manner in which its conditions cross-resonate with one another and are involved in constellations of compossibility. That, for me, is a key middle path, whether one thinks of it in Hegelian or Badiouian terms, and I think that you see deviations on either side. Both speculative realism and, for instance, McDowell’s Pittsburgh Neo-Hegelianism, represent one kind of apolitical extreme, but something like Frankfurt School critical theory represents a deviation in the opposite direction where everything is political, and politics is so primary that it just blocks out of the picture very important philosophical considerations, again, of a more epistemological and ontological sort.

I see speculative realism as maybe an overreaction, in a certain way. It is an attempt to go back to being able to do philosophy without always conducting our thought under the shadow of things like the catastrophe of World War II, looking at rationally administered societies, etc.; we realize that, no, there are things here which can’t just be lumped in with those sets of considerations and quickly dismissed.

[…]

BS: So you’ve given us a negative critique of those positions. I want to move on to your positive construction of the subject. But I still want to talk about it in terms of reductionism. You are interested in the idea of the more than material subject as coming from a material base, but also at the same time it is influenced from above, where you draw on the symbolic in Lacan. So the subject is between these two sides. For you, is the subject a point of resistance against two potential reductive strategies: between a reduction to a material base, but also a similar kind of reduction, which would be to say that the subject is nothing more than a component of the social as a whole?

AJ: Absolutely. I fully endorse that reading of what I’m up to, or after, and it’s a wonderfully clear and succinct way of translating what in some of my earlier work I’ve talked about in Lacanian parlance in terms of the subject as occupying a point of overlap between points of inconsistency within the registers of the Real and the Symbolic, in that you have corresponding to Lacan’s barred big ‘O’ Other in terms of the internally inconsistent symbolic order, you also have at the same time this barred Real, which would be the idea of the internal inconsistency, in this case, picking up on only select facets of the Lacanian Real, that material an sich is itself inconsistent. It’s thanks to the meeting up of these two points of inconsistency that you have the fullest most robust sense of subjectivity that I think is very much at stake in Lacanian and post-Lacanian variants of materialism.

[…]

I think that one of the key differences is that part of what I’m after, and this is one of the things that I take from Žižek, is a commitment to the German Idealist traditon. If one wanted to paint in the broadest of broad brush strokes, one can say that the lowest common denominator of Kantian and post-Kantian German idealism is this notion of autonomous subjectivity, and, of course, this philosophical tradition sees itself as the cultural codification and consolidation of the French Revolution, among other things. This emphasis, then, on freedom as absolutely privileged is something which I very much agree with, and in this case, of course, there’s a real tension between myself and the background that I come out of (involving, among other things, German idealism as well as Žižek’s thought) and someone like Harman; one of the things that is clearly part of the agenda of the wing of speculative realism that he represents is this anti-anthropocentrism, this wanting to argue against human privilege: we’re not exceptional we’re just a certain weird set of objects amongst others and so on and so forth. Going back to Mike’s question, with which we began, I explicitly endorse the emphasis on the peculiarity of the human that goes back to Pico della Mirandola’s C15th Ode to the Dignity of Man and look at that as really the earliest precursor of the certain aspect of the theory of subjectivity that I wish to defend, and I do think that there is something odd, exceptional, whatever adjective you wish to use, about us. In fact, for me, we’re so strange that to do justice to the sorts of subjects that we are requires modifying our more global picture of being or nature, in order to consider ourselves as immanent to it.

That, or course, sets me very much at odds with the object-oriented camp in that I think that we are exceptional, and that we are exceptional in a way that has to do with freedom, with the fact that weird structures of reflexivity or recursion are very much an essential part of the structure of our subjectivity in a way in which prevents us then being collapsed down to a flat plane within which we’re just arrayed with other objects, with no acknowledgment or concession that there is some sort of fundamental difference-in-kind, or some sort of free-standing status that is established that makes a subject something which can’t just be considered an object. That, I think, is absolutely essential to my approach. This insistence, then, that autonomy is a key component of subjectivity, albeit an autonomy that is immanently emergent out of this level of being, or matter, or even objects, that then comes to establish itself as thereafter a sort of self-grounded auto-reflexively relating set of structures or processes, which you can’t do full justice to if you don’t recognize the kind of self-enclosure that is established in the constitution of the subject out of this pre- or non-subjective background–that to me is the big difference between myself and someone like Harman. As I might put it somewhat provocatively, I’m just not enough of a self-hating human. It’s what Freud would call moral masochism. I recently wrote an extended critique of Bill Connolly’s immanent naturalism and Jane Bennett’s vital materialism. With both of them, their ecologically-informed political stances drive their anti-humanism, their new version of what was already part of French philosophy with figures like Deleuze. For Hegelian reasons, I believe, as Hegel famously puts it in the1807 Phenomenology, one always has to think of substance also as subject, something that the Spinozism embraced by Connolly and Bennett deliberately avoids and forbids.

BS: That affirmation really reminds one of Sartre. I was wondering to what extent there would be an agreement between you and Sartre? When I read the Critique of Dialectical Reason, the main point that Sartre returns to endlessly throughout both volumes is how there is no group subject. The individual is never dissolved within a group. Would you agree with that, as Sartre does, in the sense that it’s just structurally impossible for that to happen or would you perhaps argue that it’s a real threat that the subject faces and has to resist?

AJ: I am initially tempted to try and find a way to have my cake and eat it too, with regards to the two alternatives that you propose. One thing I greatly appreciated about the event at Dundee was that Sartre came up several times. There was a recognition that though he had fallen out of fashion for quite some time among the Anglo-American world of scholars interested in French philosophy, where Sartre really was deemed passé in part because, I think, he was seen to be too close to more traditional conceptions of subjectivity, going back to the modern period, which he’s unapologetic about. His emphasis on radical freedom was considered to be too voluntarist, decisionist, etc. I’m delighted to see that interest in his work is reviving.

Badiou wants to combine the figures he identifies as his three French masters: Sartre, Althusser and Lacan–with Lacan already trying to combine aspects, arguably, of Sartre and Althusser, even if Lacan was not always aware of being up to that, in those terms. I’m very much in favour of struggling toward some way of integrating those two sides, and a lot of my own work is striving for that sort of rapprochement between what Sartre represents, on the one hand, and what Althusser represents, on the other.

Badiou does an admirable job of attempting to construct a theory of subjectivity at the intersection of those figures, and I appreciate some of the more Sartrean sides of him which often draw criticism. But, I’ve defended that part of his project in print. I am very sympathetic to the project Peter Hallward, another speaker at the Dundee event, is working out under the heading of «dialectical voluntarism,» which involves, among other things, reactivating Sartre and emphasizing the more Sartrean side of Badiou as crucial today. But, on the one hand, I think there are certain dimensions of subjectivity that are structurally irreducible to trans-individual group level phenomena or processes, in the way that you articulated it as per the first alternative of the two you presented me with in your question.

Also, I think that even if there’s something there that’s ineliminable, nevertheless, especially at the level of our experience of ourselves, in our practices, there can be the threat of, at least experientially, irreducibility being occluded, lost from view–a sense of dissolution or of being leveled down, reduced away, taken up without remainder into these non- or anti-individual matrices. I think that’s certainly a danger and a lot of how we position ourselves could be seen as a reaction to that threat. Even if it can’t, in the end, just do away with it structurally, it can so eclipse it from view that de facto it might as well, for all intents and purposes, be an elimination along those lines.

In the background are some dawning problems with different uses of the word «subject.» There’s a great deal of work to be done in terms of disambiguating certain terms that have been made to carry so much weight and have been loaded with so many different significations and connotations that sometimes we end up in debates with each other that are false debates, I think. For instance, the Badiou-verses-Žižek debate about subjectivity is a false conflict that’s based upon the fact that you have different parties using the word «subject» in different ways, and that if you start doing some labour of disambiguation you realize that there’s not necessarily the impasse or direct conflict that’s seen to be there, when we were fighting this semantic tug-of-war over this single word. So, this is as much a call to myself as to anyone else, since I use figures like Badiou and Žižek together, and draw on other resources and other traditions that speak of subjectivity. I do think we’re going to have to begin doing some labour to take that single word and tease out of it the different levels and layers that have been compressed into it. Hyper-compression has created, in some cases, false problems. We shouldn’t be spending our time mired in these false debates, but, instead, figuring out where the genuine bones of contention lie.

BS: So, for example, the way that you discuss the subject in Žižek and Lacan is closer to the individual in Badiou’s philosophy as opposed to the subject?

AJ: Yes, although both Slavoj and I are very adamant that one of the things that’s missing from Badiou is that you have the stark contrast between, on the one hand, the individual, the mere miserable human animal, and, on the other hand, you have the post-evental immortal subject that’s faithful to a given evental truth cause.

There’s this missing third dimension in Badiou, which would be what Žižek is after in many cases when he talks about subjectivity in terms of the Lacanian subject as a radicalization of the Freudian death drive, which itself captures what the German idealists were after, especially Hegel, when speaking of negativity. For both Žižek and myself there’s a lot that’s involved in this third dimension, which makes possible the shift from the mere creature wrapped up in interests of self-preservation, of pleasure, etc., and the possibility of what Badiou speaks of as subjectivity, this thorough-going fidelity that breaks with that animal background. Staking out that middle ground as what Žižek has called a vanishing mediator between these different dimensions is important to me.

