Category: butler

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2004.

Impossibly, against all reason, my project stakes its claim to the very space that “politics” makes unthink­able: the space outside the framework within which politics as we know it appears and so outside the conflict of visions that share as their presupposition that the body politic must survive. Indeed, at the heart of my polemical engagement … lies a simple provocation: that queerness names the sideof those not “fighting for the children,” the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism.

The embrace of queer negativity, then, can have no justification if justification requires it to reinforce some positive social value; its value, instead, resides in its challenge to value as defined by the social, and thus in its radical challenge to the very value of the social itself. 6

cohabitation

15 September 2012 Jüdischen Museum Berlin

Butler on the contemporary reduction of Zionism

Butler begins stating that when people ask her are you a Zionist they mean, “Do you believe that the State of Israel has the right to exist?”

If you say, Well no I’m not a Zionist, that seems to imply on destruction of State of Israel.  destruction of state meant to protect jewish people, you are in favour of destruction of Jews … the debate is impossible here.

Is Zionism the best political form to protect Jewish people,and for governing jews and palestinians?

You could be a Zionist prior to 1948, a cultural Zionist, renewal of jewish spirituality, renewal of people, understand Israel as a land but not necessarily as a state.  Federated solution, commonwealth solution …   It seems to me now, if you take the position of cultural zionism, you are considered an anti-zionist.  Zionism has become:  “Do you believe in the right of Israel to exist?  This is what zionism has been reduced to.  And it is a trap.  Reduction of Zionism to this question. And this is an impoverished situation.  Israel through 1967 you could be a left Zionism, cultural Zionist and debate about different solutions.  Now if you make these arguments you are considered a threat to the people.

This question of whether there is a Palestinian partner, belongs to a discourse I don’t fully understand, implies Israel is already willing to be a partner.  I think there are resistances to partnership on both sides and for different reasons.

There are different models of bi-nationalism already at work in the region, some are strange and sad.  Settlers in West Bank depend on Palestinian labour.  Occupier and occupied, lived near one another, depend on one another.  What would bi-nationaism look like after the occupation, and after the entire project of settler colonialism comes to a halt.  You need the end of occupation, so you can meet as EQUALS.  Otherwise you ratify the colonial structure, yes we’ll be good colonial subjects etc.

We don’t know what the Palestinian political positions would look like post – Occupation.  It would be a new political configuration.

Disaspora/Cohabitation

Diaspora: jews have scattered, lost their home, wait, long and struggle for return to home. That home has been understood as the nation of Zion, of Israel.  But there is another strain in Judaism that accepts the diasporic, most of the Kabbalah, which means that we are not just as Jews scattered throughout the world, but we by necessity live with the non-jew in this scattered place.  The diasporic affect is how jew and non-jew live together, in a common world that is neither Jewish nor non-Jewish, a meeting place, of various faiths, traditions, cultural formations.  There is an Affects of cohabitation emerges from the diasporic condition becomes the actual ethos of Israel-Palestinine.  A foundation of a new political ethos for Israel-Palestine.  A Jewish affects of cohabitation that would be non-nationalist.

Jewish ethics of cohabitation, the experience of exile is precisely a condition in which one has a heightened sensitivity to others who are dispossessed, lost their homes, lost their homeland, who are speaking in a language not their own, without their basic rights.  From the position of the exilic, that an ethics has emerged that has resulted in forms of Jewish socialism, Jewish internationalism, cultural zionism that have expressed an ethical commitment not just to Jews who are dispossessed, but to ALL THOSE who are dispossed This is a UNIVERSALISING gesture that emerges from the Jewish tradition, and historical tradition of EXHILE, including forced exhile from Spain, Russia.  There is an ethics that emerges from expulsion and it is not necessarily a nationalist one.

How to live in the diaspora, how to live in this scattered way, how to live with others who are not necessarily Jewish.  What kinds of obligation do we owe to those whom we share the earth.

1947-1948: Necessary cohabitation, not necessarily chosen, or ideal, but to have a border or link with another polity within a single state or 2 states, meant there had to be some sort of commitment to cohabitation.  Arendt did not believe that Jews should have the demographic majority, there had to be equal rights for all inhabitants.   The real question is whether a Zionism of cohabitation can re-emerge, or whether those in favour of cohabitation need to distance themselves from Zionism.  It’s not about producing a perfect State, 2 state solution, bi-nationalism with 1 state or 2 states, etc.   Its not about trying to produce an IDEAL state, its about accepting the necessity of living with others and having that unchosen proximity being the basis of ethical obligations to one another.  THis is not just a problem with Israel-Palestine, but those who share borders, and history of conflict, the unchosen necessary character of living with others.  I’m not talking about everyone loving each other.

When we think of Palestinian resistance to Israel, we could say that its anti-semitism, or destruction of state of Israel.  But there other forms of resistance is seeking the end to colonial oppression, not to existence of Jewish population.  The anti-colonial struggle is pledged to co-habitation and openly refutes anti-Semitism.

If the Occupation came to an end, and conditions of equal co-habitation were established, there would be greater possibilities for living in peace and security.  Strengthening the Occupation, the Wall, the Palestinian people will resist these conditions.  There are non-violent resistance which is what BSD is. I don’t think occupying other groups, or depriving other groups of their rights has ever made the occupier more safe.

The state of Israel, claims to be a state for Jewish refugees, especially after the WWII.  It establishes a right of refugees for itself. The state of Israel at its founding produced close to 800,000 refugees. So if it believes in Right of Refugees the right of return and sanctuary, one wants to be able to stay, we need an int’l jurisprudence that will be internally consistent and be a solution to Palestinian refugees which now numbers 5 million.  Acknowledge a serious dispossession took place in the name of producing a homeland for another group of refugees.  This is a contradiction at the founding of Israel.  This is not to say that Israel can’t right this wrong. There is an organization in Israel, made plans where would the Palestinians re-settle, made maps of all Palestinian villages destroyed, built monuments and memorials to those villages, and trying to reconstruct that history and produce an archive and trying to think what the practical dimensions of return will be.

I think the structure of Settler Colonialism needs to be changed.  The boycott three principles 1) End the Occupation 2) Equal rights for non-Jewish Palestinian Israelis that make up 30% of Israeli citizens don’t have equal rights  3) Right of Return, it is an open question. it is a refugee problem.  It should be put on the table and discussed.  What can be done there?

What Edward Said thought which I find IMPORTANT, and made clear in his book on Moses and critique of Palestinian nationalism.

– The RETURN, not a return from the diaspora to homeland, but bring the principles of diaspora to the homeland, and ETHIC OF CO-HABITATION this is what he understood the return to be.  There is a tradition of Zionism that confirms this, but have to bring the history of Zionism forward into a more contemporary debate.

– RETURN means binationalism outside the structure of settler colonialism

Question: Relation cohabitation and Zionism, which one is solution anti-Zionism or redefining Zionism back to its cultural form and federated state

59 minutes in video Answer: Kafka letter to Felice Bauer:  What I really can’t stand are the Zionists, what I really can’t stand are the anti-Zionists.

I know there is a worry that the boycott singles out Israel, for its violation of human rights, and non-compliance with int’l law, and then there is another argument that says: Why is Israel always treated as exception to int’l law and human rights.   I don’t want to enter that argument.  For me it’s hard for Israel to claim that it represents the Jewish people.  No, not all the Jewish people, not all the diaspora, not even all the Jewish Israelis, its a complicated situation.  I do think what the boycott does, it produces an int’l community that demands that the state of Israel complies with int’l law and does not hold itself above the law.  Pressures manufactures and cultural institutions, the boycott becomes the means by which an int’l movement is formed.  IT is the largest non-violent movement seeking to hold Israel to int’l law.  I don’t support targeting individual Israelis.

