subjectivity – Page 12

Ž agrees with Butler and ideology

Žižek audio of his talk given in June 2012 and there is a video of Žižek in conversation with Jonathan Derbyshire June 12 2012

This following is based on his talk June 15.

On Butler’s Performativity

Yes I agree, but this precisely IS the reality of the Cartesian subject. We experience ourselves as an abstract subjectivity where all our concrete embodiments are perceived as something ultimately contingent. Marx was very clear about this which is why he always emphasized the ambiguous character of the bourgeois order: which is of course the order of alienation and so on but at the same time an order creating the conditions for liberation. Namely, let’s take Descartes with his Cogito: It is precisely because Descartes saw the CORE OF THE SUBJECT abstraction I think therefore I am, in abstraction from all my particular features he was able in a wonderful way I know a formula of radical multicultural openness. It’s not enough just to be patronizingly open to others every arrogant Eurocentric can do this. Descartes says something else: he says when I was young, when I encountered people from other cultures I perceived their manners as stupid ridiculous and so on, but then I started to ask myself a question, what if from their standpoint our own particular are no less stupid and ridiculous and so on. This is quite a redemptive feature of modernity. YOU ACCEPT the relativity, historical contingency of YOUR OWN CULTURE. Of course, things are not as simple as that. This UNIVERSALITY is not a pure universality, it is a universality grounded in a concrete bourgeois constellation. But we must remember nevertheless for Marx it is this, the reduction of the subject to UNIVERSALITY and for Marx this is what defines PROLETARIAT. The Proletarian position is SUBJECTIVITY WITHOUT SUBSTANCE. As a worker all the result of your work is taken, you are reduced to abstract labour force,

This abstraction is at the same time a medium for freedom, it creates this position outside of substantial determinations you know, you are created by this and by that.

What is the Lesson: Marx emphasizes this: IT is NOT enough when creating bourgeois ideology … no no no idealism is wrong, we are always in material reality, suffering people working hard, exploiting NO! this is a form of ideology. I did take my son, to stock exchange and showed him what ideology is, you get free leaflets, people wrongly think stock exchange is abstract, but its really about concrete people exchange and so on … Marx says NO. We should avoid this DIRECT MATERIALISM.

On Commodity Fetishism: A commodity appears at the first glance as a simple object out there, nothing mysterious, it is ONLY THE THEORETICAL analysis which discovers THEOLOGICAL SPIRITUAL mysteries of a commodity. MARX IS NOT saying in ordinary life we are dealing with mystifications etc. Marx says almost the opposite, in our ordinary experience we think we are dealing with

In other words, that the world of commodities is a Hegelian world, he is not describing our wrong perception he is describing social reality. When Marx proposes as a formula of ideology:

They don’t know what they are doing but they are doing it.

It’s not that we are doing one thing and we misperceive it

NO. Marx knew very well, a concrete bourgeois subject is not a Hegelian, but but British nominalist, only concrete objects, no abstraction, it is only in his market action that he acts in a theological way. Your theological presuppositions, theology of the market, commodity fetishism, it is not in your awareness, but in your social interaction.

Lacan says the true formula of atheism is not “God is dead” but “God is unconscious.”

even if we are subjects of capitalism, we don’t believe, we are cynical. But BELIEF IS EMBODIED in our very SOCIAL PRACTICES.

You see a teenager, he think his father is a stupid jerk. He is right. But nonetheless, when you see this same teenager interacting with his father you will see a mixture of fear, respect, even love and so on. One thing is what he thinks, “My father is a jerk” but unconsciously he has a much more traumatized affectionate relationship with his father.

On the one hand our reality is cynical, nominalist on the other ideology and financial speculations, even if we experience ourselves as cynical atheists, we practice religion, TRUST IN THE MARKET. Did you notice how we can make fun of prosopopoeia, when objects can speak. In the early operas, you still have abstract concepts appearing as persons, poetry appears and sings, with psychological realism this becomes impossible. In Bertolt Brecht this prosopopoeia returns. This prosopopoeia returns with a vengeance, although we all know MARKET does NOT EXIST, it is not a subject, all there is we concrete individuals interacting, but this is NOT what we are saying, MARKETS expressed their doubt about these measures, MARKETS are not satisified, they will demand more sacrifice, what you effectively say is more important than what you want to say.

