Category: hegel

butler post-hegelian

Butler, Judith. Giving An Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham UP, 2005.  Print.

On Recognition: Hegel says I see you, you see me, we’re the same, you and me, looking at each other. For Hegel, the other is at first outside itself, before the subject realizes that “hey, this other is actually alot like me.”  In fact this other is constitutive of the subject.  Some say this makes Hegel into an imperialist, going around appropriating the other as part of the subject itself.  However, others, like Butler, see in Hegel, a more ecstatic subject:

the “I” repeatedly finds itself outside itself, and that nothing can put an end to the repeated upsurge of this exteriority that is, paradoxically, my own. I am, as it were, always other to myself, and there is no final moment in which my return to myself takes place. In fact, if we are to follow The Phenomenology of Spirit, I am invariably transformed by the encounters I undergo; recognition becomes the process by which I become other than what I was and so cease to be able to return to what I was.  There is, then, a constitutive loss in the process of recognition, since the “I” is transformed through the act of recognition. Not all of its past is gathered and known in the act of recognition; the act alters the organization of that past and its meaning at the same time that it transforms the present of the one who receives recognition.  Recognition is an act in which the “return to self” becomes impossible for another reason as well. An encounter with an other effects a transformation of the self from which there is no return. What is recognized about a self in the course of the exchange is that the self is the sort of being for whom staying inside itself proves impossible. One is compelled and comported outside oneself; one finds that the only way to know oneself is through a mediation that takes place outside of oneself, exterior to oneself, by virtue of a convention or a norm that one did not make, in which one cannot discern oneself as an author or an agent of one’s own making.  In this sense, then, the Hegelian subject of recognition is one for whom a vacillation between loss and ecstasy is inevitable.  The possibility of the “I,” of speaking and knowing the “I,” resides in a perspective that dislocates the first-person perspective it conditions (27-28).

butler new preface to paperback edition of subjects of desire (1987) August 1998

In a sense all my work remains within the oribit of a certain set of Hegelian questions:

What is the relation between desire and recognition and how is it that the constitution of the subject entails a radical and constitutive relation to alterity?

… I am as much concerned with the way in which Antigone is consistently misread by Hegel as with his provocative way of understanding her criminal act as an eruption of an alternate legality within the sphere of public law.  Whether Antigone functions as a subject for Hegel remains a compelling question for me, and raises the question of the political limit of the subject, that is, both the limitations imposed upon subjecthood (who qualifies as one), and the limits of the subject as the point of departure for politics.  Hegel remains important here for his subject does not stay in its place displaying a critical mobility that may well be useful for further appropriations of Hegel to come.  The emergent subject of Hegel’s phenomenology is an ek-static one, a subject who constantly finds itself outside itself, and whose periodic expropriations do not lead to a return to a former self. Indeed, the self who comes outside of itself, for whom ek-statis is a condition of existence, is one for whom no return to self is possible, for whom there is no final recovery from self-loss. The notion of “difference” is similarly misunderstood, I would suggest, when it is understood as contained within or by the subject: the Hegelian subject’s encounter with difference is not resolved into identity.  Rather, the moment of its “resolutions” is finally indistinguishable from the moment of its dispersion; the thinking of this cross-vectored temporality ushers in the Hegelian understanding of infinity and offers a notion of the subject that cannot remain bounded in the face of the world. Misrecognition does not arrive as a distinctively Lacanian corrective to the Hegelian subject, for it is precisely by misrecognition that the Hegelian subject repeatedly suffers its self-loss.  Indeed, this is a self constitutively at risk of self-loss.  This subject neither has nor suffers its desire, but is the very action of desire as it perpetually displaces the subject. Thus, it is neither precisely a new theory of the subject nor a definitive displacement of the subject that Hegel provides but rather a definition in displacement, for which there is no final restoration. August 1998

malabou catherine review hegel and plasticity

Catherine Malabou and the Currency of Hegelianism

Hypatia vol. 15, no. 4 (Fall 2000) by Lisabeth During

Catherine Malabou is a professor of philosophy at Paris-Nanterre. A collaborator and student of Jacques Derrida, her work shares some of his interest in rigorous protocols of reading, and a willingness to attend to the undercurrents of  over-read and “too familiar “te xts. But, as she points out, this orientation was shared by Hegel himself.

Arguing against Heidegger, Kojeve, and other critics of Hegel, the book in which this Introduction appears puts Hegel back on the map of the present.

