Category: sub destitute

subject versus subject-position

Žižek, Slavoj. “Zizek_TheLacanianReal_Television” The Symptom 9 Summer 2008.

Here, however, we must carefully distinguish between this Lacanian notion of the divided subject and the “post-structuralist” notion of  the subject-positions.

In “post-structuralism,” the subject is usually reduced to subjection. He is conceived as an effect of a fundamentally non-subjective process: the subject is always caught in, traversed by, the pre-subjective process (of “writing,” of “desire,”  etc.), and the accent is put on different modes of how individuals “experience,” “live,” their positions as “subjects,” “actors,” “agents” of the historical process. For example, it is only at a certain point in European history that the author of works of art, a painter or a  writer, began to see himself as a creative individual who, in his work, is giving expression to his interior subjective richness. The great master of such analysis was, of course, Foucault: one might say that the main point of his late work was to articulate the different modes of how individuals assume their subject-positions.

But with Lacan, we have quite another notion of the subject. To put it in a simple way: if we abstract, if we subtract all the richness of the different modes of subjectivization, all the fullness of experience present in the way individuals “live” their subject-positions, what remains is an empty place which was filled out with this richness; and this original void, this lack of the symbolic structure is the subject, the subject of the signifier.

The subject is therefore to be strictly opposed to the effect of subjectivation: what the subjectivation masks is not a pre- or trans-subjective process of writing but a lack in the structure, a lack which is the subject.

Our predominant idea of the subject is, in Lacanian terms, that of the “subject of the signified,” the active agent, the bearer of some signification who is trying to express himself in the language. The starting point of Lacan is, of course, that the symbolic representation represents the subject always in a distorted way, that it is always a displacement, a failure, i.e., that the subject cannot find a signifier which would be “his own,” that he is always saying less or too much, in short: something other than what he wanted, intended to say.

The usual conclusion from this would be that the subject is some kind of interior richness of meaning which always exceeds its symbolic articulation: “language cannot express fully what I’m trying to say…”

The Lacanian thesis is its exact opposite: this surplus of signification masks a fundamental lack.

The subject of the signifier is precisely this lack, this impossibility to find a signifier which would be “his own”: the failure of his representation is a positive condition.

The subject tries to articulate himself in a signifying representation, and the representation fails; instead of a richness we have a lack, and this void opened by the failure is the subject of the signfier.

To put it in a paradoxical way: the subject of the signifier is a retroactive effect of the failure of his own representation; that’s why the failure of representation is the only way to represent him adequately.

riha sumic Bartleby

Jelica šumič (2011): “Giorgio Agamben’s Godless Saints.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. 16:3 (2011). 137-147.

Institute of Philosophy
Novi trg 2
1000 Ljubljana
Slovenia
E-mail: jsumr AT zrc-sazu.si

It is the simple fact of one’s own existence as possibility or potentiality.  Agamben The Coming Community 40

Put otherwise, instead of seeking to accomplish some definite task or goal, the subject must be nullified. Indeed, it is only through the destitution of the subject that man’s capacity to be pure potentiality can be restored.

Attributing all transformative force to sovereign power alone, Agamben’s solution, whose ultimate aim is to restore contingency at the heart of necessity, consists in directly valorising the ‘‘not happening’’ or rather the “nothing of happening” in order to consign change to a radical transformation in the subjective status, achieved by means of an operation of disidentification that aims, to use Agamben’s vocabulary, at revoking all vocations.

Agamben can recognise resistance only in terms of potentiality, which is to say, as passivity or inoperativeness, since, for him, ‘‘the potential welcomes non-Being, and this welcoming of non-Being is potentiality, the fundamental passivity’’ (P 182). To the extent that the potentiality that characterises human beings is primarily the potentiality of not doing something, the subject, here, is conceived as a place where the ceaseless operation of declassification, disidentification, is effected – Bartleby being the model or paradigm of such a subjective stance in so far as the latter allows the subject to become nothing other than the pure potentiality to be or not to be.