[…]

Brassier is one of my closest fellow travellers in that both of us are adamant that modern science is not something to be held warily at arms length or even aggressively checked externally from the standpoint of philosophy; he and I agree that, instead, we need to, as many of the analytics have done, embrace the sciences, really accept that they are a fundamental part of our Weltanschauung and seek in them resources as opposed to problematic points to be resisted, criticized, rejected, etc. For me, the balancing act of my position, where I think it represents an alternative, is that, on the one hand, it involves concurring with Brassier that there is something fundamental about the sciences and that the progress we make in those disciplines cannot be ignored save for at the price of some kind of irresponsible intellectual bankruptcy; but, on the other hand, I don’t think that those sciences necessarily produce, in fact I think they point in the opposite direction, they don’t produce a reductive picture where everything can be explained from within the sciences themselves. I think that the sciences are showing how you can scientifically explain why everything can’t be explained scientifically, as it were. This goes back to that Hegelian phenomenological gesture in the section on ‘Observing Reason’ in the Phenomenology of Spirit that the sciences produce out of themselves, on their own grounds, an internal delimitation of their explanatory jurisdictions. You can say that you have an empirical explanatory ground for why an empirical experimental approach can’t account for everything that you’re after, which is different from just dogmatically insisting what ultimately would have to come down to a kind of a priori theoretical dogmatism, a sort that I don’t think is very defensible, for example, simply saying,“No, there’s this dimension which can’t be reduced down to that level and that’s it.” I think that to have a scientific account for why you can’t reduce everything to the sciences is a way to get what you want, for instance, to keep what, I will concede, for instance, religion, various kinds of theological approaches are describing, things that are there, I think, albeit in a very distorted form or in a kind of dualistic or anti-reductivitst stance. I think you can get all of that without having to fall back on what, in my view, are very shaky, a priori, foot-stamping, fist-banging sorts of postulates or insistences that are threatened by the sciences. My position sounds like having your cake and eating it too, but I do think that there are good scientific supports for the idea that a subject that is not itself capturable by the sciences emerges out of what the sciences are looking at, and I think that those disciplines themselves are providing the resources for that account, which I seek to harness in this very Hegelian way too, of stepping back and just allowing those disciplines to unfold their own resources and then, as Hegel put it, recollecting the results. But, of course, the picture that emerges is different from what a lot of people who aren’t sympathetic to this approach would think, which is that in the end you’re still going to fall into something like eliminative, or reductive materialism. I don’t think so.

BS: So, you think, in a sense, this divergence that you get between the subject’s actual behaviour and our explanation of that behaviour, via the best current scientific model, can be given a positive account? We are not limited to a simple negative account of qthis divergence, in terms of the weaknesses or flaws of our current, incomplete, science? This irreducibility can be accounted for in a positive sense, and that’s the role of philosophy, to try and give a positive account of the way in which science and subjectivity will never completely coincide and merge?

AJ: Absolutely.Even though Badiou and I disagree about the nature and status of the sciences and scientificity, nonetheless, in terms of certain aspects of my approach, I’m deeply indebted to him. I come back to this idea of philosophy’s role as putting certain of its conditions in cross-resonating relationship with each other and exploring their compossibility, and so one of the features of my work that sometimes gets more attention than others is the fact that I draw on resources from the natural sciences generally, and the life sciences especially. For me, it’s never just a matter of fixating upon those disciplines, it’s about trying to see how those disciplines become self-sundering, reaching this point where they’re beginning to demarcate their own boundaries. That calls for work from other sides too., How are certain resources from philosophy, psychoanalysis, political theory, etc. necessarily part of this picture as well, and how do we then start constructing the links between those different domains and developments? That’s very much what I’m after. There are important contributions that, for example, a Lacanian psychoanalytic framework brings. It’s not that we have to, in a one-way fashion, rework Lacanian psychoanalysis, rework the various philosophers and philosophical orientations that I’m talking about, due to these sciences. It’s also an issue of asking: how do we have to modify these sciences, or how would their research programmes have to alter, in light of key contributions from philosophy and psychoanalysis? The sciences have, in some cases, vindicated us, and it’s not just a matter of us having to make concessions to them; that’s part of the rhetoric I was deploying at the end of my talk last year in Dundee. The dialectical sword slices both ways. The sciences have reached the point where they are going to have to accept that their interpretations of their data and their research programmes require significant modification in light of the contributions, for the past two centuries, we’ve been making on the philosophical side of things.

BS: Isn’t one of the deepest ways in which that comes out is that for any reductive programme in science, and some other traditional approaches in science, there is the fundamental belief that the Real, or Nature, is in some sense consistent. Whereas what you’ve always been talking about, in the psychoanalytic aspect of your work, is precisely that the Real, or Nature, or whatever you want to call it, is not consistent, and it’s that which is going to be the fundamental shift from the point of view of science in its relation to philosophy.

AJ: Yes, and there’s a lot of work to be done in this regard. In addition to McDowell, one of the other key figures who features in a piece I recently finished is the London School of Economics’ philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright. I think her work is very important. She’s published a number of books, but the text that is really invaluable for my purposes, although it builds on earlier work of hers, is the 1999 book The Dappled World: A Study in the Boundaries of Science. On the basis of considerations internal to much more analytically orientated philosophy of science, she argues for a vision of Nature as a de-totalized jumble of constituents that are not bound together by some sort of seamless underlying fundamental unity. She pleads for that very much on strict philosophy of science grounds, claiming that if you’re an empiricist and realist, then the weight of the evidence should lead you to gamble in the opposite direction, not to invest your faith in what is a metaphysical article of faith regarding the ultimate unity, homogeneity, and seamlessness of reality, its reducibility to basic fundamental laws. Keep in mind that this is an article of faith that in practice is unprovable, even if all humanity for the rest of our existence were to spend its time crunching data; we would never get to the point where we would be able to take just a one-minute slice of the behavior of a mid-sized perceivable organism, like another human being or even a smaller animal, to reduce everything down to, say, the quantum constituents of this organism, and then to show that there’s a seamless linkage that flows from the base up to the more complex aggregate levels that proves reductionism is right. Reductionism is a metaphysical article of faith, it’s a gamble, it’s a hypothesis. Even though a lot people want to be realist about it, at it’s strongest it’s just what Kant called a regulative ideal, and what he calls specifically in the Prolegomena the cosmological idea of reason as a regulative ideal for natural scientific practice. It might be a good heuristic device and I think it does have its value, at that level, but I think that one shouldn’t mistake a good heuristic device for a solid basis for an ontology. I think we’re much closer to what Cartwright calls “the dappled world” or what you point to, for which I use Lacanian and Badiouian language, when I speak of this not-One, non-All nature as our best picture of nature. I think that there are both psychoanalytic and philosophy of science considerations that show that there is better evidence for Cartwright’s dappled world, or for the de-totalized real of Lacan and Badiou. There’s even better evidence just looking at the state of the sciences and their historical achievements and lack of achievements than there is for the old reductivist dogma.

BS: Isn’t this the reversal of the standard interpretation of the consequences of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems? The orthodox response has been to affirm consistency at the expense of completeness, as opposed to affirming completeness at the expense of consistency, due, mainly, to equating inconsistency with incoherence?

AJ: That’s right. A colleague of mine here, Paul Livingston, who is a person who does very interesting cross tradition work between the analytic and continental, has a book coming out entitled The Politics of Logic. The two main figures he discusses are Wittgenstein and Badiou. In addressing Badiou, Livingston goes back to how Gödel condenses in a very clear way this fundamental set of alternatives involving consistency: you have consistency but at the price of completeness. The alternative that you point to he very clearly lays out. We’ve had conversations about this, and he even noticed in some of my earlier work I run the terms «inconsistency» and «incompleteness» together, and that’s something I’m in the process of rethinking in the light of his work, because he did a lot of work in mathematics and analytical philosophy and logic, and he’s now turned his attention to Badiou. If you’re also already sensitive to these issues in terms of these sets of alternatives that are forced upon us with a real reckoning with Gödel, I think that this work by Livingston will be quite good. Livingston quite rightly identified that I tend to go for exactly what you were talking about there: a totality that is an inconsistent totality. That’s very much what I’m after, and, of course, it’s what you have in Hegel and Žižek as well, I think; you can see a definite chaining together of positions in terms of a chain of equivalence that represents something fundamental to our approaches despite whatever other differences you might isolate.

MB: We’re curious to ask where you see philosophy going in the next few years, with particular reference to how both European and Anglo-American philosophers are returning to Hegel and idealism in general, as a general resource. What do you see as the crucial philosophical questions for the current generation?

AJ: I’ve got to say I think this is one of the most exciting times to be in philosophy, despite, of course, the job market. You have the combination of absolutely brutal practical circumstances of the most depressing sort, but simultaneously some of the most promising work being done alongside this, in these circumstances. As critical as I am, for instance, of certain aspects of speculative realism, or other recent orientations, nonetheless I’m delighted to see these things happening. There’s a greater awareness of serious problems that were eclipsed from view due to certain dominant trends and obsessions in much of what counted for continental philosophy, especially in the Anglo-American world, throughout a good portion of the middle to late 20th century.

In large part thanks to Badiou and Žižek, there has been a really interesting break with the phenomenological and post-phenomenological developments that held such sway, and were so glaringly front and centre in terms of English-speaking work, in continental philosophy. What’s followed holds out the promise for a number of different new alliances between the kind of philosophical traditions we come out of and fields such as the sciences, but also, of course, analytic philosophy. One of the things that causes the analytic and continental traditions to separate from each other and become opposed stances is the disputed status of Hegel’s philosophy. In the beginning of the 20th century you have Russell and company in reaction to the excesses of late 19th century British Hegelianism: they reject Hegel completely, utterly break with him, in the same way that Descartes did with the scholastics. For most analytic philosophers who are around even today, their history of philosophy training involved going as far as P. F. Strawson’s Kant and then leaping over everything for about a century and landing with Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein at the start of the 20th century, maybe a little Meinong before that, but that’s it. And, of course, Hegel was cut out of that picture. For all my reservations about Pittsburgh-style Neo-Hegelianism, I see it as one of the most promising developments in terms of overcoming analytical/continental divides involving using Hegel as providing a lingua franca in which we can begin having conversations with each other that we haven’t been able to have up until this point, given that the continental tradition is so deeply indebted to Hegel and to what he opens up in a number of ways. I’m very interested in reaching out and engaging with figures on the analytic side. One of the problems I have with a lot of speculative realism is, again, the people interested in it have not had any exposure or any serious sustained exposure to the analytic tradition, and therefore fail to realize what resources are out there in terms of people who’ve been working on the realism/anti-realism problem, issues having to do with scientific law and the status of causality, etc. You have just this wealth of material that’s yet to be fully tapped and that would allow for a lot of cross-fertilization.

