Category: subjectivity

pluth signified effect

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s theory of the subject New York: SUNY Press, 2007.

Certainly meanings can be quite clear at times. By saying “pass me the salt,” my intention is probably clear … But the idea of a meaning or signified effect recalls to us that there is always more evoked by words than what one wants them to mean, and it is not always possible to reduce evocation down to the kind of fixed meaning possessed by signs. The point here is that even when I say “pass me the salt,” there is still more said than what we might normally take the phrase to mean. … Maybe I am quoting someone … or maybe [it’s] an idiomatic expression from my part of the country meaning “how great!” or something entirely different. .. But I am simply trying to illustrate that what is being spoken of here as the signified — always really just a signified effect — is something other than what we might take the more or less easily determinable meaning of a signifier or phrase to be

This “easily determinable meaning” never completely does away with the aura of ambiguity surrounding every signifier and every signifying chain. This aura of ambiguity is just what Lacan’s idea of a signified effect is trying to account for (32).

  • Signified effect: the evocativeness produced by an interaction of signifiers
  • Signified: what one ends up with when on attempts to reduce this evocativeness.  In this case we have an apparently stable meaning and the appearance of a one-to-one correspondence of a signifier and a meaning.  …  Of course, such an idea is mythical, but it does nevertheless play an important role in our lived experience of language. But this fixed meaning is in fact always just another signifier, evoking others, generating yet another signified effect. (33)

pluth ego ideal

Pluth, Ed. Signifers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.

Blog post originally published on May 15, 2009 at 9:56

The ego ideal is the symbolic or linguistic foundation of identification.  It plays, in the symbolic order, roughly the same role that the mirror image plays in the imaginary order —it is something the ego strives to be but is not. 52

Driving around in a sports car to “piss daddy off.”  What is at stake here is the signifier “father.”  That is, even though they set themselves up in a defiant relation to the ego ideal, the ego ideal is still for them the point of view from which they have a place and are “seen” by the Other, and this is still, whether they are seen by the Other as good or bad, narcissistically satisfying.  Defiant or not, the common factor here is that in these examples they remain seen by the Other, and their actions occur entirely within the Other’s scope.  Indeed, their actions are for the Other, even when they appear to be against the Other (53).

What is important here is the notion that the ego ideal is a signifier in the Other from whose “point of view” the individual is given meaning and a place.  … In Lacan’s revision of the mirror stage, the child is compelled or encourged to identify its mirror image (ideal ego) as itself by a parent (or someone else) saying something like “That’s you Jimmy! Yes it is!”

The child finds that it has a place ein this symbolic Other by means of the Other’s affirmation of a place for the child. The child is told by the Other what he or she is (54).

pluth signifiers generate a signified effect

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s theory of the subject New York: SUNY Press, 2007.

Certainly, unlike a sign, a signifier is not fixed to a particular object, but in its inclusion withn a system of other signifiers there is still an extreme form of reference at work. A signifier’s reference is not to a specific object or to a specific sign but to all other signifiers, or to the mere fact that signifiers exist (26).

According to Lacan’s view, there are nothing but signifiers and signified effects in language (29).

The signifier then is a purely meaningless and purely differential unity, and … not self-sufficient but hyper-referential.  As such, it is also distinguished from the sign, whose reference is more or less fixed.

Although Lacan rejects the Saussurean notion of the sign — a union of signifier and signified — this does not prevent him from granting that some sort of signified effect is an important aspect of language.  Although there may never be a strict union of signifer and signified, signifiers, according to Lacan, give the impression that there is meaning somewhere, however elusive it may be.  In fact, this is precisely what signifiers do: they give an impression of meaning. (30)

A signifier is, moreover, meaningless. Since Lacan rejects the notion that a signifier and signified (meaning) are united in a single unit, meaning is never ultimately pinned to a signifier. So whatever meaning is, it is not reducible to or identifiable with a particular signifier (30).

According to Lacan,  signifiers generate a signified effect or meaning effect that cannot itself be situated within the order of signifiers.

pluth the real

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s theory of the subject New York: SUNY Press, 2007.

