butler – Page 5 – objet (a)

I would like a coffee, no cream. Sorry we have run out of cream. Can I bring you a coffee without milk?

For Badiou, 1 comes secondary, 1 is an operation, 1 is the effect of counting, multiplicity is there from the beginning.

For Alenka and me, of course there is no original 1, but this absence is inscribed in the multiplicity from the very beginning. It does NOT mean “we are multiple fuck the ONE” It means the 1 as absence is already here. Ontologically the zero level is a barred 1, there is no ONE. There is multiplicity because 1 cannot be 1.

Freud says somewhere “multiplicity in dreams is always a sign of CASTRATION” If you dream of many phalluses it means you don’t have one. Multiplicity is always the blocked sabotaged impossibility of the ONE.

When Lacan primordial repression is the repression of the binary signifier. Lacan’s theory of sexual differentiation is not Ying Yang bullshit. There is only one signifier, Male, but this does not make woman, more but LESS. Why?

Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a parody of Tolstoy. Dostoevsky is missing. A scene in the movie, as if this absence of D. returns. The 2 guys talk and bring in all the D. titles. Did you meet the Idiot. Ah you mean the Brother K.

We are tempted to insist on the primacy of the barred ONE, the impossible ONE. There are ONEs of course, but the existing ONEs are an echo of their own impossibility. What there is is always originally multiplicity. But why do we then always start to count to 1? Because multiplicity is always marked from the beginning by the lack or impossibility of the ONE.

In Badiou there is no ontology of the EVENT. When Badiou announced program for Logics of the Worlds. In previous book Being and Event he didn’t really account for how a World emerges out of BEING. In this book he also does NOT do it.

23:00 He says there is multiplicity, then I don’t know from where, but ALL OF A SUDDEN THERE ARE WORLDS.

23:15 WHY DOES BEING QUA BEING (THIS PRE-REPRESENTATIVE MULTIPLICITY) WHY DOES IT ORGANIZE ITSELF INTO WORLDS?

WORLDS ARE MODES OF TRANSCENDENTAL APPEARANCE. Each of the worlds is characterized by its transcendental a priori.

Alenka’s solution
Already the multiplicity from the very beginning is multiplicity because the ONE is impossible. This is the answer to why multiplicity, precisely to fill in this gap, has to appear to itself. WORLDS happen precisely to fill in this gap, to appear to itself.

BORING KANTIAN PROBLEM: We live in appearances but can we reach the THING-IN-ITSELF? THE REAL? For Hegel the problem IS EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE. The True enigma is OK there is BEING MULTIPLICITY OUT THERE BUT WHY DOES BEING START TO APPEAR TO ITSELF? The true enigma is NOT how to see reality behind appearance. But why does the real begin to appear to itself?

THE TRUE FIGHT WITH BADIOU

Z remains a old-fashion transendentalist and Badiou is a dialectical materialist.

Žižek: When Badiou mentions World, the POINT as minimum of yes/no, I claim that all the coordinates are already the coordinates of symbolic universe with subjectivity included. There is NO WORLD OUTSIDE LANGUAGE AND SUBJECT.

Badiou FANATICALLY insists that WORLD is dialectics in NATURE. Animals, even rocks, a group of stars, can be a WORLD. Ž thinks this is totally illegitimate.

28:00 More Lacan than Badiou:

Lacan: Existence is absolutely NOT the same as BEING. Existence is for Badiou, is a transcendental determination. Things exist within a transcendental world, you exist the more you are recognized within this transcendental space.

Even Hegel has this distinction in a nice way in Hegel’s LOGIC. In Hegel, existence is a category of ESSENCE. Existence is BEING which is the APPEARANCE of some ESSENCE. What does NOT have an ESSENCE, IS, but does not EXIST.

FOR LACAN Neither the subject exists NOR the WOMAN. Lacan does NOT say: Il n’ya pas de femme. But he says La Femme n’existe pas.

30:45 BRUCE FINK
IL N’YA PAS is much more radical than IL N”EXISTE PAS.

Lacan says Il n’ya pas de grand Autre. There is no big Other. He doesn’t say the big Other doesn’t exist.

The Lacanian distinction between existence, and INSISTENCE What doesn’t exist, INSISTS for LACAN: Subject doesn’t exist it just leaves TRACES in existence
DRIVE doesn’t exist it INSISTS

32:30 APPEARANCE AND PHENOMENON
the distinction is that appearance is an appearance of something. You look behind, what is appearing.

A phenomenon is an appearance behind which there is nothing

An appearance of something AND An appearance that just fills in the lack, that there is NOTHING behind it.

The two greek painters, who will do a more realistic painting the winner paints a curtain, ok pull apart the curtain to see what you painted

PHENOMENON evokes/raises the desire for something behind but there is nothing behind, it is appearance in the abyss

I would locate here the status of the subject.
Subject is for me an APPEARANCE BUT NO SUBSTANCE

The mystery of the SUBJECT: Appearance is not a simple appearance that can be SUBTRACTED. IT is NOT as if you can take away appearance and get things as they really are.

What if there is an apparance precisely as appearance is crucial for the consistency of that which appears. So that you take away appearance and you lose the thing-itself. The whole FREUD turns on this.

35:30 ENDS

36:00 The ultimate ambiguity, is Kant’s Transcendental appearance.
Kant can not accept appearance THAT ITS APPEARANCE AGAINST THE ABYSS OF NOTHING.

He still thinks there must be something substantial behind appearance which appears.

The Hegelian step is NO! Conclusion of first part of Phenomenology of Spirit, of course appearance is like a curtain we look behind, behind appearance is just a VOID, what we find there is what we put there. THIS DOES NOT MEAN THAT IN THE USUAL SENSE THAT EVERYTHING IS JUST AN APPEARANCE. EVERYTHING IS REAL BUT THIS IS NOT RELATIVISM.

38:15 BEST BOOK IS THEORY OF SUBJECT the breakthrough is there the rest of Badiou’s work is trying to catch up.

38:30 the best friendly shot at a friend (Bosteels) the best! from Belgians are well know for 2 things

He opposes Sophocles terror/anxiety ORestia courage/justice

subjective attitudes doesn’t JUSTICE stick out, replace JUSTICE WITH enthusiasm.
For reasons of consistency.
What does Terror mean here? He oscillates between 2 meanings. Bad superego terror represented by CREON. Fuck you we also need our own TERROR. THere is always a terrorist aspect in SUBTRACTION
ENTHUSIASM WILL BE CENTRAL CATEGORY OF HIS IMMANENCE OF TRUTH.

41:00 Question on ACT
44:00 Žižek replies
The problem of EVENT is Badiou seems to struggle about the relationship between Event and its nomination.