One of the things I hope that’s going to happen is that the younger generation of people working in continental philosophy will be able to begin dissolving these long-standing disciplinary divides, not just by simply continuing to present the material they’ve been doing, but dipping into the wealth of material, the resources that are there, for instance, in the analytic tradition. That idea of bringing the strengths of both sides together is one thing I’m very hopeful for and that I’m now beginning to try to do myself in a more sustained fashion.

MB: Thus far your own work and your two most recent manuscripts have been focused on Zizek and Badiou, and I think something that’s differentiated your work from other people writing on Zizek and Badiou is that in both of these works a position seems to emerge that’s neither Zizek or Badiou but rather your own position and your own sort of constructive work. So where is your research and your project going, and what can we expect to see in the future from Adrian Johnston?

AJ: At this point, I’m writing the second volume of a two-volume materialism project. The first volume is entitled Alain Badiou and the Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy: From Lacan to Meillassoux, casting Badiou in the position of Feuerbach à la Engels’ 1888 Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. Volume one is a kind of ground-clearing operation. I hope I’ve already settled my debts with Žižek, who, of course, I feel very close to in certain ways. But there are other figures, who I consider to be intellectual neighbours in relation to whom I feel very proximate and yet disagree stringently with on certain key points; these others are Lacan, Badiou, and Meillassoux. So, I settle my differences with them in the first volume as a way to set up the second volume, which is where I delineate what I’m after in its fullest form in terms of what I call transcendental materialism.

It will probably take me about another year to complete the second volume. Another forthcoming project is this book I co-authored with Catherine Malabou, which is now entitled Self and Emotional Life: Merging Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neurobiology. My portion of that involves looking at the vexing Freudian-Lacanian problem of affects in relation to the unconscious and re-evaluating that in light of the resources of contemporary affective neuroscience. Those are the things that are on the chopping block.

rothenberg Žižek universality

The truth is partial: Imagine a blue light shining from an invisible source on a room full of differently colored materials: the blue light has no visible presence in the air, but a white curtain will appear blue, a red wall will appear purple, and so forth. The same invisible force creates different effects. This is why Žižek can say that every element in the situation (which is itself shaped by some determining but hidden Real) “takes its own side” with respect to it. 162

The retroversion in Badiou’s model concerns the construction of a space and a vocabulary that could make visible what was overlooked in teh original situation — an occulted egalitarian dimension — but this dimension is posited (and glimpsed in the event) rather than achieved. To take an example from Badiou’s own political efforts, the sans-papiers, foreign workers in France, are recognized in the current political situation only as “immigrants,” not as productive workers. The “encyclopedia” of the French (and arguable Western) situation has no term for these people that would bring to light their status as workers, that is, as having the same properties, necessary to France, as any other worker. The specifically political nature of the Badiouan act is a function of working towards realizing this occulted egalitarian dimension, a dimension which we prescribe. Badiou emphasizes repeated that one’s efforts to work to reveal equality should continue regardless of any apparent lack of success. 163

Universality based on the excess generated by the formal negation does not depend upon finding a common ontic property, that is a property which is just one more difference within the situation. All such properties can be used to name differences that are mobilized in the game of hegemony, empty spaces, and master-signifiers, as we have seen in the discussion of Laclau’s political thought. Only the minimal self-difference (described as the radical antagonism cutting across every element) escapes this play of signifiers, existing in an extimate relation to the situation, rather than in its encyclopedia. This self-difference or (self-)antagonism subsists (ex-sists, Lacan would say, to emphasize its extimacy) as the hidden dimension. … Žižek goes on to argue … admonishing Laclau … for ultimately recasting antagonism as agonism, that is, as differences among self-same elements in the social field (Iraq Kettle 90 cited in Rothenberg 164)

Žižek 2 impossibilities

Only communism can save liberal democracy
Slavoj Žižek ABC Religion and Ethics 3 Oct 2011

Liberalism and fundamentalism form a single whole: liberalism generates its opposite. The paradox is that liberalism itself is not strong enough to save itself against the fundamentalist onslaught.

[…] the reaction to the inability of the Welfare State to deliver will be Rightist populism. In order to avoid this reaction, the Left will have to propose its own positive project beyond the confines of the Social-Democratic Welfare State.

This is why it is totally erroneous to pin our hopes on strong Nation-States, which can defend the acquisitions of the Welfare State, against trans-national bodies like the European Union, which, so the story goes, serve as the instruments of the global capital to dismantle whatever remained of the Welfare State. From here, it is only a short step to accept the “strategic alliance” with the nationalist Right worried about the dilution of national identity in trans-national Europe.

One should add here that Badiou in no way secretly or openly prefers the police party-State to the State of Law: he states that it is fully legitimate to prefer the State of Law to the police party-State; he draws here another key distinction:

“The trap would be to imagine that this preference, which concerns the objective history of the State, is really a subjective political decision.”

What he means by “subjective political decision” is the authentic collective engagement along the Communist lines: such an engagement is not “opposed” to parliamentary democracy, it simply moves at a radically different level – that is, in it political engagement is not limited to the singular act of voting, but implies a much more radical continuous “fidelity” to a Cause, a patient collective “work of love.”

Today, when the democratic honeymoon is definitely over, this lesson is more actual than ever: what Badiou put in theoretical terms is confirmed by daily experience of the majority of ordinary people: the collapse of Communist regimes in 1989 was no Event in the sense of a historical break, of giving birth to something New in the history of emancipation.

After this supposed break, things just returned to their capitalist normality, so that we have the same passage from the enthusiasm of freedom to the rule of profit and egotism described already by Marx in his analysis of the French Revolution.

The ruling ideology is, of course, well aware of this gap, and its reply is “maturity”: one should get rid of utopian hopes which can only end up in totalitarianism and accept the new capitalist reality. The tragedy is that some Leftists subscribe to this judgment.

Alain Badiou described three distinct ways for a revolutionary – or radical emancipatory – movements to fail.

— First, there is, of course, a direct defeat: one is simply crushed by the enemy forces.

— Second, there is defeat in the victory itself: one wins over the enemy (temporarily, at least) by way of taking over the main power-agenda of the enemy (the goal is simply to seize state power, either in the parliamentary-democratic way or in a direct identification of the Party with the State).

— third, perhaps most authentic, but also most terrifying, form of failure: guided by the correct instinct that every attempt to consolidate the revolution into a form of State power represents a betrayal of the revolution, but unable to invent and impose on social reality a truly alternative social order, the revolutionary movement engages in a desperate strategy of protecting its purity by the “ultra-leftist” resort to destructive terror.

Badiou aptly calls this last version the “sacrificial temptation of the void”:

“One of the great Maoist slogans from the red years was ‘Dare to fight, dare to win’. But we know that, if it is not easy to follow this slogan, if subjectivity is afraid not so much to fight but to win, it is because struggle exposes it to a simple failure (the attack didn’t succeed), while victory exposes it to the most fearsome form of failure: the awareness that one won in vain, that victory prepares repetition, restauration. That a revolution is never more than a between-two-States. It is from here that the sacrificial temptation of the void comes. The most fearsome enemy of the politics of emancipation is not the repression by the established order. It is the interiority of nihilism, and the cruelty without limits which can accompany its void.”

What Badiou is effectively saying here is the exact opposite of Mao’s “Dare to win!” – one should be afraid to win (to take power, to establish a new socio-political reality), because the lesson of the twentieth century is that victory either ends in restoration (return to the logic of State power) or gets caught in the infernal cycle of self-destructive purification.

This is why Badiou proposes to replace purification with subtraction: instead of “winning” (taking over power) one maintains a distance towards state power, one creates spaces subtracted from State. But does this not represent a kind of division of labour between the radical and the pragmatic Left?

Subtracting itself from State politics, the radical Left limits itself to assuming principled positions and bombarding the State with impossible demands, while the pragmatic Left makes a pact with the devil in the sense of Peter Mandelson’s admission that, when it comes to the economy, we are all Thatcherites.

Is Communism then simply “impossible” in the sense that it cannot be stabilized into a new order? Even Badiou presents the eternal “Idea of Communism” as something which returns again and again, from Spartacus and Thomas Munzer to Rosa Luxemburg and the Maoist Cultural Revolution – in other words, as something that fails again and again.

The term “impossible” should make us stop and think. Today, impossible and possible are distributed in a strange way, both simultaneously exploding into an excess.

On the one hand, in the domains of personal freedoms and scientific technology, the impossible is more and more possible (or so we are told): “nothing is impossible.” We can enjoy sex in all its perverse variations, entire archives of music, films and TV series are available for download. […]

On the other hand, especially in the domain of socio-economic relations, our era perceives itself as the era of maturity in which, with the collapse of Communist states, humanity has abandoned the old millenarian utopian dreams and accepted the constraints of reality (namely, the capitalist socio-economic reality) with all its impossibilities.

And so, today we cannot engage in large collective acts (which necessarily end in totalitarian terror), cling to the old Welfare State (it makes you non-competitive and leads to economic crisis), isolate yourself from the global market, and so on, and so on.

