hegel – objet (a)

Zupančič After End of Art

“After the End of Art: Hegel with Francis Bacon.” Alenka Zupančič, 27 March 2019, Intensive Seminars in Critical Theory at Yale

Looking at Bacon’s theory of philosophy based on Sylvester interview of Bacon, published in 1975. The way Bacon thinks art is extremely precise and resonates with Hegel.

The subject is the joke. Hegel has wilful disappearance of subject. Between Hegel and Bacon something did happen, pushing Hegelian dissolution of art into 2 extremes. Its the discovery of photography, took over the objective stream, and left art to take subjective path. For Bacon, recording-reporting, photography occupies this terrain.

Bacon doesn’t like abstract art. Tension duality of recording and something else that is what makes great art. Traditional painters thought they were just doing recording, but they were doing much more, but the necessity of recording was essential, the artistic grandeur on top of what they produced, was essential to the recording.

But photography has taken over the illustration of the thing that painters in the past had to do themselves. Abstract throw out all forms of reporting, and just do colours etc. Bacon wants to contrast free fancy play versus a deeper necessity and tension that photography ruins. Bacon’s answer is to shift the very emphasis of recording but not shift its imperative. The imperative to record has changed, its no longer about what artists think they have to do or are expected to do, its about what they REALLY have to do, Bacon’s work is obsession. Being stuck that you ABSOLUTELY want to record, yet still have to find a way to record.

Abstract painting doesn’t work, because obsession gives much greater art, than just going in a free fancy way. OBSESSION with something you WANT to record, you get STUCK in wanting to record, a singular thing, DRIVE. This is what Bacon is getting at. Obsession, and Stuckness, absolute necessity. “I want to record an image” is what Bacon repeats. What is the status of this image/appearance? It is not simply out there to be properly recorded. I can record how people look or appear to me, but how can I record how they REALLY appear.

This particular image he wants to record it can only be a MADE appearance, an artifice that renders that in reality that cannot be seen in a direct way, but what we recognize as a crucial element of reality and we say yes, that’s it.

Žižek on Hegel Interview

Visiting Hegel at Dusk: A Conversation with Slavoj Žižek (Interview by Hisham Aqeel) Rethinking Marxism, 2020

https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2020.1750193

Mao has this formula: One divides into Two. But I nonetheless correct Mao:
One is from the very beginning divided into Two. The One emerges through division.

You start with a confused field of multiplicities and then One emerges through division. One always means: “I am this and I am not that”—One is always a division.

[…] What Hegel means by “absolute recoil,” and the German term is absoluter Gegenstoß, is this closed circle when there is a cause which is generating effects, but, at some point, cause is only a retroactive effect of its effects. Let me give you a simple idea. We can say that—taking an extreme example —communists are inspired by the communist idea; the communist idea is their cause but at the same time this communist idea is only alive through the activity of communists. If you kill all the communists, there will be no communist idea.

So, you see, for Hegel it is the same with Subject. Subject expresses itself (it does something or says something), but there is no Subject prior to this expression. It is only through expressing itself that Subject emerges. In this sense you can link this to retroactivity—but very radically. Let me give you another example of retroactivity. Today we do not know what will happen; maybe there will be a new world war: Iran, Saudi Arabia, America, or China. We do not know what will happen, but if the war happens it will appear as if the war had to happen; that we were just postponing it. But if it doesn’t happen, we will be telling ourselves a story of how it was clear that it was a “false danger,” “the war couldn’t happen,” “we are not so stupid to ruin civilization,” and so on. I think that this is the deepest Hegelian insight: things become what they are only retroactively. My favorite example here is falling in love. You contingently fall in love, but once you are in love, it appears to you that all your life was moving to this point.

[…] The only thing I mean by communism is to somehow limit the market logic of capital. Capitalism works at a certain level, and very well so; look at what China has achieved through controlled capitalism. But I think capitalism must be controlled by some strong agency; we need to develop some kind of an international cooperation or agencies which are strong and have such power to coordinate not only how to fight global warming but also, for example, the problem of immigrants—this cannot be solved by nation-states. We need an international approach, where problems shouldn’t just be a humanitarian one, such as: “Will we allow more immigrants to come to Western Europe?” No! We should ask deeper questions: Why are immigrants leaving their countries? Who is responsible for those wars? Isn’t it clear that without the American intervention in Iraq, or the horrors today in Yemen and Syria (or Africa), we wouldn’t have had so many immigrants? So we should approach it in a different way, not just in a humanitarian way, such as, “Should we accept immigrants or not?” The problem is to tackle the situation which creates immigrants. You cannot do this in the level of capitalism and sovereign states.

Slavoj Žižek Sept 2020, International Philosophical Conference in Ljubljana

Implicit model of a future society Philosophy of Right. Marx thought Hegel got it right, the scheme of alienation, Hegel got it right for Fukuyama, liberal democracy. I disagree with Judith Butler, where Butler provides a vision of “we are not yet there Hegel.” Butler says about Hegel in a speech, we are not solitary creatures, though Hegel says that sometimes we see ourselves in this way. Who exactly is that idiot that says we are not solitary creatures disconnected from one another. What does Butler miss here: It’s not that if we are vulgar materialists, Hegel says we have to make the wrong choice, this is the immanent temporality. Hegel’s critique of Terror after French Revolution, its not French went too far, NO. His point is not usual critique of French Revolution, you HAVE to GO THROUGH TERROR. That is the only way we can get to reconciliation. NO, at the end the whole history is a succession of horrors. It’s totally wrong to read Hegel as nice world at the end totally reconciled. NO. At the end of Phil of Right you get the necessity of War.

Puerto Rico, Rosio Zambrana, with reference to Adorno, proposed a nice reading of Hegel, and rejects the notion of IMMANENT CRITIQUE. She sees in Hegel an ongoing critique which remains vigilant of the reversions of normative criteria. She knows Habermas, like you need normative criteria to criticize, but she says even the normative criteria have to FALL.

Robert Brandon’s The Spirit of Trust. Political Correct critiques, never see the evil in their own gaze. Say one work you are out forever. Forgiving Recollection. Our castigation of Hitler should be a reflexive determination of the evil in ourselves. Brandon’s take, he moves into this spurious infinity, our judgement is limited in the future they will recollectively forgive..

We have to introduce logical temporality of WILL HAVE BEEN. The meaning of your act can be determined retroactively. Somebody does something with the highest intentions and everything goes wrong. Bernard Williams, MORAL LUCK. you do something and it depends on the outcome of how it will be judged. For example KANT: every revolution is to be condemed, because you overthrow a legal power, but if the revolution is successful, you have to follow it.

