subjectivity – Page 25

chantal mouffe

New Statesman Published 19 November 2009

You argue that politicians should seek to create a “vibrant ‘agonistic’ public sphere”. What do you mean by that?

What I have in mind is not simply a space for the expression of any kind of disagreement, but a confrontation between conflicting notions about how to organise society. This does not exist in Britain at the moment, because no political party clearly challenges the hegemony of neoliberalism. There are, of course, disagreements about a variety of issues, but what is lacking is a debate about possible alternatives to the current neoliberal model of globalisation. We have been told by advocates of New Labour that politics now takes place at the centre and that the categories of right and left have become obsolete.

Did the BBC contribute towards the creation of such a public sphere by putting the BNP’s Nick Griffin on Question Time?

In such a situation, which I designate as “post-political”, an agonistic debate cannot exist, and it is not by inviting Nick Griffin on Question Time that things are going to change. That does not mean that he should not have been invited. Indeed, if the BNP is allowed to present candidates at elections, there is no reason to ban its representatives from taking part in public debates. To criticise the BBC for inviting him is typical of themoralistic attitude that has replaced the political confrontation between left and right. Instead of trumpeting their moral condemnation, Labour politicians should be inspired to examine why some of their supporters are being attracted by the BNP. But moral indignation is easier and more self-gratifying than auto-critique.

What concrete changes in British politics would get us closer to your ideal of agonistic democracy?

My agonistic model of democracy acknowledges the existence in social life of antagonistic conflicts, conflicts that concern the configuration of power relations and the way society should be organised. Those conflicts cannot be solved by deliberation, and they will never be eliminated. The aim of a pluralist democracy is to provide the institutions that will allow them to take an agonistic form, in which opponents will treat each other not as enemies to be destroyed, but as adversaries who will fight for the victory of their position while recognising the right of their opponents to fight for theirs. An agonistic democracy requires the availability of a choice between real alternatives and that is precisely what is missing in Britain today. What would be needed to foster an agonistic democracy is a significant break from Third Way politics by Labour or the development of a new party with a clear left identity, like Die Linke in Germany.

You talk about a “post-political” era. What do you mean by this?

When I speak of the post-political, I am not agreeing with Third Way theorists on the need to think “beyond left and right” and the demise of the adversarial model of politics. We have no doubt been witnessing a blurring of the frontiers between left and right in recent decades, but this is not something that I celebrate. In my view, such a post-political situation represents a danger for democracy. I have tried in my recent work to show that our inability to envisage the problems with which we are confronted in a properly political way is the origin of a widespread disaffection with democratic institutions. This is a disaffection that, in several European countries, has led to the growing success of right-wing populist parties.

How has the global economic crisis influenced your thinking?

There was a moment at the beginning of the financial crisis when it seemed that the hegemony of neoliberalism had received a serious blow. After decades of being demonised, the state was suddenly called to the rescue. However, instead of implementing redistributive policies, the intervention of the state has been limited to rescuing the banks. There is, though, a positive aspect. I think there is an increasing awareness that the current model of development is unsustainable.

Interview by Nina Power

Feldner

Vighi, Fabio and Heiko Feldner. Žižek Beyond Foucault. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print.

act proper (radical agency)

performative activity within a hegemonic structure

What qualifies a free act, according to Žižek, is an intervention whereby “I do not merely choose between two or more options WITHIN a pre-given set of coordinates, but I choose to change this set of coordinates itself’ (Žižek, On Belief 2001c, 121).

For Lacan, there is no ethical act proper without taking the risk of … a momentary ‘suspension of the big Other’, of the socio-symbolic network that guarantees the subject’s identity: an authentic act occurs only when the subject risks a gesture that is no longer ‘covered up’ by the big Other (Žižek, 1993, Tarrying with the Negative 262-4).

Here is a crucial quote that pretty much sums up their (Butler and Žižek) respective differences, (okay its pretty condensed)

… only the Real allows us to truly resignify the Symbolic. (110)

Žižek maintains that for all Butler’s radicality, she remains caught up in a resistance at the level of the symbolic, that is, at the level of signification. Judy Butler’s work doesn’t touch the Real.

A quote by Žižek from the book:

we cannot go directly from capitalist to revolutionary subjectivity: the abstraction, the foreclosure of others, the blindness to the other’s suffering and pain, has first to be broken in a gesture of taking the risk and reaching directly out to the suffering other — a gesture which, since it shatters the very kernel of our identity, cannot fail to appear extremely violent. (Žižek, Revolotion at the Gates 2002a, 252)

dislocation and identity

Discourse Theory in European Politics., Howarth, David and Jacob Torfing, 2005 Palgrave.

The dislocation of the discursive structure means that the subject always emerges as a split subject that might attempt to reconstruct a full identity through acts of identification. … When it comes to the theory of the subject, post-structuralism has retained a rather structuralist view that threatens to reduce the subject to an objective location within the discursive structure … The idea that the subject simultaneoulsy occupies the position of being a worker, a woman, an environmentalist, and so on, might help us to combat class reductionism, but provides an inadequate understanding of the processes that lead to the formation of multiple selves. Here, the notion of dislocation provides a fruitful starting point.

