ethics

Zupančič review of McGowan

“Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets” by Todd McGowan Reviewed by Alenka Zupančič

Continental Thought and Theory. Volume 1 | Issue 3: Feminism 757-761 | ISSN: 2463-333X http://ctt.canterbury.ac.nz

Relying on some fundamental theses of psychoanalytic (Freudian and Lacanian) theory, McGowan proposes the following argument: the signifying structure is consubstantial with a loss/lack which induces and forms the logic of desire: no object can fully satisfy the latter, because they all function as stand-ins for the impossible lost object.

Here’s a McGowan quote from his article on Trump and the movie Citizen Kane

Entry into language – the subjection to the signifier – produces a lacking subject,

Entry into language – the subjection to the signifier – produces a lacking subject, a subject with desires that cannot be realized. These desires provide satisfaction through their non-realization rather than their realization, through the repetition of failure that characterizes desire.

Whenever the subject finds a particular object that promises to fulfill its desire, it quickly moves on to another object. No object proves fully satisfying because no object can be the object – the object that embodies what the subject feels that it has lost. In the guise of a search for a variety of empirical objects, the subject seeks out a non-existent lost object that would provide it the ultimate satisfaction.

The failure of desire is the result of the type of object that desire hinges on. It is not a present object but an absent one. Even though one cannot see an absence, one can nonetheless recognize the satisfaction that derives from what isn’t there. This is what psychoanalysis unlocks but what capitalist subjectivity forces us to disavow because it would shatter the illusion that gives the commodity its allure.

The defining trauma for subjectivity is its inability to separate lack from excess. Our capacity for excessive enjoyment is inextricably linked to our status as lacking subjects.

Alenka Zupančič Hamlet Desire Law

Ethics and tragedy in Lacan in The Cambridge Companion to Lacan Edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté, Cambridge University Press 2003

Analysis is not here to help us come to terms with the sacrifices that society inflicts upon us, nor to compensate for these sacrifices with the narcissistic satisfaction linked to our awareness of the “tragic split” that divides us and prevents us from ever being fully satisfied.

Psychoanalysis is not here to repair the damage, to help the social machine to function more smoothly and to reconstruct whatever was ill-constructed. It is there to take us further along the path that our “problems” have put us on,

Alenka Zupančič interview

2014

Alenka Zupančič : The Lacanian concept of the Real allows for a problematization of this opposition which had become paralysing and unproductive philosophically. We must of course be wary of the tendency to see in this Lacanian move a simple affirmation of a naive realism – the Real understood in this objectivist fashion. The ‘Real’ for Lacan is not reducible to the discursive but neither is it simply an advocation of an ontological realism, understood unproblematically. Especially since Lacan introduces a key difference between the notion of the Real and that of being. They are related via a ‘third dimension’, that of the ‘signifier’, but they do not coincide.

What Lacan wants to tell us is that the signifier has ontological significance, the signifier tells us about ontology in a way that the notion of the signified is unable to (this latter being the usual realist referent; the object as the signified).

The signifier is interesting not because we could reduce everything to it and to different signifying operations (this reductionist question is completely false), but because there is something in the signifier and its operations that cannot be reduced back to the signifier and its operations.

This is the crucial point, and not some mythical or original outside of the signifier, irreducible to it. This is also what the ‘materialism of the signifier’ amounts to. Not simply to the fact that the signifier can have material consequences, but rather that the materialist position needs to do more than to pronounce matter the original principle. It has to account for a split or contradiction that is the matter. It has to grasp the concept of the matter beyond that imaginary notion of ‘something thick and hard’. I’m not saying: ‘For Lacan, the signifieris the real matter’, not at all.

I’m saying that, for Lacan, the signifier is what enables us to perceive the non-coincidence between being and the Real, and that this is what eventually leads to a new kind of materialism.

From this point of view, we can say that Lacan develops the modern moment in philosophy, but as Žižek says, ‘he develops it with a twist’. Then there is the new concept of the subject – another Lacanian ‘revolution’ in philosophy, retroactively relating the subject of the unconscious to the Cartesian cogito. This is often one of the great misunderstandings of Lacan (and psychoanalysis), that it jettisons the cogito, that it is anti-Cartesian pure and simple. This is a significant misunderstanding of the psychoanalytical concept of the ‘subject’ which was one of the main concepts for the delineation of a specific Lacanian orientation in the first place. This concept of ‘subject’ distinguished Lacan from the wider structuralist movement and their notion of a ‘subjectless structure’.

But somehow this conception of ‘subject’ is interpreted as anti-cogito, as the ‘subject’ is the unconscious subject. Therefore, it was important to clarify the connection between cogito and the unconscious and for example, there is an important anthology from the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, where we explore this problematic in detail (Cogito and the Unconscious edited by Žižek [1998a] and including essays by all three thinkers as well as others in the Slovenian wider group of theorists). There is also the question of the radical break with premodern metaphysics involved in the Cartesian gesture, which Lacan judges crucial for the emergence of the subject of the unconscious.

This theme is crucial also for his understanding of ethics. In his important early seminar, Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Lacan 1992), he is discussing the history of ethical thought as it related for example to the metaphysical tradition. His specific example is Aristotle and there is obviously a debt here on one level to Aristotle’s Ethics as a text and conceptual scheme. However, there is also a clear and radical parting of the ways.

In my own work on ethics, in The Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (Zupančič 2000), I draw out some of these themes. For example, I put forward a critique of what I term ‘bio-morality’ and which, in its contemporary developments, represents an allegiance (albeit in rather reduced ways) to Aristotle’s eudaimonistic ethics and metaphysics of being. This is not simply a criticism of Aristotle, but rather of what a revival of his conceptual paradigm today amounts to.

In relationship to the theme of ethics, I want to stress that what I develop out of Kant’s ethics must not be opposed or seen as completely distinct from politics. As Žižek very rightly pointed out, the contemporary fashion of playing (‘good’) ethics against (‘bad’) politics is more often than not a direct pendant of the ideology of late capitalism and its conception of democracy. Any rigorous political thought is conceived as potentially dangerous and leading to a possible ‘disaster’ (that is to say to a more fundamental change in how the present order functions), whereas ethics seems to be much safer, and centred mostly on our individual responsibility, rather than any kind of collective engagement. My own work on Kant and ethics already went against this tendency, pointing both at an unsettling dimension of Kantian ethics, as well as at its emphasis on the universal, rather than simply individual.

It is similar with psychoanalysis which supposedly also focuses on individual destinies and problems. Here, am I allowed to tell my joke about the grain of seed, or the man who thinks he is one?