For those who believe that the only way to fight anti-semitism is to support the state of Israel. Then any critique of Israel is to embrace anti-semitism.  This is a prison house, and there is no way out.   They are many different kind of Jewish people, they are not singly and exclusively represented by the state of Israel, we are complex creatures with a diverse set of viewpoints.  The presumption that the state of Israel represents the Jewish life, viewpoint.  A great number of Jews accept its role, are fundamentally committed to Israel.  But we must let the Jews be complex.  Even diasporic Jews that support Israel, have disagreements with its politics.  If anything comes out of these discussions, I would hope that it is the insight that the Jewish people have internal differences and are a complexity.

1:22 minutes

That said, it would be an entire mistake if entire conversation of Palestine or Co-habitation took place within an intra-Jewish context. Because that would mean that Jewish framework becomes the dominant framework for thinking the problem of Palestine.  That framework has to be displaced not effaced or erased, but a decentering of Jewish perspective has to happen for Co-habitation to be thinkable.  So I speak awkwardly as a Jew, at the same time I can’t allow that identity to be the only way to think ethically and politically, I have to allow myself to become decentered to have an ethical relationship to others and to participate in a democratic way of life.

This requires a decentering of my identity so there is an absolute necessity for an intra-Jewish discussion and there is also a limit to what its usefulness can be.

It matters to me that the commandments are spoken, and they are delivered through a mode of Address.  THOU SHALT NOT KILL. is something one can only hear or obey if the conditions for hearing are first established.  Even the commandment Thou shalt not kill, demands either that I understand the language in which the commandment is given or that the conditions of audability are established.  WHat the commandment comes in a language I don’t understand, or I don’t hear it, or if there is no media to relay the commandment to me.  It doesn’ t have to be a spoken voice, a picture or a sound (Levinas thought it could be a sound).  What it means is that a certain problem of translation, of media, of establishing the conditions of audibility is there for the reception of the commandment and the struggle to comply with the commandment.

We are all called upon in certain ways, that there are ethical obligations that are addressed to us, this is an important Levinasian way of thinking the commandment, then I’m also saying that there is a theological/political struggle to figure out my responsibility and how do I respond to such a call.  It is not that I am called at the expense of others, We are all called.  And yet it seems to me that there  is a great deal of noise that keeps us from hearing, and fear that keeps us from acting and responding, but it’ll be a great loss of if we lose our responsiveness and our responsibility.  So yes there is a theological dimension to my thinking of ethics.

Ž on Levinas Butler pt2

But, again, cannot this fidelity be understood precisely as a fidelity to the call of the vulnerable Other in all its precariousness? 🙂 This is Critchley’s argument that Ž disagrees with:)

The answer is not that the ethical agent should also experience his or her own fragility ― the temptation to be resisted here is the ethical domestication of the neighbor, or what Levinas effectively did with his notion of the neighbor as the abyssal point from which the call of ethical responsibility emanates.

Levinas deploys the notion of the subject as constituted by its recognition of an unconditional ethical Call engendered by the experience of injustices and wrongs: the subject emerges as a reaction to the traumatic encounter with the helpless suffering Other (the Neighbor).

This is why it is constitutively decentered, not autonomous, but split by the ethical Call, a subject defined by the experience of an internalized demand that it can never meet, a demand that exceeds it.

The paradox constitutive of the subject is thus that the demand that the subject cannot meet is what makes the subject, so that the subject is constitutively divided, its autonomy “always usurped by the heteronomous experience of the other’s demand”: “my relation to the other is not some benign benevolence, compassionate care or respect for the other’s autonomy, but is the obsessive experience of a responsibility that persecutes me with its sheer weight. I am the other’s hostage.”37

My elementary situation is thus that of an eternal struggle against myself: I am forever split between egotistic rootedness in a particular familiar world around which my life gravitates, and the unconditional call of responsibility for the Other: “The I which arises in enjoyment as a separate being having apart in itself the centre around which its existence gravitates, is confirmed in its singularity by purging itself of this gravitation, and purges itself interminably.” [Critchley Infinitely Demanding]

Levinas likes to quote Dostoyevsky here: “We are all responsible for everything and guilty in front of everyone, but I am that more than all others.” The underlying cruelty is that of the superego, of course.

What is the superego? In a Motel One, close to Alexanderplatz in Berlin, the do-not-disturb signs read: “I am enjoying my Motel One room … please don’t disturb!” Not only is this message obscene insofar as it compels the hotel guest who wants peace and quiet to declare that he is enjoying his room, the deeper obscenity resides in the fact that his desire not to be disturbed is implicitly characterized as a desire to enjoy himself in peace (and not, for example, to sleep or to work).

Recall the strange fact, regularly evoked by Primo Levi and other Holocaust survivors, about how their intimate reaction to their survival was marked by a deep split: consciously, they were fully aware that their survival was the result of a meaningless accident, that they were not in any way guilty for it, that the only guilty perpetrators were their Nazi torturers. At the same time, they were (more than merely) haunted by an “irrational” feeling of guilt, as if they had survived at the expense of others and were thus somehow responsible for their deaths ― as is well known, this unbearable feeling of guilt drove many of them to suicide. This displays the agency of the superego at its purest: as the obscene agency which manipulates us into a spiraling movement of self-destruction.

The function of the superego is precisely to obfuscate the cause of the terror constitutive of our being-human, the inhuman core of being-human, the dimension of what the German Idealists called negativity and Freud called the death drive. Far from being the traumatic hard core of the Real from which sublimations protect us, the superego is itself a mask screening off the Real.

For Levinas, the traumatic intrusion of the radically heterogeneous Real Thing which decenters the subject is identical with the ethical Call of the Good, while, for Lacan, on the contrary, it is the primordial “evil Thing,” something that can never be sublated into a version of the Good, something which forever remains a disturbing cut. Therein lies the revenge of Evil for our domestication of the Neighbor as the source of the ethical call: the “repressed Evil” returns in the guise of the superego’s distortion of the ethical call itself.

But there is a further question to be raised here: is the opposition between fellow-man and Neighbor the ultimate horizon of our experience of others?

It is clear that for Levinas the “face” is not the name for my fellow-man with whom I can empathize, who is “like me,” my semblant, but the name for a radical facelessness, for the Real of the abyss of an Otherness whose intrusion destabilizes every homeostatic exchange with others.

However, does not the very fact that Levinas can use the term “face” to designate its opposite, the faceless abyss of the other, point to the link between the two, to the fact that they belong to the same field? Is not the faceless abyss of the Neighbor a faceless Beyond engendered by the face itself, the face’s inherent overcoming, like the terrifying image (vortex, maelstrom, Medusa’s head, Irma’s throat …) which is too strong for our eyes, which closes down the very dimension of what can be seen?

Insofar as, for Lacan, the face functions as an imaginary lure, the Real of the faceless Neighbor is the imaginary Real; the question is thus whether there is another, symbolic, Real. What emerges if, in a vague homology, we push the symbolic as far as the same self-canceling into which the face is pushed to give rise to the faceless abyss of the Neighbor?

What would be the status of the human individual as a symbolic Real?

What emerges at this point is the subject, the Cartesian cogito which, according to Lacan, is none other than the subject of the unconscious. No wonder that Lacan refers to this subject as an “answer of the real”: it emerges when the symbolic is pushed to the limit of its impossibility, of its immanent Real. This subject is totally de-substantialized; coinciding with its own failure-to-be, it is a mere cut, a gap, in the order of being.

