Category: hegel

The Violent Visions of Slavoj Žižek
New York Review of Books June 12, 2012
John Gray

Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism
by Slavoj Žižek
Verso, 1,038 pp., $69.95

Living in the End Times
by Slavoj Žižek
Verso, 504 pp., $22.95 (paper)

Few thinkers illustrate the contradictions of contemporary capitalism better than the Slovenian philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek. The financial and economic crisis has demonstrated the fragility of the free market system that its defenders believed had triumphed in the cold war; but there is no sign of anything resembling the socialist project that in the past was seen by many as embodying capitalism’s successor. Žižek’s work, which reflects this paradoxical situation in a number of ways, has made him one of the world’s best-known public intellectuals.

Born and educated in Ljubljana, the capital of the People’s Republic of Slovenia in the former Yugoslav federation until the federal state began to break up and Slovenia declared independence in 1990, Žižek has held academic positions in Britain, America, and Western Europe as well as in Slovenia. His prodigious output (over sixty volumes since his first book in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology, was published in 1989), innumerable articles and interviews, together with films such as Žižek! (2005) and The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006), have given him a presence that extends far beyond the academy. Well attuned to popular culture, particularly film, he has a following among young people in many countries, including those of post-Communist Europe. He has a journal dedicated to his work—International Journal of Žižek Studies, founded in 2007—whose readership is registered via Facebook, and in October 2011 he addressed members of the Occupy movement in Zuccotti Park in New York, an event that was widely reported and can be viewed on YouTube.

Žižek’s wide influence does not mean that his philosophical and political standpoint can be easily defined. A member of the Communist Party of Slovenia until he resigned in 1988, Žižek had difficult relations with the Party authorities for many years owing to his interest in what they viewed as heterodox ideas. In 1990 he stood as a presidential candidate for Liberal Democracy of Slovenia, a party of the center left that was the dominant political force in the country for the rest of the decade; but liberal ideas, aside from serving as a reference point for positions he rejects, have never shaped his thinking.

Žižek was dismissed from his first university teaching post in the early 1970s, when the Slovenian authorities judged a thesis he had written on French structuralism—then an influential movement in anthropology, linguistics, psychoanalysis, and philosophy claiming that human thought and behavior exemplify a universal system of interrelated principles—to be “non-Marxist.” The episode demonstrated the limited nature of the intellectual liberalization that was being promoted in the country at the time, but Žižek’s later work suggests that the authorities were right in judging that his intellectual orientation was not Marxian. Throughout the enormous corpus of work he has since built up, Marx is criticized for being insufficiently radical in his rejection of existing modes of thought, while Hegel—a much greater influence on Žižek—is praised for being willing to lay aside classical logic in order to develop a more dialectical way of thinking. But Hegel is also criticized for having too great an attachment to traditional modes of reasoning, and a central theme of Žižek’s writings is the need to shed the commitment to intellectual objectivity that has guided radical thinkers in the past.

Žižek’s work sets itself in opposition to Marx on many issues. For all he owed to Hegelian metaphysics, Marx was also an empirical thinker who tried to frame theories about the actual course of historical development. It was not the abstract idea of revolution with which he was primarily concerned, but a revolutionary project involving specific and radical alterations in economic institutions and power relations.

Žižek shows little interest in these aspects of Marx’s thinking. Aiming “to repeat the Marxist ‘critique of political economy’ without the utopian-ideological notion of communism as its inherent standard,” he believes that “the twentieth-century communist project was utopian precisely insofar as it was not radical enough.” As Žižek sees it, Marx’s understanding of communism was partly responsible for this failure: “Marx’s notion of the communist society is itself the inherent capitalist fantasy; that is, a fantasmatic scenario for resolving the capitalist antagonisms he so aptly described.”

While he rejects Marx’s conception of communism, Žižek devotes none of the over one thousand pages of Less Than Nothing to specifying the economic system or institutions of government that would feature in a communist society of the kind he favors. In effect a compendium of Žižek’s work to date, Less Than Nothing is devoted instead to reinterpreting Marx by way of Hegel—one of the book’s sections is called “Marx as a Reader of Hegel, Hegel as a Reader of Marx”—and reformulating Hegelian philosophy by reference to the thought of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.