He gets cured by the psychoanalysts and then he comes running back, crying that he has just been chased by a chicken. Don’t you know you are a human being, they say? Yes, I am cured. I know that I am a human being, and not a grain of seed. But, please, does the chicken know this? This is the crux of the politics (which is also an ethics) in the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis. It is not enough simply to deal with the plight of the ‘subject’ and fantasy, through psychoanalysis.

Rather, we must seek to transform the structures of the symbolic which sustain a given order, determine the Impossible-Real that they grapple with.

Sexuality

Alenka Zupančič: Yes, when we understand the question ‘why Freud and Lacan?’, or the question ‘why psychoanalysis?’, we come close to an understanding of the paradigmatic role which a revised notion of ‘sexuality’ must play in this discussion. Joan Copjec succinctly pointed out how, for example, in the term ‘sexual difference’ the term ‘sex’ has been replaced by the more neutered category of ‘gender’. As Joan – an allied member of the ‘Ljubljana School’ – put it: Gender theory performed one major feat: it removed the sex from sex. For awhile, gender theorists continued to speak of sexual practices, they ceased to question what sex or sexuality is; sex was no longer the subject of an ontological inquiry and reverted instead to being what it was in common parlance: some vague sort of distinction, but basically a secondary characteristic (when applied to the subject), a qualifier added to others, or (when applied to an act) something a bit naughty.

This is very far from what both Freud (from his early, 1905 text Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality [Freud 1977]) and Lacan have been saying. For Freud, the notion of the ‘sexual’ is significantly broader than contemporary notions of sex. It is not a substance to be properly described and understood (by psychoanalysis), but more like an impasse that generates and structures different discursive edifices trying to respond to it. It is linked to a notion of a fundamental ontological impasse; this impasse is irreducible for Freud.

But we also see here all the accusations against psychoanalysis, that ‘Freud reduces everything to sex’. In one sense, this accusation is true but what it misses is the complexification and radicalization of what we mean by ‘sexuality’. Freud discovered human sexuality as a problem (in need of explanation), and not as something with which one could eventually explain every (other) problem. He ‘discovered’ sexuality as intrinsically meaningless, and not as the ultimate horizon of all humanly produced meaning. A clarification of this point is one of my ‘interventions’ in Why Psychoanalysis? Three Interventions (Zupančič 2008b). Lately, I dedicated a whole book to these questions – it came out in 2011 in Slovenia, but I’m still working on its English version.

On Materialism

The materialism of psychoanalysis is not simply materialism of the body;
and Lacan has learnt the philosophical lesson that is essential in this
respect: in order to be ‘materialist’ it is not enough to refer to the matter
as the first principle from which everything develops.

For, in this, we easily succumb to a rather idealistic notion of a somehow always-already spirited (‘vibrant’) matter. In recent debates, psychoanalysis – in the same package with all of the so-called post-structuralist thought – is often accused of relying on the formula ‘always-already’ as its magical formula. But this accusation misses the whole point: for psychoanalysis, ‘always-already’ is a retroactive effect of some radical contingency that changes given symbolic coordinates.

What a materialism worthy of this name has to do today is to propose a conceptualization of contingency (a break that comes from nowhere, ‘ex-nihilo’ so to say) in its complex relation to the structuring of the world.

Also, thinking is not simply opposed to things (and to matter), it is part of the thing it thinks, without being fully reducible to it. To advocate materialism and the ‘Real’ is not to advocate anti-thought. Quite the contrary, we might say – it calls for more and more thinking. And this is a problem that I sometimes detect in the recent flourishing of ‘new materialisms’ – a kind of abdication of thinking when it comes to more complex structures and arguments, as if common sense simplicities were inherently more ‘materialist’ than something
which is more complex and perhaps paradox ridden.

On Nietzsche

Alenka Zupančič: A key part of the Nietzschean legacy is I think working against the ‘moralisation’ of the symbolic, which Nietzsche describes so well in The Genealogy of Morals, for example, and which for example is also a key theme in relation to the thematic of the ‘moralisation of politics’, which I mentioned earlier.

Concerning nihilism and to quote Ray Brassier, from his text Nihil Unbound, there are things to be said for nihilism. It depends, of course, on what we mean by nihilism. If we mean by it a certain materialist position which recognizes contingency of, for example, our being in the world, and which points to a limit of ‘making sense of (all) things’, then we must say that to a great extent we cannot go beyond nihilism.

Yet this does not imply for Nietzsche that we sink in the depressive feelings of ‘worthlessness of all things’. On the contrary, it rather implies what he calls ‘gay science’. But, we must simultaneously avoid what Nietzsche calls ‘reactive nihilism’ and this is, of course, bound up with his whole critique of ressentiment (or ‘acting against’, reactiveness). To say that there is no ultimate cause of things is not to say that nothing itself is the ultimate cause of things, which amounts to putting the Nothing in the office of the Absolute.

Describing the difference between active and passive nihilism, Nietzsche famously says that man would ‘rather will nothingness than not will’ (On the Genealogy of Morals). And we could say that what defines (contemporary) passive nihilism is precisely that man would rather not will than will anything too strongly (because the latter supposedly inevitably leads to some kind of ‘nihilist’ catastrophe). And this seems to become synonymous with what ‘ethics’ now is in contemporary culture and society and the wider ‘moralisation of politics’, ‘biomorality’ etc. (to which I strongly oppose an ‘ethics of the Real’). There is a ‘deactivation’ of the will, which is also a deactivation of the ‘political will’, of the political as such as a paradigmatic space and temporality of antagonism, of the ‘Real’.

In my view, the genuinely new Nietzschean notion of nothingor n egativity is not simply that of ‘active nihilism’ as opposed to ‘passive nihilism’, but rather a transfiguration of nothing. Nothing/negativity is not a kind of ultimate absolute, but rather the smallest yet irreducible difference that is inscribed in being qua being. This is what I argue in my book. I use Nietzsche’s own metaphor of ‘the shortest shadow’. When speaking of going beyond the opposition real world/apparent world, Nietzsche describes this moment as ‘Midday; moment of the shortest shadow’ (Twilight of Idols).

Midday is thus not for him the moment when the sun embraces everything,
makes all shadows and all negativity disappear, and constitutes an undivided Unity of the world; it is the moment of the shortest shadow. And, what is the shortest shadow of a thing, if not this thing itself? Yet, for Nietzsche, this does not mean that the two becomes one, but, rather, that one becomes two. Why?

The thing (as one) no longer throws its shadow upon another thing; instead, it throws its shadow upon itself, thus becoming, at the same time, the thing and
its shadow, the real and its appearance. When the sun is at its zenith, things are not simply exposed (‘naked’, as it were); they are, so to speak, dressed in their own shadows. In other words: it is not simply that our representations do not coincide with things, it is rather that things do not simply coincide with themselves. There is thus an imperative to ‘think through’ this negativity. We
need to philosophize, as Žižek has said, philosophy is now more important than ever. It is not a game of textualism as some postmodernists would like to suggest perhaps.