If the axis fellow-man/Neighbor remains our ultimate horizon, we have to abandon the dimension of universality: the Neighbor is a singular abyss which resists universality.

But is it then the case that the non-universalizable Neighbor is the ultimate horizon of our ethico-political activity? Is the highest norm the injunction to respect the neighbor’s Otherness?

No wonder Levinas is so popular today among leftist-multiculturalist liberals who improvise endlessly on the motif of impossible universality―every universality is exclusive, it imposes a particular standard as universal.

The question to be posed here is whether every ethical universality is really based on the exclusion of the abyss of the Neighbor, or whether there is a universality which does not exclude the Neighbor.

The answer is: yes, the universality grounded in the “part of no-part,” the singular universality exemplified in those who lack a determined place in the social totality, who are “out of place” in it and as such directly stand for the universal dimension.

Ž on Levinas Butler pt1

Leszek Kolakowski once wrote that man can be a moral being only insofar as he is weak, limited, fragile, and with a “broken heart” ― this is the liberal core of Levinas’s thought, a core to which Butler also subscribes when she focuses on the fragile symbolic status of a human subject, caught in the abyss of decentered symbolic representation, and whose very identity hinges on an external, inconsistent network. Precarious Life, London: Verso Books 2006.

It is this precarious status of subjectivity which functions as the zero-level of all ethics: the absolute call, the injunction, emanating from the vulnerable neighbor’s face.  To be an ethical subject means to experience oneself, in one’s singularity, as the addressee of that unconditional call, as responsible and responding to it even when one chooses to ignore it.

[From a Christian perspective, we should go to the end here: if man is created in God’s image, the becoming-man-of-God means that the same goes for God: in Christ, God becomes a fragile absolute, precarious, vulnerable, and impotent.]

The first thing to note here is the basic asymmetry of the situation: the other’s face makes an unconditional demand on us; we did not ask for it, and we are not allowed to refuse it. (And, of course, what Levinas means by “the face” is not directly the physical face: a face can also be a mask for the face, there is no direct representation of the face.)

This demand is the Real which cannot be captured by any words; it marks the limit of language, every translation of it into language already distorts it. It is not simply external to discourse―it is its inner limit, as the encounter with the other which opens up the space for discourse, since there can be no discourse without the other. It is the real of a violent encounter that (as Badiou would put it) throws me out of my existence as a human animal. 827

[The irony here is that, with Butler, the encounter with the Other in its precariousness and fragility (finitude, mortality) has exactly the same structure as the Badiouian encounter of the Event which opens up the dimension of immortality or eternity.]

And Butler is fully justified in emphasizing that this ethical injunction, at its most basic level, is a reaction to the quasi-automatic reaction to get rid of the other-neighbor, to kill him (this urge can easily be accounted for in Freudo-Lacanian terms as the basic reaction to the encounter with the intrusive Neighbor-Thing)

But for Freud and Lacan (as was convincingly elaborated by Jean Laplanche), the traumatic encounter with the Other as a desiring which “interrupts the narcissistic circuit” is precisely the basic experience constitutive of desiring subjectivity―which is why, for Lacan, desire is a “desire of the Other.”

Thus Lacan’s “ethics of psychoanalysis” stands for his attempt to demonstrate that there is an ethical dimension discovered in the psychoanalytic experience, … Lacan’s option involves neither the aggressive thrust to annihilate the Other – Neighbor-Thing, nor its reversal into accepting the Other as the source of an unconditional ethical injunction. But why not?

🙂 constitutive of desiring subjectivity, is this initial approach what do you want.  the enigma of the desire of the other which is mind blowing and throws us totally out of joint, we react as one would violently, or indifference, but the ethical call is to not forego hiding away, and to do something.  This something as we have seen is within the 4 discourses 🙂

We should note that, in Levinas’s account, it is not me who experiences myself as precarious, but the Other who addresses me. This is why, in my very asymmetric subordination to the Other’s call, in my unconditional responsibility, in my being taken hostage by the Other, I assume supremacy over the Other.

Do we not encounter this wounded-precarious Other almost daily, in advertisements for charity which bombard us with images of starving or disfigured children crying in agony? Far from undermining the hegemonic ideology, such adverts are one of its exemplary manifestations. 828

Butler shows how the face itself can function as an instrument of dehumanization, like the faces of evil fundamentalists or despots (bin Laden, Saddam Hussein), and how the power regime also decides which faces we are allowed to see as worthy of grief and mourning and which not — it was pictures of children burning from napalm that generated ethical outrage in the US public over Vietnam. Today, the very fragility of the suffering Other is part of the humanitarian ideological offensive.  828

***

What must be added to the precariousness and vulnerability of the ethical subject is the notion of absolute fidelity, the reference to an absolute point of infinity, in accordance with Pascal’s well-known thought that man is a tiny speck of dust in the universe, but at the same time infinite spirit.  828

***

Fragility alone does not account for ethics ― the gaze of a tortured or wounded animal does not in itself make it an ethical subject. The two minimal components of the ethical subject are its precarious vulnerability and its fidelity to an “immortal Truth” (a principle for which, in clear and sometimes ridiculous contrast to its vulnerability and limitations, the subject is ready to put everything at stake)―it is only this presence of an “immortal Truth” that makes human vulnerability different from that of a wounded animal. Furthermore, to these two, we should also add the “demonic” immortality whose Freudian name is the (death) drive, the very core of the Neighbor-Thing. 829

[This is why, in psychoanalytic treatment, there is no face-to-face, neither the analyst nor his analysand sees the other’s face: only in this way can the dimension of the Neighbor-Thing emerge.]

sexual difference from LTN

“There is no sexual relationship” does not mean that there is a multiplicity of unbound or unrelated sexual positions, i.e., that there is no common measure between the masculine and the feminine positions; sexual difference is rather “impossible” because it is, in a sense, prior to both positions: masculine and feminine are the two ways to symbolize the deadlock of sexual difference. Ž LTN

How, then, does the Badiouian Event stand with regard to formulae of sexuation?

Some Lacanian feminist critics claim that the exceptional status of the Event with regard to ordinary “human-animal” life, its status as the exception to universality, compels us to locate it on the male side of the formulae―and, indeed, is not this logic of exception to universality confirmed by Badiou’s own formulations, such as when he says: “There is nothing but bodies and languages …,” to which materialist dialectics adds “…with the exception of truths” (Alain Badiou, Logiques des mondes, Paris: Seuil 2006, p. 9)?

Furthermore, does not the heroic-phallic connotation of the fidelity to an Event (the idea of “enforcing” the truth) also bear witness to its masculine nature?

There is nonetheless a key feature which renders such a reading problematic, convincing as it may appear: on the male side of Lacan’s formulae of sexuation, the exception is the exception to universality (all but x are …) which, as such, grounds this universality, while in the case of the Badiouian Truth-Event, the evental Truth is universal; i.e., here, exception does not ground universality (with regard to which it is an exception), the exception (an evental Truth) is universality.

Or, to put it in another way, universality is here singular, it is what Hegel called a universality “for itself,” a universality posited as such in a singular point. Or, to put yet another way,

universality is here not the outcome of a neutral view to which we gain access after elevating ourselves above particular or partial engaged positions; universality is, on the contrary, something which is accessible only to an engaged subjective position.