An event retroactively become necessary, it retroactively contains its own presuppositions. The Hegelian motto, is the spirit of distrust. His basic procedure, something begins well with the best intentions and then everything goes wrong. One thing you can be sure with Hegel is don’t trust any ethical project. The only thing we can gain is the failure and the reaction to the failure.

Hegel is never a guy of happy endings. Fukuyama is the greatest anti-Hegelian. Because for Hegel,when a certain movement wins, its self-divides. Hegel offers the best way to think COVID. Hegel is much more autonomous in sense of admitting autonomy of nature.

Mladen Dolar Substance as Subject

On Hegel

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

The Break that the French Revolution posed, and continuation of French Revolution throughout Europe. Emblematic moment, defeat of conservative Prussian monarchy by Napoleon, who rode through Jena the day after Hegel finished the Phenomenology.

This is a book that could only be written now at this historical moment. Hegel’s aim, this particular kind of philosophy could only be done at this particular historical conjuncture. It is only from the contingent historical moment that one could reach for Absolute Knowledge.

It’s only missing the mark which creates the mark as such.

The path to truth is truth itself.
Hegel 1807

The whole thing is on the path. What you reach in the end is a vector which points backwards, all these failures, is the path to truth. You don’t learn anything knew with Absolute Knowledge, you only learn the Absolute Knowledge was the journey.

Substance is Subject

European University at St. Petersburg December 4 2018

Hegel famously maintained that no philosophy can be summed up in a single proposition or a first principle. As he said in the Phenomenology of Spirit: “Any so-called basic proposition or principle of philosophy, if true, is also false, just because it is only a principle.” Its truth can only lie in its development, its deployment, ultimately in a system, not in the assessment of some foundational proposition. Still, once in his career he nevertheless sinned against this view and proposed such a foundational proposition of his own philosophy: “In my view, which must be justified by the exposition of the system itself, everything hangs on apprehending and expressing the truth not merely as substance but also equally as subject.” Or briefly: ‘Substance is subject’.

Ž Hegel Lacan

Žižek, S. (2009) The Cunning of Reason: Lacan as a Reader of Hegel. The Harvard Review of Philosophy. XVI. 104-117.

The status of prosopopoeia in Lacan changes radically with the shift in the status of the analyst from the stand-in for the “big Other” (the symbolic order) to the “small other” (the obstacle which stands for the inconsistency, failure, of the big Other).

The analyst who occupies the place of the big Other is himself the medium of prosopopoeia: when he speaks, it is the big Other who speaks (or rather, keeps silence) through him — that is, in the intersubjective economy of the analytic process, the analyst is not just another subject, but occupies the empty place of death.

The patient talks, and the analyst’s silence stands for the absent meaning of the patient’s talk, the meaning that is supposed to be contained in the big Other.

The process ends when the patient can himself assume the meaning of his speech. The analyst as the “small other,” on the contrary, magically transforms the words of the analysand (patient) into prosopopoeia, de-subjectivizing his words, depriving them of the quality of being an expression of a consistent subject and his intention-to-mean.

The goal is here no longer for the analysand to assume the meaning of his speech, but to assume its non-meaning, its nonsensical inconsistency, which implies, with regards to his own status, his de-subjectivation, or what Lacan calls “subjective destitution.”

zizek cynic right of distress

The Real of Violence, Cynicism, and the “Right of Distress”
Slavoj Žižek
THE SINTHOME 14 Summer 2013

Recall Marx’s brilliant analysis of how, in the French revolution of 1848, the conservative-republican Party of Order functioned as the coalition of the two branches of royalism (orleanists and legitimists) in the “anonymous kingdom of the Republic.” [1] The parliamentary deputees of the Party of Order perceived their republicanism as a mockery: in parliamentary debates, they all the time generated royalist slips of tongue and ridiculed the Republic to let it be known that their true aim was to restore the kingdom.

What they were not aware of is that they themselves were duped as to the true social impact of their rule. What they were effectively doing was to establish the conditions of bourgeois republican order that they despised so much (by for instance guaranteeing the safety of private property).

So it is not that they were royalists who were just wearing a republican mask: although they experienced themselves as such, it was their very “inner” royalist conviction which was the deceptive front masking their true social role. In short, far from being the hidden truth of their public republicanism, their sincere royalism was the fantasmatic support of their actual republicanism.

Marx describes here a precise case of perverted libidinal economy: there is a Goal (restoration of the monarchy) which members of the group experience as their true goal, but which, for tactical reasons, has to be publicly disavowed; however, what brings enjoyment are not multiple ways of obscenely making fun of the ideology they have to follow publicly (rage and invectives again republicanism), but the very indefinite postponement of the realization of their official Goal (which allows them to rule united).

Recall how it is when, in the private sphere, I am unhappily married, I mock my wife all the time, declaring my intention to abandon here for my mistress whom I really love, and while I get small pleasures from invectives against my wife, the enjoyment that sustains me is generated by the indefinite postponement of really leaving my wife for my mistress.

This is the formula of today’s cynical politics: its true dupes are the cynics themselves who are not aware that their truth is in what they are mocking, not in their hidden belief. As such, cynicism is a perverted attitude: it transposes onto its other (non-cynical dupes) its own division. This is why, as Freud pointed out, the perverse activity is not an open display of the unconscious, but its greatest obfuscation.

To draw attention to the fundamental violence that sustains a “normal” functioning of the state (Benjamin called it “mythic violence”), and the no les fundamental violence that sustains every attempt to undermine the functioning of the state (Benjamin’s “divine violence”).

This is why the reaction of the state power to those who endanger it is so brutal, and why, in its very brutality, this reaction is precisely “reactive,” protective. So, far from eccentricity, the extension of the notion of violence is based on a key theoretical insight, and it is the limitation of violence to its directly-visible physical aspect which, far from being “normal,” relies on an ideological distortion.

It is difficult to be really violent, to perform an act that violently disturbs the basic parameters of social life.

Addition: Life as the sum of ends has a right against abstract right. If for example it is only by stealing bread that the wolf can be kept from the door, the action is of course an encroachment on someone’s property, but it would be wrong to treat this action as an ordinary theft. To refuse to allow a man in jeopardy of his life to take such steps for self-preservation would be to stigmatize him as without rights, and since he would be deprived of his life, his freedom would be annulled altogether. /…/

Hegel does not talk here about humanitarian considerations which should temper our legalistic zeal (if an impoverished father steals bread to feed his starving child, we should show mercy and understanding even if he broke the law…), but about a basic legal right, a right which is as a right superior to other particular legal rights.