The Subject

Alenka Zupančič: We can say that subject is ‘the answer of the Real’, as Lacan puts it somewhere, or that it is the effect of the rift/inconsistency of the structure. And we can indeed contrast this with the structuralist notion that there is a ‘structure without a subject’, a subjectless structure.

But what is at stake is above all a profound reconfiguration of what both ‘structure’ and ‘subject’ mean, refer to. We can begin with the notion of the structure which differs in Lacan from the classical structuralist notion. Very simply put: for Lacan, structure is ‘not-all’ (or ‘not whole’), which is what he articulates with the concept of the ‘barred Other’. This implies a lack, a contradiction as – so to say – ‘structuring principle of the structure’. Structure is always and at the same time more and less than structure. And this is where the new notion of the subject comes in. Subject is not the opposite of the structure, it is not some intentionality which uses structure to express itself, or which tries to get its more or less authentic voice heard through it.

Subject is a singular torsion produced by the inconsistency of the structure.

Take the simple example of the slips of the tongue: for Freud and Lacan, they do not bear witness to a hidden(unconscious) force repressed by the structure, which nevertheless betrays its presence by these slips.

Rather, they are singular existences of structure’s own inherent negativity. This is also the argument that I want to make in the context of the contemporary debates concerning realism, which often disqualify thought or thinking as something merely subjective (facing external reality). Put in a couple of formulas: Instead of taking it as something situated vis-à-vis being, we should conceive of thought as an objectivized (and necessarily dislocated) instance of the non-relation (contradiction, inconsistency) and rift inherent in being (in ‘objective reality’). Thinking is a necessarily displaced objectification (‘objective existence’) of this rift, that is, of the relation of being to its own
‘non-’, to its own negativity.

Although being is indeed independent of thinking, the rift that structures it only objectively exists as thought, and this perspective opens a new way of conceiving realism and/or materialism. This is precisely how I would also read the Lacanian subject. And this is why if we remove subject from the structure, we do not get closer to objective reality, but rather further away from it.

We can also say that the subject for Lacan is ‘objectively subjective’, there is an asymmetry in the subject, something in the subject which is not just subjective but which is also inaccessible to the subject.

We can see the connection back to Kant. The Kantian subject I would endorse is that ‘pure something, X, which thinks’, the transcendental unity of apperception. The point where subjectivity is not fully assumable and the point where the object is not reducible to or is ‘not yet’ objectivity (this is Lacan’s notion of objet petit a). Here, we see also that the Lacanian subject radicalizes the traditional ‘object’. The concept of the ‘object a’ is perhaps the most significant Lacanian conceptual invention.

Alenka Zupančič: No, the notions of good and evil are not simply irrelevant to ethics, I would say, although they are indiscernible in advance. The responsibility we have is to decide what is good. It is difficult to overstate Kant’s significance in this respect. He did two things which may look incompatible: first, he founded ethics exclusively in human reason: no God or any other pre-established Good can serve as basis of morality. But instead of this leading to a kind of ‘relativised’, finitude-bound morality, it led to the birth of the modern thought of the absolute, the unconditional, and of the infinite as the possible, even imperative dimension of the finite.

Whatever objections we may raise to the Kantian ethics –for example, and already, from Hegel’s perspective – it was with Kant that the standing oppositions like absolute/contingent, lawful/unconditional, finite/infinite broke down, and the path was opened for a truly modern reconfiguration of these terms.

In the twentieth century, Kantian ethics has been largely domesticated to serve as an important ideological foundation of the contemporary democratic liberalism and of the gradual replacement of an emancipatory politics with the discourse of human rights or simply ethics.

I’ve always been astonished by the fact that a really radical, uncompromising and excess-ridden writing like Kant’s could be referred to in order to pacify the excess (of the political or something else). When the Nazi criminal Eichmann infamously defended himself by saying that in his doing he has been simply following the Kantian categorical imperative, this was of course an obscene perversion of Kant’s thought.

As Žižek succinctly formulated: what follows from Kant is not that we can use moral law as an excuse for our actions (‘oh, I wouldn’t do it, but the moral law commanded so’), we are absolutely responsible for the very law we are ‘executing’.

But Eichmann’s perverse defence did point at the unsettling core exposed by Kant: the unconditional law is one with (the excess of) freedom.

Lacan was probably the first to properly recognize this unsettling, excessive moment that Kant discovered at the very core of ethics.

When he wrote his famous essay ‘Kant with Sade’ (Lacan 2002b), the point was not that Kant is in truth as excessive as Sade, but rather that Sade is already a ‘taming’, a pacification – in terms perversion – of the impossible/real circumscribed by Kant. This is the thread I tried to follow in my book: Kant’s discovery of this unsettling, excessive negativity at the very core of Reason. I was not interested so much in ethics as ethics, as in this thing that Kant has formulated through his considerations of ethics.

Helena Motoh and Jones Irwin: Does this mean that the ‘ethics of psychoanalysis’ simply pits the Real against the symbolic or is there something else going on here? Also, how does the concept of ‘drive’ and especially the concept of ‘death drive’, which Žižek emphasizes,relate to an ethical dimension? Finally, what does the Lacanian concept of ‘desire’ (as he describes it in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis) have to do with this? Is ‘desire’ simply jettisoned in the later work?

Alenka Zupančič: In respect to the relation between symbolic and the Real, there are certainly oscillations and shifts at work already in Lacan, as well as in the work of the three of us (together and separately). The idea that the Real is a kind of unbearable, repulsive thickness beyond the symbolic, left out of it and inaccessible to it, may have had some presence in our work at some point. But I think it is fair to say that for many years now we are all struggling precisely with the problem of a different way of relating them as absolutely crucial. There are some differences in the way we go about it,

but the main and shared shift of perspective that orientates our work could be perhaps summed up as follows: the Real is not any kind of substance or being. It pertains to being (and to the symbolic) as its inherent contradiction/antagonism.

I started working on this issue first by getting a bit more into Nietzsche (the first, Slovene version of the Nietzsche book was published in 2001). Borrowing from Badiou his notion of the ‘minimal difference’ and relating it to Nietzsche’s notion of the ‘shortest shadow’, I tried to develop the notion of the Real as not that of some Thing, but of the fundamental non-coincidence of things with themselves. This non-coincidence is not caused by the symbolic; rather, the symbolic is already a response to it: it is discursivity as necessarily biased by the constraints of the contradiction in being.

Parallel to this work on Nietzsche was also my working on the theme of love, and later on comedy as possible ways of articulating what is at stake in the relation between the symbolic and the real. Lately, and for some time now, I have been working on this through the question of the ontological implications of the psychoanalytic notion of the sexual. I could perhaps put it in one formula: The real is part of being which is not being (or which is not qua being), but which as such dictates the (symbolic) logic of its appearance.