The supreme case here is the Marxian proletariat which stands for the exception, the “part of no-part,” of the social body, and is precisely as such the “universal class.”  Ž LTN 812

Ž on Badiou ch. world truth 12 LTN

Here is Ž from his latest book:

My ongoing debate with Badiou could be read as a series of variations on the motif of how to redeem Hegel, how to reclaim him for the contemporary universe of radical contingency. In terms of the most elementary ontological coordinates, my difference with Badiou is threefold, with regard to the triad Being/World/Event.

1. At the level of being, the multiplicity of multiples has to be supplemented by the “barred One,” the Void as the impossibility of the One becoming One.

2. At the level of appearance, the world has to be conceived of as language-bound: each world is sustained by a Master-Signifier (the true reference of what Badiou calls a “point”).

3. At the level of the Event, the “negativity” of anxiety and the (death) drive has to be posited as prior to the affirmative enthusiasm for the Event, as its condition of possibility.

How we pass from being to appearing, how and why does being start to appear to itself?  Ray Brassier is thus right to insist on Badiou’s “failure to clarify the connection between ontological inconsistency and ontical consistency,” that is, the passage from Being to a World

In the history of philosophy, the most consistent answer to this question (in a certain sense one could say the only true answer) was provided by the German Idealists, especially Schelling and Hegel. In his Weltalter manuscripts, Schelling outlined the birth of logos (the articulated World) out of the pre-ontological antagonism of drives, while Hegel, in his Logic, tries to demonstrate how “appearing” (correlative to Essence) emerges out of the immanent inconsistencies (“contradictions”) of Being. In spite of the insurmountable differences between Schelling and Hegel, the two share a key feature: they try to account for the emergence of appearing with reference to some kind of tension or antagonism or contradiction in the preceding order of being.  LTN 809

🙂 Being to appearing, the stuff of being is sheer multiplicity, what Ž is arguing is that there has to be something to organize this chaos.  But the push from being to appearing first happens as drive 🙂

This route, however, is excluded a priori by Badiou, since his axiom is that “being as being is absolutely homogeneous: a mathematically thinkable pure multiplicity.” This is why all Badiou can do is offer obscure hints about “a kind of push” of being towards appearing which belongs more to the Schopenhauerian Gnostic notion of how the abyssal Ground of Being harbors an obscure inexplicable will to appear.

The key axiom of Badiou’s “logics of worlds” concerns the concept of the “inexistent” of a world: “If a multiplicity appears in a world, one element of this multiplicity and only one is an inexistent of this world.”

A “non-existent” is an element which is part of a world but participates in it with the minimal degree of intensity; that is, the transcendental structure of this world renders it “invisible”: “The thing is in the world, but its appearing in the world is the destruction of its identity.”

The classical example is, of course, Marx’s notion of the proletariat which belongs to the existing society but within its horizon is invisible in its specific function. Such an inexistent is, of course, the “evental site” of a world: when the Event occurs, the inexistent passes from minimal to maximal existence, or, to quote the well-known line from the “Internationale”: “We were nothing, we shall be all.”

As Badiou makes clear, this inexistence is not ontological (at the level of being, workers are massively present in capitalist society), but phenomenological: they are here, but invisible in their specific mode of existence. The philosophical question here is: why, exactly, does every world contain a “non-existent”?

In short, precisely because of the gap between being (irreducible multiplicity) and appearing (atoms or Ones), the unity (overlapping) of being and appearing (existence) can only appear within the (transcendental) space of appearance in a negative way, in the guise of an inexistent, a One which is (from within the transcendental frame that regulates appearing) not-One, an atom which, while part of the world of appearing, is not properly covered by it, participates minimally in it.

This inexistent is the point of symptomal torsion of a world: it functions as a “universal singular,” a singular element which directly participates in the universal (belongs to its world), but lacks a determinate place in it.

At the formal level of the logic of the signifier, this inexistent is the empty “signifier without a signified,” the zero-signifier which, deprived of all determinate meaning, stands only for the presence of meaning as such, in contrast to its absence, to non-meaning: its meaning is tautological, it means only that things have meaning, without saying what this meaning is. 810

What Badiou calls “subtraction” is thus another name, his name, for negativity in its affirmative dimension, for a negativity which is not just a destructive gesture, but gives, opens up a new dimension. LTN 811

The question to be raised here is this: why should an Event not designate a modification of the very internal rules of the transcendental of a world? Why do we not actually pass from one to another world? Is it not that, for a non-existent to change into a being with the maximum intensity of existence, the very rules which measure the intensity of being have to change?

🙂 Žižek’s Butler moment

If proletarians are to count as “being-human as such,” does not the very measure of what counts as “being-human” have to be modified? In other words, is it not that an inexistent which is the point of symptomal torsion of a world can only be made fully existent if we pass into another world? 812

**********  PAGE 815   **************

…reality is, at its most elementary ontological level, an inconsistent multiplicity that no One can totalize into a consistent unity.  Of course, reality always appears to us within a determinate situation, as a particular world whose consistency is regulated by its transcendental features.  LTN 813

The term “inconsistency” is used here in two senses that are not clearly distinguished. First, there is inconsistency as the “true ontological foundation of any multiple-being,” namely “a multiple-deployment that no unity can gather”―inconsistency is here the starting point, the zero-level of pure presence, that which is subsequently counted-as-one, organized into a world, that which subsequently appears within a given transcendental horizon.

Then, there is inconsistency as the symptomal knot of a world, the excess which cannot be accounted for in its terms. (Exactly the same ambiguity characterizes the Lacanian Real.)

a World is historical, a transcendental-historical organization of a sphere of Being, while―as Badiou repeatedly emphasizes in his unabashedly Platonic way―Truth is eternal, in enforcing it one enforces onto reality an eternal Idea. We are thus dealing with two radically different levels: a World is a formation of human finitude, “hermeneutic” (a horizon of meaning); the evental Truth is eternal, the trans-historical persistence of an eternal Idea which continues to haunt us “in all possible worlds.” 815

Both World and Truth-Event are modes of appearing: a World consists of the transcendental coordinates of appearing, while a Truth-Event (or an immortal Idea) is something that, rather than appearing, “shines through,” transpires in reality. The status of the World is hermeneutic, it provides the horizon of meaning that determines our experience of reality, while the status of the Idea is Real, it is a virtual-immovable X whose traces are discernible in reality. In other words, the universality of a World is always “false” in the Marxist critico-ideological sense: every World is based upon an exclusion or “repression” which can be detected through its points of symptomal torsion, while the universality of Truth is unconditional, for it is not based upon a constitutive exception, it does not generate its point of symptomal torsion.

alienation separation buddhism

The core of Lacan’s atheism is best discerned in the conceptual couple of “alienation” and “separation” which he develops in his Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis.   [See Chapter 11 The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis]

ALIENATION

In a first approach, the big Other stands for the subject’s alienation in the symbolic order: the big Other pulls the strings; the subject does not speak, he is “spoken” by the symbolic structure. In short, this “big Other” is the name for the social substance, for all that on account of which the subject never fully controls the effects of his acts, so that their final outcome is always other than what he aimed at or anticipated.

SEPARATION

Separation takes place when the subject takes note of how the big Other is in itself inconsistent, lacking (“barred;’ as Lacan liked to put it) : the big Other does not possess what the subject lacks.  In separation, the subject experiences how his own lack with regard to the big Other is already the lack that affects the big Other itself. To recall Hegel’s immortal dictum concerning the Sphinx: “The enigmas of the Ancient Egyptians were enigmas also for the Egyptians themselves.”