Distinguish between 2 impossibilities

It is crucial clearly to distinguish here between two impossibilities: the impossibility of a social antagonism and the impossibility on which the predominant ideological field focuses. Impossibility is here re-doubled, it serves as a mask of itself: the ideological function of the second impossibility is to obfuscate the real of the first impossibility.

Today, the ruling ideology endeavours to make us accept the “impossibility” of a radical change, of abolishing capitalism, of a democracy not constrained to parliamentary game, in order to render invisible the impossible/real of the antagonism which cuts across capitalist societies.

This real is impossible in the sense that it is the impossible of the existing social order – which, however, in no way implies that this real/impossible cannot be directly dealt with and radically transformed in a “crazy” act which changes the basic “transcendental” coordinates of a social field, an act which changes the very coordinates of what is possible and thus retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility.

This is why Communism concerns the Real: to act as a Communist means to intervene into the real of the basic antagonism which underlies today’s global capitalism.

In authentic Marxism, totality is not an ideal, but a critical notion – to locate a phenomenon in its totality does not mean to see the hidden harmony of the Whole, but to include into a system all its “symptoms,” antagonisms, inconsistencies, as its integral parts.

In this sense, liberalism and fundamentalism form a “totality”: the opposition of liberalism and fundamentalism is structured so that liberalism itself generates its opposite. So what about the core values of liberalism: freedom, equality, fraternity? The paradox is that liberalism itself is not strong enough to save them against the fundamentalist onslaught.

Fundamentalism is a reaction – a false, mystifying, reaction, of course – against a real flaw of liberalism, and this is why it is again and again generated by liberalism. Left to itself, liberalism will slowly undermine itself – the only thing that can save its core is a renewed Left.

In Western and Eastern Europe, there are signs of a long-term re-arrangement of the political space. Until recently, the political space was dominated by two main parties which addressed the entire electoral body: a Right-of-centre party (Christian-Democrat, or liberal-conservative) and a Left-of-centre party (socialist, social-democratic), with smaller parties addressing a narrow electorate (greens, liberals, etc.).

Now, there is progressively emerging one party which stands for global capitalism as such, usually with relative tolerance towards abortion, gay rights, religious and ethnic minorities; opposing this party is a stronger and stronger anti-immigrant populist party which, on its fringes, is accompanied by directly racist neo-Fascist groups.

The exemplary case is here Poland: after the disappearance of the ex-Communists, the main parties are the “anti-ideological” centrist liberal party of the Prime Minister Donald Dusk, and the conservative Christian party of Kaczynski brothers.

Silvio Berlusconi in Italy is a proof that even this ultimate opposition is not insurmountable: the same party, his Forza Italia, can be both the global-capitalist-party and integrate the populist anti-immigrant tendency.

In the de-politicized sphere of post-ideological administration, the only way to mobilize people is to awaken fear (from immigrants – that is, from the neighbour). To quote Gaspar Tamas, we are thus again slowly approaching the situation in which “there is no one between Tsar and Lenin” – in which the complex situation will be reduced to a simple basic choice: community or collective, Socialism or Communism.

To put it in the well-known terms from 1968, in order for its key legacy to survive, liberalism needs the brotherly help of the radical Left.

The task is thus to remain faithful to what Badiou calls the eternal Idea of Communism: the egalitarian spirit alive for thousands of years in revolts and utopian dreams, in radical movements from Spartacus to Thomas Muntzer up to some religions (Buddhism versus Hinduism, Daoism or Legalists versus Confucianism, and so on).

The problem is how to avoid the alternative of radical social explosions which end in defeat, unable to stabilize themselves in a new order, or of equality, but displaced to a domain outside social reality (in Buddhism we are all equal in nirvana).

It is here that the originality of the Western thought enters, in its three great historical ruptures: Greek philosophy breaking with the mythic universe; Christianity breaking with the pagan universe; modern democracy breaking with traditional authority.

In all these cases, the egalitarian spirit is transposed into a – limited, but nonetheless actual – new positive order.

In short, the wager of the Western thought is that radical negativity (whose first and immediate expression is egalitarian terror) is not condemned to remain a short ecstatic outburst after which things have to return to normal; on the contrary, radical negativity, this undermining of every traditional hierarchic order, can articulate itself in a new positive order in which it acquires the stability of a new form of life.

This is the meaning of the Holy Spirit in Christianity: faith can not only be expressed in, but exists as the collective of believers. This faith is in itself based on “terror” indicated by Christ’s words that he brings sword, not peace, that whoever doesn’t hate his father and mother is not his true follower – the content of this terror is the rejection of all traditional hierarchic community ties, with the wager that another collective link is possible based on this terror, an egalitarian link of believers connected by agape as political love.

Another example of such an egalitarian link based on terror is democracy itself. One should follow Claude Lefort’s description of democracy here: the democratic axiom is that the place of power is empty, that there is no one who is directly qualified for this post either by tradition, charisma, or his expert and leadership properties.

This is why, before democracy can enter the stage, terror has to do its work, forever dissociating the place of power from any natural or directly qualified pretender: the gap between this place and those who temporarily occupy it should be maintained at any cost.

But we can well imagine a democratic procedure maintaining the same gap on account of the irreducible moment of contingency in every electoral result: far from being its limitation, the fact that the elections do not pretend to select the most qualified person is what protects them from the totalitarian temptation – which is why, as it was clear already to the Ancient Greeks, the most democratic form of selecting who will rule us is by a lot.

That is to say, as Lefort has demonstrated, the achievement of democracy is to turn what is in traditional authoritarian power the moment of its greatest crisis, the moment of transition from one to another master when, for a moment, “the throne is empty,” which causes panic, into the very resort of its strength: democratic elections are the moment of passing through the zero-point when the complex network of social links is dissolved into purely quantitative multiplicity of individuals whose votes are mechanically counted.

The moment of terror, of the dissolution of all hierarchic links, is thus re-enacted and transformed into the foundation of a new and stable positive political order. Hegel is thus perhaps wrong in his fear of the direct universal democratic vote (see his nervous rejection of the English Reform Bill in 1831): it is precisely democracy which accomplishes the “magic” trick of converting the negativity (the self-destructive absolute freedom which coincides with the reign of terror) into a stable new political order: in democracy.

Once upon a time, we called this Communism. Why is its re-actualization so difficult to imagine today? Because we live in an era of naturalization: political decisions are as a rule presented as matters of pure economic necessity. For instance, when austerity measures are imposed, we are repeatedly told that this is simply what has to be done.

In May 2010 and again in June 2011, large demonstrations exploded in Greece after the government announced the austerity measures it has to adopt in order to meet the conditions of the European Union for the bailout money to avoid the state’s financial collapse.

One often hears that the true message of the Greek crisis is that not only Euro, but the project of the united Europe itself is dead. But before endorsing this general statement, one should add a Leninist twist to it: Europe is dead, OK, but – which Europe?

The answer is: the post-political Europe of accomodation to world market, the Europe which was repeatedly rejected at referendums, the Brussels technocratic-expert Europe. The Europe which presents itself as standing for the cold European reason against Greek passion and corruption, for mathematics against pathetics.

But, utopian as it may appear, the space is still open for another Europe, a re-politicized Europe, a Europe founded on a shared emancipatory project, a Europe that gave birth to ancient Greek democracy, to French and October revolutions.

This is why one should avoid the temptation to react to the ongoing financial crisis with a retreat to fully sovereign nation-states, easy preys of the freely-floating international capital which can play one state against the other.

More than ever, the reply to every crisis should be even more internationalist and universalist than the universality of global capital. The idea of resisting global capital on behalf of the defense of particular ethnic identities is more suicidal than ever, with the spectre of the North Korean juche idea lurking behind.

dean revolutionary desire vs. democratic drive 2

By Jodi Dean draft version that is not to be cited

I’ve argued that the sublimation of the drive captures the subject in the repetitive circuits of communicative capitalism. What’s left? A new, shifted, desire, one that recognizes the impossibility of reaching or achieving its object and holds on, refusing to cede it. … Zizek links this new desire to Lacan’s notion of the “desire of the analyst.” [Ticklish Subject 296 and Ecrits, ‘From the Freudian Trieb to the Desire of the Analyst”]

Such a desire is collective, sustaining a community even as it has moved past the need for some kind of phantasmic support. Collective, built around a lack, provides a common desire capable of breaking through the self-enclosed circuit of drive.

The part-of-no-part doesn’t designate a subset of persons, a “we” or a “concrete identity” that can be empirically indicated. It names the gap, division, or antagonism that marks the non-identity of any ordering with its own components. The Lacanian term for the part-of-no-part would then be objet petite a, an impossible, formal object produced as the excess of a process or relation, a kind of gap that incites or annoys, the missingness or not-quite-rightness that calls out to us.

So we have a rupture or a gap and the subjectification of this gap. But subjectification in what sense? There are different politicizations, different mobilizations and subjectifications that call out to and organize different convictions and interests.

The emphasis on the gap necessary for communist desire indexes the non-coincidence of communism with its setting, echoing Marxist themes of negation and affirming the communist legacy of revolution. Nonetheless, communism is not the only political ideology that mobilizes negation and revolution. In fact, it shares such a revolutionary mobilization of negation with capitalism itself, hence communism as the negation of the negation.

The difference in the way they subjectivize the gap, then, is crucial. Capitalist subjectification, the desire it structures and incites, is individual, (even as it tends to sublimate desire in drive, or, differently put, even as individuated desires get caught up in and give way to drive’s powerfully repetitive circuits). To invert Althusser, capitalism interpellates subjects as individuals. A communism that does likewise fails to effect a rupture or install a gap. Communist desire can only be collective.

