Category: resistance

Benanav

Verso Live October 29, 2020 Figure out whether automation story: why is there few jobs, look at manufacturing sector. We can look at stats to see how many robots. Claim of industry is that its already happened.

DE-INDUSTRIALIZATION: many countries, Mexico has been de-industrializing, even China has been de-industrializing. If were the case that automation is taking off, you would expect labour productivity to be rising, this is counter-intuitive, but stats, the remaining workers appearing to produce more output per hour, but this isn’t happening. Labour productivity is not increasing.

More and more is being produced with fewer workers. Technology is always transforming, certain jobs are disappearing due to automation i.e. travel agents, but it’s due to OVERCAPACITY and Overproduction, so many suppliers have come online, its hard for producer to expand its output without taking some from others, heightened competition, lots of pressure to hold worker wages down. Hyper competition at the global level is expression of this OVER-capacity.

Continue reading “Benanav”

The Combahee River Collective Statement

NONAME BOOK CLUB

https://nonamebooks.com/Free-Reading-Program#combahee-river-collective-statement

We are excited to announce the launch of our political education series! Each month we will offer 1 essay as an alternative to our monthly book picks. For #BlackAugust we will read “Until Black Women Are Free, None of Us Will Be Free”.

Until Black Women Are Free, None of Us Will Be Free: Barbara Smith and the Black feminist visionaries of the Combahee River Collective
by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Reference reading:
The Combahee River Collective Statement
by The Combahee River Collective

varoufakis

For Europe’s sake, Britain must not be defeated — op-ed in The Sunday Times September 10, 2017.

Reading between the lines, the message to London from the EU propaganda machine is fourfold:

  • The EU will not budge. Brussels’s worst nightmare is a mutually advantageous economic agreement that other Europeans may interpret as a sign that a mutiny against Europe’s establishment may be worthwhile. To ensure that there will be no such deal, Barnier and the European Commission have not been given a mandate to negotiate any concessions to Britain regarding future arrangements such as a free trade agreement.
  • Angela Merkel will not step in to save the day. The only national leader who is capable of intervening therapeutically did not do this for Greece and she will not do it for Britain.
  • London must not try to bypass the rule of EU law. Every time London makes a proposal, Brussels will reject it as either naive or in conflict with “the rule of EU law”; a legal framework for exiting so threadbare that it offers no guidance at all regarding the withdrawal of a member state from the union. In this light, when they speak of the “rule of law” what they really mean is the logic of brute force backed by their indifference to large costs inflicted on both sides of the English Channel.
  • Prepare your people for total capitulation — that is your only option.

None of this is new. It springs out of the EU playbook that was thrown at me during our 2015 negotiations. I had bent over backwards to compromise on a deal that was viable for Greece and beneficial to the rest of the eurozone. It was rejected because being seen to work with us risked giving ideas to the Spaniards, the Italians, indeed the French, that there was utility to be had from challenging the EU establishment. Continue reading “varoufakis”

hegel democracy

Žižek, Slavoj. “Reply: What to Do When Evil Is Dancing on the Ruins of Evil” positions: east asia cultures critique, Volume 19, Number 3, Winter 2011, pp. 653-669 (Article)

So what does it mean to begin from the beginning again? One should bear in mind that 1990 was not only the defeat of communist state socialism but also the defeat of the Western social democracy. Nowhere is the misery of today’s Left more palpable than in its “principled” defense of the social-democratic welfare state: the idea is that, in the absence of a feasible radical Leftist project, all that the Left can do is to bombard the state with demands for the expansion of the welfare state, knowing well that the state will not be able to deliver. This necessary disappointment will then serve as a reminder of the basic impotence of the social- democratic Left and thus push the
people toward a new radical revolutionary Left. It is needless to add that such a politics of cynical “pedagogy” is destined to fail, since it fights a lost battle: in the present politico-ideological constellation, the reaction to the inability of the welfare state to deliver will be rightist populism.

In order to avoid this reaction, the Left will have to propose its own positive project beyond the confines of the social- democratic welfare state.

One should never forget that 1989 was the defeat of both tendencies of the modern statist Left, communist and social- democratic. This is also why it is totally erroneous to put the hopes on strong (fully sovereign) nation-states (which can defend the acquisitions of the welfare state) against transnational bodies such as the European Union which, so the story goes, serve as the instruments of global capital to dismantle whatever remained of the welfare state. From here, it is only a short step to accept the “strategic alliance” with the nationalist Right worried about the dilution of national identity in transnational Europe.

But the trickiest mode of the false fidelity to twentieth-century commu-nism is the rejection of all “really existing socialisms” on behalf of some authentic working- class movement waiting to explode … a traditional Marxist certain that— sooner or later, we just have to be patient and wait— an authentic revolutionary work-ers movement will arise again, victoriously sweeping away the capitalist rule as well as the corrupted official Leftist parties and trade unions. … the surviving Trotskyites who continued to rely on the trust that, out of the entire crisis of the Marxist Left, a new authentic revolution-ary working- class movement would somehow emerge.

So where are we today? Alain Badiou wonderfully characterized the postsocialist situation as “this troubled situation, in which we see Evil dancing on the ruins of Evil”: there is no question of any nostalgia, the com-munist regimes were “evil”— the problem is that what replaced them is also “evil,” albeit in a different way. In what way?

Back in 1991, Badiou gave a more theoretical formulation to the old quip from the times of really existing socialism about the difference between the democratic West and the communist East: in the East, the public word of intellectuals is eagerly awaited and has a great echo, but they are prohibited to speak and write freely, while in the West, they can say and write whatever they want, but their word is ignored by the wide public.