Separation stands for redoubled alienation: the subject enacts separation when his lack coincides with the lack in the Other, that is, when he recognizes that the Other also does not have what he is missing.  129

In the Gnostic mode, for Buddhism, ethics is ultimately a question of knowledge and ignorance: our craving (desire), our attachment to terrestrial goods, is conditioned by our ignorance, so that deliverance comes with proper knowing.  (What Christian love means, on the contrary, is that there is a decision not grounded in knowledge — Christianity thus breaks with the entire tradition of the primacy of Knowledge which runs from Buddhism through Gnosticism to Spinoza.)  130

Here, however, we should remain faithful to the Western “Oedipal” tradition: of course every object of desire is an illusory lure; of course the full jouissance of incest is not only prohibited, but in itself impossible; nevertheless, Lacan’s les non-dupes errent must still be asserted. Even if the object of desire is illusory, there is a real in this illusion: the object of desire in its positive content is vain, but not the place it occupies, the place of the Real; which is why there is more truth in the unconditional fidelity to one’s desire than in the resigned insight into the vanity of one’s striving.

As we have seen, at the core of this paradox is a formal structure homologous to that of the Higgs field in quantum physics: what, in the Higgs field, is called the double vacuum, appears here in the guise of the irreducible gap between ethics (understood as the care of the self, as striving towards authentic being) and morality (understood as the care for others, responding to their call). Insofar as the authenticity of the Self is taken to tne extreme in Buddhist meditation, whose goal is precisely to enable the subject to overcome (or, rather, snspend) its Self and enter the vacuum of nirvana, one should remember the Zen Buddhist claim that “Zen and the sword are one and the same,” a principle grounded in the opposition between the reflexive attitude of our ordinary daily lives (in which we cling to life and fear death, strive for egotistic pleasures and profits, hesitate instead of acting directly) and the enlightened stance in which the difference between life and death no longer matters, in which we regain the original self-less unity and become directly our acts.

The point here is not to criticize Buddhism, but merely to emphasize the irreducible gap between subjective authenticity and moral goodness (in the sense of social responsibility): the difficult thing to accept is that one can be totally authentic in overcoming one’s false Self and yet still commit horrible crimes-and vice versa, of course: one can be a caring subject, morally committed to the full, while existing in an inauthentic world of illusion with regard to oneself.  135

death drive

What, then, is that which does not die, the material support of the Holy Spirit? When Robeson sang “Joe Hill” at the legendary Peace Arch concert in 1952, he changed the key line from “What they forgot to kill” into: “What they can never kill went on to organize.” The immortal dimension in man, that in man which it “takes more than guns to kill;’ the Spirit, is what went on to organize itself.

This should not be dismissed as an obscurantist-spiritualist metaphor — there is a subjective truth in it: when emancipatory subjects organize themselves, it is the “spirit” itself which organizes itself through them. One should add to the series of what the impersonal “it” (das Es, ça) does (in the unconscious, “it talks,” “it enjoys”): it organizes itself (ça s’organise — therein resides the core of the “eternal Idea” of a revolutionary party). One should also shamelessly evoke the standard scene from science-fiction horror movies in which the alien who has taken on human appearance (or invaded and colonized a human being) is exposed, its human form destroyed, so that all that remains is a formless slime, like a pool of melted metal . . . the hero leaves the scene, satisfied that the threat has been dealt with — and then the formless slime that the hero forgot to kill (or could not kill) starts to move, slowly organizing itself, and the old menacing figure is reconstituted.

Is not what we believers consnme in the Eucharist, Christ’s flesh (bread) and blood (wine), precisely the same formless remainder, “what they [the Roman soldiers who crucified him] can never kill,” which then goes on to organize itself as a community of believers? From this standpoint we should reread Oedipus himself as a precursor of Christ: against those-including Lacan himself — who perceive Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone as figures driven by the uncompromisingly suicidal death drive, “unyielding right to the end, demanding everything, giving up nothing, absolutely unreconciled.”

Does this not recall a later beggar king, Christ himself, who, by his death as a nobody, an outcast abandoned even by his disciples, grounds a new community of believers? They both re-emerge by way of passing through the zero-level of being reduced to an excremental remainder. The notion of the Christian collective of believers (and its later versions, from emancipatory political movements to psychoanalytic societies) is an answer to a precise materialist question: how to assert materialism not as a teaching, but as a form of collective life? Therein resides the failure of Stalinism: no matter how “materialist” its teaching was, its form of organization-the Party, which is an instrument of the historical big Other-remained idealist. Only a collective of the Holy Spirit founded on the “death of God;’ on accepting the inexistence of the big Other, is materialist in its very form of social organization.

Once upon a time there was a child who was willful and did not do what his mother wanted. For this reason God was displeased with him and caused him to become ill, and no doctor could help him, and in a short time he lay on his deathbed. He was lowered into a grave and covered with earth, but his little arm suddenly came forth and reached up, and it didn’t help when they put it back in and put fresh earth over it, for the little arm always came out again. So the mother herself had to go to the grave and beat the little arm with a switch, and as soon as she had done that, it withdrew, and the child finally came to rest beneath the earth.

Is not this obstinacy that persists even beyond death freedom — the death drive at its most elementary? Instead of condemning it, should we not rather celebrate it as the last resort of our resistance? The death of Christ is also the death/end of human mortality, the “death of death,” the negation of negation: the death of God is the rise of the undead drive (the undead partial object). 101

Here, however, Hegel is not radical enough: since he is not able to think objet a, he also ignores bodily immortality (“undeadness”) — both Spinoza and Hegel share this blindness for the proper dimension of the objet a. How can a Christian believer come to terms with this obscene excess of immortality? Is the answer, once again, love? Can one love this excess? 101

Butler on Levinas, Arendt

Judith Butler with Bracha Ettinger At European Graduate School in 2011

The first is whether any of us have the capacity or inclination to respond ethically to suffering at a distance, and what makes that ethical encounter possible, when it does take place.

The second is what it means for our ethical obligations when we are up against another person or group, find ourselves invariably joined to those we never chose and responding to solicitations and languages we may not understand or even wish to understand.

… I am trying to underscore that something impinges upon us, without our being able to anticipate or prepare for it in advance, and this means that we are in such moments affronted by something that is beyond our will, not of our making, that comes to us from the outside, as an imposition, but also as an ethical demand. I want to suggest that these are ethical obligations which do not require our consent, and neither are they the result of contracts or agreements into which any of us have deliberately entered.

Can we understand the working of an ethical obligation upon our sensibilities.  Indeed this word sensibility is one that Levinas reserves for that region of responsiveness that precedes the ego.  A kind of response that therefore is and is not my response.  To say it is my response is to lodge the ego as its source.  But what we’re trying to talk about here is a form of responsiveness that implies a dispossession of the egological.

Ethical obligations that impose themselves upon us without our consent.

It is, of course, one thing to claim this in the abstract, but quite another to understand what the difficulties are in struggling for social and political forms that are committed to fostering a sustainable interdependency on egalitarian terms. When any of us are affected by the sufferings of others, we recognize and affirm an interconnection with them, even when we do not know their names or speak their language. At its best, some media representations of suffering at a distance compel us to give up our more narrow communitarian ties, and to respond, sometimes in spite of ourselves, sometimes even against our will, to a perceived injustice. Such presentations can bring the fate of others near or make it seem very far away, and yet, the kind of ethical demands that emerge through the media in these times depend on this reversibility of the proximity and distance. Indeed, I want to suggest that certain bonds are actually wrought through this very reversibility. And we might find ways of understanding the interdependency that characterizes co-habitation precisely as these bonds.

My own thesis is that the kind of ethical demands that emerge through the global circuits in these times depends on this reversibility of the proximity and distance. Indeed, I want to suggest that certain bonds are actually wrought through this very reversibility. If I am only bound to those who are close to me, already familiar, then my ethics are invariably parochial, communitarian, and exclusionary.

