Category: butler

subjectivization

Žižek, The Ticklish Subject p. 251
For Foucault, a perverse philosopher if ever there was one, the relationship between prohibition and diesire is circular, and one of absolute immanence: power and resistance (counter-power) presuppose and generate each other — that is, the very prohibitive measures that categorize and regulate illicit desires effectively generate them.

On Butler p.253
There is thus nothing more misguided than to argue that Foucault, in Volume 1 of his History of Sexuality, opens up the way for individuals to rearticulate-resignify-displace the power mechanisms they are caught in: the whole point .. lies in his claim that resistances to power are generated by the very matrix they seem to oppose.

In other words, the point of his notion of `biopower`is precisely to give an account of how disciplinary power mechanisms can constitute individuals directly, by penetrating individual bodies and bypassing the level of ‘subjectivization’ (that is, the whole problematic of how individuals ideologically subjectivize their predicament, how they relate to their conditions of existence).

It is therefore meaningless, in a way, to criticize him for not rendering this subjectivization thematic: his whole point is that if one is to account for social discipline and subordination, one has to bypass it!

Later, however (starting from Volume II of his History of Sexuality), he is compelled to return to this very ostracized topic of subjectivization: how individuals subjectivize their condition, how they relate to it — or, to put it in Althusserian terms, how they are not only individuals caught in disciplinary state apparatuses, but also interpellated subjects.

In short, what Foucault’s account of the discourses that discipline and regulate sexuality leaves out of consideration is the process by means of which the power mechanism itself becomes eroticized, that is, contaminated by what it endeavours to ‘repress’.  It is not enough to claim that the ascetic Christian subject who, in order to fight temptation, enumerates and categorizes the various forms of temptation, actually proliferates the object he tries to combat; the point is, rather, to conceive of how the ascetic who flagellates in order to resist temptation finds sexual pleasure in this very act of inflicting wounds on himself.  254

precarity question (8)

Question:

If preserving the life of the other is a precondition of the self, are we not still arguing out of self preservation?

Judith Butler: (at 6:33)

If it’s the case that I only am obligated to preserve the life of the other because I must preserve my own life and if my own life is the final reason why I preserve the life of the other then you’re absolutely right (I’m a modernist egological Bush right-winger RT).

But if in preserving the life of the other I am articulating my social and political existence in the relation to the other then I have left an egological framework for a relational one and I have lost my bounded I, or rather recast it as a certain kind of relational practice, so I would be preserving my ‘self’ my new self my recast self as a secondary effect of preserving the life of the other since it would turn out that I am bound.  But it would not be for myself rather than the other or on the basis of any other distinction between self and other that that act of preservation would occur.

precarity (7)

Butler, Judith. “Precarious Life and the Obligations of Cohabitation” The Neale Wheeler Watson Lecture 2011 Nobel Museum Stockholm Sweden, May 24 2011.

Finally, I want to say that sometimes these bonds are wretched ones, that one population is up against another in ways that feel unliveable, and the modes of interdependency are characterized as exploitative or colonizing. This is surely the case in Israel/Palestine where the notions of a national home and homeland are inevitably implicated in relations of internal heterogeneity and adjacency which bring up the issue of unchosen co-habitation in yet a different way.

Israel and Palestine are joined; they overlap, and through the settlements and the military presence, Israel invades and pervades Palestinian lands. Even if they sought a full-scale separation from each other, the two would still be bound to one another by the separation wall, by the border, by the military powers that control the border. The relationship would only be extended in its wretched form.

There are settlements now in the West Bank populated with right wing Israelis who nevertheless depend on local Palestinians for conveying food or menial jobs. And we might point out as well that the soldiers at the checkpoint are in constant contact with Palestinians who are waiting there or passing through. These are forms of contact, adjacency, unwilled modes of co-habitation that are not only clearly inegalitarian, but where the military presence is hostile, threatening, and destructive.