The recurrent dislocations of the discursive system mean that the subject cannot be conceived in terms of a collection of structurally given positions. The discursive structure is disrupted and this prevents it from fully determining the identity of the subject. The does not mean we have to reintroduce an ahistorical subjectivity that is given outside the structure. The subject is internal to the structure, but it has neither a complete structural identity nor a complete lack of structural identity. Rather it is a failed structural identity. Because of dislocation, the subject emerges as a split subject, which is traumatized by its lack of fullness. The split subject might either disintegrate or try to recapture the illusion of a full identiy by means of identifying itself with the promise of fullness offered by different political projects. Hence a dislocated Russion party functionary might aim to reconstitute a full identity by identifying with the promise of Russion nationalism, neoliberalism, social democracy, or some religious movement. The split subject might identify with many different things a the same time. In this situation the hegemonic struggles will have to offer ways of articulating the different points of identification into a relatively coherent discourse. Social antagonism will play a crucial role for the attempt to unify dissimilar points of identification. The construction of a constitutive outside facilitates the displacement of responsibility for the split subject’s lack onto an enemy, which is held responsible for all evil. The externalization of the subject’s lack to an enemy is likely to fuel political action that will be driven by an illusionary promise: that the elimination of the other will remove the subject’s original lack 17.

dean don’t like butler

Dean, Jodi. Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies. Durham: Duke UP, 2009. Print.

– – -. Žižek’s Politics. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.

logic of desire to logic of drive, which means the discourse of the hysteric to discourse of psychotic

Žižek explans that, unlike desire, where the object emerges at the moment of its loss, in drive loss itself is an object.

Big other

genealogy of discourse theory

Jacob Torfing, “Discourse Theory: Achievements, Arguments, and Challenges” in Discourse Theory in European Politics. David Howarth, Jacob Torfing (eds). Palgrave, 2005. pp. 1-32.

As against Hume, it was Kant who argued that “perception and experience of empirical phenomena are made possible by some pregiven categories in the human mind.” Discourse theory agrees that we should focus on the conditions of possibility of our perceptions, utterances, and actions, rather than on the factual immediacy or hidden meaning of the social world.” (10)

There have been many attempts in the history of Western thought to explain the course of history, the structure of society, and the identities of subjects and objects by reference to an underlying essence which is given in a full presence and plenitude and not implicated in any historical processes of structuration. God, Reason, Humanity, Nature, and the Iron Laws of Capitalism are some of the celebrated candidates for this transcendental determining centre … Discourse theory aims to draw out the consequences of giving up the idea of a transcendental centre. The result is not total chaos and flux, but playful determination of social meaning and identities within a relational system which is provisionally anchored in nodal points that are capable of partially fixing a series of floating signifiers. (13).

Two differences between the classical transcendentalism of Kant and poststructuralist discourse theory:

1. The conditions of possibility are not invariable and ahistorical as Kant suggest, but subject to political struggles and historical transformation. As such, discourse theory adopts a quasi-transcendental view of the conditions of possibility.

2. Discourse theory does not see the conditions of possibility as an inherent feature of the human mind, but takes them to be a structural feature of contingently constructed discourses. Discourse theory focuses neither on observable facts nor on deep meanings, but on the historical formation of the discursive conditions of social being.

on the subject

When it comes to the theory of the subject, post-structuralism has retained a rather structuralist view that threatens to reduce the subject to an objective location within the discursive structure, or, as Louis Althusser phrased it: to a ‘mere bearer of the structure’. The idea that the subject simultaneously occupies the position of being a worker, a woman, an environmentalist, and so on, might help us to combat class reductionism, but provides an inadequate understanding of the processes that lead to the formation of multiple selves.

Žižek aims at butler

Žižek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy Then as Farce. New York: Verso, 2009. Print.

It is as if the three components of the production process — intellectual planning and marketing, material production, the provision of material resources — are increasingly autonomized, emerging as separate spheres. In its social consequences, this separation appears in the guise of the “three main classes” in today’s developed societies, which are precisely not classes but three fractions of the working class:

– intellectual laborers,

– the old manual working class,

– and the outcasts (the unemployed, those living in slums and other interstices of public space) .

The working class is thus split into three, each fraction with its own “way of life” and ideology: the enlightened hedonism and liberal multiculturalism of the intellectual class; the populist fundamentalism of the old working class; more extreme and Singular forms of the outcast fraction.

In Hegelese, this triad is clearly the triad of the universal (intellectual workers), the particular (manual workers), and the Singular (outcasts).

The outcome of this process is the gradual disintegration of social life proper, of a public space in which all three fractions could meet, and “identity” politics in all its forms is a supplement for this loss.

Identity politics acquires a specific form within each fraction: multicultural identity politics among the intellectual class; regressive populist fundamentalism among the working class; semi-illegal groupings (criminal gangs, religious sects, etc.) among the outcasts.

What they all share is recourse to a particular identity as a substitute for the missing universal public space. The proletariat is thus divided into three, each part being played off against the others : intellectual laborers full of cultural prejudices against “redneck” workers; workers who display a populist hatred of intellectuals and outcasts; outcasts who are antagonistic to society as such.

The old cry “Proletarians, unite !” is thus more pertinent than ever: in the new conditions of “postindustrial” capitalism, the unity of the three fractions of the working class is already their victory. This unity, however, will not be guaranteed by any figure of the “big Other” prescribing it as the “objective tendency” of the historical process itself — the situation is thoroughly open, divided between the two versions of Hegelianism.

