sub destitute – Page 2

Zupančič ethics and tragedy pt1

Zupančič, Alenka. Ethics and tragedy in Lacan. (2003) The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté New York: Cambridge UP. 173-190.

Duties that we impose on ourselves and experience as “sacrifices” are, as often as not, a response to the fear of the risks involved in the case if we did not impose these duties. In other words, they are precisely the way we hang on to something that we fear most of all to lose. And it is this fear (or this “possession”) that enslaves us and makes us accept all kinds of sacrifices.

Lacan’s point is that this possession is not some empirical good that we have and don’t want to lose. It is of symbolic nature, which is precisely what makes it so hard to give up.

To renounce this “good” is not so much to renounce something that we have, as it is to renounce something that we don’t have but which is nevertheless holding our universe together.

In other words, “psychoanalysis teaches that in the end it is easier to accept interdiction than to run the risk of castration” (S VII, p. 307).

This formula is, in fact, crucial for the “ethics of psychoanalysis,” which could be defined as that which liberates us by making us accept the risk of castration.

In a certain sense, it puts us in the position where we have nothing to lose. However, while not false, this way of putting things can be misleading, since it suggests some kind of ultimate loss beyond which we no longer can desire or get attached to anything, which is precisely not the point.

The loss in question is rather supposed to liberate the field of the desire – liberate it in the sense that the desire no longer depends upon the interdiction (of the Law) but is led to find and articulate its own law.

The intervention of the law, far from simply “repressing” our desire, helps us deal with the impasse or impossibility involved in the mechanism of the desire as such. To put it simply: the law gives a signifying form to the impossibility involved in the very phenomenon of desire. 178

zizek cogito and real

Žižek’s talk on the second day March 29, 2011 at ICI Berlin.

How to relate symbolic order with Real of trauma?

If you read Freud’s Wolfman, he is not saying that the child was doing ok, the small wolfman and then he sees the coitus, and gets traumatized. No when the small wolfman saw the coitus it was not a trauma, he did nothing, he just inscribed it as neutral trace he didn’t know what to do with it. Only at 5-6 when perpelexed by sesxuality, and then to answer to symbolic deadlock he then retroactively traumatised the experience.

It is not about real as brutally intruding, it is the curvature of symbolic space which precedes its cause. The cause is a retroactive projection.

For Lacan we should take ontology literally: Ontic (beings) and logos (language) and this GAP the gap between being and logos, this gap is antagonistic.

Language is the torture house of being, of the radical Incompatibility between: Body of jouissance and Language

Antigone Heidegger’s reading, he ignores what Lacan calls ‘between 2 deaths’ between symbolic and real deaths. Francois Balmes, he wrote on Lacan, he was excellent, Zein and Seit may sound stupid but accurate: The problem with Heidegger is that his theory works for neurotics but can’t cover psychotics. In neurosis you are still within Dasein, past and future etc. In psychosis you are outside normal functioning of language, future past preset. But in a way you are still within human universe, you are outside but in a way still inside.

Žižek mentions that Heidgegger’s correspondence with Swiss psychiatrist he only comments on those cases where patients probably neurotic, are still within symbolic. He doesn’t touch what Žižek calls the Musselman or what Malabou calls post-traumatic. This leads him to the subject of Antigone. Humans beings no longer Dasein in Heideggarian sense. Why keep for them the term subject? People so totally traumatized their personalities are erased, you are not engaged in reality, you are a living dead. There is no space in Heidegger for living dead.

Human beings which are no longer Dasein, you don’t get engagement, Musselman, why do you keep the term subjects. Early Heidegger dismisses modern subjectivity presupposes, as if I am here, reality is over there, I passively observe it, but no we are thrown into it. In naive terms of people so traumatised their personality was erased, you find this type of subject, you are living dead, you are not engaged. No wonder Heidegger made tasteless remark about producing corpses, but this terrifying position in which you are living dead, alive but no engaged, death camps, Here we come to COGITO. The reason after long flirting with Heidegger and different subversions of ego, logic of fantasme he returns to COGITO.

I think where I am not. I think where I am not. The unconscious is not being outside thought, but thought outside being. Finally he asserts cogito ergo sum, as an empty identity. Unique point where I neither think nor am, brief nobody without substance. This empty point of cogito, is neither onto, nor logical. It is real of jouissance

Heidegger doesn’t have concepts to think this, the terrifying position of Musselman, the living dead in Auschwitz.

There is another dimension in cogito, a dimension is a first step this gap between BEING and LOGOS, language and thinking.

There must be a deadlock in substance to push it towards productivity.

Hegel: Things become what they always were, becomes what it is. Things become what they always already are, always already are is necessity, become is contingency.

Caesar just crossed a shitty small river, by crossing it he retroactively structured his past.

ACT: the true act is beyond the realization of possibilities, the true act creates his own possibilities. T.S. Eliot every really great work of art doesn’t only designate a break, it chages the entire past. The entire past is differently structured. The best example is Kafka, Borges wrote on Kafka had forerunners, Blake, Dostoevsky, but we can only say that after Kafka is here, Kafka retroactively creates his own forerunners. This is what Hegel means by totality or concrete universality. Historicist thinks in continuous evolution, for a dialectical materialist there is no continuum, retroactively re-written, history is continually being rewritten, history is constantly rewriting the totality itself.