I would include among these the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which now has an Israeli version, which stipulates that co-existence requires equality and cannot take place under conditions where one party is subjected to colonial subjugation and disenfranchisement – an Arendtian view, to be sure. These are but a few of the many insistent and important ways of practicing and thinking about alliance, modes of working together, but sometimes working in separate venues against the illegal occupation and for Palestinian dignity and self-determination.

Over and against these instances of co-habitation, there are, as we know, antagonistic ties, wretched bonds, raging and mournful modes of connectedness. In those cases where living with others on adjacent lands or on contested or colonized lands produces aggression and hostility in the midst of that co-habitation.

Colonial subjugation and occupation is surely one way to live without choice next to and under a colonizing population. The mode of unchosen co-habitation that belongs to the colonized is surely not the same as the notion of a democratic plurality established on grounds of equality.

And this is why only those forms of alliance that struggle to overcome colonial subjugation carry the trace of any future possibility of co-habitation between the inhabitants of that piece of earth. Otherwise, Palestinians remain disproportionately exposed to precarity, and Israelis act to shore up their territory and majority-rule through extending colonial control and heightening their modes of military aggression.

It seems to me that even in situations of antagonistic and unchosen modes of cohabitation, certain ethical obligations emerge.

Since we do not choose with whom to cohabit the earth, we have to honor those obligations to preserve the lives of those we may not love, we may never love, we do not know, and did not choose.

Second, these obligations emerge from the social conditions of political life, not from any agreement we have made, nor from any deliberate choice. And yet, these very social conditions of liveable life are precisely those that have to be achieved. We cannot rely on them as presuppositions that will guarantee our good life together. On the contrary, they supply the ideals toward which we must struggle.

Because we are bound to realize these conditions, we are also bound to one another, in passionate and fearful alliance, often in spite of ourselves, but ultimately for ourselves, for a “we” who is constantly in the making.

Thirdly, these conditions imply equality, as Arendt tells us, but also an exposure to precarity (a point derived from Levinas) which leads us to understand as a

global obligation imposed upon us to find political and economic forms that to minimize precarity and establish economic political equality.

Those forms of cohabitation characterized by equality and minimized precarity become the goal to be achieved by any struggle against subjugation and exploitation, but also the goals that start to be achieved in the practices of alliance that assemble across distances to achieve those very goals.

We struggle in, from, and against precarity. Thus, it is not from pervasive love for humanity or a pure desire for peace that we strive to live together.

We live together because we have no choice, and yet we must struggle to affirm the ultimate value of that unchosen social world, and that struggle makes itself known and felt precisely when we exercise freedom in a way that is necessarily committed to the equal value of lives. We can be alive or dead to the sufferings of others, – they can be dead or alive to us, depending on how they appear, and whether they appear at all;

but only when we understand that what happens there also happens here, and that “here” is already an elsewhere, and necessarily so, that we stand a chance of grasping the difficult and shifting global connections in which we live, which make our lives possible – and sometimes, too often, impossible.

precarity (6)

Butler, Judith. “Precarious Life and the Obligations of Cohabitation” The Neale Wheeler Watson Lecture 2011 Nobel Museum Stockholm Sweden, May 24 2011.

In my view, ethical claims emerge from bodily life itself, a bodily life that is not always unambiguously human. After all, the life that is worth preserving, and safeguarding, who should be protected from murder (Levinas) and genocide (Arendt) is connected to, and dependent upon, non-human life in essential ways; this follows from the idea of the human animal, a different point of departure for thinking about politics.

If we try to understand in concrete terms what it means to commit ourselves to preserving the life of the other, we are invariably confronted with the bodily conditions of life, and so a commitment not only to the other’s corporeal persistence, but to all those environmental conditions that make life liveable.

The possibility of whole populations being annihilated either through genocidal policies or systemic negligence follows not only from the fact that there are those who believe they can decide among whom they will inhabit the earth, but because such thinking presupposes a disavowal of an irreducible fact of politics:

the vulnerability to destruction by others that follows from a condition of precarity in all modes of political and social interdependency.

We can make this into a broad existential claim, namely, that everyone is precarious, and this follows from our social existence as bodily beings who depend upon one another for shelter and sustenance and who, therefore, are at risk of statelessness, homelessness and destitution under unjust and unequal political conditions.