The characterisations of the subjective stance in terms of inoperativeness can be seen as an attempt to move beyond the deadlocks of the end of time in so far as such a stance involves ‘‘a suspension of time’’ achieved through the only possible action at the disposal of contemporary subjectivity, an action à la Bartleby, an anticipatory figure: to opt for non-being, or more exactly, for the potentiality not to be.

His act (“I would prefer not to”…), in effect, consists in a mere taking place of the place. He turns himself into a place, an empty place, this being the only place which sovereign power cannot recapture.

However, for this place to be preserved, maintained as a place, nothing should take place therein. His act, instead of constituting an event, in its subversive force, prevents all events from happening. Indeed, Agamben’s Bartleby can be seen as a guardian of the non-event. Ultimately, rather than risking the danger of falling prey to a bad infinity, Agamben seeks to think a final event.

Thus, in contrast to Badiou, who thinks events as time-breaking and/or inaugurating ruptures, Agamben’s main preoccupation is with the event of the end. In light of this, one can also understand why the politico-ethical solution advocated by Agamben essentially consists in saving the past: not something particularly worthy of being remembered, but the past in its whatever character, as it were.

The world can only be saved if its being-thus in the smallest details is preserved. What is saved, then, is not some break-inaugurating moment, a moment of “eternity,” as Badiou would have it, but the banality of the being-thus.

It is precisely for this reason that the world can only be “saved” as irreparable, which is to say, ultimately, as absolutely unsaveable. The salvation and therefore the change of the world consist, in the final analysis, only in assuming its radical contingency.

A true change consists simply in a parallax view, a shift of perception: to see the world as including its potentiality not to be. Yet this change, Agamben insists, minimal as it may appear, is nevertheless extremely difficult to accomplish. In some radical sense, humankind is incapable of achieving it; hence, in order to attain this perspective, the Messiah must come or, at least, Bartleby.

If Deleuze, as Agamben observes, is right in calling Bartleby “a new Christ,” this is not because his aim is to ‘‘abolish the old Law and to inaugurate a new mandate.’’ Rather, “if Bartleby is a new Messiah, he comes not, like Jesus, to redeem what was, but to save what was not” (P 270). If there is something Christ-like in Bartleby, if he can, despite everything, be compared to a saviour, this is because he descends to the deepest level of Leibniz’s ‘‘Palace of Destinies,’’ in order to reveal “the world in which nothing is compossible with anything else, where ‘nothing exists rather than something'” (P 270).

In Badiou’s vocabulary, we could say that Bartleby reveals the inconsistency of being-multiple, an impossible point of the real before Being is localised in any being-there whatsoever, before any world whatsoever can take shape.

Whereas this impossible-real, according to Badiou, can only irrupt to the surface of a world through a rare, unpredictable event, Agamben, on his part, presents it as a result of the subjective destitution. 144

It is precisely because it cannot be situated within a linear temporality of past, present, and future that this time of the now is, as such, the location in which action, the hollowing out of the assigned identities, functions, or symbolic mandates take place. This also explains why the messianic subject, Bartleby, is arrested, blocked, as it were, in the “time of the now,” i.e., at the point of the suspension of time, in order to be able to effect his act, that of the de-activation of identifications assigned to him by the socio-symbolic Other.

The result of the messianic act is not a new creation – it is rather a decreation.

From such a perspective, Bartleby can be seen as someone who turns himself into an utterly irreducible remnant, the sole guardian and guarantor of the empty place destined for ‘‘the experience of taking place in whatever singularity’’ (CC 24). But the price to be paid for this operation of exposure of every singularity to its being-thus, its being whatever, is that the subject himself remains blocked, suspended on the sole act he can effect: I would prefer not to, an act which, in so far as it must be repeated again and again, imprisons the subject in a kind of tense-less space created by this very act.