Sometimes he claims more radically, transcendentally, nomination is part of the EVENT, event becomes event only through its nomination,
Sometimes he adapts a pomo attitude, the event is traumatic excess and we try to but fail to find a proper name.

A communist struggle is going on but the Marxian names for it are not good names. We didn’t nominate the event in a correct way.

There is the danger of this pomo pseudo-Nietzche b.s. the real is the event/horror we try to nominate it, but it always fails on the other hand Badiou celebrating the Master Signifier.

46:00 Theoretical couple Badiou/Barbara Kassam

The Master Signifier, Badiou who is the Badiou of Master SIgnifier, is masculine Badiou. We have the event of Chrisianity, but Christ himeself was a feminine hysterical guy, the master who provides the NAME is ST. PAUL. It is Paul who provided the MASTER SIGNIFIER that created Christianity.

47:50 Badiou made a book with Roudinesco (Ž yikes!!!) He says: without a MASTER (Kant a human being is animal who needs master) to become a subject you need a master, Badiou goes very far here.

Here I agree with him, with a precise political stake, to rehabilitate the marxist tradition of cult of PERSONALITY. Che GUAvara, Mao, Stalin, Fidel, we need a name a MASTER. Neutral theory is not enough we need a NAME a master that introduces a NEW ORDER.

Sometimes Badiou links Psychoanalysis with LOVE. At the same time, His best example of evental structure is RELIGION, St. Paul We live in secular era, religion is not evental, I just use Paul as example of formal evental structure. But how was it possible to happen there? Z believes category of LOVE is much more mysterious.

Kant = Science
Fichte = Politics
Schelling = Art supreme medium of truth is art
Hegel = LOVE category of life is central

51:50 NIGHT OF WORLD

Alenka accepts Badiou’s claim that event as real in its brutality is not enough, you need to nominate the EVENT.

She does something he doesn’t do. She introduces distinction between master signifier and signifier of the barred other. Signifier of barred other.
when you present the signifier of the inconsistent Other
when you name properly the antagonism, the real the defines a certain field: class struggle, when this turns into a Master signifier you already de-eventalize it, you lose it.

CHIESA: fuck it there will always be Master signifier obscene super ego fantasy etc.

Communist Hypothesis, the link to a master is not the ultimate social link there is a possibility of being together collectively that is not sustained by a MASTER.
If we drop this we are back to J.A. Miller

54:20 Let’s say a political system is in a crisis. If we take this crisis in a pre-evental way: It means we inscribe it, the system fails blah blah, the crucial pt. is NO! This failure, is not simply failure of the system, in this FAILURE THE TRUTH OF THE SYSTEM APPEARS.

For Freud/Marx crises, the basic antagonism of capitalism appears, symptoms are the truth of normality

To provide the name for this NECESSITY, why failures are structurally necessary, the big other itself is Barred. this is the politics of NOMINATION

55:50 Laclau
populist politics is always the politics of failure, things are basically ok, but jews traitors foreigners always fuck it up. scapegoats. corrupted the old order, the crack, the failure is not in the order as such, its an accidental corruption, you need to re-establish the proper order. NO

The EVENT IS TO FIND A NAME social antagonism, class struggle, which clearly locates the failure in the ORDER ITSELF.

58:20 Foucault

Big shift History Sex vol 1 is different from vol 2 and 3. This tension is already in his early works on Madness. Already described in Derrida.

Even in early works on madness.
The oscillation in early Foucault, on one hand he says I want to describe till now MADNESS was described by the external standpoint of science/power. I want madness itself to SPEAK. At the same time he makes it clear, that madness, substantially in-itself, is not an in-itself which is described differently, madness is an affect of mechanisms of madness. Madmen prior to modernity, was located in hermeneutics, you were devil, or divine that spoke through you. Madness was hermeneutics, a madman is that which a higher truth speaks through you. With moderinity it become POSITIVIST science. Something is wrong with brain, we incarcerate them.
In Vol 1. accent is power generates resistence to itself, resistance to power is way for power to reproduce itself more effectively

Beware, if a girl pretends to be shameful, she rejects you, but this rejection is already … they give you an entire classification of techniques

so again Foucault goes fo far as to say, power itself generates the man to be liberated. Resistance is part of power, the circle is closed.
NO LIBERATION, no space for liberation. resistance in advance is incorporated.

IN vol 2 and vol 3, he is looking for islands of resistance. He has here also rehabilitates the subject, the idea through some kind of self-education, self-relating you can acquire a distance, a resistance. No longer this co-optive pessimism.

1:04 BUTLER

This is my problem with Judith Butler. She always speaks the language of resistance. We can just occupy spaces and resist, the big OTHER OF POWER is here, but there are spaces of resistance. What if we play off the early and late Foucault. How can we have resistances which are not just caught up in counter-power. Sexuality is not the expression of sex, real sex is an effect of the discourses we have on sexuality. With these discourses, disciplinary discourses. Discourses, disciplinary discourses, a Paulian theory of transgression, every discourse of power generates the transgression it fights.

For Ž, he disagrees with all this FOUCAULT. I don’t like RESISTANCE the term. It has all this marginalist connotation, ooh the big Other is there, we can just screw it a bit, irony, displacement, performative fun, repetitiveness.

1:06 Adrian Johnson critique of Badiou where latter just focuses on Event and reactions to event.

There is a whole pre-evental strategy.

1:09 Tahir sq. Occupy wall st.
I don’t share his naive optimism. It’s still open. There are things which I am ready to extend retroative logic here. Something happens and retroactively we decide if it is an Event or not.

When Badiou was explaining FORCING event, for him forcing an event, is to impose the logic of event as immediately logic of Being. THIS IS STALINISM.

What Z doesn’t like, this is the “totalitarian temptation” says Badiou. I think there is something totally wrong in saying Stalin instead of treating communist vision as Evental, this idea, don’t translate the Event immediately into Being this is KANT.

Regulative use of idea, stalinst arrogant mistake, to take something as regulative as CONSTITUTIVE as making up reality. THIS IS KANT. Badiou makes an explicit reference to Kant’s REGULATIVE IDEA.

Here I”m more Hegelian, to explain horrors of Stalin, its’ too simply to claim that Stalin was too faithful to commie idea. No the problem is not Stalin wanted to impose to immediately Communist idea as order of being. NO THE IDEA itself was not correct. What’s the problem with forcing if you have a GOOD idea, fuck it force it if you want. But Stalin had a bad idea.

1:14 Master signifier which introduces a NEW ORDER, but there was no point de capiton. RESTRUCTURES THE WHOLE FIELD
Occupied Mexico City, they had power, they debated and talked for week or two then they said let’s go home.

1:18 HARDT NEGRI
Maybe events function in a different way, authentic political events. TJ Clark, he says this doesn’t mean system is powerful is going to go on, what he is saying is that there will not be a magic moment, where terracotta armies will emerge. Maybe we should change here the field.