A “post-structuralist” who rejected the belief that reality can be captured in language, Lacan also rejected the standard interpretation of Hegel’s idea of “the cunning of reason,” according to which world history is the realization by oblique and indirect means of reason in human life. For Lacan as Žižek summarizes him, “The Cunning of Reason…in no way involves a faith in a secret guiding hand guaranteeing that all the apparent contingency of unreason will somehow contribute to the harmony of the Totality of Reason: if anything, it involves a trust in un-Reason.” On this Lacanian reading, the message of Hegel’s philosophy is not the progressive unfolding of rationality in history but instead the impotence of reason.

The Hegel that emerges in Žižek’s writings thus bears little resemblance to the idealist philosopher who features in standard histories of thought. Hegel is commonly associated with the idea that history has an inherent logic in which ideas are embodied in practice and then left behind in a dialectical process in which they are transcended by their opposites. Drawing on the contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou, Žižek radicalizes this idea of dialectic to mean the rejection of the logical principle of noncontradiction, so that rather than seeing rationality at work in history, Hegel rejects reason itself as it has been understood in the past. Implicit in Hegel (according to Žižek) is a new kind of “paraconsistent logic” in which a proposition “is not really suppressed by its negation.” This new logic, Žižek suggests, is well suited to understanding capitalism today. “Is not ‘postmodern’ capitalism an increasingly paraconsistent system,” he asks rhetorically, “in which, in a variety of modes, P is non-P: the order is its own transgression, capitalism can thrive under communist rule, and so on?”

Living in the End Times is presented by Žižek as being concerned with this situation. Summarizing the book’s central theme, he writes:

The underlying premise of the present book is a simple one: the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point. Its “four riders of the apocalypse” are comprised by the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself (problems with intellectual property; forthcoming struggles over raw materials, food and water), and the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions.

With its sweeping claims and magniloquent rhetoric, this passage is typical of much in Žižek’s work. What he describes as the premise of the book is simple only because it passes over historical facts. Reading it, no one would suspect that, putting aside the killings of many millions for ideological reasons, some of the last century’s worst ecological disasters—the destruction of nature in the former Soviet Union and the devastation of the countryside during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, for example—occurred in centrally planned economies. Ecological devastation is not a result only of the economic system that exists in much of the world at the present time; while it may be true that the prevailing version of capitalism is unsustainable in environmental terms, there is nothing in the history of the past century that suggests the environment will be better protected if a socialist system is installed.

But to criticize Žižek for neglecting these facts is to misunderstand his intent, for unlike Marx he does not aim to ground his theorizing in a reading of history that is based in facts. “Today’s historical juncture does not compel us to drop the notion of the proletariat, or of the proletarian position—on the contrary, it compels us to radicalize it to an existential level beyond even Marx’s imagination,” he writes. “We need a more radical notion of the proletarian subject [i.e., the thinking and acting human being], a subject reduced to the evanescent point of the Cartesian cogito, deprived of its substantial content.” In Žižek’s hands, Marxian ideas—which in Marx’s materialist view were meant to designate objective social facts—become subjective expressions of revolutionary commitment. Whether such ideas correspond to anything in the world is irrelevant.

There is a problem at this point, however: Why should anyone adopt Žižek’s ideas rather than any others? The answer cannot be that Žižek’s are true in any traditional sense. “The truth we are dealing with here is not ‘objective’ truth,” Žižek writes, “but the self-relating truth about one’s own subjective position; as such, it is an engaged truth, measured not by its factual accuracy but by the way it affects the subjective position of enunciation.”

If this means anything, it is that truth is determined by reference to how an idea accords with the projects to which the speaker is committed—in Žižek’s case, a project of revolution. But this only poses the problem at another level: Why should anyone adopt Žižek’s project? The question cannot be answered in any simple way, since it is far from clear what Žižek’s revolutionary project consists in. He shows no signs of doubting that a society in which communism was realized would be better than any that has ever existed. On the other hand, he is unable to envision any circumstances in which communism might be realized: “Capitalism is not just a historical epoch among others…. Francis Fukuyama was right: global capitalism is ‘the end of history.’”¹ Communism is not for Žižek—as it was for Marx—a realizable condition, but what Badiou describes as a “hypothesis,” a conception with little positive content but that enables radical resistance against prevailing institutions. Žižek is insistent that such resistance must include the use of terror:

Badiou’s provocative idea that one should reinvent emancipatory terror today is one of his most profound insights…. Recall Badiou’s exalted defense of Terror in the French Revolution, in which he quotes the justification of the guillotine for Lavoisier: “The Republic has no need for scientists.”