If I am only bound to those who are “human” in the abstract, then I avert every effort to translate culturally between my own situation and that of others. If I am only bound to those who suffer at a distance, but never those who are close to me, then I evacuate my situation in an effort to secure the distance that allows me to entertain ethical feeling.

But if ethical relations are mediated – and I use that word deliberately here – confounding questions of location such that what is happening “there” also happens in some sense “here” and if what is happening “there” depends on the event being registered in several “elsewheres”, then it would seem that the ethical claim of the event takes place always in a “here” and “there” that are fundamentally bound to one another.

In one sense, the event is emphatically local, since it is precisely the people there whose bodies are on the line. But if those bodies on the line are not registered elsewhere, there is no global response, and also, no global form of ethical recognition and connection, and so something of the reality of the event is lost. It is not just that one discrete population views another through certain media moments, but that such a response makes evident a form of global connectedness, however provisional, with those whose lives and actions are registered in this way. In short, to be unprepared for the media image that overwhelms can lead not to paralysis but to a situation of (a) being moved, and so acting precisely by virtue of being acted upon and (b) being at once there and here, and in different ways, accepting and negotiating the multi-locality of ethical connections we might rightly call global.

Can we, then, turn to some versions of ethical philosophy in order to reformulate what it means to register an ethical demand during these times that is reducible neither to consent nor to established agreement and that takes place outside of established community bonds?

I am trying to articulate a version of cohabitation that follows from the account of ethical obligation I am describing. Turning to Palestine/Israel to suggest a set of Jewish views of cohabitation that demand a departure from communitarianism and even Jewish communitarianism and that may serve as a critical alternative during this time that state of Israel seeks to secure its claim to represent Jewishness.

Levinas’s position allows us the following conclusion: that the set of ethical values by which one population is bound to another in no ways depends on those two populations bearing similar marks of national, cultural, religious, racial belonging. It is interesting that Levinas insisted that we are bound to those we do not know, and even those we did not choose, could never have chosen, and that these obligations are, strictly speaking, pre-contractual.

Of course, this raises a question of how there can be an ethical relation to those who cannot appear within the horizon of ethics, who are not persons, or are not considered to be the kind of beings with whom one can or must enter into an ethical relation.

Here is where a most painful division within Levinas’s work continues to haunt those of us who seek ethical resources there. On the one hand, he tells us that we are claimed by others, including those we have never known, those we still don’t know, and that we are born into this situation of being compelled to honor the life of the other, every other, whose claim on life comes before our own.

On the other hand, he claims that this very ethical relation depends upon a specific set of religious and cultural conditions, Judaeo-Christian, and that those who are not formed within this tradition are not prepared for ethical life, and are not included as those who can make a claim upon those who belong to a narrow conception of the West. It is an agonizing contradiction at the heart of Levinas’s writing. But is it possible to take the ethical philosophy formulated there and deploy it against the very exclusionary assumptions by which it is sometimes supported? Can we, in other words, use Levinas against himself to help in the articulation of a global ethics that would extend beyond the religious and cultural communities that he saw as its necessary condition and limit?

Let us take as an example his argument that ethical relations are asymmetrical. In his work, the Other has priority over me. What does that concretely mean? Does the other not have the same obligation toward me? Why should I be obligated toward another who does not reciprocate in the same way toward me?

For Levinas, reciprocity cannot be the basis of ethics, since ethics is not a bargain: it cannot be the case that my ethical relation to another is contingent on their ethical relation to me, since that would make that ethical relation less than absolute and binding; and it would establish my self-preservation as a distinct and bounded sort of being as more primary than any relation I have to another. For Levinas, no ethics can be derived from egoism; indeed, egoism is the defeat of ethics itself.

I take distance from Levinas here, since though I agree in the refutation of the primacy of self-preservation for ethical thinking, I want to insist upon a certain intertwinement between that other life, all those other lives, and my own — one that is irreducible to national belonging or communitarian affiliation.

In my view (which is surely not mine alone) the life of the other, the life that is not our own, is also our life, since whatever sense “our” life has is derived precisely from this sociality, this being already, and from the start, dependent on a world of others, constituted in and by a social world.

In this way there are surely others distinct from me whose ethical claim upon me is irreducible to an egoistic calculation on my part. But that is because we are, however distinct, also bound to one another.

And this is not always a happy or felicitous experience. To find that one’s life is also the life of others, even as this life is distinct, and must be distinct, means that one’s boundary is at once a limit and a site of adjacency, a mode of spatial and temporal nearness and even boundedness.

Moreover, the bounded and living appearance of the body is the condition of being exposed to the other, exposed to solicitation, seduction, passion, injury, exposed in ways that sustain us but also in ways that can destroy us. In this sense the exposure of the body points to its precarity [precariousness].

At the same time, for Levinas, this precarious and corporeal being is responsible for the life of the other, which means that no matter how much one fears for one’s own life, preserving the life of the other is paramount.

If only the Israeli army felt this way! Indeed, this is a form of responsibility that is not easy while undergoing a felt sense of precarity. Precarity names both the necessity and difficulty of ethics.

It is surely hard to feel at once vulnerable to destruction by the other and yet responsible for the other, and readers of Levinas object all the time to his formulation that we are, all of us, in some sense responsible for that which persecutes us. He does not mean that we bring about our persecution – not at all. Rather, “persecution” is the strange and disconcerting name that Levinas gives for an ethical demand that imposes itself upon us against our will. We are, despite ourselves, open to this imposition, and though it overrides our will, its shows us that the claims that others make upon us are part of our very sensibility, our receptivity, and our answerability. We are, in other words, called upon, and this is only possible because we are in some sense vulnerable to claims that we cannot anticipate in advance, and for which there is no adequate preparation.

For Levinas, there is no other way to understand the ethical reality; ethical obligation not only depends upon our vulnerability to the claims of others, but establishes us as creatures who are fundamentally defined by that vulnerability and by that ethical relation. This ethical relation is not a virtue that I have or exercise; it is prior to any individual sense of self. It is not as a discrete individual that we honor this ethical relation. I am already bound to you, and this is what it means to be the self I am, receptive to you in ways that I cannot fully predict or control. This is also, clearly, the condition of my injurability as well, and in this way my answerability and my injurability are bound up with one another. In other words, you may frighten me and threaten me, but my obligation to you must remain firm.

This relation precedes individuation, and when I act ethically, I am undone as a bounded being. I come apart. I find that I am my relation to the “you” whose life I seek to preserve, and without that relation, this “I” makes no sense, and has lost its mooring in this ethics that is always prior to the ontology of the ego.

Another way to put this point is that the “I” becomes undone in its ethical relation to the “you” which means that there is a very specific mode of being dispossessed that makes ethical relationality possible. If I possess myself too firmly or too rigidly, I cannot be in an ethical relation to you. The ethical relation means ceding a certain egological perspective for one which is structured fundamentally by a mode of address: you call upon me, and I answer. But if I answer, it was only because I was already answerable; that is, this susceptibility and vulnerability constitutes me at the most fundamental level, and is there, we might say, prior to any deliberate decision to answer the call. In other words, one has to be already capable of receiving the call before actually answering it. In this sense, ethical responsibility presupposes ethical responsiveness.

Why bring a discussion of Levinas together with one regarding Arendt? Both Levinas and Arendt take issue with the classically liberal conception of individualism, that is, the idea that individuals knowingly enter into certain contracts, and their obligation follows from having deliberately and volitionally entered into agreements with one another. This view assumes that we are only responsible for those relations, codified by agreements, into which we have knowingly and volitionally entered.