The real is part of being which is not being (or which
is not qua being), but which as such dictates the (symbolic) logic of
its appearance.
the Real is not any kind of substance or being. It pertains to being (and to the symbolic) as its inherent contradiction/antagonism.

Helena Motoh and Jones Irwin: Can you say a bit more about the two key Lacanian concepts (not without political ramifications of course) of ‘desire’ and ‘drive’. You have already explicated these, to some extent, but can you develop some of the tensions between them? Also, how do these concepts develop in your work, as they seem to have a paradigmatic status while undergoing some transformation for example from the ‘Ethics of the Real’ book to the book on ‘comedy’. Finally, are there philosophical tensions between your work and the other members of the troika on this fraught relationship between ‘desire’ and ‘drive’?

Alenka Zupančič: Certainly, you are right to point to these concepts as paradigmatic, and they are also crucial when it comes to the articulation of the relationship of the symbolic, the imaginary and the Real You are also correct that there are some differences here – one would expect nothing less in a philosophical movement worth its salt.

In my own work, I take up the themes of desire and drive throughout. In Ethics of the Real I focused mostly, although not exclusively, on Lacan from The Ethics of Psychoanalysis and The Transference (Seminars VII and VIII). The concept of desire is in the foreground in both, but there is also a shift that starts taking place there, a conceptual move from das Ding as the impossible/Real as the focal point of desire, to the introduction of the object a. This shift then gets a further and very complex elaboration in Lacan’s subsequent seminars. But to formulate what is at stake very briefly and simply, we could say that what is involved here is a move from the Real as the abyssal beyond of the symbolic,

to a concept (of the object a) which undermines the very logic and nature of the difference on which the previous conception of the Real was based.

Object a is neither symbolic nor Real (in the previous sense of the term). It refers to the very impossibility to sustain this kind of difference between the symbolic and the Real, and it is this impossibility that is now the Real.

This also opens the door for a more systematic introduction of the concept of the drive. The notion of the object a is crucial both for desire and drive, they are different ways of relating this impossible non-ontological dimension (a) to what is, to being. In the Seminar X (Anxiety) Lacan provides a formula that I think is absolutely crucial and which I also took as the guiding line of my work after Ethics: he says that love is a sublimation, and then defines sublimation in a very surprising way, namely that sublimation is what makes it possible for jouissance to condescend to desire. If one remembers the famous definition of sublimation from Lacan’s seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (‘sublimation is what elevates an object to the dignity of the Thing’) then the shift is indeed dramatic and surprising. This new notion of sublimation becomes directly associated with the question of the drive, for sublimation is also defined as a ‘nonrepressive satisfaction of the drive’.

Now, in Lacan, as well as in our reading of him, there is indeed perceptible a turn from the logic of desire to that of the drive as somehow truer. But this is not simply a turn (of interest) from the symbolic to the Real, as it sometimes seems. What is at stake is rather the recognition of the fact that the status of the Real as the impossible Beyond of the symbolic is actually an effect of desire and its logic. Desire casts the internal contradiction that drives it in terms of the inaccessible Beyond to which it can only approach asymptomatically. With drive, the contradiction remains internal, and the impossible remains accessible as the impossible. This, I think, is absolutely crucial, and this is what

I tried to formulate with the formula the ‘Real happens’: the point of Lacan’s identification of the Real with the impossible is not simply that the Real is some Thing that is impossible to happen. On the contrary, and in this reading, the whole point of the Lacanian concept of the Real is that the impossible happens. This is what is so surprising, traumatic, disturbing, shattering – or funny – about the Real. The Real happens precisely as the impossible. It is not something that happens when we want it, or try to make it happen, or expect it, or are ready for it. It is always something that doesn’t fit the (established or the anticipated) picture, or fits it all too well. The Real as impossible means that there is no ‘right’ time or place for it, and not that it is impossible for it to happen (‘On love as comedy’, Zupančič 2000).

The Real happens precisely as the impossible. It is not something that happens when we want it, or try to make it happen, or expect it, or are ready for it.

So what is important to stress in this whole ‘turn’ to the logic of the drive is the following: this is not simply a turn to the drive on account of its supposedly being closer, truer to the Real (as established independently), but rather a turn toward a different conception of the Real as such.

With drive, the Real is no longer a relational notion (sustaining questions like ‘what is our attitude toward the Real?’). It rather suggests something like: our relation to the Real is already in the Real. This is why questions like ‘How to get outside to the Real?’ seem to be the wrong kind of questions.

This is because there is no outside of the Real from which one would approach the Real.

Byung-Chul Han

Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. 2017 Verso

True happiness comes from what runs riot, lets go, is exuberant and loses meaning — the excessive and superfluous. That is, it comes from what luxuriates, what has taken leave of all necessity, work, performance and purpose.
page 52

The art of living is the art of killing psychology, of creating with oneself and with others unnamed individualities, being, relations, qualities. If one can’t manage to do that in one’s life, that life is not worth living
Michel Foucault cited in Byung-Chul Han

The art of living stands opposed to the ‘psychological terror’ through which subjugating subjectivation occurs.

Neoliberal psychopolitics is a technology of domination that stabilizes and perpetuates the prevailing system by means of psychological programming and steering. Accordingly, the art of living, as the praxis of freedom, must proceed by way of de-psychologization. This serves to disarm psychopolitics, which is a means of effecting submission. When the subject is de-psychologized — indeed, de-voided — it opens onto a mode of existence that still has no names: an unwritten future. 79

Martin Hägglund

The James Wood Review in the New Yorker on This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

The problem with eternity is not that it doesn’t exist (Hägglund is uninterested in the pin dancing of proof and disproof) but that it is undesirable and incoherent; it kills meaning and collapses value. This is a difficult truth to learn, because we are naturally fearful of loss, and therefore attached to the idea of eternal restoration.

But Hägglund’s central claim is that a good deal of what passes for religious aspiration is secular aspiration that doesn’t know itself as such. He wants to out religionists as closet secularists. When we ardently hope that the lives of people we love will go on and on, we don’t really want them to be eternal. We simply want those lives to last “for a longer time.” So his reply would probably be: Just admit that your real concerns and values are secular ones, grounded in the frailty, the finitude, and the rescue of this life.

Feuerbach wanted to liberate human beings from their harmful self-deceptions, but Hägglund sees no imperative to disdain this venerable meaning-making projection, no need to close down all the temples and churches and wash them away with a strong dose of Dawkins. Instead, religious practice could be seen as valuable and even cherishable, once it is understood to be a natural human quest for meaning. Everything flows from the double assumption that only finitude makes for ultimate meaning and that most religious values are unconsciously secular. We are meaning-haunted creatures.