It is not that you say something, but you mean something else. The true SYMBOLIC cheating, you think you are just pretending to do something ha ha, I’m just pretending, but you don’t know that what you experience as a mask is the truth, and the inner distance you have towards it is a lie.

When you do something, this is the usual way we dupe ourselves through hypocrisy, no your inner life is a joke, what you think is a mask, the truth is what you do, the truth is out there. Marx and Freud, the unconscious truth is not, I go deep in myself, no the TRUTH IS OUT THERE, in the social relations and so on.

COMMODITY FETISHISM: An ideological formation, perverted spiritualism. An ideology that is the very core of the economic infrastructure. An objectively necessary illusion. It is an illusion that is embodied in social relations themselves. So even if you don’t believe in it subjectively, you still practice it.

It strangely persists even after you denounce it, you may grasp it as an illusion but it still persists. The mystery of the mask, then I pulled the mask off, look its still your stupid dad, then I put the mask on again and he was afraid, he knew it was me behind, a mask is never simply a mask, There is more truth in the mask.

Individual capitalists are the carriers of social roles, we can play the game, this humanist idea, we should not be reduced to our social roles, there is so much more depth in me, I love flowers etc. I can’t be reduced to a mask. THIS IS IDEOLOGY.

We are not monsters Israel soldiers, we are ordinary people, we have fear like you, we have ordinary feelings. This abstract pacifism. War is horrible, nonsensical killing. Yeah we are all human. Ok. Brecht precisely in a vulgar anti-psychological way, to reduce figures to masks, abstract social roles. A guy comes on stage, Hi I am a journalist, I am corrupted by bourgeoisie to exploit worker etc. There is a truth in it. In your personal experience all your psychological depth trauma is not your truth. YOUR TRUTH IS WHAT YOUR DOING OUT THERE

Lesson of Hegel: The structural necessity of illusion. Illusion constitutes reality. IF YOU TAKE AWAY THE ILLUSION REALITY ITSELF DISINTEGRATES.

The reality is the opposite one. Male chauvanist bonding, screw, get laid, but then in our cloud, one guy I like to do it on the forest, or on the beach, or reading a book and getting it from behind, I’ don’t care I’m reading my book. Freud is not vulgar pan-sexualism, what we are thinking about when we are doing that. There is no sexual relationship, even in the most passionate love, there is still NO complete coincidence or identity. You always need a fantasy, you are never alone, a certain fantasy scenario must be present. THIS WAS CLEAR TO MARX. This is why commodity fetishism is not an ideology. Commodity fetishm is not something in superstructure, an effect of the economic, it is something that makes consistent and livable the production process.

zupančič sexual difference and real pt 2 of 4

Video of this presentation March 2011

Here is the paper online without works cited page

Freud in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) he insists on the original nonexistence of any germ of two sexes (or two sexualities) in preadolescent time.

The auto-erotic activity of the erotogenic zones is, however, the same in both sexes, and owing to this uniformity there is no possibility of a distinction between the two sexes such as arises after puberty … Indeed, if we were able to give a more definite connotation to the concepts of “masculine” and “feminine,” it would even be possible to maintain that libido is invariably and necessary of a masculine nature, whether it occurs in men or in women and irrespectively of whether its object is a man or a woman.

In other words, at the level of the libido there are no two sexes. And if we were able to say what exactly is “masculine” and “feminine,” we would describe it as “masculine” — but we are precisely not able to do this, as Freud further emphases in the footnote attached to the quoted passage. 7

So, when confronted with the question of sexual difference, the first answer of psychoanalysis is: From the strictly analytical point of view, there is in fact only one sex, or sexuality.

Moreover, sexuality is not something that springs from difference (between sexes); it is not propelled by any longing for our lost other half, but is originally self-propelling (and “autoerotic”). Freud writes, “The sexual drive is in the first instance independent of its object; nor is its origin likely to be due to its object’s attractions.”