183-4 anti-levinasian conclusion beyond the face of the other

Slavoj, Žižek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence.” The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard. 2006. 134-190.

This brings us to the radical anti-Levinasian conclusion: the true ethical step is the one beyond the face of the other, the one of suspending the hold of the face, the one of choosing against the face, for the Third. This coldness is justice at its most elementary.

Every preempting of the Other in the guise of his or her face relegates the Third to the faceless background.

And the elementary gesture of justice is not to show respect for the face in front of me, to be open to its depth, but to abstract from it and refocus onto the faceless Thirds in the background.

It is only such a shift of focus onto the Third that effectively uproots justice, liberating it from the contingent umbilical link that renders it “embedded” in a particular situation.

In other words, it is only such a shift onto the Third that grounds justice in the dimension of universality proper.

When Levinas endeavors to ground ethics in the Other’s face, is he not still clinging to the ultimate root of the ethical commitment, afraid to accept the abyss of the rootless Law as the only foundation of ethics?

Thus, truly blind justice cannot be grounded in the relationship to the Other’s face, in other words, in the relationship to the neighbor. Justice is emphatically not justice for —with regard to— the neighbor.

since the limitation of our capacity to relate to Others’ faces is the mark of our very finitude. In other words, the limitation of our ethical relation of responsibility toward the Other’s face which necessitates the rise of the Third (the domain of regulations) is a positive condition of ethics, not simply its secondary supplement.

“When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity — that was a quality God’s image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how their hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.”

However, what this means is that, in order to practice justice, one has to suspend one’s power of imagination; if hate is a failure of imagination, then pity is the failure of the power of abstraction.

the face is the ultimate ethical lure, and the passage from Judaism to Christianity is not the passage from blindly applying the harsh law to displaying love and pity for the suffering face.

It is crucial that it was Judaism, the religion of the harsh letter of the Law, that first formulated the injunction to love thy neighbor: the neighbor is not displayed through a face; it is, as we have seen, in his or her fundamental dimension a faceless monster.

It is here that one has to remain faithful to the Jewish legacy: in order to arrive at the “neighbor” we have to love, we must pass through the “dead” letter of the Law, which cleanses the neighbor of all imaginary lure, of the “inner wealth of a person” displayed through his or her face, reducing him or her to a pure subject.

Levinas is right to point out the ultimate paradox of how “the Jewish consciousness, formed precisely through contact with this harsh morality, with its obligations and sanctions, has learned to have an absolute horror of blood, while the doctrine of non-violence has not stemmed the natural course towards violence displayed by a whole world over the last two thousand years. . . . Only a God who maintains the principle of Law can in practice tone down its severity and use oral law to go beyond the inescapable harshness of Scriptures” (DF,138).

But what about the opposite paradox? What if only a God who is ready to subordinate his own Law to love can in practice push us to realize blind justice in all its harshness? Recall the infamous lines from Che Guevara’s testamentary “Message to the Tricontinental” (1967): “Hatred is an element of struggle; relentless hatred of the enemy that impels us over and beyond the natural limitations of man and transforms us into effective, violent, selective, and cold killing machines. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy.”

And it is crucial to read these lines together with Guevara’s notion of revolutionary violence as a “work of love”: “Let me say, with the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love. It is impossible to think of an authentic revolutionary with-out this quality.”

One should confer to the words “beyond the natural limitations of man” their entire Kantian weight: in their love/hatred, revolutionaries are pushed beyond the limitations of empirical “human nature,” so that their violence is literally angelic.

Therein resides the core of revolutionary justice, this much misused term: harshness of the measures taken, sustained by love. Does this not recall Christ’s scandalous words from Luke (“if anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and his mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes even his own life —he cannot be my disciple” [Luke 14 : 26]), which point in exactly the same direction as another famous quote from Che? “You may have to be tough, but do not lose your tenderness. You may have to cut the flowers, but it will not stop the Spring.” 54

This Christian stance is the opposite of the Oriental attitude of nonviolence, which —as we know from the long history of Buddhist rulers and warriors— can legitimize the worst violence. It is not that the revolutionary violence “really” aims at establishing a nonviolent harmony; on the contrary, the authentic revolutionary liberation is much more directly identified with violence — it is violence as such (the violent gesture of discarding, of establishing a difference, of drawing a line of separation) which liberates.

Freedom is not a blissfully neutral state of harmony and balance, but the violent act which disturbs this balance.

164 Kafka odradek

Žžek, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard. 2006

Odradek, as an object that is transgenerational (exempted from the cycle of generations), immortal, outside finitude (because outside sexual difference), outside time, displaying no goal-oriented activity, no purpose, no utility, is jouissance embodied: “Jouissance is that which serves nothing,” as Lacan put in his seminar 20, Encore.

There are different figurations of Thing-jouissance— an immortal (or, more precisely, undead) excess — in Kafka’s work: the Law that somehow insists without properly existing, making us guilty without us knowing what we are guilty of; the wound that won’t heal yet does not let us die; bureaucracy in its most “irrational” aspect; and, last but not least, “partial objects” like Odradek.

They all display a kind of mock-Hegelian nightmarish “bad infinity” — there is no Aufhebung, no resolution proper; the thing just drags on. We never reach the Law; the Emperor’s letter never arrives at its destination; the wound never closes (or kills me). The Kafkan Thing is either transcendent, forever eluding our grasp (the Law, the Castle), or a ridiculous object into which the subject is metamorphosed and which we cannot ever get rid of (like Gregor Samsa, who changes into an insect). The point is to read these two features together: jouissance is that which we cannot ever attain and that which we cannot ever get rid of.

Kafka’s genius was to eroticize bureaucracy, the nonerotic entity if there ever was one. 164-165

Back to Odradek: in his concise analysis of the story, Jean-Claude Milner first draws attention to a peculiarity of Odradek: he has two legs, he speaks, laughs; in short, he displays all the features of a human being. Al-though he is human, he does not resemble a human being, but clearlyappears inhuman.

As such, he is the opposite of Oedipus, who (lamenting his fate at Colonus) claims that he became nonhuman when he finally acquired all properties of an ordinary human: in line with the series of Kafka’s other heroes, Odradek becomes human only when he no longer resembles a human being (by metamorphosing himself into an insect, or a spool,or whatever).

He is, effectively, a “universal singular,” a stand-in for humanity by way of embodying its inhuman excess, by not resembling anything “human.” The contrast with Aristophanes’ myth (in Plato’s Symposium) of the original spherical human being divided into two parts, eternally searching for its complementary counter-part in order to return to the lost Whole, is crucial here: although also a “partial object,” Odradek does not look for any complementary parts, he is lacking nothing. It may be significant, also, that he is not spherical.