In other words, we are not dealing simply with the conflict between the demands of life and the constraints of the legal system of rights, but with a right (to life) that overcomes all formal rights, i.e., with a conflict inherent to the sphere of rights, a conflict which is unavoidable and necessary insofar as it serves as an indication of the finitude, inconsistency, and “abstract” character of the system of legal rights as such.

“To refuse to allow a man in jeopardy of his life to take such steps for self-preservation /like stealing the food necessary for his survival/ would be to stigmatize him as without rights“– so, again, the point is not that the punishment for justified stealing would deprive the subject of his life, but that it would exclude him from the domain of rights, i.e., that it would reduce him to bare life outside the domain of law, of the legal order. In other words, this refusal deprives the subject of his very right to have rights.

However, the key question here is: can we universalize this “right of distress,” extending it to an entire social class and its acts against the property of another class?

Although Hegel does not directly address this question, a positive answer imposes itself from Hegel’s description of “rabble” as a group/class whose exclusion from the domain of social recognition is systematic: “§ 244,

Addition: Against nature man can claim no right, but once society is established, poverty immediately takes the form of a wrong done to one class by another.” In such a situation in which a whole class of people is systematically pushed beneath the level of dignified survival, to refuse to allow them to take “steps for self-preservation” (which, in this case, can only mean the open rebellion against the established legal order) is to stigmatize them as without rights.

subject failed articulation

ŽIŽEK, SLAVOJ. A reply: with enemies like these, who needs friends? Revue Internationale de Philosophie 2012. 439-457.

Download Revue internationale de philosophie here.

Communism should no longer be conceived as the subjective (re)appropriation of the alienated substantial content — all versions of reconciliation conceived as “subject swallows the substance” should be rejected.

The Hegelian subject has no substantial actuality, it comes second, it only emerges through the process of separation, of overcoming of its presuppositions, and these presuppositions are also just a retroactive effect of the same process of their overcoming.

The result is thus that there is, at both extremes of the process, a failure-negativity inscribed into the very heart of the entity we are dealing with.

If the status of the subject is thoroughly “processual,” it means that it emerges through the very failure to fully actualize itself.

This brings us again to one of the possible formal definitions of subject: a subject tries to articulate (“express”) itself in a signifying chain, this articulation fails, and by means and through this failure, the subject emerges: the subject is the failure of its signifying representation — this is why Lacan writes the subject of the signifier as $, as “barred.”

In a love letter, the very failure of the writer to formulate his declaration in a clear and efficient way, his oscillations, the letter’s fragmentation, etc., can in themselves be the proof (perhaps the necessary and the only reliable proof) that the professed love is authentic — here, the very failure to deliver the message properly is the sign of its authenticity. If the message is delivered in a smooth way, it arouses suspicions that it is part of a well-planned approach, or that the writer loves himself, the beauty of his writing, more than his love-object, i.e., that the object is effectively reduced to a pretext for engaging in the narcissistically-satisfying activity of writing.

And the same goes for substance: substance is not only always-already lost, it only comes to be through its loss, as a secondary return-to-itself — which means that substance is always-already subjectivized.

In “reconciliation” between subject and substance, both poles thus lose their firm identity.

Let us take the case of ecology: radical emancipatory politics should aim neither at the complete mastery over nature nor at the humanity’s humble acceptance of the predominance of Mother-Earth. Rather, nature should be exposed in all its catastrophic contingency and indeterminacy, and human agency assumed in the whole unpredictability of its consequences — viewed from this perspective of the “other Hegel,” the revolutionary act no longer involves as its agent the Lukacsean substance-subject, the agent who knows what it does while doing it.

One is even tempted to talk here about Marx’s “idealist reversal of Hegel”: in contrast to Hegel who was well aware that the owl of Minerva takes of only at the evening dusk, after the fact, i.e., that Thought follows Being (which is why, for Hegel, there can be no scientifi c insight into the future of society), Marx reasserts the primacy of Thought: the owl of Minerva (German contemplative philosophy) should be replaced by the singing of the Gaelic rooster (French revolutionary thought) — in the proletarian revolution, Thought will precede Being.

Does, however, this mean that the ultimate subjective position we can adopt is that of a split which characterizes the fetishist disavowal? Is all we can do take the stance of “although I know well there is no big Other, the big Other is only the sedimentation, the reified form, of intersubjective interactions, I am compelled to act as if the big Other is an external force which controls us all”?

Lack in the Other

It is here that Lacan’s fundamental insight into how the big Other is “barred,” lacking, in-existing even, acquires its weight: the big Other is not the substantial Ground which secretly pulls the strings, it is inconsistent/lacking, its very functioning depends on subjects whose participation in the symbolic process sustains it. Instead of either the submersion of the subject into its substantial Other or the subject’s appropriation of this Other we thus get a mutual implication through lack, through the overlapping of the two lacks, the lack constitutive of the subject and the lack of/in the Other itself. It is perhaps time to read Hegel’s famous formula “One should grasp the Absolute not only as substance, but also as subject” more cautiously and literally: the point is not that the Absolute is not substance, but subject. The point is hidden in the “not only… but also”: the interplay between the two, which also opens up the space of freedom — we are free because there is a lack in the Other, because the substance out of which we grew and on which we rely in inconsistent, barred, failed, marked by an impossibility.

However, what kind of freedom is thereby opened up? One should raise here a clear and brutal question in all its naivety: but if we reject Marx’s critique of Hegel and stick to Hegel’s notion of the owl of Minerva which takes off only in the evening — i.e., if we accept Hegel’s claim that the position of a historical agent who is able to identify its own role in the historical process and act accordingly is inherently impossible, since such a self-referentiality makes it impossible for the agent to take into account to impact of its own intervention, how this act itself will affect the constellation —, what are the consequences of this position for the act, for emancipatory political interventions?

Does it mean that we are condemned to blind acts, to risky steps into the unknown whose final outcome totally eludes us, to interventions whose meaning we can establish only retroactively, so that at the moment of the act, we can only hope that history will show mercy (grace) and crown our intervention with a minimum of success?

But what if, instead of conceiving this impossibility to take into account the consequences of our acts as a limitation of our freedom, we conceive it as the zero-level (negative) condition of our freedom?

We are free only against the background of this non-transparency: if it were to be possible for us to fully predict the consequences of our acts, our freedom would effectively be only the “known necessity” in the pseudo-Hegelian way, i.e., it would consist in freely choosing and wanting what we know to be necessary. In this sense, freedom and necessity would fully coincide: I act freely when I knowingly follow my inner necessity, the instigations that I found in myself as my true substantial nature… but if this is the case, we are back from Hegel to Aristotle, i.e., we are no longer dealing with the Hegelian subject who itself produces (“posits”) its own content, but with an agent bent on actualizing its immanent potentials, its positive “essential forces,” as the young Marx put it in his deeply Aristotelian critique of Hegel. What gets lost here is the entire dialectics of the constitutive retroactivity of sense, of the continuous retroactive (re)totalization of our experience.

