ethics – Page 6 – objet (a)

calum on Ž the act derrida part 3

Neill, Calum. “An Idiotic Act: On the Non-Example of Antigone.” The Letter , 34, 2005, 1-28.

Knowledge, for Derrida, is an indispensable prerequisite for the decision and, subsequently, for the assumption of responsibility but the decision cannot itself be reduced to knowledge without this rendering it ‘less’ than decisive, rendering it, that is, in the realm of pure calculation. On the other hand, without knowledge, there remains no possibility of responsibility insofar as responsibility would entail a context, a conception of that for and towards which one would be responsible and how.

Responsibility thus figures and can only arise between the closed automaticity of the system of knowledge and the ‘meaninglessness’ that would be beyond any systematisation.

Without exceeding knowledge, the decision is but a part of knowledge and thus not of the subject. Without returning to knowledge, the decision has no sense; it is purely arbitrary.

Is not this notion of the decision commensurate with the notion of the ethical in Lacan, with the notion of the ethical act as that which can appeal to no guarantor in the Other, as that which by definition takes place at the limits of the Symbolic order, as that which cannot be reduced to the law and yet, at the same time, must be inscribed in the Symbolic order? Is this not commensurate with the notion of the ethical as a pulsational moment which emerges from but must also assume a place in the Symbolic?

Neill’s Argument

Contra Žižek’s notion of the act which must be located absolutely beyond the Symbolic order, both Derrida’s ‘decision’ and Lacan’s ‘act’ are such that, in order to be understood as ethical, they must entail a moment of (re)inscription in the order of the comprehensible, or, for Derrida, knowledge, and for Lacan, the Symbolic.

That is to say, in insisting on the exclusivity of what he terms identification with the ‘Other-Thing’ as the defining moment of the act, Žižek might be understood to precisely
occlude the ethical potential from the act.

Returning to Antigone, if, in Žižek’s terms, her act is possible because of ‘the direct identification of her particular/determinate decision with the Other’s (Thing’s) injunction/call’, 26 then it is difficult to see in what sense such an act might be considered ethical.

It is, however, for Žižek, precisely this exclusivity, the radical suspension of the Other without recourse to a further moment of reinscription which does render the act ethical.

Antigone figures here, as we have noted, as the paramount example of the act as a moment of absolute suspension. Antigone, for Žižek, ‘does not merely relate to the Other-Thing, she – for a brief, passing moment of, precisely, decision – directly is the Thing, thus excluding herself from the community regulated by the intermediate agency of symbolic regulations’.27

It is in so excluding herself from the community, in situating herself beyond the regulations of the Symbolic order, that Antigone can be understood, for Žižek, to have engaged in a proper act, precisely because the act, for Žižek, is not simply ‘beyond the reality principle’ in the sense that it would be the engagement of a performative reconfiguration of reality, of, that is, the Symbolic.

Rather, the act is that which would ‘change the very co-ordinates of the “reality principle’’. This is not to suggest that for Žižek the act entails performing the impossible.

Žižek’s point concerns the very structuration of what would be considered (im)possible in the first place. The radical character of the act lies in the fact that it would be that which alters the very contours of what would be considered possible.

Or in moral terms, it would not be that which would challenge the received notion of the good but rather it would be that which would redefine what might be considered as good.

calum on Ž the act part 2

Neill, Calum. “An Idiotic Act: On the Non-Example of Antigone.” The Letter , 34, 2005, 1-28.

Calum says an act needs to be inscribed it in the Symbolic:

The judgement to act, that it is necessary or desirable to act, necessarily entails the judgement that acting in this way is preferable to acting in another way; for example, by doing nothing. In so judging, the subject is by necessity creating a new norm, regardless of how contingent or particular such a norm may be. In judging, then, the subject must both inscribe its judgement, its choice, in the Symbolic and assume utterly the weight of this judgement or choice. That is to say, the act, insofar as it is to be considered ethical, necessarily entails the assumption of responsibility in the field of the Other.

Yo Derrida

Politics of Friendship
In this sense, Derrida’s notion of ‘the other’s decision in me’ is actually closer to Lacan’s act than Žižek would have us believe. [cites Stavrakakis 2003 in Umbra)

In Derrida’s discussion of the decision in Politics of Friendship, the emphasis is on the incommensurability of the decision to any traditional notion of subjective agency and the related notion of responsibility.

Derrida’s point is that a decision, in the classical sense of dêcaedêre, a cut, a break, and thus an absolute decision as opposed to a mere calculation which would unfurl on the basis of a prescription, is still necessarily understood in a context.

This is precisely not to say that the decision is reducible to its context, which would be to rejoin to the logic of a calculation. The decision must, rather, be seen as breaking from the context which would precede it and be reinscribed in a context which would then be distinct from that which preceded it. It is the moment of responsibility here which would render the decision ethical and distinct from a mere occurrence or behaviour.

It is the reinscription of the decision in the realm of comprehension which allows the subject to assume responsibility.

In contrast to a traditional notion of subjective agency, a subjectivity which, in Derrida’s understanding, would be closed in on itself and thus incapable of responsibility, ‘a subject to whom nothing can happen, not even the singular event for which he believes to have taken and kept the initiative’, Derrida posits the notion of the decision as signifying ‘in me the other who decides and rends’.21

The passive decision, condition of the event, is always in me, structurally, another event, a rending decision as the decision of the other. Of the absolute other in me, the other as the absolute that decides on me in me. Absolutely singular in principle, according to its most traditional concept, the decision is not only always exceptional, it makes an exception for/of me. In me. I decide, I make up my mind in all sovereignty – this would mean: the other than myself, the me as other and other than myself, he makes or I make an exception of the same. This normal exception, the supposed norm of all decision, exonerates from no responsibility. Responsible for myself before the other, I am first of all and also responsible for the other before the other.22

We might understand Derrida here as indicating that there is that in the subject which is irrecuperable to any sense of self-identity, that which would escape the ‘monadology’ of the ego; the subject, that is, as inadequate to itself. The decision reduced to a moment of self-sufficiency of the subject would not be a decision in the traditional sense at all but would rather be contained as a moment of calculation, inextricable from the ‘calculable permanence (which would) make every decision an accident which leaves the subject unchanged and indifferent‘.23 It is in contrast to this that the notion of the other’s decision in me figures as the impossibility of self-identity, the rupture in the subject which can neither be contained nor recuperated. It is precisely from such a notion that Derrida adduces the possibility of responsibility.

Responsibility cannot remain responsibility when it is immersed in the pre-given. If subjectivity is closed upon itself, then responsibility cannot lie with the subject. The weight of the occurrence would rather remain with that system or field of understanding of which the calculation would be a moment. It is in response to the other, to ‘the other in me’ that responsibility becomes a possibility precisely because such a response cannot be contained within a pre-given system of knowledge.

To give in the name of, to give to the name of, the other is what frees responsibility from knowledge – that is, what brings responsibility unto itself, if there ever is such a thing.24

This is not, for Derrida, to separate responsibility in any absolute sense from knowledge, it is not to say that responsibility has nothing to do with knowledge. It is rather to point to the fact that, in the decision, as an ethical possibility, responsibility is impossible if the decision is reduced without remainder to knowledge.

