the real – Page 3

zupancic the real

Zupančič Realism in Psychoanalysis
ICI Conference Berlin 2011 Lecture on the second day, 29 March 2011

The absolutely crucial point of this ‘psychoanalytic realism’ is that the real is not a substance or being, but precisely its limit.

That is to say, the real is that which traditional ontology had to cut off in order to be able to speak of ‘being qua being’.

We only arrive at being qua being by subtracting something from it – and this something is precisely the ‘hole’, that which it lacks in order to be fully constituted as being;

the zone of the real is the interval within being itself, on account of which no being is ‘being qua being’, but can only be by being something else than it is.

One can ask, of course, how can it matter if one cuts off something that is not there to begin with?

It matters very much not only because it becomes something when it is cut off, but also since the something it becomes is the very object of psychoanalysis.

zupancic materialism and real

Zupančič Realism in Psychoanalysis

Conference ICI Berlin
One Divides Into Two: Dialectics, Negativity & Clinamen
Slavoj Žižek, Alenka Zupančič, and Mladen Dolar
March 2011

One of the great merits of Meillassoux’s book is that it has (re)opened, not so much the question of the relationship between philosophy and science, as the question of whether they are speaking about the same world.

I emphasize … another dimension of his [Meillassoux’s] gesture, a dimension enthusiastically embraced by our Zeitgeist, even though it has little philosophical (or scientific) value, and is based on free associations related to some more or less obscure feelings of the present Unbehagen in der Kultur. Let us call it its psychological dimension, which can be summed up by the following story:

After Descartes we have lost the great outdoors, the absolute outside, the Real, and have become prisoners of our own subjective or discursive cage. The only outside we are dealing with is the outside posited or constituted by ourselves or different discursive practices. And there is a growing discomfort, claustrophobia in this imprisonment, this constant obsession with ourselves, this impossibility to ever get out of the external inside that we have thus constructed.

There is also a political discomfort that is put into play here, that feeling of frustrating impotence, of the impossibility of really changing anything, of soaking in small and big disappointments of recent and not so recent history. Hence a certain additional redemptive charm of a project that promises again to break out into the great Outside, to reinstitute the Real in its absolute dimension, and to ontologically ground the possibility of radical change.

One should insist, however, that the crucial aspect of Meillassoux lies entirely elsewhere than in this story which has found in him (perhaps not all together without his complicity) the support of a certain fantasy, namely and precisely the fantasy of the ‘great Outside’ which will save us – from what, finally?…

it is a fantasy in the strict psychoanalytic sense: a screen that covers up the fact that the discursive reality is itself leaking, contradictory, and entangled with the Real as its irreducible other side. That is to say: the great Outside is the fantasy that covers up the Real that is already right here.

In Lacan we find a whole series of such, very strong statements, for example: ‘Energy is not a substance…, it’s a numerical constant that a physicist has to find in his calculations, so as to be able to work’.

The fact that science speaks about this or that law of nature and about the universe does not mean that it preserves the perspective of the great Outside (as not discursively constituted in any way), rather the opposite is the case. Modern science starts when it produces its object.

This is not to be understood in the Kantian sense of the transcendental constitution of phenomena, but in a slightly different, and stronger sense.

Modern science literally creates a new real(ity); it is not that the object of science is ‘mediated’ by its formulas, rather, it is indistinguishable from them; it does not exist outside them, yet it is real.

It has real consequences or consequences in the real. More precisely: the new real that emerges with the Galilean scientific revolution (the complete mathematisation of science) is a real in which – and this is decisive – (the scientific) discourse has consequences.

Such as, for example, landing on the moon. For, the fact that this discourse has consequences in the real does not hold for nature in the broad and lax sense of the word, it only holds for nature as physics or for physical nature.

At stake is a key dimension of a possible definition of materialism, which one could formulate as follows: materialism is not guaranteed by any matter. It is not the reference to matter as the ultimate substance from which all emerges (and which, in this conceptual perspective, is often highly spiritualized), that leads to true materialism.

The true materialism, which – as Lacan puts is with a stunning directness in another significant passage – can only be a dialectical materialism, is not grounded in the primacy of matter nor in matter as first principle, but in the notion of conflict, of split, and of the ‘parallax of the real’ produced in it.

In other words, the fundamental axiom of materialism is not ‘matter is all’ or ‘matter is primary’, but relates rather to the primacy of a cut. And, of course, this is not without consequences for the kind of realism that pertains to this materialism.

dolar being and void pt2

Mladen Dolar (2013) “The Atom and the Void – from Democritus to Lacan.” Filozofski vestnik Volume XXXIV, Number 2, 11–26.

