ontology – Page 2

Kant antinomy

… the strange attraction of the old Hollywood films from 30s and 40s in which actors are so obviously acting in front of a projected background?

Recall the systematic use of this device in Hitchcock: Ingrid Bergman skiing down a mountain slope in front of a ridiculously discrepant snowy background in Spellbound … the dining car table conversation between Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint, with a Hudson Bay background in which we pass three times the same barn in North by North-west…

Although it is easy to project a conscious strategy into what may have been Hitchcock’s simple sloppiness, it is difficult to deny the psychological resonance of these shots, as if the very discord between figure and background renders a key message about the depicted person’s subjectivity. It was above all Orson Welles who perfected the expressive use of this technique: one of his standard shots is the American shot of the hero too close to the camera, with the blurred background which, even if it is a “true” background, nonetheless generates the effect of something artificial, acquiring a spectral dimension, as if the hero is not moving in a real world, but in a phantasmagoric virtual universe.

And does the same not go for modern subjectivity? Perhaps it is a crucial fact that Mona Lisa was painted at the dawn of modernity: this irreducible gap between the subject and its “background,” the fact that a subject never fully fits its environs, is never fully embedded in it, defines subjectivity.

The Kantian Ding an sich (the Thing-in-itself, beyond phenomena) is not simply a transcendental entity beyond our grasp, but something discernible only via the irreducibly antinomic character of our experience of reality. (And, as René Girard pointed out, is not the first full assertion of the ethical parallax the Book of Job, in which the two perspectives — the divine order of the world and Job’s complaint — are confronted, and neither is the “truthful” one? The truth resides in their very gap, in the shift of perspective.)

Let us take Kant’s confrontation with the epistemological antinomy that characterized his epoch: empiricism versus rationalism.

Kant’s solution is neither to choose one of the terms, nor to enact a kind of higher “synthesis” which would “sublate” the two as unilateral, as partial moments of a global truth (nor, of course, does he withdraw to pure skepticism);

the stake of his “transcendental turn” is precisely to avoid the need to formulate one’s own “positive” solution. What Kant does is to change the very terms of the debate;

his solution—the transcendental turn—is unique in that it, first, rejects any ontological closure: it recognizes a certain fundamental and irreducible limitation (“finitude”) of the human condition, which is why the two poles, rational and sensual, active and passive, cannot ever be fully mediated — reconciled.

The “synthesis” of the two dimensions — that is, the fact that our Reason seems to fit the structure of external reality that affects us — always relies on a certain salto mortale or “leap of faith.”

Far from designating a “synthesis” of the two dimensions, the Kantian “transcendental” rather stands for their irreducible gap “as such”: the “transcendental” points at something in this gap, a new dimension which cannot be reduced to any of the two positive terms between which the gap is gaping.

And Kant does the same with regard to the antinomy between the Cartesian cogito as res cogitans, the “thinking substance,” a self-identical positive entity, and Hume’s dissolution of the subject in the multitude of fleeting impressions: against both positions, he asserts the subject of transcendental apperception which, while displaying a self-reflective unity irreducible to the empirical multitude, nonetheless lacks any substantial positive being, such that it is in no way a res cogitans.

Perhaps, the best way to describe the Kantian break towards this new dimension is with regard to the changed status of the notion of the “in-human.” Kant introduced a key distinction between negative and indefinite judgment: the positive judgment “the soul is mortal” can be negated in two ways, when a predicate is denied to the subject (“the soul is not mortal”), and when a non-predicate is affirmed (“the soul is non-mortal”).

not dead/undead and not human/inhuman

The difference is exactly the same as the one, known to every reader of Stephen King, between “he is not dead” and “he is un-dead.” The indefinite judgment opens up a third domain, which undermines the underlying distinction: the “undead” are neither alive nor dead, they are precisely the monstrous “living dead.”

And the same goes for “inhuman”: “he is not human” is not the same as “he is inhuman” — “he is not human” means simply that he is external to humanity, animal or divine; while “he is inhuman” means something thoroughly different, namely that he is neither human nor inhuman, but marked by a terrifying excess which, although it negates what we understand as “humanity,” is inherent to being human.

And, perhaps, one should risk the hypothesis that this is what changes with the Kantian revolution: in the pre-Kantian universe, humans were simply humans, beings of reason, fighting the excesses of animal lusts and divine madness,

while only with Kant and German Idealism is the excess to be fought absolutely immanent, the very core of subjectivity itself (which is why, with German Idealism, the metaphor for the core of subjectivity is Night, “Night of the World” in contrast to the Enlightenment notion of the Light of Reason fighting the darkness around).

So when, in the pre-Kantian universe, a hero goes mad, it means he is deprived of his humanity, that is, the animal passions or divine madness took over;

while with Kant, madness signals the unconstrained explosion of the very core of a human being.

Which, then, is this new dimension that emerges in the gap itself?

It is that of the transcendental I itself, of its “spontaneity”: the ultimate parallax, the third space between phenomena and noumenon itself, is the subject’s freedom/spontaneity, which — although, of course, it is not the property of a phenomenal entity, so that it cannot be dismissed as a false appearance which conceals the noumenal fact that we are totally caught in an inaccessible necessity — is also not simply noumenal.