Hence, it could be said that it is only through a true act of decreation, a subtractive act, to be sure, that the mark of contingency in every creature is revealed. If decreation, as Agamben tells us, “takes place where Bartleby stands” (P 271), we must ask: what exactly is this place where “the actual world is led back to its right not to be; [where] all possible worlds are led back to their right to existence”?

Here, Lacan’s famous formula, “The word is the murder of the Thing,” can help us to illuminate this singular position of the subject: if the signifier “creates” by breaking the biunivocal correlation of the word and the thing, if the word does not represent the thing but can only attain a meaning by being articulated to another word, this means that the signifier already de-realises or un-realises the world.

The act of the signifier is precisely an act of decreation, rendering indistinguishable that which exists from that which does not exist. If the signifier itself empties all reference, what could then be Bartleby’s decreation?

Consider Bartleby’s formula: “I would prefer not to.” As Deleuze correctly observed in his reading of “Bartleby,” Bartleby may well use signifiers, yet he does it in a very peculiar way since his formula is destined primarily to cut the link between words and things, between S1 and S2, leaving S1 all alone, in sufferance, in eternal anticipation of the other signifier that would give it a meaning.

But this formula is itself possible because Bartleby occupies the place of an internal exclusion in relation to language. Put otherwise, only for a subject that is outside discourse, discourse, which for Lacan is precisely the social bond, is nothing but a fraud, a make-believe.

Bartleby’s decreation, in short, can only be effected from the autistic position of the subject who refuses to be caught in any social bond whatsoever, who wants nothing, yet prefers not to, who treats signifiers as fragmented bodies, without any reference whatsoever to a symbolic order.

It is here that we can see what is subversive, really revolutionary, in the act of decreation.

Accomplished by the subject for whom there is no distinction between the real and the symbolic, indeed, by a subject for whom the symbolic is, as such, the real, the act of decreation brings into question the Other, the guarantor of the link between words and their references.

If Deleuze is right in claiming that Bartleby, “even in his catatonic or anorexic state” is not the “sick man” but rather the “Medicine-Man, the new Christ or the brother to us all,” this is because only from the position of the inexistence of the Other – this being, according to Deleuze, the position of the schizophrenic – the symbolic can appear, for other speaking beings, those who believe in the Other and live by its laws, and who use the symbolic as a defence against the real, as mere semblance.

From such a perspective, Bartleby’s act can be viewed less as an act that decreates the created (i.e., the symbolised universe) than as one that decreates the decreation, a decreation to the second power, as it were, because such an act of decreation aims at revealing the generalised semblantification at work in the symbolic order itself.

If the schizophrenic position, a position outside discourse, suits well the revolutionary who strives to unbind the existing social bond in order to postulate a different basis for a community, beyond identifications, beyond functions and places, this is because it embodies the liberating potential, as well as its risks.

For Lacan, as is well known, “not only can man’s being not be understood without madness, but it would not be man’s being if it did not bear madness within itself as the limit of his freedom.”

Indeed, it is only from such a position of extimacy in relation to the social link that “the law of our becoming” can be formulated: “The unsoundable decision of being in which human beings understand or fail to recognize their liberation, in the snare of fate that deceives them about a freedom they have not in the least conquered.”

Lacan. “Presentation on Psychical Causality” Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink 145

subject of truth death drive

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

In sum, according to Žižek (and Santner) the Freudian notion of death drive, and more generally Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis, would provide Badiou with an anti-humanist anthropology that, as a necessary supplement to his purely formal theory of the subject, would allow him to explain more precisely what it is about the human animal that makes it capable, in contrast to all other animals, of breaking with its immediate needs and desires in order to dedicate itself to a Cause beyond its own self-interests, in short, to become a subject of truth.

difference between Ž and Badiou on subject

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

What does the freedom that the death drive enables look like?