Along with Badiou, Žižek celebrates Mao’s Cultural Revolution as “the last truly great revolutionary explosion of the twentieth century.” But he also regards the Cultural Revolution as a failure, citing Badiou’s conclusion that “the Cultural Revolution, even in its very impasse, bears witness to the impossibility truly and globally to free politics from the framework of the party-State.”³ Mao in encouraging the Cultural Revolution evidently should have found a way to break the power of the party-state. Again, Žižek praises the Khmer Rouge for attempting a total break with the past. The attempt involved mass killing and torture on a colossal scale; but in his view that is not why it failed: “The Khmer Rouge were, in a way, not radical enough: while they took the abstract negation of the past to the limit, they did not invent any new form of collectivity.” (Here and elsewhere the italics are Žižek’s.) A genuine revolution may be impossible in present circumstances, or any that can be currently imagined. Even so, revolutionary violence should be celebrated as “redemptive,” even “divine.”

While Žižek has described himself as a Leninist,⁴ there can be no doubt that this position would be anathema to the Bolshevik leader. Lenin had no qualms in using terror in order to promote the cause of communism (for him, a practically attainable objective). Always deployed as part of a political strategy, violence was instrumental in nature. In contrast, though Žižek accepts that violence has failed to achieve its communist goals and has no prospect of doing so, he insists that revolutionary violence has intrinsic value as a symbolic expression of rebellion—a position that has no parallel in either Marx or Lenin. A precedent may be seen in the work of the French psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, who defended the use of violence against colonialism as an assertion of the identity of subjects of colonial power; but Fanon viewed this violence as part of a struggle for national independence, an objective that was in fact achieved.

A clearer precedent can be found in the work of the early-twentieth-century French theorist of syndicalism Georges Sorel. In Reflections on Violence (1908), Sorel argued that communism was a utopian myth—but a myth that had value in inspiring a morally regenerative revolt against the corruption of bourgeois society. The parallels between this view and Žižek’s account of “redemptive violence” inspired by the “communist hypothesis” are telling.

A celebration of violence is one of the most prominent strands in Žižek’s work. He finds fault with Marx for thinking that violence can be justified as part of the conflict between objectively defined social classes. Class war must not be understood as “a conflict between particular agents within social reality: it is not a difference between agents (which can be described by means of a detailed social analysis), but an antagonism (‘struggle’) which constitutes these agents.” Applying this view when discussing Stalin’s assault on the peasantry, Žižek describes how the distinction between kulaks (rich peasants) and others became “blurred and unworkable: in a situation of generalized poverty, clear criteria no longer applied, and the other two classes of peasants often joined the kulaks in their resistance to forced collectivization.” In response to this situation the Soviet authorities introduced a new category, the sub-kulak, a peasant too poor to be classified as a kulak but who shared kulak values:

The art of identifying a kulak was thus no longer a matter of objective social analysis; it became a kind of complex “hermeneutics of suspicion,” of identifying an individual’s “true political attitudes” hidden beneath his or her deceptive public proclamations.

Describing mass murder in this way as an exercise in hermeneutics is repugnant and grotesque; it is also characteristic of Žižek’s work. He criticizes Stalin’s policy of collectivization, but not on account of the millions of human lives that were violently truncated or broken in its course. What Žižek criticizes is Stalin’s lingering attachment (however inconsistent or hypocritical) to “‘scientific’ Marxist terms.” Relying on “objective social analysis” for guidance in revolutionary situations is an error: “at some point, the process has to be cut short with a massive and brutal intervention of subjectivity: class belonging is never a purely objective social fact, but is always also the result of struggle and social engagement.” Rather than Stalin’s relentless use of torture and lethal force, it is the fact that he tried to justify the systematic use of violence by reference to Marxian theory that Žižek condemns.