Although Lukacs used the famous Hegelian couple “in- itself/for- itself” to describe the becoming- proletariat of the “empirical” working class as part of social reality, this doesn’t mean that class consciousness arises out of the “objective” social process, that it is “inscribed, almost programmed, in and by historical and social reality”: the very absence of class consciousness is already the outcome of the politico- ideological struggle. In other words, Lukacs doesn’t distinguish the neutral objective social reality from subjec-tive political engagement, not because, for him, political subjectivization is determined by the “objective” social process, but because there is no “objective social reality” that is not already mediated by political subjectivity.

This brings us to Badiou’s dismissal of the critique of political economy. Since he conceives economy as a particular sphere of positive social being, he excludes it as a possible site of a “truth-event.” But once we accept that economy is always political economy, that is, a site of political struggle, and that its depoliticization, its status as a neutral sphere of “servicing the goods,” is in itself always-already the outcome of a political struggle, then the prospect opens up of the repoliticization of economy and thus of its reassertion as the possible site of truth-event.

Badiou’s exclusive opposition between the “corruptive” force of economy and the purity of the communist idea as two incompatible domains introduces an almost gnostic tone into his work: on the one side the noble citoyenstruggling on behalf of the principled axiom of equality, on the other side the “fallen” bourgeois, a miserable “human animal” striving for profits and pleasures. The necessary outcome of such a gap is terror: it is on account of the very purity of the communist idea motivating the revolutionary process, of the lack of “mediation” between this Idea and social reality, that the Idea can intervene into historical reality without betraying its radical character only in the guise of self- destructive terror.

This is why the “critique of political economy” is crucial if we are to surmount this deadlock: only through a change in the structure of capitalism can the circle of necessary defeats be broken.

It is crucial to clearly distinguish here between two impossibilities: the impossible-real of a social antagonism and the impossibility on which the predominant ideological field focuses. Impossibility is here redoubled, it serves as a mask of itself, that is, the ideological function of the second impossibility is to obfuscate the real of the first impossibility.

Today, the ruling ideology endeavors to make us accept the “impossibility” of a radical change, of abolishing capitalism, of a democracy not constrained to parliamentary game, and so on, in order to render invisible the impossible/real of the antagonism that cuts across capitalist societies.

This real is impossible in the sense that it is the impossible of the existing social order, that is, its constitutive antagonism— which, however, in no way implies that this real/impossible cannot be directly dealt with and radically transformed in a “crazy” act that changes the basic “transcendental” coordinates of a social field.

This is why, as Alenka Zupancic put it, Jacques Lacan’s formula of overcoming an ideological impossibility is not “everything is possible,” but “impossible happens.”

The Lacanian real/impossible is not an a priori limi-tation that should realistically be taken into account, but it is the domain of act, of interventions that can change its coordinates: an act is more than an intervention into the domain of the possible— an act changes the very coordinates of what is possible and thus retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility.

This is why communism also concerns the real: to act as a communist means to intervene into the real of the basic antagonism underlying today’s global capitalism.

In authentic Marxism, totality is not an ideal but a critical notion— to locate a phenomenon in its totality does not mean to see the hidden harmony of the whole, but to include into a system all its “symptoms,” antagonisms, inconsistencies, as its integral parts. In this sense, liberalism and fundamentalism form a “totality”: the opposition of liberalism and fundamentalism is structured so that liberalism itself generates its opposite.

So what about the core values of liberalism: freedom, equality, and so forth? The paradox is that liberalism itself is not strong enough to save them — that is, its own core — against the fundamentalist onslaught. Fundamentalism is a reaction— a false, mystifying, reaction, of course— against a real aw of
liberalism, and this is why it is again and again generated by liberalism. Left to itself, liberalism will slowly undermine itself— the only thing that can save its core is a renewed Left.

In short, the wager of the Western thought is that radical negativity (whose first and immediate expression is egalitarian terror) is not condemned to  remain a short ecstatic outburst after which things have to return to normal — on the contrary, radical negativity, this undermining of every traditional hierarchic order, can articulate itself in a new positive order in which it acquires the stability of a new form of life. This is the meaning of the Holy Spirit in Christianity: faith cannot only be expressed in, but exists as the collective of believers. This faith is in itself based on “terror,” indicated by Christ’s words that he brings sword, not peace, and that whoever doesn’t hate his or her father and mother is not his true follower, and so forth. The content of this terror is the rejection of all traditional hierarchic community ties, with the wager that another collective link is possible based on this ter-ror, an egalitarian link of believers connected by agape as political love.

Another example of such an egalitarian link based on terror is democracy itself. One should follow Claude Lefort’s description of democracy here: the democratic axiom is that the place of power is empty, that there is no one who is directly qualified for this post either by tradition, charisma, or his or her expert and leadership properties. This is why, before democracy can enter the stage, terror has to do its work, forever dissociating the place of  power from any natural or directly qualified pretender: the gap between this place and those who temporarily occupy it should be maintained at any cost.

And this is also why one can supplement in a democratic way Hegel’s deduction of monarchy. Hegel insists on the monarch as the “irrational” (contingent) head of state precisely in order to keep the summit of state power apart from the experts (for him embodied in state bureaucracy) — while the bureaucracy rules by expertise; that is, while bureaucrats are chosen on account of their abilities and qualifications, the king is a king by his birth, ultimately, by a lot, on account of natural contingency.