But, again, what does this mean for our ability to act, to intervene into ongoing history? There are in French two words for “future” which cannot be adequately rendered in English: futur and avenir. Futur stands for future as the continuation of the present, as the full actualization of the tendencies which are already here, while avenir points more towards a radical break, a discontinuity with the present — avenir is what is to come /a venir/, not just what will be.

Say, in today’s apocalyptic global situation, the ultimate horizon of the “future” is what Dupuy calls the dystopian “fixed point,” the zero-point of the ecological breakdown, of global economic and social chaos, etc. — even if it is indefinitely postponed, this zero-point is the virtual “attractor” towards which our reality, left to itself, tends.

The way to combat the catastrophe is through acts which interrupt this drifting towards the catastrophic “fixed point” and take upon themselves the risk of giving birth to some radical Otherness “to come.” (We can see here how ambiguity the slogan “no future” is: at a deeper level, it does not designate the closure, the impossibility of change, but what we should be striving for — to break the hold of the catastrophic “future” cover up and thereby open up the space for something New “to come.”) 455

mcgowan hegel master slave

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2013.
Chapter 3: Class Status and Enjoyment.

McGowan argues that what Hegel fails to see “how recognition functions as a barrier to enjoyment. In the struggle for recognition,the master wagers her or his enjoyment precisely because it has no value for the master. Unlike the slave, the master finds no satisfaction in her or his own enjoyment, which is why she or he can risk it – with life itself – for the sake of prestige [recognition].

As a result, the master may eat, wear, or hold what the the slave produces, but she or he cannot enjoy it. In assuming the position of mastery and acquiring the recognition that accompanies it, the master makes a fundamental sacrifice of enjoyment that obtaining an object from the slave cannot redeem. The slave, on the other hand, remains free to enjoy, which is what, as Jacques Lacan points out, Hegel fails to see. 93

🙂 The upshot of this is that the master invests in the idea of symbolic status and derives an identity from it while the slave adopts an attitude of indifference toward symbolic identity and is thus able to enjoy. 94

🙂 In capitalism this structural elimination of the outside position (the slave’s position) means the elimination of a site for enjoyment that existed in earlier societies not found on appropriation of surplus value. Here the slave can enjoy and its only limit to enjoyment is what his/her master dictates, the restriction is an external one. McGowan is trying to make that point that with capitalism, the restriction becomes internal. According to McGowan:

Within capitalist society, recognition becomes that which no one can avoid – a universal that structures subjectivity. If one becomes an enjoying subject, one can do so only by passing through and then rejecting the lure of recognition and class status. One can enjoy only after having initially sacrificed enjoyment in search of recognition. This process reveals the true nature of enjoyment, obscured in precapitalist societies. Enjoyment is never direct but always based on a prior loss or sacrifice. One enjoys through this loss, and thus one enjoys partially.

[…] the partiality of today’s enjoyment does not point toward a future enjoyment that would be complete. Its partiality is based on an internal necessity: without the loss of the its object, the subject cannot enjoy; it enjoys the object only in its absence. This enjoyment, like that of precapitalist epochs, has an infinite quality to it. But it is a fully realized infinite, an infinite that includes its limit – the necessity of the prior loss – internally, rather than continually moving toward this limit and never reaching it. 97

To give in to the temptation of recognition and class status is to continue to sacrifice one’s enjoyment for the sake of the production and reproduction of the social order.

The path to enjoyment is much more difficult. It involves resisting the image of enjoyment that social recognition uses to sell itself and focusing on an enjoyment that can’t be imagined.

This is the real enjoyment that the subject endures rather than performs. It is an enjoyment that generates anxiety and suffering; it is rooted in loss but at the same time, it is the only enjoyment that leaves the subject satisfied rather than continually seeking a richer experience elsewhere. 98

On page 95 McGowan’s argument goes a bit haywire. He should stay away from trying to connect sacrifice of enjoyment with surplus enjoyment. I think we need to connect with Zupancic here.

Capitalism we have surplus labor which worker performs over and above the paid labor. There is necessary labor time which worker must perform to reproduce itself, surplus labor time “in contrast is done for the sake of progress. … In the act of performing surplus labor, one spends time working that might otherwise be spent enjoying; one works excessively at the expense of one’s enjoyment, which is itself excessive.” 95

🙂 Surplus labor is the excessive work and time that could have otherwise gone towards enjoyment. McGowan states, “surplus value that surplus labor creates is the way that sacrificed enjoyment manifests itself in the capitalist system, and the universality of the appropriation of surplus value renders this sacrifice inescapable. 95

mcgowan loss

p.33 No subsequent acquisition or reward can redeem the loss of the privileged object that founds subjectivity; it is a loss without the possibility of recompense.

And yet, ideology proclaims that every loss has a productive dimension to it. In this sense, ideology is singular: all ideologies are but forms of ideology as such. According to Christian ideology, our suffering on earth finds its reward in heavenly bliss. According to capitalist ideology, our labor today has its reward in tomorrow’s riches. According to Islamic fundamentalist logic, our suicidal sacrifice results in an eternity in paradise.

No ideology can avow a completely unproductive loss, a loss that doesn’t lead to the possibility of some future pleasure, and yet an unproductive loss is precisely what defines us.

One challenges ideology not by proclaiming that loss or sacrifice is unnecessary that might live lives of plenitude but by insisting on the unproductivity of loss.

Once a subject grasps that no future gain can redeem the initial loss, ideology loses its ability to control that subject. In this sense, one of the great anti-ideological works of philosophy is Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. 33

When one reaches absolute knowledge, one recognizes that loss is constitutive of whatever position one holds. This recognition allows one to embrace loss for its own sake and to enjoy it rather than retreating from it or trying to overcome it. … Hegel leads philosophy to the position at which it can resist ideology’s effort to recuperate loss and convince subjects that the status of loss is empirical rather than constitutive. 35

Locating the source of one’s suffering in an external threat functions precisely like imagining a future recompense for that suffering. In both cases loss becomes a contingent fact that one might overcome rather than the foundation of one’s subjectivity.