Žižek communist hypothesis pt 4

This brings us to the next elementary definition of communism: in contrast to socialism, communism refers to singular universality, to the direct link between the singular and the universal, bypassing particular determinations.

When Paul says that, from a Christian standpoint, “there are no men or women, no Jews or Greeks;’ he thereby claims that ethnic roots, national identities, etc., are not a category of truth. To put it in precise Kantian terms: when we reflect upon our ethnic roots, we engage in a private use of reason, constrained by contingent dogmatic presuppositions; that is, we act as “immature” individuals, not as free humans who dwell in the dimension of the universality of reason. (104)

In his vision of public space characterized by the unconstrained exercise of Reason, he invokes a dimension of emancipatory universality outside the confines of one’s social identity, of one’s position within the order of (social) being —precisely the dimension so crucially missing in Rorty.

This space of singular universality is what, within Christianity, appears as the “Holy Spirit” -the space of a collective of believers subtracted from the field of organic communities, or of particular lifeworlds (“neither Greeks nor Jews”) . Consequently, is Kant’s “Think freely, but obey!” not a new version of Christ’s “Render therefore untoCaesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s” ? ” Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s” : in other words, respect and obey the “private” particular life —world of your community; “and unto God the things that are God’s”: in other words, participate in the universal space of the community of believers. The Paulinian collective of believers is a proto-model of the Kantian “world-civil – society;’ and the domain of the state itself is thus in its own way “private”: private in the precise Kantian sense of the “private use of Reason” in the State administrative and ideological apparatuses (106).

The ex-slaves of Haiti took the French revolutionary slogans more literally than did the French themselves: they ignored all the implicit qualifications which abounded in Enlightenment ideology (freedom-but only for rational “mature” subjects, not for the wild immature barbarians who first had to undergo a long process of education in order to deserve freedom and equality . . . ) . This led to sublime “communist” moments, like the one that occurred when French soldiers (sent by Napoleon to suppress the rebellion and restore slavery) approached the black army of (self-)liberated slaves. When they heard an initially indistinct murmur coming from the black crowd, the soldiers at first assumed it must be some kind of tribal war chant; but as they came closer, they realized that the Haitians were singing the Marseillaise, and they started to wonder out loud whether they were not fighting on the wrong side. Events such as these enact universality as a political category. In them, as Buck-Morss put it, “universal humanity is visible at the edges”:

rather than giving multiple, distinct cultures equal due, whereby people are recognized as part of humanity indirectly through the mediation of collective cultural identities, human universality emerges in the historical event at the point of rupture. It is in the discontinuities of history that people whose culture has been strained to the breaking point give expression to a humanity that goes beyond cultural limits. And it is in our emphatic identification with this raw, free, and vulnerable state, that we have a chance of understanding what they say. Common humanity exists in spite of culture and its differences. A person’s nonidentity with the collective allows for subterranean solidarities that have a chance of appealing to universal, moral sentiment, the source today of enthusiasm and hope. (112-113)

Buck-Morss provides here a precise argument against the postmodern poetry of diversity: the latter masks the underlying sameness of the brutal violence enacted by culturally diverse cultures and regimes: “Can we rest satisfied with the call for acknowledging ‘multiple modernities: with a politics of ‘diversity: or ‘multiversality,’ when in fact the inhumanities of these multiplicities are often strikingly the same?” But, one may ask, was the ex -slaves’ singing of the Marseillaise ultimately not an index of colonialist subordination-even in their self-liberation, did not the Blacks have to follow the emancipatory model of the colonial metropolis? And is this not similar to the idea that contemporary opponents of US politics should be singing the Stars and Stripes? Surely the true revolutionary act would have been for the colonizers to sing the songs of the colonized?

The mistake in this reproach is double. First, contrary to appearances, it is far more acceptable for the colonial power to see its own people singing others’ (the colonized’s) songs than songs which express their own identity — as a sign of tolerance and patronizing respect, colonizers love to learn and sing the songs of the colonized . . . Second, and much more importantly, the message of the Haitian soldiers’ Marseillaise was not “You see, even we, the primitive blacks, are able to assimilate ourselves to your high culture and politics, to imitate it as a model!” but a much more precise one: “in this battle, we are more French than you, the Frenchmen, are —we stand for the innermost consequences of your revolutionary ideology, the very consequences you were not able to assume.” Such a message cannot but be deeply unsettling for the colonizers— and it would certainly not be the message of those who, today, might sing the Stars and Stripes when confronting the US army.

(Although, as a thought experiment, if we imagine a situation in which this could be the message, there would be nothing a priori problematic in doing so.)

🙂 Žižek says the politically correct guilt felt by Western countries over its colonialist past, inhibits their ability to see things clearly

The French colonized Haiti, but the French Revolution also provided the ideological foundation for the rebellion which liberated the slaves and established an independent Haiti; the process of decolonization was set in motion when the colonized nations demanded for themselves the same rights that the West took for itself. In short, one should never forget that the West supplied the very standards by which it (and its critics) measures its own criminal past. We are dealing here with the dialectic of form and content: when colonial countries demand independence and enact a “return to roots;’ the very form of this return (that of an independent nation-state) is Western. In its very defeat (losing the colonies) , the West thus wins, by imposing its social form on the other (115).