Žižek (FTKN 206; CWZ 94, 135; PV 202, 210, 231) clearly links death drive with freedom. The death drive as a ‘self-sabotaging structure’ is what enables a break with the determinism of both our natural instincts and our ‘second nature’ in terms of the cultural dialectic of law and desire in service of the pleasure principle. This rupture with the normal run of things made possible by the death drive represents, as Žižek (PV 231) puts it, ‘the minimum of freedom’. So, according to Žižek, freedom in its most elementary form is a rupture, a break with determinism.

“I am determined by causes (be it direct brute natural causes or motivations), and the space of freedom is not a magic gap in this first-level causal chain but my ability retroactively to choose/determine which causes will determine me.” Thus, a free act is not simply what sets off a new causal sequence; rather it is the retroactive act of endorsing which causal sequence will determine me. 207

Žižek explains the retroactive character of this ‘second level reflexive causality’ through a useful opposition between what he terms the ‘ordinary historical notion of time’ and the notion of time displayed in a passage in Henri Bergson’s Two Sources of Morality and Religion.

In the ‘ordinary historical notion of time’, possibilities precede their realization, whereas the Bergsonian notion of time is characterized by the assertion that an act (realization) retrospectively opens up its own possibility.

Rather than thinking of times as succeeding moments all loaded with multiple possibilities just waiting to be realized, according to the Bergsonian notion of time, an event only even becomes possible after it has happened, and so it is not determined by its past, rather it changes the past retrospectively by now appearing as a (realized) possibility. 207

In a brief excurse in his 2008 book In Defense of Lost Causes, Žižek offers two explanations for Badiou’s (mistaken) opposition to the notion of death drive. The first reason for Badiou’s reluctance is, according to Žižek, due to the fact that he relates the death drive to the ‘religious’ motif of finitude.

But, as we have just seen in the above, in Žižek’s view the death drive has nothing to do with the pathos of finitude and obsession with mortality, on the contrary. So, as Žižek (IDLC 395) puts it, “What Badiou misses here is the fact that ‘death drive’ is, paradoxically, the Freudian name for its very opposite, for the way immortality appears within psychoanalysis: for an uncanny excess of life, for an ‘undead’ urge which persists beyond the (biological) cycle of life and death, of generation and corruption.”

The second reason for Badiou’s dismissal of the death drive is, according to Žižek (IDLC 394), an all too crude opposition in Badiou’s (e.g. IT 62; D 91-92) philosophy between the rupture of the event as the introduction of genuine novelty and repetition as an obstacle for the rise of anything truly new.

As demonstrated by Adrian Johnston (2007d, 165) in an article on Žižek’s reading of Badiou, the heart of the matter in Žižek’s critique of Badiou’s hostility to the notion of death drive is not this hostility as such, but a more fundamental matter concerning the very core of Badiou’s theory of the subject, namely the question of how Badiou explains what makes a mere human animal, caught up in a life dictated entirely by its self-interests and desire, capable of suddenly taking the decision to be true to an event and thus becomes a subject of truth. Or, to put it in terms of Badiou’s Pauline formula of ‘not…but’:

What is it that enables the individual under the law to withdraw from (‘not’) the law, from the path of the flesh, in order to affirm (‘but’) the exception of the gracious event and thus becomes a subject, entering the path of the spirit? Žižek touches upon this matter in his extensive discussion in The Ticklish Subject of the differences between Badiou’s philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis. In the section entitled ‘The Lacanian Subject’, Žižek (TTS 159) outlines what he takes to be the core of the matter:

“That is the difference between Lacan and Badiou: Lacan insists on the primacy of the (negative) act over the positive establishment of a ‘new harmony’ […] while for Badiou, the different facets of negativity […] are
reduced to so many versions of ‘betrayal’ of (or infidelity to, or denial of) the positive Truth-event.” It is undoubtedly correct that Badiou, at least prior to Logics of Worlds, seems to describe any negative mode of relationship to an event as a disqualification for being a subject; that is, anyone who denies an event can of course never become a subject, and anyone who betrays his fidelity to an event is no longer a subject.