…one must certainly know, one must know it, knowledge is necessary if one is to assume responsibility, but the decisive or deciding moment of responsibility supposes a leap by which an act takes off, ceasing in that instant to follow the consequence of what is – that is, of that which can be determined by science or consciousness – and thereby frees itself (this is what is called freedom), by the act of its act, of what is therefore heterogeneous to it, that is, knowledge.

In sum, a decision is unconscious.25

calum on Ž the act part 1

Neill, Calum. “An Idiotic Act: On the Non-Example of Antigone.” The Letter , 34, 2005, 1-28.

J. Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Ed. J.A. Miller. Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960. Trans. D. Porter. London, Routledge, (1986) 1992.
S. Žižek. Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? London, Verso, 2001.
J. Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Ed. J.A. Miller. Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Trans. A. Sheridan. London, Penguin, (1973) 1977.
J. Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Ed. J.A. Miller. Book II. The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-55. Trans. S. Tomaselli., New York, Norton, (1978) 1988.
J. Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Ed. J.A. Miller. Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960. Trans. D. Porter. 1992. London, Routledge, 1986,

The term ‘act’, in Lacanian theory, is differentiated from the sense of “mere behaviour” by the location and persistence of desire. This is to say that the act is necessarily a subjective undertaking and that it can be understood to be coterminous with the assumption of subjectivity and the responsibility entailed in such an assumption,the Freudian Wo Es war, soll Ich werden.

Where behaviour would describe the response to needs, for example, the act is defined by the impetus of desire. Desire makes the subject act and as such the weight of responsibility for the act committed lies with the subject. Desire cannot be treated as a given which would determine the subject’s act without the subject’s volition. The very subjectivity which would be taken to act cannot be described without the manifestation of desire which would allow its constitution. But such desire must always be particular to the subject; it is the subject’s desire. The act would be the moment of subjective assumption in which the desire which is in one is manifest and thus brought into existence. The act in this sense should be understood to be coterminous with the emergence of desire; the act is desire made manifest. It is in this sense that the Lacanian act is always, necessarily, idiotic, in the etymological sense, wherein idios would designate ‘one’s own’.

There is in the act, says Lacan, always ‘an element of structure, by the fact of concerning a real that is not self-evidently caught up in it’. This would appear to correspond to the structure we encounter in Antigone. The laws of the gods ‘speak’ from beyond, that is, on the side of the Real. Which is, of course, to say they do not in fact speak at all. They are manifest in Antigone and given expression through her act in such a way that ‘it isn’t a question of recognising something which would be entirely given, ready to be coapted’. In giving voice to the law of the gods, Antigone should be understood to have created and brought forth ‘a new presence in the world’. She should, that is, be understood to have named her desire and, moreover, assumed herself as the cause of this desire.

For Žižek, Antigone functions as the ethical example par excellence insofar as she is understood to ‘exemplify the unconditional fidelity to the Otherness of the Thing that disrupts the entire social edifice’.

Capitalising the ‘O’ of ‘Other’ in the ‘Otherness of the Thing’, Žižek can be understood to be emphasising the Thing, das Ding, as it relates to the field of the Symbolic. That is to say, das Ding as it would represent the limits of the Symbolic field, das Ding as indicative of the insistence of the lack in the Other as it is experienced by the subject. It is, as such, that das Ding would be understood as (a name for) that which would disrupt ‘the entire social edifice’.

The act, for Žižek, describes the moment of suspension of the Symbolic, the recognition of the limits of the Symbolic. In such a moment of recognition it is not that the Other would somehow be suspended to be subsequently resolved as a moment of a dialectic or integrated into a subsequent schemata. The act, for Žižek, is not a moment of Aufhebung.

Rather, in the Žižekian act, one would assume the very location of the lack which persists in the Other:“it is not so much that, in the act, I ‘sublate’/‘integrate’ the Other; it is rather that, in the act, I directly ‘am’ the Other-Thing.”

For Žižek, the ethical import of the act, (and the act is for Žižek the very definition of the ethical moment), is separated from any notion of responsibility for or towards the other. His is not an ethics of responsibility but, rather, his understanding of ethics is as the momentary and, in the moment, absolute suspension of the Symbolic order. The ethical act, for Žižek, is neither a response to the other nor a response to the Other.

The (ethical) act proper is precisely neither a response to the compassionate plea of my neighbourly semblant (the stuff of sentimental humanism), nor a response to the unfathomable Other’s call.11

Žižek contrasts this notion of the ‘ethical act’ as assumption of the lack in the Other, as the assumption of the location of das Ding, with the Derridean notion of ethics as decision. A notion described by Critchley as follows:

the political decision is made ex nihilo, and is not deduced or read off from a pre-given conception of justice or the moral law, as in Habermas, say, and yet it is not arbitrary. It is the demand provoked by the other’s decision in me that calls forth political invention, that provokes me into inventing a norm and taking a decision. The singularity of the context in which the demand arises provokes an act of invention whose criterion is universal.

Žižek perceives in this passage, and by extension, in the Derridean original, ‘two levels of the decision’.13 It is with this bifurcation of the decision that Žižek takes issue. The decision, understood as the act, would, for Žižek, have to be such that the two moments of decision he perceives in Derrida’s and Critchley’s accounts would coincide. Here, Antigone is offered as the paramount example.11

Is it not, rather, that her decision (to insist unconditionally on a proper funeral for her brother) is precisely an absolute decision in which the two dimensions of decision overlap?14

Žižek’s point here is that separating the decision into two moments, into, that is, the ‘decision to decide’ and ‘a concrete actual intervention’, is to render the decision or the act as non-absolute. That is, it is to render the act as less than an act.

The act, for Žižek, as we have seen, is situated in the moment of suspension of the Other, what he terms directly ‘being’ the ‘Other-Thing’, the assumption by the subject of the irrecuperable rent in the social edifice.

To incorporate as a necessary aspect of the act its reinscription in the Symbolic is, for Žižek, to miss the radicality of the act.

The question which insists here is that, in divorcing the act from any reinscription in the symbolic, is not one necessarily, from a Lacanian perspective at least, rendering the act as the impossibility of the ethical?

That is to say, Žižek’s deployment of the ‘act’ appears closer to what Lacan designates as passage à l’acte, an action in which one takes flight from the Other, an action which would properly entail the, albeit momentary, dissolution of the subject and consequent impossibility of the ethical.

Phrased otherwise, the act so divorced from its reinscription is not party to a judgement which, in Lacan’s understanding, would define the ethical;

an ethics essentially consists in a judgement of our actions, with the proviso that it is only significant if the action implied by it also contains within it, or is supposed to contain, a judgement, even if it is only implicit. The presence of judgement in both sides is essential to the structure.

ethical law

Schroeder, Jeanne L. The Four Lacanian Discourses or Turning Law Inside-Out. New York: Routledge-Cavendish, 2008.