It is a brave person who will take G W. F Hegel on his own terms in this day and age. It is, after all, 50 years at least after Martin Heidegger’s gloomy warnings about the “end of metaphysics.”‘ And at least 30 years since Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault first insisted that philosophy would have to choose between “difference” and “dialectic, “if it were to escape the banality of a teleological justification of history.2 In the United States, anyone who still sees vitality in Hegel may find themselves uncomfortably close to the right-wing apologetics of a Francis Fukuyama. For what are we to make of Hegel’s supposed announcement of the “end of history”? It is too easy to hear in it the accents of resignation or premature reconciliation, even if Hegel himself would be the last to be reconciled to the global victory of market-driven “democracy” in the aftermath of 1989. Committed to the foresight of the dialectic, for which history is an externalization of the quietly uninterrupted life of the Idea, can there be anything genuinely “new” for Hegel, any event for which the concept is not already prepared, any history that doesn’t happen, as it were, twice? And if there is no space for the new, is there in fact any space for the present? Georges Bataille fantasized about the immense “weariness” of the Hegelian standpoint.4 Heidegger dismissed it more bluntly: Hegel’s present moment is lost in eternity; it is not temporal at all; indeed all his “times” are

Lisabeth During homogenous, empty (Heidegger 1984,391-98). Because Hegel could not conceive the present except as a vanishing “point,” it was impossible for him to believe that anything really could happen “in time.” Everything is repetition, recycling: the motions that feel like revolution, overturning, reversal, are not new. They have always already been traced. Calling things to mind, if that is one way of describing knowledge, is, then, only recalling. Catherine Malabou accepts the intransigence of these questions. Is it too late for Hegel? Is any reading of Hegel, no matter how interesting, simply an exercise in nostalgia? Her recent book, The Future of Hegel: Plasticite,Temporalite, Dialectique (1996), makes a claim about Hegel’s place in history that risks disturbing a powerful precursor. Alexandre Kojeve, who was almost single-handedly responsible for French Hegelianism, believes as Malabou does in the “actualite(t he timeliness) of the Hegelian dialectic. Yet while Kojeve’s potent mix of Marxist and Heideggerean ideas made it possible to read Hegel with a modernist conscience, his influential interpretation of the Phenomenology of Spirit as an announcement of the “end of history” foreclosed any future trans-formations of the Hegelian machinery (Kojeve 1968). To approach the fulfilled spirit of Hegel, Kojeve famously decreed, is to step into the shoes of the sage, the one who ceases to act, the one for whom change is arrested.5 Bataille will add that to be “sovereign” in the limited sense of Hegelian mastery is to be dead to suffering, perhaps also immune to ecstasy and shock (Bataille 1990). Although we are told that the dialectic is a logic of unceasing alteration, which Hegel baptized “negativity,” surely only a being who has transcended finitude would be able to see that dialectical logic in history. For those enmeshed in the coils of history, the events of politics, even individual life, seem without meaning, only random and indifferent. Politically as well as philosophically, then, it is a dangerous thing to do, to situate yourself too intimately within the dialectical movements and concepts of the Hegelian system, to know them from the inside out. It is better to be protected by a selective “borrowing” th at sifts the wheat from the chaff, that exports only the more acceptable bits from Hegel. The Hegel which late modernity can claim for itself might include the portrait of desire or the un-happy consciousness. We might find a place among our prejudices for the communitarian intuitions and the distrust of liberalism, for the cult of Antigone and her tragic anomaly, for the critique of immediacy, or maybe the abuse directed at Immanuel Kant and his “formalism.” Doesn’t Hegel need a scrupulous purification — even licensing as dramatic a cleansing as that provided by John McDowell in his widely read Mind and World (1994) — before the modern reader can confront his ideas, and, in particular, his language, without wincing? Malabou thinks otherwise. To her the dialectic is a process of “plasticity,” a movement where formation and dissolution, novelty and anticipation, are in continual interplay-in the “time” of the world as in the “time” of individual life. Hegelian thought has futurity because it has plasticity. As she interprets it, the Hegelian future is not a characterless void-a space of unfilled time-but a horizon which will preserve even though it abrogates and takes away. If “plasticity” is one of the meanings of futurity in Hegel, it is also one of the best translations of Hegel’s difficult idea that the “concept” needs “self-determination” and “self-differentiation.”Even the notorious “Aufhebung” (French “reléve“) is, on Malabou’s reading, another alibi for the future. Against Hegel, Bataille and Theodor Adorno have accused the system of a symptomatic fear of loss, a speculative hunger to absorb all. There are many recognizable traits in their portrait of a philosophical economy too committed to its reserves, too closed to the anomalous and the singular.6 But the virtue of Malabou’s attractive Hegel is that, without glossing over any of the most intractable concepts in the Hegelian repertory, she can save Hegel from such a fate. “Plastic”-borrowed from the lexicon of sculpture, the “plastic” art par excellence-implies mobility, molding, forming and flexibility-“a speculative souplesse which is neither passion nor passivity.” It is a generous trait, not a petty or self-protective one. But it also suggests a certain dynamite that shares its name (the plastic bomb). She wonders if her reading of Hegel, driven by a belief that the Hegelian “future” is both open and imaginable, will strike others as “explosive.” In her account of her intention to produce a deconstructive reading, a Hegel subjected to the very metamorphoses his dialectical writing puts into motion, Malabou describes how she chose the notion of plasticity in the belief it might act as the “defective cornerstone” causing the self-reliant systematic artifice to tremble. But in fact neither plasticity nor deconstruction prove to unsettle the Hegelian text in the way Jacques Derrida had taught her to expect. Is it that Hegel-that thinker of breaks and repairs-is simply too resilient, too open himself to the way an argument moves not just from bottom to top, but from side to center, and corer to comer? Malabou prefers to give Hegel the credit. One may also wonder if it is the deconstructive scenario which is less rewarding than she would have liked to believe. Derrida’s Hegel —in Glas (1986), in “Le puits et la pyramide” (1982b), in the essay on “Ousia and gramme” (1982a) which she analyses in her book-is a tricky and fertile thinker, not a prophet of ontological closure or historical triumphalism. But Derrida’s axioms of reading, as Malabou summarizes them in her introduction to her own work, are less interesting as a program than the insights for which they are meant to account. Malabou betrays a moment of self-doubt when reflecting on the results of her own inquiry: has she finished up on the side of a philosophy of cure, of reparation and reconciliation, rather than unending rupture and untidy edges? Can she rest content with the product of her own scrupulous and inventive reading? Is her reading neither “explosive,” as she calls it, nor “transgressive,” as some students of Derrida would expect? 192

