Category: lacan

subject designates that X

The “negation of negation” is not a kind of existential sleight of hand by means of which the subject pretends to put everything at stake, but effectively sacrifices only the inessential; rather, it stands for the horrifying experience which occurs when, after sacrificing everything considered “inessential”, I suddenly realize that the very essential dimension for the sake of which I sacrificed the inessential is already lost.

The subject does save his skin, he survives the ordeal, but the price he has to pay is the loss of his very substance, of the most precious kernel of his individuality. More precisely: prior to this “transubstantiation” the subject is not a subject at all, since “subject” is ultimately the name for this very “transubstantiation” of substance which, after its dissemination, “returns to itself”, but not as “the same”.

It is all too easy, therefore, to be misled by Hegel’s notorious propositions concerning Spirit as the power of “tarrying with the negative”, that is, of resurrecting after its own death: in the ordeal of absolute negativity, the Spirit in its particular selfhood effectively dies, is over and done with, so that Spirit which “resurrects” is not the Spirit which previously expired. The same goes for the Resurrection: Hegel emphasizes again and again that Christ dies on the Cross for real – he returns as the Spirit of the community of believers, not in person. So, again, when, in what is perhaps the most famous single passage from his Phenomenology, Hegel asserts that the Spirit is capable of “tarrying with the negative”, of enduring the power the negative, this does not mean that in the ordeal of negativity the subject has merely to clench his teeth and hold out – true, he will lose a few feathers, but, magically, everything will somehow turn out OK. … Hegel’s whole point is that the subject does NOT survive the ordeal of negativity: he effectively loses his very essence, and passes over into his Other.

One is tempted to evoke here the science-fiction theme of changed identity, when a subject biologically survives, but is no longer the same person – this is what the Hegelian transubstantiation is about, and of course, it is this very transubstantiation which distinguishes Subject from Substance: “subject” designates that X which is able to survive the loss of its very substantial identity, and to continue to live as the “empty shell of its former self”. [Indivisible Remainder 1996 226-27]

enjoyment and the law

Adam Kotsko writes

Christian Thorne has a really great essay on Zizek up, which promises to be the first of three. He argues that the main point of Zizek’s work is to provide a way out of the deadlock of enjoyment on the left — neither the ascetic and over-intellectualized Old Left nor the loosey-goosey, sexually liberated New Left have managed to deal with this problem adequately. Though Thorne doesn’t use the Lacanian lingo, the way he poses Zizek’s solution can be described essentially in terms of the shift from desire (which is based on the law’s inherent transgression) to drive (an autonomous jouissance that does not need any reference to authority to sustain it).

It’s the familiar formula that Zizek’s been hammering away at from the beginning: transgression (rebellion, sexual deviancy, even knowing cynical distance) gets us nowhere, because the law has already factored that in. Early on, he tended to emphasize the more truly subversive power of over-identifying with the “official” ideology without reference to its obscene supplement of enjoyment, and in his later work, it seems that he’s tended more toward the inscrutable inertia of drive — which seems to him to be the only point of “leverage” for starting something new (i.e., something that is not conceived in terms of the order it’s supposedly rebelling against).

I think it’s at this point that we can see clear parallels between Agamben and Zizek, both in their diagnosis of the structure of the law (which includes its own transgression/exception) and their attempt to get beyond rebellion or resistence and simply build something new (either conceived positively in terms of drive or negatively as in the messianic “as if not” strategy). If this comparison holds, then it may explain why I’ve been so attracted to both figures, even though many have viewed them as coming from very incompatible places.

 Here are the highlights of Christian’s essay:

So here, for easy reference, is his animating claim: that every political formation, in addition to generating the law, generates a particular more or less expected way of violating the law. Any set of prohibitions comes with its own accustomed transgressions, a particular way in which Law-in-the-abstract allows itself to be broken. Different laws produce different lawbreakers or different modes of rebellion. And what keeps us attached to a given political order—what makes us loyal to it—is not the law, but the transgression. We like living in a particular society because of the illicit pleasures that it affords us—because, that is, it grants us a particular set of turn-ons, and it does so not by openly trading in these latter, but precisely by seeming to disallow them.