Does the real always mean the presymbolic?

2 versions of the real in Lacan’s work:

  1. real1, prior to the acquisition of language, which is “progressively symbolized” in the course of the child’s life
  2. second order real (real2) which is an effect of the symbolic order itself

Real2 is not outside the symbolic, as real1 seems to be. This second-order real is characterized by impasses and impossibilities that occur in the symbolic order itself.

The real can only be inscribed on the basis of an impasse of formalization (Seminar XX)

Instead of being a field of referents that language aims at, this version of the real is a stumbling block in the field of signification itself (17).

pluth on signifiers and subject of lacan the real

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: freedom in Lacan’s theory of the subject, New York: SUNY Press, 2007.  Print.

🙂 Lacan who not only subverts the subject but then he RETHOUGHT the subject but his critics are out there: Borch-Jacobson is saying that although Lacan’s subject is not EXTERNAL to language (that would be too Cartesian), so he says that Lacan’s subject is the same as language.

A persistent theme in Lacan’s discussions of the subject is the view that the subject is an effect of signifiers, and so B-J is right to wonder whether the subject is anything other than language. B-J does not consider, however, that thinking of the subject as an effect does not have to mean that the subject is somehow immanent in, rather than external to, language . I will be arguing that Lacan’s subject is an effect of language, but an effect that remains external to, and not reducible to, language.  This is because the subject is not simply an effect of signifiers but an effect of signifiers themselves interacting with something nonlinguistic: sexuality (12).

The subject is in part “in” the Other but is also not in the Other: in other words, the subject has an important relation to language, but it is also external to language in some way. … the subject is not identitcal to language (14).

[T]he subject is portrayed [by Lacan] as something articulated between two poles. One of the poles is language, while the other pole remains a bit vague (15).

It will turn out that the subject is produced not only by an interaction of signifiers but by an interaction of signfiers with something nonlinguistic. Although the subject is not identical to either of the poles Lacan considers here, each pole designates something that is involved in the production of a subject — and language alone does not suffice (15-16).

[T]he production of the subject by signifiers needs to be complemented with an appreciation of a particular type of obstacle to signification.  … it would be not erroneous to understand this second pole in terms of sexuality … (16).

One way to get at this second pole, nevertheless, is to consider the idea that there is something of the body that does not fit with the “socialized” body, the body that is overwritten with signifiers.

Saying that a body is overwritten with signifiers suggests that ther is something prior to signifiers on which the writing occurs, something that gets besieged by signfiers at some moment of its existence. This could be thought of as a body prior to the body that is linguistically and socially carved up, thus a body that is presymbolic and perhaps to be thought of in terms of what Lacan called the real (16-17).

Whatever term is settled upon, the category under which this organism or body is to be thought is the real, and not the symbolic (17).

pluth Other

Renata Salecl suggests that our historical moment is characterized both by the the collapse of … an Other, of a subject-supposed-to-know, and by a variety of attempts to reestablish some kind of full, “premodern” Other …is it possible to accept somehow that the Other does not know, while avoiding the temptation to “save” the Other from this fate.

Is it at all possible for us to act socially and individually in such a way that we do not either implicitly rely on a notion of an Other who knows, or implicitly expect the reestablishment of such an Other?

copjec butler sexuation

Dyess, Cynthia and Tim Dean, “Gender: The Impossibility of Meaning.” Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 10:5 (2000): 735 – 56.  Web. Oct 5, 2009.

For Lacan, as for Freud, the unconscious has no understanding of sexual difference. This is still a radical notion; it must count among the central insights of psychoanalysis most frequently in danger of disappearing when psychoanalytic theory discards Freud’s earliest discoveries. It is also a tremendously difficult idea, and there are different ways of grasping it. One way would be to hypothesize that the first sight of anatomical, genital difference is traumatic for a child in that this difference cannot be fully assimilated by the ego — assimilated, that is, to one’s sense of his or her own bodily self. Although we would not want to suggest that this moment is an empirically verifiable event in every subject’s history, nevertheless each person’s first encounter with the morphological difference of the other sex presents him or her with a failure of recognition. It is this inaugural collapse of sense with respect to sexual difference that makes gender traumatic and justifies aligning it with the Lacanian real (752).