It is the fidelity of Malabou’s Hegel which leaves the most lasting impression from her work: a Hegel as supple and ambitious as the reader he asks for. Malabou, a scholarly reader of the history of philosophy, puts her reputation on the line by identifying her very contemporary perspective with Hegel’s. She makes a case that should strike many as persuasive, claiming that Hegel’s thought is “relevant,” timely, its designs on us unfinished and still to be under-stood. For her, Hegel is not an interesting “maitre” worth a passionate but irritated conversation (as he is for Irigaray7), nor a source of philosophical guidelines who can be absorbed and then moved beyond (as he is for Judith Butler 8), but someone who must be followed “to the very limits” (jusqu’au bout), to the extremities of his unexpected thought, in order that the risk and challenge of his ideas be recognized and aspired to. If such a result is not enough to align Catherine Malabou to any particular “school” of French philosophical thought, it is more than enough to make her graceful and generous writing a novelty in the present landscape of Hegel scholarship. Her commitment to a “plastic” reading follows not only Hegel’s own instructions, but the suggestion of another influential French philosopher from the generation and circle of Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy. Nancy anticipates her in emphasizing the contribution of the reader as a “repetition” which restores the “plasticity” of the author’s exposition. (His La Remarque speculative [1973] introduces this understanding of the term.) Plastic reading, which Hegel identifies with the ideal philosophical attitude, releases the force and inexhaustibility of the “content” from its contingent and rigid form: it is as much an act of receptivity as a formative process. Refashioned and recuperated by the plastic individual, the life of philosophy (which is what Hegel, we must remember, meant by the “concept”) is freed from any moribund or “congealed” thought structure, whether that be the artificial “fixity of the proposition,” as Hegel maintained, or our more self-conscious yet no less provisional habits of mind. Plasticity, Nancy and Malabou agree, is the true product of the notorious Hegelian Aufhebung. Seen in this way, the Aufhebung marks the difference between a dependent, self-enclosed thought and a thought of transformation, of “futurity.”If  speculative thought is plastic rather than recollective, transcendental, or merely “critical,” it is because it is a movement that dissolves and restores, fractures and reweaves, in the same way that plasticity allows the organ to regain its resilience or the work of art to make and remake the possibilities of its material. It is this notion of plasticity-not so much a notion as a sign of generous reading-which tells us less about the secret and trouble-some “meaning” of Hegel’s philosophy-something neither I nor Malabou assume to be the desired goal-and more about what it would be like to carry out a Hegelian “reading” of philosophy. Here we can understand why Malabou thinks it is so important to defend the “future” of Hegel and to resist his relegation to the museum of dead onto-theological monuments. Her work intends to do something more than add another piece to the body of Hegel scholar-ship. It has no interest in the condescending way in which the present believes it can “update” or appropriate for its own ends a past form of thought. The Future of Hegel belongs not to the commemoration of Hegel but to the pro-longed effects of Hegel’s thought as it continues to address us. Inspired by her teacher and collaborator Derrida, Malabou sees a way to transform and pre-serve (auffieben) the sort of reading which Hegel’s writing teaches us how to want, and whose sophistication and clarity has rarely been recognized as effectively as here.

NOTES

1.The notes that became Heidegger’s essay” Uberwindungder Metaphysik” come from the years1936-1946; Being and Time( 1927) proclaimed the end of the “history of ontology” in order to pose in a radical and renewed fashion “the question of being.” See Heidegger(1985) and (1996).

2. See, on this, Descombes (1980).

3. See Fukuyama (1982).

4. Bataille speaks of Hegel’s immense fatigue in Bataille (1987). See also Derrida (1978), and on the inescapability of weariness, Blanchot (1993).