In a setting of capitalism’s distractions and compulsions, one may very well feel like something is wrong, something is missing, something is deeply unfair. Then one might complicate this idea, or contextualize it, or forget about it and check email. Or one might try to make a difference—signing petitions, blogging, voting, doing one’s own part as an individual. And here is the problem, one continues to think and act individualistically. Under capitalist conditions, communist desire entails “the renunciation of individual freedom,” the deliberate and conscious subordination of self in and to a collective communist will. This subordination requires discipline, work, and organization. It is a process carried out over time and through collective struggle.
Indeed, it’s active collective struggle that changes and reshapes desire from its individual (and for Lukacs bourgeois and reified form) into a common, collective one.

In this provisional sketch of a theory of communist desire, I’ve emphasized the lack (the openness of desire) and its subjectification. I’ve argued that communist desire is the collective subjectification of the lack. It is a collective assumption of the division or antagonism constitutive of the political, an assumption that takes collectivity as the form of desire in two senses: our desire and our desire for us; or, communist desire is the collective desire for collective desiring.

Oh, demographers and statisticians! What have you unleashed?As capital demolishes all previous social ties, the counting on which it depends provides a new figure of belonging! Capital has to measure itself, count its profits, its rate of profit, its share of profit, its capacity to leverage its profit, its confidence or anxiety in its capacity for future profit. Capital counts and analyzes who has what, representing to itself the measures of its success. These very numbers can be, and in the slogan “We are the 99%” they are, put to use. They aren’t resignified—they are claimed as the subjectification of the gap separating the top one percent from the rest of us. With this claim, the gap becomes a vehicle for the expression of communist desire, that is, for a politics that asserts the people as divisive force in the interest of over-turning present society and making a new one anchored in collectivity and the common.

In a close engagement with Catherine Malabou’s discussion of severe brain injuries, Zizek discusses the logic of dialectical transitions, “after negation/alienation/loss, the subject ‘returns to itself,’ but this subject is not the same as the substance that underwent the alienation—it is constituted in the very movement of returning to itself.”[i] Zizek concludes, “the subject is as such the survivor of its own death, a shell which remains after it is deprived of its substance.” Proletarianization is a name for the process of this deprivation under capital (as I discuss in chapter three). The deprivation of substance—common, social, substance—leaves collectivity as its shell, as the form that remains for communist desire.

This collective form overlaps with the object-cause of communist desire, the people understood as the part-of-no-part. As I argue above, the part-of-no-part names the gap or antagonism that marks the non-identity of any ordering with its own components. It can thus be designated with Lacan’s objet petit a, an impossible formal object produced as the excess of a process, a missingness or off-ness that calls out to us.

Zizek notes that for Lacan, the object of desire always remains at a distance from the subject; no matter how close the subject gets to the object, the object remains elusive.[ii]

The distinction between object and object-cause is not the same as any old object to which it attaches.

The object-cause of communist desire is the people and, again, the people not as a name for the social whole but as a name for the exploited, producing majority.

[i] Living in the End Times, 307
[ii] See Living in the End Times 303

Conclusion

I [Jodi Dean] have attempted to set out an idea of communist desire in the space marked by the end of a certain left melancholy and by an alternative to the way of the drive. Whereas some have viewed drive’s sublimation as the alternative to a desire configured in terms of law and its transgression, I’ve sketched an alternative notion of desire, one that, via collectivity, breaks from drive’s repetitive circuits. Instead of trapped in failure, getting off on failing to reach the goal, communist desire subjectivizes its own impossibility, its constitutive lack and openness.

Žižek on Idea of communism

Slavoj Žižek in Lacanian Ink

The Left is facing the difficult task of emphasizing that … there is nothing “natural” in the present crisis, that the existing global economic system relies on a series of political decisions—while simultaneously acknowledging that … the system obeys a pseudo-natural logic of its own … this is not the result of an evil plot by capitalists … For this reason, what is now required is not a moralizing critique of capitalism, but the full re-affirmation of the Idea of communism.

The Idea of communism, as elaborated by Badiou, remains a Kantian regulative idea lacking any mediation with historical reality. Badiou emphatically rejects any such mediation as a regression to an historicist evolutionism which betrays the purity of the Idea, reducing it to a positive order of Being (the Revolution conceived as a moment of the positive historical process). This Kantian mode of reference effectively allows us to characterize Badiou’s deployment of the “communist hypothesis” … As such, it invites us to repeat the passage from Kant to Hegel—to re-conceive the Idea of communism as an Idea in the Hegelian sense, that is, as an Idea which is in the process of its own actualization. The Idea that “makes itself what it is” is thus no longer a concept opposed to reality as its lifeless shadow, but one which gives reality and existence to itself. Recall Hegel’s infamous “idealist” formula according to which Spirit is its own result, the product of itself. Such statements usually provoke sarcastic “materialist” comments (“so it is not actual people who think and realize ideas, but Spirit itself, which, like Baron Munchhausen, pulls itself up by its own hair . . .”). But consider, for example, a religious Idea which catches the spirit of the masses and becomes a major historical force? In a way, is this not a case of an Idea actualizing itself, becoming a “product of itself”? Does it not, in a kind of closed loop, motivate people to fight for it and to realize it?

What the notion of the Idea as a product of itself makes visible is thus not a process of idealist self-engendering, but the materialist fact that an Idea exists only in and through the activity of the individuals engaged with it and motivated by it. What we have here is emphatically not the kind of historicist/evolutionist position that Badiou rejects, but something much more radical: an insight into how historical reality itself is not a positive order, but a “not-all” which points towards its own future. It is this inclusion of the future as the gap in the present order that renders the latter “not- all,” ontologically incomplete, and thus explodes the self-enclosure of the historicist/evolutionary process. In short, it is this gap which enables us to distinguish historicity proper from historicism.

Why, then, the Idea of communism? For three reasons, which echo the Lacanian triad of the I-S-R:

— at the Imaginary level, because it is necessary to maintain continuity with the long tradition of radical millenarian and egalitarian rebellions;

— at the Symbolic level, because we need to determine the precise conditions under which, in each historical epoch, the space for communism may be opened up;

— finally, at the level of the Real, because we must assume the harshness of what Badiou calls the eternal communist invariants (egalitarian justice, voluntarism, terror, “trust in the people”).

Such an Idea of communism is clearly opposed to socialism, which is precisely not an Idea, but a vague communitarian notion applicable to all kinds of organic social bonds, from spiritualized ideas of solidarity (“we are all part of the same body”) right up to fascist corporatism. The Really Existing Socialist states were precisely that: positively existing states, whereas communism is in its very notion anti-statist.

Where does this eternal communist Idea come from? Is it part of human nature, or, as Habermasians propose, an ethical premise (of equality or reciprocal recognition) inscribed into the universal symbolic order? Its eternal character cannot, after all, be accounted for by specific historical conditions. The key to resolving this problem is to focus on that against which the communist Idea rebels: namely, the hierarchical social body whose ideology was first formulated in great sacred texts such as The Book of Manu. As was demonstrated by Louis Dumont in his Homo hierarchicus, social hierarchy is always inconsistent, that is, its very structure relies on a paradoxical reversal (the higher sphere is, of course, higher than the lower, but, within the lower order, the lower is higher than the higher) on account of which the social hierarchy can never fully encompass all its elements. It is this constitutive inconsistency that gives birth to what Rancière calls “the part of no-part,” that singular element which remains out of place in the hierarchical order, and, as such, functions as a singular universal, giving body to the universality of the society in question.

The communist Idea, then, is the eternal demand co-substantial with this element that lacks its proper place in the social hierarchy (“we are nothing, and we want to be all”).

Our task is thus to remain faithful to this eternal Idea of communism: to the egalitarian spirit kept alive over thousands of years in revolts and utopian dreams, in radical movements from Spartacus to Thomas Müntzer, including within the great religions (Buddhism versus Hinduism, Daoism or Legalism versus Confucianism, etc.). The problem is how to avoid the choice between radical social uprisings which end in defeat, unable to stabilize themselves in a new order, and the retreat into an ideal displaced to a domain outside social reality (for Buddhism we are all equal—in nirvana).

It is here that the originality of Western thought becomes clear, particularly in its three great historical ruptures: Greek philosophy’s break with the mythical universe; Christianity’s break with the pagan universe; and modern democracy’s break with traditional authority. In each case, the egalitarian spirit is transposed into a new positive order (limited, but nonetheless actual).

In short, the wager of Western thought is that radical negativity (whose first and immediate expression is egalitarian terror) is not condemned to being expressed in short ecstatic outbursts after which things are returned to normal. On the contrary, radical negativity, as the undermining of every traditional hierarchy, has the potential to articulate itself in a positive order within which it acquires the stability of a new form of life.

Such is the meaning of the Holy Spirit in Christianity: faith can not only be expressed in, but also exists as, the collective of believers. And this faith is itself based on “terror,” as indicated by Christ’s insistence that he brings a sword, not peace, that whoever does not hate his father and mother is not a true follower, and so on. The content of this terror thus involves the rejection of all traditional hierarchical and community ties, with the wager that a different collective link is possible—an egalitarian bond between believers connected by agape as political love.

Democracy itself provides another example of such an egalitarian link based on terror. As Claude Lefort notes, the democratic axiom is that the place of power is empty, that there is no one directly qualified for the vacancy, either by tradition, charisma, or leadership qualities. This is why, before democracy can enter the stage, terror has to do its work, forever dissociating the place of power from any natural or directly qualified pretender: the gap between this place and those who temporarily occupy it must be maintained at all costs.