The danger Hegel is thereby trying to avoid exploded a century later in Stalinist bureaucracy, which is precisely the rule of (communist) experts: Stalin is NOT a figure of a master but the one who “really knows,” who is an expert in all imaginable fields, from economy to linguistics, from biology to philosophy.

But we can well imagine a democratic procedure maintaining the same gap on account of the irreducible moment of contingency in every electoral
result: far from being its limitation, the fact that the elections do not pretend to select the most qualified person is what protects them from the totali-tarian temptation— which is why, as it was already clear to the Ancient Greeks, the most democratic form of selecting who will rule us is by a lot.

That is to say, as Lefort has demonstrated, the achievement of democracy is to turn what is in traditional authoritarian power the moment of its great-est crisis, the moment of transition from one to another master when, for a moment, “the throne is empty,” which causes panic, into the very resort of its strength: democratic elections are the moment of passing through the zero point when the complex network of social links is dissolved into purely quantitative multiplicity of individuals whose votes are mechanically counted. The moment of terror, of the dissolution of all hierarchic links, is thus reenacted and transformed into the foundation of a new and stable positive political order.

Hegel is thus perhaps— measured by his own standards of what a ratio-nal state should be— wrong in his fear of the direct universal democratic vote (see his nervous rejection of the English Reform Bill in 1831). It is pre-cisely democracy (democratic universal election) that (much more appropri-ately than his own state of estates) accomplishes the “magic” trick of convert-ing the negativity (the self- destructive absolute freedom that coincides with the reign of terror) into a stable new political order. In democracy, the radi-cal negativity of terror, the destruction of everyone who pretends to identify with the place of power, is aufgehobenand turned into the positive form of democratic procedure.

Today, when we know the limitation of the formal democratic procedure, the question is whether we can imagine a step further in this direction of  the reversal of egalitarian negativity into a new positive order. One should look for traces of such an order in different domains, including the scientific communities. A report on how the CERN community (European Organi-zation for Nuclear Research) is functioning is indicative here: in an almost utopian way, individual efforts coexist with nonhierarchic collective spirit, and the dedication to the scientific cause (to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang) far outweighs material considerations.

We are in the middle of a new wave of “enclosure of commons”: the com-mons of our natural environs, of our symbolic substance, even of our genetic inheritance. … Antonio Negri was right with his anti- Socialist title Good- Bye Mr. Socialism: communism is to be opposed to socialism, which, instead of the egalitarian collective, offers a solitary organic community— Nazism was national socialism, not national communism. There can be socialist anti-Semitism; there cannot be a communist one. (If it appears, as in Stalin’s last years, it is an indicator that one is no longer faithful to the revolutionary event.) Eric Hobsbawm recently published a column with the title “Social-ism Has Failed. Now Capitalism Is Bankrupt. So What Comes Next?” The answer is communism. Socialism wants to solve the first three antagonisms without the fourth one, without the singular universality of the proletariat.

The only way for the global capitalist system to survive its long- term antago-nism and simultaneously to avoid the communist solution will be to reinvent some kind of socialism in the guise of communitarianism, populism, capitalism with Asian values, or whatsoever.

The future will be communist or socialist. How, then, are we to counter the threat of ecological catastrophe in a communist way? It is here that we should return to the four moments of what Badiou calls the “eternal idea” of revolutionary- egalitarian justice. What is demanded is:

– strict egalitarian justice. All people should pay the same price in eventual renumerations, that is, one should impose the same worldwide norms of per capita energy consumption, carbon dioxide emissions, and so on; the developed nations should not be allowed to poison the environment at the present rate, blaming the developing third world countries, from Brazil to China, for ruining our shared environment with their rapid development;

– terror. Ruthless punishment of all who violate the imposed protective measures, inclusive of severe limitations of liberal “freedoms” and technological control of the prospective lawbreakers;

– voluntarism. The only way to confront the threat of ecological catastrophe is by means of large- scale collective decisions that will run counter to the “spontaneous” immanent logic of capitalist development; as Walter Benjamin pointed out in his “Theses on the Concept of History,” today, the task of a revolution is not to help the historical tendency or
necessity to realize itself but to “stop the train” of history that runs toward the precipice of global catastrophe— an insight that gained new weight with the prospect of ecological catastrophe;

– and, last but not least, all this combined with the trust in the people (the wager that the large majority of the people support these severe measures, see them as their own, and are ready to participate in their enforcement). One should not be afraid to assert, as a combination of terror and trust in the people, the reactivation of one of the figures of all egalitarian-revolutionary terror, the “informer” who denounces the culprits to the authorities. (In the case of the Enron scandal, Time magazine was right to celebrate the insiders who tipped off the financial authorities as true public heroes.)

This is how what once was called communism can still be of use today.

badiou the subject

Badiou, Alain. Infinite Thought. Justin Clemens (Editor), Oliver Feltham (Editor) Continuum, 2004.

How can a modern doctrine of the subject be reconciled with an ontology?

When poststructuralists do engage with the problemof agency they again meet with difficulties, and again precisely because they merge their theory of the subject with their general ontology.  For example, in his middleperiod Foucault argued that networks of disciplinary power not only reach into the most intimate spaces of the subject, but actually produce what we call subjects. However, Foucault also said that power produces resistance. His problem then became that of accounting for the source of such resistance.