Odradek is thus simply what Lacan, in his seminar 11 and in his seminal écrit “Positions de l’inconscient,” developed as lamella, libido as an organ, the inhuman-human “undead” organ without a body, the mythical pre-subjective “undead” life-substance, or, rather, the remainder of the life-substance which has escaped the symbolic colonization, the horrible palpitation of the “acephal” drive which persists beyond ordinary death, outside the scope of paternal authority, nomadic, with no fixed domicile.

The choice underlying Kafka’s story is thus Lacan’s “le père ou pire,” “the father or the worse”: Odradek is “the worst” as the alternative to the father. 166-167

159 Kant undead madness

The same paradox is at work in the core of the “dialectic of Enlightenment”: although Adorno (and Horkheimer) conceive the catastrophes and barbarisms of the twentieth century as inherent to the project of enlightenment, not as a result of some remainder of preceding barbarism to be abolished by way of bringing “enlightenment as an unfinished project” to its completion, they insist on fighting this excess-consequence of enlightenment by the means of enlightenment itself.

So, again, if enlightenment brought to the end equals regression into barbarism, does this mean that the only concept of enlightenment that we possess is the one which should be constrained, rendered aware of its limitation, or is there another positive notion of enlightenment which already includes this limitation?

There are two basic answers to this inconsistency of Adorno’s critical project: Jürgen Habermas or Lacan. With Habermas, one breaks the deadlock by formulating a positive normative frame of reference.

Through Lacan, one reconceptualizes the “humanity” of the deadlock/limitation as such; in other words, one provides a definition of the “human” which, beyond and above (or, rather, beneath) the previous infinite universal, accentuates the limitation as such: being-human is a specific attitude of finitude, of passivity, of vulnerable exposure. 159

Therein resides, for Butler, the basic paradox: while we should, of course, condemn as “inhuman” all those situations in which our will is violated, thwarted, or under the pressure of an external violence, we should not simply conclude that a positive definition of humanity is the autonomy of will, because there is a kind of passive exposure to an overwhelming Otherness which is the very basis of being-human.

How, then, are we to distinguish the “bad” inhumanity, the violence which crushes our will, from the passivity constitutive of humanity?

At this point, Butler compromises her position, introducing a naive distinction which recalls Herbert Marcuse’s old distinction between “necessary” repression and “surplus” repression:

“of course we can and must invent norms which decide between different forms of being-overwhelmed, by way of drawing a line of distinction between the unavoidable and unsurpassable aspect here and the changeable conditions there”.

What Butler (as well as Adorno) fails to render thematic is the changed status of the “inhuman” in Kant’s transcendental turn.

Kant introduced a key distinction between negative and indefinite judgment: the positive judgment “the soul is mortal” can be negated in two ways, when a predicate is denied to the subject (“the soul is not mortal”) and when a nonpredicate is affirmed (“the soul is nonmortal”). The difference is exactly the same as the one, known to every reader of Stephen King, between “he is not dead” and “he is undead.”

The indefinite judgment opens up a third domain which undermines the underlying distinction: the “undead” are neither alive nor dead; they are the mon-strous “living dead.” [For a closer elaboration of this distinction, see chapter 3 Tarrying with the Negative 1993. The Lacanian objet petit a also follows the logic of indefinite judgment: one should not say that it isn’t an object, but rather that it is a nonobject, an object that from within undermines/negates objectivity.]

The same goes for inhuman.“He is not human” is not the same as “he is inhuman.” “He is not human” means simply that he is external to humanity, animal or divine, while “he is inhuman” means something thoroughly different, namely, that he is neither simply human nor simply inhuman, but marked by a terrifying excess which, although it negates what we understand as “humanity,” is inher-ent to being-human.

And perhaps I should risk the hypothesis that this is what changes with the Kantian revolution: in the pre-Kantian universe, humans were simply humans, beings of reason, fighting the excesses of animal lusts and divine madness, but since Kant and German Idealism, the excess to be fought is absolutely immanent, the very core of subjectivity itself (which is why, with German Idealism, the metaphor for the core of subjectivity is Night, “Night of the World,” in contrast to the Enlightenment notion of the Light of Reason fighting the surrounding darkness).

So when, in the pre-Kantian universe, a hero goes mad, it means he is deprived of his humanity, in other words, the animal passions or divine madness took over, while with Kant, madness signals the unconstrained explosion of the very core of a human being. 159-160

158 What Levinas leaves out the nonhuman

The limitation of Levinas is not simply that of a Eurocentrist who relies on a too narrow definition of what is human, a definition that secretly excludes non-Europeans as “not fully human.”*

What Levinas fails to include into the scope of “human” is, rather, the inhuman itself, a dimension which eludes the face-to-face relationship of humans.

In a first approach, Butler may seem to be more sensitive to this aspect — say, when she provides a subtle description of Adorno’s ambiguity with regard to the “inhuman”: while Adorno is well aware of the violence involved in the predominant definition of what counts as “human” (the implied exclusion of whole dimensions as “nonhuman”), he nonetheless basically conceives “inhuman” as the depository of “alienated” humanity — ultimately, for Adorno, “inhuman” is the power of barbarism we have to fight.

What he misses here is the paradox that every normative determination of the “human” is only possible against an impenetrable ground of “inhuman,” of something which remains opaque and resists inclusion into any narrative reconstitution of what counts as “human.”

In other words,although Adorno recognizes that being-human is constitutively finite, nontotalized, that the very attempt to posit the Human as “absolute subject” dehumanizes it, he does not deploy how this self-limitation of the Human defines “being-human”: Is being-human just the limitation of human, or is there a positive notion of this limitation which constitutes being-human? 158

*One may formulate the reproach also at this level, however. Today, in our politically correct anti-Eurocentric times, one is tempted to admire Levinas’s readiness to openly admit his being perplexed by the African-Asian other who is too alien to be a neighbor: our time is marked, he says, by “the arrival on the historical scene of those underdeveloped Afro-Asiatic masses who are strangers to the Sacred History that forms the heart of the Judaic-Christian world” (DF,160)

155-7 I am a hole in the order of being obscene supplement to levinas

Although Levinas asserts this asymmetry as universal (every one of us is in the position of primordial responsibility toward others), does this asymmetry not effectively end up in privileging one particular group that assumes responsibility for all others … in this case, of course, Jews … “The idea of a chosen people must not be taken as a sign of pride. … It knows itself at the centre of the world … for I am always alone in being able to answer the call, I am irreplaceable in my assumption of responsibility” (DF,176 –77).