As much as I am making such a claim, I am also making another, namely, that our precarity is to a large extent dependent upon the organization of economic and social relationships, the presence or absence of sustaining infrastructures and social and political institutions. In this sense, precarity is indissociable from that dimension of politics that addresses the organization and protection of bodily needs. Precarity exposes our sociality, the fragile and necessary dimensions of our interdependency.

Whether explicitly stated or not, every political effort to manage populations involves a tactical distribution of precarity, more often than not articulated through an unequal distribution of precarity, one that depends on dominant norms regarding whose life is grievable, and worth protecting, and whose life is ungrievable, or marginally or episodically grievable and so, in that sense, already lost in part or in whole, and thus less worthy of protection and sustenance. In my own view, then, a different social ontology would have to start from this shared condition of precarity in order to refute those normative operations, pervasively racist, that decide in advance who counts as human and who does not. My point is not to rehabilitate humanism, but rather to struggle for a conception of ethical obligation that is grounded in precarity.

No one escapes the precarious dimension of social life – it is, we might say, our common non-foundation. And we cannot understand co-habitation without understanding that a generalized precarity obligates us to oppose genocide and to sustain life on egalitarian terms. Perhaps this feature of our lives can serve as the basis for the rights of protection against genocide, whether through deliberate or negligent means. After all, even though our interdependency constitutes us as more than thinking beings, indeed as social and embodied, vulnerable and passionate, our thinking gets nowhere without the presupposition of the interdependent and sustaining conditions of life.

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.

Arendt (5)

Butler, Judith. “Precarious Life and the Obligations of Cohabitation” The Neale Wheeler Watson Lecture 2011 Nobel Museum Stockholm Sweden, May 24 2011.

[Arendt] could not have predicted the 1.7 million who now have that refugee status within the West Bank and Gaza alone, but she did predict that nation-states that seek to regulate the racial or religious composition of their populations invariably produce new classes of refugees, and call into question their own legitimacy by expelling populations who do not conform to the national norm. Her call for co-habitation was meant quite clearly to counter not only the genocidal politics of National Socialism but the recurrent production of the stateless by any and all nations that purging themselves of heterogeneity. And though she would have never argued that Israel is like Nazi Germany, and she would have opposed all such analogies, she was clear that Israel was continuing a project of settler colonialism in the name of a national liberation project, producing hundreds of thousands of refugees that would not only delegitimate any claims to democracy made by that state, but keep the state embroiled in conflict for decades to come. 17

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.

Precarity only makes sense if we are able to identify as clearly political issues bodily dependency and need, hunger and the need for shelter, the vulnerability to injury and destruction, forms of social trust that let us live and thrive, and the passions linked to our very persistence.

If Arendt thought that such matters had to be relegated to the private realm, Levinas understood the importance of vulnerability, but failed to really link vulnerability to a politics of the body. Although Levinas seems to presuppose a body impinged upon, he does not give it an explicit place in his ethical philosophy. And though Arendt theorizes the problem of the body, of the located body, the speaking body emerging into the “space of appearance” as part of any account of political action, she is not quite willing to affirm a politics that struggles to overcome inequalities in food distribution, that affirms rights of housing, and which targets inequalities in the sphere of reproductive labor.

 

Arendt (4)

Butler, Judith. “Precarious Life and the Obligations of Cohabitation” The Neale Wheeler Watson Lecture 2011 Nobel Museum Stockholm Sweden, May 24 2011.

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. 11

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. We can choose in some ways how to live and where, and in local ways we can choose with whom to live. But if we were to decide with whom to co-habit the earth, we would be deciding which portion of humanity may live, and which may die.

If that choice is barred to us, that means that we are under an obligation to live with those who already exist, and that any choice about who may or may not live is always a genocidal practice, and
though we cannot dispute that genocide has happened, and happens still, we are wrong to think freedom in any ethical sense is ever compatible with the freedom to commit genocide.