If the subject – right down to its most intimate desires, actions and thoughts – is constituted by power, then how can it be the source of independent resistance? For such a point of agency to exist, Foucault needs some space which has not been completely constituted by power, or a complex doctrine on the relationship between resistance and independence. However, he has neither. In his later works he deals withthis problem by assigning agency to those subjects who resist powerbymeans of anaesthetic project of self-authoring.  Again, the source of such privileged agency — why do some subjects shape themselves against the grain and not others? — is not explained.  5-6

For Badiou, the question of agency is not so much a question of how a subject can INITIATE an action in an autonomous manner but rather how a subject EMERGES through an autonomous chain of actions within a changing situation.

That is, it is not everyday actions or decisions that provide evidence of agency for Badiou. It is rather those extraordinary decisions and actions which ISOLATE an actor from their context, those actions which show that a human can actually be a free agent that supports new chains of actions and reactions. For this reason, not every human being is always a subject, yet some human beings BECOME subjects; those who act in FIDELITY to a chance encounter with an EVENT which disrupts the SITUATION they find themselves in. 6

The consequence of such a definition of the subject seems to be that only brilliant scientists, modern masters, seasoned militants and committed lovers are admitted into the fold. A little unfair perhaps? Is Badiou’s definition of the subject exclusive or elitist? On the one side, you have human beings, nothing much distinguishing them from animals in their pursuit of their interests, and then, on the other side, you have the new elect, the new elite of faithful subjects. This has a dangerous ring, and one could be forgiven for comparing it at first glance to Mormon doctrine.  7

However — and this is crucial — there is no predestination in Badiou’s account. There is nothing other than chance encounters between particular humans and particular events; and subjects MAY be born out of such encounters. There is no higher order which prescribes who will encounter an event and decide to act in relation to it. Thereis only chance. Furthermore, there is no simple distinction between subjects and humans. Some humans become subjects, but only some of the time, and often they break their fidelity to an event and thus lose their subjecthood.

Thus, Badiou displaces the problem of agency from the level of the human to the level of being. That is, his problem is no longer that of how an individual subject initiates a new chain of actions, since for him the subject only emerges in the course of such a chain of actions.

His problem is accounting for how an existing situation — given that BEING, for Badiou, is nothing other than multiple situations — can be disrupted and transformed by such a chain of actions. This displacement of the problem of agency allows Badiou to avoid positing some mysterious autonomous agent within each human such as ‘free will’. However, the direct and unavoidable consequence of the displacement is that the problem of agency becomes the ancient philosophical problem of how the new occurs in being. 8

In L’Etre et l’événement, Badiou’s solution IS SIMPLY TO ASSERT THAT ‘EVENTS HAPPEN’, events without directly assignable causes which disrupt the order of established situations. IF decisions are taken by subjects to work out the consequences of such events, NEW SITUATIONS emerge as the result of their work. 9

badiou 2007

Critical Inquiry 2008 interview with Alain Badiou conducted in Los Angeles 7 Feb. 2007.  (the pdf has been uploaded)

Question: What, today, on the eve of the presidential election, is the “postcolonial” situation of the French banlieues? More generally, how do you see the relationship between politics and violence in the “banlieue – monde”— what Mike Davis has recently called a “planet of slums”—that is in the process of globalizing itself in the twenty-first century?

BADIOU: Here we encounter a problem that we might call, in the Leninist tradition, the problem of the masses. That is, how can the political come to really organize or be present among the great masses of the planet? The fundamental problem is how we might enter into relations with this gigantic mass, with a population that is disorganized and chaotic, poor and deprived of everything, and often prey to criminal organizations, religious messianisms, and unchecked destructive violence. This is the calling and task of every contemporary emancipatory politics. After all, we are speaking of billions of people; address this problem or our horizon will remain too narrow.

In the nineteenth century, the problem was the arrival of the new proletarian masses on the political scene; in the twentieth century, it was the political emancipation of colonized peoples. In the first case we have the workers’ movement, the Paris Commune, and, finally, the revolution of1917; in the second, the wars of national liberation, Algeria, Vietnam, and the Chinese popular war. But today we can no longer speak either of the working masses, forged in the discipline of the factory, or of the peasant masses, localized and orga-nized on the basis of agrarian relations. The masses we speak of are profoundly atomized by capitalism. They are, for the most part, delivered over to conditions of existence that are precarious and chaotic.

They are a collective figure that still has no name. The category of the subproletariat doesn’t work in this case, since that category still presupposes the existence of an organized proletariat — which, in this case, does not exist. These masses are not organized according to the traditional categories of class, and so for the moment they are more or less entirely abandoned to the nihilism of capitalism.

Here the link with the French banlieues becomes clear. The distinc-tion between the Third World and the developed countries is increasingly less important. We have our Third World within the developed states. This is why the so-called question of immigration has become so important for us. The United States, for example, this nation of immigrants, is today constructing a wall and reinforcing its border security system against immigration, an action largely agreed upon by the Democrats — not necessarily concerning the wall but the need for a substantial increase in the border patrol.

In France, this rhetoric has poisoned political life for some time now. It feeds the extreme Right, but, ultimately, the Left always aligns itself with this rhetoric. It’s a very interesting phenomenon because it shows that these destructured masses, poor and deprived of everything, situated in a nonproletarianized urban environment, constitute one of the principal horizons of the politics to come. These masses, therefore, are an important factor in the phenomenon of globalization. The true globalization, today, would be found in the organization of these masses — on a worldwide scale, if possible — whose conditions of existence are essentially the same. Whoever lives in the banlieues of Bamako or Shanghai is not essentially different from someone who lives in the banlieues of Paris or the ghettos of Chicago. They might be poorer and in worse conditions, but they are not essentially different. Their political existence is characterized by a distance from the state — from the state and its clients, the dominant classes but also the middle classes, all of whom strive to maintain this distance. On this political problem, I have only fragmentary ideas.  It’s a question that is as difficult as the problem of organizing workers in the nineteenth century. I am convinced it is the fundamental problem today.