As Alain Badiou insists, Lacanian ethics is a rejection of a Levinasian theory of the other. Levinas insists that we respect the absolute otherness of the other that the I of the subject can never fathom. But to do so, is precisely to treat the other as a transcendental thing – a noumenon. It is to assume that the other exists. To a Lacanian this is mystification. It is telling that Levinas insists that we are ethically called on to recognize the other’s face, and have a face-to-face conversation with the other. From a Lacanian perspective, Levinas is completely taken in by the feminine masquerade and thinks that a true face exists beneath the other’s opaque mask! He thinks that God exists. As such, Levinas is guilty of idolatry. 164

Lacan is revealed as the anti-Levinas. Justice requires not that we respect the ineffable otherness of the Other because to do so is to objectify the Other, and reduce her to what Badiou calls suffering animality.

As Badiou insists, otherness, diversity, and multiplicity are mere empirical facts that have no moral purchase. Otherness understood this way merely exists – it is the status of a thing. In contrast, justice insists on a notion of a radical equality that goes beyond mere empiricism. Consequently, Badiou, despite his avowed atheism, states that our ethical duty to other humans does not spring from our sympathy for their empirical suffering (animality), but from our recognition of their potential for ‘immortality.’ Political equality requires that we decide to recognize the sameness – our shared capacity for immortality—in the other despite her empirical otherness. This takes an act. 167

Lacan insists that the subject cannot hold the Other apart as Levinas would want us to, precisely because the desire of the subject is the desire of the Other.

Indeed, to proclaim the Other to be other consists in nothing but the subject’s attempt to export her internal split into the Other, thereby abjecting him. In other words, the subject is in the impossible situation of having to both engage the Other while keeping her distance. The Other is extimate, simultaneously external and internal to the barred subject. 167

To recapitulate, Kantian morality is defined by the formal demands of universality imposed by the categorical imperative. Therefore, it has no pre-existing content. The concept of good relates to substantive content – pathology. Morality consists of adopting maxims for action that are consistent with right regardless of the consequences. Kant goes so far as to posit that doing an act that is consistent with right because one desires to achieve a good result is smeared with pathology and, therefore, is not purely moral – in Christian terms it is sinful.

As we say, a problem facing Kant is that if the criterion for ethical law is purely formal, how can we recognize the ethical law and achieve right? More importantly, even if our souls were noumenal, as empirical human beings each of us is a phenomenon defined by her pathological content. Moreover it is impossible for any human being to fully know her own intentions – in Kant’s words, “The depths of the human heart are unfathomable.” Consequently, it is not merely that we can’t identify what right might be, we can never know whether we are acting rightfully in accordance with the ethical law which is real.

Nevertheless, Kant also understands that it is precisely this impossibility to know the ethical law that makes the subject an ethical creature capable of making ethical decisions. This trauma is the condition of human freedom. If we know what we had to do, we would not be free – w would not be making choices so we would have no moral responsibility for our acts. If we could see the mind of God we would become automatons. Our capacity for sin creates the possibility of holiness.

Lacan considers Kant the father of psychoanalysis. The problem with psychoanalytic ethics is precisely that we are duty bound to be true to our desire. Our desire is the desire of the Other, but the Other never answers our question, “What do you want from me?” We can never see the mind of God. Consequently we are forced to choose what to do. Although the choice is forced on us, it is radically free. It is the freedom of choice that makes the choice a moral act. And it is the fact that the act is our choice that makes it our own and imposes ethical responsibility if we choose wrongly. As Badiou says, ethics is a wager on which we must bet everything.

The ethical law constitutes a trauma. It is the repressed real to which we have no direct access, but which structures our lives. We are in a constant state of anxiety because we are duty bound to obey an ethical law we can never know. Indeed, as Kant insists, the only thing we can know is that we are always at least partially wrong and sinning against the ethical law.

We have seen that master’s and university’s discourses that characterize most modern jurisprudence reflect a profound fear of freedom. The master claims that we are obligated to obey the law merely because it is law, and not because we decide that it deserves to be obeyed. Positive laws are propsed precisely to limit the freedom of the subjects who are subjected to the law.

Being goal driven, the university’s discourse of law-and-economics seeks predictability. Consequently, it defines “rationality” in terms of predictable ends-means reasoning and seeks to squelch spontaneity. Classic law-and-economics at least pays lip-service to freedom in that it claims to merely respect the aggregate pre-existing goals of its members. It is just that sometimes we need to use the law to help—i.e. force—people to act rationally and choose the most appropriate means of achieving these ends. But note that insofar as the economist believes that the subject’s goals are pre-existing and are incapable of being rationally chosen, there is no Kantian freedom in this system at all.

From a Lacanian perspective, the fear of freedom is perfectly understandable. Freedom is terrifying. It is the abyss of the real where there are no answers. Infancy itself is a form of psychoanalysis in that the child learns how to integrate the facts of his life into the symbolic.

Positive law is in the realm of the symbolic. By adopting positive law we try to integrate the facts of our ethical life into the symbolic order. We adopt positive law precisely in an attempt to relieve us from the impossible demands of ethical law – to free us from our freedom. The symbolic is only created by the repression of the real that is its limit. Positive law is structured around a founding repression of not merely content, generally, but ethical law, specifically. 168-169

excremental remainder ethical monster

Kotsko, Adam. “Žižek and the Excremental Body of Christ” Presentation at the American Academy of Religion 2009 Conference

The basic structure of Žižek’s interpretation of Christianity is provided by Hegel, who elaborates a theology of the “death of God” (which was later taken up by American theologians such as Thomas Altizer, whom Žižek discovered after developing his own Hegelian reading of Christianity). Hegel contends that the three persons of the Trinity do not represent three coeternal realities, but rather three decisive and irreversible turning points in the life of God:

the Father empties out the entirety of his divinity into the Son, and by dying the Son then empties out that divinity into the Holy Spirit, which is understood as a new form of social bond.

Coming at this basic structure from a Lacanian perspective and specifically from his use of Lacan to found a contemporary form of ideology critique, Žižek argues that Christ represents a unique form of “master signifier.” Normally “master signifiers” are tautologous authorities whose self-assertion allows some form of symbolic order or ideological structure to crystallize — for instance, in modern society money serves as the foundation of our entire system of values, but when you ask what money is worth, you can only answer that it’s worth… money.

Money is valuable because it’s valuable. The model of this kind of “master signifier” is of course God, whose authority ultimately stems from the fact that he is God. Žižek claims, however, that the founding myth of Christianity provides us with a weird kind of self-effacing or self-denying master signifier — a God who not only dies (many gods have died throughout history, only to be replaced), but who himself becomes an atheist.

In Žižek’s reading, Christ’s cry of dereliction on the cross—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” — presents us with an image of a God who doesn’t believe in himself.

Elevating Christ to the level of a “master signifier” thus means effectively giving up on “master signifiers,” producing a whole new form of social bond — one that is outside of ideology.

As I argue in Žižek and Theology, this elaboration of a “death of God” theology as a path to a non-ideological social bond is the end result of a long and difficult development in Žižek’s political thought, because—to put it bluntly — getting rid of master signifiers is difficult.

