dissertation – objet (a)

Briko Racing journal

At this present moment I’m looking at the Briko Racing black journal. My first entry is dated June 17, 1995 and its on Gayle Rubin’s “The Traffic in Women.” And so almost to the day, 18 years later in June 2013 I would be defending a thesis that deals with this exact article. I’m absolutely amazed that the things I was thinking about and taking notes on close to 18 and a half years ago is what I’m still on today. Laclau/Lacan and split subjectivity, a recurring theme that I have never left.

I have even detailed the June 21 1996 trip to Hungary and December 15 1996 departure for Japan, I celebrated the arrival of 1997 in Totaro’s hometown.

I have the Lacanian Graphs of Desire, taking them from Žižek’s 1989 book The Sublime Object of Ideology.

Žižek books online

Only Communism Can Save Us From Liberal Democracy 3 Oct. 2011.

1989 marked not only the defeat of the Communist State-Socialism, but also the defeat of the Western Social Democracy.

Nowhere is the misery of today’s Left more palpable than in its “principled” defence of the Social-Democratic Welfare State: the idea is that, in the absence of a feasible radical Leftist project, all that the Left can do is to bombard the state with demands for the expansion of the Welfare State, knowing well that the State will not be able to deliver.

This necessary disappointment serves as a reminder of the basic impotence of the social-democratic Left and thus push the people towards a new radical revolutionary Left.

Needless to say, such a politics of cynical “pedagogy” is destined to fail, since it fights a lost battle: in the present politico-ideological constellation, the reaction to the inability of the Welfare State to deliver will be Rightist populism. In order to avoid this reaction, the Left will have to propose its own positive project beyond the confines of the Social-Democratic Welfare State.

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

(One of the crazy consequences of this stance is that some Leftists support the Czech liberal-conservative President Vaclav Klaus, a staunch Euro-sceptic: his ferocious anti-Communism and opposition to the “totalitarian” Welfare State is dismissed as a cunning strategy to render acceptable his anti-Europeanism …)

So where does the Left stand today? Alain Badiou wonderfully characterized the post-Socialist situation as “this troubled situation, in which we see Evil dancing on the ruins of Evil”: there is no question of any nostalgia, the Communist regimes were “evil” – the problem is that what replaced them is also “evil,” albeit in a different way.

In what way?

Back in 1991, Badiou gave a more theoretical formulation to the old quip from the times of Really Existing Socialism about the difference between the democratic West and the Communist East.

In the East, the public word of intellectuals is eagerly awaited and has a great resonance, but they are prohibited to speak and write freely; while in the West, they can say and write whatever they want, but their word is ignored by the wide public.

Badiou opposes the West and the East with regard to the different way the (rule of the) Law is located between the two extremes of State and philosophy (thinking).

In the East, philosophy is asserted in its importance, but as a State-philosophy, directly subordinated to the State, so that there is no rule of Law: the reference to philosophy justifies the State as working directly on behalf of the Truth of History, and this higher Truth allows it to dispense with the rule of Law and its formal freedom.

In the West, the State is not legitimized by the higher Truth of History, but by democratic elections guaranteed by the rule of Law, and the consequence is that the State as well as the public are indifferent to philosophy:

“The submission of politics to the theme of Law in parliamentary societies… leads to the impossibility of discerning the philosopher from the sophist… Inversely, in bureaucratic societies it is impossible to distinguish the philosopher from the functionary or the policeman. In the last instance, philosophy is generally nothing other than the word of the tyrant.”

In both cases, philosophy is denied its truth and autonomy because:

“the inherent adversaries of the identity of philosophy, the sophist and the tyrant, or even the journalist and the policeman, declare themselves philosophers.”

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

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

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

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

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

Exemplary here is the case of Vaclav Havel: his followers were shocked to learn that this highly ethical fighter for “living in truth” later engaged in shady business deals with suspicious real estate companies dominated by the ex-members of the Communist secret police.