But, the question is, whether Badiou, as Žižek seems to imply, refuses negativity as such in regard to the subject. Nevertheless, Žižek (TTS 159) is completely right, when he in the succeeding paragraph states that: “This difference between Badiou and Lacan concerns the precise statusof the subject: Badiou’s main point is to avoid identifying the subject with the constitutive void of the structure […].” (BE 432; C 202-203; IT 86) Badiou has himself on more than one occasion declared this as the crucial difference between Lacanian psychoanalysis and his own philosophy.

Žižek (TTS 159-160) elaborates further on this difference between Lacan and Badiou concerning the subject in the following way:

For Badiou […] the subject is consubstantial with a contingent act of Decision; while Lacan introduces the distinction between the subject and the gesture of subjectivization: what Badiou […] describe[s] is the process of subjectivization – the emphatic engagement, the assumption of fidelity to the Event […] while the subject is the negative gesture of breaking out of the constraints of Being that opens up the space of possible subjectivization.

In Lacanese, the subject prior to subjectivization is the pure negativity of the death drive […]

In other words, according to Žižek, Badiou wrongly equates the subject with the process of subjectivization, that is, to put it in Badiou’s terms, with the ‘operation’ of decision, fidelity and forcing by means of which we pass from being a mere human animal to becoming a subject of truth. What Badiou misses here is … the negative moment or dimension that grounds the decision to affirm the event, the dimension that makes it possible to engage in a fidelity to an event in the first place. And this dimension is precisely the self-sabotaging dimension of the death drive. (TTS 160)

death drive desire

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

It is this thrust to go (on) beyond biological life (and death) that Žižek (PV 62) identifies with human immortality: “The paradox of the Freudian “death drive” is therefore that it is Freud’s name for its very opposite, for the way immortality appears within psychoanalysis, for an uncanny excess of life, for an ‘undead’ urge which persists beyond the (biological) cycle of life and death, of generation and corruption.”

Thus, in the most basic sense, what the strange assertion of immortality of man frequently advanced by Žižek in his more recent work refers to is this unnatural urge to live life in an excessive way beyond biological self-preservation, ‘beyond the pleasure principle’, towards something which cannot be reduced to mere biological life. 199

Thus, paradoxically, in Žižek’s view the automatism of the death drive does not designate an additional kind of natural function determining the cause of man, rather it designates a dimension of autonomy in man that since Descartes has been associated with the term ‘subject’. 199

In his discussion in The Ticklish Subject of the transition from nature to culture, Žižek (TTS 37) underlines … the role of the law (culture) is, in service of the ‘pleasure principle’, to pacify, not man’s natural instincts, but “[…] his excessive love for freedom, his natural ‘unruliness’, which goes far beyond obeying animal instinct […]”, or in short, the death drive.

The law does this by prohibiting the object to which the drive is excessively attached, which forces open the closed loop of the drive, replacing the continuous circulation around one object with a successive movement from one substitute object to another.

Another way to put it is that the law’s prohibition of the object introduces a lack which constitutes what Lacan terms the metonymy of desire; that is, the infinite sliding from one substitute object to another, driven by the loss of the original object, which is in fact nothing but is own lack.

Desire, as the endless transgressing thrust toward the ‘Thing’ (Lacan’s term for the lost/forbidden object of desire), is therefore not prior to the law, but, as Paul already knew, instituted by the law itself (HTRL 42; Evans 2010, 99).

The law is thus not aimed at regulating man’s desire, rather desire is a product of the law’s attempt to regulate the drives and thus in a certain sense part of this regulation.

The metonymy of desire is furthermore sustained by the fantasy fostered by the law that the ‘Thing’ is not really impossible (nothing but lack), but merely forbidden, and that it therefore at some point will be possible to obtain it; or in short, the fantasy that desire might actually be satisfied. But, as Žižek (AF 80) underlines: “desire is […] always and by definition unsatisfied, metonymical, shifting from one object to another, since I do not actually desire what I want.