There have been important political experiments in this field — with the sans papiers in France, for example. But this is only one part of a problem that is extremely vast. We have no relations with the young people in revolt in the banlieues. It is once again a dimension of the crisis of negation. We should absolutely be able to think a subtractive form, however minimal, for this type of population. The sans papiers, for example, should have some form of minimal workers’ organization, since they often work in restaurants or in construction. This is why it is possible to make some progress in their struggle.

universal bartleby

Daly, Glyn. “Politics of the political: psychoanalytic theory and the Left(s).” Journal of Political Ideologies (October 2009), 14(3), 279–300

In this sense our autonomy is at once more precarious and more radical. Today we are bombarded with all sorts of choices (consumption, lifestyles, customization of computers, cell-phones, iPods, MySpace, Facebook, etc.) that identify us as ‘free individuals’. Yet we also possess the capacity to refuse the field of choosing and freedom; to reject the very modality of making changes to our lives and to break with the terms and conditions that are implicit in the latter.

Along the lines of the famous monologue from Trainspotting, we are in a position in which we can choose ‘not to choose life’.  This involves a more radical ethical freedom in which one can assume a certain position of ‘being impossible’: i.e. a position of refusing the terms of socio-political engagement and identitarian inscription; of refusing the terms of existing possibility.

In other words, what is needed is the development of forms of political subjectivity that do not embrace the conventions and protocol of existing hegemonic engagement.

Both Žižek’s Bartleybyan politics and Badiou’s politics of subtraction—i.e. the effective withdrawal from official political/participatory structures in such a way that it undermines simultaneously their symbolic purchase and constitutive logics—point in a different direction. Thus it is not so much a question of siding with the underdog in the game of existing democracy, but rather rejecting the very terms of the latter. In other words, it involves a critique of how democracy, through its mythologization of the idea that all underdogs are potential winners provided they play the game effectively, can become drawn into, and start to function on behalf of, the dominant politico-economic forces.

Second, and related, the political focus is placed not so much on marginalized groups/identities in general but rather on those whose position (or perhaps, more accurately, lack of position) embody the symptomal truths of our age — i.e. those whose situation appears naturalized as irresolvable, inert and beyond any feasible or direct solution.

These are the displaced and the destitute, the poverty-trapped, the vagrants, homeless and slum-dwellers. They are the radically excluded who are constitutively excessive, who cannot be accommodated and who present a kind of dysfunctional resistance that is nevertheless necessary to the functioning of the whole. They are the nameless ‘unfortunate’ who are passed over, treated with gentrified deliquescence and kept at a non-threatening distance through the ‘ethical’ concerns of charity and aid. What is needed is a politics that strives to overcome this distancing and to confront directly the primordial repressions that are central to the operation of capitalism as a global economic and socio-cultural system.

It is against this background that distinct approaches to the Lacanian traversing the fantasy emerge.

In radical democratic thought, the lesson of the traversal is one that tends to imply that we should assume a proper distancing in order to avoid getting caught up in the ‘cataclysmic desire of fantasy’. The problem therefore is one of adopting the right predisposition: to detach ourselves from objet (a) and to thereby affect a condition where we can ‘really enjoy our partial enjoyment’.

– Radical politics should consequently restrict itself to revolutionary-reform rather than revolution as such. In general, political engagement should not be excessive but should avoid substantial projects of overhaul in favour of the finite, provisional and pragmatic.

– Yet it is precisely in these terms that radical democracy appears to remain stuck in the register of desire: real emancipation is postponed eternally; we should be enthusiastic in the chase but never believe that we hold it in our grasp. This is a politics of desire, of infinite deferral. It becomes effectively ‘a constant search for something else… (with) no specifiable object that is capable of satisfying it’.

– Radical democratic desire, in this sense, is sustained by not having the ‘object’ of democracy. Democracy is always finally elsewhere. In this context, political subjectivity becomes one of establishing a kind of homoeostatic predisposition or proper distancing: one avoids excess in order to avoid disappointment in never attaining the real Thing.

Yet for Žižek traversing the fantasy does not mean to proceed to a non-fantasmatic or even a post-fantasmatic universe defined simply in terms of a containment and/or domestication of excess (this in itself would be something of a fantasy). There is no transcendence of the fantasmatic (the structuring of desire) as such.

Traversal in this sense is the opposite of exorcism. The point is not simply to expel excess but rather to inflect/assume the latter: to take responsibility for the inherency of excess that is integral to human drive.

Traversal, in this sense, puts one in touch with the object of drive — the hole presupposed by all demand and around which Being revolves.

To put it in the terms of Star Wars, the problem is not to bring balance to the force but to recognize that the force itself is the result of a certain (tilted) excess — a Real intervention/structuring — and that it is only through contingence with the latter that alternative possibilities (a different kind of force, or indeed political) can be shown.

The freedom which is gained here, which can be called post-fantasmatic, is thus not one of overcoming alienation but precisely a freedom through alienation in its most radical sense: i.e. the acceptance of the fact that imbalance/excess is our most basic condition towards which we cannot exercise any pre-given partiality or disposition.

Ž’s Lacanian radicalism can be thought of as something that tries to break out of the endless cycle of desire and to move towards a certain logic of love (involving both desire and drive).