A hundred pages or more on “Capital,” “Grundrisse,” and the “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” might at first seem like an extended session of literary-theoretical self-pleasuring. But Marx is at the living center of “This Life,” not just as the slayer of religious and capitalist illusion but, more important, as the utopian who saw beyond merely negative critique. For it’s not enough to claim that religious values can be subsumed by secular ones. One has to lay out new, better secular values. Otherwise, why would religionists ever want to become secularists?

Savagely compressed, Hägglund’s argument goes something like this: If what makes our lives meaningful is that time ends, then what defines us is what Marx called “an economy of time.” Marx is, in this sense, probably the most secular thinker who ever lived, the one most deeply engaged with the question of what we do with our time. He divided life into what he called the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom. Hägglund adopts these categories: the realm of necessity involves socially necessary labor and the realm of freedom involves socially available free time. Rationally, Hägglund says, we should strive to reduce the realm of necessity and increase the realm of freedom. But capitalism is systemically committed to exploiting most of us, and to steadily increasing the amount of labor at the expense of our freedom. Capitalism treats the means of economic life, labor, as though it were the purpose of life. But, if we are to cherish this life, we have to treat what we do as an end in itself. “The real measure of value,” Hägglund says, “is not how much work we have done or have to do (quantity of labor time) but how much disposable time we have to pursue and explore what matters to us (quality of free time).”

Rather than simply replace the realm of necessity with the realm of freedom—which would be impossible anyway, because there is always tedious and burdensome work to be done—we should be able to better “negotiate” the relationship between those realms. Hägglund gives an example of how this might be done when he talks about the way his own work on the book we are reading unites the two realms: writing “This Life” was labor, of course, but it was pursued as an end in itself, as a matter of intellectual inquiry. In a Hägglundian utopia, labor would be part of our freedom. Even drudgery—his example is “participating in the garbage removal in our neighborhood on a weekly basis”—could be an element of our freedom if we see it as part of a collective understanding that we are acting in order to reduce, in the aggregate, socially necessary labor time and to increase socially available free time. This revolution, he says, will require the “revaluation of value” (in Nietzsche’s phrase); and he criticizes a number of thinkers on the left, such as Thomas Piketty and Naomi Klein, for wanting to alter capitalism (via redistribution) rather than effectively abolish it (via a deep redefinition of value). Such people, he says, are stating that capitalism is the problem while also stating that capitalism is the solution.

And yet Hägglund’s very vulnerability increases my regard for his project. I admire his boldness, perhaps even his recklessness. And his fundamental secular cry seems right: since time is all we have, we must measure its preciousness in units of freedom. Nothing else will do. Once this glorious idea has taken hold, it is very hard to dislodge. Hägglund offers a fulfillment of what Marx meant by “irreligious criticism,” a criticism aimed at both religion and capitalism, because both forms of life obscure what is really going on: that, as Hägglund puts it, “our own lives—our only lives—are taken away from us when our time is taken from us.” We are familiar with the secular charge that religion is “life-denying.” Hägglund wants to arraign capitalism for a similar asceticism. Religion, you might say, enforces asceticism in the name of the spiritual; capitalism enforces asceticism in the name of the material.

I finished “This Life” in a state of enlightened despair, with clearer vision and cloudier purpose—I was convinced, step by step, of the moral rectitude of Hägglund’s argument even as I struggled to imagine the political system that might institute his desired revaluation of value. As if aware of such faintheartedness, he ends the book with a beautiful examination of Martin Luther King, Jr.—in particular the celebrated last speech he gave, in Memphis. Hägglund reminds us that King had studied Marx with care while a student, and that he told the Montgomery Advertiser, in 1956, that his favorite philosopher was Hegel. Toward the end of his life, King had begun to insist that society has to “question the capitalistic economy.” He called for what he described as “a revolution of values.” At a tape-recorded staff meeting for the Poor People’s Campaign in January, 1968, King appears to have asked for the recording to be stopped, so that he could talk candidly about the fact that, in the words of a witness, “he didn’t believe capitalism as it was constructed could meet the needs of poor people, and that what we might need to look at was a kind of socialism, but a democratic form of socialism.” King told the group that if anyone made that information public he would deny it.

Hägglund does his usual deconstructive reversal, and argues that King’s religiosity was really a committed secularism. At this point in the book, this looks less like a hermeneutic move than like an expected reality. We read the famous words of King’s last speech with new eyes, alert both to his secularism and to a burgeoning critique of capitalism that had to stay clandestine:

It’s all right to talk about “streets flowing with milk and honey,” but God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here, and his children who can’t eat three square meals a day. It’s all right to talk about the new Jerusalem, but one day, God’s preacher must talk about the new New York, the new Atlanta, the new Philadelphia, the new Los Angeles, the new Memphis, Tennessee. This is what we have to do.
Martin Luther King Jr.

After the theory and the academic reversals and the grand proposals, Hägglund’s book ends, stirringly, with a grounded account of a man who died trying to use his precious time to change the precious time of oppressed people, aware that the full realization of his vision would likely involve a revaluation of value that could not yet be spoken in America. We still haven’t seen that system, and it’s hard to imagine it, but someone went up the mountain and looked out, and saw the promised land. And that land is in this life, not in another one. ♦

WeWork meltdown: Adam got the last helicopter out of Saigon

‘At What Point Does Malfeasance Become Fraud?’: NYU Biz-School Professor Scott Galloway on WeWork

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/10/marketing-expert-scott-galloway-on-wework-and-adam-neumann.html

How much of the company’s problem was solved when Adam Neumann stepped down?

At this point, I would say about none. He and SoftBank entered into a suicide pact, and he jumped out of the plane before it hit the ground. He pulled the rip cord. He has exited the suicide pact with $740 million, and everyone else gets to ride this out to its logical end, which will likely be a bankruptcy file.

But that doesn’t rescue the entire idea of WeWork, right? It just scales it back. Is their profitability dependent on the chance that some WeWorks work and some don’t?

There probably are a minority of WeWorks that are cash-flow positive and could sustain a corporate headquarters with 80 percent fewer staff. They have 15,000 employees; I don’t see any path that doesn’t involve 5,000 to 10,000 layoffs in the next 60 days. Then the question is how to restructure. This is now a distressed asset that requires immediate restructuring. So does SoftBank want to put more capital in? If SoftBank does not want to put more capital in, they can’t cut costs fast enough and it will be a Chapter 11. If SoftBank does want to put money in, they need to basically cut costs. They’re going to need to close a massive number of offices, and they’re going to need to lay off somewhere between a third and two-thirds of staff at corporate. The consensual hallucination here continues. This is a distressed asset in free fall that is inarguably worth less than zero. Because all we have here is an entity burning $700 million a quarter.