It’s easy enough to overthrow any given master signifier, but the human tendency to reestablish them seems irresistible — and before his foray into theology, Žižek seemed to be essentially advocating revolution for its own sake, as a kind of moment of pure authenticity and truth, despite the fact that every revolution will necessarily be a matter of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

The reason for this is that “master signifiers” are a way of organizing our enjoyment, keeping the suffocating force of jouissance sufficiently at bay to give us breathing room, while nonetheless giving us access to occasional moments of indulgence.

A key aspect of this is Žižek’s view that every form of law founded in a “master signifier” includes its own “inherent transgression”— that is, it depends on people occasionally feeling like they not only have permission to break the rules but are actively exhorted to do so, so that they have a way to let off steam.

A familiar example of this is the Jim Crow order in the US — in addition to the official laws segregating blacks and whites, the order was characterized by extra-legal attacks such as lynch mobs.

Žižek would argue that these weren’t unfortunate outbursts but were an integral part of the Jim Crow order, allowing whites to “let off steam” by forcibly asserting their dominance while maintaining the public fiction that segregation was a harmonious system with everyone in their natural place.

Inspired by Alain Badiou’s work on St. Paul, Žižek turns to the origins of Christianity as a way of thinking through what it might mean to have a revolution that would be a durable achievement rather than a flash of inspiration between two ideological regimes. His main critique of Badiou is that Badiou one-sidedly emphasizes the resurrection over the cross — in Lutheran terms, Badiou is a theologian of glory rather than a theologian of the cross.

Žižek believes that any new order (represented by the resurrection) must be preceded by a break with the old (represented by the cross) — some act of negation, some negative gesture separating oneself from the reigning master signifier. But again, this is very difficult to achieve.

Not only does the ideological order actively rely on its own violation through the “inherent transgression,” but Žižek had also argued extensively that “cynical distance” from ideology—the sense that “no one really believes this stuff”—is actually a built-in feature of all ideologies. Just “going through the motions” without really believing it isn’t a way of escaping ideology, but rather the most powerful form of submitting to ideology.

If the seemingly most obvious ways to negate ideology are built-in features of ideology already, then where can one turn? In The Puppet and the Dwarf, which represents his most fully realized account of Christian origins, Žižek makes what is, in my view, one of his most interesting moves—he claims that Judaism represents a kind of inherently negative space, a culture that is “unplugged” from the enjoyment provided by the surrounding pagan ideology, so that the logic of the “inherent transgression” and of “cynical distance” alike don’t apply.

Contradicting both Badiou and centuries of Christian interpreters, Žižek thus argues that the point of Pauline Christianity wasn’t to escape from the Jewish law, but to find some way to induct Gentiles into this “unplugged” Jewish stance.

Historically, of course, Christianity wound up betraying its Jewish roots and became an ideological order like any other, so that perhaps Žižek’s attempt to find a durable model that would be something other than the space between two ideologies has failed — yet he believes that the Pauline communities built on engrafting Gentiles into the promises of Judaism provide at least a way of thinking through what a durable non-ideological social bond might look like.

II.

So where does the Body of Christ fit into all this? As I’ve said, he is uninterested in the idea of the Christian community or church as the “Body of Christ,” and this is not only because he has opted to refer to that social bond as the “Holy Spirit”—in addition to his general distaste for anything as “harmonious” or “organic” as a body metaphor would imply, Žižek also has no interest whatsoever in ecclesiology or in the institutional church as such, believing it to be a betrayal of Christianity’s original revolutionary core. Furthermore, Žižek has never, to my knowledge, addressed the sacraments in any serious way, and so the sacramental Body of Christ in the Eucharist is not on his radar.

What remains, though, is the literal, physical body of Jesus, which Žižek basically only discusses in the context of the crucifixion. Like a medieval mystic, Žižek is fixated on Christ’s weakness and suffering, his pathetic and pitiable appearance—the absolute disjuncture between this disgraced and repulsive dying body and the divine nature he embodies. More than that, he claims, in something like an orthodox fashion, that Christ embodies the truth of humanity, the truth that, in Luther’s words, “we are the shit that fell out of God’s anus.” Drawing on this Lutheran inheritance, Žižek defines Christianity as providing a vision of a God who “freely identified himself with his own shit” (Parallax View, 187).

Now this focus on excrement is not entirely new for Žižek, who has always had a fixation of sorts on whatever is disgusting, repulsive, or otherwise off-putting. In fact, one of the key concepts he takes from Lacan, objet petit a, which represents the ever-elusive object and cause of desire, frequently bears the name of the “excremental remainder,” referring to that little “something” that one has to give up in order to join the social order. What Žižek calls Luther’s “excremental anti-humanism,” then, does not simply lead to humanity wallowing in its own self-disgust.

Rather, it leads to humanity wallowing in its own enjoyment, or as Žižek says, to the emergence of enjoyment as a direct political factor. For Žižek all ideological orders represent a way of organizing enjoyment or jouissance, of keeping it at a distance while allowing periodic indulgence, but what Luther’s position opens up is the possibility of a kind of short-circuit, where jouissance is not just a silently presupposed basis of the political order but instead a conscious emphasis and goal.

The end result is what Žižek characterizes as the contemporary “superego injunction to enjoy” — the perverse situation where authorities are directly exhorting people to enjoy. The most obvious manifestation of this tendency was perhaps George W. Bush’s injunction that people go shopping in response to 9/11, but Žižek believes this basic attitude is absolutely pervasive.

Increasingly, Žižek claims, one feels guilty not for having sex, but for not having enough sex — and even the asceticism of dieting and exercise is geared toward the hedonistic ends of attractiveness and longer lifespan.

Increasingly, contemporary Western subjects, or at least contemporary middle and upper class Western subjects, directly identify with their excremental remainder, with objet petit a — with the end result of a kind of autistic compulsion to enjoy, an obligatory enjoyment that one begins to suspect is not finally all that enjoyable.

The answer to this situation, for cultural conservatives and particularly for conservative Catholics such as Žižek’s dialogue partners G. K. Chesterton and John Milbank, is to reimpose some version of traditional values in order to save enjoyment from itself. For Žižek, however, such a solution is both dishonest and self-undermining, or in other words, perverse — hence the subtitle of The Puppet and the Dwarf:The Perverse Core of Christianity, which refers to Actual Existing Christianity and not to its original, supposedly revolutionary form.

His solution is not to disavow enjoyment, but rather to focus on the enjoyment of the other, to form a community centered on the care for the concrete suffering and enjoying others one happens to encounter. This, in his view, is Christian love, a love he characterizes as “violent” in that it cuts beneath the ideological identity markers of the other and attends directly to the excremental remainder underneath it all.

Though this notion of an authentically Christian community is based in an adaptation of one of the later Lacan’s more opaque concepts, the “discourse of the analyst,” I believe that the clearest example of what he’s talking about can be found in his final contribution to The Monstrosity of Christ. There he discusses Agota Kristof’s novel The Notebook, which for him is “the best literary expression” of an ethical stance that goes beyond the sentimentality of moralism and instead installs “a cold, cruel distance toward what one is doing.”