Following the law is one path to subservience; breaking it is a second. Transgression, in fact, produces in us the more powerful political obligation; it is the device by which a governing order takes hold of us for good.

law by itself couldn’t possibly work; the law alone can never be lawlike in its effects, for if some authority genuinely denied us all pleasure, we would take measures to abolish it. But authority doesn’t deny us pleasures; it creates new ones and can become, indeed, just another target for our ardor. [great warmth of feeling; fervor; intense devotion; zeal]

Enjoyment, to bottom-line it, is not the heroic alternative to discipline and convention. It is discipline’s sidekick and in some sense the authentically nomian term — the secret bearer of law’s regularities and compulsions.

The libido is the vehicle of our subjection and thus the answer to why most of us, even those of us in the habit of striking defiant poses, don’t seek fundamental political changes or seek them only half-heartedly: Change would disrupt whatever erotic bargain we’ve quietly worked out with the prevailing order.

Žižek’s way of putting all this is to say that every political system — every code of law or tablet of rules — comes with an “obscene supplement”; he also calls it “the inherent transgression.” And his single greatest talent as an intellectual is to survey some corner of the social scene and find the smudge of obscenity that holds it together, to smoke out its anchoring enjoyment, to help you see how people are getting off on things that they don’t seem to be getting off on.

Reich perceived a basic contradiction in the political constellation of the early 1930s: The fascists successfully appealed to people at the level of pleasure and desire, even while implementing punishment. The socialists, meanwhile, had big plans for emancipating their fellows in several different senses at once, and yet comported themselves according to the petty morality of the well-cushioned parlor. Fascism, in short, broke through in Germany because it was a lot more fun — it seemed to run on expanded erotic energies — whereas the Left, as ever, preferred to educate its potential comrades in the gross national product of India while asking them pointedly whether they fully understood that children made their shoes. Marxists, Reich concluded, needed to buy some guitars; they would have to write some better tunes.

Žižek’s sense is that we almost all engage in unusual behavior—sexual or at least eroticized behavior—to some degree. The problem is that nearly all of that behavior takes place with reference back to authority or to the law. We develop most of our sexual quirks as a way of taking a position with regard to the Master; we carry some notion of authority around in our heads, and the ways in which we like to get off are almost always predicated on what we believe to be true about the people in charge. So Žižek does indeed reject as facile the usual anti-authoritarian thrust of radical psychoanalysis, convinced as it is that we can forthrightly strip down and hump our way to emancipation, but it does so only to reinstate that anti-authoritarianism in another, more difficult place.

Psychoanalysis in this mode doesn’t care what you get up to — it really doesn’t care how you take your pleasures — provided that these make no reference to the Master, provided, that is, that they aren’t even a rebellion against him. And to that extent there is one sense in which Žižek’s Lacanian-Hegelian system, otherwise committed to the ideas of negation and the lack, is fully invested in establishing a positivity or simple fact. Your task is to figure out the peculiar way you happen to desire when authority is entirely removed from the picture, when, that is, you no longer take the Master to be peeping from behind the curtains.

This, then, is the reason to go into analysis: The analyst has to be on the lookout for the one thing you desire — or the one way you desire, the one way you organize your satisfaction — that is not relational, not a position over and against bosses and fathers. Such is the knack that any good analyst has to develop: the ability to discriminate between Master-directed kink and kink that is truly your own. The bargain that analysis will make with you is that any enjoyment that survives the sundering of your psyche from authority is yours to keep. It’s just that most of your libidinal habits are not going to survive that sundering—or will be transformed by it into new ones.

Žižek, following Lacan, calls any enjoyment thus liberated a sinthome, which, in the original French, isn’t anything more than an arch misspelling of and murky pun upon the word symptom. The Lacanian point is that the enjoyment that you take home with you at the end of a successful course of psychoanalysis is likely to look like and sound like a symptom — fevered, morbid, a “deviation from normal functioning,” the clinicians like to say. But it won’t actually be a symptom, or it will be a symptom with a difference, a symptom that is not a symptom. Analysis, in other words, aims not to cure you or return you to normal functioning, but to help you find your way to a happier disorder. Žižek’s hunch is that most people will leave analysis freakier than when they went into it.

So can we tell the difference between the raunch that unshackles us and the raunch that fixes us in place? This is one of the more pungent questions that a political psychoanalysis prompts us to ask. For Wilhelm Reich was, of course, in one sense absolutely correct. It is not hard to agree that fascism succeeded in large part by devising new gratifications for its adherents. And perhaps it was only predictable that the Western Left would decide to take Reich’s advice and compete on that ground and help build consumer society’s all-singing-all-dancing-24-hour gaudy show.