Žižek’s rejection of anything that might be described as social fact comes together with his admiration of violence in his interpretation of Nazism. Commenting on the German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s much-discussed involvement with the Nazi regime, Žižek writes: “His involvement with the Nazis was not a simple mistake, but rather a ‘right step in the wrong direction.’” Contrary to many interpretations, Heidegger was not a radical reactionary. “Reading Heidegger against the grain, one discovers a thinker who was, at some points, strangely close to communism”—indeed, during the mid-Thirties, Heidegger might be described as “a future communist.”

If Heidegger mistakenly chose to back Hitler, the mistake was not in underestimating the violence that Hitler would unleash:

The problem with Hitler was that he was “not violent enough,” his violence was not “essential” enough. Hitler did not really act, all his actions were fundamentally reactions, for he acted so that nothing would really change, staging a gigantic spectacle of pseudo-Revolution so that the capitalist order would survive…. The true problem of Nazism is not that it “went too far” in its subjectivist-nihilist hubris of exercising total power, but that it did not go far enough, that its violence was an impotent acting-out which, ultimately, remained in the service of the very order it despised.

What was wrong with Nazism, it seems, is that—like the later experiment in total revolution of the Khmer Rouge—it failed to create any new kind of collective life. Žižek says little regarding the nature of the form of life that might have come into being had Germany been governed by a regime less reactive and powerless than he judges Hitler’s to have been. He does make plain that there would be no room in this new life for one particular form of human identity:

The fantasmatic status of anti- Semitism is clearly revealed by a statement attributed to Hitler: “We have to kill the Jew within us.” …Hitler’s statement says more than it wants to say: against his intentions, it confirms that the Gentiles need the anti-Semitic figure of the “Jew” in order to maintain their identity. It is thus not only that “the Jew is within us”—what Hitler fatefully forgot to add is that he, the anti-Semite, is also in the Jew. What does this paradoxical entwinement mean for the destiny of anti-Semitism?

Žižek is explicit in censuring “certain elements of the radical Left” for “their uneasiness when it comes to unambiguously condemning anti-Semitism.” But it is difficult to understand the claim that the identities of anti-Semites and Jewish people are in some way mutually reinforcing—which is repeated, word for word, in Less Than Nothing—except as suggesting that the only world in which anti-Semitism can cease to exist is one in which there are no longer any Jews.

Interpreting Žižek on this or any issue is not without difficulties. There is his inordinate prolixity, the stream of texts that no one could read in their entirety, if only because the torrent never ceases flowing. There is his use of a type of academic jargon featuring allusive references to other thinkers, which has the effect of enabling him to use language in an artful, hermetic way. As he acknowledges, Žižek borrows the term “divine violence” from Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” (1921). It is doubtful whether Benjamin—a thinker who had important affinities with the Frankfurt School of humanistic Marxism—would have described the destructive frenzy of Mao’s Cultural Revolution or the Khmer Rouge as divine.

But this is beside the point, for by using Benjamin’s construction Žižek is able to praise violence and at the same time claim that he is speaking of violence in a special, recondite sense—a sense in which Gandhi can be described as being more violent than Hitler.⁵ And there is Žižek’s regular recourse to a laborious kind of clowning wordplay:

The…virtualization of capitalism is ultimately the same as that of the electron in particle physics. The mass of each elementary particle is composed of its mass at rest plus the surplus provided by the acceleration of its movement; however, an electron’s mass at rest is zero, its mass consists only of the surplus generated by the acceleration, as if we are dealing with a nothing which acquires some deceptive substance only by magically spinning itself into an excess of itself.

It is impossible to read this without recalling the Sokal affair in which Alan Sokal, a professor of physics, submitted a spoof article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” to a journal of postmodern cultural studies. Equally, it is hard to read this and many similar passages in Žižek without suspecting that he is engaged—wittingly or otherwise—in a kind of auto-parody.