What I actually desire is to sustain desire itself, to postpone the dreaded moment of its satisfaction.”

difference between instincts and death drive

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

In … in the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Work of Sigmund Freud, there has been an unfortunate tendency to translate both ‘drive’ (Trieb) and ‘instinct’ (Instinkt) as instinct (Evans 2010, 46). However, as Žižek (like many others before him) repeatedly insists, we must not ignore this important distinction made by Freud. ‘Instincts’ have to do with biological needs such as the need to eat or the need to propagate. Another key feature is that instincts are relatively fixed and directly related to their objects (Evans 2010, 85). Furthermore, and most importantly, an instinct can be satisfied, for instance by eating or copulating, thus once a need is fulfilled the instinct finds peace (OB 94). In contrast to biological instincts, ‘drives’ are not directly bound to a specific object. As Dylan Evans (2010, 46, cf. OB 93-94) puts it: “The drives differ from biological needs in that they can never be satisfied, and do not aim at an objectbut rather circle perpetually around it.”

Moreover, as Žižek also importantly explains in his discussion of the neurosciences, the possibility condition for the death drive to emerge is the not-All character of reality itself. It is the incompleteness of being/nature that makes possible its own derailing/malfunctioning. As Adrian Johnston (2007d, 8) puts it in his review of the book: “Relatively early in The Parallax View, Žižek appeals […] to a notion of being as shot through with holes and void; […] This perforation of being provides the minimal opening needed for the introduction of the psychoanalytic motif of conflict into ontology itself […].”

Another serious mistake in the reception of the notion of death drive is, according to Žižek, to read it in terms of Freud’s own dualistic framework of Thanatos and Eros as part of a conflict between two different forces.  As he stresses in his discussion of Catherine Malabou’s book Les nouveaux blesséson Freud and neuroscience: “When Malabou varies the motif that, for Freud, Eros always relates to and encompasses its opposite Other, the destructive death drive, she […] conceives this opposition as the conflict of two opposed forces, not, in a more proper sense, as the inherent self-blockade of the drive: ‘death drive’ is not an opposite force with regard to libido, but a constitutive gap which makes drive distinct from instinct […].”  For a reading inline with the one suggested by Žižek see Gilles Deleuze (2004, 18-19) Difference and Repetition.

according to Žižek (SOI 4): “[…] we have to abstract Freud’s biologism: ‘death drive’ is not a biological fact, but a notion indicating that the human psychic apparatus is subordinated to a blind automatism of repetition beyond the pleasure-seeking, self-preservation, accordance between man and his milieu.” 196

The inaccessible object becomes an ‘obsession’, something to which the rat is excessively attached, something to which it returns again and again seeking to obtain it. According to Žižek (OB 94), it is exactly this ‘closed loop’ of perpetual repetition of the same failed gesture which characterises the drive. It is this gesture of ‘stubborn attachment’ that makes man the maladaptive animal;

or, as Žižek (PV 231) underscores in The Parallax View: […] we should bear in mind the basic anti-Darwinian lesson of psychoanalysis repeatedly emphasized by Lacan: man’s radical and fundamental dis-adaptation, mal-adaptation, to his environs. At its most radical, ’being-human’ consists in an ‘uncoupling’ from immersion in one’s environs, in following a certain automatism which ignores the demands of adaptation—this is what the ‘death drive’ ultimately amounts to. […]

‘death drive’ as a self-sabotaging structure represents the minimum of freedom, of a behavior uncoupled from the utilitarian-survivalist attitude.

Although man is thus in a certain sense determined by a malfunction, a failure to adapt to his surroundings, it is, as implied in the last part of the quote, also (though it might seem counter-intuitive) this very mal-adaptive automatism of the death drive that due to its ‘uncoupling’ from the normal run of things, grounds a break with determinism and thus enables a genuine act of freedom 197

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.

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.”

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