The unchosen character of earthly co-habitation is, for Arendt, the condition of our very existence as ethical and political beings. 13

Arendt stands for this plurality when he argues that none of us may choose with whom to co-habit the earth; we can surely choose with whom to share a household and perhaps also with whom to share a neighborhood or a region, or where to draw the boundary of a state, but we are not in such instances deciding against the right to live for those who are outside of those communities.

But when people decide that they will not share the earth, that means that they are committed to
eradicating a population from the face of the earth. Not only is this choice an attack on co-habitation as a precondition of political life in Arendt’s view, but it commits us to the following proposition:

we must devise institutions and policies that actively preserve and affirm the non-chosen character of open-ended and plural co-habitation.

Not only do we live with those we never chose and to whom we may feel no immediate sense of social belonging, but we are also obligated to preserve those lives and the open-ended plurality that is the global population. 13

Arendt … has offered … an ethical view of co-habitation that serves as a guideline for particular forms of politics. In this sense, concrete political norms and policies emerge from the unchosen character of these modes of co-habitation. The necessity of co-habiting the earth is a principle that … must guide the actions and policies of any neighborhood, community, or nation. The decision to live in one community or another is surely justified as long as it does not imply that those who live outside the community do not deserve to live.

In other words, every communitarian ground for belonging is only justifiable on the condition that it is subordinate to a noncommunitarian opposition to genocide.

The way I read this, every inhabitant who belongs to a community belongs also to the earth, and this implies a commitment not only to every other inhabitant of that earth, but we can surely add, to sustaining the earth itself. And with this last proviso, I seek to offer an ecological supplement
Arendt’s anthropocentrism.

it appears that “belonging” must actually no know bounds and exceed every particular nationalist and communitarian limit. Both the arguments against genocide and the arguments for the rights of the stateless depend upon underscoring the limits of communitarianism. 15

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. 15-16

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. 16

Butler on Levinas (3)

Butler, Judith. “Precarious Life and the Obligations of Cohabitation” The Neale Wheeler Watson Lecture 2011 Nobel Museum Stockholm Sweden, May 24 2011.

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.

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 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.

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.

Butler on Levinas (2)

Butler, Judith. “Precarious Life and the Obligations of Cohabitation” The Neale Wheeler Watson Lecture 2011 Nobel Museum Stockholm Sweden, May 24 2011.

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. 8

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 interwinement (sic) between that other life, all those other lives, and my own – one that is irreducible to national belonging or communitarian affiliation.

In my view … 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 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.

Can we use Levinas against himself? (1)

Butler, Judith. “Precarious Life and the Obligations of Cohabitation” The Neale Wheeler Watson Lecture 2011 Nobel Museum Stockholm Sweden, May 24 2011.

Butler’s Thesis

I am trying to underscore that something impinges upon 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. 2

– Is what is happening so far from me that I can bear no responsibility for it?

– Is what is happening so close to me that I cannot bear having to take responsibility for it? If I myself did not make this suffering, am I still in some other sense responsible to it?

How do we approach these questions? … I want to suggest that the ethical solicitation that we encounter in, say, the photograph of war suffering brings up larger questions about ethical obligation.

… ethical obligation imposes itself upon us without our consent, suggesting that consent is not a sufficient ground for delimiting the global obligations which form our responsibility. 4

[What does it mean] 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? 5

I hope it will become possible to understand an alternative set of Jewish views on co-habitation, ones that not only demand a departure from communitarianism but that may serve as a critical alternative to the views and practices of the state of Israel, especially its version of political Zionism and settler colonialism.

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. And yet, he was of the one who claimed in an interview that the Palestinian had no face, and that he only meant to extend ethical obligations to those who were bound together by his version of Judeo-Christian and classical Greek origins. In some ways, he gave us the very principle that he betrayed. And this means that anyone and everyone are not only free, but obligated, to extend that principle to the Palestinian people, precisely because he could not. His failure directly contradicts his formulation of the demand to be ethically responsive to those who exceed our immediate sphere of belonging, but to whom we nevertheless belong, regardless of any question of what we choose or by what contracts we are bound, or what established forms of cultural belonging are available.

