lacan – Page 22 – objet (a)

moment of madness between nature and culture death drive

Peter Karlsen The Grace of Materialism Theology with Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. Københavns Universitet 2010.

Freud formulated his thesis on the death drive precisely in response to phenomena which could not be explained on the basis of the ‘pleasure principle’, phenomena that were ‘beyond the pleasure principle’, and its directive of self-preservation. In Žižek’s (CWZ 61) words:

“In trying to explain the functioning of the human psyche in terms of the pleasure principle, reality principle and so on, Freud became increasingly aware of a radical non-functional element, a basic destructiveness and excess of negativity, that couldn’t be accounted for. And thatis why Freud posed the hypothesis of death drive.”

How did man go from being a mere animal to a being of language bound by the symbolic order? How was the passage from a natural into a civil or cultural state brought about? The answer given by classical Political Philosophy is of course the famous narrative of the ‘social contract’.

But in Žižek’s (FTKN 205) view this is an inconsistent explanation insofar that “[…] the fiction of a ‘social contract’ presupposes in advancewhat is or should be its result, its final outcome – the presence of individuals who act according to rules of a civilized rational order […].” According to Žižek (TTS 36; FTKN 206), the passage from a natural to a cultural state cannot be accounted for in terms of a smooth continuous transition, something has to intervene between these two states. What the evolutionary narratives of social contract silently presuppose is, according to Žižek (TTS 36), a kind of ‘vanishing mediator’ which is neither nature nor culture. So, what is this vanishing mediator? 193

Man did not become what he is through a “[…] spark of logos magically conferred on Homo sapiens[…].” Instead, Žižek’s (CWZ 80) claim is that the transition from nature to culture is enabled by a ‘malfunction’, a failure, in nature itself. As he (CWZ 65) puts it in one of his conversations with Glyn Daly: “We cannot pass directly from nature to culture. Something goes terribly wrong innature: nature produces an unnatural monstrosity and I claim that it is in order to cope with, to domesticate, this monstrosity that we symbolize.”

As the last part of the quote suggests, and as Žižek (TTS 37) explicitly underlines in his discussion in The Ticklish Subject, the symbolic order of law (culture) is thus not, as it is usually asserted, aimed at controlling our natural instincts and inclination (nature) but, rather directed against something in us which is not natural, namely this moment of thoroughly derailed, malfunctioning, denaturalized ‘nature’.

Indeed in the effort to domesticate this malfunctioning (de)nature “[…] man’s natural propensities are, rather, on the side of moral law against the excess of ‘unruliness’ that threatens his well-being” (TTS 37). As Žižek (TTS 289) emphasizes later in the same book, one should never forget that the law is ultimately in the service of the ‘pleasure principle’ which dictates our daily functioning in accordance with the upholding of our welfare; that is to say, the law is not opposed to our natural instincts as it is claimed in the standard story of ‘nature versus culture’, rather the law and the natural instincts are united in their attempt to constrain the derailed (de)nature of man endangering his self-preservation.

This mediating moment of malfunction, this intersection between nature and culture, which made possible the transition between these two states, only to ‘vanish’ under the domesticating reign of symbolic law and the ‘pleasure principle’, is, according to Žižek (TTS 36; FTKN 207; CWZ 65), nothing less than the emergence of the (death) drive.

Universality vertigo objet a

Žižek, S. Living in End Times New York: Verso, 2010.

Christian church faced with dilmemma starting in 4th century: how to reconcile feudal class society where rich lords ruled over impoverished peasants WITH Egalitaran poverty of the collective of believers as described in Gospels?

Thomas Aquinas believes that while in principle shared property is better, this only holds for perfect humans, majority of us dwell in sin etc. so private property and difference in wealth are natural and it is sinful to demand egalitarianism or abolish private property in “our fallen societies, i.e., to demand for imperfect people what befits only the perfect.”

Is this supplmenting of universality with exceptions a case of the concrete universal?

Structure of universal law and Hegelian “concrete universality” mobilize the gap between the pure universal principle or law and the pragmatic consideration of paritcular circumstances , i.e., the (ultimately empiricist) notion of the excess of the wealth of concrte partiuclar content over any abstract principle — in other words, here, unversality precisely REMAINS ABSTRACT, which is why it has to be twisted or adapted to particular circumstances in order to become operative in real life.

In the second case, on the contrary, the tension is absolutely immanent, inherent to universality itself: the fact that a universality actualizes itself in a series of exceptions is an effect of this universality being at war with itself, marked by an inherent deadlock or impossibility. … The idea’s imperfect [or, rather, catastrophic as in the case of Communism] actualizations bear witness to an “inner contradiction” at the very heart of the idea.

“concrete universality” an example:

Jewish story about death penalty and God who ordained it. devised a practical solution: “one should not directly overturn the divine injunction, that would have been blasphemous; but one should treat it as God’s slip of tongue, thismoment of madness, and invent a complex network of sub-regulations and conditions which, while leaving the possibility of a death penaly intact, ensure that this possibility will never be realized. The beqauty of this procedure is that it turns around the standard trick of prohibiting something in principle (torture, for instance), but then slipping in enough qualifications (“except in specified extreme circumstancess…”) to ensure it can be done whenever one really wants to do it.

It is thus either “In principle yes, but in practice never” or “In principle no, but when exceptional circumstances demand it, yes.”

Note the asymmetry between the two cases: the prohibition is much stronger when one allows torture in principle — in this case, the principled “yes” is NEVER allowed to realize itself; while in the other case, the principled “no” is EXCEPTIONALLY allowed to realize itself.

In other words, the only “reconciliation” between the universal and particular is that of the UNIVERSALIZED EXCEPTION: only the stance which re-casts every particular case as an exception treats all particular cases WITHOUT EXCEPTION in the same way.

And it sould be clear now why this is a case of “concrete universality”: the reason we should find a way to argue, in each particular case, that the death penalty is not deserved, lies in our awareness that there is something wrong with the very idea of the death penalty, that this idea is an injustice masked as justice. 20-21

Ambedkar saw how the structure of four castes does not unite four elements belonging to the same order: while the first three castes (priests, warrior-kings, merchant producers) form a consistent All, an organic tgriad the Untouchables, like Marx’s “Asiatic mode of production,” the “part of no part,” the INCONSISTENT ELEMENT WITHIN THE SYSTEM WHICH HOLDS THE PLACE OF WHAT THE SYSTEM EXCLUDES — as as such the Untouchables STAND FOR UNIVERSALITY.