But psychoanalysis allows us to take stock of where we rock’n’rollers remain least at ease—or, indeed, to describe with some precision the new forms of anxiety that have come to the fore in an age of sex-without-taboos. Žižek’s argument is, in this respect, best understood as proposing a new way to periodize recent history—a new way, that is, of identifying the novelty of the present. It bears repeating: If Žižek is right, then in the political organization of enjoyment, obscenity has always played some kind of role. Even public life organized around strong authority figures used to summon the obscene supplement in its support.

Even public life organized around strong authority figures used to summon the obscene supplement in its support. But we’ll want to at least consider the possibility that in our version of consumer capitalism, the obscene supplement has become primary and so largely supplanted what it had once been asked merely to buoy. The transgression has moved into the position of the master and so instituted a kind of authoritative obscenity. This marks a comprehensive change in what we might call the regime of enjoyment. Again: What keeps you attached to a society is the forms of deviant pleasure that it winks at.

In nearly every social order that has ever existed, there has been law: state law or generally recognized prohibitions, and some people get off on breaking the law, while other people get off on the law itself, get off on enforcing it, get off on playing the cop or exasperated schoolmarm.

What sets the present apart is that the prohibitions have to some considerable extent faded, which has produced a system of transgression without law or perhaps even transgression as law—what Žižek calls “the world of ordained transgression” — a society of compulsory pleasure in which you are perpetually enjoined to blow your load.

You can think of this, if you like, as the flip side to another of Reich’s signature arguments. Sex-pol claimed that if you raised children in a sexually liberated way, refusing to drum inhibition into them, then they would not be willing later in life to go along with authority, because they would not be in the habit of giving up what was important to their happiness. They would be able to resist the call to renunciation, and if authority threatened their enjoyment directly, they would mutiny. Libidinally unpoliced children would become anti-authoritarian adults. The simple corollary of this argument is a catastrophe that Reich never even paused to consider—the plausibility of which advanced capitalism endlessly demonstrates—which is that if authority doesn’t threaten such people’s enjoyment, they will never rebel.

If the social order gives people abundant opportunities to get off, it can abuse and exploit them in every other way.

 

neill lacanian subjectivity 2011 pt1

Neill, Calum. Lacanian Ethics and the Assumption of Subjectivity 2011

Against what one might characterise as the ‘common-sense’ notion that language (pre)exists as a tool to be utilised by a subject (or person) in the expression of their (pre-linguistic) needs, wants, beliefs etc., the notion of subjectivity in Lacan’s work posits a subject who only ever comes to be anything at all because of the signifying chain of language, because of the (pre)existence of a symbolic order in which it comes to operate.

What is crucial here is that, if it is the order of signifiers which takes logical precedence, then signifiers are not arsenal to be deployed between subjects, or, to oversimplify, words are not carriers of meaning between people, but, rather, it is the subject which is constituted in the movement of signifiance between signifiers.  45

It is in this sense that Lacan borrows Hegel’s dictum that ‘the symbol manifests itself first of all as the murder of the thing’ and adds that ‘this death constitutes in the subject the eternalization of his desire’ (Ibid.).

An example of this notion of the signifier representing the subject for another signifier is already apparent in Freud when he writes, in A Project for a Scientific Psychology, of a soldier’s willingness to sacrifice himself for his country’s flag or, as Freud emphasises it, for ‘a many coloured scrap of stuff’ (Freud, 1966: 349). Here, the soldier is clearly not concerned with the thing of the flag, the flag as material object. The flag only assumes its significance in relation to another signifier, in this instance, the ‘fatherland’ (Ibid.). The soldier, the subject, is given his subjectivity through the mediating representation between one signifier, ‘the flag’, and another, ‘the fatherland’. 45

Ž interview 2008

Unbehagen and the subject: An interview with Slavoj Žižek  Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 15.4. 2010. 418–428

If beneath what you are asking me now is the big question, where does Freud really stand with regard to politics, I think the answer is pretty clear if you really look. I think Freud’s position was, to put it very simply, that psychoanalysis allows us, when you analyse a society, to formulate, to articulate Unbehagen in der Kultur literally, the uneasiness in culture, but more famously translated as Civilization and Its Discontents.

It does this basic symptomal job of showing how the failures, the pathological malfunctions, are symptomatic of the whole. I think that, for a true Freudian, it is totally wrong to distinguish the proper domain where you can use psychoanalysis. For the true Freudian it is not that Freud did his true job in his clinical analysis but then got a little bit crazy when he was writing Totem and Taboo and Unbehagen in der Kultur [Civilization and Its Discontents]. No, because the whole point of Unbehagen in der Kultur is that these pathological phenomena are conditioned by the truth.