And Johnston’s book is a detailed perspicuous elaboration of the consequences for psychoanalytic theory of this most radical dimension of the Kantian breakthrough. He takes literally Lacan’s claim that Kant’s philosophy was the initial moment in the line of thought which led to Freud’s discovery — Lacan’s own “return to Freud” could be read precisely as an elevation of Freud to the dignity of a philosopher, as the reading of Freud’s meta-psychology as a “critique of pure desire.” And, as in the case of Kant him-self, the ethical consequences of this “return” are shattering.

Traditionally, psychoanalysis was expected to allow the patient to overcome the obstacles which prevented him/her access to “normal” sexual enjoyment. Today, however, when we are bombarded from all sides by the different versions of the superego injunction “Enjoy!” — from direct enjoyment in sexual performance to enjoyment in professional achievement or in spiritual awakening — one should move to a more radical level: psychoanalysis is today the only discourse in which you are allowed NOT to enjoy (as opposed to “not allowed to enjoy”).

Hegel and Žižek

Žižek seminar Hegel Now? Workshop Philosophy Department, Middlesex University. Thursday May 5, 2011.

Žižek’s Hegel Lecture put on by Dahlem Humanities Center (DHC), Freie Universität Berlin, on March 31, 2011, in the Henry Ford Building in Dahlem.

Post-Hegel: A move to a positivity of Being and on the other hand, formalist pure repetition, Kierkargard and Freud (death drive) two strange bedfellows.
You can’t be a Hegelian after this break. Before there were communitarian Hegelians, and radical Hegelians. the Pittsburgh Hegelians have rejuvenated Hegel for Liberals. Their point is ‘recognition’. This is Zizek’s problem with them.

Catherine Malabou in her debate with Judith Butler There is an co-written article in Houlgate’s recent edited collection on Hegel

For Malabou, she says, no intersubjectivity is not the ulitmate horizon of Hegel

Master — Servant

Phenomenology of Spirit: you should be attentive to the beginning of Master-Servant

Self-consciousness, a subject which perceives among the objects in the world, another object that claims “fuck you” I’m also a subject.

This is an absolute ontological standard. The original situation is not, I’m a subject and you’re a subject. “This is not the 69 position, lick and recognize each other.” No there is an absolute antagonism, I am as a subject singular and absolute, now there is another guy there that says I am also like you, there is only room for one and there is two now competing for the only place. This Other is not the Levinasian other, nor the (Butler) Other, I recognize you, you recognize me. The Other is an absolutely shattering intrusion.

The Pittsburgh Hegelians deflate Hegel, no metaphysical commitment, just a transcendental forms of a priori rational forms of argumentation.
Suspension of big ontological questions always implies the worst historicism, which opens up the path of violent return of realist metaphysics, neo-Darwinism

Avoiding or suspending the big ontological questions never works, the big radical questions return.

The break is between post-Hegelian thought and the pre-Hegelian metaphysics. My thesis is that precisely Hegel disappears in this passage. Hegel is a vanishing mediator between the two: traditional philosophy and post-metaphysical thought. Hegel something that is neither is one nor the other. If you are in-between you can see something which afterwards becomes invisible. Nice example, the beginning of sound, for a brief moment, the apparent reactionaries like Chaplin, knew something about the ghastly dimension of voice, he saw a potentially ominous spectral dimension of voice, that voice is never a self-transparent means of self-expression but a foreign intruder that can haunt us. But this became invisible. This unbearable excess in Hegel becomes invisible.

The ultra-totalitarian Hegel: GK Chesterton “The Man Who was Thursday” the work of the philosophical policeman. Popper, Adorno, Levinas, Glucksman, would they also subscribe, totalitarianism, the philosophical crime is totality. Totality = Totalitarianism. The task of philosophical police, is to find a political crime, gulag, totalitarianism, reading Rousseau etc that a philosophical crime will be committed. They search out for proponents of totality. But Ž wants to defend totality.

Žižek’s definition of the Hegelian Totality: [I should go back to the audio to fill in this definition a bit more]

Totality is not an ideal of an organic whole. But a critical notion. To locate a phenomenon in it’s totality is not to locate hidden harmony of its whole. antagonism, self-contradictory antagonistic. The whole which is the true is the whole plus its symptoms, It’s unintended consequences which betrays its untruth. Today’s global capitalism means speak of the Congo. This is why again the anti-Hegelian rhetorics, which … the space of the Hegelian totality is the space of the abstract harmonious whole, and the excess which undermine it.

Whenever you have a project to something, you can expect it to go wrong, every project is undermined by its inconsistency.

extrnal negtion becomes self-negation.

Only the abstract terror of the French Revolution creates the conditions for liberal freedom. The first choice has to be the wrong choice, it is only the wrong choice that opens the space for concrete freedom.

You arrive at the highest only thruogh the radical contradiction of the lowest. This is the basic temporality of the dialectical process.

Book of Job
Each of 3 theologists try to convince JOb that his suffering must have a deeper meaning.

Why did you do all these things to me? God there commits a blasphemy, the true answer is, you think you are something special but I screwed up everything.

What dies on the cross is God of beyond itself. Holy Spirit is totally unique, what dies on the cross is this disgusting idea that God is up there as a guarantee of meaning. As in when something appears to us as evil, you are looking too close it is a stain, but if you stand back, you can look at it as a part of global harmony. The sacrifice of Jesus Christ, there is no big Other, no guarantee of meaning, the Holy Ghost is that we are here alone without a guarantee. The true message of Christianity is not Trust God, but God Trusts Us. Holy Spirit is the first radical egalitarian institution.

Hate your mother and father, as parts of hierarchy of social order, god is dead, the only hope after this break is an egalitarian community. But there is in Hegel a teleological movement. Not so according to Ž.