While this may sound hopelessly sentimental, we should recall that in Lacan love is distinguished from desire in coming to terms with the non-ideal and the non-all and with accepting precisely the lack in the Other. Love is its own excess, an uncompromising ‘violence’ that goes beyond mere antagonism (i.e. it does not externalize blockage/failure but accepts this as the very condition of being). Through love one finds, and indeed makes, the universal-divine in all its contingent fragility and failing.

Perhaps a more appropriate way of thinking about this shift is in terms of opening the possibility of a politics of excess; a politics that effectively chooses ‘something else’ — i.e. something other than the current mode of choosing.

It refuses to embrace today’s alibis where social ‘problems’ are displaced onto charities, ethical committees, focus groups and all the institutions of political deferral up to and including existing democracy. In this way it places ‘us’ in the scene and refuses not to take responsibility for the contemporary totality and its symptoms. Such a politics is distinguished from radical democratic hegemony in that it does not give up on the real thing or view concrete projects as merely the ersatz fillers of the empty place.

The point is rather to see how this very division between the universal (as empty place) and particular (contingent filler) is inherent to the latter.

In other words, the universal-divine is manifested … through substantial engagement; through finding and making the universal in the particular and through ‘excessive’ commitment, without excuses or dependency on the Other.   It is a politics that affirms that the only way out is the way in.

badiou forcing event

Johnston, Adrian. Badiou, Zizek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change. Northwestern University Press, 2009.

The Zizekian interpretation of Lenin’s writings suggests something already proposed here: in certain circumstances, forcing must precede,rather than simply follow, an event. A forcing prior to the actual event itself must seize an opportunity arising by chance for disruption (i.e.,some sort of structural flaw or historical vulnerability, the “weakest link”as a proverbial chink in the armor of the status quo) inadvertently presented by the reigning state-of-the situation. This point of weakness within a state’s constellation must be grasped firmly beforehand (steered by the discerning gaze of one not fooled, not taken in, by the preexistent distribution of relations and roles as influenced by statist ideologies) in order to spark an event’s occurrence.

Badiou, by contrast, describes the labor of forcing as trans­piring only after the fact of an evental occurrence; the already-past event is identified following its having appeared and disappeared, and exclu­sively in the aftermath of this vanished winking can the work of stretching out the effects of its truth-consequences through forcing move forward  under the guidance of subjects-of-the-event.

Badiou treats events (including political ones)as anonymous and mysterious happenings. Badiouian events can not be forced into occurring; as others have justifiably described them, such moments just pop up within the current scene as out-of-nowhere miracles. This sort of purposive refusal to think through in precise details the preconditions for the genesis of events is incompatible with Lenin’s insistence that, in initiating a revolution, one must “prematurely” force an event before it actually transpires spontaneously (in the mode of organically emerging out of the defiles of sociohistorical trends) by deliberately and nimbly exploiting whatever small chances there are in a situation despite the overall absence of the “proper condi­tions” for this event’s blooming.

In short, Badiou’s adamant insistence on there being a theoretically unbridgeable divide between an event and its pre-evental background (including his position that all subjects, with their capacities for forcing, are post-evental) forecloses considering how concrete forms of engaged praxis might, in certain instances, participate in precipitating in advance an ensuing evental sequence. 133-134

zizek April 24 2012 Los Angeles

Žižek is in Los Angeles 3 days before I met him in Brockport

Why did God have to die on the cross?

– pay price of our sins , to whom?  Another guy, the devil??

– because justice must be done, this is paganism, God is not really the top, there is some kind of cosmic destiny in which god is subordinated

– we wouldn’t be grateful to god, like he’s a narcissist, PR, lets make god look good

Malbranche: god wanted to be admired, w/o Jesus sacrifice we wouldn’t all be lost, we would be redeemed automaticlly, god through us all into sin so he could save some of us. — a perverse God. There is something a little impenetrable today, which is covered over by the usual dogma today. When Napoleon took the crown and put it himself on the head, the Pope said to Napoleon, you try to ruin the church, but catholics have been trying for 2000 years

How exactly do you read those statements : I don’t bring peace and love I bring sword and fire, if you don’t love your parents … there is a system of de-traumatizing these statements – don’t read them too seriously, don’t get too attached to earthly objects obei wan kenobi philosophy.  The best answer: my god, I wasn’t prepared for this question … But you had 2000 years to prepare for this question!

Žižek solution:  when in the bible if you don’t hate your father, mother, it stands for entire power edifice social hierarchy, that is Christian message an egalitarian community outside of the power hierarchy. In Pagan religions you can only attain this in death … Christian an egalitarian collective is the Holy Ghost.

Book of Job: First great critique of ideology. why?  Things go terribly wrong for Job.  Each of his friends try to convince Job that there is a deeper meaning to his suffering.  The greatnest of Job he doesn’t say I’m innocent, only that these catastrophes have NO MEANING.  God comes and agrees with JOB.  GK CHESTERTON: Why did all this happen to me??  God’s reply is usually read as arrogance of god, the gap that separates us from God. Chesteron turns this around God’s answer: You think you are in trouble, look at the entire universe I created it’s one big mess.  God expresses his perplexity at his own creation.  This is an incredible ETHICAL REVOLUTION.  First step out of Pagan justice means: do your particular duty … this withdrawal culminates in the death of Christ: What dies on the cross: not God’s messenger, what dies on the cross is GOD of BEYOND himself, God as that TRANSCENDENT power that secretly pulls the strings.  Precisely god can no longer be conceived as we are in shit, but there’s a guy up there who secretly pulls the strings, NO this is no longer.  Something tremedous happens in Christianity.  After death of Christ we have not the Father but the HOLY SPIRIT.  where there is love between the two of you I AM THERE.

