ethics – Page 2 – objet (a)

zupančič Kant non-realized

Villanova Philosophy Conference: Alenka Zupančič and Mladen Dolar April 2013 Notes to the talk given by Zupančič: Tarrying with the Imperative

The Rift in Being

[The sense of apocalypse today is this sense that if we don’t do or stop doing something, a catastrophe will take place, founds the neceessity of doing something on being or non-being of something else]

Do something that is Absolutely necessary on its own grounds. Act so that the maxim of your will can always hold at the same time as the principle giving universal law. It does not tell me what to do, universalizability in the maxim of my conduct. PINCHES us: alerts us to something, incites us DO YOUR DUTY!

Exercise a strategic pressure on Kant, this thing that he is pursuing and then provide a conceptualization of it. A READING OF THE categorical imperative that builds on his fundamental matrix in a different direction. Continue reading “zupančič Kant non-realized”

graeber morality of debt and work

A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse
David Graeber
[from The Baffler No. 22, 2013]

What is a revolution? We used to think we knew. Revolutions were seizures of power by popular forces aiming to transform the very nature of the political, social, and economic system in the country in which the revolution took place, usually according to some visionary dream of a just society. Nowadays, we live in an age when, if rebel armies do come sweeping into a city, or mass uprisings overthrow a dictator, it’s unlikely to have any such implications; when profound social transformation does occur—as with, say, the rise of feminism—it’s likely to take an entirely different form. It’s not that revolutionary dreams aren’t out there. But contemporary revolutionaries rarely think they can bring them into being by some modern-day equivalent of storming the Bastille.

At moments like this, it generally pays to go back to the history one already knows and ask: Were revolutions ever really what we thought them to be? For me, the person who has asked this most effectively is the great world historian Immanuel Wallerstein. He argues that for the last quarter millennium or so, revolutions have consisted above all of planetwide transformations of political common sense.

Already by the time of the French Revolution, Wallerstein notes, there was a single world market, and increasingly a single world political system as well, dominated by the huge colonial empires. As a result, the storming of the Bastille in Paris could well end up having effects on Denmark, or even Egypt, just as profound as on France itself—in some cases, even more so. Hence he speaks of the “world revolution of 1789,” followed by the “world revolution of 1848,” which saw revolutions break out almost simultaneously in fifty countries, from Wallachia to Brazil. In no case did the revolutionaries succeed in taking power, but afterward, institutions inspired by the French Revolution—notably, universal systems of primary education—were put in place pretty much everywhere. Similarly, the Russian Revolution of 1917 was a world revolution ultimately responsible for the New Deal and European welfare states as much as for Soviet communism. The last in the series was the world revolution of 1968—which, much like 1848, broke out almost everywhere, from China to Mexico, seized power nowhere, but nonetheless changed everything. This was a revolution against state bureaucracies, and for the inseparability of personal and political liberation, whose most lasting legacy will likely be the birth of modern feminism.

A quarter of the American population is now engaged in “guard labor”—defending property, supervising work, or otherwise keeping their fellow Americans in line.

Revolutions are thus planetary phenomena. But there is more. What they really do is transform basic assumptions about what politics is ultimately about. In the wake of a revolution, ideas that had been considered veritably lunatic fringe quickly become the accepted currency of debate. Before the French Revolution, the ideas that change is good, that government policy is the proper way to manage it, and that governments derive their authority from an entity called “the people” were considered the sorts of things one might hear from crackpots and demagogues, or at best a handful of freethinking intellectuals who spend their time debating in cafés. A generation later, even the stuffiest magistrates, priests, and headmasters had to at least pay lip service to these ideas. Before long, we had reached the situation we are in today: that it’s necessary to lay out the terms for anyone to even notice they are there. They’ve become common sense, the very grounds of political discussion.

Until 1968, most world revolutions really just introduced practical refinements: an expanded franchise, universal primary education, the welfare state. The world revolution of 1968, in contrast—whether it took the form it did in China, of a revolt by students and young cadres supporting Mao’s call for a Cultural Revolution; or in Berkeley and New York, where it marked an alliance of students, dropouts, and cultural rebels; or even in Paris, where it was an alliance of students and workers—was a rebellion against bureaucracy, conformity, or anything that fettered the human imagination, a project for the revolutionizing of not just political or economic life, but every aspect of human existence. As a result, in most cases, the rebels didn’t even try to take over the apparatus of state; they saw that apparatus as itself the problem.

It’s fashionable nowadays to view the social movements of the late sixties as an embarrassing failure. A case can be made for that view. It’s certainly true that in the political sphere, the immediate beneficiary of any widespread change in political common sense—a prioritizing of ideals of individual liberty, imagination, and desire; a hatred of bureaucracy; and suspicions about the role of government—was the political Right. Above all, the movements of the sixties allowed for the mass revival of free market doctrines that had largely been abandoned since the nineteenth century. It’s no coincidence that the same generation who, as teenagers, made the Cultural Revolution in China was the one who, as forty-year-olds, presided over the introduction of capitalism. Since the eighties, “freedom” has come to mean “the market,” and “the market” has come to be seen as identical with capitalism—even, ironically, in places like China, which had known sophisticated markets for thousands of years, but rarely anything that could be described as capitalism.