Does this mean that sexual difference is only and purely a symbolic construction? Here waits the other surprise (not unrelated to the first, of course) of the psychoanalytic stance: Sexual difference doesn’t exist in the symbolic either, or, more precisely, there is no symbolic account of this difference as sexual. “In the psyche, there is nothing by which the subject may situate himself as male or female being.”

That is to say, although the production of meaning of what it is to be a “man” or a “woman” is certainly symbolic—and massive—it doesn’t amount to producing sexual difference as signifying difference. In other words, sexual difference is a different kind of difference; it doesn’t follow the differential logic.

Mladen Dolar quote: “There is a widespread criticism going around that aims at the binary oppositions as the locus of enforced sexuality, its règlementation, its imposed mould, its compulsory stricture. By the imposition of the binary code of two sexes we are subjected to the basic social constraint. But the problem is perhaps rather the opposite: the sexual difference poses the problem of the two precisely because it cannot be reduced to the binary opposition or accounted for in terms of the binary numerical two. It is not a signifying difference, such that it defines the elements of structure. It is not to be described in terms of opposing features, or as a relation of given entities preexisting the difference One could say: bodies can be counted, sexes cannot. Sex presents a limit to the count of bodies; it cuts them from inside rather than grouping them together under common headings.”

And sex does not function as a stumbling block of meaning (and of the count) because it is considered morally naughty. It is considered morally naughty because it is a stumbling block of meaning.

This is why the moral and legal decriminalization of sexuality should not take the path of its naturalization (“whatever we do sexually is only natural behavior”).

We should instead start from the claim that nothing about (human) sexuality is natural, least of all sexual activity with the exclusive aim of reproduction. There is no “sexual nature” of man (and no “sexual being”). The problem with sexuality is not that it is a remainder of nature that resists any definite taming; rather, there is no nature here — it all starts with a surplus of signification.

If we now return to the question of what this implies in relation to ontology in general, and, more specifically, to the performative ontology of contemporary gender studies, we must start from the following, crucial implication: Lacan is led to establish a difference between being and the Real. The real is not a being, or a substance, but its deadlock. It is inseparable from being, yet it is not being. One could say that for psychoanalysis, there is no being independent of language (or discourse)—which is why it often seems compatible with contemporary forms of nominalism.

All being is symbolic; it is being in the Other. But with a crucial addition, which could be formulated as follows: there is only being in the symbolic — except that there is real. There “is” real, but this real is no being. Yet it is not simply the outside of being; it is not something besides being, it is — as I put it earlier — the very curving of the space of being. It only exists as the inherent contradiction of being.

Which is precisely why, for Lacan, the real is the bone in the throat of every ontology: in order to speak of “being qua being,” one has to amputate something in being that is not being.

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

We only arrive to being qua being by subtracting something from it — and this something is precisely that which, while included in being, prevents it from being fully constituted as being.

The real, as that additional something that magnetizes and curves the (symbolic) space of being, introduces in it another dynamics, which infects the dynamics of the symbolic, makes it “not all.”

Now, a very good way of getting closer to the relationship between sexuality as such (its real) and sexual difference is via an excerpt from a lecture by Joan Copjec, in which she made the following crucial observation:

“The psychoanalytic category of sexual difference was from this date [the mid-1980s] deemed suspect and largely forsaken in favor of the neutered category of gender. Yes, neutered. I insist on this because it is specifically the sex of sexual difference that dropped out when this term was replaced by gender.

Gender theory performed one major feat: it removed the sex from sex.

For while gender theorists continued to speak of sexual practices, they ceased to question what sex or sexuality is; in brief, sex was no longer the subject of an ontological inquiry and reverted instead to being what it was in common parlance: some vague sort of distinction, but basically a secondary characteristic (when applied to the subject), a qualifier added to others, or (when applied to an act) something a bit naughty.” [Copjec The Sexual Compact]

Goto Part 3

Zupančič sexual difference pt 1 of 2

Alenka Zupančič Sexual Difference and Ontology This paper was originally presented at the 2011 Summer School EGS

And here is a general discussion of ontology and realism: “One Divides Into Two: Negativity, Dialectics, and Clinamen,” held at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin in March 2011.