To avow the structural necessity of loss would deprive ideology of its most powerful incentive, which is why no ideology takes up this relation to loss. Or to put it in other terms, what no ideology can acknowledge is the death drive. 35

Žižek Croatia May 2013, Brazil July 2, Greece

July 8, 2013 Only 14 minutes and mostly a gloss on his ideas developed in Zagreb, Croatia

May 16, 2013 Croatia

June 2013 Greece with Costas

How do we experience ourselves as persons, we are now directly linking our thoughts directly to things, a wheelchair that runs directly on thoughts. What will become of us, our very identity is based on this difference between my inner life and outer life.
Greatest philosophical book of all times, a story but a crazy story, Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit. We should let readers discover for themselves why big fat book is relevant.
To return to Hegel is answer to deadlock failure of today’s left. Stalinist commie failed, I told Fukuymama, maybe capitalism won, but did commies prove they are best managers. We should not play boring game, idea is good they just did it wrong in Russia, no Hegel says if idea goes wrong in reality, there is something wrong with the idea itself.
Hegel was fully aware for logical conceptual necessity to realize itself, it has to attach itself to contingent moment. Monarch, he is not divine, he is idiot like all of us, if you have a government justified by higher right, divine right, you get alienation, no at the top there must be an idiot like all of us. We need a jury for example, selected from our peers, the Monarch is just representation of utter contingency.
LOVE
Retroactive reversal of contingency into necessity, something contingently happens but once its here it is necessary.
Subject is reduced to point of emptiness, but at this moment there is a possibility of reversal
what crisis? East Asia is growing, Africa in some parts is progressing. There is only a crisis in western Europe. You leftists love to be anti-Euro, but hey … yes I agree, first at this immediate economic level, its only west Europe in crisis, what this NEW FORM of capitalism, WHAT WILL IT BE? This new capitalism will be more and more capitalism with Asian values, not despotism, simply autocratic capitalism. Eternal marriage of democracy and capitalism is on deathbed. Lee Quan Yew founder of modern Singapore.
Gradual opening gives rise to expectations, not in darkess Stalinism, its when relative expansion of capitalism will render situation even more destabilizing
Hegel’s refined dialectical paradox This is my message in India, in strict correlation to their class status. The very loss of something creates the lost dimension. We don’t have pre-colonial india then brutal colonization which makes them aware of what they lost and then they struggle to get it back. NO! This new dimension that they are craving for, new modern democratic India, the very program of decolonization is engendered by colonialism itself.
Malcolm X and Buthelezi in South Africa, fake multiculturalism
Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin: an important thinker in the development of German Idealism, particularly his early association with and philosophical influence on his seminary roommates Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
Mandel: No we should beat whites at their own game BY BEING MORE UNIVERSAL THAN THEY ARE.
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Žižek december 2011 Berlin

Slavoj Žižek: “The Animal Doesn’t Exist” (respondent: Lorenzo Chiesa) The Human Animal in Politics, Science, and Psychoanalysis
Organised by: Lorenzo Chiesa (Reader in Modern European Thought, University of Kent) and Mladen Dolar (Professor of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana; Advising Researcher, Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht) KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 16 — 17 December 2011

Part 2

New Guinea Tribe
Rejection of binary logic is a cover-up of a central antagonism Retroactive totalization, a violent cut, a violent impostition of a totality, there is a truth in it. What emerges through the animal, it is only through this minimal distance of speech that retroactively we can formulate not an eternal essence of animality but the deadlock of animality. Redefine the notion of essence, do not reject it.

UNIVERSAL and PARTICULAR: the first antagonism is not between particularities, but universality and particular are deal with this antagonism.
Corporate capitalism, liberal capitalism, capitalism with Asian values. There are only different capitalism, but they all try to obfuscate control a central deadlock.

Big Rule of Hegelian Dialectics
In each Hegelian totality or concrete universality, universality is one of its own species, it encounters itself as one of its own species. RABBLE, sticks out the only point of universality. In Rabble human as a social being exists, as an outcast universality comes to exist as such. A species which relates to itself as a universal being. What if this animal as such does exist and this is we humans. and this is the HORROR animals see in us. We are the ANIMAL for other animals.
Animals are immediately caught in their environment, speechless instinct NO! this is wrong. This is retroactive projection … I think that the true mystification in this standard opposition between human-animal, what effectively disappears here, what we miss is the most radical dimension of what WE humans are.
Becoming — Being. We are already constituted reason, speech and then measure animals. WHat this can’t think is HUMAN IN ITS BECOMING, it can’t think human from animal standpoint.

Psychoanalysis: Zupancic Freudian DRIVE which is NOT YET CULTURE BUT NO LONGER ANIMAL INSTINCT.
Not animal life but not yet human culture. Meillassoux After Finitude. Alenka elaborated a nice Lacanian answer to Meillassoux. NON-ALL Meillassoux reads in the masculine logic. You get a more provocative result if you read contingency along the FEMININE LOGIC OF SEXUATION. Contingency is non-all, precisely because you can’t totalize it through exception.

Fossils: Transcendental Kantian legacy can’t provide clear answer to status of FOSSILS. If you take this ontologically seriously, it refers before transcendental horizon. Meillassoux demonstrates transcendental tricks don’t work here. If we want to isolate the dimension Darwin didn’t see, I would like to rehabilitate, who said regarding fossils, that God planted those fossils. And Ž wants to dialectically incorporate this story
The true problem brings us to object (a). The true problem is not the fossil out there, was there life on earth before human beings, the true fossil are human beings, we are UNABLE TO SEE OURSELVES IN BECOMING. The problem is we cannot see ourselves as in-itself as it were. Its easy to claim tha we Christians can’t read pagan religions we reduce them to our perspective, you miss what Judaism is … what we miss even more what was Christ before he became a Christian, are we aware what a MONSTROSITY JESUS CHRIST WAS FOR THE JEWS. We have to see the past in its BECOMING. What was Christ before he became a Christian.

Part 2

The whole of Christianity as an instution is not a fight against paganism but its own excess, the struggle of being human is not fight against animal nature, but fight against EXCESS that marks our break with NATURE. There is a wonderful text in Kant about education and humans, to control their excess. Man is an ANIMAL WHO NEEDS A MASTER. Only humans have a certain WILD UNRULINESS.
The BRUTALITY IS THE FREUDIAN DRIVE, not animal nature. We are not fighting animal nature, we are fighting the Freudian Drive.

The excess that needs to be explained is the OTHER SIDE of what we humans are in ourselves, what was lost the moment we got caught in our ideological self-perception.
I diagree with vulgar Darwinians when they look for solution in what human mind can do its complexities, talk, infinitesimal mathametics. No begin with Badiou, what defines a WORLD, are not its positive features, but the way a structure of a world relates to its OWN INHERENT POINT OF IMPOSSIBILITY. the true changes in world, are changes in the status of this impossibility.