As long as there are castes, there will be an excessive excremental zero-value element which, while formally part of the system, has no proper place within it. This is why the properly dialectical parados is that, if one is to break out of the caste system, it is not enough to reverse the status of the Untouchables, elevating htem into the “children of god” — the first step should rather be exactly the opposite one: to UNIVERSALIZE their excremental status to the whole of humanity.

Martin Luther directly proposed just such an excremental identity for man: man is like a divine shit, he fell out of God’s anus — and, effectively, it is only within this Protestant logic of man’s excremental identity that the true menaing of Incarnation can be formulated. 23

Protestantism, finally, posits the relationship as real, conceiving Christ as a God who, in His act of Incarnation, freely IDENTIFIED HIMSELF WITH HIS OWN SHIT, with the excremental real that is man — and it is only at this level that the properly Christian notion of divine love can be apprehended, as the love for the miserable excremental entity called “man.”

We are dealing here with what can be ironically referred to as the cosmic-theological proletarian position, whose “infinite judgment” is the identity of excess and universality: the shit of the earth is the universal subject.

The Phenomenology of Spirit, between the two readings of “the Spirit is a bone” which Hegel illustrates by way of the phallic metaphor (the phallus as organ of insernination or as the organ of urination). Hegel’s point is NOT that, in contrast to the vulgar empiricist mind which sees only urination, the proper speculative attitude has to choose insemination.

The paradox is that making the direct choice of insemination is the infallible way to miss the point: it is not possible directly to choose the “true meaning,” for one HAS to begin by making the “wrong” choice (of urination) — the true speculative meaning emerges only through the repeated reading, as the after-effect (or by-product) of the first, “wrong,” reading.

And the same goes for social life in which the direct choice of the “concrete universality”of a particular ethical Iifeworld can end only in a regression to a pre-modern organic society that denies the infinite right of subjectivity as the fundamental feature of modernity.

Since the subject-citizen of a modern state can no longer accept immersion in some particular social role that would confer on him a determinate place within the organic social Whole, the construction of the rational totality of the modern state leads to Revolutionary Terror: one should ruthlessly tear up the constraints of the pre-modern organic “concrete universality” and fully assert the infinite right of subjectivity in its abstract negativity.

In other words, the point of Hegel’s analysis of the Revolutionary Terror is not the rather obvious insight into how the revolutionary project involved the unilateral and direct assertion of abstract universal reason, and as such was doomed to perish in self-destructive fury since it was unable to channel the transposition of its revolutionary energy into a concrete, stable and differentiated social order; Hegel’s point turns rather on the enigma of why, in spite ofthe fact that the Revolutionary Terror was a historical deadlock, we have to pass through it in order to arrive at the modern rational state. 26-27

This is why Hegelian dialectics is not a vulgar evolutionism claiming that while a phenomenon may be justified in its own time, it deserves to disappear when its time passes: the “eternity” of dialectics means that the de-legitimization is always retroactive, what disappears “in itself” always deserves to disappear.

Recall also the paradox of the process of apologizing: if I hurt someone with a rude remark, the proper thing for me to do is to offer a sincere apology, and the proper thing for the other party to do is to say something like “Thanks, I appreciate it, but I wasn’t offended, I knew you didn’t mean it, so you really owe me no apology!”

The point is, of course, that although the final result is that no apology is needed, one has to go through the elaborate process of offering it -“you owe me no apology” can only be said once I have actually offered an apology, so that, although formally “nothing happens,” and the offer of apology is proclaimed unnecessary, there is still a gain at the end of the process (perhaps, even, the friendship is saved).

Is it not that, here also, one has to do something (offer an apology, choose terror) in order to see how superfluous it is? This paradox is sustained by the distinction between the “constative” and the “performative,” between the “subject of the enunciated” and the “subject of the enunciation”: at the level of the enunciated content, the whole operation is meaningless (why do it -offer an apology, choose terror – when it is superfluous?);

but what this commonsensical insight overlooks is that it was only the “wrong” superfluous gesture which created the subjective conditions that made it possible for the subject to really see why this gesture was indeed superfluous. The dialectical process is thus more refined than it may appear; the standard notion is that one can only arrive at the final truth at the end of a series of errors, so that these errors are not simply discarded, but are “sublated” in the final truth, preserved therein as moments within it. What this standard notion misses, however, is how the previous moments are preserved PRECISELY AS SUPERFLUOUS. 28

This is why the obvious response “But is this idea ofretroactively canceling the contingent historical conditions, of transforming contingency into Fate, not ideology at its formally purest, the very form of ideology?” misses the point, namely that this retroactivity is inscribed into reality itself:

what is truly “ideological” is the idea that, freed from “ideological illusions,” one can pass from moment A to moment B directly, without retroactivity — as if, for instance, in an ideal and authentic society, I could apologize and the other party could respond “I was hurt, an apology was required, and I accept it” without breaking any implicit rules. Or as if we could reach the modern rational state without having to pass through the “superfluous” detour of the Terror. 28

…when something radically New emerges it retroactively creates its own possibility, its own causes or conditions. 28

Falling in love changes the past: it is as if I ALWAYS ALREADY loved you, our love was destined to be, is the “answer of the real.” 28 In Vertigo, it is the opposite that occurs: the past is changed so that it loses the ohjet a. What Scottie first experiences in Vertigo is the LOSS of Madeleine, his fatal love; when he recreates Madeleine in Judy and then discovers that the Madeleine he knew was actually Judy already pretending to be Madeleine, what he discovers is not simply that Judy was a fake (he knew that she was not the true Madeleine, since he had used her to recreate a copy of Madeleine), but that, BECAUSE SHE WAS not A FAKE — SHE is MADELEINE — MADELEINE HERSELF WAS ALREADY A FAKE — the objet a disintegrates, the very loss is lost, and we have a “negation of the negation.” His discovery CHANGES THE PAST, deprives the lost object of the objet a. 29

OBJECT A 2012, Žižek at the EGS

What Judy was doing in playing Madeleine was TRUE LOVE.

In Vertigo Scottie does NOT love Madeleine-the proof is that he tries to recreate her in Judy, changing Judy’s properties to make her resemble Madeleine. Similarly, the idea ofcloning a dead child for bereaved parents is an abomination: if the parents are satisfied by this, it is proof that their love was not genuine — love is not love for the properties of the object, but for the abyssal X, the JE NE SAIS QUOI, in the object. 29-30

Neighbour Thing

Žžek. Living in End Times New York: Verso, 2010.