The ironies are endless. While the new free market ideology has framed itself above all as a rejection of bureaucracy, it has, in fact, been responsible for the first administrative system that has operated on a planetary scale, with its endless layering of public and private bureaucracies: the IMF, World Bank, WTO, trade organizations, financial institutions, transnational corporations, NGOs. This is precisely the system that has imposed free market orthodoxy, and opened the world to financial pillage, under the watchful aegis of American arms. It only made sense that the first attempt to recreate a global revolutionary movement, the Global Justice Movement that peaked between 1998 and 2003, was effectively a rebellion against the rule of that very planetary bureaucracy.

Future Stop

In retrospect, though, I think that later historians will conclude that the legacy of the sixties revolution was deeper than we now imagine, and that the triumph of capitalist markets and their various planetary administrators and enforcers—which seemed so epochal and permanent in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991—was, in fact, far shallower.

I’ll take an obvious example. One often hears that antiwar protests in the late sixties and early seventies were ultimately failures, since they did not appreciably speed up the U.S. withdrawal from Indochina. But afterward, those controlling U.S. foreign policy were so anxious about being met with similar popular unrest—and even more, with unrest within the military itself, which was genuinely falling apart by the early seventies—that they refused to commit U.S. forces to any major ground conflict for almost thirty years. It took 9/11, an attack that led to thousands of civilian deaths on U.S. soil, to fully overcome the notorious “Vietnam syndrome”—and even then, the war planners made an almost obsessive effort to ensure the wars were effectively protest-proof. Propaganda was incessant, the media was brought on board, experts provided exact calculations on body bag counts (how many U.S. casualties it would take to stir mass opposition), and the rules of engagement were carefully written to keep the count below that.

The problem was that since those rules of engagement ensured that thousands of women, children, and old people would end up “collateral damage” in order to minimize deaths and injuries to U.S. soldiers, this meant that in Iraq and Afghanistan, intense hatred for the occupying forces would pretty much guarantee that the United States couldn’t obtain its military objectives. And remarkably, the war planners seemed to be aware of this. It didn’t matter. They considered it far more important to prevent effective opposition at home than to actually win the war. It’s as if American forces in Iraq were ultimately defeated by the ghost of Abbie Hoffman.

Clearly, an antiwar movement in the sixties that is still tying the hands of U.S. military planners in 2012 can hardly be considered a failure. But it raises an intriguing question: What happens when the creation of that sense of failure, of the complete ineffectiveness of political action against the system, becomes the chief objective of those in power?

The thought first occurred to me when participating in the IMF actions in Washington, D.C., in 2002. Coming on the heels of 9/11, we were relatively few and ineffective, the number of police overwhelming. There was no sense that we could succeed in shutting down the meetings. Most of us left feeling vaguely depressed. It was only a few days later, when I talked to someone who had friends attending the meetings, that I learned we had in fact shut them down: the police had introduced such stringent security measures, canceling half the events, that most of the actual meetings had been carried out online. In other words, the government had decided it was more important for protesters to walk away feeling like failures than for the IMF meetings to take place. If you think about it, they afforded protesters extraordinary importance.

Is it possible that this preemptive attitude toward social movements, the designing of wars and trade summits in such a way that preventing effective opposition is considered more of a priority than the success of the war or summit itself, really reflects a more general principle? What if those currently running the system, most of whom witnessed the unrest of the sixties firsthand as impressionable youngsters, are—consciously or unconsciously (and I suspect it’s more conscious than not)—obsessed by the prospect of revolutionary social movements once again challenging prevailing common sense?

It would explain a lot. In most of the world, the last thirty years has come to be known as the age of neoliberalism—one dominated by a revival of the long-since-abandoned nineteenth-century creed that held that free markets and human freedom in general were ultimately the same thing. Neoliberalism has always been wracked by a central paradox. It declares that economic imperatives are to take priority over all others. Politics itself is just a matter of creating the conditions for growing the economy by allowing the magic of the marketplace to do its work. All other hopes and dreams—of equality, of security—are to be sacrificed for the primary goal of economic productivity. But global economic performance over the last thirty years has been decidedly mediocre. With one or two spectacular exceptions (notably China, which significantly ignored most neoliberal prescriptions), growth rates have been far below what they were in the days of the old-fashioned, state-directed, welfare-state-oriented capitalism of the fifties, sixties, and even seventies. By its own standards, then, the project was already a colossal failure even before the 2008 collapse.

If, on the other hand, we stop taking world leaders at their word and instead think of neoliberalism as a political project, it suddenly looks spectacularly effective. The politicians, CEOs, trade bureaucrats, and so forth who regularly meet at summits like Davos or the G20 may have done a miserable job in creating a world capitalist economy that meets the needs of a majority of the world’s inhabitants (let alone produces hope, happiness, security, or meaning), but they have succeeded magnificently in convincing the world that capitalism—and not just capitalism, but exactly the financialized, semifeudal capitalism we happen to have right now—is the only viable economic system. If you think about it, this is a remarkable accomplishment.

Debt cancellation would make the perfect revolutionary demand.

How did they pull it off? The preemptive attitude toward social movements is clearly a part of it; under no conditions can alternatives, or anyone proposing alternatives, be seen to experience success. This helps explain the almost unimaginable investment in “security systems” of one sort or another: the fact that the United States, which lacks any major rival, spends more on its military and intelligence than it did during the Cold War, along with the almost dazzling accumulation of private security agencies, intelligence agencies, militarized police, guards, and mercenaries. Then there are the propaganda organs, including a massive media industry that did not even exist before the sixties, celebrating police. Mostly these systems do not so much attack dissidents directly as contribute to a pervasive climate of fear, jingoistic conformity, life insecurity, and simple despair that makes any thought of changing the world seem an idle fantasy. Yet these security systems are also extremely expensive. Some economists estimate that a quarter of the American population is now engaged in “guard labor” of one sort or another—defending property, supervising work, or otherwise keeping their fellow Americans in line. Economically, most of this disciplinary apparatus is pure deadweight.