June 23, 1789: King says scram. Mirabeau, “Go and tell your king that we shall leave our places here except when forced by bayonets” the invention of the new surprises you. A prophet from chance, you say too much, you try to integrate the excess, and you suceed.

Christ died. It was a shock. They didn’t know what. Somebody says, why don’t we see it as a triumph.

Contingency, is a deeper necessity that articulates itself through contingency. Julius Cesar crossing the Rubicon. At that point it was totally open. Once he crossed the Rubicon, he created his destiny, so that in retrospect it appeared necessary.

Baladour 1995, Le Monde wrote, “if B will be elected, then we can say his election was necessary” something happens and once it happens it retroactively appears necessary.

The time is come to do a materialist reversal of Marx back to Hegel. This opening towards contingency, Hegel is radical thinker of contingency. marx is you as a historical agent can look into history, see where history is going, and then posit yourself as an agent of progress. Hegel no way. there is no big Other. The conservative poet T.S. Eliot. Every really new work of art, it retroactively changes the whole history of art. This is the Hegelian theory of totality. With every new break the whole past is re-written.

Borges wrote about Kafka, every writer has his predesccors, Kafka can be said to create his forerunners. No. We are not simply retroactively projecting things into the past. No what if history is open, events are retroactively constituted.

Can we think this incompleteness of reality without God thinking of it, in a materialist way. We cannot simply become Hegelians. We should admit that there are things Hegel didn’t know. The topic of REPETITION. Deleuze made it clear, what characterizes post-Hegelian space, it is a notion of REPETITION, in contrast to Hegel involves no Aufhebung.

Kierkargard and Freud: A pure repetition. It’s not that Hegel didn’t see it, but there are signs that point to the unthought of Hegel. There are points that you can see where Hegel wasn’t Hegelian enough. This is what Marx was saying. Hegel’s theory of economy, didn’t yet capture the whole speculative madness of economy. The ideal of captial as abstraction that rules concrete life, Hegel wasn’t Hegelian enough, passage from money to capital subject to substance. Marx in Grundrisse, capital is an AUTOMATIC SUBJECT. Captial wouldh ave been an horror for Hegel, because it is actually infinity and bad repetitive infinity.

hegel’s theory of madness where Hegel develops the rise of human spirit out of animal life, which is more radical than Foucault. The passage through radical madness, is a permanent background to being human. What Hegel missed, its not simple as passing directly from nature to culture, our cultural rituals of love is not a defence against a naturalism, but against a deadly force, once we pass from nature to culture RETROACTIVELY a third domain of radical negativity arises.
Kant: Man is an animal who needs a master, not because of any natural unruliness, but metaphysical unruliness.
Hegel would have been against the Catholic church, Hegel would have said, animals only do it for procreation, to take something that serves a biological aim, and autonomize it with regard to that aim,

Lacan is right. the horror of sexuality for Christianity, is not vulgar biological life, but metaphysical competitor. Sexuality is the very domain where at its most elementary, wher ethe passage fro manimal to human emerges.

In todays crazy world, offers itself to a Hegelian in-between … and for us too, a certain epock is coming to an end.

Mobilizing Hegelian potentials in today’s world, the time has come to return to Hegel against post-Hegelians against Marx. For example his stuff on the rabble, isnt it today precisely, is that the main form of class struggle isn’t just working class-bourgeouisie, but many forms of rabble, illegal immigrants, landless, etc.

Today isn’t that we are living in a time, maybe in the 20th century we tried too quick to change the world, and that we should reflect on it radically. A brutal fasciest counter-revolution Bologna educational reform. Change intellectuals into experts, change higher education to make it useful. Demonstration in suburbs call psychologists, sociologists. ecology should also ask how did it come to that, do we perceive it correctly.

We are aproaching a time where thinking is absolutely needed Ecology, biogenetics, the limit between inside from outside, we can control mind from outside, chairs moving by your thoughts. This changes the very definition of being human. Be careful to resist the pseud-state of emergency talk. Bill Gates talks like that, Why are we still caught in these ideological debates while children are starving in Africa. The message is do, don’t think about it. Consumption, but I almost become tempted when I pass a Starbucks, they do a wonderful job of ideology, 1% goes to Guatamala children. In the old times citizens/consumers. Now buying the coffee the consumer, your citizenship will be also done by others. Don’t be afraid to be intellectuals today The BOlogna reforms show that those in power know that we are dangerous.

butler on bracha ettinger matrixial

Butler, Judith. “Bracha’s Eurydice” (2002) Theory, Culture & Society, 21: 1, (2004) 95-100.

So we do not know what we have lost in her, or whom we have lost. But there is more. We are not speaking only of the loss of childhood, or the loss of a maternal connection that the child must undergo, but also of

an enigmatic loss that is communicated from the mother to the child, from the parents to the child, from the adult world to the child who is given this loss to handle when the child cannot handle it, when it is too large for the child, when it is too large for the adult, when the loss is trauma, and cannot be handled by anyone, anywhere, where the loss signifies what we cannot master.

When we turned, looking for Eurydice, we thought perhaps we could know she was there by seeing, and so we thought that looking would be a way of knowing and capturing.

But it turned out that she was uncapturable in this way, and that, in general, she is uncapturable, that capture will not be the way in which we might experience her. Bracha writes, ‘failure is the measure of what has been recognized’.