There may be some who are tempted to condemn Žižek as a philosopher of irrationalism whose praise of violence is more reminiscent of the far right than the radical left. His writings are often offensive and at times (as when he writes of Hitler being present “in the Jew”) obscene. There is a mocking frivolity in Žižek’s paeans to terror that recalls the Italian Futurist and ultra-nationalist Gabriele D’Annunzio and the Fascist (and later Maoist) fellow traveler Curzio Malaparte more than any thinker in the Marxian tradition. But there is another reading of Žižek, which may be more plausible, in which he is no more an epigone of the right than he is a disciple of Marx or Lenin.

Whether or not Marx’s vision of communism is “the inherent capitalist fantasy,” Žižek’s vision—which apart from rejecting earlier conceptions lacks any definite content—is well adapted to an economy based on the continuous production of novel commodities and experiences, each supposed to be different from any that has gone before. With the prevailing capitalist order aware that it is in trouble but unable to conceive of practicable alternatives, Žižek’s formless radicalism is ideally suited to a culture transfixed by the spectacle of its own fragility. That there should be this isomorphism between Žižek’s thinking and contemporary capitalism is not surprising. After all, it is only an economy of the kind that exists today that could produce a thinker such as Žižek. The role of global public intellectual Žižek performs has emerged along with a media apparatus and a culture of celebrity that are integral to the current model of capitalist expansion.

In a stupendous feat of intellectual overproduction Žižek has created a fantasmatic critique of the present order, a critique that claims to repudiate practically everything that currently exists and in some sense actually does, but that at the same time reproduces the compulsive, purposeless dynamism that he perceives in the operations of capitalism. Achieving a deceptive substance by endlessly reiterating an essentially empty vision, Žižek’s work—nicely illustrating the principles of paraconsistent logic—amounts in the end to less than nothing.

Slavoj Žižek, “Have Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Rewritten the Communist Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century?,” Rethinking Marxism: a Journal of Economics, Culture and Society , Vol. 13, No. 3–4 (2001), p. 190.

I am a Leninist. Lenin wasn’t afraid to dirty his hands. If you can get power, grab it.” Quoted by Jonathan Derbyshire, New Statesman , October 29, 2009.

“It’s crucial to see violence which is done repeatedly to keep the things the way they are. In that sense, Gandhi was more violent than Hitler.” See Shobhan Saxena’s interview with Žižek, “ First they called me a joker, now I am a dangerous thinker ,”

More ideas from Slavoj Žižek

More than ever we need philosophy today.  Even the most speculative (in the sense of reflecting on itself) science has to rely on a set of automatic  presuppositions, like a scientist simply presupposes in his or her very approach to nature a set of implications of how the nature functions, what’s the causality in nature and so on and so on.  And philosophy teaches us that.  Philosophy teaches us what we have to know without knowing it in order to function, even in science — the silent presuppositions.

I claim that what is happening, for example, in quantum physics in the last 100 of years — these things which are so daring, incredible, that we cannot include into our conscious view of reality — that Hegel’s philosophy, with all it’s dialectical paradoxes, can be of some help here.  I claim that reading quantum physics through Hegel and vice versa is very productive.

What I really want do is rehabilitate classical philosophy today.  That is to say, Hegel was a child of his time.  We are 200 years later.  How to repeat Hegel, not to do the same things as he did but repeat in new circumstances the same gesture?  And even here more for Hegel than for Marx.  I think we should even return from Marx back to Hegel.  So this is the focus of my work.  Then come all the things for which I’m unfortunately better known, for example, my dealings with critique of capitalism, analysis of popular culture and so on and so on.  But frankly, to use the not very appropriate metaphor known from today’s military adventures, all this, my writings on politics, on analysis of Hollywood and so on, is more or less collateral damage of my basic work.

I think this is also what has to be done today.  The danger today is precisely a kind of a bland, pragmatic activism.  You know, like when people tell you, oh my God, children in Africa are starving and you have time for your stupid philosophical debates.  Let’s do something.  I always hear in this call there are people starving.  Let’s do something.  I always discern in this a more ominous injunction.  Do it and don’t think too much.  Today, we need thinking.

http://www.youtube.com/user/TheEthanwashere?feature=watch

This is from the Word Document of LTN.  All page references are to this doc. Where indicated I’ll try to cross ref to the book as well.

Is It Still Possible to be a Hegelian Today, (Chapter 4 pp. 193-240)

I want to succinctly summarize the main arguments of this important section of the book.