In fact, most of the economic innovations of the last thirty years make more sense politically than economically. Eliminating guaranteed life employment for precarious contracts doesn’t really create a more effective workforce, but it is extraordinarily effective in destroying unions and otherwise depoliticizing labor. The same can be said of endlessly increasing working hours. No one has much time for political activity if they’re working sixty-hour weeks.

It does often seem that, whenever there is a choice between one option that makes capitalism seem the only possible economic system, and another that would actually make capitalism a more viable economic system, neoliberalism means always choosing the former. The combined result is a relentless campaign against the human imagination. Or, to be more precise: imagination, desire, individual creativity, all those things that were to be liberated in the last great world revolution, were to be contained strictly in the domain of consumerism, or perhaps in the virtual realities of the Internet. In all other realms they were to be strictly banished. We are talking about the murdering of dreams, the imposition of an apparatus of hopelessness, designed to squelch any sense of an alternative future. Yet as a result of putting virtually all their efforts in one political basket, we are left in the bizarre situation of watching the capitalist system crumbling before our very eyes, at just the moment everyone had finally concluded no other system would be possible.

Work It Out, Slow It Down

Normally, when you challenge the conventional wisdom—that the current economic and political system is the only possible one—the first reaction you are likely to get is a demand for a detailed architectural blueprint of how an alternative system would work, down to the nature of its financial instruments, energy supplies, and policies of sewer maintenance. Next, you are likely to be asked for a detailed program of how this system will be brought into existence. Historically, this is ridiculous. When has social change ever happened according to someone’s blueprint? It’s not as if a small circle of visionaries in Renaissance Florence conceived of something they called “capitalism,” figured out the details of how the stock exchange and factories would someday work, and then put in place a program to bring their visions into reality. In fact, the idea is so absurd we might well ask ourselves how it ever occurred to us to imagine this is how change happens to begin.

This is not to say there’s anything wrong with utopian visions. Or even blueprints. They just need to be kept in their place. The theorist Michael Albert has worked out a detailed plan for how a modern economy could run without money on a democratic, participatory basis. I think this is an important achievement—not because I think that exact model could ever be instituted, in exactly the form in which he describes it, but because it makes it impossible to say that such a thing is inconceivable. Still, such models can be only thought experiments. We cannot really conceive of the problems that will arise when we start trying to build a free society. What now seem likely to be the thorniest problems might not be problems at all; others that never even occurred to us might prove devilishly difficult. There are innumerable X-factors.

The most obvious is technology. This is the reason it’s so absurd to imagine activists in Renaissance Italy coming up with a model for a stock exchange and factories—what happened was based on all sorts of technologies that they couldn’t have anticipated, but which in part only emerged because society began to move in the direction that it did. This might explain, for instance, why so many of the more compelling visions of an anarchist society have been produced by science fiction writers (Ursula K. Le Guin, Starhawk, Kim Stanley Robinson). In fiction, you are at least admitting the technological aspect is guesswork.

Myself, I am less interested in deciding what sort of economic system we should have in a free society than in creating the means by which people can make such decisions for themselves. What might a revolution in common sense actually look like? I don’t know, but I can think of any number of pieces of conventional wisdom that surely need challenging if we are to create any sort of viable free society. I’ve already explored one—the nature of money and debt—in some detail in a recent book. I even suggested a debt jubilee, a general cancellation, in part just to bring home that money is really just a human product, a set of promises, that by its nature can always be renegotiated.

Labor, similarly, should be renegotiated. Submitting oneself to labor discipline—supervision, control, even the self-control of the ambitious self-employed—does not make one a better person. In most really important ways, it probably makes one worse. To undergo it is a misfortune that at best is sometimes necessary. Yet it’s only when we reject the idea that such labor is virtuous in itself that we can start to ask what is virtuous about labor. To which the answer is obvious. Labor is virtuous if it helps others. A renegotiated definition of productivity should make it easier to reimagine the very nature of what work is, since, among other things, it will mean that technological development will be redirected less toward creating ever more consumer products and ever more disciplined labor, and more toward eliminating those forms of labor entirely.

What would remain is the kind of work only human beings will ever be able to do: those forms of caring and helping labor that are at the very center of the crisis that brought about Occupy Wall Street to begin with. What would happen if we stopped acting as if the primordial form of work is laboring at a production line, or wheat field, or iron foundry, or even in an office cubicle, and instead started from a mother, a teacher, or a caregiver? We might be forced to conclude that the real business of human life is not contributing toward something called “the economy” (a concept that didn’t even exist three hundred years ago), but the fact that we are all, and have always been, projects of mutual creation.

It’s as if American forces in Iraq were ultimately defeated by the ghost of Abbie Hoffman.

At the moment, probably the most pressing need is simply to slow down the engines of productivity. This might seem a strange thing to say—our knee-jerk reaction to every crisis is to assume the solution is for everyone to work even more, though of course, this kind of reaction is really precisely the problem—but if you consider the overall state of the world, the conclusion becomes obvious. We seem to be facing two insoluble problems. On the one hand, we have witnessed an endless series of global debt crises, which have grown only more and more severe since the seventies, to the point where the overall burden of debt—sovereign, municipal, corporate, personal—is obviously unsustainable. On the other, we have an ecological crisis, a galloping process of climate change that is threatening to throw the entire planet into drought, floods, chaos, starvation, and war. The two might seem unrelated. But ultimately they are the same. What is debt, after all, but the promise of future productivity? Saying that global debt levels keep rising is simply another way of saying that, as a collectivity, human beings are promising each other to produce an even greater volume of goods and services in the future than they are creating now. But even current levels are clearly unsustainable. They are precisely what’s destroying the planet, at an ever-increasing pace.