Self-questioning is always by definition the obverse of self-privileging; there is always something false about respect for others which is based on questioning of one’s own right to exist. 155

For Spinoza there is no Hobbesian “Self” as extracted from and opposed to reality. Spinoza’s ontology is one of full immanence to the world; in other words, I “am” just the network of my relations with the world, I am to-tally “externalized” in it. My conatus, my tendency to assert myself, is thus not my assertion at the expense of the world, but my full acceptance of being part of the world, my assertion of the wider reality only within which I can thrive. The opposition of egotism and altruism is thus overcome: I fully am, not as an isolated Self, but in the thriving reality, part of which I am. When Levinas writes that “enjoyment is the singularization of an ego. . . . it is the very work of egoism” and when he concludes from it that “giving has meaning only as a tearing from oneself despite oneself. . . . Only a subject that eats can be for-the-Other,” he therefore secretly imputes to Spinoza an egotistic “subjectivist” notion of (my) existence. 156

His anti-Spinozistic questioning of my right to exist is inverted arrogance, as if I am the center whose existence threatens all others.

So the answer should not be an assertion of my right to exist in harmony with and tolerance of others, but a more radical claim: Do I exist in the first place? Am I not, rather, a hole in the order of being? 156

This brings us to the ultimate paradox on account of which Levinas’s answer is not sufficient: I am a threat to the entire order of being not insofar as I positively exist as part of this order, but precisely insofar as I am a hole in the order of being. As such, as nothing, I “am” a striving to reach out and appropriate all (only a Nothing can desire to become Everything).

Friedrich Schelling already defined the subject as the endless striving of the Nothing to become Everything. On the contrary, a positive living being occupying a determinate space in reality, rooted in it, is by definition a moment of its circulation and reproduction.

The figure of Benny Morris, this symptom of the falsity of the liberal-benevolent-peacenik Israelis, is to be conceived as the concealed obscene supplement to Levinasian ethics. After bringing to the light the “dark” side of the emergence of the State of Israel (the aim of David Ben-Gurion and the first generation of Israeli leaders in the 1949 war was to provoke the Arab population to leave Palestine … including raping and killing innocent civilians), for which he was shunned by the Israeli academic establishment, Morris…stated that these “dark” acts were necessary for the constitution and survival of the State of Israel…Ben-Gurion’s mistake was that he did not complete the ethnic cleaning, including expelling Arabs from the West Bank — in this case, there would have been peace today in the Middle East. 157

The merit of this reasoning is that it thoroughly avoids the standard liberal hypocrisy: if you want the State of Israel, you have to accept the price of ethnic cleansing; there was never any third way of living peacefully side by side with the Palestinians in a Jewish or even secular democratic state.

All the liberal complaints about the unfair harshness in the treatment of Palestinians, all their condemnation of the terror of the West Bank occupation, avoid the key issue by sustaining the illusion that a little bit more tolerance and withdrawal will bring peace.

…the State of Israel was possible only through the ethnic cleansing of the majority of people living there prior to the Jewish resettlement.

One should effectively read Morris as anti-Levinas par excellence, as the truth of Levinas’s hope that the State of Israel will be a unique state directly grounded in the messianic promise of Justice; to retain his vision of Israel, Levinas has to deny what Morris ruthlessly admits.

Morris’s attitude, his cold acceptance of the fact that we have to kill others in order to survive, is the truth of the Levinasian questioning of one’s own right to exist. 157

147 the face ultimate fetish shame Jerry Lewis

The face is thus the ultimate fetish, the object which fills in (obfuscates) the big Other’s “castration” (inconsistency, lack), the abyss of its circularity. At a different level, this fetishization— or, rather, fetishist disavowal — is discernible also in our daily relating to another person’s face. This disavowal does not primarily concern the raw reality of flesh (“I know very well that beneath the face there is just the Real of the raw flesh, bones, and blood, but I nonetheless act as if the face is a window into the mysterious interiority on the soul”),

but rather, at a more radical level, the abyss/void of the Other: the human face “gentrifies” the terrifying Thing that is the ultimate reality of our neighbor.

And insofar as the void called “the subject of the signifier” ($) is strictly correlative to this inconsistency (lack) of the Other, subject and face are to be opposed: the Event of encountering the other’s face is not the experience of the abyss of the other’s subjectivity — the only way to arrive at this experience is through defacement in all its dimensions, from a simple tic or grimace that disfigures the face (in this sense, Lacan claims that the Real is “the grimace of reality”) up to the monstrosity of the total loss of face.

Perhaps the key moment in Jerry Lewis’s films occurs when the idiot he plays is compelled to become aware of the havoc his behavior has caused: at this moment, when he is stared at by all the people around him, unable to sustain their gaze, he engages in his unique mode of making faces, of ridiculously disfiguring his facial expression, combined with twisting his hands and rolling his eyes. This desperate attempt of the ashamed subject to efface his presence, to erase himself from others’ view, combined with the endeavor to assume a new face more acceptable to the environs, is subjectivization at its purest.

However, Lacan’s counterargument is here that shame by definition concerns fantasy. Shame is not simply passivity, but an actively assumed passivity:if I am raped, I have nothing to be ashamed of; but if I enjoy being raped, then I deserve to feel ashamed. Actively assuming passivity thus means, in Lacanian terms, finding jouissance in the passive situation in which one is caught. And since the coordinates of jouissance are ultimately those of the fundamental fantasy, which is the fantasy of (finding jouissance in) being put in the passive position (like the Freudian “My father is beating me”), what exposes the subject to shame is not the disclosure of how he is put in the passive position, treated only as the body. Shame emerges only when such a passive position in social reality touches upon the (disavowed intimate) fantasy.

Let us take two women, the first, liberated and assertive, active; the other, secretly daydreaming about being brutally handled by her partner, even raped. The crucial point is that, if both of them are raped, the rape will be much more traumatic for the second one, on account of the fact that it will realize in “external” social reality the “stuff of her dreams.” Why?

There is a gap which forever separates the fantasmatic kernel of the subject’s being from the more “superficial” modes of his or her symbolic and /or imaginary identifications — it is never possible for me to fully assume (in the sense of symbolic integration) the fantasmatic kernel of my being.

When I approach it too closely, what occurs is the aphanisis of the subject: the subject loses his or her symbolic consistency, it disintegrates. And the forced actualization in social reality itself of the fantasmatic kernel of my being is, perhaps, the worst, most humiliating kind of violence, a violence which undermines the very basis of my identity (of my “self-image”) by exposing me to an unbearable shame.

142-4 neighbor real thing and its symbolic gentrification

Smashing the Neighbor’s Face
How does subjectivity relate to transcendence? There seem to be two basic modes exemplified by the names of Jean-Paul Sartre and Levinas.

(1) The “transcendence of the ego” (Sartre), in other words, the notion of subject as the force of negativity, self-transcending, never a positive entity identical to itself.