5. This conclusion is implicit in almost every passage of Kojeve’s lectures, but see especially Kojeve (1981, 95-99, 167-68). 6. For Adorno o n Hegel see Adoro (1993); for Batailles see Bataille (1987;1990).

7. See Irigaray (1987).

8. See Butler (1987; 1997).

REFERENCES

Adorno,Theodor W. 1993. Hegel: Three studies. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Bataille,G eorges.1987. Inner experience.Trans. Leslie Ann Boldt. Albany: SUNY Press. .1990. Hegel,death and sacrifice. Yale French Studies 78:9 -28.

Blanchot, Maurice. 1993.The infinite conversation. Trans. Susan H anson. Minneapolis: University of  Minnesota Press.

Butler, Judith. 1987. Subjects of desire: Hegelian reflections in twentieth-century Fra nce. New York: Columbia University Press.

—., 1997. The psychic life of power: Theories of subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 1978.From restricted to general economy:A Hegelianism without reserves. In Writing and difference, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

1982a. Ousia and gramme. In Margins of philosophy, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. . 1982b. The pit and the pyramid. In Margins of philosophy, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. . 1986. Glas. Trans. John P. Leavey and Richard Rand. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Descombes, Vincent. 1980. Modem French philosophy. Trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press.

Fukuyama, Francis. 1982. The end of history and the last man. New York: Free Press.

Hegel, G. W. F 1977. The phenomenologyof spirit. Trans. A . V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Heidegger, Martin. 1984. Sein und Zeit. Tiibingen: Max Niemeyer. 1985. Vortrdge und Aufsatze. Pfullingen: Neske .1996. Being and time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Irigaray, Luce. 1987. L’universel c mme mediation. In Sexes et parentes. Paris: Editions de Minuit. . 1993. The universal as mediation. In Sexes and genealogies. Trans.Gillian C. Gill. New York: Columbia University Press.

Alexandre Kojeve. 1968. Introduction a la lectured e Hegel: Lecons sur la Phenomenologie de l’Esprit professes de 1933 a 1939 a I’Ecole des Hautes Etudes reunites et publiees par Raymond Queneau. Paris: Gallimard. 1980. Introduction to the reading of Hegel: Lectures on the phenomenologyof spirit. Ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Malabou, Catherine. 1996. L’avenir de Hegel: Plasticite, temporalite, dialectique. Paris: Vrin. Malabou, Catherine, and Jacques Derrida. 1999. La contre-allee. Paris: La Quinzaine Litteraire-Louis Vuitton.

McDowell, John. 1994. Mind and world. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1973. La Remarque speculative. Paris: Galilee.

butler lordship and bondage

Butler, Judith. Subjects of Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1987.  Print.

We have seen that desire is a polyvalent structure, a movement to establish an identity coextensive with the world. Hegel’s discussion of labor begins to show us how the world of substance becomes recast as the world of the subject. Desire as a transformation of the natural world is simultaneously the transformation of its own natural self into an embodied freedom. And yet, these transformations cannot occur outside of an historically constituted intersubjectivity which mediates the relation to nature and to the self.  True subjectivities come to flourish only in communities that provide for reciprocal recognition, for we do not come to ourselves through work alone, but through the acknowledging look of the Other who confirms us (58).

butler on kojeve anthropocentrism

Butler, Judith. Subjects of Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1987.  Print.

Work that exemplifies human being as transcending the natural and which occasions the recognition of the Other is termed historical action.  As the efficacious transformation of biological or natural givens, historical action is the mode through which the world of substance is recast as the world of the subject.

Confronting the natural world, the historical agent takes it up, marks it with the signature of consciousness and sets it forth in the social world to be seen.  This process is evident in the creation of a material work, in the linguistic expression of a reality, in the opening up of dialogue with other human beings: historical action is possible within the spheres of interaction and production alike. 68

kojève

Butler, Judith. Subjects of Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1987.  Print.

Desire is thus a kind of negation that is not resolved into a more inclusive conception of being; desire indicates an ontological difference between consciousness and its world, which, for Kojève, cannot be overcome.

Kojève’s formulation of desire as a permanent activity of negation permits a modern conception of desire freed from the implicit teleological claims of Hegel’s view in the Phenomenology. Kojève views desire as a … negative or negating intentionality without a preestablished teleological structure. … The dissolution of Hegel’s harmonious ontology, the scheme whereby negation is continuously superseded by a more encompassing version of being, allows for the formulation of desire as an expression of freedom. 69

Below is taken from Scott R. Stroud

Another important consideration that should lend credibility to Kojève’s externalist, social reading, although not to his ultimate materialist conclusions, is the issue of power in the master/slave dialectic. The important developments for the slave come in and through her reaction to the wielding of power by the master. Initially, however, one must recognize that the struggle was initiated over a desire for unilateral recognition by the other; in other words, each agent wanted power over the other to the extent that they could achieve unreciprocated recognition. This leads to the staking of lives qua transcending being, and to the life or death struggle for recognition. Kojève is accurate in his assessment of conflict relating to power; in this case, the power relates to external objects that a subject would like to exercise control over.