Square root of minus one, before it was dismissed as nonsense. Even Marx said this, dismisses this. But revolution of math, even if square root of minus one, even if nonsensical you can integrate it and it functions. What is great about democracy, it takes traumatic impossibility, my God throne is EMPTY …Leader dies, VOID must be filled immediately, Democracy integrates it, and makes it the instrument of its relative stability. Capitalism, the impossibility of stability, makes it the very mode of its functioning. WHAT IF WE SHOULD LOOK for what makes us Humans, at this level, not at what we can do, but a changed status of what we can’t do, the changed status of impossibility.

How is it we humans obsessively care again and again about something with NO ADAPTIVE VALUE?

Objective reality is ontologically not-all I’m totally materialist. Quantum physics, reality in-itself is not fully ontologically constituted, there are gaps in reality. I would like to supplement Alain Badiou, his quote is problematic, his english theoretical writings. Where does Event come from if all there is is the order of Being?

An event is nothing but the part of a given situation, a fragment of Being. If an event is nothing but a fragment of Being, why asks Ž can we not describe it as such. Here is Badiou’s Kantianism. We are only free from our finitude, Kant tries to imagine what would happen to us if we gained full access to thing-in-itself. We would turn into puppets. So our freedom and ethical activity only emerges from standpoint of our finitude. That’s Kant. If event is nothing but fragment of being, why can’t we then reduce it to Being. Badiou says because of our finitude. Z says no, its because Being in incomplete, you must introduce the non-all of BEING.

Žižek May 9 2013 madness and Hegel

Žižek 9 May 2013 and broken down into 8 videos on YouTube
13.40 Antonio Damascio “Descartes Error” Cognitivist rejection of Descartes. Descartes draw a strict line of description neutral abstract thinking and animality, Descartes drew a strict distinction.
18:00 Smoking gun on Heidegger
21:25 Deleuze and Hegel: Hegel should simply be ignored. Forget Hegel.
28.00 Pittsburgh Hegelians

29:30 The Concept of Madness
Plato describes Socrates being seized by an idea. A description of someone in a hysterical seizure. Then we know Plato, the hypothesis of the evil spirit, universalized madness, debates between Derrida and Foucault. And Hegel dismissed as ultimate madman of philosophy.
31:20 Anti-Event Philosophers
Platonic Idea we have some eternal order/ideas existing in immutable way, nothing really happens, all that really happens is remembrance, rediscovering all that already is deep within ourselves, rediscovering truth that is already there. The ultimate philosopher of ANTI-EVENT.
Hegel has a system, dialectical movement, but in the course of dialectical movement, things are already becoming what they eternally are.

34:00 NO it isn’t like this says Ž. No event in Plato? Look at what actually happens in Plato, (see Badiou), the zero-level of the Platonic experience, we live ordinary daily life immersed in our daily shit, then we encounter an idea, Saul’s conversion in to St. Paul, something happens a radical cut and you discover another dimension. No wonder Plato was celebrating Love as Madness, Plato emphasized Love as the beginning of Wisdom.

We should never forget how it all begins for Plato: you are in your daily universe, thinking about daily shit, and then you confront someone who is your love, and your life is forever changed, you can feel this brutal encounter in Plato, if you are passionately in love then in your most intimate rational interests: parents, colleagues, children, can vanish, you experience a weird indifference to moral obligation to those around you. Falling in Love is the Platonic Event. This is missing in ‘Oriental’ thought. The oriental idea you are in undisturbed state of bliss, you get too engaged and fall into. Plato emphasizes this falling into as FULL engagement.

38:00 Descartes Cogito is precisely a PURE EVENT. Here Descartes misunderstands himself. Cogito is NOT a substance which is thinking. No. Cogito is this experience of a thing that exists only in sofar as it is thinking, only in the course of the process of thinking. What is CRUCIAL is not to forget that when he describes this pure experience of COGITO he’s not playing a intellectual game, he’s describing a concrete mystical/spiritual experience, you have this THE NIGHT OF THE WORLD, when you withdraw in a kind of psychotic reduction, you withdraw from reality into the abyss of your soul, the point of darkess, darkness as the absolute depth of your soul. What Descartes is describing as ‘Cogito Ergo Sum’ is precisely this thought disconnected from reality, this pure moment of inwardness which is at the same time the moment of MADNESS.

Hegel was well aware of how in order for Human Spirit, our Symbolic universe to develop we have to go through the zero-point of madness, Hegel is more Foucaultian than Foucault, madness is not just a possibility of things go wrong, but our rational world emerges only as a defence against the threat of madness. Even if most of us our not mad, the only way to understand human reason is as a reaction as a form of madness, a form of madness. Wonderful passage in Freud’s reading in his analysis of paranoia, Judge Schreber, Freud says that in a paranoiac system what we usually take as the sign of madness is on the contrary an attempt to get out of madness, the paranoiac construct is an ersatze normality, the true madness is the night of the World, the withdrawal from reality. The paranoiac is a crazy attempt to cure yourself. Lacan sometimes along these lines proposed there is a moment of madness in all rationality, every rationality is an attempt to get out of madness. Platonic Event, encounter the IDEA. We can formulate the basic Platonic experience independently of this idealist substantialist metaphysics. In authentic moments of LOVE, POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT, we encounter some kind of ABSOLUTE, something strikes you, morality can act as ABSOLUTE, did you see that bullshit the life of PI.

44:00 Ang Lee wants to meet Ž. But in the novel, when you must do something, when you experience something as ethical pressure, you must do it because you cannot NOT do it. You CANNOT NOT DO IT. Absolute is something much more fragile something that belongs to the order of appearance than ordinary reality, Absolute is you have a duty, you can say fuck off if you are an unethical person. You cannot not do it. An entity totally powerless fragile, but nonetheless you CANNOT get rid of it. The more fragile the more it has a hold over you.

I think therefore I am, I am only so far as I am caught in the process of thinking.

46:00 HEGEL Philosopher of the EVENT

In what sense for Hegel is TRUTH itself evental? Appearance misleading false appearance is immanent to TRUTH. Yes of course first you cling to one idea its partially true, the other side is partial, then a higher synthesis NO NO. The ABC in the conflict between appearance and reality, the truth is in appearance. Innocent bystander, you are in a certain situation, what matters is not what you sincerely think deep in yourself, but how your situation appears to an observer, even if appearance is false, it is socailly determining, it is stronger. The drama of false appearances. There can be more truth in superficial appearances. Through totally invented accusation, the two women discover that they are attached. Inner self-experience doesn’t get it all, it is the 3rd party external observation.