… the point is simply that the British colonization of India created the conditions for the double liberation of India: from the constraints of its own tradition as well as from colonization itself (116).

The standard position adopted by the unconditional defenders of the rights of illegal immigrants is to concede that, at the level of state, the counter-arguments may well be “true” (ie., of course a country cannot accept an endless flow of immigrants; of course they compete in ways which threaten local jobs, and may also pose certain security risks), but their defense moves at a different level altogether, a level which has a direct link with demands of reality, the level of principled politics where we can unconditionally insist that “qui est ici est d’ici” (“those who are here are from here’) . But is this principled position not all too simple, allowing for the comfortable position of a beautiful soul?

I insist on my principles, and let the state deal with pragmatic constraints of reality . . . In this way, do we not avoid a crucial aspect of the political battle for the rights of immigrants: how to convince the workers opposing those immigrants that they are fighting the wrong battle; and how to propose a feasible form of alternative politics?

The “impossible” (an openness to immigrants) has to happen in reality-this would be a true political event.

But why should the immigrant not be satisfied with his normalization? Because, instead of asserting his identity, he has to adapt to his oppressor’s standards: he is accepted, but defacto in a secondary role. His oppressor’s discourse defines the terms of his identity. One should remember here the programmatic words of Stokely Carmichael (the founder of Black Power) :

“We have to fight for the right to invent the terms which will allow us to define ourselves and to define our relations to society, and we have to fight that these terms will be accepted. This is the first need of a free people, and this is also the first right refused by every oppressor.”

The problem is how, exactly, to do this. That is to say, how to resist the temptation to define oneself with reference to some mythical and totally external identity (“African roots”) , which, by way of cutting links with “white” culture, also deprives the oppressed of crucial intellectual tools for their struggle (namely, the egalitarian emancipatory tradition) as well as potential allies.

One should thus slightly correct Carmichael’s words: what the oppressors really fear is not some totally mythical self-definition with no links to white culture, but a self-definition which, by way of appropriating key elements of the “white” egalitarian-emancipatory tradition, redefines that very tradition, transforming it not so much in terms of what it says as in what it does not say —that is, obliterating the implicit qualifications which have defacto excluded Blacks from the egalitarian space. In other words, it is not enough to find new terms with which to define oneself outside of the dominant white tradition —one should go a step further and deprive the whites of the monopoly on defining their own tradition.

In this precise sense, the Haitian Revolution was “a defining moment in world history. The point is not to study the Haitian Revolution as an extension of the European revolutionary spirit, that is, to examine the significance of Europe (of the French Revolution) for the Haitian Revolution, but rather to assert the significance of the Haitian Revolution for Europe.

It is not only that one cannot understand Haiti without Europe —one cannot understand either the scope or the limitations of the European emancipation process without Haiti. Haiti was an exception from the very beginning, from its revolutionary struggle against slavery which ended in independence in January 1804: “Only in Haiti was the declaration of human freedom universally consistent. Only in Haiti was this declaration sustained at all costs, in direct opposition to the social order and economic logic of the day:’ For this reason, “there is no single event in the whole of modern history whose implications were more threatening to the dominant global order of things.” (Hallward Damning the Flood) 121

Žižek communist fidelity

Žižek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy Then as Farce. New York: Verso, 2009. Print.

What the communist fidelity to the proletarian position involves is thus an unambiguous rejection of any ideology implying a return to any kind of prelapsarian substantial unity, On November 28, 2008, Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, issued a public letter on the subject “Climate Change: Save the Planet from Capitalism:’ Here are its opening statements:

Sisters and brothers: Today, our Mother Earth is ill . . . . Everything began with the industrial revolution in 1750, which gave birth to the capitalist system, In two and a half centuries, the so called “developed” countries have consumed a large part of the fossil fuels created over five million centuries . . . . Competition and the thirst for profit without limits of the capitalist system are destroying the planet. Under Capitalism we are not human beings but consumers. Under Capitalism Mother Earth does not exist, instead there are raw materials. Capitalism is the source of the asymmetries and imbalances in the world.

The politics pursued by the Morales government in Bolivia is on the very cutting edge of contemporary progressive struggle. Nonetheless, the lines just quoted demonstrate with painful clarity its ideological limitations (for which one always pays a practical price). Morales relies in a simplistic way on the narrative of the Fall which took place at a precise historical moment: “Everything began with the industrial revolution in 1750 . . .” —and, predictably, this Fall consists in losing our roots in mother earth: “Under Capitalism mother earth does not exist.”

(To this, one is tempted to add that, if there is one good thing about capitalism, it is that, precisely, mother earth now no longer exists.) “Capitalism is the source of the asymmetries and imbalances in the world” —meaning that our goal should be to restore a “natural” balance and symmetry. What is thereby attacked and rejected is the very process that gave rise to modern subjectivity and that obliterates the traditional sexualized cosmology of mother earth (and father heaven), along with the idea that our roots lie in the substantial “maternal” order of nature.

Fidelity to the communist Idea thus means that, to repeat Arthur Rimbaud, il faut etre absolument moderne —we should remain resolutely modern and reject the all too glib generalization whereby the critique of capitalism morphs into the critique of “instrumental reason” or “modern technological civilization.”