The novel follows two twin brothers who are “utterly immoral… yet they stand for authentic ethical naivety at its purest.” Žižek gives two examples. In one, they meet a starving man who asks for help and get him everything he asks for, while claiming that they helped him solely because he needed help, not out of any desire to be kind. In another, they urinate on a German officer with whom they find themselves sharing a bed, at his request.

Žižek remarks, “If ever there was a Christian ethical stance, this is it: no matter how weird their neighbor’s demands, the twins naively try to meet them.”

(Interestingly, this ethical stance of giving people what they ask for in the most literal way corresponds with one of Žižek’s earliest political prescriptions for dealing with the cynical distance that is inherent to ideology—instead of resisting the demands of ideology, one should take them as literally as possible, because that’s the one response ideology isn’t prepared for.) Žižek commends the twins’ amoral ethics as follows:

This is where I stand—how I would love to be: an ethical monster without empathy, doing what is to be done in a weird coincidence of blind spontaneity and reflexive distance, helping others while avoiding their disgusting proximity. With more people like this, the world would be a pleasant place in which sentimentality would be replaced by a cold and cruel passion. Monstrosity of Christ 303

Such is Žižek’s understanding of Christian ethics, a position I am sure will not be included in any Christian ethics courses any time soon.

III.

I would like to conclude this presentation by connecting Žižek’s work to liberation theology—not through the more obvious path of the reliance of both on the Marxist tradition, but rather precisely through Žižek’s notion of the Body of Christ as a kind of “excremental remainder.” My initial point of contact here might seem superficial initially, but I believe it will prove surprisingly revealing. In his essay “Extra pauperes nulla salus,” or “No salvation outside the poor,” Jon Sobrino begins with a quotation from his fallen comrade Ignacio Ellacuría, who was among the members of Sobrino’s Jesuit community who were massacred by a Salvadoran death squad in 1989 while Sobrino happened to be out of the country:

What on another occasion I called copro-historical analysis, that is, the study of the feces of our civilization, seems to reveal that this civilization is gravely ill and that, in order to avoid a dreadful and fatal outcome, it is necessary to change it from within itself.

Sobrino agrees, claiming that the “excrement” or waste product of capitalist civilization, in the form of massive impoverishment in the Third World, demonstrates that it is profoundly sick. Reciting the massive imbalances in global priorities, for instance the inconceivable sums spent on arms at the same time as people are starving daily, Sobrino concludes that “we are dealing with a metaphysical obscenity” and that “God is furious” (39). That is of course because for Sobrino and for all liberation theologians, God has identified decisively with this excremental remainder of the poor. The parallel here with Žižek’s “God who freely identifies with his own shit” is inexact—most notably because liberation theologians do not believe God is the author of the process that produces the poor as an excremental remainder — but also compelling, insofar as Žižek has written a great deal recently on the obscene inequalities that characterize the contemporary world and has even put forth urban slum dwellers in the Third World as a contemporary parallel to the “unplugged” stance he detects in first-century Judaism.

In addition, Žižek’s account of “Christian love” as naively meeting people’s needs simply because they ask resonates profoundly with the implied premise of Sobrino’s harsh and furious text: people need to eat!

Regardless of whether they’re deserving, whether giving them food would produce bad economic incentives, etc., etc., people need to eat. The same could obviously be said for all basic needs—for example, regardless of whether it undermines someone’s ability to put big numbers in quarterly reports, people who have AIDS need medicine!

A little more literalism and naïveté would certainly help in our present situation. In addition, simply listening to what people are asking for would be a huge improvement over the patronizing tutelage of NGOs and foreign aid, which Sobrino characterizes as actively contributing to the dehumanization of the already dehumanized people they serve, insofar as it deprives them of agency.

The principle here is basically Jesus’s: sell all you have and give to the poor. The focus here isn’t on liquidating your holdings so that you can enjoy the moral righteousness of poverty, but of putting your goods at the disposal of the poor—or, as Jesus says in another setting, of using your dishonest wealth to make friends.

The really difficult question between Žižek and liberation theology, however, is what the end state looks like. For Sobrino as for most liberation theologians, the basic stance seems to be humanist in the broad sense—a society that respects human dignity, that looks to the intrinsic worth of every individual. Yet Žižek remains resolutely anti-humanist and suspicious of the language of human rights. And while Sobrino can look forward to a correction of civilization’s digestive system such that it will stop producing the poor as excrement, Žižek revels in the disgusting and repellant aspect of the “excremental remainder.”

When the case is stated in this way, it seems difficult to favor Žižek over Sobrino, yet I wonder if Žižek is getting at an important truth here—namely that the end state is something that we, blinkered as we are by the ideology of our present sick civilization, simply cannot recognize as beautiful or desirable, that the change we need is so profound that it will change our very concept of what it means to be human.

In any case, both Žižek and Sobrino agree that what it means to be human now entails the production of a massive and appalling waste product—and that what it means to be faithful to the message of Christ is to freely identify with that waste product.

antigone

Belsey, Catherine. Culture and the Real : Theorizing Cultural Criticism.

Zeuxis wanted to look behind the veil of the paint that constituted his rival’s picture. The psychoanalytic subject longs to look behind the veil of the signifier, but what it seeks there is not so much the forgotten, repressed real, not that part of itself, or its continuity with the world, cut off by the symbolic and lost. Instead, it looks for the object and cause of its own desire, an identifiable something that would fill the gap created by the loss of the real. This object that motivates and perpetuates desire took on increasing importance for Lacan. In Seminar 7 in 1959– 60, he named it the Thing (das Ding); later, the Thing disappeared, to be remodelled as the objet a. 45

We need to go back a bit. For much of his life Freud insisted that the unconscious motor force of all human life was sexual. But during and after the First World War, his work begins to demonstrate a mounting conviction that there must be another drive that presses towards death. How else to account for the sustained carnage of that extraordinary and unheralded episode of history? Beyond the Pleasure Principle, published in 1920, begins by proposing an antithesis between the life-affirming sexual drive towards pleasure and, in contrast, the death drive that seeks inertia for the organism, but may equally be projected outwards by the subject as aggression against others. As Freud’s argument here unfolds, however, the two principles refuse to stay apart. On the one hand, there often seems to be an element of aggression in the sexual act; on the other, the pleasure principle too seeks release from tension, and so shares the aim of the death drive. Do they, then, support rather than oppose each other? Jacques Derrida has brilliantly deconstructed the opposition between the two (1987a), in this instance ably supported by Freud himself, who concluded his book with disarming honesty by admitting that he was not satisfied with a theory that remained purely speculative. 45