The primordial form of negativity, is excessive

Hegel and Madness: Hegel tries to develop out of animals human spirituality emerge. He starts at habits, to simplify, his idea is that first you have traumatic gap: madness, which you try to control through mechanical habits. If you want to think creatively, you can only do it against the background of thinking automatically, you can be free only as far as you obey the rules of language. Madness always remains as a potential threat to our existence, we can be human only against the persisting insisting background of madness.

When you have a totality and something appears as its lowest excremental outpost, that is truth of totality. The standpoint of truth is the outcast. Why is notion of Rabble important?

Hegel’s concrete universality is totally misunderstood, if think parts vis a vis an organic totality. We cannot be members of society as directly abstract individuals, you can only occupy a place in a specific role: worker, mother. No. Hegel’s point is totality becomes concrete when you include abstraction.

Cogito: Marx of German Ideology, cogito is ideological illusion, what exists is concrete living people blah blah. You experience yourself as actually existing abstraction, you relate to all your particular features as contingent. Lacan says personality is the stuff of the “I”.

My truth is the void of the cogito.

You have to be shattered, you have to say hello and encounter abstract negativity: WAR and the necessity of rebellion. From time to time you have to have war.

Sexuality: Hegel is not radical enough measured by his own standards. He is almost a vulgar evolutionist. We humans gradually put on it human symbolic mediated form. Instead of directly raping her, I write poems a sumblimated idealized form.

The CUT as such. Isn’t it clear, here Hegel is not at level of Freud. It is not culture overcome sexuality making it civililized, sexuality is precisely the domain that separates humans from animals.

Rituals try to control not nature but death drive, sexual passion.

Nature — civiliszed sex. you have something in between, even Kant got this: Man is an animal who needs a master, Why? Not to control civilized instincts, but there is a strange excessive, unruliness, that has to be controlled. Cutting its links to organic reproductive goal, and develops other plurality of aims. Sacrifice all utilitarian interests for this.

Something has to repeat itself (without aufhebun). Madness, sexual passion, war are always there as a possibility.

STRUGGLE FOR RECOGNITION: when I see/encounter another consciousness, I am the absolute, and now there is another which is an absolute, 2 are there when there is only place for 1.

There is no sexual relation: women are from Mars blah blah

Sexual difference is not the difference between men and women, but difference of gap, incessant production of what is feminine and masculine, we are constantly are defining what is masculine and feminine but because there is a difference that produces this incessant production

Sex/Gender

sexual difference is niether sex nor gender it is precisely what stands at the of nature and culture

zupančič notes

Present work

Reduces difference to difference between different entitites. What is lost is precisely sexual difference to gender difference what is lost is this negativity

Epistemological Ontological

2:00 New Materialism, Object Oriented Ontology: Treat real as something we need to reach and make objectively present. Real make objectively present. They misread psychoanalysis, because it is about more than simply subjective experience. Never get out of the cage of discursive deconstructed reality, but setting it up this way is false.

3:40 Trying to think about something of epistemological order that is already at work on the ontological level

4:00 KANT

Went back to Kant through this perspective of how to think of it in relationship to this, ontological negativity and ethical imperative is all about, what it strives to articulate, a holder for this very negativity. So definitely the attempt to articulate this, this thing is definitely there …

5:15 Absolute Necessity and Freedom

This is the crucial point:

This kind of opposition which brings us back to materialist discussions, they try to re-read as if there is an Absolute guarantee or principal to guarantee what is out there.

But the Absolute precisely is what is not out there

7:00 Hegel: Absolute is precisely there when there is no higher ground, it cannot simply be thought independently of subjectivity but at the same time it is precisely not subjective, the subject is kind of an answer to this, an entity in this sense correlative to the Absolute.

8:00 Absolute Necessity is precisely the point when there is no higher reason

KANT: DUTY

Everything is already laid out for you, as part of reality and you just have to figure out what is right and the CI can help you.

No, it is rather something that opens up or introduces something that is not already there, in this way it introduces a new element [?]

9:30 One could rethink Kant in this way, a kind of formula that tries to capture this non-realized dimension that is negativity, and is not so much what you must do in order to act …

10:00 This Kant where the CI is a kind of recipe this is not the best Kant, obsessive preoccupation, did you really act truly without pathological.

If one reduces Kant to this one loses an important dimension

I used the term Non-realized, I just used it by way of association, Lacan actually uses this term is Seminar 11. When he speaks about Unconscious pertains to the order of the non-realized … he uses this term he uses it in the same sense, non-realized not as something which is waiting to be realized but precisely as a negative underpinning of everything that happens. It is not something not yet born but will be born once you’re in analysis. Something happens ontologically, before something is being.

Its not that now we’ll make it be, but we need to somehow circumscribe or think the very negativity that is very much involved in structuring the positive order of being, that there is this not really causality but relation with this negativity and what is articulated around it as positive order of being, there is some kind of logic of appearance related to this.