Žižek mentions neighbour in this talk here

face conceals the horror of the Neighbor-Thing. So it isn’t the Levinasian “that Otherness from which the unconditional ethical call emanates” no it isn’t that for Ž. Semblance: is french term for just the ordinary Joe. The face makes the Neighbor into a semblance with whom we can identify and empathize.

So why does the covered face cause anxiety for the rest of us?

“because it confronts us directly with the abyss of the Other-Thing, with the Neighbor in its uncanny dimension. The very covering-up of the face obliterates a protective shield, so that the Other-Thing stares at us directly (recall that the burqa has a narrow slit for the eyes; we don’t see the eyes, but we know there is a gaze there)”. 2

[Ž relates Salome’s dance, wonders if she could go further and take off the skin of her face itself so that we see smooth burqa-like surface with slit for gaze] “Love thy neighbor!” means, at its most radical, precisely the impossible — real love for this de-subjetivized subject, for this monstrous dark blot cut with a slit/gaze.

This is why, in psychoanalytic treatment, the patient does not sit face to face with the analyst: they both stare at a third point, since it is only this suspension of the face which opens up the space for the proper dimension of the Neighbor-Thing. 3

politics is the unconcsious: here the unconscious is elevated into the big Other: it is posited as a substance which really dominates and regulates political activity “… true driving force of our political activity … unconscious libidinal activity.”

the unconscious is politics: here the big Other itself loses its substantial character, it is no longer “THE Unconscious,” for it transforms into a fragile inconsistent field overdetermined by political struggles.”

master signifier objet a

… the formal homology (as well as substantial difference) between this reflexive logic of the Master-Signifier — the signifier of the lack of the signifier, the signifier which functions as a stand-in (filler) of a lack — and the logic of the objet petit a which is also repeatedly defined by Lacan as the filler of a lack: an object whose status is purely virtual, with no positive consistency of its own, only a positivization of a lack in the symbolic order. Something escapes the symbolic order, and this X is positivized as the objet a, the je ne sais quoi which makes me desire a certain thing or person.

However, this formal parallel between the Master-Signifier and the objet petit a should not deceive us: although, in both cases, we seem to be dealing with an entity which fills in the lack, what differentiates the objet a from the Master-Signifier is that, in the case of the former, the lack is redoubled, that is, the objet a is the result of the overlapping of the two lacks, the lack in the Other (the symbolic order) and the lack in the object — in the visual field, say, the objet a is what we cannot see, our blind spot in relation to the picture.

Each of the two lacks can operate independently of the other: we can have the lack of the signifier, as when we have a rich experience for which “words are missing” or we can have the lack in the visible for which, precisely, there is a signifier, namely the Master-Signifier, the mysterious signifier which seems to recapture the invisible dimension of the object.

Therein resides the illusion of the Master-Signifier: it coalesces with the objet a, so that it appears that the subject’s Other/Master possesses what the subject lacks. This is what Lacan calls alienation: the confrontation of the subject with a figure of the Other possessing what the subject lacks. In separation, which follows alienation, the objet a is separated also from the Other, from the Master-Signifier; that is, the subject discovers that the Other also does not have what he is lacking. The axiom Lacan follows is “no I without a”: wherever an I (unary feature, signifying mark that represents the subject) emerges, it is followed by an a, the stand-in for what was lost in the signification of the real.

Is, then, the objet a the signified of the S1 of the Master-Signifier? It may appear so, since the Master-Signifier signifies precisely that imponderable X which eludes the series of positive properties signified by the chain of “ordinary” signifiers (S2).

But, upon a closer look, we see that the relationship is exactly the inverse: with regard to the division between signifier and signified, the objet a is on the side of the signifier, it fills in the lack in/of the signifier, while the Master-Signifier is the “quilting point” between the signifier and the signified, the point at which the signifier falls into the signified. 598-599

neighbour

However, from a strict materialist standpoint, Laplanche’s notion of the “enigmatic signifier” should be critically supplemented: it is not a primordial fact, an “original trauma” which sets the human animal on the path of subjectivization; it is, rather, a secondary phenomenon, a reaction to the primordial fact of the over-proximity of the other, of his or her intrusive presence or bodily material too-much-ness. 543

It is this intrusive presence which is then interpreted as an “enigma,” as an obscure “message” from the other who “wants something” from me. In this sense, the “Neighbor” refers NOT primarily to the abyss of the Other’s desire, the enigma of “Che vuoi?” of “What do you really want from me?” but to an intruder who is always and by definition too near. This is why for Hitler the Jew was a neighbor: no matter how far away the Jews were, they were always too close; no matter how many were killed, the remnants were always too strong.” Chesterton made this point with utmost clarity: “The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.” 543

The properly Freudian materialist solution would be to turn this relationship around and to posit the paradox of an original excess, an excess “in itself” rather than in relation to a presupposed norm.The Freudian drive is just such an excess-in-itself: there is no “normal” drive. The formation of the Ego with its borderline between Inside (Ego) and Outside (non-Ego) is already a defense-formation, a reaction against the excess of the drive. In short, it is not the excess of the drive which violates the “norm” of the Ego, it is the “norm” (proper measure) itself which is a defense against the excess of the drive.

It is for this reason that intersubjectivity is not a primordial or “natural” state of human being. 544

To find traces of a dimension “beyond intersubjectivity” in Hegel, one should look for them in the very place which is the central reference for the partisans of recognition: the famous chapter on servitude and domination from the Phenomenology.

Malabou has noted perceptively that, in spite of the precise logical deduction of the plurality of subjects out of the notion of life, there is an irreducible scandal, something traumatic and unexpected, in the encounter with another subject, that is, in the fact that the subject (a self-consciousness) encounters outside itself, in front of it, another living being in the world which also claims to be a subject (a self-consciousness).

As a subject, I am by definition alone, a singularity opposed to the entire world of things, a punctuality to which all the world appears, and no amount of phenomenological description of how I am always already “together-with” others can cover up the scandal of another such singularity existing in the world. 544

So when I encounter in front of me another self-consciousness, there is something in me (not simply my egotism, but something in the very notion of self-consciousness) which resists the reduction of both myself and the opposed self-consciousness to simple members of the human species: what makes the encounter shocking is that in it, two universalities meet where there is room only for one. 545

In the original encounter, the Other is thus not simply another subject with whom I share the intersubjective space of recognition, but a traumatic Thing. This is why this excess cannot be properly counted: subjects are never 1 + 1 + 1. .., there is always an objectal excess which adds itself to the series. … an alien monster which is less than One but more than zero. (The psychoanalytic treatment recreates this scene; the analyst is not another subject, there is no face to face, s/he is an object which adds itself to the patient.) This excessive spectral object is, of course, a stand-in for the subject, the subject itself as object, the subject’s impossible-real objectal counterpart. 545

Two men, having had a drink or two, go to the theater, where they become thoroughly bored with the play. One of them feels an urgent need to urinate, so he tells his friend to mind his seat while he goes to find a toilet: “I think I saw one down the corridor outside.” The man wanders down the corridor, but finds no WC; wandering ever further into the recesses of the theater, he walks through a door and sees a plant pot. After copiously urinating into it and returning to his seat, his friend says to him: “What a pity! You missed the best part. Some fellow just walked on stage and pissed in that plant pot!” The subject necessarily misses its own act, it is never there to see its own appearance on the stage, its own intervention is the blind spot of its gaze.