On page 223 Ž quotes Asad responding to Butler’s query regarding where his theoretical critque of liberalism is leading. btw, I back in the day, read this book Is Critique Secular?

“there can be no abstract answer to this question because it is precisely the implications of things said and done in different circumstances that one tries to understand … one should be prepared for the fact that what one aims at in one’s thinking may be less significant than where one ends up … in the process of thinking one should be open to ending up in unanticipated places―whether these produce satisfaction or desire, discomfort or horror.” [Ž quoting Asad]

Is Ž here simply making the point that we can’t predict the consequences of our actions?   I act freely when I know I’m following my inner necessity, is bunk for Ž because he’s trying to establish retroactive hegelian thing.

Žižek Oct 2 2011 in Australia  in this talk Ž  updates on Hegelian totality, Lubitsch, ideological critical glasses, Starbucks, organic apples, Fukuyama, Breivik and anti-semitism

A scene from Ninotchka 1939 by Ernst Lubitsch  said again in Greece August 2012

Can I have a coffee without cream.  Sorry we have run out of cream, we only have milk, so can I bring you a coffee without milk?

– We have to ask here a simple question: why do we add to coffee milk or cream?  Because there is something missing in coffee alone and we try to fill in this void.  There is no full self-identical plain coffee, every simple plain coffee is a coffee without.

– The Hegelian lesson: coffee can be just coffee, and it can be coffee without milk, and it can be coffee without cream, although they appear positively the same they are not the same.

This logic is important not only politically but also sexually.

In the movie Brassed Off:  “Would like to come in for a coffee. I would love to but there is a problem I don’t drink coffee. No problem, I don’t have any.”

Through a double negation she pronounces an embarrassing direct sexual invitation without ever mentioning sex.   She invites a guy in for coffee and then admits she has no coffee.  She doesn’t cancel her invitation, she makes it clear her first invitation for a coffee was a pre-text was simply a pre-text for sex.

Can you imagine a more erotic invitation.  Something is offered and it is negated but the result is not zero.  The result is the most erotic tension you can imagine.

what is said and what is not said, which un-said is implied in what is said. do we get coffee without cream or coffee without milk.

Kinder Surprise: after you unwrap the egg, and crack the shell you find a small plastic toy, is this toy not objet (a) the small object filling in the central void of our desire.

This structure of determining absence is crucial for how ideology functions today.

People dancing on street momentary obliterating class differences, worker dancing or rich farmer, they are both in the street, while the worker is dancing without milk, and the farmer without cream.
Continue reading “coffee without cream coffee without milk and the dimension of the unsaid”

Atheism has become part of official American dialogue, Dawkins, Hitchens.  Are there ways for the emanicpatory dimension in regligious discourse, if yes, are there limitations to it … if yes, then cultural imperialism, etc.

Bruno Bosteels (young guy, good looking, nice haircut, shirt button down collar

Zizek whatever you do you cannot squeeze Paul into the line of saints, there was a deep resonance between Maoists and preaching sainthood … Maoist saints.

Lin Bao second man after Mao, he said the origin of revisionism is fear of death.

Augustine: I totally agree with you, he is for me the arch-bad guy.  Fred Jameson St. Augustine as a social democrat: SA inventetd bullshit about inner struggles precisly so Christianity can function as a state religion.

Pope and Napoleon: Napoleon took the crown and crowned him, we know what you want to do destroy christianity
You can discern an inner tension in christianity: the entire church org. as one desperate attempt to contain the founding gesture of christianity itself.  What is this founding gesture: Me and Alain, deeply agree with terror founding violence, but I agree with Rene Girard’s (the enemy) point is that in the death of christ is not simply a repetition of founding violence, but the mechannism to Break withthe logic of Sacrificial Founding Violence.

I bring war not peace, if you do not hate your father/mother you are not with me:  You shouldn’t get too attached to worldy beings, as if Christ is some primitive jealous god … zizek’s point is he talked to bishops/priests, the best answer from a priest in Poland, “my god, I can’t answer this now you surprised me” Zizek replied hey you had 2000 years to reply.