And so, how naive did Timothy Garton Ash appear on his visit to Poland in 2009 to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of Communism: blind to the vulgar grey reality around him, he tried to convince the Poles that they should feel glorious, as if their land is still the noble land of Solidarity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the one hand, in the domains of personal freedoms and scientific technology, the impossible is more and more possible (or so we are told): “nothing is impossible.” We can enjoy sex in all its perverse variations, entire archives of music, films and TV series are available for download. There is even now the prospect of enhancing our physical and mental abilities, of manipulating our basic properties through interventions into genome, up to the tech-gnostic dream achieving immortality by way of fully transforming our identity into a software which can be downloaded from one to another hardware …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slavoj spoke at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas on Sunday, 2 October 2011.

outwith calum neill

I’m really pleased to hear you’ve found my book and that you are enjoying it. It’s curious that among all the Lacanian terminology that it is always outwith which snags people.

It’s a Scottish word but one which is apparently spreading in usage. Basically it means something close to ‘beyond’.

I prefer it to beyond in that it doesn’t carry the implication of exceeding or surpassing, doesn’t suggest a value relation, at least not in that simple sense.

You could also see it as close to ‘outside of’ but this seems clumsier and lacks the juridical sense that outwith carries, as in being beyond the scope or reach of something.

Partly too I wanted to use a word which would not be over or comfortably familiar to the reader in the hope that it would snag the eye and force the reader to think the relationship in question further.

Countdown

8:20 PM 09/06/2013
Listening to House

Wo Es war, soll Ich werden.
Where there was desire there shall I be, the subject should assume the object cause of desire, the subject should place itself in the place of the cause of desire, “the subject’s situating of itself as the cause of its own desire” 245 Neill

Now its Trance
Calum says this, “The ethical moment is purely subjective and, as Lacan stresses, one will have to pay for it. It is not already, and cannot already, be formulated in the symbolic order as one would encounter it but, rather, it entails the separation from and return to and, thus, change in and in relation to, the symbolic.” 247-8

This is what I’m getting from Calum. His disagreement with the Slovenian School regards the ethics of the Real, which Neill rejects. Ethics for Neill must include a role for the symbolic register. You can’t just do ethics out of the symbolic, in the Real, cause then how do you talk about it, it is without meaning if it remains ‘stuck’ there in the Real.

But I’m not convinced with Calum’s version of Lacanian ethics. He’s big on desire; emphasizes the conjunction of the symbolic and the Real. He says that ethics is about desire on that dangerous precipice between the two registers. But is desire radical? His emphasis on desire instead of the Real, the Real in his theory plays really a marginal role, whereas I tend to think a radical ethics places the Real center stage. I think this is how Terry Eagleton understands Lacanian ethics notwithstanding the fact that he is not a fan.

Hardstyle whatever that is
9:37 PM Ok. Now I’m reading Terry Eagleton. I mean I read his book on ethics 2 years ago but I should have take real careful notes cause I don’t remember what he said bozo. I am boze on this. So here is an article I’m reading and I promise to be better.
Avatars of the Real I like this term. However Eagleton concludes with a total rejection of what he considers to be a Parisian disdain for the everyday subtext which really all an ethics of the Real is a cover.

rogers and the comma

The placement of a comma in a contract between Rogers Communications Inc. and Aliant Inc. looks like it will cost Rogers dearly—an extra $2.13 million. Rogers thought it had a 5-year deal with Aliant to string Rogers’ cable lines across thousands of utility poles in Canada for an annual fee of $9.60 per pole.

But early last year Rogers was informed that the contract was being cancelled and the rates were going up. Impossible, Rogers thought, its contract was iron-clad until the spring of 2007, and could potentially be renewed for another 5 years.

The construction of one sentence in the contract allowed the entire deal to be scrapped with only a year’s notice, Aliant argued [1].

The contract states that the agreement “shall continue in force for a period of 5 years from the date it is made, and thereafter for successive 5 year terms, unless and until terminated by 1 year prior notice in writing by either party.”

Sous réserve des dispositions relatives à la résiliation du présent contrat, ce dernier prend effet à la date de signature. Il demeure en vigueur pour une période de cinq (5) ans à partir de la date de la signature et il est subséquemment renouvelé pour des périodes successives de cinq (5) années, à moins d’un préavis écrit de résiliation d’un an signifié à l’autre partie.

CRTC agreed with Aliant that the right to cancel did apply to the first five years of the contract. “Based on the rules of punctuation,” the comma in question “allows for the termination of the [contract] at any time, without cause, upon one-year’s written notice,” the CRTC said.