They are the symptom, the result of what is wrong in the entire social body as such. In this sense, the two sides are necessarily connected. What is totally alien to Freud is this purely clinical idea that there is the normal functioning of society, then somebody doesn’t work, then the psychoanalyst would have been like the psychological mechanic, the repairman who will set me straight.

I think that Freud, to put it in fashionable terms, isolates a certain excess. He calls it death drive, a certain excess of destructability that is, as it were, undermining, destabilizing the social order, an excess that is ambiguous in the sense that it can be a source of constructive energy or it can be purely destructive.

The idea is that Freud isolates this space of excess, which then, of course, opens up the space for possible change. I think Freud’s basic answer would have been: psychoanalysis just does this elementary job of showing how there is a gap, a failure, a nonfunctioning excess in society. But then, about what to do, he leaves it open. We cannot jump from here directly to positive programs.

This then opens up all possible versions. You can have a conservative Freudian answer: the whole point is to control this threat. You can have a Reichian, naïve, Leftist answer: what is a threat is only a threat from the ruling perspective and we should identify ourselves with it. And you can have a liberal, middle-of-the-way game.

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 the Real Winnebago Tribe

Here is a version from Parallax View I think
Short 6 minute video on the Real, Birkbeck 29 June, 2011

The real is at the same time the obstacle that makes reality inaccessible.

Recall Claude Levi-Strauss’s exemplary analysis, from his Structural Anthropology, of the spatial disposition of buildings in the Winnebago, one of the Great Lake tribes, might be of some help here. The tribe is divided into two sub-groups (“moieties”), “those who are from above” and “those who are from below”; when we ask an individual to draw on a piece of paper, or on sand, the ground-plan of his/her village (the spatial disposition of cottages), we obtain two quite different answers, depending on his/her belonging to one or the other sub-group.

Both perceive the village as a circle; but for one sub-group, there is within this circle another circle of central houses, so that we have two concentric circles, while for the other sub-group, the circle is split into two by a clear dividing line. In other words, a member of the first sub-group (let us call it “conservative-corporatist”) perceives the ground-plan of the village as a ring of houses more or less symmetrically disposed around the central temple, whereas a member of the second (“revolutionary-antagonistic”) sub-group perceives his/her village as two distinct heaps of houses separated by an invisible frontier… 20

The point Levi-Strauss wants to make is that this example should in no way entice us into cultural relativism, according to which the perception of social space depends on the observer’s group-belonging: the very splitting into the two “relative” perceptions implies a hidden reference to a constant – not the objective, “actual” disposition of buildings but a traumatic kernel, a fundamental antagonism the inhabitants of the village were unable to symbolize, to account for, to “internalize”, to come to terms with, an imbalance in social relations that prevented the community from stabilizing itself into a harmonious whole.

The two perceptions of the ground-plan are simply two mutually exclusive endeavors to cope with this traumatic antagonism, to heal its wound via the imposition of a balanced symbolic structure. It is here that one can see it what precise sense the Real intervenes through anamorphosis. We have first the “actual,” “objective,” arrangement of the houses, and then its two different symbolizations which both distort in an anamorphic way the actual arrangement. However, the “real” is here not the actual arrangement, but the traumatic core of some social antagonism which distorts the tribe members’ view of the actual arrangement of the houses in their village.

The Real is thus the disavowed X on account of which our vision of reality is anamorphically distorted; it is SIMULTANEOUSLY the Thing to which direct access is not possible AND the obstacle which prevents this direct access, the Thing which eludes our grasp AND the distorting screen which makes us miss the Thing.

More precisely, the Real is ultimately the very shift of perspective from the first to the second standpoint. Recall the old well-known Adorno’s analysis of the antagonistic character of the notion of society: in a first approach, the split between the two notions of society (Anglo-Saxon individualistic-nominalistic and Durkheimian organicist notion of society as a totality which preexists individuals) seems irreducible, we seem to be dealing with a true Kantian antinomy which cannot be resolved via a higher “dialectical synthesis,” and which elevates society into an inaccessible Thing-in-itself; however, in a second approach, one should merely take not of how this radical antinomy which seems to preclude our access to the Thing ALREADY IS THE THING ITSELF – the fundamental feature of today’s society IS the irreconcilable antagonism between Totality and the individual.