Even those running the system are reluctantly beginning to conclude that some kind of mass debt cancellation—some kind of jubilee—is inevitable. The real political struggle is going to be over the form that it takes. Well, isn’t the obvious thing to address both problems simultaneously? Why not a planetary debt cancellation, as broad as practically possible, followed by a mass reduction in working hours: a four-hour day, perhaps, or a guaranteed five-month vacation? This might not only save the planet but also (since it’s not like everyone would just be sitting around in their newfound hours of freedom) begin to change our basic conceptions of what value-creating labor might actually be.

Occupy was surely right not to make demands, but if I were to have to formulate one, that would be it. After all, this would be an attack on the dominant ideology at its very strongest points. The morality of debt and the morality of work are the most powerful ideological weapons in the hands of those running the current system. That’s why they cling to them even as they are effectively destroying everything else. It’s also why debt cancellation would make the perfect revolutionary demand.

All this might still seem very distant. At the moment, the planet might seem poised more for a series of unprecedented catastrophes than for the kind of broad moral and political transformation that would open the way to such a world. But if we are going to have any chance of heading off those catastrophes, we’re going to have to change our accustomed ways of thinking. And as the events of 2011 reveal, the age of revolutions is by no means over. The human imagination stubbornly refuses to die. And the moment any significant number of people simultaneously shake off the shackles that have been placed on that collective imagination, even our most deeply inculcated assumptions about what is and is not politically possible have been known to crumble overnight.

This article is an excerpt from The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement, by David Graeber. Copyright © 2013 by David Graeber. Published by arrangement with Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

David Graeber is a contributing editor of the magazine and the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years. His new book is The Democracy Project.

ethics other relationality

Alterity, Intersubjectivity, Ethics

Workshop Abstract:

The ‘ethical turn’ across the arts and humanities has taken its place in social and cultural anthropology primarily as a way to address long-standing questions of human agency within cultural and political systems. Anthropologists have been developing their own take on questions of ethics and morality in ways drawing largely from neo-Aristotelian and Foucauldian theorisations. Building on this emerging literature, but cautious of some of its ontological assumptions, the premise behind this workshop questions the prioritisation of certain notions of the ‘self’ over inquiries into the nature of the ethical ‘subject’.

The workshop will approach questions of ethics from different theoretical and disciplinary perspectives, which have thus far remained marginal in the emerging anthropology of ethics and morality. Anthropology has traditionally sought to understand the socially or relationally constituted nature of persons and the historical processes within which they are embedded, and yet literature on ethical agency has often foregrounded voluntaristic notions of self-cultivation. We ask what contributions theories concerned with the relational or intersubjective nature of subject formation framed as responsibility for the other can make to our conceptualisation of ethics and ethical agency.

Theories of subjectivity, gendered or sexual difference, affect, and the ‘post-human’ have become prominent in investigations that question the bounds of the self/subject, and the ways in which we can conceptualise it as socially or politically emplaced. We ask what such theories, and different disciplines’ elaborations and critiques of them, can usefully lend our conceptualisations of ethics and morality.
We hope to open up avenues for further research and collaboration amongst those attending the workshop, in the form of publication and/or a broader conference at a later date.

Workshop format:

The aim of the workshop is primarily to exchange ideas across disciplines and with different theoretical and ethnographic references. The day therefore will be structured so as to promote as much discussion as possible, rather than presenting polished research results. The workshop will be divided into four thematic sessions, with a keynote lecture delivered by Associate Professor Jarrett Zigon of the University of Amsterdam.

The four sessions will address the themes of:

• Feminism and the question of the other
• Ethics, violence and politics
• Post-humanism and animal/human relations
• Affect and the ethics of noise

Each of the four sessions will be structured around a research paper, to be pre-circulated to all workshop participants, which will form the starting point for the discussion. The discussions will be co-facilitated by the paper authors and workshop organisers. In the abstract and in the suggested questions for discussion below, we have started to shape and open the discussions in particular directions. However these questions are both preliminary and open-ended, and we welcome different perspectives and challenges that are relevant to the workshop’s themes and concerns.

Workshop preparation

After registering each participant will receive the research papers in advance for each of the four sessions and you are strongly encouraged to read these prior to attending the workshop. The workshop welcomes participants across academic disciplines keen to engage in lively discussions and raise questions and ideas during the day.

Questions to initiate discussion:

• What analysis of attachments and detachments across sameness and difference do concepts such as affect enable or disable?

• What are the challenges to more recent feminist theories that attempt to show how ethics is suggested and solicited by an ontology of interdependency between people?

• How do lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex subjectivities complicate ethical and political responses to deeply ingrained normative practices?

• In light of the central place of ‘the Other’ in anthropological concerns, how can feminist and other theories of alterity inflect anthropological theories of ethics?

• How do questions of politics enter into, impact upon, or undermine our theorisations of the ethical?

• Can claims of relationality and acknowledgment of difference be shown to be fundamentally non-violent? How do we continue to address violence within ethics?

• How can psychoanalytic theories addressing subject/object, or self/other, relations, help us to theorise the space in which ethical subjectivity is formed?