13:00 BADIOU

The biggest problem of Badiou’s ontology is not really how does the Event happen or take place, no the real question is how does this inconsistent being appear … why does it appear as it appears? What makes this inconsistent being appear? Why does it appear so as it appears? At a certain level again you are really faced with the question of the relationship between ontology and epistemology. Appearance is not just subjective constitution of reality, but there is also something in the very reality that kind of through subjectivity dictates this kind of constitution, as if there is something on the ontological level that is involved in the very way being appears.

17:00 Subjective Destitution: Discontinuity in the subject

The subject emerges in this ethical dimension. It is precisely this figure of Synge de Coufontaine it was crucial to think this through …

Badiou’s Subject:

18:15 For Badiou it is simply conceptualized as something subsequent to the Event. Inscribing it into the everyday reality by practicing, and this is a notion of subject that is fundamentally different form that in Lacan. One thing is that first of all for Lacan subjectivity is not simply this post-evental thing, but is also related to reality as such as point of its symptomatic impasses.

First you have in Badiou this banal reality where nothing really interesting, human animal existence, nothing happens and then with Lacan you get a very different picture of reality, what is crucial, this is for Lacan, this banal reality is already traversed by all kinds of antagonisms, by all kinds of impasses.

Social reality is antagonistic and there are rifts and divisions, and subject is not simply a kind of pathological subjective response, but is also a symptomatic point where this antagonism be it social or familial, is actually present as a subjective figure with its own symptoms, the symptoms psychoanalysis works with thinks certain antagonisms that structure the field of being in general

Not simply some kind of subjective pathology, but always as a subject has this objective dimension … an antagonism that is constitutive of the historical moment

Synce de Coufontaien or Antigone, they behave not simply subjectively, embody a certain kind of significant impasse or antagonism that structures,

So there is a subjectivity, if you take any hysterical subject that Freud started to work with, he doesn’t simply take this, and Lacan is explicit that this is the best in Freud, as some kind of personal problem that these woman have, but as a symptomatic subjective figure, something at stake in the reality of their existence.

23:00 There is this notion of subject that can’t be reduced to the figure of human animals because what it carries is this link to this negativity or madness, is there or suppressed for things to function

It is obvious for Lacan, when you speak of everyday reality and its problems: internal antagonisms, struggles etc, we can’t think of this without the notion of subject in the stronger sense of the word, it is not just subjective response to injustice, but the way this injustice exists for the reality within which it appears.

24:30 For Lacan one could say that there is a certain dimension of the subject that is similar to Badiou’s there are things that happen endure this shift, this transformation, there is the subject there before, it is not that this subject is the same as after, Event Rupture appears, there is this idea that yes, Subjective Destitution is induced by some kind of event, and it is out of this, that some kind of dimension of something which was simply not part of the configuration before, if you go back to our previous discussion, it was not simply a choice, there is another choice that becomes possible that was not there before.

28:25 Something happens and then doesn’t change things so much … Occupy Wall St. but it would not move to next stage, where this could be articulated …

31:00 Gesture of NO!

Badiou/Deleuze … subject needs to be related to something affirmative … either a formation of the event … negativity is bad. NO but then what? The answer is the negativity we are talking about and striving to articulate… is a negativity which as such is the underpinning of something it is not as if first we get rid of something… it is through this radical negativity that something appears. It is not a choice either you are negative you say no, or you are affirmative you say yes. This is a bad way of putting it. The drive is not simply negative or simply positive.

Death Drive it is not simply negative or positive it can only appear or take place through this radical negativity, one can’t separate the two

Radical Negativity: When one speaks about this, they take it as if you start with a subject and then you have a whole movement to destitute it and then you’re left with what?

33:00 Destitution of subject PRECEDES subjectivity. You don’t start with subject and let us dismantle the subject. It is not this, whatever subjectivity is there is there on behalf of the destitution. We are persons and then we have to destitute ourselves. The notion of the subject is related to this radical negativity but it isn’t as if we have to destitute the subject

It is a SURPLUS that came out of this negativity. It is precisely the very point through which some newness emerges through this destitution

That thing that emerged as a new possibility as a new something through this destitution

Political reproach one gets this criticism ok but what do we do with this? But it’s not supposed to be a recipe.

35:00 Destitution of the subject is not a recipe, it’s not ok let’s now destitute the subject. It is always aprés coup it’s always afterwards when you see the trace of the subject you follow it, because you can be sure that something already happened there

Otherwise people get image of a kind of notion of the political level worshipping of the ultimate sacrifice that one can make of oneself. The temporality of it is twisted, one should precisely not take this as a kind of recipe or prescription but a picturing of what happens when something happens.

37:00 This whole questions of ethics and politics, Slavoj wrote about it, this whole talk about the ethics, pushed from the discussion the concept of politics.

38:00 Tolerating the Other, being open to otherness, Levinasian … the whole discussion, responsibility to the Other

I agree with Badiou and Slavoj, this is not ethics.