What this means is that, ultimately, the status of the Real is purely parallactic and, as such, non-substantial: is has no substantial density in itself, it is just a gap between two points of perspective, perceptible only in the shift from the one to the other.

The parallax Real is thus opposed to the standard (Lacanian) notion of the Real as that which “always returns at its place,” i.e., as that which remains the same in all possible (symbolic) universes: the parallax Real is rather that which accounts for the very multiplicity of appearances of the same underlying Real – it is not the hard core which persists as the Same, but the hard bone of contention which pulverizes the sameness into the multitude of appearances.

In a first move, the Real is the impossible hard core which we cannot confront directly, but only through the lenses of a multitude of symbolic fictions, virtual formations. In a second move, this very hard core is purely virtual, actually non-existing, an X which can be reconstructed only retroactively, from the multitude of symbolic formations which are “all that there actually is.”

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.

zupančič sexual difference pt 3

Sexual Difference  Her lecture at EGS 2011 Summer course

Goto part 2

And sex does not function as a stumbling block of meaning (and of the count) because it is considered morally naughty. It is considered morally naughty because it is a stumbling block of meaning.

This is why the moral and legal decriminalization of sexuality should not take the path of its naturalization (“whatever we do sexually is only natural behavior”).

We should instead start from the claim that nothing about (human) sexuality is natural, least of all sexual activity with the exclusive aim of reproduction.

There is no “sexual nature” of man (and no “sexual being”). The problem with sexuality is not that it is a remainder of nature that resists any definite taming; rather, there is no nature here — it all starts with a surplus of signification.

If we now return to the question of what this implies in relation to ontology in general, and, more specifically, to the performative ontology of contemporary gender studies, we must start from the following, crucial implication: Lacan is led to establish a difference between being and the Real.

The real is not a being, or a substance, but its deadlock.

It is inseparable from being, yet it is not being. One could say that for psychoanalysis, there is no being independent of language (or discourse) — which is why it often seems compatible with contemporary forms of nominalism.

All being is symbolic; it is being in the Other. But with a crucial addition, which could be formulated as follows: there is only being in the symbolic — except that there is real.

There “is” real, but this real is no being. Yet it is not simply the outside of being; it is not something besides being, it is — as I put it earlier — the very curving of the space of being.

It only exists as the inherent contradiction of being. Which is precisely why, for Lacan, the real is the bone in the throat of every ontology: in order to speak of “being qua being,” one has to amputate something in being that is not being.

That is to say, the real is that which the traditional ontology had to cut off in order to be able to speak of “being qua being.” We only arrive to being qua being by subtracting something from it — and this something is precisely that which, while included in being, prevents it from being fully constituted as being. The real, as that additional something that magnetizes and curves the (symbolic) space of being, introduced in it another dynamics, which infects the dynamics of the symbolic, makes it “not all.”

It is because sexual difference is implicated in sexuality that it fails to register as symbolic difference.

Indeed, psychoanalysis doesn’t try to de-essentialize sexual difference. What de-essentializes it most efficiently (and in the real) is its implication in sexuality as defined above; that is, as the out-of-beingness of being.

And this is what psychoanalysis brings out and insists upon — as opposed to the gender differences, which are differences like any other, and which miss the point by succeeding too much, and by falling in the trap of providing grounds for ontological consistency.

It might seem paradoxical, but differences like form- matter, yin-yang, active-passive  … belong to the same onto-logy as “gender” differences.

Even when the latter abandon the principle of complementarity and embrace that of gender
multiplicity, it in no way effects the ontological status of entities called genders. They are said to be, or to exist, emphatically so. (This “emphatically” seems to increase with numbers: One is usually timid in asserting the existence of two genders, but when passing to the multitude this timidity disappears, and their existence is firmly asserted.)

If sexual difference is considered in terms of gender, it is made — at least in principle — compatible with mechanisms of its ontologization.

De-sexualization of ontology (its no longer being conceived as a combinatory of two, “masculine” and “feminine” principles) coincides with the sexual appearing as the real/disruptive point of being.

And taking the sexual away (as something that has no consequences for the ontological level) opens again the path of the ontological symbolism of sexual difference.

This is why, if one “removes sex from sex,” one removes the very thing that has brought to light the problematic and singular character of sexual difference in the first place. One doesn’t remove the problem, but the means of seeing it and eventually tackling it.