This is why we should insist on the qualitative difference between the fourth antagonism —the gap that separates the Excluded from the Included— and the other three: it is only this reference to the Excluded that justifies the use of the term communism. There is nothing more “private” than a state community which perceives the excluded as a threat and worries how to keep them at a proper distance. (97)

In the series of the four antagonisms then, that between the Included and the Excluded is the crucial one. Without it, all others lose their subversive edge —ecology turns into a problem of sustainable development, intellectual property into a complex legal challenge, biogenetics into an ethical issue. One can sincerely fight to preserve the environment, defend a broader notion of intellectual property, or oppose the copyrighting of genes, without ever confronting the antagonism between the Included and the Excluded.

🙂 Judy Butler smile (click)

Furthermore, one can even formulate certain aspects of these struggles in the terms of the Included being threatened by the polluting Excluded. In this way, we get no true universality, only “private” concerns in the Kantian sense of the term. Corporations such as Whole Foods and Starbucks continue to enjoy favor among liberals even though they both engage in anti-union activities; the trick is that they sell their products with a progressive spin. One buys coffee made with beans bought at above fair-market value, one drives a hybrid vehicle, one buys from companies that ensure good benefits for their staff and customers (according to the corporation’s own standards), and so on. In short, without the antagonism between the Included and the Excluded, we may well find ourselves in a world in which Bill Gates is the greatest humanitarian battling against poverty and disease, and Rupert Murdoch the greatest environmentalist mobilizing hundreds of millions through his media empire (98).

There is another key difference between the first three antagonisms and the fourth: the first three effectively concern questions of the (economic, anthropological, even physical) survival of humanity, but the fourth is ultimately a question of justice. If humanity does not resolve its ecological predicament, we may all vanish; but one can well imagine a society which somehow resolves the first three antagonisms through authoritarian measures which not only maintain but in fact strengthen existing social hierarchies, divisions and exclusions.

In Lacanese, we are dealing here with the gap that separates the series of ordinary signifiers (S2) from the Master-Signifier (S1), that is, with a struggle for hegemony: which pole in the antagonism between the Included and the Excluded will “hegemonize” the other three? One can no longer rely on the old Marxist logic of “historical necessity” which claims that the first three problems will only be solved if one wins the key “class” struggle between the Excluded and the Included-the logic of “only the overcoming of class distinctions can really resolve our ecological predicament.”

There is a common feature shared by all four antagonisms: the process of proletarianization, of the reduction of human agents to pure subjects deprived of their substance; this proletarianization, however, works in different ways. In the first three cases, it deprives agents of their substantial content; in the fourth case, it is the formal fact of excluding certain figures from socio-political space.

We should underline this structure of 3 + 1, namely the reflection of the external tension between subject and substance (“man” deprived of its substance) within the human collective. There are subjects who, within the human collective, directly embody the proletarian position of substanceless subjectivity. Which is why the Communist wager is that the only way to solve the “external” problem (the re-appropriation of alienated substance) is to radically transform the inner-subjective (social) relations.

It is thus crucial to insist on the communist-egalitarian emancipatory Idea, and insist on it in a very precise Marxian sense: there are social groups which, on account of their lacking a determinate place in the “private” order of the social hierarchy, stand directly for universality; they are what Ranciere calls the “part of no-part” of the social body.

All truly emancipatory politics is generated by the short-circuit between the universality of the “public use of reason” and the universality of the “part of no-part” —this was already the communist dream of the young Marx: to bring together the universality of philosophy with the universality of the proletariat. From Ancient Greece, we have a name for the intrusion of the Excluded into the socio-political space: democracy. Our question today is whether democracy is still an appropriate name for this egalitarian explosion.

Žižek communist hypothesis pt 2

Žižek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy Then as Farce. New York: Verso, 2009. Print.

For this reason, a new emancipatory politics will stem no longer from a particular social agent, but from an explosive combination of different agents. What unites us is that, in contrast to the classic image of proletariat who have “nothing to lose but their chains;’ we are in danger of losing everything: the threat is that we will be reduced to abstract subjects devoid of all substantial content, dispossessed of our symbolic substance, our genetic base heavily manipulated, vegetating in an unlivable environment.

This triple threat to our entire being renders us all proletarians, reduced to “substanceless subjectivity” as Marx put it in the Grundrisse. The ethico-political challenge is to recognize ourselves in this figure —in a way, we are all excluded, from nature as well as from our symbolic substance. Today, we are all potentially a homo sacer, and the only way to stop that from becoming a reality is to act preventively. If this sounds apocalyptic, one can only retort that we live in apocalyptic times.

It is easy to see how each of the three processes of proletarianization refer to an apocalyptic end point: ecological breakdown, the biogenetic reduction of humans to manipulable machines, total digital control over our lives . . . At all these levels, things are approaching a zero-point; “the end of times is near. ”

Apocalypse is characterized by a specific mode of time, clearly opposed to the two other predominant modes: traditional circular time (time ordered and regulated on cosmic principles, reflecting the order of nature and the heavens; the time-form in which microcosm and macrocosm resonate in harmony), and the modern linear time of gradual progress or development.