39:00 The Neighbour Kicking the cat

Slavoj’s reading of Hegel is not intersubjective dialectic, recognition

Precisely this is not about recognition, this is about getting to a point of something in the other that one can’t recognize, identify with and this is the point which transforms the very relationship I can have with the Other

The dimension which is more real, it precisely breaks out of this imaginary game of recognition.

42:00 Hegel is aware of this, he uses other terms and concepts, there is precisely something that slips away in recognition, or produced as a surplus. So this recognition reading is Kojeve’s reading which unfortunately influenced Lacan’s reading to some extent.

43:00 Agota Kristoff: This sense Levinas caused damage, it is a way of avoiding the Real, sort of say. [Alenka much prefers Butler in her Gender Trouble phase.]

45:00 An ethics that cannot simply be separated from the political you cannot have one or the other. Take Antigone it is a political issue that is at stake there, not just issues with her brother, but connected to how the political landscape is structured.

Badiou’s quarrel, is situated on this level, recognized ethical discourse is way of avoiding to think ethical on more political terms

zupančič 7 subjectivation without subject

Zupančič, Alenka. The Ethics of the Real. New York: Verso. 2000.

‘Act so that the maxim of your will can always hold at the same time as the principle giving universal law’ — what is the paradox implicit in this formulation of the categorical imperative?

The paradox is that, despite its ‘categorical’ character, it somehow leaves everything wide open .

For how am I to decide if (the maxim of) my action can hold as a principle providing a universal law, if I do not accept the presupposition that I am originally guided by some notion of the good (i.e. some notion of what is universally acceptable)?

In other words, there is no a priori criterion of universality. It is true that Kant was convinced that he had found this criterion in the principle of non-contradiction. However, there is an impressive body of commentary demonstrating the weakness of this criterion. 92

Kant invents two stories which are supposed, first, to ‘prove’ the existence of the moral law and, secondly, to demonstrate that the subject cannot act contrary to his pathological interests for any reason other than that of the moral law. The first story concerns a man who is placed in the situation of being executed on his way out of the bedroom as a condition of spending the night with the woman he desires . The other story, which we have already discussed, concerns a man who is put in the position of either bearing false witness against someone who, as a result, will lose his life, or being put to death himself if he does not do so.

As a comment on the first alternative , Kant simply affirms: ‘We do not have to guess very long what his [the man’s in question] answer would be.’

As for the second story, Kant claims that it is at least possible to imagine that a man would rather die than tell a lie and send another man to his death.

It follows from these two comments that there is no ‘force’ apart from the moral law that could make us act against our well-being and our ‘pathological interests’. Lacan raises the objection that such a ‘force’ — namely, jouissance (as distinct from pleasure ) – does exist:

The striking significance of the first example resides in the fact that the night spen t with the lady is paradoxically presented to us as a pleasure that is weighed against a punishment to be undergone … but one only has to make a conceptual shift and move the night spent with the lady from the category of pleasure to that of jouissance, given that jouissance implies precisely the acceptance of death … for the example to be ruined. (Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. 1992, 189). 99

For Kant, it is unimaginable that someone would want his own destruction — this would be diabolical — Lacan’s answer is not that this is nevertheless imaginable, and that even such extreme cases exist, but that there is nothing extreme in it at all: on a certain level every subject, average as he may be, wants his destruction, whether he wants it or not. 100

Kant’s point can be formulated more generally: there is no (ethical) act without a subject who is equal to this act. This, however, implies the effacement of the distinction between the level of the enunciation and the level of the statement: the subject of the statement has to coincide with the subject of the enunciation – or, more precisely, the subject of enunciation has to be entirely reducible to the subject of the statement. 102

The am lying is a signifier which forms a part, in the Other, of the treasury of vocabulary. This ‘vocabulary’ is something that I can use as a tool, or something that can use me as a ‘talking machine’. As subject, I emerge on the other level, the level of enunciation, and this level is irreducible.

Here we come, once again, to the point which explains why the subject cannot ‘hide behind’ the Law, presenting himself as its mere instrument: what is suspended by such a gesture is precisely the level of the enunciation.

That ‘there is no deposit without a depositor who is equal to his task’, or ‘there is no (ethical) act without the subject who is equal to his act’, implies that we set as the criterion or the condition of the ‘realization’ of an act the abolition of the difference between the statement and the enunciation. 102

But the crucial question is why the abolition of this difference should be the criterion or the necessary condition of an act.

Why claim that the accomplishment of an act presupposes the abolition of this split?

It is possible to situate the act in another, inverse perspective: it is precisely the act, the (‘successful’) act, which fully discloses this split, makes it present. From this perspective, the definition of a successful act would be that it is structured exactly like the paradox of the liar: this structure is the same as the one evoked by the liar who says ‘I am lying’, who utters ‘ the impossible’ and thus fully displays the split between the level of the statement and the level of the enunciation, between the shifter ‘I’ and the signifier ‘am lying’.

To claim, as we are claiming here, that there is no subject or ‘hero’ of the act means that at the level of ‘am lying’, the subject is always pathological (in the Kantian sense of the word), determined by the Other, by the signifiers which precede him. At this level, the subject is reducible or ‘dispensable’.