Notice the second comma. Did it have the effect of permitting the contract to be terminated by one year’s notice at any time, or only after the initial period of 5 years had expired? The CRTC held that the contract could be terminated at any time

In the Commission’s view, the “rules of punctuation” meant that the second comma—placed as it was before the phrase “unless and until terminated by one year’s prior notice in writing by either party”—meant that that phrase qualified both the phrases before it. One party argued that the phrase “unless and until terminated by one year’s prior notice in writing by either party” qualified only “thereafter for successive five (5) year terms”.

On this construction, the agreement would continue in force for at least the first five-year period. But that construction would deny the efficacy of the second comma. Hence, the “plain and ordinary meaning” of the clause allowed for termination at any time without cause, upon one year’s written notice… a report of the decision in the Canadian Globe and Mail on 6 August 2006 calculated the cost of the “grammatical blunder” as upwards of $2.13m—being the cost to the losing party of the winning party’s right to terminate the contract on one year’s notice.

Rogers’ intent in 2002 was to lock into a long-term deal of at least 5 years, but the regulators with the CRTC stated that the validity of the contract came down to the second comma in the previous sentence. Had it not been there, the right to cancel wouldn’t have applied to the first 5 years of the contract, and Rogers would be protected from the higher rates it now faces.

The regulator stated that the comma in question “allows for the termination of the [contract] at any time, without cause, upon 1-year’s written notice.” Rogers intention was to shield itself from rate increases, but now it will see its costs increase to up to $28.05 per pole. Rogers will probably have to pay $2.13 million more than expected, based on rough calculations.

August 21, 2007

The French language has trumped the comma in a contract dispute between Rogers Communications Inc. and Bell Aliant Regional Communications LP.

Rogers claimed victory yesterday after the French version of a five-year contract convinced the CRTC to overturn an earlier decision in which the regulator said the placement of a comma justified Bell Aliant’s decision to terminate the contract early.

In the English version, the CRTC said last year, the insertion of a comma to separate a termination clause from a clause about future renewals of the contract suggested the contract could be terminated before it expired in 2007. Had there been no comma, it would have been clear that the right to termination applied only to the end of the contract that set telephone pole access fees and future renewals. In the French version, the commission concluded yesterday, there were no errant commas to cloud the termination rights.

“We’re pleased that we prevailed,” said Pam Dinsmore, vice-president of regulatory issues for Rogers. “We’re pleased the commission interpreted the clause in the same way we had done.”

In addition to providing the commission with a French version and drafts of the contract, Rogers took issue with the federal regulator’s grasp of grammar, insisting the “rule of punctuation that the Commission purported to rely on did not exist” and was “inconsistent with ordinary English.”

Even if the commission’s “alleged punctuation rule” existed, it was an error of law to rely on it without consider “broader rules of construction,” Rogers argued.

Bell Aliant had argued that last year’s decision in its favour should stand, saying the decision was “valid, regardless of the rules of punctuation and an inquiry into the separation of phrases by commas was unnecessary.”

The firm further argued it was “inappropriate” to try to determine the intent of the contract in French because it was “a form of words and a language” the companies did not use.

But in yesterday’s decision, which reversed the earlier ruling, the CRTC said it was appropriate to review the French version of the contract because the commission had approved the pole access rates and regulations in both English and French in 2000 when they were put in place.

“The Commission considers that, between the two versions, it is appropriate to prefer the French language version as it has only one possible interpretation, and that interpretation is consistent with one of the two possible interpretations of the English language version.”

The dispute now boils down to $800,000 in fees Rogers has paid for access to telephone poles since the more favourable contract with Bell Aliant was terminated prematurely last year. “Unfortunately it’s not over. There’s still money at stake,” Ms. Dinsmore said yesterday.

comparison of freudian hegelian notions of negativity

What Freud aimed at with his notion of death-drive — more precisely, the key dimension of this notion for which Freud himself was blind, unaware of what he discovered, is the “non-dialectical” core of the Hegelian negativity, the pure drive to repeat without any movement of sublation/idealization.