1:05 Derrida started to imitate his American followers who misunderstood him. The TRUTH CAN ARISE OUT OF A MISRECOGNITION.
Immanence of Appearance to TRUTH. Something starts as misleading appearance but triggers a process making it true. This is Hegelian dialectic. Alenka Zupancic: Evental Status of a TRUTH. The truth emerges out of a series of EVENTS, out of an evental process, what begins as a misleading process becomes a TRUTH. This holds at a fundamental level of SEXUALITY.

1:10 infantile sexuality this notion is oppressed today, it is as if this is the price we are paying for our permissivity. Everything is permitted today, do it with dogs, but children are innocent, pedophilia is the ultimate crime. Innocent child as returned with a vengence. Children are the innocent observers, we can participate in orgies etc, but children must not know about it, parents who are swinging, if you mention this to my son but don’t tell my son, on condition that the child doesn’t know it, we need an innocent gaze.

So we should ask: Who are the typical bad guys. Fred Jameson says this about WIRE the HBO series, today the only acceptable bad guys in movies are terrorists, serial killers and pedaphiliacs. House of Cards, with Kevin Spacey, you can still be the point of identification as a murderer, all other murderers are relativized. Copjec told me there was that hit series HOME ALONE, a celebration of children, invincible, they always win, a protection of the innocence. Let’s go a step further.

What is so scandalous about infantile sexuality?

The scandal resides in 2 features:

1. Alenka Zupancic, infantile sexuality is something weird, its neither biologically grounded, nor fitting symbolic cultural norms. Biologically sexuality is made for copulation. It invades before biologically mature sexuality. The problem here is its not we have first infantile, then once puberty enter we can start fucking in a normal way, no it ruins the entire field. The way infantile sexuality approaches sexual topic remains in power to the end.

Quote from Laplanche: drives precede what is innate and instinctual. Instinctually biologically fucking with genitals, but you don’t start at biologically and then get cultural, no you start with unnatural sexuality,

It is instinctual sexuality (fuck to get children) which is adaptaive, it has evolutionary function, infantile drives already present in the unconscious. why this strange intrusion in children neither biology (biologically infantile sexuality is meaningless), nor culture, normativity. But some wierd in-between.

The reason for this strange excess, is the link between sexuality and cognition. Against the standard idea of sexuality as instinctual force which is sublimated though culture, one should assert the link between sexuality and cognition.

1:20 Childrens’sexuality is not masturbatory pre-genital, it is deeply cognitive, where do babies come from? And it is deeply embedded in fantasies, the small child sees some strange things, the enigma of the other’s desire, he feels something obscene in adults, what do they want from me, This is for Laplanche, the original experience of subjectivity, what do the others see in me? I have something in me that others see in me but I don’t know what. Children’s sexuality is grounded in such a cognitive search, but there is always a missing link you never get the answers, that why you have fantasies.

1:24 What I’m saying is 2 things: 1. these are childish fantasies, when you reach puberty you know answers, NO. You need Fantasies to the end. THis is what Lacan means by there is no sexual relation. To get aroused you need fantasy excess. The problem for psychoanalysis, is not vulgar pan-sexualism, the enigma of psycho-analysis is the opposite, what are we thinking when we are doing sex, there has to be some detail, you imagine the curl of the hair: somebody observing you, the scent of her hair, her calves.

The structure of infantile sexuality which is a cognitive missing link remains here to the end. We never reach maturity. The structure of sexuation through cognitive missing link and fantasy, this structure remains to the end.

1:27 Did you see David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. This is a nice fantasy structure. The best scene, Kyle observes from the closet Dennis Hopper, breathing through oxygen mask etc. Chion said only way to read the scene is a visualized audio hallucination. Oxygen breathing, this is a child listening to parent’s copulating, he hears strange sounds, the parent’s fucking but he doesn’t know what fucking is, so makes up scenario, imagines daddy breathing etc.

1:29 Judith Butler Narrative
There is normal sex, heterosexual, straight, and then we have this childish games, that if not refocused on heterosex, they are used as subordinated moments for genital sex. If I like to look at you it is ok only if its foreplay to proper penetration its okay.

Butler/Deleuze Version: we have polymorphous perverse paradise of plural practices which is violently normativized to a genital paradigm. This is also false. There is no plurality of perversions and then bad patriarchy which subordinates it. NO wrong. It is not enough to reassert infantile sexuality which is polymorphous perverse sexuality which is then totalized regulated by the Oedipal genital norm. Infantile sexuality is not the original base of sexuality which is then captured and regulated by the heterosex norm.

The idea here is that Alenka Zupancic, copulation fucking is a central point but precisely as such it ESCAPES normativity. THERE IS NO SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP.

We do have this perverse polymorphous mastabatory practices, but always against the background of a cogntive hole, could have been filled in by a full genital sex, but this can’t be done there is no formula here. There is no knowledge here, there is no formula for sex. Full sex copulation, its space has be sustained by perverse scenarios.

Already Lacan says Seminar XX, simple observation, turns around completely the standard idea that Catholic church its sexual teaching privileges normative genital sexuality at the expense of oppressed perverse infantile drives etc. As if the only thing church tolerates is genital straight heterosexuality NO. Absolutely NOT TRUE.

If you look at the church imaginary it is full or oral/anal drives and art, saints eating shit, fondling each other, but never fucking, copulation is prohibited in the church imaginary. Reject Catholic sexual morality imposes normative sexuality on polymorphous perverse sexuality of humans.

One should insist that there is nothing necessarily asocial in partial drives, they function as glue as society, in contrast to the sexual straight couple.

Pre-genital oral, anal drives, the Church and Army is full of this. What they feel threatened by is copulation, the couple.

Zupancic there is something profoundly disruptive at stake in copulation, the kind of social bond it proposes (copulation) that Christianity proposes, it doesn’t need copulation, natural copulation is utterly banned from the religious imaginary.

Christianity is all about jouissance of the body, the body of God as constituting another person’s jouissance, partial drives and the satisfaction they procure are abundantly present. In its libidinal aspect, satisfaction and bonding by way of partial objects with the exclusion of sexual coupling. Infantile sexuality is part of Christianity. The pure enjoyment, enjoyment for sake of enjoyment is not banned, what is banned is sexuality in form of copulation. Christianity fully acknowledges the polymorphous perverse satisfaction of drives but Christianity desexualizes the pleasure they provide. Why this oppression of Sexuality in Church?

1:41 What happens in copulation is precisely a certain link, coupling of 2 dimension which make it problematic for Church. On the one hand sexuality in sense of partial drives, you can’t find satisfaction put finger up here, squeeze here, technical stuff of how to do it then we have the inter-subjective LINK, but isn’t the tendency today that the 2 should be kept apart.