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. 7-8

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 limit?

 

Ž on butler laclau badiou emphasis on locality

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

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

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

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

Hegel and Žižek

Žižek seminar Hegel Now? Workshop Philosophy Department, Middlesex University. Thursday May 5, 2011.

Žižek’s Hegel Lecture put on by Dahlem Humanities Center (DHC), Freie Universität Berlin, on March 31, 2011, in the Henry Ford Building in Dahlem.

Post-Hegel: A move to a positivity of Being and on the other hand, formalist pure repetition, Kierkargard and Freud (death drive) two strange bedfellows.
You can’t be a Hegelian after this break.  Before there were communitarian Hegelians, and radical Hegelians.  the Pittsburgh Hegelians have rejuvenated Hegel for Liberals.  Their point is ‘recognition’.  This is Zizek’s problem with them.

Catherine Malabou in her debate with Judith Butler There is an co-written article in Houlgate’s recent edited collection on Hegel

For Malabou, she says, no intersubjectivity is not the ulitmate horizon of Hegel

Master — Servant

Phenomenology of Spirit: you should be attentive to the beginning of Master-Servant

Self-consciousness, a subject which perceives among the objects in the world, another object that claims “fuck you” I’m also a subject.

This is an absolute ontological standard.  The original situation is not, I’m a subject and you’re a subject.  “This is not the 69 position, lick and recognize each other.”  No there is an absolute antagonism, I am as a subject singular and absolute, now there is another guy there that says I am also like you, there is only room for one and there is two now competing for the only place.  This Other is not the Levinasian other, nor the (Butler) Other, I recognize you, you recognize me.  The Other is an absolutely shattering intrusion.

The Pittsburgh Hegelians deflate Hegel, no metaphysical commitment, just a transcendental forms of a priori rational forms of argumentation.
Suspension of big ontological questions always implies the worst historicism, which opens up the path of violent return of realist metaphysics, neo-Darwinism

Avoiding or suspending the big ontological questions never works, the big radical questions return.

The break is between post-Hegelian thought and the pre-Hegelian metaphysics.  My thesis is that precisely Hegel disappears in this passage.  Hegel is a vanishing mediator between the two: traditional philosophy and post-metaphysical thought.   Hegel something that is neither is one nor the other.  If you are in-between you can see something which afterwards becomes invisible.  Nice example, the beginning of sound, for a brief moment, the apparent reactionaries like Chaplin, knew something about the ghastly dimension of voice, he saw a potentially ominous spectral dimension of voice, that voice is never a self-transparent means of self-expression but a foreign intruder that can haunt us.  But this became invisible.  This unbearable excess in Hegel becomes invisible.

The ultra-totalitarian Hegel: GK Chesterton “The Man Who was Thursday” the work of the philosophical policeman.  Popper, Adorno, Levinas, Glucksman, would they also subscribe, totalitarianism, the philosophical crime is totality.  Totality = Totalitarianism.  The task of philosophical police, is to find a political crime, gulag, totalitarianism, reading Rousseau etc that a philosophical crime will be committed.  They search out for proponents of totality.  But Ž wants to defend totality.

Žižek’s definition of the Hegelian Totality: [I should go back to the audio to fill in this definition a bit more]

Totality is not an ideal of an organic whole. But a critical notion. To locate a phenomenon in it’s totality is not to locate hidden harmony of its whole. antagonism, self-contradictory antagonistic.  The whole which is the true is the whole plus its symptoms, It’s unintended consequences which betrays its untruth. Today’s global capitalism means speak of the Congo. This is why again the anti-Hegelian rhetorics, which … the space of the Hegelian totality is the space of the abstract harmonious whole, and the excess which undermine it.

Whenever you have a project to something, you can expect it to go wrong, every project is undermined by its inconsistency.

extrnal negtion becomes self-negation.

Only the abstract terror of the French Revolution creates the conditions for liberal freedom. The first choice has to be the wrong choice, it is only the wrong choice that opens the space for concrete freedom.