But this is not all there is to it. Whereas the ‘subject’ of the statement is determined in advance (he can only use the given signifiers), the (shifter) I is determined retroactively: it ‘becomes a signification, engendered at the level of the statement, of what it produces at the level of the enunciation‘.

It is at this level that we must situate the ethical subject: at the level of something which becomes what ‘it is’ only in the act (here a ‘speech act) engendered, so to speak, by another subject. 103

However, the fact that the act ‘reveals’ the difference between the level of the statement and the level of the enunciation does not imply that the subject of the act is a divided subject. On the contrary, we know very well that when we are really dealing with an act, the subject ‘is all there in his act’.

What reveals the distinction between the statement and the enunciation, between the subject who says or does something and the subjective figure which arises from it, is precisely the abolition of the division of the subject. Of course, this does not mean that the subject of an act is a ‘full ‘ subject who knows exactly what he wants but, rather, that the subject ‘is realized’, ‘objectified‘ in this act: the subject passes over to the side of the object. The ethical subject is not a subject who wants this object but, rather, this object itself. In an act, there is no ‘divided subject’: there is the ‘it’ (the Lacanian ça) and the subjective figure that arises from it.

We may thus conclude that the act in the proper sense of the word follows the logic of what Lacan calls a ‘headless subjectivation’ or a ‘subjectivation without subject’.

zupančič 4

Zupančič, Alenka. Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan. New York: Verso, 2000.

The advent of the subject of practical reason coincides with a moment that might be called a moment of ‘forced choice’.

Paradoxical as this may seem, the forced choice at issue here is none other than the choice of freedom, the freedom that first appears to the subject in the guise of psychological freedom.

It is essential to the constitution of the subject that she cannot but believe herself free and autonomous.

The subject is presumed to be free , yet she cannot disclose this freedom in any positive way, cannot point to it by saying:’This act of mine was free; this precise moment I was acting freely.’

Instead, the more she tries to specify the precise moment at which freedom is real, the more it eludes her, ceding its place to (causal) determination, to the pathological motives which were perhaps hidden from view at first glance.

The left side of the schema presents the ‘fact of the subject’, the fact that the subject is, so to speak, free by definition, that the subject cannot but conceive of herself as free.

The right side illustrates the choice the ethical subject faces, in which she must choose herself either as pathological or as divided.

The paradox, however, is that the subject cannot choose herself as pathological (S) without ceasing to be a subject as a result. The choice of the S is an excluded, impossible choice.

🙂 Pathological means here to be fully determined by internal causes, hate/love/jealousy/fear/anger etc, and to be determined strictly by pathological motives would preclude freedom.

The other choice would simply be that of choosing oneself as subject, as the ‘pure form’ of the subject, which is the form of the division as such.

We might also say that in this case the subject chooses herself as subject and not as (psychological) ‘ego’, the latter being understood — in all its profundity and authenticity — as the locus of the pathological. 32

subject failed articulation

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

Download Revue internationale de philosophie here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lack in the Other

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

rothenberg acephalous subject

Something must be renounced in order for a subject to emerge.

The “acephalous subject” does not function in this intentionalized mode of traditional political discourse: “the subject who acts is no longer a person but, precisely, an object.” That is, in his view, we must give up, once and for all, our sense of the political – the political act, the political domain, and the political collectivity – as based on promise or calculation.

To clarify his point that, in the political Act, the subject assumes the position of the object, Žižek rehearses the relationship of subject to object in Lacanian theory. Psychoanalysis, as we have seen, posits that something must be renounced (or formally negated) in order for a subject to emerge. 175

The objet a comes to stand in for this lost part: “drive is fundamentally the insistence of an undead ‘organ without a body,’ standing, like Lacan’s lamella, for that which the subject had to lose in order to subjectivize itself in the symbolic space of the sexual difference” (OWB 174).

It is in this way that it makes sense to think of objet a as the “correlate” of the subject, even if the object is impossible, i.e., an absence that nonetheless functions as a strange attractor for the drive. In his most straightforward statement about the acephalous subject, Žižek draws explicitly on the metaphor of the Mobius band to elucidate how the subject and the object should be thought together:

[P]ersons and things are part of the same reality, whereas the object is the impossible equivalent of the subject itself. We arrive at the object when we pursue the side of the subject (of its signifying representation) on the Moebius track to the end and find ourselves on the other side of the same place from where we started. One should thus reject the topic of the personality, a soul-body unity, as the organic Whole dismembered in the process of reification-alienation: the subject emerges out of the person as the product of the violent reduction of the person’s body to a partial object. (OWB 175)

The acephalous subject, or subject of the drives, has a Mobius topology. In Žižek’s thinking, the excessive dimension of the Mobius subject comes into play during the political act as the means by which the subject itself encounters the objective dimension. The objet a, the excessive part of the subject, is “the subject’s stand-in within the order of objectivity” (OWB 175).

When the subject identifies directly with this excess, it becomes genuinely revolutionary because it gains access to the register of the Real, the object. How? According to Žižek, the identification with the object de-personalizes the subject, instituting a gap between its subjectivated individuation (all the little preferences and properties that make up our social identities) and its subject-ness, the “pure” subject that emerges as a function of the drive. This shift in perspective, whereby the subject becomes the object (that it always was) and vice versa, is what Žižek calls the parallax view.