And Arendt disputes this view. Indeed, it was the substance of the argument that she made against Eichmann. He thought he could choose which populations should live and die, and in this sense he thought he could choose with whom to co-habit the earth. What he failed to understand, according to Arendt, is that no one has the prerogative to choose with whom to co-habit the earth.

There is no one part of the population that can claim the earth for itself, no community or nation-state or regional unit, no clan, no party, and no race. As I have suggested, to make such a claim is to enter into a policy of genocide. This means that unwilled proximity and unchosen cohabitation are preconditions of our political existence, the basis of her critique of nationalism, the obligation to live on the earth and in a polity that establishes mode of equality for a necessarily and irreversibly heterogenous population.

Indeed, unwilled proximity and unchosen cohabitation serve as well as the basis of our obligations not to destroy any part of the human population, and to outlaw genocide as a crime against humanity, but also to invest institutions with the demand to seek to make all lives liveable.

Thus, from unchosen co-habitation, Arendt derives notions of universality an equality

that commit us to institutions that seek to sustain human lives without regarding some part of the population as socially dead, as redundant, or as intrinsically unworthy of life and therefore ungrievable.

But what is evident is that her views on cohabitation, federated authority, equality, and universality were in stark contrast to those who were defending nationalist forms of Jewish sovereignty, differential classifications for Jewish and non-citizens, military policies to uproot Palestinians from their lands, and efforts to establish a Jewish demographic majority for the state.

Although it is so often taught that Israel became an historical and ethical necessity for the Jews during and after the Nazi genocide, and that anyone who questions the founding principles of the Jewish state shows an extraordinary insensitivity to the plight of the Jews, there were Jewish thinkers and political activists at the time, including Arendt, Martin Buber, Hans Kohn, and Judah Magnus, who thought among the most important lessons of the Holocaust was an opposition to illegitimate state violence, to any state formation that sought to give electoral priority and citizenship to one race or religion, and that nation-states ought to be internationally barred from dispossessing whole populations who fail to fit the purified idea of the nation.

For those who extrapolated principles of justice from the historical experience of internment and dispossession, the political aim is to extend equality regardless of cultural background or formation, across languages and religions, to those none of us ever chose (or did not recognize that we chose) and with whom we have an enduring obligation to find a way to live.

For whoever “we” are, we are also those who were never chosen, who emerge on this earth without everyone’s consent and who belong, from the start, to a wider population and a sustainable earth. And this condition, paradoxically, yields the radical potential for new modes of sociality and politics beyond the avid and wretched bonds formed through settler colonialism and expulsion.

We are all, in this sense, the unchosen, but we are nevertheless unchosen together. It is not uninteresting to note that Arendt, herself a Jew and refugee, understood her obligation not to belong to the “chosen people” but rather to the unchosen, and to make mixed community precisely among those whose existence implies a right to exist and to lead a liveable life.

In Sweden on May 27 2011 at the Nobel Museum Butler gave a similar talk and this is her paper here. IF you want to download it click here. Download a copy of Butler’s talk

Ž agrees with Butler and ideology

Žižek audio of his talk given in June 2012 and there is a video of Žižek in conversation with Jonathan Derbyshire June 12 2012

This following is based on his talk June 15.

On Butler’s Performativity

Yes I agree, but this precisely IS the reality of the Cartesian subject.  We experience ourselves as an abstract subjectivity where all our concrete embodiments are perceived as something ultimately contingent.  Marx was very clear about this which is why he always emphasized the ambiguous character of the bourgeois order: which is of course the order of alienation and so on but at the same time an order creating the conditions for liberation.  Namely, let’s take Descartes with his Cogito: It is precisely because Descartes saw the CORE OF THE SUBJECT abstraction I think therefore I am, in abstraction from all my particular features he was able in a wonderful way I know a formula of radical multicultural openness.  It’s not enough just to be patronizingly open to others every arrogant Eurocentric can do this.  Descartes says something else: he says when I was young, when I encountered people from other cultures I perceived their  manners as stupid ridiculous and so on, but then I started to ask myself a question, what if from their standpoint our own particular are no less stupid and ridiculous and so on.  This is quite a redemptive feature of modernity.  YOU ACCEPT the relativity, historical contingency of YOUR OWN CULTURE. Of course, things are not as simple as that.  This UNIVERSALITY is not a pure universality, it is a universality grounded in a concrete bourgeois constellation.  But we must remember nevertheless for Marx it is this, the reduction of the subject to UNIVERSALITY and for Marx this is what defines PROLETARIAT.  The Proletarian position is SUBJECTIVITY WITHOUT SUBSTANCE.  As a worker all the result of your work is taken, you are reduced to abstract labour force,

This abstraction is at the same time a medium for freedom, it creates this position outside of substantial determinations you know, you are created by this and by that.

What is the Lesson: Marx emphasizes this: IT is NOT enough when creating bourgeois ideology … no no no idealism is wrong, we are always in material reality, suffering people working hard, exploiting NO! this is a form of ideology.  I did take my son, to stock exchange and showed him what ideology is, you get free leaflets, people wrongly think stock exchange is abstract, but its really about concrete people exchange and so on … Marx says NO. We should avoid this DIRECT MATERIALISM.

On Commodity Fetishism:  A commodity appears at the first glance as a simple object out there, nothing mysterious, it is ONLY THE THEORETICAL analysis which discovers THEOLOGICAL SPIRITUAL mysteries of a commodity.  MARX IS NOT saying in ordinary life we are dealing with mystifications etc.  Marx says almost the opposite, in our ordinary experience we think we are dealing with

In other words, that the world of commodities is a Hegelian world, he is not describing our wrong perception he is describing social reality. When Marx proposes as a formula of ideology:

They don’t know what they are doing but they are doing it.

It’s not that we are doing one thing and we misperceive it

NO. Marx knew very well, a concrete bourgeois subject is not a Hegelian, but but British nominalist, only concrete objects, no abstraction, it is only in his market action that he acts in a theological way.  Your theological presuppositions, theology of the market, commodity fetishism, it is not in your awareness, but in your social interaction.

Lacan says the true formula of atheism is not “God is dead” but “God is unconscious.”

even if we are subjects of capitalism, we don’t believe, we are cynical. But BELIEF IS EMBODIED in our very SOCIAL PRACTICES.

You see a teenager, he think his father is a stupid jerk.  He is right. But nonetheless, when you see this same teenager interacting with his father you will see a mixture of fear, respect, even love and so on. One thing is what he thinks, “My father is a jerk” but unconsciously he has a much more traumatized affectionate relationship with his father.

On the one hand our reality is cynical, nominalist on the other ideology and financial speculations, even if we experience ourselves as cynical atheists, we practice religion, TRUST IN THE MARKET. Did you notice how we can make fun of prosopopoeia, when objects can speak.  In the early operas, you still have abstract concepts appearing as persons, poetry appears and sings, with psychological realism this becomes impossible. In Bertolt Brecht this prosopopoeia returns.  This prosopopoeia returns with a vengeance, although we all know MARKET does NOT EXIST, it is not a subject, all there is we concrete individuals interacting, but this is NOT what we are saying, MARKETS expressed their doubt about these measures, MARKETS are not satisified, they will demand more sacrifice, what you effectively say is more important than what you want to say.

It is not that you say something, but you mean something else.  The true SYMBOLIC cheating, you think you are just pretending to do something ha ha, I’m just pretending, but you don’t know that what you experience as a mask is the truth, and the inner distance you have towards it is a lie.