This means that we cannot hope to establish a sure way of knowing what loss it is that we negotiate here. So we have to ask about historical losses, the ones that are transmitted to us without our knowing, at a level where we cannot hope to piece it together, where we are, at a psychic level, left in pieces, pieces that might be linked together in some way, but will not fully ‘bind’ the affect.

This is part of the work of borderlinking that Bracha writes about, and it is, in her view, prior to identity, prior to any question of construction, a psychic landscape that gives itself as partial object, as grains and crumbs, as she puts it, as remnants that are, on the one hand, the result, the scattered effects of an unknowable history of trauma, the trauma that others who precede us have lived through and, on the other hand, the very sites in which a new possibility for visual experience emerges, one which establishes a temporality in which the past is not past, but is not present, in which the present emerges, but from the scattered and animated remains of a continuing, though not continuous, trauma. 3-4

But who are we? Are we really intact before these images? Or do they also look back at us and banish us to a realm that is prior to the speakability of the ‘I’? Do these images not imperil a certain self-recognition precisely through linking us to a psychic and cultural prehistory that we cannot think, cannot know?

Does Bracha mock the philosopher? Or does she expose the philosopher to a scene of emergence at once traumatic, scattered, partial, multiple, non-unified and non-unifiable, the scene which is closed over again and again by our talk of identity and our presumption that what we most need is recognition for what we distinctly are?

If failure is the measure of recognition, then we will be recognized for what fails the terms of recognition, for what goes beneath, before or beyond the terms of self-definition or, indeed, cultural identification. Identification itself will be understood to emerge from a space in which we unknowingly inherit the trauma and desires of others, and find that they are indistinguishable from our own, that we are transitively instated by the other, and that the speaking of the ‘we’ or of the ‘I’ is not really possible in this domain.

And it may be that language cedes to vision here, to the particular kind of frozen motion that the pre-narrative understanding of identity requires.

Bracha calls this non-unifiable and linked space of a primary psychic relation the feminine, the matrixial. She uses words here to designate the space from which her theory and her painting and her analytic experience emerge.

But we would be incautious if we were to understand that she is simply giving new definition to ‘the feminine’, or producing a new version of feminine identity. We would be equally precipitous if we were to assume that ‘the feminine’ has a monopoly on non-identity.

But we have to hear this word if we are to understand the way in which she is displacing the ‘phallus’ from its position as the original signifier for Lacan. For she is opening up the landscape in another direction through this word, ‘the feminine’ or this word, ‘the matrixial’.

She is, I think, asking us to reformulate the very relation between the subject and its other, and to ask what precedes this encounter in which the phallus seeks to confirm its status, where the feminine acts only as a faulty mirror in the circuitry of that narcissism? What form of relationality troubles the distinctness of these terms?

I would even claim that, in her view, it is not possible to say ‘I am feminine’, or that ‘you are feminine’. Since the very ontological designations, ‘I am’ and ‘you are’, post-date the space of the matrixial.

The matrixial is what we guard against when we shore up the claims of identity, when we presume that to recognize each other is to know, to name, to distinguish according to the logic of identity. 5

What is the agency of the one who registers the imprints from the other? This is not the agency of the ego, and neither is it the agency of one who is presumed to know. It is a registering and a transmutation that takes place in a largely, though not fully, preverbal sphere, an autistic relay of loss and desire received from elsewhere, and only and always ambiguously made one’s own. Indeed, they are never fully made one’s own, for the claim of autonomy would involve the losing of the trace. And the trace, the sign of loss, the remnant of loss, is understood as the link, the occasional and nearly impossible connection, between trauma and beauty itself.

So much works against this encounter, the possibility of this transmutation, since to lose the trace is to lose the connection with the matrixial space itself, and to articulate the trace through a history or a conceptual representation that is too masterful is to lose the trace again, this time through seeking to know it too fully and too well.

We lost Eurydice because we sought too quickly to know that she was behind us, and the look which seeks to know, to verify, banished her yet more fully into the past. And yet, in Bracha’s tableaux, the image is still there, coming toward us, fading away, a moment that is frozen in its doubleness, layered, fractured, filtered. The suspension of time conditions the emergence of a space that suspends the sequential ordering of time.

We cannot tell our story here, nor offer a recognition in which a gaze seeks to become commensurate with what it sees. We are invited into the space in which we are not one, cannot be, and yet we are not without the capacity to see. We see here, as a child or, perhaps, an infant, whose body is given as the remnants of another’s trauma and desires. What is it we seek to recognize here? That she is gone, that she is staying? Eurydice cannot be captured, cannot be had. She appears only in the moment in which we are dispossessed of her.

There is something of our dispossession in her, the one by which we come into being, through another, as another, that links us not only with this or that maternal origin, but perhaps more emphatically, with her history, the one she cannot tell.

That history emerges not only as a tableau, as a frozen landscape, but as one whose motion and beauty is precisely derived from its traumatic character. This is not to make the ‘I’ any less absolute than it is, but it is to suggest that trauma stages its encounters, has its own illuminations, and that the work of art registers this radical and originary dispossession of the ‘I’, the subject, and its gaze that constitutes the condition for a certain work and even a kind of agency prior to the subject itself.

We see Eurydice, but she does not belong to us at the moment that we see her. And because she does not belong to us, she comes forth, delineating a field of appearance and of art, beyond foreclosure and redemption. But it is only on the condition that she is not fully banished, and that she still does not belong to us that she appears, and that trauma finds its rare encounter with appearance itself.(6-7)

Note: This article originally appeared as the catalogue essay for The Eurydice Series:
Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, Drawing Papers 24 (New York: The Drawing Center
Publications, 2002).

tuhkanen critique of butler

Tuhkanen, Mikko. “Performativity and Becoming” Cultural Critique. 72, Spring (2009): 1-35.