This point raises an issue on which we part company with Copjec’s account. Attempting to specify the distinctness of sexual difference vis-à-vis other categories of difference, Copjec (1994) argued that “sexual difference is unlike racial, class, or ethnic differences. Whereas these differences are inscribed in the symbolic, sexual difference is not: only the failure of its inscription is marked in the symbolic. Sexual difference, in other words, is a real and not a symbolic difference” (p. 207). Yet once sexual difference is understood as real in the sense that it is experienced originally as traumatic, then we can start to appreciate how racial difference also operates as a real, not merely a symbolic, difference. One’s first encounter with another human whose skin is colored very differently than his or her own also prompts a failure of recognition; to the extent that one cannot make sense of this difference, racial difference too remains in the real. The distinction between sexual difference and racial difference lies in the fact that every human encounters the trauma of sexual difference very early in life, whereas an encounter with racial difference may be deferred far longer, especially in racially homogeneous cultures. (note 4: 752)

There is a certain driven quality to these projects—to Freud’s essentialist stories as well as to the current dogma of gender’s plasticity. This may reflect the inevitable downfall of narrative, its failure to let itself fail in making sense. Perhaps the most obvious way in which Butler’s theory of gender attempts to make too much sense is in its concept of gender identification as loss resolved by melancholic identification (Butler, 1995a). Butler and Copjec agree that the symbolic order is founded on what exceeds its grasp. But Butler takes the additional step of theorizing this absence of meaning as a set of culturally foreclosed identifications. By presuming she knows what is already missing, Butler follows in Freud’s footsteps when he set about providing us with his infamous developmental narratives of gender. In this respect, the resolutely abstract quality of Copjec’s argument is particularly refreshing. She offers no account of why sexual difference should be traumatic for the individual, but only attempts to show us in logical terms how this is necessarily so. Culturally contingent explanations of gender will inevitably vary, but, as she puts it, “sex does not budge” (Copjec, 1994, p. 211) (753).

Gender is the prime example not only of the impossibility of meaning, but also of the structural impossibility of full relationality. This implies that our theory of gender must describe not only the limit conditions of signification, but also those of relationality. The essentialist, heterosexist alternative refuses to admit any such limitations. In this view, gender is something substantial that one acquires and that lends meaning to one’s relations. Men and women find their counterpart in each other. The social constructivist alternative also eschews limits; as discourse determines subjectivity, subjectivity can be manipulated via the rhetorical device of deconstruction. In other words, it’s all in our hands, and a potentially endless number of possibilities for full relationship may prevail. Yet no analysis of external limits, be they biological or social, ultimately accounts for the impossibility of completely knowing ourselves or one another. Psychoanalysis, when it attempts to theorize this internally imposed impossibility, positions itself to address how the connection between the individual subject and the social is continually mediated by factors outside our awareness. In so doing, it can help us fail better.

critique of butler from copjec perspective using real

Dyess, Cynthia and Tim Dean, “Gender: The Impossibility of Meaning.” Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 10:5 (2000): 735 – 56.  Web. Oct 5, 2009.

So when Lacan points out that “the signifier can’t signify itself,” he is drawing our attention not only to what has yet to be signified, but more fundamentally to the negative effects of the real, to what is outside the symbolic. Furthermore, once we agree with Lacan that the formal properties of discourse are determined by factors outside our grasp, we can consider a dimension of subjectivity that cannot be placed in the harness of language, that is not manipulable in rhetorical terms.  … Lacan’s concept of the real is intended to designate just this impossibility, the internal fissure or constraint that we are constitutively unable to grasp. (743).

Like Butler, Copjec is also aware of gender’s radical contingency, but whereas for Butler this is an effect of its social construction, for Copjec it is an effect of its location in the real. Although Butler leaves herself open to the charge of voluntarism, the idea that gender can be performed at will, Copjec emphasizes that, by virtue of its position in the Lacanian real, gender is no more subject to our manipulation than is the unconscious itself.