• Do contemporary theories of affect push us beyond concepts of ‘relationality’ or ‘intersubjectivity’ in theorisations of ethics?

• Can Levinasian theories of ethics as the pre-subjective relation to the Other inform ethnographic inquiries into ethical relationality?

• What other approaches from philosophy or other disciplines can inform the study of ethics and morality?

• Do these theoretical approaches invite us to question the idea of intersubjectivity as the place of ethical relationality?

belief materialism subjectivity neighbour no big Other

Simon Critchley on love and self-loss

spiritual daring that attempts to eviserate and excoriate the old self, love dares the self to leave the self behind, to hue and hack to make a space large enough for love to enter love is an enrichment through impoverisment.

Slavoj Žižek, Tilton Gallery, New York City, 19 Nov. 2006

Belief

Steve Martin in Leap Of Faith: He really produced a miracle and breaks down
Atheism is secret inner conviction of believers. Internal doubt, but believe in external rituals.
Either we are alone in universe or there are aliens/God. Both situations are toally unbearable. WE would break down if aliens visited us, but we can’t stand that nobody is there too.
Ecology We can’t be sure or its the big multinationals. No we know but we are not ready to believe, you know global warming, but you look outside and see the sun and flowers. WE are wired, we can’t accept because our BEING itself disappears.
Free is a true human who is ready to make this step. One guy did it Mao in 1955. Why chinese people should not be afraid of American Atom Bomb. “But eve in atom bombs so powerful, they would blow the earth up, it would just be a minor event for the solar system.” This totally crazy position where you are ready to put everything at risk is the true radical position.

In order to truly confront global warming, we must cut our organic embeddedness. Gap between poetic universe and scientific results. Even if we know something to be NOT true, our poetry is naive. WE know there is no sunset, the earth rotation which moves, not sun, not sunset. The true tasks of poetry today is to make poetry at level of results. Oh my darling let’s meet a last quarter turn of earth.

Only in Christianity God himself for a moment becomes an atheist.
This idea of imperfect God. Wait a minute let’s call God. Wait a minute this is a old stupid man who screwed up creation. God accepts, yes you are right … What is the underlying message?
What is materialism
A particle position/velocity. REALITY IS IN-ITSELF UNDETERMINED. THINGS GET FUZZY as if they disappear into nothingness. Here he uses the famous video game analogy but doesn’t mention or credit that guy Nicholas somebody’s book.

We should read reality like this computer game? What if God underestimated us. God thought when he programmed the universe, a don’t have to program all the way down, I ‘ll go so far as atoms. God was too lazy to program further. He cheated a bit.

Materialism at its purest

The movie 13th floor. You reach the end, earth is no longer earth, it slowly moves into digital coordinates. Now this would be the true materialism. To think the unfinished character of reality, we don’t need God to imagine it. Reality is in-itself unfinished.

When you approach too close an image, all you see are stains. Modernism is an event, postmodernism is NOT.

Badiou and Multiplicity
His ontology of multiplicity, this dispersal multiplicity is fundamental of ontology, but it is not a multiplicity of ONES, his ontology is an ontology the oppositie of zero is not ONE, the primoridal fact is multiple in a void and then comes ONE.

What are the consequences for subjectivity, what kind of subjectivity fits this universe?
It is an EMPTY SUBJECTIVITY. Recently a publisher asked me to do what I hate. Books have on the back cover, personal idiosyncracies, John Irving is a wrestler and gardens in his spare time … Ž wanted to test them: in his free time Ž surfs internet for child porn and teaches his son to pull the legs off of spiders. This supplement is a FUNDAMENTAL LIE.
The core of the subject is the THING and that’s the neighbour.

Neighbour is a THING. THING is the Impenetrable abyss of the Other’s desire. Everything else like gardening is to cover it up.

Here is the famous phone call on the plane about to crash
You call your beloved and say “I love you.” when the whole world is falling apart, what remains is love. No, I am more a pessimist. I claim that in that totally desperate scary position, you lie to yourself, you want to die with a clear account in good memory, at that point you lie.

A truly atheist crazy thing: imagine somebody who, the plane is falling down you are married, Honey just so that it is clear, the marriage was hell I want to divorce you. Bye. That would be an act.
Decentrement of subjectivity
When you are at your innermost yourself, you are NOT yourself, you are LYING. You are at a distance from TRUTH.
Woman is a SYMPTOM OF MAN. It means for Lacan the symptom pre-exists what it is a symptom of. If woman is a symptom, imagine a woman walking around, do you want me to be your symptom. TO be an empty pure symptom, a NUN, A truly AUTHENTIC position, it could be a radical feminine position, I will remain a pure symptom. Woman can do it, man can’t do it. Man needs a symptom.
DaVINCI Code the movie
X-files of Darian Leader. Why do some many things happen OUT THERE. To cover up the fact that nothing happens here. Nothing happens here, no sex between the characters.
Abyss of subjectivity
Openness, our elementary reaction is FEAR, especially today the inexistence of the big OTHER is more marked than ever. Not just symbolic, but what is truly horrifying, in ecology, that nature itself as ultimate big Other is disappearing. NATURE is impenetrable density of our background, but the moment through genome and bio-genetic manipulations, NATURE itself turns into something else, it is no longer nature in terms of dense impenetrability.
Predominant mode of politics FEAR
Expert administration, to go a little bit up, to mobilize people, is to mobilize them with some kind of a fear, fear of immigrants/state/crime/terrorists
PReviously science nonetheless wanted to understand reproduce, now it can reproduce new forms of monsters. Cows with 2 heads, freaks of nature. Things will explode out of control. YET Behind all this is FEAR OF THE NEIGHBOUR
Control the explosive dimension of the neighbour.