Where does the comparison to Travis Kalanick begin and end?

Travis is guilty of being an asshole. That was more like frat-bro-culture problems. The market is going to have to decide how thin the lines are between vision, bullshit, and fraud. Nobody ever accused Kalanick of fraud. You’re going to start hearing that a lot more at WeWork. If Goldman Sachs told them that they were going out with a valuation of $60 billion to $90 billion and the thing is worth zero two weeks later, are Goldman that stupid or were they told something that wasn’t true? There’s reports that they were giving 100 percent commissions to put tenants in the buildings and then figuring out some sort of accounting jiujitsu to try to turn those expenses into revenues. The notion that they brought in people to solve the problems of their own making — they’ve invited pyromaniacs to put out the fire. The first thing they did was sold the $60 million plane that the board bought or approved. Either Adam hadn’t told them about the plane or they approved a $60 million plane. At what point does malfeasance become fraud?

Adam Neumann fired? He was liberated. This guy just played this perfectly. Could you imagine what his life would be like right now? If he was still CEO? Showing up every day to an office where he had sold $750 million and everybody else was trying to figure out how they were going to pay the rent on the new apartment they had moved into because they thought they had $7 million in We stock?

It really makes you rethink that picture of Neumann walking around barefoot in the middle of the tempest.

Why wouldn’t you be happy? You haven’t even begun to see the anger that will be unleashed on Adam Neumann. He has 15,000 people right now who are stuck cleaning up. They feel like circus clowns shoveling the shit behind the elephant of Adam Neumann. He has taken $750 million and left a toxic-waste cleanup.

Is this a case of self-delusion? Did Adam Neumann believe his own story?

I don’t know. I speak from some experience as a CEO in the ’90s in the internet days: If you tell a 30-year-old male he’s Jesus Christ, he’s inclined to believe you.

Basically Uber started the decline and WeWork has massively increased the momentum. It’s like we’ve had this cocaine-fueled party at Studio 54, Uber was the lights starting to go on, and now they’ve gone on so bright it’s like you’re in an operating room. Endeavor couldn’t get out. Basically, these guys have totally shit in the IPO pond.

What other companies are still in Studio 54 right now?

There’s a lot of them in the SoftBank portfolio. Wag, Compass. These things were kind of insane. Peloton. Peloton is getting pelted so to speak, because that’s more yoga babble. Delivering happiness. It’s a good company, it’s just overvalued. The marketplace is sort of saying that after WeWork and Uber, there’s two types of companies in the unicorn space: ones that are overvalued and ones that are just going to zero.

You can only blame charismatic CEOs for so much. What is wrong with investors?

There’s a few things at play here. One is just a function of the marketplace. It’s frothy, and there’s more capital than operators. Any operator who has a vision and can promise the potential and convince people they can be the next Google or Facebook can attract billions of dollars right now. The reality is there’s more money out there. We reached “peak founder” with Travis Kalanick. Now, there’s always a tension between capital and founders around who has power. Ever since Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, slowly but surely the pendulum has swung back to the founder. In the ’90s, founders didn’t survive. We were seen as crazy, and once the company became real, we were to be shoved to the side and some 55-year-old CEO from PepsiCo was supposed to come in and be the real CEO. Then when Jobs was ousted and a series of gray-hairs came in and almost brought the company to the ground and he came back and took them from $3 billion to $300 billion, that changed everyone’s perception of founders. Then Bill Gates took a company from zero to $500 billion. So Bill Gates and Steve Jobs totally changed the market’s viewpoint on founders and the balance of powers shifted way back to founders. Founders were seen as DNA and visionary. We’ve not seen another peak. It’ll start swinging back. This is a train wreck.

What is the biggest takeaway from the WeWork story?

The bigger story here is SoftBank. WeWork is the opportunistic infection that is going to kill the Vision One Fund. It’s beyond repair. Between Uber and WeWork, you have $20 billion of the hundred billion. One is likely going to be a zero — that’s WeWork — of $11 billion. So it’s hard to imagine they’re even going to get their investors their principal back. WeWork is ground zero. If the only way it can survive is a deliberate strategy to make it a shadow of itself — massive layoffs, massive restructuring — there’s only thing they can do. JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs? These guys were about to collect $130 million in fees and then prop up some equity analysts to tell their private-wealth managers in the marketplace that this thing was $40 billion to $60 billion. And according to Goldman, it was worth $60 billion to $90 billion! What does that say about them? What happens to the New York and Chicago commercial-real-estate markets where WeWork was the biggest and the second-biggest tenants? What happens to IPOs? The reverberations here are going to be pretty dramatic. WeWork declined in value more in 30 days — SoftBank and all these smart people had their shares on their books at $47 billion — it went to zero in 30 days. That’s more value destruction than the three biggest losers in the S&P 500 lost all year. Macy’s, Nektar Therapeutics, and Kraft Heinz. The three worst performing stocks in the S&P 500 this year, their value destruction pales in comparison to the value destruction of WeWork.

But there is a silver lining. The marketplace stepped in. The mandatory disclosure that the SEC requires in the form of S-1. The autopsy here will reflect death by S-1. Then, media and academics read the S-1 and started applying this incredibly prescient competence called math. Essentially what happened is that the employees of We who didn’t get a chance to sell, SoftBank, and some other institutional investors have lost $47 billion. Had this consensual hallucination gone on for 60 more days, retail investors would have experienced that loss. So this is a good thing! This is the markets working. Whereas Uber, the consensual hallucination continues. They have to maintain the illusion of growth. They have to maintain the growth story. Without the growth story, they’re worth 20 percent of what they’re worth now. I think that chops off 50 to 80 percent in the next 25 months. WeWork can start from zero. If they act crisply enough, it can still be a nice, cute office-sharing company. Uber has to maintain the hallucination. Uber has to keep chasing that eight ball.

What does the WeWork fallout look like?

There will be some pain at SoftBank, but they’re all billionaires. They’ll be fine. It’s embarrassing for Masayoshi Son, but big deal. MBS’s Saudi Arabia investment fund? Couldn’t happen to a nicer group of people. It’s the latent collateral damage that is the real hurt. It’s the employees. It’s a lot of landlords who are going to incur a lot of pain because in exchange for ten-year leases, they put in huge improvements for these spaces which they won’t be able to recapture if WeWork moves out. And you also have a lot of IPOs that will be affected, but I think that’s a good thing — Peleton’s a great company, but it’s not worth $8 billion. Everyone’s kind of been woken up from their trip.