The other source of power in the struggle comes from the master, once the roles have been assigned. One agent becomes a slave because he yields to his natural instincts and desires; the master is able to risk his life long enough for the other’s desire to give way. In this regard, he earns the title of master because he was able to transcend his natural desires, such as those of self-preservation. The slave feels this external power exercised by the master and is forced to work and labor on the world to sate the master’s desires. Again, the externality of Hegel’s point is clear, in that the two self-consciousnesses are in a struggle that involves the status of both wills; the master’s will is that which ends up being sated with the unwilled action of the slave because of the massive power difference. The master is able to force the slave to serve him through the fear of death. It is through this experience, however, that the slave gains a realization of her being in the world; she realizes that she is a being-for-self and that the master’s power only goes so far. Indeed, in the later sections on stoicism and skepticism, the slave begins to exercise this putative freedom through mental activity.

aufhebung

Butler, Judith.Subjects of Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.  Print.

… Hegel here characterizes the negativity of desire as the final, fully realized form of self-consciousness. To understand this correctly, we must not assume that negation is nothingness; on the contrary, as a differentiating relation that mediates the terms that initially counter each other, negation, understood in the sense of Aufhebung, cancels, preserves, and transcends the apparent differences it interrelates. As the final realization of self-consciousness, negation is a principle of absolute mediation, an infinitely capable subject that is its interrelations with all apparently different phenomena. 41

reading butler’s work on Hegel’s Phenomenology

I’m trying to follow her genesis of desire in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit which isn’t easy. I’m at the section in which Butler is moving towards the all important Lord and Bondsman, but before she can do that, she is outlining her understanding of the role that desire plays in the text.  Her take on desire in the P. is unique in the central role that she gives it, that is, the central role she attributes this concept playing in his overall work.

As destructive agency, self-consciousness “as desire essays to gain reality through the consumption of a living thing” 38.  But what it finds its that its consumption of living things, draws out the fact of its reliance on the very thing it seeks to destruct. An infinite number of objects must be negated in order for self-consciousness to gain the “monopoly on life that it seeks” 38

The conclusion drawn by self-consciousness that the world of objects is not consumable in its entirety has an unexpected inverse conclusion: desire requires this endless proliferation of alterity in order to stay alive as desire, as a desire that not only wants life, but is living. If the domain of living things could be consumed, desire would, paradoxically, lose its life; it would be a quiescent satiety, an end to the negative generativity that is self-consciousness. 39

“Self-consciousness thus concludes that Life and living objects cannot be fully assimilated, that desire must find some new form, that it must develop from destruction to a recognition of the insurpassibility of other living things … ” 38

butler desire

Butler, Judith. Subjects of Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1987.

Desire has been deemed philosophically dangerous precisely because of its propensity to blur clear vision and foster philosophical myopia, encouraging one to see only what one wants, and not what is. (3)

– moral subject must evince a moral intentionality, desire must be good, they must desire the good, ‘passionately wants what is right’ (4),

– if philosophy did not ‘evince a moral intentionality … philosophy would be left defenceless against the onset of nihilism and metaphysical dislocation.

… for desire, according to Hegel, is the incessant human effort to overcome external differences, a project to become  self-sufficient subject for whom all things apparently different finally emerge as immanent features of the subject itself (6).

Enter Hegel’s 20th century French commentators, “desire increasingly becomes a principle of the ontological displacement of the human subject, and in its latest stages, in the work of Lacan, Deleuze, and Foucault, desire comes to signify the impossibility of the coherent subject itself.” (6)

Twentieth-century French reflections on Hegel have, then, consistently looked to the notion of desire to discover possibilities for revising Hegel’s version of the autonomous human subject and the metaphysical doctrine of internal relations that conditions that subject (6).

How is it that desire, once conceived as the human instance of dialectical reason, becomes that which endangers dialectics, fractures the metaphysically integrated self, and disrupts the internal harmony of the subject and its ontological intimacy with the world? (7)

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)

Self-consciousness in general is Desire para 167

– consciousness must become other to itself in order to know itself, “The Hegelian subject cannot know itself instantaneously or immediately, but requires mediation to understand its own structure.

Insofar as desire is this principle of consciousness’ reflexivity, desire can be said to be satisfied when a relation to something external to consciousness is discovered to be constitutive of the subject itself … the Hegelian subject expands in the course of its adventure through alterity; it internalizes the world that it desires, and expands to encompass, to be, what it initially confronts as other to itself.  The final satisfaction of desire is the discovery of substance as subject, the experience of the world as everywhere confirming that subject’s sense of immanent metaphysical place (8-9).

Žižek there is no big Other

Žižek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy Then as Farce. New York: Verso, 2009.  Print.