(2) The existence of the subject as grounded in its openness to an irreducible -unfathomable- transcendent Otherness — there is a subject only insofar as it is not absolute and self-grounded but remains in a tension with an impenetrable Other; there is freedom only through the reference to a gap which makes the Other unfathomable …

As expected, Hegel offers a kind of “mediation” between these two extremes, asserting their ultimate identity. It is not only that the core of subjectivity is inaccessible to the subject, that the subject is decentered with regard to itself, that it cannot assume the abyss in its very center;

it is also not that the first mode is the “truth” of the second (in a reflexive twist, the subject has to acknowledge that the transcendent power which resists it is really its own, the power of subject itself), or vice versa (the subject emerges only as confronted with the abyss of the Other).

This seems to be the lesson of Hegel’s intersubjectivity — I am a free subject only through encountering another free subject— and the usual counterargument is here that, for Hegel, this dependence on the Other is just a mediating step/detour on the way toward full recognition of the subject in its Other, the full appropriation of the Other.

But are things so simple? What if the Hegelian “recognition” means that I have to recognize in the impenetrable Other which appears as the obstacle to my freedom its positive-enabling ground and condition? What if it is only in this sense is that the Other is “sublated”?

143:

The topic of the “other” is to be submitted to a kind of spectral analysis that renders visible its imaginary, symbolic, and real aspects — it provides perhaps the ultimate case of the Lacanian notion of the “Borromean knot” that unites these three dimensions.

First, there is the imaginary other — other people “like me,” my fellow human beings with whom I am engaged in the mirrorlike relationships of competition, mutual recognition, and so forth.

Then, there is the symbolic “big Other”— the “substance” of our social existence, the impersonal set of rules that coordinate our coexistence.

Finally, there is the Other qua Real, the impossible Thing, the “inhuman partner,” the Other with whom no symmetrical dialogue, mediated by the symbolic Order, is possible.

And it is crucial to perceive how these three dimensions are hooked up. The neighbor (Nebenmensch) as the Thing means that, beneath the neighbor as my semblant, my mirror image, there always lurks the unfathomable abyss of radical Otherness, of a monstrous Thing that cannot be “gentrified.”

In his seminar 3, Lacan already indicates this dimension:

And why “the Other” with a capital O? For a no doubt mad reason, in the same way as it is madness every time we are obliged to bring in signs supplementary to those given by language. Here the mad reason is the following. You are my wife — after all, what do you know about it? You are my master — in reality, are you so sure of that? What creates the founding value of those words is that what is aimed at in the message, as well as what is manifest in the pretence, is that the other is there qua absolute Other. Absolute, that is to say he is recognized, but is not known. In the same way, what constitutes pretence is that, in the end, you don’t know whether it’s a pretence or not. Essentially it is this unknown element in the alterity of the other which charac-terizes the speech relation on the level on which it is spoken to the other. [Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, livre 3: Les psychoses (Paris: Seuil, 1981), 48.]

Lacan’s notion, from the early 1950s, of the “founding word,” of the statement which confers on you a symbolic title and thus makes you what you are (wife, master), is usually perceived as an echo of the theory of performative speech acts …

However, it is clear from the above quote that Lacan aims at something more: we need the recourse to performativity, to the symbolic engagement, precisely and only insofar as the other whom we encounter is not only the imaginary semblant, but also the elusive absolute Other of the Real Thing with whom no reciprocal exchange is possible.

In order to render our coexistence with the Thing minimally bearable, the symbolic order qua Third, the pacifying mediator, has to intervene: the “gentrification” of the Other-Thing into a “normal human fellow” cannot occur through our direct interaction, but presupposes the third agency to which we both submit ourselves — there is no intersubjectivity (no symmetrical, shared, relation between humans) without the impersonal symbolic Order.

So no axis between the two terms can subsist without the third one one: if the functioning of the big Other is suspended, the friendly neighbor coincides with the monstrous Thing (Antigone);

if there is no neighbor to whom I can relate as a human partner, the symbolic Order itself turns into the monstrous Thing which directly parasitizes upon me (like Daniel Paul Schreber’s God who directly controls me, penetrating me with the rays of jouissance).

If there is no Thing to underpin our everyday symbolically regulated exchange with others, we find ourselves in a Habermasian “flat,” aseptic universe in which subjects are deprived of their hubris of excessive passion, reduced to lifeless pawns in the regulated game of communication.

We can clearly see, now, how far psychoanalysis is from any defense of the dignity of the human face. Is the psychoanalytic treatment not the experience of rendering public (to the analyst, who stands for the big Other) one’s most intimate fantasies and thus the experience of losing one’s face in the most radical sense of the term? This is already the lesson of the very material dispositif of the psychoanalytic treatment: no face-to-face between the subject-patient and the analyst; instead, the subject lying and the analyst sitting behind him, both staring into the same void in front of them. There is no “intersubjectivity” here, only the two without face-to-face, the First and the Third. 148

140 Ž begins his critique of butler the act neighbor as Thing

The limit of such a reference to the impenetrable background into which we are thrown and on account of which we cannot be taken as fully accountable and responsible for our acts is the negativity of freedom: even when the entire positive content of my psyche is ultimately impenetrable, the margin of my freedom is that I can say No! to any positive element that I encounter.

This negativity of freedom provides the zero-level from which every positive content can be questioned. Lacan’s position is thus that being exposed/overwhelmed, caught in a cobweb of preexisting conditions, is not incompatible with radical autonomy.

Of course, I cannot undo the substantial weight of the context into which I am thrown; of course, I cannot penetrate the opaque background of my being; but what I can do is, in an act of negativity, “cleanse the plate,” draw a line, exempt myself, step out of the symbolic in a “suicidal” gesture of a radical act —what Freud called “death drive” and what German Idealism called “radical negativity.”

What gets lost in this “critique of ethical violence” is precisely the most precious and revolutionary aspect of the Jewish legacy.

Let us not forget that, in the Jewish tradition, the divine Mosaic Law is experienced as something externally, violently imposed, contingent and traumatic—in short, as an impossible/real Thing that “makes the law.”

What is arguably the ultimate scene of religious-ideological interpellation — the pronouncement of the Decalogue on Mount Sinai — is the very opposite of something that emerges “organically” as the outcome of the path of self-knowing and self-realization: the pronouncement of the Decalogue is ethical violence at its purest.

The Judeo-Christian tradition is thus to be strictly opposed to the New Age Gnostic problematic of self-realization or self-fulfillment, and the cause of this need for a violent imposition of the Law is that the very terrain covered by the Law is that of an even more fundamental violence, that of encountering a neighbor: far from brutally disturbing a preceding harmonious social interaction, the imposition of the Law endeavors to introduce a minimum of regulation onto a stressful “impossible” relationship.

When the Old Testament enjoins you to love and respect your neighbor, this does not refer to your imaginary semblable/double, but to the neighbor qua traumatic Thing.