You arrive at the highest only thruogh the radical contradiction of the lowest. This is the basic temporality of the dialectical process.

Book of Job
Each of 3 theologists try to convince JOb that his suffering must have a deeper meaning.

Why did you do all these things to me? God there commits a blasphemy, the true answer is, you think you are something special but I screwed up everything.

What dies on the cross is God of beyond itself. Holy Spirit is totally unique, what dies on the cross is this disgusting idea that God is up there as a guarantee of meaning. As in when something appears to us as evil, you are looking too close it is a stain, but if you stand back, you can look at it as a part of global harmony. The sacrifice of Jesus Christ, there is no big Other, no guarantee of meaning, the Holy Ghost is that we are here alone without a guarantee. The true message of Christianity is not Trust God, but God Trusts Us. Holy Spirit is the first radical egalitarian institution.

Hate your mother and father, as parts of hierarchy of social order, god is dead, the only hope after this break is an egalitarian community.  But there is in Hegel a teleological movement. Not so according to Ž.

June 23, 1789: King says scram. Mirabeau, “Go and tell your king that we shall leave our places here except when forced by bayonets” the invention of the new surprises you. A prophet from chance, you say too much, you try to integrate the excess, and you suceed.

Christ died. It was a shock. They didn’t know what. Somebody says, why don’t we see it as a triumph.

Contingency, is a deeper necessity that articulates itself through contingency. Julius Cesar crossing the Rubicon. At that point it was totally open. Once he crossed the Rubicon, he created his destiny, so that in retrospect it appeared necessary.

Baladour 1995, Le Monde wrote, “if B will be elected, then we can say his election was necessary” something happens and once it happens it retroactively appears necessary.

The time is come to do a materialist reversal of Marx back to Hegel. This opening towards contingency, Hegel is radical thinker of contingency. marx is you as a historical agent can look into history, see where history is going, and then posit yourself as an agent of progress. Hegel no way. there is no big Other. The conservative poet T.S. Eliot. Every really new work of art, it retroactively changes the whole history of art. This is the Hegelian theory of totality. With every new break the whole past is re-written.

Borges wrote about Kafka, every writer has his predesccors, Kafka can be said to create his forerunners. No. We are not simply retroactively projecting things into the past. No what if history is open, events are retroactively constituted.

Can we think this incompleteness of reality without God thinking of it, in a materialist way. We cannot simply become Hegelians. We should admit that there are things Hegel didn’t know. The topic of REPETITION. Deleuze made it clear, what characterizes post-Hegelian space, it is a notion of REPETITION, in contrast to Hegel involves no Aufhebung.

Kierkargard and Freud: A pure repetition. It’s not that Hegel didn’t see it, but there are signs that point to the unthought of Hegel. There are points that you can see where Hegel wasn’t Hegelian enough. This is what Marx was saying. Hegel’s theory of economy, didn’t yet capture the whole speculative madness of economy. The ideal of captial as abstraction that rules concrete life, Hegel wasn’t Hegelian enough, passage from money to capital subject to substance. Marx in Grundrisse, capital is an AUTOMATIC SUBJECT. Captial wouldh ave been an horror for Hegel, because it is actually infinity and bad repetitive infinity.

hegel’s theory of madness where Hegel develops the rise of human spirit out of animal life, which is more radical than Foucault. The passage through radical madness, is a permanent background to being human. What Hegel missed, its not simple as passing directly from nature to culture, our cultural rituals of love is not a defence against a naturalism, but against a deadly force, once we pass from nature to culture RETROACTIVELY a third domain of radical negativity arises.
Kant: Man is an animal who needs a master, not because of any natural unruliness, but metaphysical unruliness.
Hegel would have been against the Catholic church, Hegel would have said, animals only do it for procreation, to take something that serves a biological aim, and autonomize it with regard to that aim,

Lacan is right. the horror of sexuality for Christianity, is not vulgar biological life, but metaphysical competitor. Sexuality is the very domain where at its most elementary, wher ethe passage fro manimal to human emerges.