What, then, divides the subject? Lacan’s answer is simple and radical: its (symbolic) identity itself — prior to being divided between different psychic spheres, the subject is divided between the void of its cogito (the elusively punctual pure subject of enunciation) and the symbolic features which identify it in or for the big Other (the signifier which represents it for other signifiers). 555

In Agnieszka Holland’s Europa, Europa, the hero (a young German Jew who passes as an Aryan and fights in the Wehrmacht in Russia) asks a fellow soldier who had been an actor prior to the war: “Is it hard to play someone else?” The actor answers: “It’s much easier than playing oneself.”

We encounter this otherness at its purest when we experience the other as a neighbor: as the impenetrable abyss beyond any symbolic identity.

When a person I have known for a long time does something totally unexpected, disturbingly evil, so that I have to ask myself, “Did I really ever know him?” does he not effectively become “another person with the same name”?

Ž EGS 2012 There is no original One Act evental enthusiasm

Slavoj Being and Subjectivity: Act and Evental Enthusiasm

16:19 Alenka Z

I would like a coffee, no cream. Sorry we have run out of cream. Can I bring you a coffee without milk?

For Badiou, 1 comes secondary, 1 is an operation, 1 is the effect of counting, multiplicity is there from the beginning.

For Alenka and me, of course there is no original 1, but this absence is inscribed in the multiplicity from the very beginning. It does NOT mean “we are multiple fuck the ONE” It means the 1 as absence is already here. Ontologically the zero level is a barred 1, there is no ONE. There is multiplicity because 1 cannot be 1.

Freud says somewhere “multiplicity in dreams is always a sign of CASTRATION” If you dream of many phalluses it means you don’t have one. Multiplicity is always the blocked sabotaged impossibility of the ONE.

When Lacan primordial repression is the repression of the binary signifier. Lacan’s theory of sexual differentiation is not Ying Yang bullshit. There is only one signifier, Male, but this does not make woman, more but LESS. Why?

Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a parody of Tolstoy. Dostoevsky is missing. A scene in the movie, as if this absence of D. returns. The 2 guys talk and bring in all the D. titles. Did you meet the Idiot. Ah you mean the Brother K.

We are tempted to insist on the primacy of the barred ONE, the impossible ONE. There are ONEs of course, but the existing ONEs are an echo of their own impossibility. What there is is always originally multiplicity. But why do we then always start to count to 1? Because multiplicity is always marked from the beginning by the lack or impossibility of the ONE.

In Badiou there is no ontology of the EVENT. When Badiou announced program for Logics of the Worlds. In previous book Being and Event he didn’t really account for how a World emerges out of BEING. In this book he also does NOT do it.

23:00 He says there is multiplicity, then I don’t know from where, but ALL OF A SUDDEN THERE ARE WORLDS.

23:15 WHY DOES BEING QUA BEING (THIS PRE-REPRESENTATIVE MULTIPLICITY) WHY DOES IT ORGANIZE ITSELF INTO WORLDS?

WORLDS ARE MODES OF TRANSCENDENTAL APPEARANCE. Each of the worlds is characterized by its transcendental a priori.

Alenka’s solution
Already the multiplicity from the very beginning is multiplicity because the ONE is impossible. This is the answer to why multiplicity, precisely to fill in this gap, has to appear to itself. WORLDS happen precisely to fill in this gap, to appear to itself.

BORING KANTIAN PROBLEM: We live in appearances but can we reach the THING-IN-ITSELF? THE REAL? For Hegel the problem IS EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE. The True enigma is OK there is BEING MULTIPLICITY OUT THERE BUT WHY DOES BEING START TO APPEAR TO ITSELF? The true enigma is NOT how to see reality behind appearance. But why does the real begin to appear to itself?

THE TRUE FIGHT WITH BADIOU

Z remains a old-fashion transendentalist and Badiou is a dialectical materialist.

Žižek: When Badiou mentions World, the POINT as minimum of yes/no, I claim that all the coordinates are already the coordinates of symbolic universe with subjectivity included. There is NO WORLD OUTSIDE LANGUAGE AND SUBJECT.

Badiou FANATICALLY insists that WORLD is dialectics in NATURE. Animals, even rocks, a group of stars, can be a WORLD. Ž thinks this is totally illegitimate.

28:00 More Lacan than Badiou:

Lacan: Existence is absolutely NOT the same as BEING. Existence is for Badiou, is a transcendental determination. Things exist within a transcendental world, you exist the more you are recognized within this transcendental space.

Even Hegel has this distinction in a nice way in Hegel’s LOGIC. In Hegel, existence is a category of ESSENCE. Existence is BEING which is the APPEARANCE of some ESSENCE. What does NOT have an ESSENCE, IS, but does not EXIST.

FOR LACAN Neither the subject exists NOR the WOMAN. Lacan does NOT say: Il n’ya pas de femme. But he says La Femme n’existe pas.

30:45 BRUCE FINK
IL N’YA PAS is much more radical than IL N”EXISTE PAS.

Lacan says Il n’ya pas de grand Autre. There is no big Other. He doesn’t say the big Other doesn’t exist.

The Lacanian distinction between existence, and INSISTENCE What doesn’t exist, INSISTS for LACAN: Subject doesn’t exist it just leaves TRACES in existence
DRIVE doesn’t exist it INSISTS

32:30 APPEARANCE AND PHENOMENON
the distinction is that appearance is an appearance of something. You look behind, what is appearing.

A phenomenon is an appearance behind which there is nothing

An appearance of something AND An appearance that just fills in the lack, that there is NOTHING behind it.

The two greek painters, who will do a more realistic painting the winner paints a curtain, ok pull apart the curtain to see what you painted

PHENOMENON evokes/raises the desire for something behind but there is nothing behind, it is appearance in the abyss

I would locate here the status of the subject.
Subject is for me an APPEARANCE BUT NO SUBSTANCE

The mystery of the SUBJECT: Appearance is not a simple appearance that can be SUBTRACTED. IT is NOT as if you can take away appearance and get things as they really are.