It may be helpful to return to our original formulation of the Mobius subject to understand why Žižek places such importance on this depersonalization.

If we think of the subject after subjectification as a set, A = {x, y, z, Ø}, we could draw the analogy that the elements of the set (x, y, z as the things-turned-objects by the formal negation) are the subject’s “properties” in its symbolic identity: piano-player, husband, chocolate lover.

The excessive dimension of this set derives from the fact that the external brackets marking the set correspond precisely to the internal element of the empty set.

Let us recall that setness (the externality of the brackets) correlates to the place of the subject’s inscription in the Symbolic, prior to any specific content, and the empty set (Ø) correlates to the impossible objet a, which counts as an element of the set but does not have any specific properties. The “pure” subject of Žižek’s remarks is reduced to these formal elements, what we have called the subject* considered by way of the operation of “subtraction” of the ontic properties from the presentation of the subject.

As long as we are fixated – as happens in multiculturalism and identity politics – on the symbolic identifiers of our personal identities, we obscure the link between the subject and the drive as the true engine of the subject’s existence. 176

For when we focus on the symbolic dimension of identity, we are conceiving of the subject as a subject of desire, perpetually seeking to overcome its lack by finding its object of desire. Any political action founded on this premise dooms the actors to a futile search for a Utopia which, of necessity, must always be deferred. footnote 18 [176]

In highlighting the difference between the subject of desire and the subject of the drive, Žižek sets the stage for a theory of collective action that does not depend upon the symbolic properties of the individuals involved, including their “common humanity”:

The collective that emerges at the level of such a fighting subjectivity is to be thoroughly opposed to the intersubjective topic of “how to reach the other,” how to maintain the openness and respect toward Otherness. There are, grosso modo, three ways to reach out to the other that fit the triad of ISR: imaginary (“human touch”), symbolic (“politeness,” “good manners”), real (shared obscenity).

Each of the three has its own dangers… It is easy to discern the falsity of such a gesture of empathy [like that of an Israeli soldier towards a Palestinian he is evicting]: the notion [is false] that, in spite of political differences, we are all human beings with the same loves and worries, neutralizes the impact of what the soldier is effectively doing at that moment. (OWB 177)

Other modes, such as shared obscenity, “can function as a fake solidarity masking underlying power relations” (OWB 178). What then does the acephalous subject offer to counter these deficient approaches to solidarity?

In Žižek’s view, the political meaning of one’s acts has nothing to do with one’s “sincerity or hypocrisy” – that is, one’s “subjective self-experience” is irrelevant to the objective truth of one’s actions. Rather, the subject of the drive institutes a gap between itself and its symbolic-subjective dimension. The subject’s identification with objet a re-casts it, not as a set of symbolic properties, but as connected directly to the order of objectivity.

Introducing a distance towards one’s own symbolic identity puts one in a position to act in an “objective-ethical” way (OWB 182).

Presumably, it is this link to the objective that makes solidarity possible. The manifold differences or symbolic properties of individuals move to the background, while each subject, as identified with the object of the drive, finds its way to the objective order, the only terrain on which meaningful change can occur.

Solidarity, then, emerges not from intersubjective relations but rather from the relations of subjects purified of their symbolic identities, subjects who meet on the ground of objectivity, as objects. 177

There is a tentative feel about this argument, as Žižek shifts from considerations of solidarity to ethics to a more general discussion of whether it is possible to distinguish fascism as a form of group solidarity from other political forms that are ranged against it in contemporary theory, and finally to his judgment that the multitude in Hardt and Negri involves the ultimate type of depoliticization.

So, the underlying difficulty of articulating the grounds on which subjects – subjects that are avowedly excessive – can come together as solidary political groups in a way that avoids fascism is never directly addressed. 177

mcgowan death drive violence politics

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. 2013.

The conceptual breakthrough involved with the abandonment of the seduction theory paved the way for the discovery of the death drive because it permitted Freud to consider violence not as primarily coming from someone else but as what the subject itself fantasizes about. After this development in his thought, it would make theoretical sense to conceive of an original violence that the subject does to itself as the genesis of subjectivity and the death drive, which is the move that Freud makes in 1920.

The seduction theory would have prevented Freud from recognizing that subjectivity has its origin in violence that the subject does to itself – the violent sacrifice of the privileged object that begins desire. The death drive, the structuring principle of the psyche, engages the subject in a perpetual repetition of this violence.

Both nostalgia and paranoia try to flee the subject’s original self-inflicted violence. But even the attempt to avoid violence leads back to it. Nostalgia and paranoia lead almost inevitably to violence directed toward the other who appears as a barrier to the subject’s enjoyment

[…] Violence against the other attempts to replace violence against the self; this type of violence attempts to repeat the subject’s initial moment of loss on the cheap, so to speak. It seeks repetition while sparing the subject itself the suffering implicit in this repetition.

Aggressive violence toward the other tries to separate the enjoyment of repetition (which it reserves for the subject) with the suffering of it (which it consigns to the other).