In contrast to the New Age attitude which ultimately reduces my Other/Neighbor to my mirror-image or to the means in the path of my self-realization (like the Jungian psychology in which other persons around me are ultimately reduced to the externalizations-projections of the different disavowed aspects of my personality), Judaism opens up a tradition in which an alien traumatic kernel forever persists in my Neighbor — the Neighbor remains an inert, impenetrable, enigmatic presence that hystericizes me. The core of this presence, of course, is the Other’s desire, an enigma not only for us, but also for the Other itself.

For this reason, the Lacanian “Che vuoi?” is not simply an inquiry into “What do you want?” but more an inquiry into “What’s bugging you? What is it in you that makes you so unbearable, not only for us but also for yourself, that you yourself obviously do not master?”

— in Serb, there is a vulgar expression which perfectly renders this meaning: when somebody is getting on one’s nerves, one asks him, “What for a prick is fucking you? [Koji kurac te jebe?]”

138-9 plea ethical violence Ž summary of B’s position

Here is Žižek’s interpretation of Butler’s ethics

The impossibility of fully accounting for oneself is conditioned by the irreducible intersubjective context of every narrative reconstitution: when I reconstruct my life in a narrative, I always do it within a certain intersubjective context, answering the Other’s call-injunction, addressing the Other in a certain way.

This background, including the (unconscious) motivations and libidinal investments of my narrative, cannot ever be rendered fully transparent within the narrative. To fully account for oneself in a symbolic narrative is a priori impossible; the Socratic injunction, “know thyself,” is impossible to fulfill for a priori structural reasons.

My very status as a subject depends on its links to the substantial Other: not only the regulative-symbolic Other of the tradition in which I am embedded, but also the bodily-desiring substance of the Other, the fact that, in the core of my being, I am irreducibly vulnerable, exposed to the Other(s). And far from limiting my ethical status (autonomy), this primordial vulnerability due to my constitutive exposure to the Other grounds it: what makes an individual human and thus something for which we are responsible, toward whom we have a duty to help, is his/her very finitude and vulnerability.

Far from undermining ethics (in the sense of rendering me ultimately nonresponsible: “I am not a master of myself, what I do is conditioned by forces that overwhelm me.”), this primordial exposure /dependency opens up the properly ethical relation of individuals who accept and respect each other’s vulnerability and limitation.

Crucial here is the link between the impenetrability of the Other and my own impenetrability to myself: they are linked because my own being is grounded in the primordial exposure to the Other. Confronted with the Other, I never can fully account for myself. And when Butler emphasizes how one should not close oneself off to this exposure to the Other, how one should not try to transpose the unwilled into something willed, is she not thereby opposing the very core of Nietzsche’s thought, the stance of willing the eternal return of the Same, which involves precisely the transposition of everything unwilled, everything we are thrown into as given, into something Willed?

The first ethical gesture is thus to abandon the position of absolute self-positing subjectivity and to acknowledge one’s exposure / thrownness, being overwhelmed by Other(ness): far from limiting our humanity, this limitation is its positive condition. This awareness of limitation implies a stance of fundamental forgiveness and a tolerant “live and let live” attitude: I will never be able to account for myself in front of the Other, because I am already nontransparent to myself, and I will never get from the Other a full answer to “who are you?” because the Other is a mystery also for him /herself.

To recognize the Other is thus not primarily or ultimately to recognize the Other in a certain well-defined capacity (“I recognize you as . . . rational, good, lovable”), but to recognize you in the abyss of your very impenetrability and opacity. This mutual recognition of limitation thus opens up a space of sociality that is the solidarity of the vulnerable. 🙂 Žižek is looking for an opening to insert something of his monstrous neighbor.

Page 139: Butler’s central “Hegelian” reflexive turn here is that it is not only that the subject has to adopt a stance toward the norms that regulate his activity — these norms in their turn determine who and what is or is not recognized as subject.

Relying on Foucault, Butler thus formulates the basic feature of critical tradition: when one criticizes and judges phenomena on behalf of norms, one should in the same gesture question the status of these norms. Say, when one holds something to be (un)true, one should at the same time question the criteria of “holding something to be true,” which are never abstract and ahistorical, but always part of a concrete context into which we are thrown.

This move, of course, is the elementary Hegelian move formulated in the introduction to the Phenomenology: testing is always minimally self-relating and reflexive, in other words, when I am testing the truth of a statement or an act, I am always also testing the standard of testing, so that if the test fails, the standard of success or failure should also be problematized. This reference to Hegel is mediated by Adorno’s critique of Hegel’s idealism, a critique which Butler submits to critical reading.

When Adorno claims that “the true injustice is always located at the place from which one blindly posits oneself as just and the other as unjust”, does he thereby not basically repeat Hegel’s old argument about the Beautiful Soul: “The true Evil is the very gaze which sees evil all around itself”? Recall the arrogance of many West Germans in 1990, when they condemned the majority of East Germans as moral weaklings corrupted by the Communist police regime — this very gaze which saw in East Germans moral corruption was corruption itself.

(Symptomatically, although many DDR files were opened to the public, the ones that remained secret are the files recording contact between East German and West German politicians — too much West sycophancy would be revealed here.)

[There is a double paradox in Butler’s establishing the link between Adorno’s critique of the ethical violence of the abstract universality imposed from outside upon a concrete life-world and Hegel’s critique of revolutionary terror as the supreme reign of the abstract universality.

First, one should bear in mind that Hegel here relies on the standard conservative motif (elaborated before him by Edmund Burke) of organic traditional ties which a revolution violently disrupts and that Hegel’s rejection of universal democracy is part of the same line of thought. So we have here Butler praising the “conservative” Hegel!

Furthermore, Hegel is not simply rejecting revolutionary terror. He is in the same gesture asserting its necessity: we do not have a choice between the abstract universality of terror and the traditional organic unity — the choice is here forced, the first gesture is necessarily that of asserting abstract universality.

136-7 neighbor plea for ethical violence butler Ž

To play this game to the end, when the Wolf Man “regressed” to the traumatic scene that determined his further psychic development—witnessing the parental coitus a tergo — the solution would be to rewrite this scene, so that what the Wolf Man effectively saw was merely his parents lying on the bed, father reading a newspaper and mother a sentimental novel?

Ridiculous as this procedure may appear, let us not forget that it also has its politically correct version, that of the ethnic, sexual, and so on minorities rewriting their past in a more positive, self-asserting vein (African-Americans claiming that long be-fore European modernity, ancient African empires already had highly developed science and technology, etc.). … What disappears in this total availability of the past to its subsequent retroactive rewriting are not primarily the “hard facts,” but the Real of a traumatic encounter whose structuring role in the subject’s psychic economy forever resists its symbolic rewriting.