What if there is an apparance precisely as appearance is crucial for the consistency of that which appears. So that you take away appearance and you lose the thing-itself. The whole FREUD turns on this.

35:30 ENDS

36:00 The ultimate ambiguity, is Kant’s Transcendental appearance.
Kant can not accept appearance THAT ITS APPEARANCE AGAINST THE ABYSS OF NOTHING.

He still thinks there must be something substantial behind appearance which appears.

The Hegelian step is NO! Conclusion of first part of Phenomenology of Spirit, of course appearance is like a curtain we look behind, behind appearance is just a VOID, what we find there is what we put there. THIS DOES NOT MEAN THAT IN THE USUAL SENSE THAT EVERYTHING IS JUST AN APPEARANCE. EVERYTHING IS REAL BUT THIS IS NOT RELATIVISM.

38:15 BEST BOOK IS THEORY OF SUBJECT the breakthrough is there the rest of Badiou’s work is trying to catch up.

38:30 the best friendly shot at a friend (Bosteels) the best! from Belgians are well know for 2 things

He opposes Sophocles terror/anxiety ORestia courage/justice

subjective attitudes doesn’t JUSTICE stick out, replace JUSTICE WITH enthusiasm.
For reasons of consistency.
What does Terror mean here? He oscillates between 2 meanings. Bad superego terror represented by CREON. Fuck you we also need our own TERROR. THere is always a terrorist aspect in SUBTRACTION
ENTHUSIASM WILL BE CENTRAL CATEGORY OF HIS IMMANENCE OF TRUTH.

41:00 Question on ACT
44:00 Žižek replies
The problem of EVENT is Badiou seems to struggle about the relationship between Event and its nomination.

Sometimes he claims more radically, transcendentally, nomination is part of the EVENT, event becomes event only through its nomination,
Sometimes he adapts a pomo attitude, the event is traumatic excess and we try to but fail to find a proper name.

A communist struggle is going on but the Marxian names for it are not good names. We didn’t nominate the event in a correct way.

There is the danger of this pomo pseudo-Nietzche b.s. the real is the event/horror we try to nominate it, but it always fails on the other hand Badiou celebrating the Master Signifier.

46:00 Theoretical couple Badiou/Barbara Kassam

The Master Signifier, Badiou who is the Badiou of Master SIgnifier, is masculine Badiou. We have the event of Chrisianity, but Christ himeself was a feminine hysterical guy, the master who provides the NAME is ST. PAUL. It is Paul who provided the MASTER SIGNIFIER that created Christianity.

47:50 Badiou made a book with Roudinesco (Ž yikes!!!) He says: without a MASTER (Kant a human being is animal who needs master) to become a subject you need a master, Badiou goes very far here.

Here I agree with him, with a precise political stake, to rehabilitate the marxist tradition of cult of PERSONALITY. Che GUAvara, Mao, Stalin, Fidel, we need a name a MASTER. Neutral theory is not enough we need a NAME a master that introduces a NEW ORDER.

Sometimes Badiou links Psychoanalysis with LOVE. At the same time, His best example of evental structure is RELIGION, St. Paul We live in secular era, religion is not evental, I just use Paul as example of formal evental structure. But how was it possible to happen there? Z believes category of LOVE is much more mysterious.

Kant = Science
Fichte = Politics
Schelling = Art supreme medium of truth is art
Hegel = LOVE category of life is central

51:50 NIGHT OF WORLD

Alenka accepts Badiou’s claim that event as real in its brutality is not enough, you need to nominate the EVENT.

She does something he doesn’t do. She introduces distinction between master signifier and signifier of the barred other. Signifier of barred other.
when you present the signifier of the inconsistent Other
when you name properly the antagonism, the real the defines a certain field: class struggle, when this turns into a Master signifier you already de-eventalize it, you lose it.

CHIESA: fuck it there will always be Master signifier obscene super ego fantasy etc.

Communist Hypothesis, the link to a master is not the ultimate social link there is a possibility of being together collectively that is not sustained by a MASTER.
If we drop this we are back to J.A. Miller

54:20 Let’s say a political system is in a crisis. If we take this crisis in a pre-evental way: It means we inscribe it, the system fails blah blah, the crucial pt. is NO! This failure, is not simply failure of the system, in this FAILURE THE TRUTH OF THE SYSTEM APPEARS.

For Freud/Marx crises, the basic antagonism of capitalism appears, symptoms are the truth of normality

To provide the name for this NECESSITY, why failures are structurally necessary, the big other itself is Barred. this is the politics of NOMINATION

55:50 Laclau
populist politics is always the politics of failure, things are basically ok, but jews traitors foreigners always fuck it up. scapegoats. corrupted the old order, the crack, the failure is not in the order as such, its an accidental corruption, you need to re-establish the proper order. NO

The EVENT IS TO FIND A NAME social antagonism, class struggle, which clearly locates the failure in the ORDER ITSELF.

58:20 Foucault

Big shift History Sex vol 1 is different from vol 2 and 3. This tension is already in his early works on Madness. Already described in Derrida.

Even in early works on madness.
The oscillation in early Foucault, on one hand he says I want to describe till now MADNESS was described by the external standpoint of science/power. I want madness itself to SPEAK. At the same time he makes it clear, that madness, substantially in-itself, is not an in-itself which is described differently, madness is an affect of mechanisms of madness. Madmen prior to modernity, was located in hermeneutics, you were devil, or divine that spoke through you. Madness was hermeneutics, a madman is that which a higher truth speaks through you. With moderinity it become POSITIVIST science. Something is wrong with brain, we incarcerate them.
In Vol 1. accent is power generates resistence to itself, resistance to power is way for power to reproduce itself more effectively

Beware, if a girl pretends to be shameful, she rejects you, but this rejection is already … they give you an entire classification of techniques

so again Foucault goes fo far as to say, power itself generates the man to be liberated. Resistance is part of power, the circle is closed.
NO LIBERATION, no space for liberation. resistance in advance is incorporated.

IN vol 2 and vol 3, he is looking for islands of resistance. He has here also rehabilitates the subject, the idea through some kind of self-education, self-relating you can acquire a distance, a resistance. No longer this co-optive pessimism.