Continued in pt 4 the final part

copjec sexual difference 2012

Joan Copjec (2012): The Sexual Compact, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 17:2, 31-48

The psychoanalytic category of sexual difference was from this date deemed suspect and largely forsaken in favor of the neutered category of gender. Yes, neutered, I insist on this; for it was specifically the sex of sexual difference that dropped out when this term was replaced by gender.

Gender theory not only thrust the term sexual difference out of the limelight but also it removed the sex even from sex. For, while gender theorists continued to speak of sexual practices, they ceased to question what sex is; no longer the subject of serious theoretical inquiry, sex reverted then to being what it was in common parlance: that which is involved in a highly restricted set of activities or in attachments to certain objects or person.

Although it was acknowledged that sexual difference was conceived by psycho-analysis not as a biological given but as an effect of a specific technique, or apparatus – namely language – the new wave of feminists worried that the structuralist conception of language was ahistorical and produced effects that were invariant. For this reason the apparatus (l’appareil) of language was dislodged from its role as the smithy of sex and replaced by historically variable technologies or dispositifs – that is, the complex machinery of social practices and knowledges, relations of power, norms and ideals – responsible for constructing gendered positions and relations.

The recourse to technologies of gender quickly encountered a problem, however:that of technological determinism. How to insure that what came out of the machine was not simply what was put into it, that the gendered subject was not completely stripped of autonomy? This problem was fixed by a well-recognized and anodyne truth: techniques had to be continually redeployed, repeated, but repetition always fails because nothing can be repeated in the same way twice. Or: there is no such thing as repetition.

It was on this denial of repetition that gender theory staked its hope, for the dooming of repetition meant variation was inevitable and this margin of variation, this slim difference, was seized upon as the site of resistance, the launching pad of thousands of small differences. 35

The elimination of sexual difference in favor of a study of the social technologies of gender construction left biology behind altogether and produced subjects without any vitality, subjects without bodies or, more precisely, subjects without sexual organs 38

Sex can never be put on display because it is nothing other than that teetering, unsettling displacement which permanently throws the subject’s identity off balance. In short, Foucault attributed to Freud a position he never held and then attacked it, arguing that far from demanding release from the shackles of power, sex operates in solidarity with it; sex, the notion of sex, Foucault insisted, is saturated with power through and through.

In truth, Lacan and Foucault wereon the same side in regard to the way sex had – incorrectly – become a political factor during this period and the role it was being made to play in the new paradigm of human domination. Both cautioned the students that the demand for sexual liberation did not oppose power but, on the contrary, played into its hands. What they disagreed on was what sex meant, how it was conceived, in psychoanalysis.

Lacan argued forcefully that sex is not repressed, that the mechanism of repression does not apply to it, and for this very reason it made no sense to say that sex sought to be liberated from repression. Lacan thus enjoined the students not to sacrifice their enjoyment to those in power by parading it, exposing it as if it were a predicate – more: the major one – of their identity.

In Foucault’s view, sex was nothing more than a fictional construct of power that serves to bind subjects to unified, determinate, and normative identities. Political opposition to bio-power must take the form, therefore, not of liberating suppressed sexual identities but of liberating oneself from them, freeing oneself from classification by their categories.

Thus, while Lacan and Foucault were allied in their opposition to the demand for the liberation of sex, on the grounds that this demand was a ruse of power, Lacan put all his energy into showing that sex, or jouissance, was not answerable to the opposition liberation/repression and castigated the jouissance restructured by the demand for liberation as a sham, while Foucault pursued the idea that sex and the demand to be liberated, to be known, to assert one’s identity, were inextricably intertwined. 39

 

 

Žižek on Hegel May 2013

Audio Link: Ž on Hegel May 12 2013.

Real is impossible and unavoidable.  As long as we are subjects of market we are universal.

7:00 Universality, oh we can’t reach universality, imperialism imposing their universality.
8:00 India struggle for universal
8;30 desire is indestructable, it avoids you as such it always returns
9:00 Freedom in a hidden way there was a pathological motivation, even if your act was pure you did it maybe to boast to others. What causes true anxiety, is the prospect that our act truly was free and this trauma is domesticated by reducing it to the pathological. What’s traumatic for Kant is that its terrifying to accept a FREE act, so he reduces it to something pathological.
The unbearable fact is that we are immortal, responsible in the afterlife …
11:30 Hegel’s materialism: Can the Hegelian moment of negation of negation account for redoubled impossibilities.
I’m not free I negate freedom but this escape from freedom proves impossible.