The paradox here is that pure repetition (in contrast to repetition as idealizing sublation) is sustained precisely by its impurity, by the persistence of a contingent “pathological” element to which the movement of repetition remains stuck.

In the Kierkegard-Freudian pure repetition, the dialectical movement of sublimation thus encounters itself, its own core, outside itself, in the guise of a “blind” compulsion-to-repeat.

And it is here that one should apply the great Hegelian motto about the internalizing of the external obstacle: in fighting its external opposite, the blind nonsublatable repetition, the dialectical movement is fighting its own abyssal ground, its own core;

in other words, the ultimate gesture of reconciliation is to recognize in this threatening excess of negativity the core of the subject itself. This excess has different names in Hegel: the “night of the world,” the necessity of war, of madness, etc.

And perhaps, the same holds for the basic opposition between the Hegelian and the Freudian negativity: precisely insofar as there is a unbridgeable gap between them (the Hegelian negativity is idealizing, mediatizing/”sublating” all particular content in the abyss of its universality, while the negativity of the Freudian drive is expressed as being-stuck onto a contingent particular content),

the Freudian negativity provides (quite literally) the “material base” for the idealizing negativity — to put it in somewhat simplified terms, every idealizing/universalizing negativity has to be attached to a singular contingent “pathological” content which serves as its “sinthom” in the Lacanian sense (if this sinthom is unravelled/disintegrated, universality disappears).

The exemplary model of this link is, of course, Hegel’s deduction of the necessity of hereditary monarchy: the rational state as universal totality mediatizing all particular content has to be embodied in the contingent “irrational”figure of the monarch.

taking deleuze from behind destitution concrete universal

Žižek. Organs without Bodies. Deleuze and Consequences. Routledge. 2004. (50-51)

Taking Deleuze from Behind

And, what is the Hegelian Begriff as opposed to the nominalist “notion,” the result of abstracting shared features from a series of particular objects?

Often, we stumble on a particular case that does not fully “fit” its universal species, that is “atypical”; the next step is to acknowledge that every particular is “atypical;’ that the universal species exists only in exceptions, that there is a structural tension between the Universal and the Particular.

At this point, we become aware that the Universal is no longer just an empty neutral container of its subspecies but an entity in tension with each and every one of its species. The universal Notion thus acquires a dynamics of its own. More precisely, the true Universal is this very antagonistic dynamics between the Universal and the Particular.

It is at this point that we pass from “abstract” to “concrete” Universal — at the point when we acknowledge that every Particular is an “exception,” and, consequently, that the Universal, far from “containing” its particular content, excludes it (or is excluded by it).

This exclusion renders the Universal itself particular (it is not truly universal, since it cannot grasp or contain the particular content), yet this very failure is its strength: the Universal is thus simultaneously posited as the Particular.

The supreme political case of such a gesture is the moment of revolutionary “councils” taking over – the moment of “ahistorical” collective freedom, of “eternity in time;’ of what Benjamin called “dialectic in suspense. ” Or, as Alain Badiou would have put it in his Platonic terms, in such historical moments, the eternal Idea of Freedom appears/transpires.

Even if its realization is always “impure,” one should stick to the eternal Idea, which is not just a “generalization” of particular experiences of freedom but their inherent Measure.

(To which, of course, Hegel would have retorted that the Thermidor occurs because such a direct actualization of freedom has to appear as Terror.)

One should insert this appearance of Freedom into the series of exceptional temporalities, together with the Messianic time first formulated by Paul — the time when “the end is near: the time of the end of time (as Giorgio Agamben puts it) when, in an ontological “state of emergency;’ one should suspend one’s full identification with one’s sociosymbolic identity and act as if this identity is unimportant, a matter of indifference.

(This exceptional temporality is to be strictly distinguished from the ecstatic-carnivalesque suspension of Order in which things are turned upside-down in a generalized orgy.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thesis

Antigone and the Real: Judith Butler’s

Postoedipal Subject and the Left Lacanian Critique

Judith Butler’s theory of subjectivity remains highly suggestive for radical politics in a number of ways. Her politics is based not on a conception of a volitional subject located within an ontology of ‘natural sex’ since sex for Butler is shot through with culturally prescribed norms. In fact sex is revealed to be gender all along. To be a gendered subject is to reiterate a set of norms and thus the possibility for a failure or short circuit in the reiteration of the norm is, for Butler, the moment of politics. Yet if Butler’s politics is to overcome the solely individualistic and voluntaristic nature of this reiterative transgression, what does it then need to become?