If you are frigid = problem of partial drives. Sexual topic is reduced to question of partial drives. Sexual topic is reduced to topic of partial drives, if you can’t get erection do this … sexuality is subordinated to, does it contribute to your relation to other. What happens in intense copulation the 2 dimensions go together.

The mystery of sexuality is intense bodily enjoyment and connection with Other, not in this metaphysical sense, communicating with sould no fuck soul, it is brutally concrete, not connecting with souls, the more you reduce the other to an object, the more you have spiritual surrender.

The Church prefers missionary position, this is way to maintain distance from other, in other words the Church wants to protect us from the miraculous EVENTAL, traumatic event of SEXUALITY. a traumatic event that can’t be reduced to reproductive copulation.

1:44.20 This missing link, no sexual relationship, the last trap here. If you read Lacan, you must notice AMBIGUITY. 1. massively endorses philosophic topic, division between animal and humans. Animals=instinct you know when to copulate. Humans we need fantasies, poetry it doesn’t function. This idea of Opposing nature as domain of immediate BALANCE, no, we have to do a step: This idea that it’s not enough to say man is de-natured animal, Nature is already de-natured it doesn’t know it.
Alenka Zupancic: are you aware of something, conscious of something. UNCONSCIOUS of something. Both nature and man don’t know how to do it. Nature doesn’t know that it doesn’t know. Lacan gives some hints in Seminar II. LAMELLA undead object. at the level of animal sexuality. Oscillates Lacan between simple celebration of humanity, Man doesn’t have instinctual coordinates, which is why has to invent things NO Nature has gap itself, The battler is DENATURALIZING nature. The ultimae idealist resistance, we have nature, then somehow things go wrong with humans.

This wonderful idea in Shcelling, Benjamin, this idea human language was created to give words to the pain that is already in nature, to redeem the pain in nature. If we drop this mystical topic, and say radical discord that is ALREADY IN NATURE. with humanity nature becomes UNCONSCIOUS of its own DISCORD. THis is the way I read quantum physics, the latter denaturalizes nature, what we get is not culture but not nature in the usual way we understand it.
151:00 What would be materialist theology. Kierkargards idea of anxiety: tried to develop logical proof of God, while he’s trying to deduce existence of God, God himself is watching with anxiety, because if he fails, then God himself like the cat walking over the cliff on thin air, will suddenly drop. Will god’s existence depend on philosophy proving his existence.

Like monarch anxiety if General Assembly deciding if partial or absolute monarch.
Crazy as it may sound, each of us as subjects are in position of GOD, our existence depends on the other, fuck it, I exist if the whole world disappears, for you to exist you depend radically on the others.

The lesson of Quantum physics, at the micro level, things can go on, you can cheat ontologically. Einstein answer to Borg, God does not cheat. Ok, maybe God doesn’t cheat but he can be cheat, at quantum level things can happen that God doesn’t know about. IT isn’t is God cheating, NO. We can cheat on GOD.

Ž around May 2013

Žižek slamming Jameson
The Cynic. Do not need symptomal reading of ideology. Who needs complex theories, things are so obvious we just have to inform the people.
Pics from Guantonamo but Žižek showed these pics to friends and asked them “what is this?” answer: Avantgarde theatre. No. This is an intro to the Obscene underside of American culture.

The truly subversive thing today
Not to engage in any dreams, but brutal confrontation. Most of the critical analysis, whenever you talk about poverty, its much more mobilizing to talk about poverty in Africa, then the Bill Gates game, today, its precisely this need to present a terrifying situation, presenting a light at the end of the tunnel that prevents change.

Hegel and Literature
Point de capiton, Rebecca Comay hesitates here. What I think is no, Hegel is there totally consequent, he is applying the same logic all around the Phenomenology. You need a brutal regression at the. The theory of the Monarch. To get a modern state, does not depend on tradition, but a rational state, you need on the top a king, who is who he is by just a stupid biological fact. Hegel does not violate anything, this is a crucial mechanism of Hegel. To finish the mediation itself, you need a brutal return to immediacy.

What is the possible limitation of Hegel?
Can Hegel think negation of negation. Negate something into nothing, the second move is not “nothing is the subordinated moment you then get a complex” no nothing is even less than nothing ..”

Aaron Schuster on wierd optimism
The Joke by Milan Kundera.
Hegel cannot think pure repetition, he has a wonderful theory of repetition, but as an idealizing moment, second time sublation into iseal form.
He can’t think a purely mechanical repetition, a repetition without this moment of sublation.

A True post-Hegelian space
pure repetition. The problem is that the entire theory of exploitation by Marx is based on this model. When talk is returning to Marx, question, what happens to his labour theory of value and theory of exploitation. You know Marx is Capital when he emphasizes, that natural resources are not source of value, he give example of oil, if we apply Marx directly, Chavez is exploiting U.S. We have to do something different with Marx.
Second anniversary of Petrograd revolution where people played themselves. It was really a wierd moment. They repeated the attack on Winter Palace. How would Benjamin to account the urge to stage revolution itself as aesthetic itself. Ranciere tries to rehabilitate this type of aesthetics.
What do you mean by emanicpation, is it emancipation that Marx had in mind?

On Moshe Postone
Marx is not historicist enough, Marx emphasizes the definition of work. He does something strange. If we approach labour, its’ only worker on one side and object on other side. The moment we move to universal dimension the social dimension disappears???? In a communist society production will become automated, we will have collective worker, just manipulating the process. We have to think these limitations of Marx.

Disagrees with Badiou
extra state agency, the communist party which was undermining the state authority, Stalinism is not absolute state authority, it undermined state authority.
China pretends to be normal state, ministries blah blah, and then you have weird entity called Communist Party China, this party does not exist, there are no laws regulating it. The functioning of communist party, it controls the state, but has no full legal status. It is here we plead for Hegel, state socialism is precisely that the rule of law, the state was undermined. When Hegel says when some idea is actualized in wrong way, in some ways you have to blame the idea, you can’t say oh they misinterpreted Marx. What the world needs today is a good radical critique of Marx, only we can do it.

The Big Moment Will Never Arrive
Ok there was a crisis, do you hear any consistent proposal of radical left to get out of it. I’m not optimistic. The first duty of theory is to put into question this model, “there will be a true theory that will come …” As if we intellectuals will provide the true theory and people will learn it, NO. There will be dangerous moments, catastrophes, this big event, even what Benjamin was expecting, in a much more Hegelian way we must renounce this there will not be a big revolutionary moment. No program for future. in the sense in the complexity of history, you cannot include into the historical process the effects of your intervention … you HAVE TO TAKE A RISK AND INTERVENE.

But somehow the most subversive thing sometimes may appears as just a repetition.