Beginning where Freud had left off, but going back to take account of a passage from ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’, published five years earlier (Freud 1984: 136– 8), Lacan condensed the two drives into one. His rereading of Freud acknowledges only one drive, and it is both life-giving and deadly. Seminar 7 attends primarily to the quest for pleasure, which Lacan locates on the side of the signifier. Love is allied with pleasure, a form of sublimation, separable from desire itself. But Lacan also brings pleasure together with death here in his account of tragedy. Where Freud roots his theory in the story of Oedipus, Lacan (as a child of Freud?), defies his phallocentric reputation and takes as his heroic protagonist Antigone, daughter of Oedipus and offspring, therefore, of an incestuous marriage. On the basis of the organic bond with her brother, Antigone is impelled to bury him against Creon’s law, and to confront death as the inevitable punishment for her deed. Lacan sees Antigone as heroic because, like Marvell’s lovers, she assumes her fate, her Até, ‘atrocious’ though it is. For Lacan, she represents human sovereignty in the face of death: 46

“Antigone appears as autonomos, as a pure and simple relationship of the human being to that of which he miraculously happens to be the bearer, namely, the signifying cut that confers on him the indomitable power of being what he is in the face of everything that may oppose him.” (1992: 282)

Rather than languish as the victims of incompleteness that the signifier makes us, we are enabled by the same signifier to desire not to remain at its mercy. We can, in other words, want not to be. … Antigone, in Lacan’s account, just as defiantly precipitates her own death. It is because she loves her brother that she ‘pushes to the limit the realization of something that might be called the pure and simple desire of death as such. She incarnates that desire’ (1992: 282).

Lacan’s death drive bears very little resemblance to Freud’s, which depends on the thesis that the organism prefers stasis, or inertia. 46 We do not seek annihilation, Lacan says, for the sake of restoring equilibrium. But he does draw on Freud’s proposal that the organism is driven to die at its own time and in its own way (Freud 1984: 311– 12). In Lacan the death drive operates in the speaking being, at the level of the signifier, and seeks what he calls ‘the second death’.

This is not just physical extinction (the first death), which might take place at any time, by accident. Instead, the second death entails the full recognition of what we are, which is to say, of course, what we are not: not complete, not knowing, not immortal. The tragic hero acts on this understanding, assumes the destiny of a being-for-death and, when the time comes, willingly accedes to the state of non-being that is the outcome of the human condition.

At this stage of Lacan’s work the object of the drive is identified as the Thing. An archaic, maternal, forbidden and impossible object of desire, the Thing is ‘both living and dead’ (1992: 300), at once life-giving and deadly. Lacan’s name for it is partly ironic, since no such object exists in the real; at the same time, there is the suggestion of a pun in French on la Chose and the cause of desire that we attribute to the Thing. The Thing is ‘that which in the real, the primordial real, I will say, suffers from the signifier’ and ‘presents itself’ to the analyst in the gap produced by the signifying cut (1992: 118). Constructed retroactively to occupy the space of pure loss that is left by the erasure of the real, the Thing marks the place where the real was, constitutes itself as filling the emptiness that resides there for the speaking being. Subsequently the object of the drive is renamed by the even more evasive term, objet a, and located more firmly at the level of demand. Lacan also calls it the petit a, to differentiate the little ‘a’ from the Autre, the big Other, which is language itself. Little Ernst’s wooden reel offers an example of the objet a.

Loizidou norms

Loizidou, Elena. Judith Butler: Ethics, Law, Politics. New York: Routledge Cavendish, 2007.

Hegel, Lacan, Irigaray: Antigone for them is not a political figure, one whose defiant speech has political implication but rather … one who articulates a pre-political opposition to politics representing kinship as the sphere that conditions the possibility of politics without ever entering into it” (81-81 Loizidou citing JB in Antigone’s Claim 3)

Butler’s subject is one that comes into being through norms and language that pre-exist it. Though, let’s not forget that the subject becomes agentic through its resistance to these norms. This very constellation of the subject puts the subject within the sphere of the public. Language or norms are public. For Butler, in this sense there is no pre-political or private, our coming into the world establishes us as public and therefore political figures. 83

Let’s not forget that Antigone thought that her life was worthless if she was unable to provide her brother with the appropriate burial rites. Antigone, who comes into being through the norms that she does not possess, through a language that is not her own, a human walking towards death, offers, as Butler writes, a catachrestic reading of the human, in the sense that she has been stolen of her humanity. however, in re-appropriating and risking the truth, she turns her inhumanity, her zoe into a possibility for the future.

When Heidegger criticizes metaphysical philosophers for forgetting, in their attempt to find what it means to be human and their preoccupation with the meaning of human, he points out that the human is thrown into the world, is ek-static and through ek-stasy moves towards a future of death. … (For Butler) The human is thrown into the world, it comes into the world through language norms that are represented as culturally intelligible, but at the same time this human is always inhuman, it always resists or deliberates these norms that bring it into being.85

If we are to rethink how we can have livable and viable lives, despite how different and irreconcilable each life is to each other, we need to think of the subject within the parameters that Butler proposes: a subject that deliberates before it acts in the face of absolute difference and moves towards the Other despite this difference. 85

Loizidou ethics antigone

Loizidou, Elena. Judith Butler: Ethics, Law, Politics. New York: Routledge Cavendish, 2007.

a de-struktion of the way philosophy, since Plato, constituted the subject, Levinas’s critique of western metaphysics offered us an important lesson. We have learned that if we are not to regress into morality, if we are to have an ethical relationship with the Other, we are required to establish ethics as a first philosophy.

The requires a reconception of how we understand ourselves. It necessitates the deconstruction of the ego or knowing self when the Other, the one that is external to me, calls upon me. 72

In some respects, the call for this type of ethics could also be a description of moments when my ego, my self-knowledge, is reconstituted via the call of the Other, where I fail to reduce the Other to myself. … It becomes paramount that if we talk of ethics, bereft of moralisation, we need to think of the subject as, unreflexive, not-knowing, a surprise, non-identical and particular. As is by now apparent, Levinas’s critique of western metaphysical philosophy could be comfortably directed towards Descartes and Kant.

quoting Antigone

I’d never have taken this ordeal upon myself, never defied our people’s will. What law, you ask, do I satisfy with what I say? A husband dead, there might have been another. A child by another too, if I had lost the first. But mother and father both lost in the halls of Death, no brother could ever spring to light again. (Robert Fagles Trans.)

burying her brother … was done in honour or celebration of the particularity of her brother. Her brother, unlike a child or a husband, is irreplaceable, especially since both her parents are dead. She stresses that she would not have acted the same in other circumstances, turning her act into a singular act. Ethical subjects — subjects that act responsibly … are the ones that celebrate the singularity of the other, without reducing the other to the universal and the laws that govern this universality. It is not difficult to see how Antigone is made into an ethical heroine, given this. 81

Stavrakakis Lacan and the Political pt 4

Sinthome

an identification with the symptom, a recognition in the real of our symptom of the only support of our being (Stav citing Žižek 1989) 133

Wo es war soll Ich werden: the subject must identify with the place where the syumptom already was: ‘In its pathological particularity [it] … must recognise the element which gives consistency to [its] being’ (Žižek 1989) 133

By saying ‘We are all Jews’, ‘We all live in Chernobyl!’ or ‘We are all boat people!’ — … we elevate the symptom, the excluded truth of the social field (which has been stigmatised as an alien particularity) to the place of the universal — to the point of our common identification which was up to now, sustained by its exclusion or elimination. The same happens when we say ‘We are all gypsies!’ — … What is promoted here is an attitude consistent with identifying with the symptom of the social and traversing social fantasy.