Paul Claudel:  Not we can trust God, but God has to trust us.  This is an important message of freedom.  In all other religions you have atheists, people who don’t believe in God, only in Christianity, God himself becomes for a moment an atheist.  Far from fashionable talk i.e.,  we are in neo-pagan era, NO we should stick to this tremendous explosive impact of what Christianity is telling us.

Not Dennett or Hitchens (DITCHKINS), to be an atheist, this AUTHENTIC atheism, in the sense of experiencing the radical absence of any transcendental guarantee, you have to go through Christianity.

Only through the Christian experience can you REACH THE ABYSS OF ATHEISM.  Ditchkins is some stupid sense there is some truth, but it doesn’t work, there is no insight of how a religion effectively works.  A whole dimension is missing in Ditchkins.  The status of BELIEF is very mysterious, do we really believe?  We don’t live in an era of hedonism, but in strictly controlled hedonism … celebrating sex, explaining it in pragmatic terms, like Dr. Ruth, yes sex, but healthy sex, beer without alcohol  The only hedonists today are those who take drugs and those who smoke.  This obsession with the danger of smoking … distinguished black guy smoking, “I’m from the South, and when I was young I remember racism, but it isn’t as bad as now as being oppressed for smoking.”

WE BELIEVE MORE THAN EVER.  beliefs in order to function, don’t have to be FIRST person beliefs, you can BELIEVE THROUGH OTHERS.  We are Atheists, but in order not to hurt our children we believe, and then you ask the children … you have a belief that no one believes in the FIRST person.   CANNED LAUGHTER  Prayer wheels

We need to believe that there is someone who believes, even if that someone is hypothetical

CHRISTIAN GESTURE: ABANDON OBJECTIFIED BELIEF.  Life is Beautiful movie: to make it a much better film, the father discovers at the end that THE SON KNEW THIS ALL THE TIME HE PRETENDED TO BELIEVE HIS FATHER TO PROTECT HIM. this is the christian reversal.

🙂 I don’t see what the difference here is between the Objectifying belief in prayer wheel or canned laughter. Okay. But he goes on to say that equally, belief occurs through 3rd parties, we don’t necessarily believe, as long as somebody believes for us.  I don’t really believe in Christmas, I do it for the kids. But he claims that the boy in Life is Beautiful  in an alternate ending, should all along have pretended to believe his father, rather than sincerely believing in his father’s stories about how it’s just an extended vacation etc.  That is, I think he is arguing that instead of disavowal, of claiming we don’t believe but as long as others believe for us, we turn it around, we avow our belief in something, though still pretend.  Why did the boy still need to pretend, even though he know his dad was full of crap?  It’s the fetishist disavowal.

fetishist disavowal: “I know very well that things are the way I see them /that this person is a corrupt weakling, but I nonetheless treat him respectfully, since he wears the insignia of a judge, so that when he speaks, it is the Law itself which speaks through him”. So, in a way, I effectively believe his words, not my eyes, i.e. I believe in Another Space (the domain of pure symbolic authority) which matters more than the reality of its spokesmen.

The cynical reduction to reality thus falls short: when a judge speaks, there is in a way more truth in his words (the words of the Institution of law) than in the direct reality of the person of judge – if one limits oneself to what one sees, one simply misses the point. This paradox is what Lacan aims at with his les non-dupes errent: those who do not let themselves be caught in the symbolic deception/fiction and continue to believe their eyes are the ones who err most.

What a cynic who “believes only his eyes” misses is the efficiency of the symbolic fiction, the way this fiction structures our experience of reality. The same gap is at work in our most intimate relationship to our neighbors: we behave AS IF we do not know that they also smell badly, secrete excrement, etc. – a minimum of idealization, of fetishising disavowal, is the basis of our co-existence.

And doesn’t the same disavowal account for the sublime beauty of the idealizing gesture discernible from Anna Frank to American Communists who believed in the Soviet Union? Although we know that Stalinist Communism was an appalling thing, we nonetheless admire the victims of the McCarthy witch hunt who heroically persisted in their belief in Communism and support for the Soviet Union.

🙂 And Žižek says this ending to A Beautiful Life is preferable? In what sense?  The Christian reversal, is this fetishist disavowal, take it upon ourselves as our belief, know that what we are relying on belief not relying on somebody else to believe for us, we don’t sub-contract our belief, we do it ourselves, we believe in order to believe.

Žižek continues: For me Church is today at a CROSSROADS: it could be authentic liberation, an authentic subjective experience, at the same time it can be terribly misused.

Good people do bad things: we are relatively decent people, we do need some strong mythopoetic structure to serve as a screen to convince us thta the horrors we do can be transubstantiated into a higher meaning: POETRY. No ethnic cleansing without POETRY. you must be de-sensitized, to rape ethnic cleansing, it is preciesly this ethnic founding mythic, sacred text religions that can do the job.  Rwanda massacre, a great poet was laying the foundations for the slaughter.   This is the MEGA MEGA dilemma, how to find the way here.  For me, the message of Christiantity is the opposite of this need for TRANSCENDENCE.  Modern world is not a world with too much freedom, I can’t speak dirty, I can’t beat my wife, by becoming ethnic fundamentalists, opens up a space of freedom.  I am ethnically cleansing for my country I can rape, I can kill.  If there is God, I am an instrument of god, then everything is permitted.

hallward on logics of worlds badiou

Hallward, Peter.On Badiou’s Logics of Worlds New Left Review 53 sept oct 2008 97-122.