This is also why Hegel’s deduction of the monarchy can be given a democratic supplement: Hegel insists on the monarch as the “irrational” (i.e. contingent) head of state precisely in order to keep the summit of state power apart from the expertise embodied in the state bureaucracy. While the bureaucrats are chosen on account of their abilities and qualifications, the king is the king by birth— that is, ultimately, he is chosen by lot, on account of natural contingency. The danger Hegel was trying to avoid here exploded a century later in Stalinist bureaucracy, which was precisely the rule of (Communist) experts: Stalin is not a figure of a master, but the one who “really knows,” an expert in all imaginable fields, from economy to linguistics, from biology to philosophy.

We can well imagine a democratic procedure maintaining the same gap on account of the irreducible moment of contingency in every electoral result: far from being a limitation, the fact that elections do not pretend to select the most qualified person is what protects them from the totalitarian temptation (which is why, as was already clear to the Ancient Greeks, choosing rulers by lot is the most democratic form of selection). That is to say, as Lefort has again demonstrated, the achievement of democracy is to turn what for traditional authoritarian power is the moment of greatest crisis—the moment of transition from one master to another, the panic- inducing instant at which “the throne is empty”—into the very source of its strength: democratic elections thus represent the passage through that zero-point at which the complex network of social links is dissolved into a purely quantitative multiplicity of individuals whose votes are mechanically counted. The moment of terror, of the dissolution of all hierarchical links, is thereby re-enacted and transformed into the foundation of a new and stable political order.

Measured by his own standards of what a rational state should be, Hegel was thus perhaps wrong to fear universal democratic suffrage (see his nervous rejection of the English Reform Bill in 1832. It is precisely democracy (universal suffrage) which, much more appropriately than Hegel’s own State of estates, performs the “magic” trick of converting radical negativity into a new political order: in democracy, the negativity of terror (the destruction of everyone who pretends to identify with the place of power), is aufgehoben and turned into the positive form of the democratic procedure.

The question today, now that we know the limitations of that formal procedure, is whether we can imagine a step further in this process whereby egalitarian negativity reverts into a new positive order.

We should look for traces of such an order in different domains, including in scientific communities. The way the CERN community functions is indicative here: in an almost utopian manner, individual efforts are undertaken in a collective non-hierarchical spirit, and dedication to the scientific cause (to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang) far outweighs any material considerations. But are such traces, no matter how sublime, merely that —— marginal traces?

… Two years before his death, when it became clear that there would be no immediate European revolution, and that the idea of building socialism in one country was nonsense, Lenin wrote: “What if the complete hopelessness of the situation, by stimulating the efforts of the workers and peasants tenfold, offered us the opportunity to create the fundamental requisites of civilization in a different way from that of the West European countries?”[1]

Is this not the predicament of the Morales government in Bolivia, of the (former) Aristide government in Haiti, of the Maoist government in Nepal? They came to power through “fair” democratic elections, rather than insurrection, but having gained power, they exerted it in a way which was (partially, at least) “non-statist”: directly mobilizing their grassroots supporters, by-passing the Party-State network. Their situation is “objectively” hopeless: the whole drift of history is against them, they cannot rely on any “objective tendencies” pushing in their direction, all they can do is to improvise, do what they can in a desperate situation.

Nevertheless, does this not give them a unique freedom? (And are we—the contemporary Left—not in exactly the same situation?) It is tempting to apply here the old distinction between “freedom from” and “freedom for”: does their freedom from History (with its laws and objective tendencies) not sustain their freedom for creative experimenting? In their activity, they can rely only on the collective will of their supporters.

According to Badiou, “The model of the centralized party made possible a new form of power that was nothing less than the power of the party itself. We are now at what I call a ‘distance from the State.’ This is first of all because the question of power is no longer ‘immediate’: nowhere does a ‘taking power’ in the insurrectional sense seem possible today.”[2] But does this not rely on an all too simple alternative? What about heroically assuming whatever power may be available—in the full awareness that the “objective conditions” are not “mature” enough for radical change— and, against the grain, do what one can?

Let us return to the situation in Greece in the summer of 2010, when popular discontent brought about the delegitimization of the entire political class and the country approached a power vacuum. Had there been any chance for the Left to take over state power, what could it have done in such a situation of “complete hopelessness”? Of course (if we may permit ourselves this personification), the capitalist system would have gleefully allowed the Left to take over, if only to ensure that Greece ended up in a state of economic chaos which would then serve as a severe lesson to others.

Nevertheless, despite such dangers, wherever an opening for taking power does arise, the Left should seize the opportunity and confront the problems head-on, making the best of a bad situation (in the case of Greece: renegotiating the debt, mobilizing European solidarity and popular support for its predicament).

The tragedy of politics is that there will never be a “good” moment to seize power: the opportunity will always offer itself at the worst possible moment (characterized by economic fiasco, ecological catastrophe, civil unrest, etc.), when the ruling political class has lost its legitimacy and the fascist-populist threat lurks in the background.

For example, the Scandinavian countries, while continuing to maintain high levels of social equality and a powerful Welfare State, also score very well on global competitiveness: proof that “generous, relatively egalitarian welfare states should not be seen as utopias or protected enclaves, but can also be highly competitive participants in the world market. In other words, even within the parameters of global capitalism there are many degrees of freedom for radical social alternatives.”[3]

Perhaps the most succinct characterization of the epoch which began with the First World War is the well-known phrase attributed to Gramsci: “The old world is dying away, and the new world struggles to come forth: now is the time of monsters.” Were Fascism and Stalinism not the twin monsters of the twentieth century, the one emerging out of the old world’s desperate attempts to survive, the other out of a misbegotten endeavor to build a new one? And what about the monsters we are engendering now, propelled by techno-gnostic dreams of a biogenetically controlled society? All the consequences should be drawn from this paradox: perhaps there is no direct passage to the New, at least not in the way we imagined it, and monsters necessarily emerge in any attempt to force that passage.

One sign of a new rise of this monstrosity is that the ruling classes seem less and less able to rule, even in their own interests. Take the fate of Christians in the Middle East. Over the last two millennia, they have survived a series of calamities, from the end of the Roman Empire through defeat in crusades, the decolonization of the Arab countries, the Khomeini revolution in Iran, etc.—with the notable exception of Saudi Arabia, the main US ally in this region, where there are no autochthonous Christians. In Iraq, there were approximately one million of them under Saddam, leading exactly the same lives as other Iraqi subjects, with one of them, Tariq Aziz, even occupying the high post of foreign minister and becoming Saddam’s confidante. But then, something weird happened to Iraqi Christians, a true catastrophe — a Christian army occupied (or liberated, if you want) Iraq.

The Christian occupation army dissolved the secular Iraqi army and thus left the streets open to Muslim fundamentalist militias to terrorize both each other and the Christians. No wonder roughly half of Iraq’s Christians soon left the country, preferring even the terrorist-supporting Syria to a liberated Iraq under Christian military control. In 2010, things took a turn for the worse. Tariq Aziz, who had survived the previous trials, was condemned by a Shia court to death by hanging for his “persecution of Muslim parties” (i.e., his fight against Muslim fundamentalism) under Saddam.

Bomb attacks on Christians and their churches followed one after the other, leaving dozens dead, so that finally, in early November 2010, the Baghdad archbishop Atanasios Davud appealed to his flock to leave Iraq: “Christians have to leave the beloved country of our ancestors and escape the intended ethnic cleansing. This is still better than getting killed one after the other.” And to dot the i, as it were, that same month it was reported that al Maliki had been confirmed as Iraqi prime minister thanks to Iranian support. So the result of the US intervention is that Iran, the prime agent of the axis of Evil, is edging closer to dominating Iraq politically.

US policy is thus definitively approaching a stage of madness, and not only in terms of domestic policy (as the Tea Party proposes to fight the national debt by lowering taxes, i.e., by raising the debt—one cannot but recall here Stalin’s well-known thesis that, in the Soviet Union, the state was withering away through the strengthening of its organs, especially its organs of police repression). In foreign policy also, the spread of Western Judeo-Christian values is organized by creating conditions which lead to the expulsion of Christians (who, maybe, could move to Iran . . .). This is definitely not a clash of civilizations, but a true dialogue and cooperation between the US and the Muslim fundamentalists.[4]

Our situation is thus the very opposite of the classical twentieth-century predicament in which the Left knew what it had to do (establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, etc.), but simply had to wait patiently for the opportunity to offer itself.

Today, we do not know what we have to do, but we have to act now, because the consequences of inaction could be catastrophic. We will have to risk taking steps into the abyss of the New in totally inappropriate situations; we will have to reinvent aspects of the New just in order to maintain what was good in the Old (education, healthcare, etc.) … In short, our times can be characterized as none other than Stalin characterized the atom bomb: not for those with weak nerves.

Communism is today not the name of a solution but the name of a problem: the problem of the commons in all its dimensions —— the commons of nature as the substance of our life, the problem of our biogenetic commons, the problem of our cultural commons (“intellectual property”), and, last but not least, the problem of the commons as that universal space of humanity from which no one should be excluded. Whatever the solution might be, it will have to solve this problem.

Bosteels on Žižek

Bosteels, Bruno. The Actuality of Communism. New York: Verso, 2011.

To envision a new positive order beyond the present horizon thus requires that we take a step back to grasp the moment of genesis of order out of disorder. “In the end, teh alternative here is between idealism and materialism: is the ‘big Other’ (the ideal symbolic order) always already here as a kind of insurmountable horizon, or is it possible to deploy ts ‘genesis’ out of the dispersed ‘non-all’ network of contingent material singularities?” Žižek also asks, before answering his own question in the positive: “The answer is a definite ‘yes’ — it is contained in Lacan’s unexpected vindication of the notion of creativity at its most radical, that is, as creatio ex nihilo: by means of reference to the void of the Thing in the midst of the symbolic structure, the subject is able to ‘bend’ the symbolic space she inhabits, and thus to define his/her desire in its idiosyncrasy.”