In todays crazy world, offers itself to a Hegelian in-between … and for us too, a certain epock is coming to an end.

Mobilizing Hegelian potentials in today’s world, the time has come to return to Hegel against post-Hegelians against Marx. For example his stuff on the rabble, isnt it today precisely, is that the main form of class struggle isn’t just working class-bourgeouisie, but many forms of rabble, illegal immigrants, landless, etc.

Today isn’t that we are living in a time, maybe in the 20th century we tried too quick to change the world, and that we should reflect on it radically. A brutal fasciest counter-revolution Bologna educational reform. Change intellectuals into experts, change higher education to make it useful. Demonstration in suburbs call psychologists, sociologists. ecology should also ask how did it come to that, do we perceive it correctly.

We are aproaching a time where thinking is absolutely needed Ecology, biogenetics, the limit between inside from outside, we can control mind from outside, chairs moving by your thoughts. This changes the very definition of being human. Be careful to resist the pseud-state of emergency talk. Bill Gates talks like that, Why are we still caught in these ideological debates while children are starving in Africa. The message is do, don’t think about it. Consumption, but I almost become tempted when I pass a Starbucks, they do a wonderful job of ideology, 1% goes to Guatamala children. In the old times citizens/consumers. Now buying the coffee the consumer, your citizenship will be also done by others. Don’t be afraid to be intellectuals today The BOlogna reforms show that those in power know that we are dangerous.

stavrakakis yes men 6

Stavrakakis, Yannis. Subjectivity and the Organized Other: Between Symbolic Authority and Fantasmatic Enjoyment Organization Studies 2008 29: 1037

Very often, however, experiencing such alienation is not enough to effect a lessening of the bonds attaching us to the socio-symbolic Other. In other words, subjects are willing to do whatever may be necessary in order to repress or disavow the lack in the Other.

This insight is crucial in understanding power relations. Moving beyond the banal level of raw coercion, which (although not unimportant) cannot form the basis of sustainable hegemony, everyone seeking to understand how certain power structures manage to institute themselves as objects of long-term identification and how people get attached to them is sooner or later led to a variety of phenomena associated with what, since de la Boetie, has been called ‘voluntary servitude’. The central question here is simple:

Why are people so willing and often enthusiastic — or at least relieved — to submit themselves to conditions of subordination, to the forces of hierarchical order? Why are they so keen to comply with the commands of authority often irrespective of their content?

The famous words of Rousseau from the second chapter of The Social Contract are heard echoing here: ‘A slave in fetters loses everything — even the desire to be freed from them. He grows to love his slavery …’   Obviously, the Oedipal structure implicit in the social ordering of our societies, the role of what Lacan calls ‘the Name-of-the-Father’ in structuring reality through the (castrating) imposition of the Law, predisposes social subjects to accept and obey what seems to be emanating from the big Other, from socially sedimented points of reference invested with the gloss of authority and presented as embodying and sustaining the symbolic order, organizing (subjective and objective) reality.  This central Freudian-Lacanian insight can indeed explain a lot. And this can be very well demonstrated through some empirical examples.

Consider, for instance, the story of The Yes Men, two anti-corporate activistpranksters who have set up a fake ‘World Trade Organisation’ website. Believing that the site is the official WTO site, many visitors have sent them speaking invitations addressed to the real WTO. Mike and Andy decided to accept some of the invitations and soon started attending business meetings and conferences throughout the world as WTO representatives. Although intending to shock and ridicule they soon discovered that their ludicrous interventions generated other types of reaction. This is how they describe their experience themselves:

Neither Andy nor Mike studied economics at school. We know very little about the subject, and we won’t attempt to convince you otherwise; if you are of sound mind, you would see through us immediately. Yet, to our surprise, at every meeting we addressed, we found we had absolutely no trouble fooling the experts — those same experts who are ramming the panaceas of ‘free trade’ and ‘globalization’ down the throats of the world’s population. Worse: we couldn’t get them to disbelieve us.