… the task is “merely” to stop the train of history which, left to its own course, leads to a precipice. (Communism is thus not the light at the end of the tunnel, that is, the happy final outcome of a long and arduous struggle — if anything, the light at the end of the tunnel is rather that of another train approaching us at full speed.)

This is what a proper political act would be today: not so much to unleash a new movement, as to interrupt the present predominant movement. An act of “divine violence” would then mean pulling the emergency cord on the train of Historical Progress. In other words, one has to learn fully to accept that there is no big Other

The moment the “big Other” falls, the Leader can no longer claim a privileged relationship to Knowledge — he becomes an idiot like everyone else. (152)

Žižek communist hypothesis pt 4

This brings us to the next elementary definition of communism: in contrast to socialism, communism refers to singular universality, to the direct link between the singular and the universal, bypassing particular determinations.

When Paul says that, from a Christian standpoint, “there are no men or women, no Jews or Greeks;’ he thereby claims that ethnic roots, national identities, etc., are not a category of truth. To put it in precise Kantian terms: when we reflect upon our ethnic roots, we engage in a private use of reason, constrained by contingent dogmatic presuppositions; that is, we act as “immature” individuals, not as free humans who dwell in the dimension of the universality of reason. (104)

In his vision of public space characterized by the unconstrained exercise of Reason, he invokes a dimension of emancipatory universality outside the confines of one’s social identity, of one’s position within the order of (social) being —precisely the dimension so crucially missing in Rorty.

This space of singular universality is what, within Christianity, appears as the “Holy Spirit” -the space of a collective of believers subtracted from the field of organic communities, or of particular lifeworlds (“neither Greeks nor Jews”) . Consequently, is Kant’s “Think freely, but obey!” not a new version of Christ’s “Render therefore untoCaesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that  are God’s” ? ” Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s” : in other words, respect and obey the “private” particular life —world of your community; “and unto God the things that are God’s”: in other words, participate in the universal space of the community of believers. The Paulinian collective of believers is a proto-model of the Kantian “world-civil – society;’ and the domain of the state itself is thus in its own way “private”: private in the precise Kantian sense of the “private use of Reason” in the State administrative and ideological apparatuses (106).

The ex-slaves of Haiti took the French revolutionary slogans more literally than did the French themselves: they ignored all the implicit qualifications which abounded in Enlightenment ideology (freedom-but only for rational “mature” subjects, not for the wild immature barbarians who first had to undergo a long process of education in order to deserve freedom and equality . . . ) . This led to sublime “communist” moments, like the one that occurred when French soldiers (sent by Napoleon to suppress the rebellion and restore slavery) approached the black army of (self-)liberated slaves. When they heard an initially indistinct murmur coming from the black crowd, the soldiers at first assumed it must be some kind of tribal war chant; but as they came closer, they realized that the Haitians were singing the Marseillaise, and they started to wonder out loud whether they were not fighting on the wrong side. Events such as these enact universality as a political category. In them, as Buck-Morss put it, “universal humanity is visible at the edges”:

rather than giving multiple, distinct cultures equal due, whereby people are recognized as part of humanity indirectly through the mediation of collective cultural identities, human universality emerges in the historical event at the point of rupture. It is in the discontinuities of history that people whose culture has been strained to the breaking point give expression to a humanity that goes beyond cultural limits. And it is in our emphatic identification with this raw, free, and vulnerable state, that we have a chance of understanding what they say. Common humanity exists in spite of culture and its differences. A person’s nonidentity with the collective allows for subterranean solidarities that have a chance of appealing to universal, moral sentiment, the source today of enthusiasm and hope. (112-113)

Buck-Morss provides here a precise argument against the postmodern poetry of diversity: the latter masks the underlying sameness of the brutal violence enacted by culturally diverse cultures and regimes: “Can we rest satisfied with the call for acknowledging ‘multiple modernities: with a politics of ‘diversity: or ‘multiversality,’ when in fact the inhumanities of these multiplicities are often strikingly the same?” But, one may ask, was the ex -slaves’ singing of the Marseillaise ultimately not an index of colonialist subordination-even in their self-liberation, did not the Blacks have to follow the emancipatory model of the colonial metropolis? And is this not similar to the idea that contemporary opponents of US politics should be singing the Stars and Stripes? Surely the true revolutionary act would have been for the colonizers to sing the songs of the colonized?

The mistake in this reproach is double. First, contrary to appearances, it is far more acceptable for the colonial power to see its own people singing others’ (the colonized’s) songs than songs which express their own identity  — as a sign of tolerance and patronizing respect, colonizers love to learn and sing the songs of the colonized . . . Second, and much more importantly, the message of the Haitian soldiers’ Marseillaise was not “You see, even we, the primitive blacks, are able to assimilate ourselves to your high culture and politics, to imitate it as a model!” but a much more precise one: “in this battle, we are more French than you, the Frenchmen, are —we stand for the innermost consequences of your revolutionary ideology, the very consequences you were not able to assume.”  Such a message cannot but be deeply unsettling for the colonizers— and it would certainly not be the message of those who, today, might sing the Stars and Stripes when confronting the US army.