July 4, 2012 both Zupančič and Copjec particpated in a forum in Spain. Audio is here.

Traditional ontologies and traditional cosmologies were strongly reliant on sexual difference, taking it as their very founding, or structuring, principle. Ying-yang, water-fire, earth-sun, matter-form, active-passive—this kind of (often explicitly sexualized) opposition was used as the organizing principle of these ontologies and/or cosmologies, as well as of the sciences—astronomy, for example—based on them.

And this is how Lacan could say,“primitive science is a sort of sexual technique.”

At some point in history, one generally associated with the Galilean revolution in science and its aftermath, both science and philosophy broke with this tradition. And if there is a simple and most general way of saying what characterizes modern science and modern philosophy, it could be phrased precisely in terms of the “desexualisation” of reality, of abandoning sexual difference, in more or less explicit form, as the organizing principle of reality, providing the latter’s coherence and intelligibility.

The reasons why feminism and gender studies find these ontologizations of sexual difference highly problematic are obvious. Fortified on the ontological level, sexual difference is strongly anchored in essentialism—it becomes a combinatory game of the essences of masculinity and femininity. Such that, to put it in the contemporary gender-studies parlance, the social production of norms and their subsequent descriptions finds a ready-made ontological division, ready to essentialize “masculinity” and “femininity” immediately. Traditional ontology was thus always also a machine for producing “masculine” and “feminine” essences, or, more precisely, for grounding these essences in being.

When modern science broke with this ontology it also mostly broke with ontology tout court. (Modern) science is not ontology; it neither pretends to make ontological claims nor, from a critical perspective on science, recognizes that it is nevertheless making them. Science does what it does and leaves to others to worry about the (ontological) presuppositions and the (ethical, political, etc.) consequences of what it is doing; it also leaves to others to put what it is doing to use.

Rather, the sexual in psychoanalysis is something very different from the sense-making combinatory game—it is precisely something that disrupts the latter and makes it impossible. What one needs to see and grasp, to begin with, is where the real divide runs here.

Psychoanalysis is both coextensive with this desexualisation, in the sense of breaking with ontology and science as sexual technique or sexual combinatory, and absolutely uncompromising when it comes to the sexual as the irreducible real (not substance). There is no contradiction here.

The lesson and the imperative of psychoanalysis is not, “Let us devote all of our attention to the sexual (meaning) as our ultimate horizon”; it is instead a reduction of the sex and the sexual … to the point of ontological inconsistency, which, as such, is irreducible.

Here is her start on Judith Butler:

One of the conceptual deadlocks in simply emphasizing that gender is an entirely social, or cultural, construction is that it remains within the dichotomy nature/culture.

Judith Butler saw this very well, which is why her project radicalizes this theory by linking it to the theory of performativity. As opposed to expressivity, indicating a preexistence and independence of that which is being expressed, performativity refers to actions that create, so to speak, the essences that they express. Nothing here preexists: Sociosymbolic practices of different discourses and their antagonisms create the very “essences,” or phenomena, that they regulate.

The time and the dynamics of repetition that this creation requires open up the only margin of freedom (to possibly change or influence this process in which sociosymbolic constructions, by way of repetition and reiteration, are becoming nature — “only natural,” it is said.

What is referred to as natural is the sedimentation of the discursive, and in this view the dialectics of nature and culture becomes the internal dialectics of culture. Culture both produces and regulates (what is referred to as) nature. We are no longer dealing with two terms: sociosymbolic activity, and something on which it is performed; but instead, we are dealing with something like an internal dialectics of the One (the discursive) that not only models things but also creates the things it models, which opens up a certain depth of field. Performativity is thus a kind of onto-logy of the discursive, responsible for both the logos and the being of things.

To a large extent, Lacanian psychoanalysis seems compatible with this account, and it is often presented as such. The primacy of the signifier and of the field of the Other, language as constitutive of reality and of the unconscious (including the dialectics of desire), the creationist aspect of the symbolic and its dialectics (with notions such as symbolic causality, symbolic efficiency, materiality of the signifier) …

All of these (undisputed) claims notwithstanding, Lacan’s position is irreducibly different from the above performative ontology. In what way exactly? And what is the status of the real that Lacan insists upon when speaking of sexuality?