It is only by accepting such an impossible representation, by making this declaration of impossibility, that it is possible to ‘represent’ the impossible or rather to identify with the impossibility of its representation. Identification with the symptom is thus related to the traversing of the fantasy. Going through fantasy entails the realisation of the lack or inconsistency in the Other which is masked by fantasy, the separation between objet petit a and the Other, a separation which is not only ethically sound but also ‘liberating’ for our political imagination. 134

What is clearly at stake here is the possibility of enacting symbolic gestures that institutionalise social lack, that is to say incorporate the ethical recognition of the impossibility of social closure.

Critique of Judith Butler, Will Connolly, Simon Critchley

Critchley’s Levinaisan ethics of the Other [and probably Butler’ s too]. ‘The community remains an open community in so far as it is based on the recognition of difference, of the difference of the Other’ (citing Critchley 1992).

The problem with such an analysis is that it presupposes the Other as a unifed totality or, even if this is not always the case, it seems to be offering a positive point of identification remaining thus within the limits of traditional ethical strategies or, in any case, not undermining them in a radical way. What has to be highlighted is that it is precisely this relation — the identification with the Other — that attempts to bring closure to the social.

In order to have a non-totalisable relation to the Other we must relate — identify — with the lack in the Other and not with the Other per se. This is the radical innovation of Lacanian ethics. And this is what democracy needs today. 139

subject*

social change is irremediably fantasmatic (206)

The excess (*) attending the subject, to repeat, is therefore both the medium of its connection to other subjects and the obstacle to that connection. This dual function comprises the “relation of nonrelation” that undergirds the social field, a relation predicated on an obstacle to relationality.

… because the Möbius subject encompasses both its symbolic properties (elements of the set) and its formal properties (set-ness, empty set), de-personalization doesn’t rid the subject of its ontic properties but it sets them off, revealing them as contingent (rather than necessary) bearers of meaning. By making visible the relation of nonrelation through symbolic divestiture the subject situates itself as the source of the non-orientability of the social field, without however being able to account for its own effects within that field in any predictive or comprehensive sense.

In this way, the subject takes ethical responsibility for its parallax oscillation, exposing the excess that sticks to itself (as if it were being seen from the perspective of others) and establishing distance from it, which is a prerequisite to tolerating it nondefensively (207).

As far as I can see, the suspension of the defense against excess — or the neutralization of the more destructive defenses — is the only way that the subject’s transformation of its relation to its own jouissance can affect others. This suspension means that the subject accepts the relation of nonrelation, giving up its fruitless but often destructive efforts to locate the excess outside itself or to eradicate it. By refusing to defend itself (or by refusing to deploy destructive defenses such as narcissism, aggression, projection, and scapegoating), the subject decreases its contribution to the affective storm in a social field that circulates excess like a hot potato. The potentiation of affect decreases, however temporarily, when the subject absorbs some of the affective energy without releasing it back in a destructive form (207).

… in general the absorption of affect by one member of the group provides an opening for others to change their own affective posture.

In any case, no matter what the specific defense aroused, the encounter with the neosubject will make apparent the dominant identifications and defenses of others. This display of the dominant tendencies in a particular social universe permits reflection on what works and what doesn’t, helping to aggregate and focus social energies. These may be actions that put the brakes on violence, stymie bullies, alleviate suffering, secure privacy, promote stability and so on. That is, the encounter with the neosubject forces into the open the rationalizations for the status-quo, and in so doing can foster the conditions under which people will have a choice to make at the level of practices — individual, familial, institutional.

The setting-off of the subject’s substantive traits — through, for example, self-deprecating humor — both exposes the contingent meaning of those traits and reflects back to others the way those traits get used as explanations for social discord. In this way, the subject brings something new into the social field — not only a de-emphasis on ontic properties and a revelation of a dimension of universality independent of such properties, but also a new way of being in the social field that nondefensively accepts the relation of nonrelation. What is more, unlike the immanent cause or the exceptional cause, the effects of the deployment of the extimate cause, as it generates new behavior and new relations, can be tracked, studied, and analyzed (208).

tuhkanen critique of butler

Tuhkanen, Mikko. “Performativity and Becoming” Cultural Critique. 72, Spring (2009): 1-35.

For example, her description of Antigone as “the limit without which the symbolic cannot be thought” or the “unthinkable within the symbolic” might seem to be referring to the real, yet she goes on to identify Antigone’s position as possibly embodying an “alternative symbolic or imaginary” (Antigone’s Claim, 40) and, immediately afterward, turns to Lacan’s second seminar to criticize his totalizing theory of the symbolic law (41–42; see also 47). Arguably, this conflation of different stages in Lacan’s work forces (or allows) her to ignore Lacan’s divergence from a structuralist understanding of a system (see also Penney, 19).

Relevant here is Shepherdson’s suggestion that “the ‘real’ can be understood as a concept that was developed in order to define in a clear way how there is always an element that ‘does not belong’ within the structure, an ‘excluded’ element which escapes the law, but which can nevertheless be approached in a precise theoretical fashion.” Consequently, “psychoanalysis is not in fact committed to the ‘law’ in the manner of classical structuralist thought” (“Intimate Alterity,” paras. 13, 24).

In No Future, Lee Edelman argues that, rather than making good on its claim to conjure up from the tragic heroine’s tomb a radical challenge to the protocols of symbolic legitimation, Butler’s rendering of Antigone “returns us, instead, to familiar forms of a durable liberal humanism whose rallying cry has always been, and here remains,‘the future’” (105–6). For Edelman, such seamless domestication of the real to symbolic meaning is symptomatic of the inherent failure of futurity to be evoked in terms of anything but what he calls “reproductive futurism” (2 and passim). In the figure of the Child, politics premised on futurism “generates generational succession, temporality, and narrative sequence, not toward the end of enabling change, but, instead, of perpetuating sameness, of turning back time to assure repetition” (60). In this schema of enabling the future to unfold as a reassuringly recognizable continuation of the present, queers are “stigmatized as threatening an end to the future itself” (113). Given the unquestioned reflex of seeing “every political vision as a vision of futurity” (13), Edelman’s exhilaratingly counterintuitive argument that queer respond to its stigmatization with a kind of an answer of the real, with an embrace of its status as an embodiment of “the arbitrary, future-negating force of a brutal and mindless drive” (127), has a strong appeal. If there are reasons to resist this appeal, they must come from the fact that queer theory may not yet have come to grips with the specificity of the consequences of its paradigmatic groundings.

I would propose that, because of the Butlerian paradigm on which much of queer theory has developed, the question of becoming, of futurity’s claim on our thinking, may not yet have been adequately posed.