In terms of human toll, this is where the real damage starts. This has been a really interesting and romantic story about the fall of Adam Neumann and SoftBank. They’ve got it wrong. Adam Neumann came in, smoked his own supply, and walked out with three-quarters of a billion dollars about the time that people in hazmat suits showed up. It’s like the guy at Chernobyl who refused to believe what was going on was given three-quarters of a billion dollars to leave before shit got real. That’s what happened here. So he and his family will literally have to go into hiding. There will be threats against his life. There’s going to be so much anger here.

If you want to talk about real toll here — the real toll is that there’s somewhere between 5,000 and 15,000 WeWork employees who took a job and a big part of their compensation — the reason they took these jobs was because of equity value. And it’s impossible not to count your money 30 days out from an IPO. It’s impossible to tell your husband to not start looking at houses. It’s impossible not to tell your parents, “Let’s think about going on a family cruise together.” It’s impossible not to start thinking that you can afford that new car. $47 billion? We’re probably talking about several thousand people who were going to be millionaires. Now most of them are probably thinking that in the next 30 days there’s a one-in-two chance I don’t have health insurance. You want to talk about the sheer human toll? The notion that Adam Neumann was fired? My God, he got on the last helicopter out of Saigon.

varoufakis Kant Greece debt crisis what is right

Yannis Varoufakis: No Time for Games in Europe
Feb 16, 2015

ATHENS — I am writing this piece on the margins of a crucial negotiation with my country’s creditors — a negotiation the result of which may mark a generation, and even prove a turning point for Europe’s unfolding experiment with monetary union.

Game theorists analyze negotiations as if they were split-a-pie games involving selfish players. Because I spent many years during my previous life as an academic researching game theory, some commentators rushed to presume that as Greece’s new finance minister I was busily devising bluffs, stratagems and outside options, struggling to improve upon a weak hand.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

If anything, my game-theory background convinced me that it would be pure folly to think of the current deliberations between Greece and our partners as a bargaining game to be won or lost via bluffs and tactical subterfuge.

The trouble with game theory, as I used to tell my students, is that it takes for granted the players’ motives. In poker or blackjack this assumption is unproblematic. But in the current deliberations between our European partners and Greece’s new government, the whole point is to forge new motives. To fashion a fresh mind-set that transcends national divides, dissolves the creditor-debtor distinction in favor of a pan-European perspective, and places the common European good above petty politics, dogma that proves toxic if universalized, and an us-versus-them mind-set.

As finance minister of a small, fiscally stressed nation lacking its own central bank and seen by many of our partners as a problem debtor, I am convinced that we have one option only: to shun any temptation to treat this pivotal moment as an experiment in strategizing and, instead, to present honestly the facts concerning Greece’s social economy, table our proposals for regrowing Greece, explain why these are in Europe’s interest, and reveal the red lines beyond which logic and duty prevent us from going.

The great difference between this government and previous Greek governments is twofold: We are determined to clash with mighty vested interests in order to reboot Greece and gain our partners’ trust. We are also determined not to be treated as a debt colony that should suffer what it must. The principle of the greatest austerity for the most depressed economy would be quaint if it did not cause so much unnecessary suffering.

I am often asked: What if the only way you can secure funding is to cross your red lines and accept measures that you consider to be part of the problem, rather than of its solution? Faithful to the principle that I have no right to bluff, my answer is: The lines that we have presented as red will not be crossed. Otherwise, they would not be truly red, but merely a bluff.

But what if this brings your people much pain? I am asked. Surely you must be bluffing.

The problem with this line of argument is that it presumes, along with game theory, that we live in a tyranny of consequences. That there are no circumstances when we must do what is right not as a strategy but simply because it is … right.

Against such cynicism the new Greek government will innovate. We shall desist, whatever the consequences, from deals that are wrong for Greece and wrong for Europe. The “extend and pretend” game that began after Greece’s public debt became unserviceable in 2010 will end. No more loans — not until we have a credible plan for growing the economy in order to repay those loans, help the middle class get back on its feet and address the hideous humanitarian crisis. No more “reform” programs that target poor pensioners and family-owned pharmacies while leaving large-scale corruption untouched.

Our government is not asking our partners for a way out of repaying our debts. We are asking for a few months of financial stability that will allow us to embark upon the task of reforms that the broad Greek population can own and support, so we can bring back growth and end our inability to pay our dues.

One may think that this retreat from game theory is motivated by some radical-left agenda. Not so. The major influence here is Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher who taught us that the rational and the free escape the empire of expediency by doing what is right.

How do we know that our modest policy agenda, which constitutes our red line, is right in Kant’s terms? We know by looking into the eyes of the hungry in the streets of our cities or contemplating our stressed middle class, or considering the interests of hard-working people in every European village and city within our monetary union. After all, Europe will only regain its soul when it regains the people’s trust by putting their interests center-stage.
(Yanis Varoufakis is the ex-finance minister of Greece.)

Judith Butler Paris Nov 14 2015

“Mourning becomes the law”—Judith Butler from Paris
Saturday 14th November, 2015

I am in Paris and passed near the scene of killing on Boulevard Beaumarchais on Friday evening. I had dinner ten minutes from another target. Everyone I know is safe, but many people I do not know are dead or traumatized or in mourning. It is shocking and terrible. Today the streets were populated in the afternoon, but empty in the evening. The morning was completely still.

It seems clear from the immediate discussions after the events on public television that the “state of emergency”, however temporary, does set a tone for an enhanced security state. The questions debated on television include the militarization of the police (how to “complete” the process),, the space of liberty, and how to fight “Islam” – an amorphous entity. Hollande tried to look manly when he declared this a war, but one was drawn to the imitative aspect of the performance so could not take the discourse seriously.

And yet, buffoon that he is, he is acting as the head of the army now. The state/army distinction dissolves in the light of the state of emergency. People want to see the police, and want a militarized police to protect them. A dangerous, if understandable, desire. The beneficient aspects of the special powers accorded the sovereign under the state of emergency included giving everyone free taxi rides home last night, and opening the hospitals to everyone affected, also draws them in. There is no curfew, but public services are curtailed, and no demonstrations are allowed. Even the “rassemblements” (gatherings) to grieve the dead were technically illegal. I went to one at the Place de la Republique and the police would announce that everyone must disperse, and few people obeyed. That was for me a brief moment of hopefulness.

Those commentators that seek to distinguish among sorts of Muslim communities and political views are considered to be guilty of pursuing “nuances.” Apparently,the enemy has to be comprehensive and singular to be vanquished, and the difference between muslim and jihadist and ISIL becomes more difficult to discern in public discourse. The pundits were sure who the enemy was before ISIL took responsiblity for the attacks.

It was interesting to me that Hollande announced three days of mourning as he tightened security controls – another way to read the title of Gillian Rose’s book, “mourning becomes the law.” Are we grieving or are we submitting to increasingly militarized state power and suspended democracy? How does the latter work more easily when it is sold as the former? The public days of mourning are to be three, but the state of emergency can last up to twelve days before the national assembly has to approve it.