1:04 BUTLER

This is my problem with Judith Butler. She always speaks the language of resistance. We can just occupy spaces and resist, the big OTHER OF POWER is here, but there are spaces of resistance. What if we play off the early and late Foucault. How can we have resistances which are not just caught up in counter-power. Sexuality is not the expression of sex, real sex is an effect of the discourses we have on sexuality. With these discourses, disciplinary discourses. Discourses, disciplinary discourses, a Paulian theory of transgression, every discourse of power generates the transgression it fights.

For Ž, he disagrees with all this FOUCAULT. I don’t like RESISTANCE the term. It has all this marginalist connotation, ooh the big Other is there, we can just screw it a bit, irony, displacement, performative fun, repetitiveness.

1:06 Adrian Johnson critique of Badiou where latter just focuses on Event and reactions to event.

There is a whole pre-evental strategy.

1:09 Tahir sq. Occupy wall st.
I don’t share his naive optimism. It’s still open. There are things which I am ready to extend retroative logic here. Something happens and retroactively we decide if it is an Event or not.

When Badiou was explaining FORCING event, for him forcing an event, is to impose the logic of event as immediately logic of Being. THIS IS STALINISM.

What Z doesn’t like, this is the “totalitarian temptation” says Badiou. I think there is something totally wrong in saying Stalin instead of treating communist vision as Evental, this idea, don’t translate the Event immediately into Being this is KANT.

Regulative use of idea, stalinst arrogant mistake, to take something as regulative as CONSTITUTIVE as making up reality. THIS IS KANT. Badiou makes an explicit reference to Kant’s REGULATIVE IDEA.

Here I”m more Hegelian, to explain horrors of Stalin, its’ too simply to claim that Stalin was too faithful to commie idea. No the problem is not Stalin wanted to impose to immediately Communist idea as order of being. NO THE IDEA itself was not correct. What’s the problem with forcing if you have a GOOD idea, fuck it force it if you want. But Stalin had a bad idea.

1:14 Master signifier which introduces a NEW ORDER, but there was no point de capiton. RESTRUCTURES THE WHOLE FIELD
Occupied Mexico City, they had power, they debated and talked for week or two then they said let’s go home.

1:18 HARDT NEGRI
Maybe events function in a different way, authentic political events. TJ Clark, he says this doesn’t mean system is powerful is going to go on, what he is saying is that there will not be a magic moment, where terracotta armies will emerge. Maybe we should change here the field.

subjective destitution 514

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

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

The patient talks, and the analyst’s silence stands for the absent meaning of the patient’s talk, the meaning supposed to be contained in the big Other. The process ends when the patient can himself assume the meaning of his speech.

The analyst as the “small other,” on the contrary, magically transforms the words of the analysand into prosopopoeia, de-subjectivizing his words, depriving them of the quality of being an expression of the consistent subject and his intention-to-mean.

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

Prosopopoeia is defined as “a figure of speech in which an absent or imaginary person is represented as speaking or acting.” The attribution of speech to an entity commonly perceived to be unable to speak (nature, the commodity, truth itself …) is for Lacan the condition of speech as such, not only its secondary complication.

Does not Lacan’s distinction between the “subject of enunciation” and the “subject of enunciated”point in this direction?

When I speak, it is never directly “myself” who speaks ― I have to have recourse to a fiction which is my symbolic identity.

In this sense, all speech is “indirect”: “I love you” has the structure of: “my identity as lover is telling you that it loves you.”

The implication of prosopopoeia is thus a weird split of which Robert Musil was aware: the “man without properties” (der Mann ohne Eigenschaften) has to be supplemented with properties without man (Eigenschaften ohne Mann), without a subject to whom they are attributed.

There are two correlative traps to be avoided here, the rightist and the leftist deviations. The first, of course, is the pseudo-Hegelian notion that this gap stands for a “self-alienation” which I should strive to abolish ideally and then fully assume my speech as directly my own.

Against this version, one should insist that there is no I which can, even ideally, assume its speech “directly,” by-passing the detour of prosopopoeia.

Wearing a mask can thus be a strange thing: sometimes, more often than we tend to believe, there is more truth in the mask than in what we assume to be our “real self.”

Think of the proverbial shy and impotent man who, while playing an interactive video game, adopts the screen identity of a sadistic murderer and irresistible seducer―it is all too simple to say that this identity is just an imaginary supplement, a temporary escape from his real-life impotence.

The point is rather that, since he knows that the video game is “just a game,” he can “reveal his true self,” do things he would never do in real-life interactions―in the guise of a fiction, the truth about himself is articulated.

Therein lies the truth of a charming story like Alexandre Dumas’s The Man in the Iron Mask: what if we invert the topic according to which, in our social interactions, we wear masks to cover our true face?

What if, on the contrary, in order for us to interact in public with our true face, we have to have a mask hidden somewhere, a mask which renders our unbearable excess, what is in us more than ourselves, a mask which we can put on only exceptionally, in those carnivalesque moments when the standard rules of interaction are suspended? In short, what if the true function of the mask is not to be worn, but to be kept hidden?

from repetition to drive p.496 lost object to loss itself as object

What does the drive mean from a philosophical standpoint? In a vague general sense, there is a homology between the shift from Kant to Hegel and the shift from desire to drive: the Kantian universe is that of desire (structured around the lack, the inaccessible Thing-in-itself), of endlessly approaching the goal, which is why, in order to guarantee the meaningfulness of our ethical activity, Kant has to postulate the immortality of the soul (since we cannot reach the goal in our terrestrial life, we must be allowed to go on ad infinitum).

For Hegel, on the contrary, the Thing-in-itself is not inaccessible, the impossible does happen here and now―not, of course, in the naïve pre-critical sense of gaining access to the transcendent order of things, but in the properly dialectical sense of shifting the perspective and conceiving the gap (that separates us from the Thing) as the Real. With regard to satisfaction, this does not mean that, in contrast to desire which is constitutively non-satisfied, the drive achieves satisfaction by way of reaching the object which eludes desire. True, in contrast to desire, the drive is by definition satisfied, but this is because, in it, satisfaction is achieved in the repeated failure to reach the object, in repeatedly circling around the object. Following Jacques-Alain Miller, a distinction has to be introduced here between a lack and a hole: a lack is spatial, designating a void within a space, while a hole is more radical, it designates the point at which this spatial order itself breaks down (as in the “black hole” in physics).

Therein lies the difference between desire and drive: desire is grounded in its constitutive lack, while the drive circulates around a hole, a gap in the order of being. In other words, the circular movement of the drive obeys the weird logic of the curved space in which the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line, but a curve: the drive “knows” that the quickest way to realize its aim is to circulate around its goal-object. At the immediate level of addressing individuals, capitalism of course interpellates them as consumers, as subjects of desire, soliciting in them ever new perverse and excessive desires (for which it offers products to satisfy them); furthermore, it obviously also manipulates the “desire to desire,” celebrating the very desire to desire ever new objects and modes of pleasure. However, even if it already manipulates desire in a way which takes into account the fact that the most elementary desire is the desire to reproduce itself as desire (and not to find satisfaction), at this level, we do not yet reach the drive.