Lacan also starts with a One (not with two, which he would try to compose and articulate together in his theory).

He starts with the One of the signifier. But his point is that, while this One creates its own space and beings that populate it (which roughly corresponds to the space of performativity described above), something else gets added to it. It could be said that this something is parasitic of performative productivity; it is not produced by the signifying gesture but together with and “on top of” it.

It is inseparable from this gesture, but, unlike how we speak of discursive creations/beings, it is not created by it. It is neither a symbolic entity nor one constituted by the symbolic; rather, it is collateral to the symbolic. Moreover, it is not a being: It is discernable only as a (disruptive) effect within the symbolic field, yet it is not an effect of this field, (it is NOT) an effect of the signifier; the emergence of the signifier is not reducible to, or exhausted by the symbolic.

The signifier does not only produce a new, symbolic reality (including its own materiality, causality, and laws); it also “produces,” or opens up, the dimension that Lacan calls the Real. This is what irredeemably stains the symbolic, spoils its supposed purity, and accounts for the fact that the symbolic game of pure differentiality is always a game with loaded dice. This is the very space, or dimension, that sustains the previously mentioned “vital” phenomena (the libido or jouissance, the drive, sexualized body) in their out-of-jointness with the symbolic.

Sexuality (as the Real) is not some being that exists beyond the symbolic; it “exists” solely as the curving of the symbolic space that takes place because of the additional something produced with the signifying gesture.

This, and nothing else, is how sexuality is the Real.

Starting from sexuality’s inherent contradictions — from its paradoxical ontological status, which precisely prevents us from taking it as any kind of simple fact — psychoanalysis came to articulate its very concept of the Real as something new.

The Real is not predicated on sexuality; it is not that “sexuality is the real” in the sense of the latter defining the ontological status of the former. On the contrary, the psychoanalytic discoveries regarding the nature of sexuality (and of its accomplice, the unconscious) have led to the discovery and conceptualization of a singularly curved topological space, which it named the Real.

The antagonism conceptualized by psychoanalysis is not related to any original double, or original multiple, but to the fact that a One introduced by the signifier is always a “One plus” — it is this unassignable plus that is neither another One nor nothing that causes the basic asymmetry and divide of the very field of the One .

The most general, and at the same time precise, Lacanian name for this plus is jouissance, defined by its surplus character. …

The Other is not the Other of the One ; it is the Lacanian name for the “One plus,” which is to say, for the One in which this plus is included and for which it thus has considerable consequences. This, by the way, is also why the Other referred to by Lacan is both the symbolic Other (the treasury of signifiers) and the Other of jouissance, of sexuality.

The first and perhaps most striking consequence of this is that human sexuality is not sexual simply because of its including the sexual organs (or organs of reproduction). Rather, the surplus (caused by signification) of jouissance is what sexualizes the sexual activity itself, endows it with a surplus investment (one could also say that it sexualizes the activity of reproduction).

This point might seem paradoxical, but if one thinks of what distinguishes human sexuality from, let’s say, animal or vegetal sexualities, is it not precisely because of the fact that human sexuality is sexualized in the strong meaning of the word (which could also be put in a slogan like, “sex is sexy”)? It is never “just sex.” Or, perhaps more precisely, the closer it gets to “just sex,” the further it is from any kind of “animality” (animals don’t practice recreational sex).

This constitutive redoubling of sexuality is what makes it not only always already dislocated in respect to its reproductive purpose but also and foremost in respect to itself. The moment we try to provide a clear definition of what sexual activity is, we get into trouble. We get into trouble because human sexuality is ridden with this paradox: The further the sex departs from the “pure” copulating movement (i.e., the wider the range of elements it includes in its activity), the more “sexual” it can become. Sexuality gets sexualized precisely in this constitutive interval that separates it from itself.

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.

metonymy

A figure of speech that replaces the name of one thing with the name of something else closely associated with it, e.g.

the bottle for alcoholic drink,
the press for journalism,
skirt for woman,
Mozart for Mozart’s music,
the Oval Office for the US presidency.