(Although, as a thought experiment, if we imagine a situation in which this could be the message, there would be nothing a priori problematic in doing so.)

🙂 Žižek says the politically correct guilt felt by Western countries over its colonialist past, inhibits their ability to see things clearly

The French colonized Haiti, but the French Revolution also provided the ideological foundation for the rebellion which liberated the slaves and established an independent Haiti; the process of decolonization was set in motion when the colonized nations demanded for themselves the same rights that the West took for itself. In short, one should never forget that the West supplied the very standards by which it (and its critics) measures its own criminal past. We are dealing here with the dialectic of form and content: when colonial countries demand independence and enact a “return to roots;’ the very form of this return (that of an independent nation-state) is Western. In its very defeat (losing the colonies) , the West thus wins, by imposing its social form on the other (115).

… the point is simply that the British colonization of India created the conditions for the double liberation of India: from the constraints of its own tradition as well as from colonization itself (116).

The standard position adopted by the unconditional defenders of the rights of illegal immigrants is to concede that, at the level of state, the counter-arguments may well be “true” (ie., of course a country cannot accept an endless flow of immigrants; of course they compete in ways which threaten local jobs, and may also pose certain security risks), but their defense moves at a different level altogether, a level which has a direct link with demands of reality, the level of principled politics where we can unconditionally insist that “qui est ici est d’ici” (“those who are here are from here’) . But is this principled position not all too simple, allowing for the comfortable position of a beautiful soul?

I insist on my principles, and let the state deal with pragmatic constraints of reality . . . In this way, do we not avoid a crucial aspect of the political battle for the rights of immigrants: how to convince the workers opposing those immigrants that they are fighting the wrong battle; and how to propose a feasible form of alternative politics?

The “impossible” (an openness to immigrants) has to happen in reality-this would be a true political event.

But why should the immigrant not be satisfied with his normalization? Because, instead of asserting his identity, he has to adapt to his oppressor’s standards: he is accepted, but defacto in a secondary role. His oppressor’s discourse defines the terms of his identity. One should remember here the programmatic words of Stokely Carmichael (the founder of Black Power) :

“We have to fight for the right to invent the terms which will allow us to define ourselves and to define our relations to society, and we have to fight that these terms will be accepted. This is the first need of a free people, and this is also the first right refused by every oppressor.”

The problem is how, exactly, to do this. That is to say, how to resist the temptation to define oneself with reference to some mythical and totally external identity (“African roots”) , which, by way of cutting links with “white” culture, also deprives the oppressed of crucial intellectual tools for their struggle (namely, the egalitarian emancipatory tradition) as well as potential allies.

One should thus slightly correct Carmichael’s words: what the oppressors really fear is not some totally mythical self-definition with no links to white culture, but a self-definition which, by way of appropriating key elements of the “white” egalitarian-emancipatory tradition, redefines that very tradition, transforming it not so much in terms of what it says as in what it does not say —that is, obliterating the implicit qualifications which have defacto excluded Blacks from the egalitarian space. In other words, it is not enough to find new terms with which to define oneself outside of the dominant white tradition —one should go a step further and deprive the whites of the monopoly on defining their own tradition.

In this precise sense, the Haitian Revolution was “a defining moment in world history. The point is not to study the Haitian Revolution as an extension of the European revolutionary spirit, that is, to examine the significance of Europe (of the French Revolution) for the Haitian  Revolution, but rather to assert the significance of the Haitian Revolution for Europe.

It is not only that one cannot understand Haiti without Europe —one cannot understand either the scope or the limitations of the European emancipation process without Haiti. Haiti was an exception from the very beginning, from its revolutionary struggle against slavery which ended in independence in January 1804: “Only in Haiti was the declaration of human freedom universally consistent. Only in Haiti was this declaration sustained at all costs, in direct opposition to the social order and economic logic of the day:’ For this reason, “there is no single event in the whole of modern history whose implications were more threatening to the dominant global order of things.” (Hallward Damning the Flood) 121

Žižek Tilton Gallery NYC nov 2006

Can one really tolerate a neighbour

the symptom pre-exists what it is a symptom of

If a woman is a symptom, she is walking around, do you want me to be your symptom
Pure symptom: a nun, a radical feminine position, I will be a pure symptom
Man need a symptom to be
Film DaVinci Code: The girl is frigid, totally de-sexualized. She witnessed the primordial sin, saw her grandfather in some pagan sin.  So jesus has to copulate to cover up that she doesn’t.
Solution: She accepts her role as leader of group who believe in her.  A passage from eros to agape, from eros to political love.
Abyss of subjectivity: elementary reaction is FEAR, especially today, the inexistence of the big Other is more apparent than ever, not only language, but also ecology, is disappearing.  The moment through genome and bio manipulations, the moment you can manipulate nature this way, it is no l onger nature in the sense of dense impenatrability.
If somone fucks with your inner nature, they violate your freedom, no its much more radical … the ultimate horror, modern science can produce new forms of monstors, not just observe.
Nonetheless behind all this is fear of the neigbour.  The big problem today is to control this dimension of the neighbour.