12:10 Lacan’s Alienation and Separation. Alienation in Symbolic order constitutive of the subject. The Subject is the RESULT of the process of alienation. It emerges as a result, alienation is not standard Hegelian view, no, alienation for Lacan is just re-doubled. Ancient Egyptians secrets, what we saw as secrets of Egyptians for us, were secrets for them as well. The secrets remain its just redoubled.

Self-negated pessimism. A form of optimism which is worse than pessimism.
15:00 optimism is negated, life is shit. but the very form of pessimists position is negated, life is shit is too much of a principled position, in a wierd optimistic way, life goes on……….
15:50 Aaron Schuster: subtracted from the nothingness of pessimism, violent peterbation of self-cancelling nothing
17:30 immortality, vampires undead.
Where does Hegel stand with regard to all of this. Can formal matrix of dialectic process account for this downward synthesis, the lowest of the lowest.

19:00 Where the danger is grows also what can save us. Where the danger is is also hope for a reversal. Hegel is usually taken as clearest case of this paradigm, NO, Hegel is not part of this paradigm.
20:00 textbook Hegel. It is Marx not Hegel who follows this logic. Precapitalist modes of economic production, the uniqueness of the CMP, labour is torn out of its primoridal condition into its objective conditions … the worker appears as objectless, purely subjective capacity of labour with its objective conditions of production.
22:50 Proletariat substanceless subjectivity
23:40 The true Hegel. Resolution misses its goal and turns into nightmare, how to remain faithful to goal of original liberation and not get conservative, oh a nihilistic mistake. How at the very moment is liberation goes wrong, how to nonetheless save the day through repetition and redeem its rational core. Our moment is still Hegelian. What Hegel called absolute Freedom and Terror was pretty mild compared to Stalin. The Jacobins were simply overthrown by a vote in Assembly National, ha do that to Stalin.
26:00 return from Marx to Hegel. From Marxist revolution eschatology, to Hegel’s tragic vision of history as open. The historical process always redirects are activity into an unexpected direction. Accepted the alienation of the historical process, we can’t control, not because we are puppets, no, there is no big Other. This acceptance of alienation. It implies a fully engaged position, aware of the risks involved. There is no higher historical necessity, only activity open to risks of open contingent history. The conclusive moment of the dialectic process is not synthetic unity, return at a higher level to some form of the One, for Hegel, alienation is also constitutive of the subject, subject does not pre-exist its alienation, but emerges through it. It’s only nature that only alienates itself from itself, the subject is the outcome of the self-alienation of nature.

The big Other doesn’t exist, no higher historical necessity, no World Spirit (forget Charles Taylor). Nonetheless, because self-alienation of nature is constitutive of subject, when you break out of alienation, you don’t get overblown narcissistic subject that appropriates the other, the GAP is displaced, we experience ourself as alienated from the other, we see how this alienation is displaced into the other itself, there is no substantial other to which we are alienated, the gap is redoubled.

On late Heidegger: historicity goes all the way down, cannot be reduced to a non-historical absolute. His achievement is a transcendental historicism, different historicist modes of being. The ultimate horizon is the horizon of this play of different transcendental horizons. For Heidegger at much higher level, does same as west coast American pseudo-follower of Foucault, what is this table? we can only ask what discursive regime, the ontic question is subordinated to the ontological horizon, the ultmate catastrophe is the ontological one. The true catastrophe is not whether humanity will destroy itself ontically, the true catastrophe has already happened, humanity dwells in technology etc. From the beginning of zein and seit Heidegger was bothered, transcendental is not creation, objects appear within a horizon of being, what Nature would be without man? The past carries with it a temporal index, our coming was expected on earth, we should bring this logic to the end, later the last big revolution will retroactively redeem earlier revolution, human being and nature: that is to say, what is nature outside humanity with no relation to humanity 1929-1930, perhaps animals are in an unknown way aware of their lack, their poorness. The definition of animal as poor in the world, as stone without world, when Heidegger as animals as poor in the world he means that we as humans are dwelling within a world, and we cannot but experience animals as within this world, we can’t step outside our horizon of meaning, and simply look at reality. He doubts this transcendental reply, not that things are simply there, it is something that characterizes immanently, the sorrow of nature as Derrida, the animal that I am: our human exploded to redeem nature from its suffering. it raises the right question: NOt what is nature for language, can we grasp nature adequetely through language, but What is language for nature, how does emergence of language affect nature.
Aaron Schuster: on the one hand official position, symbolic order is ultimate horizon, all we can do is concoct invent beautiful stories, myths about what went on before, BUT the symbolic order is a reaction to some RADICAL deadlock (sorrow in nature) dislocation, that is already there in nature. So that the Freudian civilization and its discontents, nature is not homeostatic universe things in their own place and then human being displace nature NO. a displacement was already in place in nature.
Higher level of non-resolution. Lacan speculates on infinite pain of being a plant. on the one hand you have this eternal poetry of dislocation of sexuality in human species in contrast to poor animals who nonetheless have instincts that tell them when/how to copulate. The fascination of national Geographic, animals a universe that works, I think we should go here a step further, when you watch National Geographic, they report on human community which is treated as a small animal community, one should risk a step further, a secret awareness already in nature, no go further than New Age, maybe nature is the ultimate invented tradition, True Materialism begins when you transpose the gap as specifically human. when we transpose this gap back into nature itself. Sexuality, when Lacan introduces Lamella, Seminar XI. the deadlock is already there in nature, it means that human speech is not a fall from some natural balance but a reaction reacting to a fall that was already there.
The Wound can be healed only by the spear that Cut it.
The spirit is itself the wound it tries to heal. The spirit of human subjectivity is the power of tearing apart, spirit is nothing but the process of overcoming immediacy and organic unity.
a withdrawal the creates that which it withdraws from.
50:00 India