In Antigone’s Claim Butler reads the Sophoclean tragedy as a postoedipal claim upon the future and asks the question first posed by George Steiner, “What would happen if psychoanalysis were to have taken Antigone rather than Oedipus as its point of departure?” Taking one’s cue from Steiner’s provocative question, and transposing Antigone in the place of the Oedipal law, the primary aim of this dissertation will be to articulate the postoedipal subject and politics that emerge in the work of Judith Butler. It will explore how Butler views both resistance and agency and locate in her thought a willingness to get beyond the postmodern view that theorizes subjectivity and agency in terms of multiple contradictory subject positions. In her own theory of postoedipal agency Butler spells out a ‘corporeal vulnerability’ alongside her theory of performativity, reflecting her growing interest in the ethical theory of Levinas. Additionally, Butler tackles the thorny issue of the subject’s investment in its own subjection which can be read in parallel with the Lacanian understanding of how the subject not only ‘participates’ in, but also ‘enjoys’ or get its ‘kicks’ in its own subjection, thus placing the subject beyond the immediate redemptive reach of any well meaning radical pedagogy etc., and highlighting the fact that subjective change does not ‘gain traction’ first and foremost on a conscious level. How subjects in fact move from one position to another: from sexist to feminist, from racist indifference to supporter of a socialist cause, is by no means straightforward. A central issue in the debate between Butler and the left Lacanians is the extent to which Butler’s theory of agency fails to acknowledge the extent to which a fundamental change in the symbolic universe requires a mutation in subjectivity at the level of the Real, that is, a change in the way in which the subject ‘enjoys’ in relation to their fundamental fantasy. But it must also be pointed out as well that Butler’s rewriting of social ontology towards one of vulnerability, precarity, otherness and abjection underscores a similar radical mutation in the very coordinates of subjectivity. In fact the sine qua non of Butler’s politics is the ‘traversing’ of the ideological hegemony of the hetero-symbolic under which we currently live. How this traversing is unfurled in Butler in light of her critical rejection of Lacan will be another point of investigation of this dissertation.

The very contours of Butler’s postoedipal politics are premised on a going ‘beyond’ of the standard Oedipal narrative and its attendant discursive regime that, Butler contends, remains caught within a heteronormative hegemonic frame. To emerge on a postoedipal discursive terrain requires tracing a particular trajectory in her thought which this dissertation seeks to achieve. But this will not be an idle exercise in speculation because Butler’s theory of subjectivity is critically relevant on a number of political fronts. Her political attachment to progressive causes is well known and these attachments are also underscored by a deep commitment to theoretical analyses. Her incisive criticism of United States foreign policy on Iraq and Afghanistan, the prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay, the Palestinian question, her unrelenting critique of Zionism, and most recently, her misgivings about the California proposition on same sex marriage, are all underpinned by her theoretical labours.

Yet the left Lacanians have suggested that Butler’s theory is overly voluntaristic and mere ‘political correctness’ masquerading as critical theory. Butler is certainly no stranger to this criticism of her work, and in this dissertation the confrontation with a Lacanian critique will be (re)staged, encompassing not only Slavoj Žižek but a number of other prominent left Lacanian theorists. Will taking up the theoretical charges of her Lacanian critics ultimately benefit her postoedipal politico-ethico theory? A close textual exegesis of the left Lacanian critique of Judith Butler will prove valuable as it touches on a question that serves as the articulating spirit of this dissertation and which could be stated as follows: is Slavoj Žižek’s self-defined, self-proclaimed distinction — pitting himself as the old school ‘Lacanian-Hegelian-Marxist crusader’ opposed to Butler’s ‘postmodern political correctness’ — a politically productive distinction? It seems as if there has been a line drawn in the sand. On one side are the Lacanians holding dear to a theory of sexuation and a radical fissure of the Real, and sceptical of Butler’s ‘resignificatory’ politics. For these left Lacanians (Žižek, Copjec, Pluth, Restuccia) Butler’s critical theory plays on the field of the symbolic without touching the Real and without effecting lasting political change. They further argue that Butler’s postoedipal politics of radical gender/sexual resignification has, like all counter-cultural political currents, been shown to function quite smoothly within the grid of global capitalism. Such an accusation need not be seen as downplaying the ground-breaking theoretical significance of Butler’s work for political theory. The current incorporation of sexual identities into a logic of capitalism i.e., alternative sexualities as a new market niche etc., does not spell the death of, but, perhaps requires the further radicalization of Butler’s initial constitution of the postoedipal subject. It isn’t a question of turning Butler into a Lacanian but, rather, could it be that by incorporating into her postoedipal theory an understanding of a concept of, for example, the Real, one may be able to accomplish a ‘going beyond’ the politics of symbolic re-signification?