To justify his belief in the possibility of a transformative act that would open up a new order not limited to the alternative of either the pure lack of desire or else the pure positivity of drives, Žižek thus raises the question of the originary act that brings order out of disorder and breaks with the constraints of the always already existing state of affairs. 204

Žižek on Badiou pt 2 universal truth

Žižek interview 2004 part 2

This is where I think Agamben misreads Badiou (because Agamben’s book is explicitly in polemic with Badiou) precisely concerning universality. What Agamben tries to prove is that Paul’s position is not universality but even double division—you cut a line, a division between those who are in and those who are out within every community. But I would say that precisely this is the Paulinian-Hegelian notion of universality, not universality as a positive encompassing feature.

Universality is a line that cuts universally and this is, how shall I put it, absolutely unique in Christianity and this is what we are losing with these gnostic wisdoms and even with political correctness, tolerance, and so on, because the notion of truth there is not that of a fighting truth but that of differences, space open for everything. This notion of truth as painful, truth means you cut a line of difference . . . which is why for me, as I claim, you know that mysterious statement of Christ’s

“I came here not to bring peace but a sword”— I don’t think this should be read as “kill the bad guys.” It is a militant work of love.

The key point for me is that Hegelian statement which I make all the time, which is that what dies on the cross is not a finite representative of God, but the God beyond himself. So that “Holy Spirit” means precisely, we are on our own, in a way. This terrible opening, this freedom, which, and here I am quite dogmatic: what we really mean by freedom was opened only through Judeo-Christian space. Freedom in this radical sense is … what Lacan would have called desire of the Other qua Other.

Without the abyss of the other, without perceiving the other in an abyss, without not knowing what the other wants, you are not free.

Žižek on Badiou pt 1

Spring 2004 issue of Journal of Philosophy and Scripture

Badiou has some kind of natural, gut-feeling resistance toward the topic of death and finitude. For him, death and finitude, animality and so on, being-towards-death, death-drive—he uses the term sometimes in a purely nonconceptual way, “death drive, decadence” as if we were reading some kind of naïve Marxist liberal optimist from the early 20th century.

This is all somehow for me interconnected. Although I am also taking St. Paul as a model, a formal structure which can then be applied to revolutionary emancipatory collectivities, and so on, nonetheless I try to ground it in a specific Christian content, which again for me focuses precisely on Christ’s death, [his]
death and resurrection. …

Now in Badiou’s reading of psychoanalysis, he totally dismisses death drive. But the paradox for me, as I try to develop in my work, is that death drive is a very paradoxical notion if you read Freud closely. Death drive is basically, I claim, the Freudian term for immortality. Death drive has nothing to do, as Lacan points out, convincingly, with this so-called nirvana principle where everything wants to disappear, and so on. If anything (and because of this I like to read Richard Wagner’s operas where you have this), death drive is that which prevents you from dying. Death drive is that which persists beyond life and death. Again, it’s precisely what, in my beloved Stephen King’s horror/science fiction terminology he calls the “undead”: this terrifying insistence beneath death, which is why Freud links death drive to the compulsion to repeat. You know, it can be dead, but it goes on. This terrifying insistence of an undead object.

Point two: … The big breakthrough of Heidegger is to totally reconceptualize the notion of finitude. Already we have this in the early Heidegger with special reference to Kant. Already you see precisely how the other of finitude, the big stuff—infinity, eternity, and so on—is a category, modality, horizon of finitude. This was, for Heidegger, Kant’s big breakthrough: transcendental as opposed to transcendent is a category of finitude. All this somehow gets lost, in Badiou. [But] the whole category of “event” works only from the category of finitude. There are events only in finite situations.

Badiou is … cannot elevate finitude to its transcendental a priori dignity. He remains precisely, at a certain level, a pre-kantian metaphysician.

My desperate problem is how to draw, how to extract the Christian notion of redemption from this financial transaction logic. This is what I’m desperately looking for. Here I think it is crucial to read Christ’s sacrifice not literally as paying a debt. It is also—we should just trust our intuitions here—

because the message of Christ’s sacrifice is not “now I take it for you, you can screw it up again.” No, it just opens the space for our struggle, and this is the paradox I like.

This is what I like in what maybe is the best chapter of this book, the fifth one [of Puppet]. To put it in very simple terms, Christ’s redemption doesn’t mean that, OK, now we can go watch hardcore movies because we are redeemed each time. No, it’s done, the Messiah is here, it’s done, means that the space is now open for struggle. It’s this nice paradox that the fact that the big thing happened does not mean it’s over. It precisely opens the space for struggle.

This is what I find again so incredible. Which is why to the horror of some of my Jewish friends, who doesn’t like this idea that in Christianity everything happened whereas in Judaism the Messiah is always postponed, always to-come, and so on.

No, I like here this crazy radicality of Christianity which is that, no, it happened, it already happened. But precisely that doesn’t mean everything is already decided.

No, again, what intrigues me is that I find here such a shattering revolution of the entire economy. . .

And another aspect which is linked to this entire economy—and here I do agree with Badiou—I do not agree with his critics who think Paul’s famous “for me there are no Jews nor Greeks” simply means everybody can become a member, it is universally open. Then you can play all these games: if you are out, then you are not even human, there are only my brothers and if you are not my brother you are not even people. OK, OK, but my point is that Badiou nonetheless is still more precise. I speak here ironically
of Badiou’s Leninism. The shattering point is that truth is unilateral, that universal truth, no less universal for that reason, is accessible only from an engaged position.

We don’t have, “you are saying this, I am saying that, let’s find the neutral position, the common.” Truth is unilateral.

finitude antigone

Žižek. Traversing the Fantasy eds. Boucher, Glynos, Sharpe. 2005

So what is it that this emphasis on finitude as the ultimate horizon of our existence misses? How can we assert it in a materialist way, without any resort to spiritual transcendence? The answer is, precisely, objet petite a as the ”undead” (“noncastrated”) remainder which persists in its obscene immortality. No wonder the Wagnerian heroes want so desperately to die: they want to get rid of this obscene immortal supplement which stands for libido as an organ, for drive at its most radical, i.e., death drive. In other words, the properly Freudian paradox is that what explodes the constraints of our finitude is death drive itself.

Back to the texts in ‘ the present volume: the main thing that I find problematic in Grigg’s contribution is precisely what appears the most natural thing for a psychoanalyst to do-his “clinical” reading of Antigone’s act as a gesture of hysterical provocation. Lacan, surprisingly, avoided this direction completely: there is, in his detailed reading of Antigone, no mention of repression, of the formations of the unconscious, of incestuous desires (although we are dealing here the Oedipus family, the incestuous family !) . . . And I think Lacan was right here: the dimension he is focusing on-that of the ethical act-cannot be rendered (and also not “demystifled”) in clinical terms. Furthermore, I think Grigg is wrong when he claims that Antigone “defies the law of her city in the name of her (Oedipal) law”: it is her brother’s proper burial that she insists on (as the theatre piece informs as in the lines which are often dismissed as problematic, but on whose key importance Lacan insists, it is only apropos her brother that she is ready to go to the end), and it is not clear what this has to do with the Oedipal Law.

Furthermore, we should not forget the obvious fact that we are not dealing here with just any case of the Oedipus complex, but with Oedipus himself-and, as Lacan liked to point out, the Oedipus family, precisely, was not Oedipal, and Oedipus did not suffer from the Oedipus complex.

Grigg’s other counterargument concerns the problematic status of what I call the “act of absolute freedom” which “derives its essential features (its freedom, its gratuitousness, its criminality, its unaccountability and unpredictability) from the fact that it lies outside all possible symbolic dimensions. It strikes me that not only does Antigone not conform to this requirement but also that this requirement makes an act indistinguishable from mere whimsicality. There is no objective criterion and there can clearly be no appeal to any subjective features to distinguish an act of absolute freedom from a gratuitous act.”

As I abundantly developed elsewhere (among other places in my (Ticklish Subject), such a reading of the act is wrong: what makes a certain move an act proper are not its inherent qualities but its structural place within a given symbolic network — to put it in Badiou’ s terms. an act intervenes at the point of the “symptomal torsion” of this network. This is what distinguishes an act from a mere whimsicality, and this is also why, of course, the externality of the act is absolutely internal to the symbolic order-an act is ex-timate, to use Lacan’s pun.

Johnston Intervierw regarding Badiou

The Role of Alain Badiou’s Inaesththetics in Visual Culture: An Interview with Adrian Johnston (circa 2010)

Hilary Ellenshaw, Department of Art and Art History, University of New Mexico

One of the read threads throughout the span of Logics and Worlds is a sustained Plato-influenced polemic against a very dominant twentieth century tendency to always historicize, as exemplified by Frederic Jameson’s injunction “Always historicize!” (Jameson is very well known for his Marxist work particularly with regard to aesthetic issues, especially literature.) Badiou feels that to some extent this must be resisted. He thinks this has become an instinctive reaction, and whenever we are confronted with a form we want to describe it as peculiar to a given context that emerges out of a specific backdrop. Its validity and status is bound up with its place in time. To speak of these diagonal lines, which cut across vast swaths of history from the cave paintings up through to Picasso, is viewed as a heresy for a sensibility that is so attune to and so careful to always speak of history as a matter of particularization.

There is a resistance to any kind of positing of anything universal, anything trans-temporal, anything that smacks of the old eternals that philosophy seems so preoccupied with. Badiou wants to plead on behalf of these things.