Sam Harris the End of Belief; justifies torture. Truth Pill, a de-caffeinated torture. Subjectively the person who takes the pill would suffer incredibly, but outwardly it looks like he just took a nap. Fat-free cakes, alcohol without beer.

Why is this reasoning wrong. When Sam Harris talks about this proximity, is the Other too close to us or not. He’s too short there. This proximity is not physical proximity. It’s the proximity precisely of the neighbour who can be too close even if he is far away. That’s the definition of the neighbour. The neighbour INTRUDES. So I claim that this argument only works if the Other human beings are no longer treated as neighbours, they simply become objectivized in this field of calculation where you can say Ok I can torture you here to prevent a greater number of suffering … The dimension of the neighbour gets lost. For Sam Harris the dimension of the neighbour gets lost.

All our outbursts of violence are ultimately outbursts against the neighbour. The neighbour being not simply the other person in front of us but the ABYSS of the OTHER which can be detected from our fantasmatic symbolic space.

It’s easy to praise today’s global capitalism, oh a big village, but we are still Neighbours, with our own symbolic universe, our own way of enjoying, what we need today is not more communication, but more distance, we need a NEW CODE OF DISCRETION. We need to ignore others more. This is the great art today.

SOLUTIONS to proximity of neighbour is TOLERANCE. Ž criticizes new book by Wendy Brown. Tolerance as a solution to the neighbour is a problem.

Culturalization of politics, politics is culturalized. Fukuyama and Huntington, Clash of Civilizations is not opposed to End of History. Politics as rational administration, the only true conflicts are ones of culture.

Part 8 is a good discussion by Žižek
Good discussion of Amish and subjectivity
The moment you change them substantially, the whole attitude to community changes, you undermine communal identity and change into liberal subject, he made have freedom of choice but its no longer Amish culture.

Problem with Wendy Brown: They remain caught in pseudo-Marxist denouncing false universality, it goes like this, what appears to be a neutral universality really privleges a certain strata. Human rights not really universal human rights, the privlege male white of certain property, human rights are natural to every man, insofar as they are resonable human man, woman nope to passionate, workers have no time, criminals are out, savages are out …

I claim two things should be opposed, of course there is a GAP between universal human rights and how they truly function. Nonetheless this very GAP has its positive aspects

It allows for a re-writing of it. Mary Wollstencraft, Haiti revolution.

if you read closely the great idealist tradition of Hegel, its that this is only one side of the story, this denouncing universality as false universality. We also have the opposite mystification which is much more interesting: your particular interests is already the tool for the actualization of universality.

Its not that formal universality masks you particular interests, its the opposite, your particularity you are not aware of the universal dimension of what you are doing, you think you are following particular interests, but you don’t see the universal nature of you acts.

So it is totally wrong to play the game capitalism is Eurocentric

As a capitalist subject, in your OWN INDIVIDUAL SELF-EXPERIENCE, you relate yourself to yourself as UNIVERSAL.

I am in myself an abstract universal, what I am in my particular identity, a teacher is something contingent, not part of my nature. You experience yourself in the core of your being as universal. Capitalist is universal in this way, it undermines the culture from within.

Example TIBETAN CULTURE and the Chinese onslaught
Descartes At first foreign cultures appeared strange, but then I asked myself, what if I’m viewed from foreign gaze, I must appear to them stupid idiosyncratic. Core of modernity, when you see your core of your identity as something as ultimately something contingent.
Feminism outside of modernity as Ying-Yang, we should reassert the feminine aspect etc.

The Neighbour
The way to break out this eternal Levinasian problematic, oh neighbour, abyss, otherness, should we respect/tolerate the other or not, This is a false problem
We should embrace this RADICAL UNIVERSALITY, Not i’m difference, we share common concerns
What interests me is my culture has some fights in it, your culture has some fights, what I want to share with you is the universality of our struggles.

Cultural solipsism: how can I be sure I’m not imposing, I am not fully myself, and can I share it with you
I am not myself, there is in the very core of myself a universality that surpasses me.

Ethics

Lacan: Have you acted in conformity with your desire, do not compromise/betray your desire. THIS IS AMBIGUOUS.
Psychoanalysis can justify anything. Stupid psychoanalysts, oh end oppression, liberate it and everything will be ok.
Israel Defense Forces: main theoretical references is Deleuze Guttari. Strange things are happening.

Immoral Ethics: Nietzschean ethics
It doesn’t matter what you do, be authentic, be engaged.

Kantian Ethics: you not only responsible to do you duty, but you are responsible to determine what is your duty

There is no big Other, you can’t put on the big Other to tell you what is your duty, you have to be fully responsible for it. Hannah Arendt is wrong, Eichmann said I just did my duty. No you can’t do this. YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED to use duty as an excuse to do my duty. You have to FULLY STAND BEHIND your duty. No Guarantee behind the big Other.

Questions
Violent imposition of a universal will
Native Americans and white stupidity

Abandon that which you are afraid to lose Accept the loss, become universal. You are afraid to lose you particular identity, my solution is NOT identity politics. What if what you are so passionately protecting is in itself worthless, abandon that. As an attitude, I refer to Mao, “So what, a minor disturbance in the solar system.”
I think that again, the solution is don’t fear, be calm enjoy your life. No the solution is more radical, accept that the big Other does NOT exist.