Hasn’t one avoided the void by espousing it? The void can be seen as the way to make non-being manageable, to turn it into something countable, the very condition of count.

But ‘is’ there non-being which cannot be quite accounted for by the binary couple of the one and the void?

dolar 1 into 2 pt1

Dolar, Mladen “One Divides into Two.” e-flux journal #33 March 2012.

This was an old Maoist slogan from the 1960s. Despite its air of universal truth it has become dated, and I fully realize the danger of appearing dated myself by starting in this way. Nowadays, one can recite this slogan in front of a class full of students and none will have ever heard it or have any inkling as to its bearing or its author — it’s almost like speaking Chinese.

However much we count, however many ones we add to the first one, we cannot count to the two of the Other. The progression of counting extends the initial one into a homogeneous and uniform process, while the Other presents a dimension that would be precisely “other” in relation to this uniformity.

In a nutshell, the otherness of the Other, if it can be conceived, is a dimension that cannot be accounted for in terms of One. If the Other exists, then we have some hope of escaping from the circle, or the ban, of One.

The dimension of the Other might present a two that would really make a difference, not merely a difference between one and another, that is, ultimately, between the one and itself, the count based on the internal splitting of one, but rather another difference altogether, beyond the delightful oxymoronic phrase “same difference.”

One can immediately appreciate the high philosophical stakes here. A large part of modern philosophy, if not all of it, has aligned under the banner of the Other, in one way or another, whatever particular names have been used to designate it, and if philosophy has thus espoused the slogan of the Other it has done so in order to establish a dimension that would beable to break the spell of One, in particular its complicity with totality, with forming a whole.

There is a hidden propensity of One to form a whole, to encompass multiplicity and heterogeneity within a single first principle. That program was pronounced at the dawn of philosophy, spelled out by Parmenides in three simple words, the slogan hen kai pan, one and all

So if the Other exists, if it can be conceived in terms other than the terms of one, it would permit us to get out of this ban and this circle.

Indeed, the task of modern philosophy, if I may take the liberty of using this grossly simplified and massive language, was to think the Other that would not be complicit in collusion with the One of hen kai pan, and thus, ultimately, the task to think the two, to conceive the Other that wouldn’t fall into the register of the One

***

I will invoke Freud and now I will take the tricky path of conceiving the two in terms of the Other in psychoanalysis, the Other being a key psychoanalytic term

I said above “If the Other exists …” and this brings me to a very basic asset that lies at the heart of psychoanalysis and the work of Jacques Lacan. There is something like a spectacular antinomy at the foundation of psychoanalytic theory,

an antinomy worthy of Kantian antinomies, and Kant has brought the notion of antinomy to a pinnacle where reason, as a striving for unity, runs into an irremediable two, an opposition that cannot be reduced.

This Lacanian antinomy of the two pertains to the nature of the Other.

One can pose it as the antinomy of two massively opposing statements:

1. There is the Other, which is the essential dimension that psychoanalysis has to deal with. Notoriously, Freud spoke of the unconscious as “ein anderer Schauplatz,” the other scene, another stage, a stage inherently other in relation to the one of consciousness, to its count and to what it can account for. It defies the count of consciousness, which is ultimately the homogeneous count providing sense as a unitary prospect

So there is the Other of the unconscious. … “The unconscious is the discourse of the Other.”

And another of his formulas runs: “Desire is the desire of the Other”

There is an Other that agitates our desires and prevents us from assuming them simply our own. These two short statements, in no uncertain terms, place the unconscious and desire under the banner of the Other.

There is the unconscious, and there is desire only insofar as each intimately pertains to the Other, they are “of the Other,” and the Other is what stirs their intimacy.

There is the Other at the heart of all entities that psychoanalysis has to deal with, … the Other of a qualitatively different nature in relation to the realm of One.

2. The second part of this antinomy, in stark contradiction to the first, states bluntly: The Other lacks.

There is a lack in the Other, the Other is haunted by a lack, or to extend it a bit further: The Other doesn’t exist.

“There is the Other” vs. “The Other doesn’t exist.”

How can the very dimension on which psychoanalysis is ultimately premised not exist?

What is the status of this Other that is emphatically there, permeating the very notion of the unconscious, of desire, and so forth, and that yet at the same time emphatically lacks?

Can the two statements be reconciled in their glaring contradiction?

Is this a case of a Kantian antinomy, exceeding the limits of knowledge and unitary reasoning?

And how can one posit the Other as the very notion surpassing the boundaries and the framework of One while maintaining that it lacks?

Is this an exhaustive alternative?

dolar being and void pt 1

Mladen Dolar (2013) “The Atom and the Void – from Democritus to Lacan.” Filozofski vestnik, Vol XXXIV, Number 2, 11–26.