Apocalyptic time is the “time of the end of time;’ the time of emergency, of the “state of exception” when the end is nigh and we can only prepare for it. There are at least four different versions of apocalyptism today:

Christian fundamentalism, New Age spirituality, techno-digital post-humanism, and secular ecologism. Although they all share the basic notion that humanity is approaching a zero-point of radical transmutation, their respective ontologies differ radically:

Techno-digital apocalyptism (of which Ray Kurzweil is the main representative) remains within the confines of scientific naturalism, and discerns in the evolution of human species the contours of our transformation into “post-humans.”

New Age spirituality gives this transmutation a further twist, interpreting it as the shift from one mode of “cosmic awareness” to another (usually a shift from the modern dualist-mechanistic stance to one of holistic immersion).

Christian fundamentalists of course read the apocalypse in strictly biblical terms, that is, they search for (and find) in the contemporary world signs that the final battle between Christ and the Anti-Christ is imminent.

Finally, secular ecologism shares the naturalist stance of post-humanism, but gives it a negative twist-what lies ahead, the “omega point” we are approaching, is not a progression to a higher “post-human” level, but the catastrophic self-destruction of humanity.

Although Christian fundamentalist apocalyptism is considered the most ridiculous, and dangerous, in its content, it remains the version closest to a radical “milenarian” emancipatory logic. The task is thus to bring it into closer contact with secular ecologism, thereby conceiving the threat of annihilation as the chance for a radical emancipatory renewal.

Such apocalyptic proletarianization is, however, inadequate if we want to deserve the name of “communist:’ The ongoing enclosure of the commons concerns both the relation of people to the objective conditions of their life processes as well as the relation between people themselves: the commons are privatized at the expense of the proletarianized majority.

But there is a gap between these two kinds of relation: the commons can also be restored to collective humanity without communism, in an authoritarian communitarian regime; likewise the de-substantialized, “rootless” subject, deprived of content, can also be counteracted in ways that tend in the direction of communitarianism, with the subject finding its proper place in a new substantial community. In this precise sense, Negri’s anti-socialist title, GoodBye Mr. Socialism, was correct: communism is to be opposed to socialism, which, in place of the egalitarian collective, offers an organic community (Nazism was national socialism, not national communism). In other words, while there may be a socialist anti-Semitism, there cannot be a communist form. (If it appears otherwise, as in Stalin’s last years, it is only as an indicator of a lack of fidelity to the revolutionary event.) Eric Hobsbawm recently published a column with the title: “Socialism Failed, Capitalism Is Bankrupt. What Comes Next?” The answer is: communism.

Socialism wants to solve the first three antagonisms without addressing the fourth-without the singular universality of the proletariat. The only way for the global capitalist system to survive its long-term antagonism and simultaneously avoid the communist solution, will be for it to reinvent some kind of socialism-in the guise of communitarianism, or populism, or capitalism with Asian values, or some other configuration. The future wil thus be communist . . . or socialist (95).

As Michael Hardt has put it, if capitalism stands for private property and socialism for state property, communism stands for the overcoming of property as such in the commons. Socialism is what Marx called “vulgar communism” in which we get only what Hegel would have called the abstract negation of property, that is, the negation of property within the field of property —it is “universalized private property.”

hysterical

Žižek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy Then as Farce. New York: Verso, 2009. Print.

The incessant pressure to choose involves not only ignorance about the object of choice, but, even more radically, the subjective impossibility of answering the question of desire. When Lacan defines the object of desire as originally lost, his point is not simply that we never know what we desire and are condemned to an eternal search for the “true” object, which is the void of desire as such, while all positive objects are merely its metonymic stand-ins. His point is a much more radical one: the lost object is ultimately the subject itself, the subject as an object; which means that the question of desire, its original enigma, is not p rimarily “What do I want?” but “What do others want from me? What object — objet a— do they see in me?” Which is why, apropos the hysterical question “Why am I that name? ” (ie., where does my symbolic identity originate, what justifies it? ) , Lacan points out that the subject as such is hysterical. He defines the subject tautologically as “that which is not an object:’ the point being that the impossibility of identifying oneself as an object (that is, of knowing what I am libidinally for others) is constitutive of the subject. In this way, Lacan generates the entire diversity of “pathological” subjective positions, reading it as the diversity of the answers to the hysterical question: the hysteric and the obsessive enact two modalities of the question — the psychotic knows itself as the object of the Other’s jouissance, while the pervert posits itself as the instrument of the Other’s jouissance (64).

Herein resides the terrorizing dimension of the pressure to choose — what resonates even in the most innocent inquiry when one reserves a hotel room (“Soft or hard pilows? Double or twin beds?”) is the much more radical probing: “Tell me who you are? What kind of an object do you want to be? What would fill in the gap of your desire?” This is why the “anti-essentialist” Foucauldian apprehension about “fixed identities” -the incessant urge to practise the “care of the Self,’ to continuously re- invent and re- create oneself-finds a strange echo in the dynamics of “postmodern” capitalism.