Simply put, on one side of the left theory divide is Slavoj Žižek and the left Lacanians who insist on the theoretical importance of a radical politics of jouissance and the Real that breaks through endless resignifications and, they go on to argue, can restructure the very symbolic coordinates of global capitalism. Yet at the same time they seem unwilling to grant Butler’s postoedipal re-orientation of human being based on precarity and corporeal vulnerability. Perhaps it is in this context that Butler’s accusations of a Lacanian ‘family value’ social conservatism applies. These tensions between Butler and Žižek (and the left Lacanians) will be engaged and explored in order to allow Butler’s postoedipal politics to emerge on a theoretical terrain shorn of any residual inclinations that would compromise its radical spirit.

Chapter 1. Butler and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

The genesis of Butler’s theory of the subject begins with Hegel. This chapter will trace the evolution of her thought on Hegel, starting with her early work Subjects of Desire through to her latest Frames of War, particularly with regards to her changing conceptions of the Lord and Bondsman dialectic. Beginning with Hegel’s treatment of this encounter in his Phenomenology of Spirit, it will subsequently concentrate on Butler’s critical appraisal of Hegel in her early and later works. Does Hegel now remain merely a negative point of departure for Butler, or is her entire oeuvre still, to a certain extent, caught within a particular Hegelian frame?

Chapter 2. Butler and psychoanalysis

Butler’s critical yet productive relationship to psychoanalysis is reflected in her concepts of heterosexual melancholy, the lesbian phallus and her critique of Jacques Lacan. Her critical relation to Freud and Lacan will be explored with special focus on her contributions in the debate with Laclau and Žižek, and in her 1997 work, Psychic Life of Power where she attempts to bridge a gap between Foucault and Freud. Locating a breach between the psychoanalytic and Foucaultian treatments of the subject, Butler then embarks on a complex re-configuring of her theory of subjectivity. Next, in Giving Account of Oneself Butler highlights the work of Jean Laplanche which traces an alternative narrative to the Oedipal complex. This avenue of investigation will also be explored in this chapter with the purpose of bringing into sharper theoretical focus Butler`s postoedipal endeavour.

Chapter 3. Reading Antigone: Butler’s postoedipal politics

What sets Butler’s reading of Antigone apart from all other commentators is her positioning of Antigone as representative of a ‘new field of the human’. In this sense Butler’s reading of Antigone points towards a more fundamental rethinking of the formation of the radical subject.

Taking into account that, for Butler, Antigone signifies a break with the law of the Father and, simultaneously, the heralding of a distinct postoedipal politics, her reading of Antigone will be placed in the context of the wider feminist debate on Antigone with specific focus on two other contemporary thinkers of significance: Jean Bethke Elshtain and Luce Irigaray. Elshtain’s work will be used as a theoretical foil in order to further underscore the nature of Butler’s postoedipal politics. Irigaray’s reading of Antigone will provoke a move into a more extended explication of of sexual difference. Although Irigaray and Butler theoretically differ in a number of areas, their respective treatment of sexual difference is important to explore before staging the encounter with the left Lacanians over this divisive though important topic.