The neighbour INTRUDES. Unlike Sam Harris who can happily promote torture because the dimension of the neighbour gets LOST. So Sam can just go ahead and treat humans as just a calculus of ok I toruture you here to prevent greater suffering.  the dimension of the neighbour gets lost.

All outbursts get lost, is outburst against the neighbour.  Since we are still neighbours within our own symbolic universes, own ways of enjoyment.  So what we need today is not more communication but more distance, a new code of discretion, to ignore others more.
Our solution to deal with proximity of the neighbour is Tolerance which Zizek HATES.
He criticizes Wendy Brown, but likes her book, Regulating Aversion.
He talks about Martin Luther King who didn’t use ‘tolerance’ as a category, same with feminism, they don’t ask to be ‘tolerated’.  Tolerance is a depoliticized politics.  MLK was inequality, poverty which demands political solutions.
Brown develops the culturalization of political differences, political differences translated into cultural differences, into different ways of life.
Fukuyama and Huntington Clash of Civilizations, are same don’t contribute, class of civilizations is politics at the ‘end of history’.  politics is rational administration, the only true passionate conflicts are conflicts of culture.

Critique of Brown: They remain caught in too primitive critique of ideology: denouncing the false universality
What appears to be a neutral notion, privledges a certain culture, human rights are not real human rights they privledge male straight males.  Zizek doesn’t subscribe to this.

Of course there is a gap, universal human rights and hwo they function.  this gap has POSITIVE aspects, we can REWRITE IT, mary wollstencraft rewrote it, the blacks in Haiti after the French Rev.

2. If you read closely Hegel it’s that this is only 1 side of the story, of denouncing universality as false universality, blah blah

– We also have the opposite mystification which is more interesting: something you percieve is only your particular interest is already universal dimension.

The cunning of reason, you think you are just following your narrow interests, you don’t see the universal dimension of your acts.

As capitalist subject, you are universal in your own individual self experience, you relate to yourself as self as universal.

My profession is being a knight or a serf, this is absurd they didn’t see themselves as a profession

you yourself experience yourself in the core of your being as universal, whenever capitalism spreads, from within it undermines each culture.  Chinese discovered this and now are using capitalism to destroy their culture instead of the primitive way of using guns that didn’t work.

Foreign cultures appear stupid to me, what from

Experience your own identity as ultimately contingent.  there is no authentic liberation, there is no feminism,

the way to break out of neighbour, abbyss otherness, should we tolerate it or not

EMBRACE this radical universality … in the form of a struggle.  Not that I’m in my culture and you in yours, it’s that what I want to share with you is our shared intolerances, the only universality I share with you is universality of struggle.  My own particular identity, I am not fully myself, in the very core of my identity is a universality that surpasses me, that’s what gives us some hope, that we are not only more particular than we think, even when you think you are immersed in your culture you are UNIVERSAL

SOLIPSISM is FALSE.

THE UNIVERSAL ETHICS IS KANTIAN ETHICS

IMMORAL ETHICS: It doesn’t matter what you do, by fully engaged. No that’s not Zizek.

Kantian Ethics is for Zizek.  there is no BIg other, you cant put on big other to tell you your duty, YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR IT.  A Good Kantian cannot say, what can I do I just obeyed my duty, you are NOT ALLOWED to use duty as excuse to do your duty.  No you have to fully stand behind your duty.  You can’t say I was only doing my duty.

Problem of tolerance:

TERROR!
Abandon that what you are afraid to lose, Accept the loss become UNIVERSAL

You are afraid to lose your particular identity, maybe what you are protecting is in itself worthless, ABANDON THAT

So what a minor disturbance in the solar system.

Don’t fear be calm, things will get better: NO it’s not this, there is no BIG OTHER, it doesn’t exist, we are in the abyss there are no guarantees.

ABC good radical ecology; there is no natural balance, there is no way to return.  Nature as balanced homeostasis HA, Nature is one big catastrophe, what is oil, one big catastrophe of unimaginable proportions.

If all human industry to stop, earth is so adapted to it, it would cause a catastrophe.

Violent Imposition of Universal Will: ecological crisis, other crisis, the way to beat phenomena like Bush, is not through local resistances, don’t buy the pomo poetry, no longer capitalism from top down, but decentralized, multiple agents, multiple sites of resistance.

NO we must reassert BIG COLLECTIVE decisions.  we have a struggle, you have a struggle, lets see if we can join our struggles, our universality is universality of struggles.
We will need to assert big collective decisions.  The capitalist state is getting bigger and stronger.  State mechanisms military spending, economy these are all state interventions.  More than ever the state is crucial.

If I were to choose American or Chinese model of capitalism,