For example, her description of Antigone as “the limit without which the symbolic cannot be thought” or the “unthinkable within the symbolic” might seem to be referring to the real, yet she goes on to identify Antigone’s position as possibly embodying an “alternative symbolic or imaginary” (Antigone’s Claim, 40) and, immediately afterward, turns to Lacan’s second seminar to criticize his totalizing theory of the symbolic law (41–42; see also 47). Arguably, this conflation of different stages in Lacan’s work forces (or allows) her to ignore Lacan’s divergence from a structuralist understanding of a system (see also Penney, 19).

Relevant here is Shepherdson’s suggestion that “the ‘real’ can be understood as a concept that was developed in order to define in a clear way how there is always an element that ‘does not belong’ within the structure, an ‘excluded’ element which escapes the law, but which can nevertheless be approached in a precise theoretical fashion.” Consequently, “psychoanalysis is not in fact committed to the ‘law’ in the manner of classical structuralist thought” (“Intimate Alterity,” paras. 13, 24).

In No Future, Lee Edelman argues that, rather than making good on its claim to conjure up from the tragic heroine’s tomb a radical challenge to the protocols of symbolic legitimation, Butler’s rendering of Antigone “returns us, instead, to familiar forms of a durable liberal humanism whose rallying cry has always been, and here remains,‘the future’” (105–6). For Edelman, such seamless domestication of the real to symbolic meaning is symptomatic of the inherent failure of futurity to be evoked in terms of anything but what he calls “reproductive futurism” (2 and passim). In the figure of the Child, politics premised on futurism “generates generational succession, temporality, and narrative sequence, not toward the end of enabling change, but, instead, of perpetuating sameness, of turning back time to assure repetition” (60). In this schema of enabling the future to unfold as a reassuringly recognizable continuation of the present, queers are “stigmatized as threatening an end to the future itself” (113). Given the unquestioned reflex of seeing “every political vision as a vision of futurity” (13), Edelman’s exhilaratingly counterintuitive argument that queer respond to its stigmatization with a kind of an answer of the real, with an embrace of its status as an embodiment of “the arbitrary, future-negating force of a brutal and mindless drive” (127), has a strong appeal. If there are reasons to resist this appeal, they must come from the fact that queer theory may not yet have come to grips with the specificity of the consequences of its paradigmatic groundings.

I would propose that, because of the Butlerian paradigm on which much of queer theory has developed, the question of becoming, of futurity’s claim on our thinking, may not yet have been adequately posed.

With Deleuze, for example, we must ask whether futurity as becoming is reducible to breeding, in the sense in which fag slang uses the term to signal the mindless, mechanic, and (in Foucault’s terms) docile reproduction of the same. Edelman writes:

“the true oppositional politics implicit in the practice of queer sexualities lies not in the liberal discourse and patient negotiation of tolerances and rights, important as these undoubtedly are to all of us still denied them, but in the capacity of queer sexualities to figure the radical dissolution of the contract, in every sense social and Symbolic, on which the future as putative assurance against the jouissance of the Real depends” (16).

While not precisely disagreeing with Edelman, I would ask whether we have quite exhausted the question of futurity before we abandon it. To do this, we may want to shift our paradigmatic perspective such that our grounding assumptions are defamiliarized and our concepts—here the question of becoming—are necessarily rethought. Such a shift, I propose, would allow us to see that the futurity of performative politics may constitute only a partial understanding of what Deleuze, for example, sees as becoming.

fichte schelling

Williams, Robert R. Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997.

Fichte says that Kant’s theory presupposes a wider inter-subjective human community

According to Fichte, the self cannot give itself the consciousness of freedom; rather the consciousness of freedom is intersubjectively mediated. Schelling qualifies the latent solipsism of transcendental idealism when maintains that the ground of free self-determination must lie partly “within” the subject and partly “outside” of the subject. Schelling’s point in affirming that the ground of freedom is divided is that freedom is social and intersubjective. Hence the ground of freedom cannot be identified with subjectivity alone; the grounds of freedom must be both “in” the subject and yet transcend the subject. Freedom and consciousness of freedom must obviously be the subject’s own doing, yet the subject is incapable of making itself and its freedom into an object and so it cannot be autonomously self-conscious in the crucial sense. Something irreducibly other is required to make the subject available to itself and to arouse the subject to freedom and responsibility.

For this reason self-consciousness and freedom require reciprocal interaction between self and other. Neither self nor other is, by itself, sufficient; consequently, the ground of freedom must be twofold, and yet correlative.

Yet the correlation of the internal and external grounds of freedom, or self and other, is not simply a positive empirical one. Schelling shares Fichte’s tendency to conceive the other in terms of negation. The other is not-I, and I am not-other. Both the other and the self mutually condition each other, but such conditioning is negative. There is no direct presence of the other to the self, or vice versa. The important concept of a doubled ground of freedom makes central the issue of coordinating and ordering the dual grounds of freedom: each self, in its independence, depends on an other that it is not. In spite of its claims to freedom and independence, each seeks security and legitimation from an other whose recognition is contingent and not guaranteed.