Chapter 4. The left Lacanian Critique of Judith Butler

Concerned by Butler’s accusation that many Lacanian concepts lack historical specificity, Žižek and Copjec make the counter claim that Butler’s historicism itself is in need of an historical analysis. Having looked at Butler’s critique of Lacan in an earlier chapter, this chapter will explore the left Lacanian critique of Butler. It will outline the general contours of their differences, and then proceed to a close reading of a number of left Lacanian thinkers critical of, though at the same time, politically sympathetic to her goals. In Žižek’s version of the postoedipal condition, he asserts his notion of the ‘neighbour’ in strict opposition to Butler’s more ethically laden subject and in Signifiers and Acts, Ed Pluth provides a theoretically provocative and prolonged discussion of the Lacanian act, arguing that Butler remains caught within symbolic resignifications due precisely to the absence of any notion of a subjective act in her theory. Along these lines, Frances Restuccia uses Butler as a jumping off point to argue for a theory of radical subject formation that traverses what she calls the ‘hetero-symbolic’ and in opposition to Butler, Kirsten Campbell’s works theorizes, on Lacanian epistemological grounds, a subject of feminist theory. Finally, Joan Copjec asserts the Lacanian model of sexuation over and against Butler’s insistence on the resignification of sexual/gender difference. To date there has been no analysis of the core theoretical differences between Butler’s Foucaultian inspired genealogy and Copjec’s Lacanian structuralism. This chapter will explore in what theoretically interesting and productive ways these Lacanian investigations intersect with Butler’s work and critically assess the political consequences of their differences for a radical left politics.

Chapter 5. Butler’s postoedipal politics

Taking one’s cue from Antigone’s Claim, this concluding chapter will extend many of Butler’s suggestive comments in this work but now, in light of the working through of the Lacanian moments of this dissertation, the Butlerian articulation of the politics of the postoedipal will emerge as an ethico-politico theory that incorporates not only her later turn towards a social ontology of the abjected other, but also address a political orientation that was missing in her work which was why it was criticized in the first place for being voluntarist, subjectivist and, above all, liberal. In this final chapter Butler’s postoedipal theory will emerge on a stronger footing with regards to her theory of subject formation, agency and political change due to the outcome of a creative and constructive exchange with the left Lacanians.

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take on Butler

Butler is no Lacanian, she argues the Symbolic, the Paternal law is a ruse, is just power in a Foucaultian way, that is, the difference between the Lacanian Real and Symbolic is an effect of a discourse of power
There is a hetersexual matrix literally like the matrix in the movie of the same name. This structures sexuality, and in particular the Lacanian emphasis on the differentiation of sex into male/female as being/having, is a primary example of a construction that is meant to follow a hetersexual normativity.
Gender melancholia and the Lesbian Phallus are her two signature moves that sum up her radical reinterpretation of gender and sexuality that is critical of psychoanalysis, but is also aware of the shortcomings of Foucault’s premature dismissal of Freud.

Link to book review of Vicki Kirby’s Live Theory book on JB

capital the real

The deep structures of capital, those that prevail above and beyond culture assume a superhard transcendentality something in capital more than itself” the “real” of capital –> along this come a core subjectivation. Is there an “interpellation” (a ‘pure interpellation’) a core act of identification” a subjugation at the core of capital. In other words unless we understand the necessary subjectivation, the way in which capital carves out of us an essential act, a founding act of identity, a way in which we must be in order to be capitalist subjects that goes beyond the surface attributes: rationality, self-interest, individualistic, appetitive.

unconscious, violent, held in place by fantasmatic structures, in us more than us. REAL, it is at the core of neurosis is a particular capitalist form of neurosis
identity is tied up with appetitive calculation, job/employment
This is not a “capitalism makes us sick” thesis.

It’s or peculiar sickness is what makes capitalism. I would like to advocate a particular form of communist core or at least that which is not-capitalist

To alleviate core component of subjectivity it may be illustrative and helpful to look at a form of subjectivity that cannot be allowed to exist –> free software foundation why Richard Stallman’s project necessarily had to morph in “open source” and tensions and contradictions between the two. The whole subjectivity label – “geek” is a subjectivity marginalized and not allowed to flourish under capitalism — also Homer Saucer non subjects.

Ill look at this to see an example of capitalism brutalizing subjectivity that refuse to comply with its logic or is rendered surplus — Edelman– suggestive of gay subjectivity that cannot be symbolized.

sale of labour power creates space for identity as they free not-slaves Free to sell labour-power is the TIPPING POINT