Understood in terms of the death drive, one can readily see the appeal of aggressive violence. It provides a seemingly elegant solution to the troubling link between enjoyment and suffering. 49-50

[…] Aggressive violence is nothing but a detour or prolongation of the path toward self-inflicted violence. In this sense, the other’s violent act of vengeance in response to the subject’s own violence is precisely what the subject unconsciously hopes to trigger when committing a violent act in the first place.

The other’s violent response allows us to experience the loss that we have hitherto avoided. Violence directed to the other does not satisfy the subject in the way that violence directed toward the self does. In order to accomplish the repetition that the death drive necessitates, external violence must finally lead back to violence directed at the self.

The power of repetition in the psyche leaves the subject no possibility for escaping self-inflicted violence. This is what psychoanalytic thought allows us to recognize and to bring to bear on our political activity.

The only question concerns the form that this violence will take. Will the subject use the other as a vehicle for inflicting violence on itself, or will it perform this violence directly on itself?

By recognizing the power of unconscious repetition, we can grasp the intractability of the problem of violence, but we can also see a way out of aggressive violence that doesn’t involve utopian speculation.

Rather than trying to avoid violence, we can restore to it its proper object – the self. The more the subject engages in a violent assault on its own forms of symbolic identity, its own ego, its own deepest convictions, the more the subject finds an enjoyable alternative to the satisfactions of aggression. 51

critchley and cornel west

Critchley on deconstitution of subjectivity Love is not some kind of tepid contract, nor is it an act of spiritual daring eviscerates excoriate the old self so that a new seslf can come into being, hue and hack at old self large enough for love to enter, an enrichment through impoverishment
How to Live has become the question How to Love.
On Violence

Kant phenomenal noumenal split subject Johnston

Johnston, Adrian. Žižek‘s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity. Northwestern University Press, 2008.

That is to say, if psychoanalysis is indeed correct to maintain that the subject ontogenetically emerges through and comes to constitute itself by a sort of radical, primordial gesture of negating rejection (whether as Freud’s primal/primary repression as original Verwerfung or Verneinung, Lacan’s “cut” of symbolic castration, or Julia Kristeva’s abjection) , then feelings of revulsion toward the corporeal substratum of the mortal body essentially are indicative of the presence of a form of subjectivity resistant to being collapsed back into its material foundation. (Johnston ŽO 25)

The subject is inherently barred from any form of phenomenal self-acquaintance in which it would know itself as finite in the ontological-material sense. The nothingness fled from, the void that Kant allegedly labors so hard to avoid, is nothing other than the very absence of the subject itself, the negation of the insurmountable “transcendental illusion” of its apparent immortality. (31)

The split within the structure of the subject that Zizek credits Kant with having discovered is that between the phenomenal and noumenal dimensions of subjectivity, namely, between the subject as it appears to itself in an experiential fashion (i.e., through conceptual and spatio-temporal mediation) and the subject as it exists/subsists “in itself.”

The subject an sich that makes experience possible cannot itself fall, as a discrete experiential, representational element, within the frame of the field it opens up and sustains (a point already grasped by Descartes in his second meditation). Hence, Kant famously speaks of “this lor he or it (the thing) that thinks”. The noumenal subject is just as much of a permanently shrouded mystery as things-in-themselves. The entire thrust of the first Critique (particularly the “Dialectic of Pure Reason”) is to establish the epistemological grounds for forbidding any and every philosophical reference to the noumenal realm beyond the familiar limits of possible experience. (Johnston ŽO 30)

According to Zizek’s heterodox juxtaposition of Kant and Lacan, the psychoanalytic notion of fantasy has direct relevance to this splitting of subjectivity between, on the one hand, the noumenal subject of (unconscious) enunciation and, on the other hand, the phenomenal subject of utterances (as determinate signifier-predicates). [ŽO 32]

If… one bears in mind the fact that, according to Lacan, the ego is an object, a substantial “res,” one can easily grasp the ultimate sense of Kant’s transcendental turn: it desubstantializes the subject (which, with Descartes, still remained “res cogitans,” i.e., a substantial “piece of reality”)—and it is this very desubstantialization which opens up the empty space (the “blank surface”) onto which fantasies are projected, where monsters emerge. To put it in Kantian terms: because of the inaccessibility of the Thing in itself, there is always a gaping hole in (constituted, phenomenal) reality, reality is never “all,” its circle is never closed, and this void of the inaccessible Thing is filled out with phantasmagorias through which the trans-phenomenal Thing enters the stage of phenomenal presence—in short, prior to the Kantian turn, there can be no black hulk at the background of the stage. (Zizek Enjoy Your Symptom 1992, 136) [Johnston ŽO 32]

Elsewhere Zizek draws out the consequences of this, maintaining that every mediated identity, all signifier-predicates appended to the original nothingness of subjectivity in its raw negativity, are “supplements” aiming to “fill out this void”:

Lacan’s point here is that an unsurmountable gap forever separates what I am “in the real” from the symbolic mandate that procures my social identity: the primordial ontological fact is the void, the abyss on account of which I am inaccessible to myself in my capacity as a real substance — or, to quote Kant’s unique formulation from his Critique of Pure Reason, on account of which I never get to know what I am as “I or he or it (the thing) which thinks [Ich, oder Er, oder Es (das Ding), welches denkt]”