Some of our presentations were based on official theories and policies, but presented with far more candour than usual, making them look like the absurdities that they actually are. At other times we simply ranted nonsensically. Each time, we expected to be jailed, kicked out, silenced, or at the very least interrupted. But no one batted an eye. In fact, they applauded. (The Yes Men 2005)

Simply put, people seem to be ready to accept anything insofar as it is perceived to be transmitted from a source invested with authority: for businessmen and many academics the WTO is obviously such a source. In other words, the content of a message is not as important as the source from which it emanates. Likewise, the subject’s autonomy in filtering and consciously managing its beliefs seems to be undermined by a dependence on symbolic authority per se.

We saw in the activities staged by the Yes Men how easily people are prepared to accept whatever is perceived as coming from an authority. Obviously, what is at stake here is not only acceptance but also compliance and obedience.

Most people, as is shown in their activities, are indeed prepared to accept and obey anything coming from a source of authority irrespective of the actual content of the command. In fact, this structure of authority seems to be a frame presupposed in every social experience.

As Milgram points out, already before the experiment starts, ‘the subject enters the situation with the expectation that someone will be in charge’. Now, and this is the most crucial point, the role of this someone is structurally necessary, without him the identity of the subject itself remains suspended and no functional social interaction can take place: ‘the experimenter, upon first presenting himself, fills a gap experienced by the subject’.  This quasi-Lacanian formulation reveals something essential. First of all, it lends support to the Lacanian understanding of the Name-of-the-Father, the signifier representing authority and order, as instituting the reality of the subject. In his brief Lacanian analysis of the Milgram experiment, David Corfield is right to point out that it ‘reveals something of the super-egoical consequences of the establishment of the paternal metaphor in a clear, albeit brutal fashion’ (Corfield 2002: 200).

The founding moment of subjectivity proper, the moment linguistic/social subjects come to being, has to be associated with symbolic castration, with the prohibition of incest that resolves imaginary alienation and permits our functional insertion into the social world of language.

In other words, the command embodied in the Name-of-the-Father offers the prototype of symbolic power that structures our social reality in patriarchal societies. This is a power both negative and positive, both prohibitive and productive (à la Foucault). The performative prohibition of the paternal function is exactly what makes possible the development of (sexual) desire. Furthermore, it is a power that presupposes our complicity or rather our acceptance; only this acceptance is ‘forced’ since without it no social subject can emerge and psychosis seems to be the only alternative.

And this is a dialectic which is bound to affect our whole life: ‘A power exerted on a subject, subjection is nevertheless a power assumed by the subject, an assumption that constitutes the instrument of that subject’s becoming’ (Butler 1997b: 11).

Without the assumption of castration no desire can emerge. In that sense, if Giorgio Agamben links biopolitics (a characteristically modern phenomenon according to Foucault) with sovereignty per se (Agamben 1998), Lacan seems to be highlighting the inextricable bond between repressive and productive (symbolic) power. Hence, symbolic castration marks a point of no return for the subject.

It is the command of prohibition and our subjection to it that institutes our social world as a structured meaningful order. Without someone in command reality disintegrates.

What Lacan, in his ‘Agency of the Letter’, describes as the ‘elementary structures of culture’ (Lacan 1977: 148), meaning a linguistically determined sense of ordering, are now also revealed as elementary structures of obedience and symbolic power. The intersubjective effects of this logic are immense: ‘It is not only the subject, but the subjects, caught in their intersubjectivity, who line up … and who, more docile than sheep, model their very being on the moment of the signifying chain that runs through them’ (Lacan 2006: 21).

Without such an elementary structure of obedience — instituted and reproduced in what Milgram calls ‘antecedent conditions’: the individual’s familial experience, the general societal setting built on impersonal relations of authority — the experiment would collapse. And these antecedent conditions have to be understood in their proper Lacanian perspective: they refer primarily to the whole symbolic structure within which the subject is born: ‘the subject … if he can appear to be the slave of language is all the more so of a discourse in the universal movement of which his place is already inscribed at birth, if only by virtue of his proper name’ (Lacan 1977: 63–4).