When you do something, this is the usual way we dupe ourselves through hypocrisy, no your inner life is a joke, what you think is a mask, the truth is what you do, the truth is out there. Marx and Freud, the unconscious truth is not, I go deep in myself, no the TRUTH IS OUT THERE, in the social relations and so on.

COMMODITY FETISHISM:  An ideological formation, perverted spiritualism.  An ideology that is the very core of the economic infrastructure.  An objectively necessary illusion.  It is an illusion that is embodied in social relations themselves.  So even if you don’t believe in it subjectively, you still practice it.

It strangely persists even after you denounce it, you may grasp it as an illusion but it still persists.  The mystery of the mask, then I pulled the mask off, look its still your stupid dad, then I put the mask on again and he was afraid, he knew it was me behind, a mask is never simply a mask,  There is more truth in the mask.

Individual capitalists are the carriers of social roles, we can play the game, this humanist idea, we should not be reduced to our social roles, there is so much more depth in me, I love flowers etc.  I can’t be reduced to a mask. THIS IS IDEOLOGY.

We are not monsters Israel soldiers, we are ordinary people, we have fear like you, we have ordinary feelings.  This abstract pacifism.  War is horrible, nonsensical killing.  Yeah we are all human.  Ok.  Brecht precisely in a vulgar anti-psychological way, to reduce figures to masks, abstract social roles.  A guy comes on stage, Hi I am a journalist, I am corrupted by bourgeoisie to exploit worker etc.   There is a truth in it. In your personal experience all your psychological depth trauma is not your truth.   YOUR TRUTH IS WHAT YOUR DOING OUT THERE

Lesson of Hegel: The structural necessity of illusion.  Illusion constitutes reality.  IF YOU TAKE AWAY THE ILLUSION REALITY ITSELF DISINTEGRATES.

The reality is the opposite one.  Male chauvanist bonding, screw, get laid, but then in our cloud, one guy I like to do it on the forest, or on the beach, or reading a book and getting it from behind, I’ don’t care I’m reading my book.  Freud is not vulgar pan-sexualism, what we are thinking about when we are doing that.  There is no sexual relationship, even in the most passionate love, there is still NO complete coincidence or identity.  You always need a fantasy, you are never alone, a certain fantasy scenario must be present.  THIS WAS CLEAR TO MARX.  This is why commodity fetishism is not an ideology.  Commodity fetishm is not something in superstructure, an effect of the economic, it is something that makes consistent and livable the production process.

zupančič sexual difference and real pt 2 of 4

Video of this presentation March 2011

Here is the paper online without works cited page

Freud in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) he insists on the original nonexistence of any germ of two sexes (or two sexualities) in preadolescent time.

The auto-erotic activity of the erotogenic zones is, however, the same in both sexes, and owing to this uniformity there is no possibility of a distinction between the two sexes such as arises after puberty … Indeed, if we were able to give a more definite connotation to the concepts of “masculine” and “feminine,” it would even be possible to maintain that libido is invariably and necessary of a masculine nature, whether it occurs in men or in women and irrespectively of whether its object is a man or a woman.

In other words, at the level of the libido there are no two sexes. And if we were able to say what exactly is “masculine” and “feminine,” we would describe it as “masculine” — but we are precisely not able to do this, as Freud further emphases in the footnote attached to the quoted passage. 7

So, when confronted with the question of sexual difference, the first answer of psychoanalysis is: From the strictly analytical point of view, there is in fact only one sex, or sexuality.

Moreover, sexuality is not something that springs from difference (between sexes); it is not propelled by any longing for our lost other half, but is originally self-propelling (and “autoerotic”). Freud writes, “The sexual drive is in the first instance independent of its object; nor is its origin likely to be due to its object’s attractions.”

Does this mean that sexual difference is only and purely a symbolic construction? Here waits the other surprise (not unrelated to the first, of course) of the psychoanalytic stance: Sexual difference doesn’t exist in the symbolic either, or, more precisely, there is no symbolic account of this difference as sexual. “In the psyche, there is nothing by which the subject may situate himself as male or female being.”

That is to say, although the production of meaning of what it is to be a “man” or a “woman” is certainly symbolic—and massive—it doesn’t amount to producing sexual difference as signifying difference. In other words, sexual difference is a different kind of difference; it doesn’t follow the differential logic.

Mladen Dolar quote: “There is a widespread criticism going around that aims at the binary oppositions as the locus of enforced sexuality, its règlementation, its imposed mould, its compulsory stricture. By the imposition of the binary code of two sexes we are subjected to the basic social constraint. But the problem is perhaps rather the opposite: the sexual difference poses the problem of the two precisely because it cannot be reduced to the binary opposition or accounted for in terms of the binary numerical two. It is not a signifying difference, such that it defines the elements of structure. It is not to be described in terms of opposing features, or as a relation of given entities preexisting the difference One could say: bodies can be counted, sexes cannot. Sex presents a limit to the count of bodies; it cuts them from inside rather than grouping them together under common headings.”

And sex does not function as a stumbling block of meaning (and of the count) because it is considered morally naughty. It is considered morally naughty because it is a stumbling block of meaning.

This is why the moral and legal decriminalization of sexuality should not take the path of its naturalization (“whatever we do sexually is only natural behavior”).

We should instead start from the claim that nothing about (human) sexuality is natural, least of all sexual activity with the exclusive aim of reproduction. There is no “sexual nature” of man (and no “sexual being”). The problem with sexuality is not that it is a remainder of nature that resists any definite taming; rather, there is no nature here — it all starts with a surplus of signification.

If we now return to the question of what this implies in relation to ontology in general, and, more specifically, to the performative ontology of contemporary gender studies, we must start from the following, crucial implication: Lacan is led to establish a difference between being and the Real.   The real is not a being, or a substance, but its deadlock. It is inseparable from being, yet it is not being. One could say that for psychoanalysis, there is no being independent of language (or discourse)—which is why it often seems compatible with contemporary forms of nominalism.

All being is symbolic; it is being in the Other. But with a crucial addition, which could be formulated as follows: there is only being in the symbolic — except that there is real.  There “is” real, but this real is no being. Yet it is not simply the outside of being; it is not something besides being, it is — as I put it earlier — the very curving of the space of being. It only exists as the inherent contradiction of being.

Which is precisely why, for Lacan, the real is the bone in the throat of every ontology: in order to speak of “being qua being,” one has to amputate something in being that is not being. 

That is to say, the real is that which the traditional ontology had to cut off in order to be able to speak of “being qua being.”

We only arrive to being qua being by subtracting something from it — and this something is precisely that which, while included in being, prevents it from being fully constituted as being.

The real, as that additional something that magnetizes and curves the (symbolic) space of being, introduces in it another dynamics, which infects the dynamics of the symbolic, makes it “not all.”

Now, a very good way of getting closer to the relationship between sexuality as such (its real) and sexual difference is via an excerpt from a lecture by Joan Copjec, in which she made the following crucial observation:

“The psychoanalytic category of sexual difference was from this date [the mid-1980s] deemed suspect and largely forsaken in favor of the neutered category of gender. Yes, neutered. I insist on this because it is specifically the sex of sexual difference that dropped out when this term was replaced by gender.

Gender theory performed one major feat: it removed the sex from sex.

For while gender theorists continued to speak of sexual practices, they ceased to question what sex or sexuality is; in brief, sex was no longer the subject of an ontological inquiry and reverted instead to being what it was in common parlance: some vague sort of distinction, but basically a secondary characteristic (when applied to the subject), a qualifier added to others, or (when applied to an act) something a bit naughty.” [Copjec The Sexual Compact]

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