A well‐known metonymic saying is the pen is mightier than the sword (i.e. writing is more powerful than warfare).

A word used in such metonymic expressions is sometimes called a metonym. … An important kind of metonymy is synecdoche , in which the name of a part is substituted for that of a whole (e.g. hand for worker), or vice versa. Modern literary theory has often used ‘metonymy’ in a wider sense, to designate the process of association by which metonymies are produced and understood: this involves establishing relationships of contiguity between two things, whereas metaphor establishes relationships of similarity between them.

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.

wendy brown interview 2010

Interview Wendy Brown conducted around April 2010

CPS: You have argued … that neoliberalism does not simply promote economic policies but to quote you “disseminates market values into every sphere of human activity.” What distinguishes your perspective here from the despair found in someone like Adorno? What would it require to translate the despair that many people experience in very personal and de-politicized ways into a form of political mobilization?

Wendy Brown: That is an interesting question because it assumes that neoliberalism produces despair. I wish it did but I am not convinced that it does. I think that the process that some of us have called neoliberalization actually seizes on something that is just a little to one side of despair that I might call something like a quotidian nihilism. By quotidian, I mean it is a nihilism that is not lived as despair; it is a nihilism that is not lived as an occasion for deep anxiety or misery about the vanishing of meaning from the human world.

Instead, what neoliberalism is able to seize upon is the extent to which human beings experience a kind of directionlessness and pointlessness to life that neoliberalism in an odd way provides.

It tells you what you should do: you should understand yourself as a spec of human capital, which needs to appreciate its own value by making proper choices and investing in proper things. Those things can range from choice of a mate, to choice of an educational institution, to choice of a job, to choice of actual monetary investments – but neoliberalism without providing meaning provides direction.

In a sad way it is seizing upon a certain directionlessness and meaninglessness in late modernity. Again, I am talking mainly about the Euro-Atlantic world: without providing meaning, it provides direction. So I think it is quite a different order of things from the one that Adorno was describing.

CPS: [re.] the crisis within the humanities. You were arguing against the way that there is such a specialization and jargonization of what we do – where it becomes hard to explain what we do to people outside of academia. Do you think this kind of insulation within academia helps feed political ignorance and this divide?

Wendy Brown: Sure, we’ve really lost the ability – and I am not blaming us as individuals – it is really part of a creation of niche industries everywhere in capitalism today. But, we’ve really lost the ability as social and cultural scholars – I want to say humanists but I am trying to get social scientists in there too – we’ve lost the ability to be able to talk about what we do and promulgate the knowledge we have in an everyday fashion. I think that happens in the classroom and it is not even just a question of what is outside. More and more, for example, political science educates its undergraduates in the profession of political science, rather than in the study of politics. That means we are cranking out students who may know how to behave like professional political scientists but they don’t really know how to analyze political problems.

[…] I’ve been working for a couple of years on something I hope to finish in the next year, which is a rethinking of Marx’s critique of religion. What I am trying to do there is think about what is often treated as an early and relatively unimportant concern of Marx, one that he is presumed to have dropped once he moves on to full-blown materialism and study of political economy. What I am doing is tracing the ways in which his engagement with Feuerbach and his critique of religion extends all the way through his work right up into Das Kapital. One of the things that has allowed me to see is the ways in which Marx can contribute to understanding a contemporary problem of ours, which is this: why is it that at the very moment that capitalism seems finally to have painted all the colors of the globe and really has ascended as a global power – why is that moment coterminous with the resurgence of world religions?