Of course, good old existentialism had already claimed that man is what he makes of himself, and had linked this radical freedom to existential anxiety. Here the anxiety of experiencing one’s freedom, the lack of one’s substantial determination, was the authentic moment at which the subject’s integration into the fixity of its ideological universe is shattered. But what existentialism was not able to envisage is … namely how,

by no longer simply repressing the lack of a fixed identity, the hegemonic ideology directly mobilizes that lack to sustain the endless process of consumerist “self-re-creation.” (65)

stavrakakis Žižek antigone the act

Stavrakakis, Yannis. “The Lure of Antigone: Aporias of an Ethics of the Political” Boucher, Geoff, and Jason Glynos and Matthew Sharpe, eds. Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Responses to Žižek. Great Britain: Ashgate. 2005. Print.

It is difficult to see, however, how the “inhuman” position of Antigone could point to an alternative formulation of the socio-political structure. … Antigone’s intransigence, her deadly passion, may thus be what creates her tragic appeal, but even by Žižek’s 1998 standards, one has to conclude that this makes her unsuitable as a model for transformative ethico-political action (173).

Unless of course, one reinterprets her in a substantial way. But then a certain paradox emerges: Antigone can only function as a model for radical political action on the condition that she is stripped of her radically inhuman (anti-social and anti-political) desire.

🙂 Stavrakakis isn’t clear on just exactly what it is in Žižek’s argument that he finds disagreeable. He thinks that Žižek has to ‘tame’ Antigone first in order to find her suitable for politics, that is ‘give way’ on her radical desire, which means, in this case, retreat or withdraw from her radical desire. For Stavrakakis: Wouldn’t the truly radical act be to traverse the lure of Antigone altogether? (174)

🙂 Stavrakakis points out that Lacan himself moved from this position on ethics outlined in this Book 7, to a different position in the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, where the idea of pure desire is questioned. “This shift needs to be taken into account when discussing the function of Antigone.

Desire not only loses its value as a pure force of transgression, but is also revealed as the ultimate support of power and the order of goods. As soon as jouissance acquires its central place in Lacan’s theoretical universe, desire is revealed as a defense against enjoyment, as a compromise formation, while drive emerges as the nodal point of his ethical thought (cites Zupančič, 2000:235) In that sense, desire can never be a pure transgressive force (175).

… desire also has precise limits. It [desire] is always conditioned by the structures of fantasy sustaining “hegemonic” regimes —regimes of power, consumption, and even resistance and transgression. It is always stimulated by the imaginary lure of attaining jouissance, but it is also sustained by the constitutive inability to realise such a goal. In that sense, desire”succeeds,” reproduces itself, through its own failure. This reproduction is not politically innocent. For example, consumer culture is partly sustained by the continuous displacement of final satisfaction from advertisement to advertisement, from product to product, from fantasy to fantasy (176)

The important “by-product” of this play is a specific structuration of desire which guarantees, through its cumulative metonymic effect, the reproduction of the market economy within a distinct “promotional culture“.

It is Lacan himself then who points the way to traversing the lure of Antigone by shifting his understanding of desire. This shift needs to be acknowledged as the radical break it truly represents. Any attempt to reconcile the “pure” desire of Antigone with the later conceptualisation and the critique of illusory desire and/or the ethics of desire with the ethics of drive —what Zupančič seems to attempt in the last pages of her Ethics of the Real — needs to be re-examined and further debated

*Undoubtedly desire and drive are related, but their relation seems to me to escape any logic of reconciliation or supplementation, which is how Zupančič ultimately views their relation. Her aim seems to be to “reconcile” desire with drive (Zupančič, 2000:238), something attempted through presenting drive as a “supplement” of desire (Zupančič, 2000:239): at the heart of desire a possible passage opens up towards the drive; one might therefore come to drive if one follows the ‘logic’ of desire to its limit (Zupančič, 2000: 243).

What is not given appropriate attention here is that reaching this limit entails a crossing which radically transforms our relation to desire. In other words, the limit of desire does not connote the automatic passage into a supplementary field of reconciliation; it primarily signifies a rupture, precisely because “desire never goes beyond a certain point” (Miller, 1996: 423).

Whereas Lacan’s early work and his conceptualisation of desire as something “always in violation, always rebellious and diabolical” —a position informing his reading of Antigone— leads to “the confusion between the drive and desire,” as soon as desire is reconceptualised as ultimately submissive to a law, a shift of almost “gigantic” proportions is insituted, and this shift needs to be acknowledged thoroughly (Miller, 1996: 422-423)

Miller, Jacques-Alain (1996). “Commentary on Lacan’s Text.” Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Return to Freud. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink and Maire Jaanus (Eds). Albany: SUNY Press.

As Žižek himself has pointed out in another text, “[t]here is ethics —that is to say, an injunction which cannot be grounded in ontology— in so far as there is a crack in the ontological edifice of the universe: at its most elementary, ethics designates fidelity to this crack” (Žižek, 1997c:214).

In order for a truly ethical fidelity to an event ot become possible another fidelity is presupposed, a fidelity that cannot be reduced to the event itself or to particular symbolisations of the event and has to retain a certain distance from them: a fidelity to event-ness as distinct from particular events, a “fidelity to the Real qua impossible” (Žižek, 1997c:215).

Such a standpoint not only presents the necessary symbolic prepartions for the proper ethical reception of the act/event, but also offers our best defense against the ever-present risk of being lured by a false event, a satanic miracle, against the ever-present risk of terror and absolutisation of an event, to use Badiou’s vocabulary (Badiou, 2001:85).