In politics he still speaks nowadays of what he first referred to in a short text on ideology—from 1976 that has yet to be translated—what he calls “communist invariance.” This would be history as the practice of true politics in his sense, a kind of radical emancipator and generally leftist sort of politics. There are certain lowest common denominators, from Spartacus and the slave revolt in the Ancient World, through the struggle of Chinese peasants under Mao’s direction, and everything in between. This is also related to a cause dear to Badiou’s heart, the struggles of the undocumented workers in France, les sans papiers, of North African origin for recognition. Badiou says that these different movements, despite of all of their differences, and even though of course there is much that is contextually specific about each of these struggles, that one will find the same sorts of basic core concepts or causes motivating and justifying the rightness of these revolts. And he consistently does this with art and politics.

He defines democratic materialism as the notion that there are only bodies and languages. You have incarnate individuals whose bodies are particular entities. Then these beings are fully ensconced within the linguistic life-worlds of particular communities. All that is left then is a relativism of different people with different language games, and what perspectives you have is relative to which of these worlds you inhabit.

Badiou wants to claim that there is another kind of materialism, which adds a qualification to the axiom, or the core tenant, of democratic materialism. In addition to the bodies and languages, the materialist dialectic states that there are truths that cannot be reduced to particular people, who are ensconced in particular social or cultural linguistic context, and to cut across these otherwise divided spheres that seem to present us with nothing but a fragmented multitude of partial perspectives. At the same time these truths are not transcending. Again they are not like Plato’s metaphysical realism, in which pure forms or ideas exist in a timeless state of unchanging heaven of purely conceptual intelligible axis that we can only get a sideways glimpse of in this world.

But rather his idea is that you have produced certain things out of particular times and places that can survive an indefinite number of de-contextualizations and re-contextualizations.

Mathematics provides him with an easy and obvious set of examples. For instance for any given mathematical truth we can clearly identify the given time and place in which it arose. We can look back at ancient Greece for the genesis of the fundamental ingredients of arithmetic and geometry brought about by particular individuals living in that specific life-world. We can point to Kurt Gödel in the twentieth century, with his famous incompleteness theorem. But for Badiou those mathematical truths are true and they have a historical genesis, they arise in a particular time and place; certain people with certain languages forge them and they cannot be reduced to that contextual point of origin. They thereafter achieve independence relative to their site of genesis. And he wants to claim that this is something that is affirmed by materialist dialectics that democratic materialism denies. Democratic materialism compulsively historicizes and contextualizes, and denies that there is anything, which really does genuinely have that kind of trans-contextual, autonomous, and irreducible truth status to itself. And that is the fundamental thing he is after in Logics of Worlds.

… To bring it into context with art, part of what is involved in an artistic work that has a truth to it is that it is not in principle closed to anyone. It is not as though only if you are from that community, you are that kind of person with that sort of linguistic, cultural, social, etc. background can it speak to you.

But for Badiou any truth, whether it is artistic, amorous, political or scientific, has something in it that is at least potentially, if not actually, universal.

It addresses anyone and everyone without discriminating amongst its addressees based upon their background or based upon particular characteristics or differences that mark them. There is that insistence on the universality of artistic truths as with all truths.

Also it would not be to deny that given works of art emerge from particular times and places; specific people embedded in a particular cultural horizon fashion these works. If they really are artists worthy of being paid attention to philosophically in his view, they manage to produce something in a sensible medium that can survive being exported out of that particular context in which that artistic product was first produced, despite being something ensconced in a particular life-world. And that for him is very essential. He strongly opposed any kind of cultural relativist approach to artistic analysis. He acknowledged form as a twentieth-century concern, and even though there are certain concerns that emerge in a particular time and place, that does not mean that if we look back at formal features, or become preoccupied with the pre-twentieth century that it should just be denounced as anachronisms. He would hesitate to endorse that sort of caveat to qualifications.

… If a piece of art worthy of the name bears within itself something (i.e., a truth) that can be exported beyond the culturally localized/situated site of its production, something that is (at least in principle) open to everyone and is able to address an incalculable multitude others situated in an indefinite plurality of different cultural life-worlds,

then an authentic instance of art proper is, in fact, a/non-cultural (insofar as it cuts across cultures, being de-contextualized out of the culture in which it was fashioned and re-contextualized in any number of cultures distinct from its culture of origin).

Ž on butler laclau badiou emphasis on locality

Žižek, Slovoj. In Defence of Lost Causes. (2008) London: Verso, 2009. page 403.

Badiou reads this failure [of the Chinese Cultural Revolution] — and, more generally, the demise of Communism — as signaling the end of the epoch in which, in politics, it was possible to generate truth at the universal level, as a global (revolutionary) project: today, in the aftermath of this historical defeat, a political truth can only be generated as (the fidelity to) a local event, a local struggle, an intervention into a specific constellation. However, does he not thereby subscribe to his own version of postmodernism, of the notion that, today, only local acts of “resistance” are possible? What Badiou (Like Laclau and Butler) seems to lack is a meta-theory of history that would provide a clear answer to the alternative that haunts “postmodern” theorizations of the political: is the passage from “large” to “small” (hi)stories, from essentialism to contingency, from global to local politics, and so forth, itself a historical shift, so that, prior to it, universal politics was possible, or is the insight into the local character of political interventions an insight into the very essence of poltics, so that the previous belief in the possiblity of universal political intervention was an ideological illusion?

Bartlebian Act: Saragmago’s Seeing: voters en masse refuse to vote instead casting invalid ballots. It is the dialectical difference between not-voting (cynical indifference) and not not voting, (they instead un-vote). As Ž explains the difference is a focus on the big Other, “the majority of those who do not vote do t not as an active gesture of protest, but in the mode of relying on others — “I do not vote, but I count on others to vote in my place …” Non-voting becomes an act whe it affects the big Other.” (In Defence 410)

One needs to add here, when one no longer relies on a big Other,

over-proximity

Tutt, Daniel. The Object of Proximity: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis in Žižek and Santner via Lacan. American University Also available here danielp.tutt(at)gmail.com

The Psychotheology of Over-Proximity

The ethical problem of proximity to the neighbor introduces a number of ethical implications for ethics, and the ethical relation to the Other in Eric Santner’s work, The Psychotheology of Everyday Life. For Santner, the ultimate problem of the neighbor is based on the whether the subject accepts the Other (or neighbor) in their jouissance, or REAL excess, and in so doing, how they come to handle this over-proximity. Santner characterizes the Freudian “mental excess” (what Lacan would later deem jouissance) as an “excess of validity over meaning,” as the “undeadness of biopolitical life,” and his primary ethical concern is in how to convert the excess into a “blessings of more life.”[25] This mental excess that the subject inhabits, or what Santner refers to as “undeadness” colors everyday life as “a paradoxical kind of mental excess that constrains by means of excess.”[26] Santner develops a slightly different type of Otherness than that of Lacan, based on Jean Laplanche’s psychoanalytic theory of “seduction. ” Laplanche was an intimate student and colleague of Lacan, and in his conception of the Other, or the “enigmatic signifier” the traumatic encounter with the Other’s desire becomes constitutive of the inner strangeness we call the unconscious itself. Therefore, unlike the Lacanian Other, Santner’s Other is stripped of its material properties, a position that evokes Derrida’s notion of the spectral aura of the Other:

“the other is not reducible to its actual predicates, to what one might define or thematize about it, anymore than the I is. It is naked. Bared of every property, and this nudity is also its infinitely exposed vulnerability: its skin. This absence of determinable properties, of concrete predicates, of empirical visibility, is not doubt what gives to the face of the other a spectral aura.” [Derrida, Adieu. To Emmanuel Levinas, pg. 111]

The subject is placed in a relationship with the enigma of the Other’s desire not through language (as in Lacan) but through an unconscious transmission that is neither simply enlivening nor simply deadening but rather “undeadening” – the encounter with the Other produces an internal alienness that has a sort of vitality, and yet belongs to no life at all. This “undeadness” creates an encounter with legitimation, or what Freud referred to as the death drive, a “too much-ness” of pressure and the build of an urge to put an end to it.

Santner’s ethics at this point, in light of the crisis of symbolic identity is concerned with whether we ought to assume our identity in the social body based on the symbolic mandates that determine our identity, or whether the subject ought to break with this system. The two poles of ethical action he develops are the “sciences of symbolic identity,” and the “ethics of singularity.” The strength of Santner’s ethical position is that only when we “truly inhabit the midst of life” are we able to “loosen the fantasy” that structures everyday life.

Thus, similar to what we see in Lacan, to own one’s fantasy is to really live as a free subject, aiming at the truly ethical question that Lacan poses: “have you acted in conformity with the desire which inhabits you?” for it is desire that aims at the real.

The Crisis of Symbolic Investiture

How the subject in Santner’s the Psychotheology, as well as Lacan’s ethical subject deals with “the crisis of symbolic investiture” are a matter of ethics, which we will explore below.

For both Lacan and Santner, ethics requires a confrontation with the Other to free oneself of the Other and then surrender to the real, or everyday life. The confrontation with everyday life, or the Lacanian real is a collapse of the subject’s symbolic constructed identity.

The symbolic identity crisis that Lacan and Santner refer to can be more clearly understood through Santner’s reading of the book Soul Murder, and Lacan’s theory of the Name of the Father. Soul Murder and Name of the Father are instructive to understanding how “the crisis of symbolic investiture” operates through psychoanalytic theory. Both Lacan and Santner refer to the crisis of symbolic identity when discussing the infamous case of the Judge Daniel Schreber, who upon receiving the symbolic authority in society as a Judge experienced a total psychotic breakdown where his very ability to assume a symbolic identity rooted in authority became penetrated with “a kernel of invasiveness, which introduced the subject into too much reality.” What is it about this “too much reality” that created the conditions for the “the crisis of symbolic investiture?” To fully understand this crisis, a reading of Lacan’s late capitalist “university discourse” and the complex insertion of the Name of the Father bring the crisis into more clarity.