Bosteels: The bombing of presidential palace in overthrowing Allende the Chilean sept 11
Fascist revolution are not paternal revolutions, there are son rebelling against fathers.
if we are all materialists, why not simply formulate things directly, can’t we say it better directly … don’t go through christianity

Atheist=Christianity
Death of Christ is death of god there is no big Other, the death of this secularized religion, ie., there is no god but a form of big Other.

Atheist w/o Christiantity you go through a big Other
materialists who still believe in the big Other

We don’t believe, but a big Other believes for us. We can be athiests, while the bourgeois subject is a britsh utitlitarian, he doesn’t believe but the commoditieis beleive for us.

Christianity is a much more radical athiesm.

Bosteels replies: collateral undesired advantages, it’s simply acceptable why not make those arguments in a materialist way, where your interlocutors are not Christians, Millbanks etc.
Bosteels let’s be atheist materialists, why this talk about perverse core of Christiantity.  Dominant religious ideology that’s been part of a state apparatus for hundreds of years.

Zizek: The enemy today , with all our sturggle against fundamentalists, the enemy is logic embodied in secular apparatuses, I don’t know any fundamentalist theologists who like Zizek.  Even sympathetic theologists are paternalists, … it’s not enough to be against relgion, to be truly an atheist today, its absolutely to include the theological dimension of secular state appartus itself.

Susan BUck
Politics is not Ontology
the ontolgoical is never political

la politice (empirical politics)  —->  le politique (essence of the political)

(ontic) empirically given   to ontological (essence of existence)

A communist ontology is a contradiction in terms!!

MAN IS BY NATURE A SOCIAL ANIMAL isn’t that an ontological claim
– man’s alienation from nature

in actual political life this ontological man doesn’t exist
– gay straight, black white, citzen, non-citizen, worker

Yes the Young Marx developed a philosophical ontolgoy but nothing follows from this politically

Marx of the 1844 manuscripts talking about ‘social being’ but No specific orientation follows from this.

How do we turn this social fact of this work … into a communist practice?  How to conceive of a communist practice?  Not in the Heideggarian way of what it is to be a caring being.

Buck-Morss is anti-Heidegger
Today’s philosophically naive social sciences and philosophy retreats to the humanities celebration of affect, contingency, positivism

Due to the epistemoligcal consequences, reject creating an ‘ism’ out of any belief because they turn into cosmological systems.  Too closed and hermetic, essntialist.

To argue with Negri of a historical ontology is DUBIOUS, he wants an ontological fix to avoid the dangers of relativism.  With due respect to Negri there can be no ontology of history, it is the realm of the unpredictable because of human action.

Brecht described as non-elegant thinking: Buck-Morss

pragmatic approach to doing theory

a tiger does not proclaim its ‘tigretude’ it pounces.

a theoretical pragmatics:  things acquire meaning because of their relation to other things and this relation is flexible

SBM emphasizes that the big 3 guys read newspapers: the political centrality of the event, the unpredictability of the EVENT.  It is not truth that punches a whole in knowledge, it is social action, the truth it reveals is the possibility of freedom.

A pragmatics of the suddenly possible.

– What’s happening?
What’s new, is there an event going on here.  What gives, what is yielding.  What’s going on?  are certain structures not changing.

What to do?
Tarry over these questions for a while to view them in a commie mode.

What’s happenning?  The event is not a miracle that overcomes us with awe and strices us down it lifts us up.  the possibility to act in common.  it is an empirical question.

non-violent protetst, SBM is big on this non-violent aspect.

Steve Jobs father was a Syrian Muslim [this has nothing to do with SBM talk]

Maybe this is excessive subjectivity: maybe a new way of doing theory,
“I’ve seen it before, I know what it means, or it doesn’t rise to the level of philosophical sophistication etc.”

The big thing

Bosteel’s reply to SBM:
Capital even if we don’t call it capitalism, produces abstraction, abstraction is not simply a spectral deviation, it is the one universal being produced, teh capitalist universal.  the nominalist universal is not a philosopher’s mistake, itis part and parcel and funcitoning of the captilaist system,

social nature of human animal — I am active as a human being active as a social being.