Of course, one should be aware that fidelity to event-ness, to what ultimately permits the emergence of the new and makes possible the assumption of an act, presupposes a certain betrayal, not of the act itself, but of a certain rendering of the act as an absolute and divine positivity.

In that sense, fidelity to an event can flourish and avoid absolutisation only as an infidel fidelity, only within the framework of another fidelity — fidelity to the openness of the political space and to the awareness of the constitutive impossibility of a final suture of the social — within the framework of a commitment to the continuous political re-inscription of the irreducible lack in the Other (180).

The transformative potential of a Lacanian ethics of the political is a crucial issue that is far from settled.

Žižek desire drive review of Fink 1996

On the web here at lacan.com

This paper was first published in the Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 1 (1996), 160-61, as a review of Bruce Fink’s The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

Insofar as, according to Lacan, at the conclusion of psychoanalytic treatment, the subject assumes the drive beyond fantasy and beyond (the Law of) desire, this problematic also compels us to confront the question of the conclusion of treatment in all its urgency. If we discard the discredited standard formulas (“reintegration into the symbolic space”, etc.), only two options remain open: desire or drive.

– That is to say, either we conceive the conclusion of treatment as the assertion of the subject’s radical openness to the enigma of the Other’s desire no longer veiled by fantasmatic formations,

– or we risk the step beyond desire itself and adopt the position of the saint who is no longer bothered by the Other’s desire as its decentred cause.

In the case of the saint, the subject, in an unheard-of way, “causes itself”, becomes its own cause. Its cause is no longer decentred, i.e., the enigma of the Other’s desire no longer has any hold over it.

How are we to understand this strange reversal on which Fink is quite justified to insist? In principle, things are clear enough: by way of positing itself as its own cause, the subject fully assumes the fact that the object-cause of its desire is not a cause that precedes its effects but is retroactively posited by the network of its effects: an event is never simply in itself traumatic, it only becomes a trauma retroactively, by being ‘secreted’ from the subject’s symbolic space as its inassimilable point of reference.

In this precise sense, the subject “causes itself” by way of retroactively positing that X which acts as the object-cause of its desire. This loop is constitutive of the subject.

That is, an entity that does not ’cause itself’ is precisely not a subject but an object. However, one should avoid conceiving this assumption as a kind of symbolic integration of the decentred Real, whereby the subject ‘symbolizes’, assumes as an act of its free choice, the imposed trauma of the contingent encounter with the Real.

One should always bear in mind that the status of the subject as such is hysterical: the subject ‘is’ only insofar as it confronts the enigma of Che vuoi? -“What do you want?”- insofar as the Other’s desire remains impenetrable, insofar as the subject doesn’t know what kind of object it is for the Other. Suspending this decentring of the cause is thus strictly equivalent to what Lacan called “subjective destitution”, the de-hystericization by means of which the subject loses its status as subject.

The most elementary matrix of fantasy, of its temporal loop, is that of the “impossible” gaze by means of which the subject is present at the act of his/her own conception. What is at stake in it is the enigma of the Other’s desire: by means of the fantasy-formation, the subject provides an answer to the question, ‘What am I for my parents, for their desire?’ and thus endeavours to arrive at the ‘deeper meaning’ of his or her existence, to discern the Fate involved in it.

The reassuring lesson of fantasy is that “I was brought about with a special purpose”. Consequently, when, at the end of psychoanalytic treatment, I “traverse my fundamental fantasy”, the point of it is not that, instead of being bothered by the enigma of the Other’s desire, of what I am for the others, I “subjectivize” my fate in the sense of its symbolization, of recognizing myself in a symbolic network or narrative for which I am fully responsible, but rather that I fully assume the uttermost contingency of my being.The subject becomes ’cause of itself’ in the sense of no longer looking for a guarantee of his or her existence in another’s desire.

Another way to put it is to say that the “subjective destitution” changes the register from desire to drive. Desire is historical and subjectivized, always and by definition unsatisfied, metonymical, shifting from one object to another, since I do not actually desire what I want. What I actually desire is to sustain desire itself, to postpone the dreaded moment of its satisfaction.

Drive, on the other hand, involves a kind of inert satisfaction which always finds its way. Drive is non-subjectivized (“acephalic”); perhaps its paradigmatic expressions are the repulsive private rituals (sniffing one’s own sweat, sticking one’s finger into one’s nose, etc.) that bring us intense satisfaction without our being aware of it-or, insofar as we are aware of it, without our being able to do anything to prevent it.

In Andersen’s fairy tale The Red Shoes, an impoverished young woman puts on a pair of magical shoes and almost dies when her feet won’t stop dancing. She is only saved when an executioner cuts off her feet with his axe. Her still-shod feet dance on, whereas she is given wooden feet and finds peace in religion.

These shoes stand for drive at its purest: an ‘undead’ partial object that functions as a kind of impersonal willing: ‘it wants’, it persists in its repetitive movement (of dancing), it follows its path and exacts its satisfaction at any price, irrespective of the subject’s well-being. This drive is that which is ‘in the subject more than herself’: although the subject cannot ever ‘subjectivize’ it, assume it as ‘her own’ by way of saying ‘It is I who want to do this!’ it nonetheless operates in her very kernel.

As Fink’s book reminds us, Lacan’s wager is that it is possible to sublimate this dull satisfaction. This is what, ultimately, art and religion are about.