The ultimate irony is that this “critique of ethical violence” is some-times even linked to the Nietzschean motif of moral norms as imposed by the weak on the strong, thwarting their life-assertiveness: moral sensitivity, bad conscience, and guilt feeling are internalized resistances to the heroic assertion of Life. For Nietzsche, such “moral sensitivity” culminates in the contemporary Last Man who fears excessive intensity of life as something that may disturb his search for “happiness” without stress, and who, for this very reason, rejects “cruel” imposed moral norms as a threat to his fragile balance.

No wonder, then, that the latest version of the critique of ethical violence was proposed by Judith Butler, whose last book, although it does not mention Badiou, is de facto a kind of anti-Badiou manifesto: hers is an ethics of finitude, of making a virtue out of our very weakness, in other words, of elevating into the highest ethical value the respect for our very inability to act with full responsibility. The question one should ask concerns the limits of this operation.

Butler describes how, in every narrative account of myself, I have to submit myself to the foreign temporality of my language tradition and thus have to accept my radical decenterment. The irony of this description is that Butler, the sharp critic of Lacan, renders here (a somewhat simplified version of) what Lacan calls “symbolic castration,” the subject’s constitutive alienation in the decentered symbolic order.

Is, then, the subject totally determined by the signifying structure, or does it dispose of a margin of freedom? In order to account for this resistance to the rule of symbolic norms, Butler turns to Foucault: norms rule only insofar as they are practiced by subjects, and the subject disposes here of a minimum of freedom to arrange itself with these norms, to subvert them, to (re)inscribe them in different modes, and so on.

Lacan, on the contrary, allows for a much stronger subjective autonomy: insofar as the subject occupies the place of the lack in the Other (symbolic order), it can perform separation (the operation which is the opposite of alienation), and suspend the reign of the big Other, in other words, separate itself from it. 137

🙂 Ž doesn’t go anywhere with this last point. He says Lacan, contra Butler, allows for a strong subjective autonomy. Ok. So? This is the one and only time he speaks of separation.

Adorno Prize

Can one lead a good life in a bad life?
Judith Butler September 11 2012 Adorno Prize Lecture download

JB starts her talk with a quote from Theodore Adorno: Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen (Wrong life cannot be lived rightly).

She uses this quote to structure her talk firstly as a question of morality and ethics, what is it to live a good life? And secondly, “what form does this question take for us now? Or, how does the historical time in which we live condition and permeate the form of the question itself?”

Good life cannot be separted from the question of whose life? Life must be seen as that something which many who follow outside of the parameters that define life as such, do not even register. So what would this question mean for those who lives do not count properly as lives.

Taking the term as it stands: “good life” ambiguity surrounding this term. Those who claim to be living the good life may be living off the profits made off the back of workers, thus in relations of exploitation. The phrase “has become a vector for competing schemes of value.”

So where does JB go. She rejects Aristotelian formulation as too individualistic and on the other that ‘the good life’ has been too “contaminated by commercial discourse to be useful to those who want to think about the relationship between morality, or ethics more broadly, and social and economic theory.”

Ok so JB has cleared her slate to begin her theoretical investigation from perspective that as hinted earlier, begins from a perspective of the relationship between morality/ethics and social theory, as she quotes Adorno from his Problems of Moral Philosophy, that the individual “who exists pure for himself is an empty abstraction.” Butler thus is angling towards looking at how the broader “operations of power and domination enter into, or disrupt, our individual reflections on how best to live.”

Are we surprised? Of course not. Butler really does not waste any time in underscoring the importance of embedding the question “what is the good life” into a wider sociality. She intends to address the fact that a “good life” is dependent upon a wider social configuration of forces.

“And And so it makes sense to ask: which social configuration of ‘life’ enters into the question, how best to live? If I ask how best to live, or how to lead a good life, I seem to draw upon not only ideas of what is good, but also of what is living, and what is life. I must have a
sense of my life in order to ask what kind of life to lead, and my life must appear to me as something I might lead, something that does not just lead me. And yet it is clear that I cannot ‘lead’ all aspects of the living organism that I am, even though I am compelled to ask: how might I lead my life? How does one lead a life when not all life processes that make up a life can be led, or when only certain aspects of a life can be directed or formed in a deliberate or reflective way, and others clearly not?

Here Butler touches on all the themes that she will follow in her discussion: Life is something I must have a sense of, of something I can lead but at the same time, it is something that “leads me.” What are we to make of this?

Morality and Biopolitics
Biopolitics Butler broadly defines as management of life, “powers that differentially dispose lives to precarity as part of a broader management of populations.” 10

How am I to lead a good life?

1. lives are disposed to differential precarity
2. Whose lives matter? Whose lives do not matter, lives not recognizable as living or count only ambiguously as alive?

WE cannot take for granted that all living human beings bear the status of a subject who is worthy of rights and protections, with freedom and a sense of political belonging; on the contrary, such a status must be secured through political means, and where it is denied that deprivation must be made manifest. 10

Whose lives are grievable, and whose are not?

The biopolitical management of the ungrievable proves crucial to approaching the question, how do I lead this life? And how do I live this life within the life, the conditions of living, that structure us now?

At stake is the following sort of inquiry: whose lives are already considered not lives, or only partially living, or already dead and gone, prior to any explicit destruction or abandonment?

Grievability leads Butler to argue for the necessary structure of support that goes to sustaining a life.

Not worth protecting, or seen as worth under the “dominant schemes of value.”
Only a grievable life can be valued, and thus eligible for
– social and economic support
– housing
– health care
– employment
– rights of political expression
– forms of social recognition
– conditions for political agency

“… and one must be able to live a life knowing that the loss of this life that I am would be mourned and so every measure will be taken to forestall this loss.” 11

Do I establish myself in the terms that would make my life valuable, or do I offer a critique of the reigning order of values?

Modalities of social death

… the term ‘precarity’ can distinguish between modes of ‘unliveability’: those who, for instance,

– belong to imprisonment without recourse to due process;

– those living in war zones or under occupation, exposed to violence and destruction without recourse to safety or exit;

– those who undergo forced emigration and live in liminal zones, waiting for borders to open, food to arrive, and the prospect of living with documentation;

– those that mark the condition of being part of a dispensable or expendable workforce for whom the prospect of a stable livelihood seems increasingly remote, and who live in a daily way within a collapsed temporal horizon, suffering a sense of a damaged future in the stomach and in the bones, trying to feel but fearing more what might be felt.

How can one ask how best to lead a life when one feels no power to direct life, when one is uncertain that one is alive, or when one is struggling to feel the sense that one is alive, but also fearing that feeling, and the pain of living in this way? Under contemporary conditions of forced emigration, vast populations now live with no sense of a secure future, no sense of continuing political belonging, living a sense of damaged life as part of the daily experience of neoliberalism. 12

Category: butler

Ž EGS 2012 There is no original One Act evental enthusiasm