Nature, there is no balanced nature
There is no way to return.
We need to re-assert BIG COLLECTIVE decisions. without this we are lost

We have a struggle you have a struggle, let’s see how we can join our struggles. Universality is the universality of struggle.

Chinese Model of Capitalism

Ž in south korea june 2012 buddha buddhism

Zizek Lecture in South Korea Kyung Hee University in June 27 2012

Q and A Zizek in South Korea Kyung Hee University in June 27 2012

Universality is Universality of Struggle
Symbolic Castration
Father confused impotent person, but his symbolic identity you respect him
Famous Ninotchka Joke: Coffee Without Cream/Run Out of Cream/Only Have Milk/Coffee Without Milk
What you don’t have (negativity) is part of your identity. What is missing is part of your identity. Coffee without what it is.
I don’t drink coffee, that’s ok, I don’t have any. Today, the way ideology works today, is not as a direct lie, in the sense it directly tells something not true, ideology lies in not in what it says, it lies it says what it says, by generating in us implicit meaning, while it relies on the opposite meaning. To use the example of coffee, it is giving us coffee w/o milk, but it claims it is giving us coffee w/o cream. Be attentive to these implicit meanings, what is said w/o being said. In Europe, austerity, when those in power want to impose people austerity measures, they pretend they are offering coffee w/o milk, when they are really offering coffee w/o cream. Why is this so important?

– Hegelian Totality
precisely a totality of what there is, and what there is not. in true dialectical analysis, the point is not to include particular events in larger harmonious totality, the point is not to look at phenomena isolated, look holistically, this is NOT enough, but include in concept all its failures and so on, take capitalism, to take it as a totality, it is not enough to say as a system it is good, NO we should look at all those points where it fails, inside a country and outside, i.e., APPLE as a country, oooh, see it as a success, but we say NO Apple without FOXCON. or take the CONGO. It is a state that is immensely mineral rich but the state doesn’t funciton, you simply have local warlords and directly deal with foreign companies. Congo is not developed enough to be part of global capitalism NO. There are child warriors, as such as this hell on earth, CONGO IS PART OF TODAY’S GLOBAL CAPITALISM. global capitalism is also the dark side.
South Korea: One of your big companies, had intentions to buy all arable land in Madagascar. throw out local farmers. This is global capitalism. A proper dialectical analysis begins, you have a ideal universal notion, then look at failures and non-intended by-products, the dialectic will show these failures are NECESSARY failures, all mistakes, antagonisms are part of the UNIVERSAL NOTION.

The category which is more and more becoming crucial is the category of UNEMPLOYMENT
In standard Marxist story: Exploitation. But today the unemployed are becoming more and more crucial, not just RESERVE ARMY. but the forever UNEMPLOYABLE. Whole countries, Somalia, Congo, or whole regions in countries, in a sense Unemployed, excluded from world markets, you have people in advance that are Unemployable. Millions of students who study, but realize there is no chance they will get a job in the domain of their studies. We have somehow to expand the Domain of Proletarians. It is NOT just who work and exploited, it is those who are not working. Capitalism is more and more generating NECESSARY UNEMPLOYMENT.

Why don’t we see this more clearly? This shows the strength of the ruling hegemonic ideology. The omniprescence of anti-capitalism, look at any popular media, you have many anti-capitalist stories, but all these critiques are moralistic critiques, greedy bankers, polluting environment. The problem is what changed in recent capitalism, that this greed can be realized with such catastrophic consequences. The limit of this moralistic anti-capitalism, by blaming people, it prevents us from doing the crucial analysis of the SYSTEM. what is wrong with the SYSTEM as such. Almost everyone today is a Fukuyamist. Liberal democractic capitalism is the only game in town. All we can do is make it a little better. a little more efficient.
We can easily imagine the end of the world, but a little change in capitalism we can’t imagine.

class struggle: antagonism deadlock is constitutive of society
multiculturalist where problem is recognition, how can we be recognized: gay, women etc.
I am still for BINARY logic against multiplicity of struggles.

Laclau critique none of these struggles have apriori central position, all strategic consideration. There is no priority

Politico-economic antagonism is not at same level of these other struggles, it has a MORE SUBSTANTIAL position, of overdetermining, structuring other struggles.

Buddhism and Dalai Lama

Origin of fall of Buddhism. Mahayama: Bhodisava, you were already there liberated, out of this compassion with humanity, you CAME back into this world of suffering, so you postponed your liberation until all others are liberated this is a SACRIFICIAL logic. I don’t trust anybody that is willing to sacrifice themselves for you.

Communism will win There are miracles but only for those who believe in the miracle. Communism will win means that we who are engaged in the struggle, we can read events as signs of communism: Tahir Sq. etc, are all signs that point towards a possible communism but there is no guarantee, no objective necessity, communism will win for those who believe in communism, a bit of a tautology.

Truth is not a neutral objective truth. Truth is universal: but it is nonetheless PARTIAL. No if you look neutrally you see nothing, you only see truth if you are interested in truth, an emancipatory truth. Communism will come as an unintended consequence We Chinese commies are the best managers of capitalism. It less and less needs democracy. This should worry us. In Lacanian the gap between what you want and what you desire. People desire communism but they don’t want. What people usually desire they don’t want. People all the time think they desire something, but when they come close to it, they think its horrible and don’t want it. What you want is not the same is what you desire. Communism will come but people will not want it.