Adrian Johnston
1975 Theory of contradiction Badiou based on Mao’s essay on Contradiction: Badiou asserts primacy of disunity over unity.
EMERGENTISM???
life is irreducible to matter
thought irreducible to life

non-deterministic materialism

capitalist biologist: fixed instincts and fluid providers, medicate or kill those who will not make peace with it.

REWORK THE ENGELSIAN DIALECTICS OF NATURE

The part played by labour in transition from ape to man: the closest Engels comes to use dialectics as human beings as labouring creatures.

bio-plasticity (Malabou re-writing the dialectic)
human being as self-transformative subjects-objects

split between manual and intellectual labour produced out of manual labour, intellectual labour erases its own origins in manual labour, thus the birth of idealism.

Levins and Lewontin were good with Engels, and Steve Rose too.  organisms are not passively determined by their environments, but act to change their environments in turn.

tensions in engels materialist dialectics of nature
– criticized arid Hegelian formalism projected onto nature, methodical formalization of Hegel.
– AJ is doing an immanent instead of external critique of Engelsian dialectics

Dialectics is science of inter-connections
1. quantity into quality
2. interpenetration of opposites
3. negation of negation

QiQ = emergentism of LevinsLewontins etc.  anti-reductivist dialectics of nature.
– weak constraints as regards the concrete localizations of entities
biological objects are internally heterogeneous, at the nexus of a large number of weak forces, and subsystems independent of one another, and the effects on organism appear as random.

Technical legal stipulations – Tax code  as a SYMBOLIC SYSTEM
– every year laws are changed, and loopholes are created, unforseen possibilities will arise from structural ineractions with changes, additions subtractions —

loophole like short-circuits zones of anomie

transcendental materialism is deeply indebted to Engels DM.

ohh he doesn’t like Rose.

democratic materialsim vs. materialist dialectic

Lysenko a terrifying nosedive into dogmatism and paranoi purges.

DM appropriation of the natural sciences is something Adrian wants to DO.

Engels DM engagement with the sciences and carrying forward by Soviet scientists, is an image of past not recognized by present as one of its concerns which threatens to disappear.
Johnston RETURN TO ENGELS DM!  Might equip left against a globalized capitalism focused on natural sciences economics and ideologically.

Better than cultural ideological critque against capital.  The only critiques worth doing are IMMANENT ones.

Ecology genetics health and agriculture.

18th century French Materialism must be revised against the UNIVERSITY DISCOURSE

The sciences are ripe for joining in movements of history!  Engelsian projects for theorizing the sciences.

Necessary condition for current renewal of communism, not only more political economy, a revival of dialectics of nature, nurtured by cuttiing edge science.  Repeating anew Engels DM philosophy of the natural sciences.

A kind of society of materialist friends of Hegelian dialectics.

Žizek: You know this concept DM has a history far from unproblematic.  So when you are saying return to this traditioin of DM.  You make it sound like its a glorious return to a tradition.

I agree with AJ is what we should get rid of is this idea of  science identified with exploitation of nature, we should free science from this.  Relativism, we llike to replace science with “fields of knowledge” isn’t it eurocentrism to privlege our science, do we have any right to etc. different modes of discourse blah blah.  Here we agree.  But you have to be more evil to Engels … you passed gently over language.  Engels at his most stupid.  With development of work it got so complex that people had to invent language to talk about it.
Negation of Negation: all DM that I know, even if we include Engels and Lenin their understanding of dialectics stops at interaction A influences B and B influences A.  With proper negation of negation you need more complexity than just interaction.
There is one mega revolution theory of relativity, quantum physics.  with every great scientific revolution the theory of materialism has to be refined.
It’s something new, how to read it in a materialist way, without watering it down in a old school way.

Rex Butler Slavoj Žižek: Live Theory. London: Continuum. 2005

Materialism is to be found in that moment when he admits that God is not eternally given but has as it were to posit Himself, contract Himself out of some obscure impenetrable “ground” … Schelling is concerned not with the problem of how to pass from the perfect to the imperfect, how God enters the world, but on the contrary with the problem of how to pass from the imperfect to the perfect, how God arises in the first place.  Schelling’s crucial realization is that God is imperfect, that there is always something missign from Him: a gap that might be understood as the human itself. 9