Since the parochial self, as self-repulsive negativity, is hidden from itself, it depends on the other for its own critical self-consciousness. that is why self-knowledge for Hegel take the form of Self-recognition in other. The road to interiority passes through the other. The self is for itself only by being for an other, and the self is for an other only by being for itself. The ‘for itself’ formulates not the beginning but the result and telos of the process of recognition.

The natural “solipsism” of desire is a condition that must be transformed and sublimated if the self is to become capable of enduring relationships with others. Hegel’s account of the process of recognition is at the same time an account of the sublimation of desire. In this process desire is fundamentally a desire for the other.

The point to be underscored here is that the other, or the confrontation with the other, both shatters the natural solipsism of the self, and “pulls” it out of its natural solipsism. The analysis of recognition therefore is also and at the same time a story of self-overcoming, through which a enlarged ethical-social mentality or Geist, is attained. (50)

Hegel conceives the individual self in its desires not as a simple, stable, quiescent self-identity but as a complex, restless, self-repulsive, negative identity. This self-repulsing negativity means that the self is not initially present to itself, much less transparent to itself. The immediate self does not yet know what it is. What it is, is still implicit and must become explicit to it.

It can become explicit to itself, that is, discover what it is, only through the mediation of an other. Self-consciousness requires an other to confirm and transform its own self-understanding. The self’s presence to itself is mediated by an other that is likewise a self-repulsing negative identity. But this does not mean tha the relation to the other is inherently or essentially negative.

Rather only the other is capable of satisfying the desire for recognition, which is at the same time a desire for an other. “Self-consciousness attains its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness.” … Believing at first that it has no need of the other, the self makes the discovery that it needs and depends on the very other that it originally deemed “unessential.”

As immediate, each self operates with the presumption of being absolute. According to Hegel, desire signifies a condition of natural egoism in which the self’s satisfaction is the end to which everything else is regarded as merely instrumental and subordinate. Natural egoism is immediate, parochial, and abstract; it excludes the other, difference, and relation. For this reason, the confrontation with the other is experienced as an abrupt self-transcendence, that is, a plunge into a relation that “others” or alters the self. In Hegel’s words: “Self-consciousness is confronted by an other self-consciousness. It has come out of itself. This has a double [equivocal] significance: first it has lost itself, because it finds itself as an other being. Second, it has thereby canceled [aufgehoben] the other, because it does not look upon the other as essential, but rather sees only itself in other.

The presence of the other precipitates a crisis in abstract parochial self-identity. The “shock” or upsurge of the other is immediate and underivable. The encounter with an other calls into question the immediate natural solipsism or naive self-identity. the encounter with the other reveals that naive or parochial self-identity is exclusive. The self achieves its identity by excluding the other. the other constitutes a shock to this naive parochial identity, which works an immediate change. The self now finds itself as other, or as “othered.” The presence of the other signifies a loss of the original naive certitude, and this may be experienced as a loss of self.

The starting point of the process of recognition is the apparent loss of self before the other, or conversely, an apparent loss of the other owing to the inability to see anything but oneself in the other. The second phase is the attempt to cancel the self-othering, which can take two forms: elimination and/or domination of the other, or finding some accommodation with the other. The former involves eliminating the other, or compelling the other to recognize. Either form of violence is self-subverting in Hegel’s view. Hegel believes that the concept of recognition must take the second path. This means that the self may “return” to itself out of its “othered” state, but it can do so only if it abandons mastery and domination. the recognition that is needed cannot be coerced or controlled.

Mutual-reciprocal recognition is possible only if coercion is renounced. The authentic “cancellation” of other-being means that the other is not eliminated but allowed to go free and affirmed. But if the other is allowed to go free, this means that is affirmed, not simply in its identity, but also in its difference. Without the release and allowing of the other to be as other, in its difference, the ‘We’ would be merely an abstract, parochial identity. The release and affirmation of the other is constitutive of the determinately universal identity of the ‘We’. The ‘We’ is not a return to abstract, parochial self-identity of the original self-certain I. It is a determinate universal that reflects both the common identity and individual differences. Releasement of the other is the condition for the other’s release of the self and the self’s “return to itself” from “being-other,” both of which constitute the We qua determinate universal.

The self’s return to itself out of self-othering is not simply a restoration of the original parochial and abstract self-identity. It is not a simple satisfaction of desire, a filling of the lack by consumption of the object. Rather the original absolute self-identity of desire is decentered and relativeized by relation to other, while being enlarged and legitimated by the other’s recognition. This return to self in freedom is intersubjectively mediated. The condition under which the self can pass through the other and the other’s freedom and return to itself affirmatively is that coercion and mastery must be given up.

butler Hegel life as sociality

Public lecture presented by the Humanities and Arts Research Centre of Royal Holloway, the School of Psychosocial Studies (Birkbeck) and the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research 4th February, 2009.

Norms constitute specific ontologies of the Subject, historically contingent ontologies, being of the subject given over to norms, to be a body is to be exposed to social crafting and form, the body is a social ontology, NORMATIVE PRODUCTION OF ONTOLOGY, HISTORICALLY CONTINGENT ONTOLOGY

Our very capacity to discern and name the being of the subject is dependent on norms that facilitate that recognition.

differential allocation of precarity

Apprehension of precariousness leads to heightening of violence, insight into vulnerability increases desire to destroy them

Butler on Hegel

At begin of Lordship and Bondage: a self-consciousness sees another self-consciousness and is scandalized by this event.

Some Other appears, at first that Other appears to be me, how is it possible that this is me over there? How can I account for this apparent distance between me over there and the “I” who regards this “me”.