Every symbolic identity I acquire is ultimately nothing but a supplementary feature whose function is to fill out this void. This pure void of subjectivity, this empty form of “transcendental apperception,” has to be distinguished from the Cartesian Cogito which remains a res cogitans, a little piece of substantial reality miraculously saved from the destructive force of universal doubt: it was only with Kant that the distinction was made between the empty form of “I think” and the thinking substance, the “thing which thinks.” (Zizek Metastases of Enjoyment 1994, 144) Johnston ŽO 32-33

Thus, the entire range of significations and images proposed by the subject to itself in response to the question of self-identity (“Who or what am I?”) falls under the heading of transcendental illusion. That is to say, these fantasmatic productions striving to seal this crack in reality are semblances. And yet they are the inevitable results of a structurally determined dynamic rooted in subjectivity’s internal division: “The subject is this emergence which, just before, as subject, was nothing, but which, having scarcely appeared, solidifies into a signifier” (SXH99). ŽO 33

subject-as-negativity two intersecting lacks

What if the negativity of Cartesian-Kantian-Hegelian subjectivity (as the monstrous cogito, the horrible void of the Thing, and the terrifying abyss of nocturnal dismemberment) is a symptomatic ideality-as-idealization derived from and conditioned by a contingent yet a priori material foundation (what, in psychoanalysis, would be designated as a violent “reaction-formation”) ?

Is the subject-as-negativity a response to its corporeal Grund (ground), to a primordially chaotic and discordant Real that produces its own negation immanently out of itself? Are Zizek’s otherwise inexplicably odd choices of adjectives here indicative of such a link, of a thinly concealed umbilical cord tethering the (pseudo)immateriality of the modern subject to a dark base rendered obscure through a forceful disavowal/abjection? 22

Lacan furthers this Freudian line of thought through his portrayal of the libido in the myth of the lamella (a myth Zizek cites repeatedly). Sexuality is depicted as a frightening monster-parasite that aggressively grafts itself onto the being of the individual and drives him or her toward death.

In the same seminar in which the lamella is invoked (the eleventh seminar), Lacan also sketches a logic of two intersecting lacks, a Real lack (introduced by the fact of sexual reproduction) and a Symbolic lack (introduced by the subject’s alienation via its mediated status within the defiles of the signifying big Other).

The Real lack is nothing other than the individual’s “loss” of immortality due to its sexual-material nature as a living being subjected to the cycles of generation and corruption, albeit as a loss of something never possessed except in primary narcissism and/or unconscious fantasy.

Symbolic lack serves, in away, as a defensive displacement of this more foundational lack in the Real.

Not only are psychoanalytic psychopathologies painful struggles with both of these lacks, but “it is this double lack that determines the ever-insistent gap between the real and the symbolico-imaginary, and thus the constitution of the subject” (Verhaeghe Collapse of Function of Father 2000, 147).

One possible manifestation of the neurotic rebellion against this fundamental feature of the corporeal condition is a strong feeling of disgust in the face of all things fleshly, of everything whose palpable attraction and tangible yet fleeting beauty smacks of a transience evoking the inexorable inevitability of death (an attitude that Freud comments on in his short 1916 piece “On Transience”). [Johnston ŽO 23]

barred real Being as incomplete internally inconsistent

Johnston, Adrian. Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity. Northwestern University Press, 2008

In Organs Without Bodies, Žižek insists,while discussing Kant, that freedom (in the form of autonomous subjectivity) is possible only if being, construed as whatever serves as an ultimate grounding ontological register, is inherently incomplete and internally inconsistent. … “Schelling was first and foremost a philosopher of freedom” [Indivisible Remainder, 15]

He goes on bluntly to assert that “either subjectivity is an illusion or reality is in itself (not only epistemologically) not-All (Organs Without Bodies 2004,115).

If being is entirely at one with itself, if material nature is a perfectly functioning machine in which each and every cog and component is organically coordinated into the single, massive whole of an uninterrupted “One-All,” then no space remains, no clearing is held open, for the emergence of something capable of (at least from time to time) transcending or breaking with this stifling ontological closure.

Being must be originally and primordially unbalanced in order for the subject as a (trans-)ontological excess to become operative.

As Schelling himself succinctly states, “Were the first nature in harmony with itself, it would remain so. It would be constantly One and would never become Two” . Those points and moments where being becomes dysfunctional (i.e.,when,to put it loosely, “the run of things” breaks down) signal the possibility for the genesis of subjectivity as that which cannot be reduced to a mere circuit in the machinery of a base material substratum in which everything is exhaustively integrated with everything else.

Zizek makes the move of identifying the Schellingian-Lacanian subject with this inconsistency internal to the ontological edifice itself: “Subject designates the ‘imperfection’ of Substance, the inherent gap, self deferral, distance-from-itself, which forever prevents Substance from fully realizing itself, from becoming’ fully itself” (The Abyss of Freedom, 7)