The drive inheres in capitalism at a more fundamental, systemic, level: the drive is that which propels forward the entire capitalist machinery, it is the impersonal compulsion to engage in the endless circular movement of expanded self-reproduction.

We enter the mode of the drive the moment the circulation of money as capital becomes an end in itself, since the expansion of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. (One should bear in mind here Lacan’s well-known distinction between the aim and the goal of drive: while the goal is the object around which the drive circulates, its true aim is the endless continuation of this circulation as such.)

The capitalist drive thus belongs to no particular individual―it is rather that those individuals who act as the direct “agents” of capital (capitalists themselves, top managers) have to display it.

Miller recently proposed a Benjaminian distinction between “constituted anxiety” and “constituent anxiety,” which is crucial with regard to the shift from desire to drive: while the first designates the standard notion of the terrifying and fascinating abyss of anxiety which haunts us, its infernal circle which threatens to draw us in, the second stands for the “pure” confrontation with the : objet petit a as constituted in its very loss.

Miller is right to emphasize here two features: the difference which separates constituted from constituent anxiety concerns the status of the object with regard to fantasy. In a case of constituted anxiety, the object dwells within the confines of a fantasy, while we get only the constituent anxiety when the subject “traverses the fantasy” and confronts the void, the gap, filled up by the fantasmatic object. Clear and convincing as it is, Miller’s formula misses the true paradox or, rather, ambiguity of the objet a, the ambiguity which concerns the question: does the objet a function as the object of desire or of the drive?

That is to say, when Miller defines the objet a as the object which overlaps with its loss, which emerges at the very moment of its loss (so that all its fantasmatic incarnations, from breast to voice to gaze, are metonymic figurations of the void, of nothing), he remains within the horizon of desire―the true object-cause of desire is the void filled in by its fantasmatic incarnations. While, as Lacan emphasizes, the objet a is also the object of the drive, the relationship is here thoroughly different: although in both cases the link between object and loss is crucial, in the case of the objet a as the object-cause of desire, we have an object which is originally lost, which coincides with its own loss, which emerges as lost, while, in the case of the objet a as the object of the drive, the “object” is directly the loss itself―in the shift from desire to drive, we pass from the lost object to loss itself as an object.

That is to say, the weird movement called “drive” is not driven by the “impossible” quest for the lost object; it is a drive to directly enact the “loss”― the gap, cut, distance ― itself. There is thus a double distinction to be drawn here: not only between the objet a in its fantasmatic and post-fantasmatic status, but also, within this post-fantasmatic domain itself, between the lost object-cause of desire and the object-loss of the drive. 497

objet a death drive negativity

But there is a paradox which complicates this critique of Hegel: is not absolute negativity, this central notion of Hegelian thought, precisely a philosophical figure of what Freud called the “death drive”? Insofar as ― following Lacan ― the core of Kant’s thought can be defined as the “critique of pure desire,” is not the passage from Kant to Hegel then precisely the passage from desire to drive? The very concluding lines of Hegel’s Encyclopedia (on the Idea which enjoys repeatedly transversing its circle) point in this direction, suggesting that the answer to the standard critical question ― “Why does the dialectical process always go on? Why does dialectical mediation always continue its work?” ― is precisely the eppur si muove of the pure drive. 495

This structure of negativity also accounts for the quasi-“automatic” character of the dialectical process, for the common reproach concerning its “mechanical” character: belying all the assurances that dialectics is open to the true life of reality, the Hegelian dialectic is like a processing machine which indifferently swallows up and processes all possible contents, from nature to history, from politics to art, delivering them packaged in the same triadic form. 492

What further complicates the scheme are objects and signifiers which somehow overlap with their own lack: for Lacan, the phallus is itself the signifier of castration (this introduces all the paradoxes of the signifier of the lack of signifier, of how the lack of a signifier is itself “remarked” in a signifier of this lack), not to mention l’objet petit a,;the object-cause of desire which is nothing but the embodiment of lack, its place-holder. The relationship between object and lack is here turned around: far from lack being reducible to the lack of an object, the object itself is a spectral positivization of a lack. And one has to extrapolate this mechanism into the very (pre-)ontological foundation of all being: the primordial gesture of creation is not that of an excessive giving, of assertion, but a negative gesture of withdrawal, of subtracting, which alone opens up the space for the creation of positive entities. This is how “there is something rather than nothing”: in order to arrive at something, one has to subtract from nothing its nothing(ness) itself, that is, one has to posit the primordial pre-ontological Abyss “as such,” as nothing, so that, in contrast to (or against the background of) nothing, something can appear.

What precedes Nothing is less than nothing, the pre-ontological multiplicity whose names range from Democritus’s den to Lacan’s objet a,. The space of this pre-ontological multiplicity is not between Nothing and Something (more than nothing but less than something); den is, on the contrary, more than Something but less than Nothing. The relationship between these three basic ontological terms―Nothing, Something, den―thus takes the form of a paradoxical circle, like Escher’s famous drawing of the interconnected waterfalls forming a circular perpetuum mobile: Something is more than Nothing, den is more than Something (the objet a is in excess with regard to the consistency of Something, the surplus-element which sticks out), and Nothing is more than den (which is “less than nothing”). 495

The underlying problem here is to determine which of the Freudian negations is the primordial one―which one opens up the space for all the others. From the Lacanian perspective, the most obvious candidate may appear to be the notorious “symbolic castration,” the loss which opens up and sustains the space of symbolization―recall, in relation to the Name-of-the-Father as the bearer of symbolic castration, how Lacan, as we have seen, plays on the French homophony between le Nom-du-Père and le Non-du-Père. But it seems more productive to follow a more radical path of thinking beyond the father (père) to what is even worse (pire). Again, the most obvious candidate for this “worse” is the (death) drive, a kind of Freudian correlate of what Schelling called the primordial “contraction,” an obstinate repetitive fixation on a contingent object which subtracts the subject from its direct immersion in reality. 495

Verwerfung Verneinung Verleugnung Verdrängung

Hegelian “negation of negation” is far from being the simple sublation of negativity in a new positive order, while the Freudian death drive is not a push towards total disappearance or self-annihilation, but an “undead” persistence attached to a contingent particularity.