The path of the void and of non-being is the path that one cannot possibly adopt and therefore one must not adopt it (‘it must not be’) – but why the prohibition since one cannot conceivably adopt it at all?

Why prohibit something that cannot be anyway?

The tacit presupposition of the first statement, its implicit assumption, is that one must act in favour of being to counteract a possible catastrophe, to abjure the void. One is on a battlefront, and being is a weapon one has to use against an unfathomable enemy.

… being would be like a defense mechanism against the void, and by presenting being as a matter of choice and decision there is a disavowed primacy of the void as the lure, the temptation and the threat, lurking behind any talk about being, part and parcel with its logos.

So how did the void come about? It came about as the discourse of being as the defense mechanism against the void.

Atomism emerged as a reaction against the Parmenidian assertion of being, not accepting the choice and the alternative, but taking both paths at the same time, … it introduces the void as the essential component of being. … one posits the non-being at the core of being

atomism includes a certain insight that Hegel sees as valid and far-reaching, namely that there is a principle of negativity which moves both thought and being, and that this principle forms the inside of both at their core,

****
The Lacanian real – and if there is a Lacanian materialism, then it pertains to the notion of the real – is neither a thought, an idea, nor a being (nor matter for that matter), but something emerging precisely in their rift, something that gets lost in the subsequent self-evident division into being and thought and their opposition.
****

So what is indivisible to Hegel is neither the one nor the void, the indivisible is the division itself.

However far we seek for a minimal element, we never arrive at a one as the minimal and the indivisible, but at the division. … what cannot be divided any further is the division;

Against the Parmenidian exorcism of the void, he takes up the atomistic espousal of the void as the way to address the basic matrix of being.

Against the exclusion of the void, there is the inclusion of the void into each particle, the missing half of anything positively existing, of any manifestation of being, and this invisible missing half endows being with Unruhe, its unrest, its restlessness, its being ever propelled, the fact that it can only be addressed in its becoming, its production and its incompleteness.

zupančič not-mother pt 2

Zupančič, Alenka. Not-Mother: On Freud’s Verneinung. E-flux Journal 2012

What is at stake in the Freudian discovery that, when dealing with the unconscious, the alternative “mother/not mother” is not exhaustive (negation of negation doesn’t bring us to the supposedly original affirmation)… It is not a “more or less mother,” nor is it a difference in intensity with regard to two extremes, or absolutes; it is a paradoxical entity of “with-without.”

The third term (or third possibility), which is included rather then excluded, is nothing other than the very point of the (onto)logical impossibility of the third.

In other words, what is included as something (as an entity) receives the very logical impossibility on which the alternative mother/not-mother is based.

The fact that it is included doesn’t mean that the impossible now becomes possible (one of the possibilities, as in the intuitionist logic); rather, it is included in its very onto-logical impossibility — hence its spectral character: as included in reality, the impossible-real can only be a specter.

This is then where a first cut is produced, the split between in and out, which also and immediately coincides with the dividing lines between good and bad, foreign, or alien, and familiar.

[In the] original pleasure-ego, these dividing lines simply coincide: the inner — the good — the familiar, on the one side, and the outer — the bad — the alien on the other. But already in the next step things become more complicated and these dividing lines fall out of joint.

but of whether something which is in the ego as a presentation can be rediscovered in perception (reality) as well

In other words, what is at stake here is the famous reality check, or “reality testing,” based on the presupposition of an original loss of pleasure.

The crucial aspect of which is the loss of immediacy: From now on, all pleasure will be a found-again-pleasure.

The same goes for all objects of reality: As objects of reality (which is thus constituted as objective reality, that is, constituted through the opposition subjective-objective) they are never simply found, but always refound, found again,

“The first and immediate aim, therefore, of reality testing is not to find an object in real
perception which corresponds to the one presented, but to refind such an object, to
convince oneself that it is still there.”

So the moment we begin dealing with thinking and with certain relation to reality, both our pleasure and the existence of things are no longer immediate, but bear the mark of repetition and of the gap the latter implies.

The second repartition of the dividing lines doesn’t simply replace the first, however, but adds to it with a twist, resulting in a gap, or a third dimension, that haunts from then on the very consistency of the distinction between inner and outer, and blurs the subject-object division and relation.

We could also recapitulate the movement described by Freud like this. The first mythical difference between inside and outside is not yet a real difference, but a process of differentiating the indifferent, or the indistinct, led by the primary process of the pleasure

zupančič why P? 2

Zupančič Zupančič, Alenka. Why Psychoanalysis: 3 interventions. Aarhus University Press 2008.