johnston ethics desire Seminar VII part 2 das Ding

Johnston, Adrian. “The Vicious Circle of the Super-Ego: The Pathological Trap of Guilt and the Beginning of Ethics.” Psychoanalytic Studies. 3.3/4 (2001): 411-424.

🙂 Johnston does not agree with Žižek’s take on das Ding.

Žižek’s definition: das Ding doesn’t exist prior to the ‘backwards glance’ of the nostalgic subject of the Symbolic wishing to have lost something he/she never possessed in the Žfirst place (das Ding is a result of the fundamental strategy of fantasy, wherein the structural impossibility of the drives’ ‘full satisfaction’ qua ‘jouissance obtained’ is concealed from the subject by making it seem as if this enjoyment is hypothetically re-obtainable).

However, this is a misleading exaggeration that treats Lacan as wholly Hegelian.

The most misleading feature of virtually every extant commentary on Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis is the attribution to him of the imperative “Do not give way on your desire!”

In the seventh seminar, Lacan does not present the link between desire and guilt in the form of a command, an injunction to ‘persist’ in one’s desire.

Instead, he merely states that guilt is the result of ‘ceding on’ (i.e., not enacting in reality, refraining from concrete actualization ) one’s desires—“Je propose que la seule chose don t on puisse être coupable, au moins dans la perspective analytique, c’est d’avoir cédé sur son désir”.

At the beginning of this seminar, Lacan remarks that psychoanalysis is confronted , across the range of its analysands, with the omnipresence of guilt in human life.

Lacan is not so much interested in proposing a new prescriptive ethics as in comprehending the precise nature of ‘moral masochism’, in fully grasping how the constellation of the id, the super-ego, and the socio-symbolic Umwelt of reality ‘pathologize ’ the ethical Žfield.

At most, this Lacanian analytic diagnosis of moral masochism should be interpreted as a preparatory clearing of the ground for a genuine ethics, as a mapping out of the obstacles hindering the construction and enactment of a non-pathological ‘metaphysics of morals’. 417

Lacan repeatedly makes reference to the Freudian super-ego as an excessive, greedy, and out-of-control agency. Echoing Freud, he observes that, “the more one sacrifiŽces to it, the more it demands”.

The super-ego isn’t satisfied with mere external/behavioral conformity to ethico-moral precepts; it uncompromisingly insists upon the impossible purification of intentionality itself (thus, the super-ego is, in a manner of speaking, a spontaneous Kantian). 418

… when Lacan speaks about being guilty for having ‘ceded’ or ‘given ground’ relative to one’s desire, what he really means is the following: the more the subject surrenders (to) his/her desires by obeying the restrictions of the Law, the more guilty he/she feels, since such concessions only aggravate the (unconscious) volatility and intensity of these same desires (namely,‘internal’ repressed desires which never fail to escape the notice of the omniscient authority of the sadistic super-ego).

Near the end of his 1974 television interview, Lacan clearly advances this claim in saying that, “Freud reminds us that it’s not evil, but good, that engenders guilt” (Lacan, p. 45).
To be Continued …