Why still keep the stupid name?

on Egypt

on Greece

On Marx To be a Marxist today, means not to return to Marx, in a radically critical way, totally reconstruct radically his analysis. A fundamental flaws we can see today in his notion of communism. His notion of communism is still a capitalism, that is, capitalism without the private property, then this wild development will continue. He didn’t see that this dynamism is only possible within the capitalist frame. Second limitation, he had ingenious insights 1848 revolution, 18th Brumaire, but in terms of analysis of power, he didn’t develop it properly. The horrors of 20th Century communism you can’t explain through a critical Marxism. Stalinism occured because communsm developed in the wrong place. No. This is wrong.

I don’t like the term Third Way. If you want the Third way, what is Second way: Fascism, Communism, the Second way failed because they stayed within capitalism, total productivity, efficiency and so on. I don’t like to talk about the Third way because the Second way wasn’t a serious second way. Too much of this we have extremes and we need proper balance. I don’t like balance, I like extremes.

on Violence: Hitler and Ghandi, the quote that got him in a lot of trouble

Hitler was afraid to do real social change. Tahir Sq. they stopped the entire functioning of the state. Mubarak’s violence was a violence aimed at restoring social order. It’s not that we live in peaceful times and some crazy revolutionary starts violence, but what about violence in Congo? Structural violence, the violence that is here as part of NORMAL state of things. The positive violence is violence of just occupying space and preventing things from going on as normal. Ghandi was much more violent than Hitler, because his aim was to stop the state from functioning. It was an anti-systemic violence.

neighbour

Zukić, Naida. “My Neighbor’s Face and Similar Vulgarities.” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies. Vol. 5, No. 5, November 2009.

Against the Ethics of Unconditional Hospitality

Crucial here, however, is an ideological shift from a neighbor in the simple sense, to the neighborin its radical otherness. The neighbor in its radical otherness disturbs; the neighbor “remains an inert, impenetrable, enigmatic presence that hystericizes” (Žižek, “Neighbors” 140-1).

Ethnic cleansing, neighbor-on-neighbor violence, and dehumanization of the Other read as the portrayal of humankind at its worst. Complicating Derrida’s notion of ethical hospitality are narratives of mass atrocities within which lurks the neighbor—the unfathomable abyss, the radical otherness in all its intensity and inaccessibility.

Nevertheless, gross violations of hospitality, including massive atrocities and human rights abuses are occurring not between strangers, but between neighbors. The neighbor is one such figure of the Other toward whom my relationship is that of familiarity, common language, and proximity. Underlying Derrida’s unconditional hospitality is fear of the Other—the fear of the unfathomable abyss of radical otherness that transgresses, compromises, and disturbs from within. The neighbor.

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.

182-3 versagung love Third justice

The first act of Sygne, the heroine of Paul-Louis-Charles-Marie Claudel’s The Hostage, is that of what, following Freud, Lacan calls Versagung: the radical (self-relating) loss/renunciation of the very fantasmatic core of her being.

First, I sacrifice all I have for the Cause-Thing that is for me more than my life; what I then get in exchange for this sacrifice is the loss of this Cause-Thing itself

***************
We should therefore assume the risk of countering Levinas’s position with a more radical one: others are primordially an (ethically) indifferent multitude, and love is a violent gesture of cutting into this multitude and privileging a One as the neighbor, thus introducing a radical imbalance into the whole.

In contrast to love, justice begins when I remember the faceless many left in shadow in this privileging of the One. Justice and love are thus structurally incompatible: justice, not love, has to be blind; it must disregard the privileged One whom I “really understand.”

What this means is that the Third is not secondary: it is always-already here, and the primordial ethical obligation is toward this Third who is not here in the face-to-face relationship, the one in shadow, like the absent child of a love-couple.

This not simply the Derridean-Kierkegaardian point that I always betray the Other because toute autre est un autre, because I have to make a choice to select who my neighbor is from the mass of the Thirds, and this is the original sin-choice of love.

The structure is similar to the one described by Emile Benveniste regarding verbs: the primordial couple is not active-passive, to which the middle form is then added, but active and middle (along the axis of engaged-disengaged).

The primordial couple is Neutral and Evil (the choice which disturbs the neutral balance) or, grammatically, impersonal Other and I — “you” is a secondary addition.

To properly grasp the triangle of love, hatred and indifference, one must rely on the logic of the universal and its constitutive exception which only introduces existence.

The truth of the universal proposition “Humans are mortal” does not imply the existence of even one human, while the “less strong” proposition “There is at least one human who exists (i.e., some humans exist)” implies their existence.

Lacan draws from this the conclusion that we pass from universal proposition (which defines the content of a notion) to existence only through a proposition stating the existence of — not the at least one element of the universal genus which exists, but — at least one which is an exception to the universality in question.

What this means with regard to love is that the universal proposition “I love you all” acquires the level of actual existence only if “there is at least one whom I hate”— a thesis abundantly confirmed by the fact that universal love for humanity always led to the brutal hatred of the (actually existing) exception, of the enemies of humanity. 182

… true love … can emerge only against the background —not of universal hatred, but— of universal indifference: I am indifferent toward All, the totality of the universe, and as such, I actually love you, the unique individual who stands/sticks out of this indifferent background.

Love and hatred are thus not symmetrical: love emerges out of universal indifference, while hatred emerges out of universal love.

159 Kant undead madness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

142-4 neighbor real thing and its symbolic gentrification

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

143:

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

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

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

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

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

In his seminar 3, Lacan already indicates this dimension:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

136-7 neighbor plea for ethical violence butler Ž

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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