But also, the state explains it must now restrict liberties in order to defend liberty – that seems to be a paradox that does not bother the pundits on television. Yes, the attacks were quite clearly aimed at iconic scenes of daily freedom in France: the cafe, the rock concert venue, the football stadium. In the rock concert hall, there was apparently a diatribe by one of the attackers committing the 89 brutal assasinations, blaming France for failing to intervene in Syria (against Assad’s regime), and blaming the west for its intervention in Iraq (against the Baathist regime). So, not a position, if we can call it that, against western intervention per se.

There is also a politics of names: ISIS, ISIL, Daesh. France will not say “etat islamique” since that would be to recognize the state. They also want to keep “Daesh” as a term, so it is an Arabic word that does not enter into French. In the meantime, that organization took responsibility for the killings, claiming that they were retribution for all the aerial bombing that has killed muslims on the soil of the Caliphate. The choice of the rock concert as a target – a sight for assasinations, actually – was explained: it hosted “idolatry” and “a festival of perversion.” I wonder how they come upon the term “perversion.” Sounds like they were reading outside of their field.

The presidential candidates have chimed in: Sarkozy is now proposing detention camps, explaining that it is necessary to be arresting those who are suspected of having ties to jihadists. And Le Pen is arguing for “expulsion”, having only recently called new migrants “bacteria.” That one of the killers of Syrian origin clearly entered France through Greece may well become a reason for France to consolidate its nationalist war against migrants.

My wager is that the discourse on liberty will be important to track in the coming days and weeks, and that it will have implications for the security state and the narrowing versions of democracy before us. One version of liberty is attacked by the enemy, another version is restricted by the state. The state defends the version of liberty attacked as the very heart of France, and yet suspends freedom of assembly (“the right to demonstrate”) in the midst of its mourning and prepares for an even more thorough militarization of the police. The political question seems to be, what version of the right-wing will prevail in the coming elections? And what now becomes a permissable right-wing once le Pen becomes the “center”. Horrific, sad, and foreboding times, but hopefully we can still think and speak and act in the midst of it.

Mourning seems fully restricted within the national frame. The nearly 50 dead in Beirut from the day before are barely mentioned, and neither are the 111 in Palestine killed in the last weeks alone, or the scores in Ankara. Most people I know describe themseves as “at an impasse”, not able to think the situation through. One way to think about it may be to come up with a concept of transversal grief, to consider how the metrics of grievability work, why the cafe as target pulls at my heart in ways that other targets cannot. It seems that fear and rage may well turn into a fierce embrace of a police state. I suppose this is why I prefer those who find themselves at an impasse. That means that this will take some time to think through. It is difficult to think when one is appalled. It requires time, and those who are willing to take it with you – something that has a chance of happening in an unauthorized “rassemblement.”

Judith

calum neill wo es war

Neill, C. (2011) Lacanian Ethics and the Assumption of Subjectivity, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Neill on signifer represents the subjectt for another signifier

The ethical invocation of Wo Es war, soll Ich werden is not something than can be responded to once and for all in an attainment of subjective security.

Rather it is momentary and perpetual. It is momentary insofar as it manifests in conscious life only fleetingly. It is perpetual insofar as it is indicative of the unconscious processes which necessarily continue unobserved. 20

What Descartes does not adequately answer here, but what is nonetheless raised in his text, is the question of what is going on when I am not thinking, i.e. when ‘I’ is not (re)presented in thought.

eagleton ethics pt 2

Eagleton, T. Trouble with Strangers: A Study of Ethics. Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

Part One

zupančič sublimation pt 2

Zupančič, A. (2003) The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two. MIT Press

Here we come to the last grand narrative from the era of the end of grand narratives: there is no Real, everything is convention, language games, a labyrinth of different possibilities that, at least in principle, are all of equal value. What is the effect of this thesis?

Its effect is not exactly the disappearance of the Real, but, rather, its full coincidence with reality. In other words, the reality principle is now conceived of as the only and ultimate Real.

This is what Nietzsche calls “modern nihilism” and the “crisis of values,” the latter being precisely the “crisis of sublimation” in the sense described above.

At issue is not a complaint about the corruption of values, and lack of respect for them, but a diagnosis concerning the weakening of the sublimatory force, the force that could produce or create some distance toward the reality principle and its claims.

It entails the closure of the very space of creativity. This is why it is very important to keep insisting upon the notion of the Real that, in turn, has to be defined in terms other than those of some “authentic Real” lurking behind the deceptive appearances. And the (late) Lacanian notion of the Real can help us to do precisely that.

The Real is not some authentic Beyond, constituting the truth of the reality. The Real is not the Beyond of reality, but its own blind spot or dysfunction—that is to say, the Real is the stumbling block on account of which reality does not fully coincide with itself. The Real is the intrinsic division of reality itself.

eagleton trouble with strangers 1

Eagleton, T. Trouble with Strangers: A Study of Ethics. Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

Whereas the angelic, as Milan Kundera argues, are notable for their peculiarly ‘shitless’ discourse, all vapid rhetoric and edifying sentiment, the demonic see nothing around them but shit. Parsons and politicians are angelic, whereas tabloid journalists are demonic. The deominic are not evil, since to be evil entails believing in value if only to negate it. 133

Angelo’s interview with Isabella is by no means his first encounter with the shattering force of desire, whatever he may suppose himself. On the contrary, the snake was curled up in the garden from the outset. Its deadly venom has infected him already in the form of his pathological will to dominion, within which Freud would doubtless detect the shadow of the death drive. Angelo represents a pure cult of the superego, with its lethally aggressive rage for order,

its neurotic fear that without fine definitions and unimpeachable grounds the world will collapse into chaos.

Because they are secretly fuelled by the death drive, the very powers which set out to subdue chaos are secretly in love with it. The urge to order is itself latently anarchic. It is prepared to subjugate the world into sheer nothingness.

The superego as Freud taught, borrows its terrifyingly vindictive force from the unruly id. 136

This is why Angelo can keel over with scarcely a struggle from ascetic authoritarian to libidinal transgressor. The same goes for the law, or indeed for any system of symbolic exchange.

Because such symbolic economies are precisely regulated, they tend to stability; but because the rules which regulate them can permutate any one item with another, indifferent to their specific nature, they can breed an anarchic condition in which every element blurs indiscriminately into every other, and the system appears to be engaging in transactions purely for their own sake. There is something in the very structure of stability which threatens to subvert it.

This is most obviously so in the case of the symbolic order, which in order to work effectively must allow flexible permutations between its various roles, and thus cannot avoid generating the permanent possibility of incest. Without this monstrous horror at its heart, the system would not be able to operate. 137