If I have come outside myself then I am no longer localized and this tells me something new about who I am, my relation to space. If I am no longer localized, I am not fully or in exclusively a bounded being, I have the capacity to appear elsewhere.

I am a kind of being here and there apparently at once. I can as it were face myself, and this involves a certain amount of self-loss. I am then not quite bounded in space as I apparently assumed, this unboundedness by which I am now characterized, seems bound up as it were with a redoubling of myself. The I seems to have become 2.

The problem is that the Other whom I face, is in some sense me and is some sense not-me. I encounter myself at a spatial distance re-doubled. I encounter at the same time and through the same figure the limit to what I can call myself. Both of these things happen at the same time, but this does not mean that these two encounters are reconciled. On the contrary they exist in a certain tension with one another. This Other who appears to be me is at once me and not-me. So what I have to live with is not just the fact that I have become 2, but that I can be found at a distance from myself and what I find at that distance is also and at once not myself.

This Other who appear as me is at once me and not-me. I encounter myself at a spatial distance redoubled.

—————-

Hegel has established through these steps the constitutive sociality of this self-consciousness. The apprehension of the Other as a living being, one whose living is like my own is essential to this process of developing a social bond. There’s a shape over there, a living one and its understood as belonging to this or that living thing.

The living consciousness can only return to its absolute singularity by risking its own life, but dead that living consciousness cannot achieve the self-certainty it seeks. So the question becomes, how best to live and how best to live with others. The defensive effort to shore up one’s singularity in the face of a duplication or substitutability is apparently overwhelming, but is only by considering

Singularity and Substitutability without a dialectical synthesis that an ethical opening to the other can take place.

Who is this I who is on the one hand substitutable and yet also singularly alive on some other hand. If this “I” is to register its substitutability it has to survive as this singular life to do precisely that. In other words its singularity is the precondition of its understanding of substitutability and is presupposed logically by the idea of substitution itself which involves replacing one term by another.

The Non-substitutable, is the persistent, logical and existential condition of substitutability. As much as the “I” might be threatened by negation or threatens the other with negation, so it is clear that the life of the one is dependent on the life of the other. This interdependency becomes a new way of conceiving of life as sociality. Sociality cannot be reduced to the existence of this identity or that identity, this group or that group, but is the open temporal trajectory of interdependency and desire, struggle, fear, murderous dispositions as well as the desire to maintain and repair social bonds.

So although I find my departure here in Hegel, I move in at least two distinct directions:

1. The ethical necessity of a non-coincidence of singularity and substitutability. I’m not interested in a dialectical synthesis of those two terms. The ethical demand to live both singularity and substitutability as an ongoing paradox is something that I affirm.

2. There can be no recognition of my life being like another’s life except through the specific social norms that allow certain populations to emerge as living beings and others to be considered as non-living, as only partially living, or as actually figuring a threat to life itself.

We cannot remain dependent on existing and already established norms of recognition, if we are to try to expand our understanding not only of who deserves to live, who lives are worth protecting but more fundamentally whose lives count as lives and whose lives are finally grievable.

The problems is not merely to include more people in the existing norms but to consider how existing norms allocate recognition differentially? What new norms are possible and how are they wrought.

What might be done to produce a more egalitarian set of conditions for recognizablity. What might be done in other words to shift the very terms of recognizability in order to to produce more radically democratic results.

New egalitarian norms of recognizability.

butler scene of address

Third International Conference of the Whitehead Research Project
Date: December 3-5, 2009
Location: Claremont, California

Judith Butler at the Claremont Graduate School, School of Art and Humanities. Look for it on Itunes or here In her 2 hour talk with students on her book Giving Account of Oneself I found this to be one of her most interesting points. She made this in response to a question at 1:18:30 into the talk.

When we strive for the single, the one account. When we are asked to give an account even of an accident, we go back and tell the story one way, and then another way, we give different accounts at different times, each of these accounts produce a constellation, so there has to be a revisability that should not be understood as falsification, each of these accounts produce a constellation that gives us a more complex idea of what happened.

But when we come to the question of identity, if we say I am this and this and also this and we try to undo the logic of “non-contradiction” that governs our statements about what we are. I am not this, I am rather this and this. I am both, I am both and more. But we are still within what Foucault calls the “regime of ontology.” I’m still trying to determine what I am, I’m just doing it multiplee (multiply? multiple? Judy pronounces it with a long ‘e’ sound, as in ‘multiplicity’).

But maybe the thing is to NOT determine who I am whether singly or multiplee, but to be engaged in a kind of scene of address to oneself, to another, to a set of others, where those terms get re-worked in ways that make a difference, then we are less interested in determining who we are singly or multiply than in some act of communication, or some act of avowing and articulating a relationship which is more ethically significant than establishing who I am. I guess I would displace the framework to some degree.

butler insurrection at the level of ontology

I am referring not only to humans not regarded as human, and thus to a restrictive conception of the human that is based upon their exclusion. It is not a matter of a simple entry of the excluded into an established ontology, but an insurrection at the level of ontology, a critical opening up of the questions, What is real? Whose lives are real? How might reality be remade? Those who are unreal have, in a sense, already suffered the violence of derealization. (Precarious Life, Verso 2004, 33.)

sharpe subjectivity hegelian

The Jacobin Reign of Terror … for Hegel, is that within it for the first time subjects could at any moment ‘lose everything’ with no hope of any equivalent return. To quote The Phenomenology of Spirit

… all these determinations [that the subject receives in its ‘acculturation’ hence] have vanished in the loss suffered by the self in absolute freedom: its negation is the death that is without meaning, the sheer terror of the negative that contains nothing positive … [Hegel, 1997:362]

… it is only when the individual has experienced this ‘terror of the negative’, and had the courage to see in what appeared to him qua particular Self as a groundless alien force something which is ‘immediately one with self-consciousness’, that full ‘self-consciousness’ emerges. [Žižek 1999a: 94] (139).