Marx is often thought to not be able to help us think that problem at all because Marx is usually thought to be saying that capitalism secularizes and even abolishes religion and that religion is one of the casualties – in his sense, good casualties – of capitalism’s desacralization of the world. I think that is a wrong reading. I actually think Marx has a deep understanding of just how religious capital is and how much it requires and entails religion. That is what the re-reading of Marx is for, and I hope that book will be done in another year, but we’ll see.

parallax kant sade

So, far from announcing a triumphant solution, Lacan’s “Kant avec Sade,” his assertion of Sade as the truth of Kant, rather names an embarrassing problem that Lacan failed to resolve — and did not even fully confront — in his Ethics seminar: how are we to distinguish the appearance of pure desire—the violent gesture of transgressing the social domain of “servicing goods” and entering the terrifying domain of ate, that is, the ethical stance of the subject who “does not compromise his desire”—from the fully consummated “passion for the Real,” the subject’s disappearance-immersion in the primordial jouissance? 95

What, then, is the Fall from this Kantian perspective? Consider the first moments of a feminist awakening: it all begins not with a direct attack on patriarchy, but with experiencing one’s situation as unjust and humiliating, one’s passivity as a failure to act—is this very overwhelming awareness of failure not in itself a positive sign? Does it not, in a negative way, bear witness to the fact that women clearly perceive the need to assert themselves, that they perceive the lack of it as a failure? In the same way,“Fall” is the first step toward liberation—it represents the moment of knowledge, of cognizance of one’s situation. Thus “fall into sin” is a purely formal change: nothing changes in reality, it is just the subject’s stance toward reality that undergoes a radical change.

This means that the Fall in the religious sense (the knowledge of sin) is already a reaction to the Fall proper, the retreat from the “dizziness of freedom.”This is why it is crucial to realize that Kierkegaard leaps over the first contraction of finitude, the first emergence of a sinthome which makes the subject a creature proper, and goes directly from the primordial repose to the Prohibition.We should focus on the difference between the two withdrawals from the Void of infinity: the first one is the primordial contraction that creates the sinthome — it precedes Prohibition, while it is only the second one, the retreat from the “dizziness of freedom,” which is the Fall proper: with it,we enter the domain of the superego, of the vicious cycle of the Law and its transgression.

zupančič ethics of real

Zupančič, Alenka. Ethics of the Real. 2000
It is at precisely this point that we must situate the scandal of this dialogue: the terror of Turelure ‘s demands pales before the terror inflicted upon Sygne ( through the intermediary of Badilon ) by the Holy Father.

Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself, has not lost its currency. The commandment in question is evident in the profane discourse of ethics (and politics), where it presents itself under the flag of ‘cultural diversity’ and the associated commandment: ‘Respect the difference of the other.’ This commandment, it is true, does not ask that we love the neighbour/other — it suffices that we “tolerate” him or her. But it seems that at bottom, as Freud would say, it comes down to the same thing. … Thus Badiou has observed:

A first suspicion arises when we consider that the proclaimed apostles of ethics and of the ‘right to difference’ are visibly horrified by any difference that is even a bit pronounced. Because for them, African costumes are barbarous, Islamic fundamentalists are frightening, as is the Chinese totalitarian, and so on. In truth, this famous “other” is not presentable unless he is a good other, that is to say, insofar as he’s the same as us … Just as there is no freedom for the enemies of freedom, so there is no respect for those whose difference consists precisely in not respecting differences.

That is to say: one finds here the same conjuncture as in the case of the commandment to ‘love thy neighbour’: what happens if this neighbour is ‘wicked’, if he or she has a completely different idea of the world, if he or she gets his or her enjoyment in a manner that conflicts with mine?

When Lacan, in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, comments on the commandment ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’, and on Freud’s hesitation regarding this subject, he formulates its impasse with essentially same words as Badiou uses in speaking of the ‘right to ‘difference ‘ :

My egoism is quite content with a certain altruism, altruism of the kind that is situated on the level of the useful. And it even becomes the pretext by means of which I can avoid taking up the problem of the evil I desire, and that my neighbour desires also … What I want is the good of others in the image of my own. That doesn’t cost so much. What I want is the good of others provided that it remain in the image of my own.

we cannot conceive of radical alterity, of the ‘completely other’ (to which Lacan gives the Freudian name das Ding [the Thing]), without bringing up the question of the Same (as opposed to the similar). The similar [le semblable] presupposes and necessitates difference; it requires — in Badiou’s terms – a multiplicity, even an ‘infinite multiplicity’.

Contrary to this, the problem of enjoyment is the problem of the Same, which must be excluded so that this multiplicity can be closed, or ‘united’.