The Freudian series of Vers

Verdrängung―repression
Verwerfung―foreclosure
Verleugnung―disavowal
Verneinung―denial

which supplements the Hegelian-dialectical No is thus not just a complication of that No, it points towards a more radical No, the core of negativity which escaped Hegel and which leaves its traces in different post-Hegelian versions of pure repetition. 490

foreclosure I think with Alenka

Book of Job Traversing the fantasy

He insists on the inexplicableness of everything. “Hath the rain a father? … Out of whose womb came the ice?” (38:28). He goes farther, and insists on the positive and palpable unreason of things; “Hast thou sent the rain upon the desert where no man is, and upon the wilderness wherein there is no man?” (38:26) … To startle man, God becomes for an instant a blasphemer; one might almost say that God becomes for an instant an atheist. He unrolls before Job a long panorama of created things, the horse, the eagle, the raven, the wild ass, the peacock, the ostrich, the crocodile. He so describes each of them that it sounds like a monster walking in the sun. The whole is a sort of psalm or rhapsody of the sense of wonder. The maker of all things is astonished at the things he has Himself made. From G.K. Chesterton The Book of Job, London: Cecil Palmer & Hayard, 1916, p. xxii-xxiii.

God is here overwhelmed by the miracle of his own creation―and we should not miss the negative aspect also at work here. In referring to the chaotic wealth of creatures, God is not boastfully asserting the infinite gap which separates Job from him (as in: “Who are you to complain about your little misery? You have no idea what the universe is …”); he is―implicitly, at least―also admitting that Job has nothing to complain about because his case is in no way unique: the whole world is a terrifying unreasonable mess. This “negation of negation” thus deprives Job even of the last solace brought by the hope that, in God’s eyes at least, his suffering has some deeper meaning: what he thought to be his own perplexity reveals itself to be the perplexity of God himself. This brings us again to Lacan’s key motif of the lack in the Other, best rendered by Hegel’s famous remark that the secrets of the Egyptians were secrets also for the Egyptians themselves: the secret of God is also a secret for God himself.

Here is Žižek in 2009 at EGS with an explanation of the Book of Job and Sexuation

So far so good, we may say: by way of transposing what appears as an epistemological limit into the Thing itself, Hegel shows how the problem is its own solution―but in what precise sense? To avoid a fatal misunderstanding: this crucial dialectical move from epistemological obstacle to ontological impossibility in no way implies that all we can do is reconcile ourselves to this impossibility, i.e., accept reality itself as imperfect.

The premise of psychoanalysis is that one can intervene with the symbolic into the Real, because the Real is not external reality-in-itself, but a crack in the symbolic, so one can intervene with an act which re-configures the field and thus transforms its immanent point of impossibility. “Traversing the fantasy” does not mean accepting the misery of our lives―on the contrary, it means that only after we “traverse” the fantasies obfuscating this misery can we effectively change it. 476

Ž and Badiou

This essay is located here However I think this is basically his essay in Hallward’s Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy 2004

Insofar as, for Badiou, the science of love – this fourth, excessive, truth-procedure – is psychoanalysis, one should not be surprised to find that Badiou’s relationship with Lacan is the nodal point of his thought. How, exactly, does Badiou’s philosophy relate to Lacan’s theory? One should begin by unequivocally stating that Badiou is right in rejecting Lacan’s “anti-philosophy.” In fact, when Lacan endlessly varies the motif of how philosophy tries to “fill in the holes,” to present a totalizing view of the universe, to cover up all the gaps, ruptures and inconsistencies (say, in the total self-transparency of self-consciousness), and how, against philosophy, psychoanalysis asserts the constitutive gap/rupture/inconsistency, etc.etc., he simply misses the point of what the most fundamental philosophical gesture is: not to close the gap, but, on the contrary, to OPEN UP a radical gap in the very edifice of the universe, the “ontological difference,” the gap between the empirical and the transcendental, where none of the two levels can be reduced to the other (as we know from Kant, transcendental constitution is a mark of our – human – finitude and has nothing to do with “creating reality”; on the other hand, reality only appears to us within the transcendental horizon, so we cannot generate the emergence of the transcendental horizon from the ontic self-development of reality). 3

This general statement does not allow us to dispense with the work of a more detailed confrontation. It was Bruno Bosteels who provided the hitherto most detailed account of the difference between Badiou’s and the Lacanian approach. What the two approaches share is the focus on the shattering encounter of the Real: on the “symptomal torsion” at which the given symbolic situation breaks down. What, then, happens at this point of the intrusion of utmost negativity?

According to Badiou, the opposition is here the one between impasse and passe.

For Lacan, the ultimate authentic experience (the “traversing of fantasy”) is that of fully confronting the fundamental impasse of the symbolic order; this tragic encounter of the impossible Real is the limit-experience of a human being: one can only sustain it, one cannot force a passage through it. The political implications of this stance are easily discernible: while Lacan enables us to gain an insight into the falsity of the existing State, this insight is already “it,” there is no way to pass through it, every attempt to impose a new order is denounced as illusory: “From the point of the real as absent cause, indeed, any ordered consistency must necessarily appear to be imaginary insofar as it conceals this fundamental lack itself.” Is this not the arch-conservative vision according to which, the ultimate truth of being is the nullity of every Truth, the primordial vortex which threatens to draw us into its abyss? All we can do, after this shattering insight, is to return to the semblance, to the texture of illusions which allow us to temporarily avoid the view of the terrifying abyss, humbly aware of the fragility of this texture… While, for Lacan, Truth is this shattering experience of the Void – a sudden insight into the abyss of Being, “not a process so much as a brief traumatic encounter, or illuminating shock, in the midst of common reality” -, for Badiou, Truth is what comes afterward: the long arduous work of fidelity, of enforcing a new law onto the situation. 5 The choice is thus: “whether a vanishing apparition of the real as absent cause (for Lacan) or a forceful transformation of the real into a consistent truth (for Badiou)”:

is Lacan really unable to think a procedure which gives being to the very lack? Is this not the work of sublimation? Does sublimation not precisely “give being to this very lack,” to the lack as/of the impossible Thing, insofar as sublimation is “an object elevated to the dignity of a Thing” (Lacan’s standard definition of sublimation from his Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis)? This is why Lacan links death drive and creative sublimation: death drive does the negative work of destruction, of suspending the existing order of Law, thereby as it were clearing the table, opening up the space for sublimation which can (re)starts the work of creation. Both Lacan and Badiou thus share the notion of a radical cut/rupture, “event,” encounter of the Real, which opens up the space for the work of sublimation, of creating the new order