‘Subject’ [thus] emerges at this very point of utterly meaningless voidance brought about by a negativity which explodes the frame of balanced exchange. That is to say, what is ‘subject’ [in Hegel] if not the infinite power of absolute negativity/mediation … [for] whom every ‘pathological’ particular positive content [henceforth] appears as ‘posited’, as something externally assumed? [Žižek, 1993, 27; Hegel 1997: 355-63] (139)

Žižek thus comments that what ‘… Bataille fails to … note … is that the modern (Cartesian) subject no longer needs to sacrifice goats intestines, his children, and so on, since his very existence already entails the most radical … sacrifice, the sacrifice of the very kernel of his being’. [Žižek, 1996a 125 … ] (139).

In Hegel, who for Žižek most consistently thought through this subject’s philosophical subversion, the ‘Cartesian’ subject corresponds to: ‘.. the purely negative gesture of limiting phenomena without providing any positive content that would fill out the space beyond the limit.’ [Žižek, 1993, 21]

From Hegel’s Realphilosophie of 1805-6:

The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains everything in its simplicity — an unending wealth of presentations, images, none of which occurs to him or is present … here shoots out a bloody head, there a white shape … [Žižek, 1991a, 87; 1997b:8; 1992: 50; 1999b: 136] (139)

sharpe the Other is itself divided the Other does not exist

Sharpe, Matthew. Slavoj Žižek: a little piece of the real. Burlington Vt: Ashgate, 2004.

Žižek’s position is that ideology primarily captures subjects at the level of their unconscious beliefs, and that it does this by structuring their access to jouissance (99).

Žižek proposes … that the answer to how one can still speak from ‘outside’ of the big Other of a hegemonic ideological system comes from a more detailed ontology of this Other itself. … the Other is itself divided and/or inconsistent, and so contains the resources of its own critique (100).

Modernity, Žižek repeats, is that ‘enlightened’ epoch wherein: “… the symbolic substance (the “big Other” qua texture of symbolic tradition) can no longer contain the subject, can no longer hold him to his symbolic mandate. [Žižek, 1992: 134 (Sharpe’s italics)]

Žižek’s argument is that sexuality only emerges in the first place at the points of the failure of what can be sanctioned by social discourse (113).

butler frames of war

Judith Butler, Frames of War. New York: Verso, 2009.

The point, however will be to ask how such norms operate to produce certain subjects as “recognizable” persons and to make others decidedly more difficult to recognize. The problem is not merely how to include more people within existing norms, but to consider how existing norms allocate recognition differentially. What new norms are possible, and how are they wrought? What might be done to produce a more egalitarian set of conditions for recognizability? What might be done, in other words, to shift the very terms of recognizability in order to produce more radically democratic results? 6

Indeed, every normative instance is shadowed by its own failure, and very often that failure assumes a figural form. The figure lays claim to no certain ontological status, and though it can be apprehended as “living,” it is not always recognized as a life.

What one is pressing for, calling for, is not a sudden break with the entirety of a past in the name of a radically new future. The “break” is nothing other than a series of significant shifts that follow from the iterable structure of the norm. 169.

butler interview feb 2008 sexual difference

Italian interview Feb 2008 in Monthy Review Magazine (wow, times are a changin)
I am always surprised that, in Europe, these great divisions are made between Irigaray and the philosophers of sexual difference, on one side, and Butler, on the other, because in the USA we work in both lines. For me, this supposed contrast does not exist; in my classes I teach Irigaray. In my opinion, when we study the signiﬁcances that have been conferred on sexual reproduction and how it has been organised, we ﬁnd important convergences between Irigaray’s work and mine, because the question is:

how does the scene of reproduction come to be the deﬁning moment of sexual difference?
And what do we do with this?

And, in this respect, we ﬁnd various points of view: that of psychoanalysis, which underlines masculine dependence on the mother and at the same time its rejection; that which emphasises the importance of the maternal as a feminine value, as the basis for the feminist critique; and we can also ﬁnd another perspective that raises questions like:

why has sexuality been thought of in a restrictive form within the framework of sexual reproduction?
What does it mean that sexual difference is determined around the idea of reproduction?
What does it mean to think of non-reproductive sexuality in relation to this burdensome symbolic scene of reproduction?

Every nation-state, every national religious unit, wants to control reproduction, everybody is very uneasy about reproduction: the Spanish conservatives want to control reproduction, they say “no” to abortion. Why? Because it is through the control of women’s bodies that reproduction of the population is achieved and it becomes possible to reproduce the nation, the race, masculinity. We are all trying to change these values and work on them, trying to ﬁnd other spaces and possibilities for femininity, for masculinity, for that which is neither feminine nor masculine.

We have distinct conceptions about how to think this difference, but, for sure, we are all interested in exploring this difference. Given that we cannot assume a hard and fast division between these positions, I think there could be a dialogue between them: none of us want to accept the conception of sexual reproduction that transforms woman into a non-being that makes possible the being of man. We all start here, though we all have different strategies about how to move on.