The moment the similar gives way to the Same, evil appears, and with it the hostility associated with the ‘completely other’.

Sygne’s real ethical act does not consist simply in her sacrifice of everything that is dearest to her; this act is, rather, to be found in the final scene of the play: the act in the proper sense of the term, the ethical act, resides in Sygne’s ‘no’ It is only this ‘no’ that propels her sacrifice into the dimension of the real. Let us now turn to this ‘no’ to determine its status, and to specify the relation between the two scenes or ‘events’ in question, Sygne’s sacrifice and her ‘no’.

The thesis which seems the most questionable is the one according to which we realize at the end that Sygne, ‘by some part of herself’, had not really given way or adhered to the politico-religious compromise demanded of her. Contrary to this reading we would insist that:

1. Her act (of sacrifice) is not an instance of ‘giving up on one’s desire ‘ but, rather, one of pure desire; it is characteristic of the logic of desire itself to have as its ultimate horizon the sacrifice of the very thing in the name of which Sygne is ready to sacrifice everything.

2. There is in fact a connection that leads from ‘Sygne’s choice ‘ (her sacrifice) to her final ‘ no ‘. That is to say: without her initial choice, Sygne would never have reached an occasion for Versagung, and — it follows from this —

3 . In the final analysis, it is precisely Badilon who leads her to this ‘negation’; this means that he is not the simple opposite of the analyst but that, in a certain respect, he ‘personifies’ the position of the analyst.

Maxim of ethics of desire: Sadder than to lose one’s life is it to lose one’s reason for living.

Sacrifice everything, including her life to HONOUR (her reason to live).

Life is situated not in the register of being, but in the register of having, HONOUR is something that belongs to the very being of Sygne. 231

It is not this choice: Life or HONOUR

It is this choice: if HONOUR is the only thing left to her, if she has nothing else to give, she will have to give this last thing 231

The logic of Sygne’s sacrifice remains inscribed in the logic of desire, and represents the ultimate horizon of her ‘fundamental fantasy’. But the paradox here is that the moment Sygne attains this ultimate horizon, she is already obliged to go beyond it, to leave it behind.

ethics zupancic review

Jason B. Jones. “The Real Happens” Emory University jbjones AT emory.edu Review of: Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan. New York: Verso, 2000.

The point of Lacan’s identification of the Real with the impossible is not simply that the Real is some Thing that is impossible to happen. On the contrary, the whole point of the Lacanian concept of the Real is that the impossible happens. This is what is so traumatic, disturbing, shattering–or funny–about the Real. The Real happens precisely as the impossible. (“Signs”)

Ethics of the Real merits the serious attention of anyone interested in one of the great ethical crises of our time: Why is nothing but fundamentalism deemed worth dying for any longer?
Continue reading “ethics zupancic review”

interpellation althusser

From Protic, N. notes from Literary Theory

The term is central to his account of ideology as the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence. It names the non-coercive process whereby a subject is called upon by a particular social formation to misrecognize themselves as a subject and thereby forget that they are constituted by society rather than constitutive of society as they henceforth imagine themselves to be. Ideology recruits individuals and transforms them into subjects (which for Althusser implies that they are simultaneously the subjects of society, meaning the products of society, and subjected to society, meaning subordinate to society) by persuading them to occupy a subject position it has prepared for them and see themselves in that otherwise vacant position. … But this process should not be thought of as a kind of becoming; for Althusser ideology is eternal, so one is always already interpellated, or to put it another way ideology has no outside—one is always already inside ideology. The pivotal notion of misrecognition is drawn from French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s account of the mirror stage. … Althusser hypothesizes that just as babies look in the mirror and misrecognize their virtual image as their actual self, so under conditions of ideology individuals misrecognize socially produced virtual representations as their actual self. This concept (directly and indirectly) has been used to great effect by a variety of radical minority groups to argue the social and cultural importance of affirmative representations of politically marginalized groups.

5 regrets of the dying

Here are the top five regrets of the dying:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

“This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it.”

2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

“This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship. Women also spoke of this regret, but as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.”

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

“Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result.”

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

“Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying.”

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

“This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called ‘comfort’ of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content, when deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again.”