It is in this sense that we should understand a crucial Lacanian thesis concerning the issue of the cause:

“Il n’y a de cause que de ce qui cloche”

There is but the cause of that which does not work, or which does not add up. 24

(pssst … check out Dolar’s interpretation here)

There are (at least) two important ideas behind this proposition.

1. the non-immediate character of the causal relationship, which has its classic philosophical articulation in the Hume – Kant debate. The connection between cause and effect involves an irreducible gap, or leap, on account of which Hume wanted to dismiss the very notion of the cause, and which led Kant to propose rational subjectivity as the transcendental constitutive background against which the leap involved in the passage from a cause to its effect remained possible without the causal structure simple falling apart. 24

2. the other important idea involved in Lacan’s account of causality: something appears in this hole, in this interval, in this gap, in this structural split of causality, and it is for this something that psychoanalysis reserves the name of the cause in the strict sense of the term (the cause of object a, the objet as the distortional cause of itself). 25

The elements exposed above could be related to yet another discussion of causes in psychoanalysis: to the already mentioned two aspects of the question of the cause (the question of the unconscious causes, and the question of the unconscious as cause) we can add a third one, which seems even more fundamental and concerns

3. the very cause of the constitution of the unconscious. This is a debate developed in a very intriguing way by Jean Laplanche in answer to the deadlocks of the Freudian theory of sexual seduction (of children). 25 Continue reading “zupančič why P? 2”

zupančič Why P? 2008 1

Zupančič, Alenka. Why Psychoanalysis: 3 interventions Aarhus University Press 2008.

Freud discovered human sexuality as a problem (in need of explanation), and not as something with which one could eventually explain every (other) problem. He ‘discovered’ sexuality as intrinsically meaningless, and not as the ultimate horizon of all humanly produced meaning.

Three Essay on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) remains a major text in this respect. If one needed to sum up its argument in a single sentence, the following would come close enough to the mark: (human) sexuality is a paradox-ridden deviation from a norm that does not exist. Continue reading “zupančič Why P? 2008 1”

zupančič April 2014 Toronto

philosophical ontological implications of psychoanalytic notions of sexuality and unconscious. Something happened to philosophy when this thing started to get articulated. One needs to think through this consequences of this unprecedented articulation. The concept of unconscious in its intrinsic link with sexuality is not simply concept of some newly discovered entity, of being. No.

It is not exactly an entity, it is not simply being nor non-being. Sexuality is constitutively unconscious. Fundamental negativity, non-being or gap implied in sexuality.

When Freud discovered sexuality what did this imply? He insisted against Jung, there is NO natural or pre-established place for human sexuality, it is constitutively out of its place. It is fragmented, dispersed.

3 Essays on Sexuality: Sexuality is nothing other than this out-of-placeness of its satisfaction. The sexual for Freud was not a substance to be properly described and circumscribed but rather the impossibility of its own circumscription and the limitation.

Sexual is NOT a separate domain of human activity or human life. Sexuality is something that exists in-itself only as something other. Sexuality is the very out-of-itselfness of being. Continue reading “zupančič April 2014 Toronto”

zupančič sexual difference pt 4

e-flux journal #32 February 2012 Alenka Zupančič. Sexual Difference and Ontology

Continued from part 3

The fact that “sexual difference” is not a differential difference (which might explain why Lacan actually never uses the term “sexual difference”) can explain why Lacan’s famous formulas of sexuation are not differential in any common sense: They don’t imply a difference between two kinds of being(s) — there is no contradiction (antagonism) that exists between M and F positions.

On the contrary, contradiction, or antagonism, is what the two positions have in common. It is what they share, the very thing that binds them. It is the very point that accounts for speaking about “men” and “women” under the same heading.

Succinctly put, the indivisible that binds them, their irreducible sameness, is not that of being, but that of contradiction or out-of-beingness of being. Continue reading “zupančič sexual difference pt 4”

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 Kant non-realized

Villanova Philosophy Conference: Alenka Zupančič and Mladen Dolar April 2013 Notes to the talk given by Zupančič: Tarrying with the Imperative

The Rift in Being

[The sense of apocalypse today is this sense that if we don’t do or stop doing something, a catastrophe will take place, founds the neceessity of doing something on being or non-being of something else]

Do something that is Absolutely necessary on its own grounds. Act so that the maxim of your will can always hold at the same time as the principle giving universal law. It does not tell me what to do, universalizability in the maxim of my conduct. PINCHES us: alerts us to something, incites us DO YOUR DUTY!

Exercise a strategic pressure on Kant, this thing that he is pursuing and then provide a conceptualization of it. A READING OF THE categorical imperative that builds on his fundamental matrix in a different direction. Continue reading “zupančič Kant non-realized”