With Deleuze, for example, we must ask whether futurity as becoming is reducible to breeding, in the sense in which fag slang uses the term to signal the mindless, mechanic, and (in Foucault’s terms) docile reproduction of the same. Edelman writes:

“the true oppositional politics implicit in the practice of queer sexualities lies not in the liberal discourse and patient negotiation of tolerances and rights, important as these undoubtedly are to all of us still denied them, but in the capacity of queer sexualities to figure the radical dissolution of the contract, in every sense social and Symbolic, on which the future as putative assurance against the jouissance of the Real depends” (16).

While not precisely disagreeing with Edelman, I would ask whether we have quite exhausted the question of futurity before we abandon it. To do this, we may want to shift our paradigmatic perspective such that our grounding assumptions are defamiliarized and our concepts—here the question of becoming—are necessarily rethought. Such a shift, I propose, would allow us to see that the futurity of performative politics may constitute only a partial understanding of what Deleuze, for example, sees as becoming.

fichte schelling

Williams, Robert R. Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997.

Fichte says that Kant’s theory presupposes a wider inter-subjective human community

According to Fichte, the self cannot give itself the consciousness of freedom; rather the consciousness of freedom is intersubjectively mediated. Schelling qualifies the latent solipsism of transcendental idealism when maintains that the ground of free self-determination must lie partly “within” the subject and partly “outside” of the subject. Schelling’s point in affirming that the ground of freedom is divided is that freedom is social and intersubjective. Hence the ground of freedom cannot be identified with subjectivity alone; the grounds of freedom must be both “in” the subject and yet transcend the subject. Freedom and consciousness of freedom must obviously be the subject’s own doing, yet the subject is incapable of making itself and its freedom into an object and so it cannot be autonomously self-conscious in the crucial sense. Something irreducibly other is required to make the subject available to itself and to arouse the subject to freedom and responsibility.

For this reason self-consciousness and freedom require reciprocal interaction between self and other. Neither self nor other is, by itself, sufficient; consequently, the ground of freedom must be twofold, and yet correlative.

Yet the correlation of the internal and external grounds of freedom, or self and other, is not simply a positive empirical one. Schelling shares Fichte’s tendency to conceive the other in terms of negation. The other is not-I, and I am not-other. Both the other and the self mutually condition each other, but such conditioning is negative. There is no direct presence of the other to the self, or vice versa. The important concept of a doubled ground of freedom makes central the issue of coordinating and ordering the dual grounds of freedom: each self, in its independence, depends on an other that it is not. In spite of its claims to freedom and independence, each seeks security and legitimation from an other whose recognition is contingent and not guaranteed.

Since the parochial self, as self-repulsive negativity, is hidden from itself, it depends on the other for its own critical self-consciousness. that is why self-knowledge for Hegel take the form of Self-recognition in other. The road to interiority passes through the other. The self is for itself only by being for an other, and the self is for an other only by being for itself. The ‘for itself’ formulates not the beginning but the result and telos of the process of recognition.

The natural “solipsism” of desire is a condition that must be transformed and sublimated if the self is to become capable of enduring relationships with others. Hegel’s account of the process of recognition is at the same time an account of the sublimation of desire. In this process desire is fundamentally a desire for the other.

The point to be underscored here is that the other, or the confrontation with the other, both shatters the natural solipsism of the self, and “pulls” it out of its natural solipsism. The analysis of recognition therefore is also and at the same time a story of self-overcoming, through which a enlarged ethical-social mentality or Geist, is attained. (50)

Hegel conceives the individual self in its desires not as a simple, stable, quiescent self-identity but as a complex, restless, self-repulsive, negative identity. This self-repulsing negativity means that the self is not initially present to itself, much less transparent to itself. The immediate self does not yet know what it is. What it is, is still implicit and must become explicit to it.

It can become explicit to itself, that is, discover what it is, only through the mediation of an other. Self-consciousness requires an other to confirm and transform its own self-understanding. The self’s presence to itself is mediated by an other that is likewise a self-repulsing negative identity. But this does not mean tha the relation to the other is inherently or essentially negative.

Rather only the other is capable of satisfying the desire for recognition, which is at the same time a desire for an other. “Self-consciousness attains its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness.” … Believing at first that it has no need of the other, the self makes the discovery that it needs and depends on the very other that it originally deemed “unessential.”

As immediate, each self operates with the presumption of being absolute. According to Hegel, desire signifies a condition of natural egoism in which the self’s satisfaction is the end to which everything else is regarded as merely instrumental and subordinate. Natural egoism is immediate, parochial, and abstract; it excludes the other, difference, and relation. For this reason, the confrontation with the other is experienced as an abrupt self-transcendence, that is, a plunge into a relation that “others” or alters the self. In Hegel’s words: “Self-consciousness is confronted by an other self-consciousness. It has come out of itself. This has a double [equivocal] significance: first it has lost itself, because it finds itself as an other being. Second, it has thereby canceled [aufgehoben] the other, because it does not look upon the other as essential, but rather sees only itself in other.

The presence of the other precipitates a crisis in abstract parochial self-identity. The “shock” or upsurge of the other is immediate and underivable. The encounter with an other calls into question the immediate natural solipsism or naive self-identity. the encounter with the other reveals that naive or parochial self-identity is exclusive. The self achieves its identity by excluding the other. the other constitutes a shock to this naive parochial identity, which works an immediate change. The self now finds itself as other, or as “othered.” The presence of the other signifies a loss of the original naive certitude, and this may be experienced as a loss of self.

The starting point of the process of recognition is the apparent loss of self before the other, or conversely, an apparent loss of the other owing to the inability to see anything but oneself in the other. The second phase is the attempt to cancel the self-othering, which can take two forms: elimination and/or domination of the other, or finding some accommodation with the other. The former involves eliminating the other, or compelling the other to recognize. Either form of violence is self-subverting in Hegel’s view. Hegel believes that the concept of recognition must take the second path. This means that the self may “return” to itself out of its “othered” state, but it can do so only if it abandons mastery and domination. the recognition that is needed cannot be coerced or controlled.

Mutual-reciprocal recognition is possible only if coercion is renounced. The authentic “cancellation” of other-being means that the other is not eliminated but allowed to go free and affirmed. But if the other is allowed to go free, this means that is affirmed, not simply in its identity, but also in its difference. Without the release and allowing of the other to be as other, in its difference, the ‘We’ would be merely an abstract, parochial identity. The release and affirmation of the other is constitutive of the determinately universal identity of the ‘We’. The ‘We’ is not a return to abstract, parochial self-identity of the original self-certain I. It is a determinate universal that reflects both the common identity and individual differences. Releasement of the other is the condition for the other’s release of the self and the self’s “return to itself” from “being-other,” both of which constitute the We qua determinate universal.

The self’s return to itself out of self-othering is not simply a restoration of the original parochial and abstract self-identity. It is not a simple satisfaction of desire, a filling of the lack by consumption of the object. Rather the original absolute self-identity of desire is decentered and relativeized by relation to other, while being enlarged and legitimated by the other’s recognition. This return to self in freedom is intersubjectively mediated. The condition under which the self can pass through the other and the other’s freedom and return to itself affirmatively is that coercion and mastery must be given up.