French philosophy in the twentieth century was marked above all by two projects.1 For the sake of simplicity we might distinguish them with the labels of ‘subject’ and ‘science’. On the one hand, thinkers influenced by phenomenology and existentialism—Sartre, Fanon, de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty—embraced more or less radical notions of individual human freedom, and on that basis sought to formulate models of militant collective commitment that might engage with the forms of oppression or domination that constrain the subjects of a given situation. On the other hand, thinkers marked by new approaches in mathematics and logic, and by the emergence of new human sciences such as linguistics or anthropology, attempted to develop more adequate methods to analyse the fundamental ways in which a situation might be ‘structured in dominance’. In the 1960s in particular,many thinkers came to the conclusion that a concern for the subject or for individual freedom was itself one of the main mechanisms serving to obscure the deeper workings of impersonal and ‘inhuman’ structure, be it unconscious, ideological, economic, ontological, or otherwise.

Deleuze, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida—all sought to develop forms of thinking that might integrate or at least accommodate aspects of both these projects; and that, conditioned by a broadly ‘scientific’ anti-humanism, might decentre but not simply exclude the role of an active subject. What is immediately distinctive about Alain Badiou’s contribution to this endeavour is the trenchant radicalism of his own peculiar subject-science synthesis. Badiou formulates this synthesis in the uncompromising and unfashionable language of truth. Badiou’s chief concern has been to propose a notion of truth that holds equally true in both a ‘scientific’ and a ‘subjective’ sense. A truth must be universally and even ‘eternally’ true, while relying on nothing more, ultimately, than the militant determination of the subjects who affirm it.

By ‘holding true’ to their consequences, the militant partisans of such truths enable them to persist, and to evade the existing norms of knowledge and authority that otherwise serve to differentiate, order and stabilize the elements of their situation. The discoveries of Galileo or Darwin, the principles defended by the French or Haitian revolutionaries, the innovations associated with Cézanne or Schoenberg—these are the sorts of sequences that Badiou has in mind: disruptive and transformative, divisive yet inclusive, as punctual in their occurrence as they are far-reaching in their implications.

Within a situation, a truth is the immanent production of a generic and egalitarian indifference to the differences that (previously) structured that situation.

The two most important general notions that underlie this philosophy of truth are fidelity and inconsistency. However varied the circumstances of its production, a truth always involves a fidelity to inconsistency. The semantic tension between these terms is only apparent. Fidelity : a principled commitment, variously maintained, to the infinite and universalizable implications of a disruptive event. Inconsistency: the presumption, variously occasioned, that such disruption touches on the very being of being.

Inconsistency is the ontological basis, so to speak, of a determined wager on the infinitely revolutionary orientation and destiny of thought. Fidelity is the subjective discipline required to sustain this destiny and thus to affirm an ‘immortality’ that Badiou readily associates with the legacy of Saint Paul and Pascal. Inconsistency is what there is and fidelity is a response to what happens, but it is only by being faithful to the consequences of what happens that we can think the truth of what there is. In every case, ‘the truth of the situation is its inconsistency’, and ‘a truth does not draw its support from consistency but from inconsistency’.

To think the being of a situation as inconsistent rather than consistent is to think it as anarchic and literally unpresentable multiplicity. Badiou posits being as the proliferation of infinite multiplicity or difference, rather than as the orderly manifestation of stable and self-identical beings.

As far as the discourse of being is concerned, the multiple having priority over the one means that any figure of unity or identity, any conception of a being as a being, is itself secondary. Unity is the derivative result of a unifying or identifying operation performed upon a being that is itself without unity or identity, i.e. that in-consists. Badiou admits that we can only ever experience or know what is presented to us as consistent or unified, but it can sometimes happen, in the wake of an ephemeral and exceptional event, that we have an opportunity to think, and hold true to, the inconsistency of what there is. page 99

This means that unity or consistency is not itself a primordial ontological quality, and it implies that the unifying or structuring operation specific to each situation applies to material that in itself is not unified or structured, i.e. that is inconsistent. All that can be presented of such inconsistent being, however, from within the limits of the situation, is that which counts for nothing according to the criteria of the situation. What figures as nothing or ‘void’ will thus present inconsistency ‘according to a situation’.

In the situation of set theory (the situation that presents or counts instances of counting as such), inconsistency takes the form of a literally empty set, a null- or void-set — one that counts as zero. By analogy, in the situation of capitalism, a situation that counts only profits and property, what counts for nothing would be a proletarian humanity.

Now although it is an intrinsic determination of being that it be there, or that it appear (locally), nevertheless it is not exactly pure being-qua-being as such that appears: what appears of pure being is a particular quality of being, namely existence. Thanks to the equation of ontology and set theory, pure being-qua-being is essentially a matter of quantity and univocal determination: something either is or is not, with no intermediary degree. Existence, by contrast, is precisely a ‘quality’ of being, a matter of relative ‘intensity’ or degree.

Something is if it belongs to a situation, but it exists (in a world that manifests something of that situation) always more or less, depending on how intensely or distinctively it appears in that world. We might say for instance that while a great many things belong to the world of the US, it is normally arranged such that certain distinctively ‘American’ things—free speech, pioneers, private property, baseball, freeways, fast food, mobile homes, self-made men—appear or exist more intensely than other, dubiously ‘un-American’ things: ‘unassimilated’ immigrants, communists, supporters of Hezbollah or Hamas, for example.