Another way of putting this is to say that, at the most basic level, Butler’s account of gender doesn’t leave room for the unconscious. Butler’s theory encourages us to rethink gender in terms of its possibilities; Copjec responds by pointing to a fundamental impossibility that inheres to gender. This doesn’t mean that Copjec is defeatist, but rather that she is familiar with the limit conditions imposed upon us by the unconscious and believes that a psychoanalytic theory of gender should account for these (745-6).

However, by locating gender in the real, Copjec is insisting that sexual difference resists meaning, rather than gives rise to competing meanings. …

For Butler … there is no viable distinction between the concept or discourse of gender and gender itself. On this point, Copjec lays bare the core difficulty in Butler’s argument. Referring to Butler’s conflation of concept and thing, Copjec (1994) wrote, “To speak of the deconstruction of sex makes about as much sense as speaking about foreclosing a door; action and object do not belong to the same discursive space”(p. 210). And this is precisely the position Butler occupies when, after noting that signification is always in process, she assumes that there is no stability of gender.

Deconstruction applies only to discourse, or in this case to the concept of gender. Although agreeing with Butler that the conceptual dimension of gender (i.e., its meaning) is always unstable, Copjec aims to argue further. Indeed, Copjec allows us to take the desubstantialization of gender one radical step further by describing how gender’s meaning is necessarily incomplete, not because of its unstable linguistic properties, but rather because it involves an inherent impossibility that arises as a consequence of its nonlinguistic dimension (746).

Copjec’s interpretation of the impossibility that Lacan presents us with nonetheless encourages us to think about the nonsymbolic, nonimaginary aspect of gender—in other words, she helps us to think gender in the real. Copjec’s use of Lacan’s sexuation graphs has some intuitive appeal. In talking about the limits of reason and about the real as a limit internal to language, Copjec shifts our attention away from what is imposed from the outside, whether it be the effects of an oppressive social regime, on one hand, or of brute materiality, on the other. Copjec is interested less in the external limits proffered by social constructivism or biological determinism than in a limit internal to language itself — the Lacanian real and the impasse in meaning that it creates. Being situated in the real, which is itself a negative instance, gender has no positive content. In this schema, gender is not an incomplete entity, but a totally empty one. Facing off with Butler, who by joining gender and signification makes gender something which communicates itself to others, Copjec (1994) argued:

When, on the contrary, sex is disjoined from the signifier, it becomes that which does not communicate itself, that which marks the subject as unknowable. To say that the subject is sexed is to say that it is no longer possible to have any knowledge of him or her. Sex serves no other function than to limit reason, to remove the subject from the realm of possible experience or pure understanding. This is the meaning, when all is said and done, of Lacan’s notorious assertion that “there is no sexual relation”: sex, in opposing itself to sense, is also, by definition, opposed to relation, to communication [p. 207].

Copjec is taking us much further than perhaps Lacan himself intended. It’s not merely that “there is no relation” (i.e., no symmetrical or complementary relation between men and women), but that sexual difference itself has no signifier, that it is not fully representable. Imaginary constructions of the difference between the sexes are fantasies—ways in which we provide ourselves with answers to impossible questions. In aligning sexual difference with the structural incompleteness of language—the impossibility of articulating this difference — Copjec puts her finger on its traumatic dimension, and this component of experience is something for which deconstruction has no vocabulary. According to Copjec, this is fundamentally what sexual difference is—a difference that cannot be determined. From this perspective, essentialism and social constructivism are efforts to negate this impossibility, this impasse of reason.

Žižek Tilton Gallery NYC nov 2006

Can one really tolerate a neighbour

the symptom pre-exists what it is a symptom of

If a woman is a symptom, she is walking around, do you want me to be your symptom
Pure symptom: a nun, a radical feminine position, I will be a pure symptom
Man need a symptom to be
Film DaVinci Code: The girl is frigid, totally de-sexualized. She witnessed the primordial sin, saw her grandfather in some pagan sin.  So jesus has to copulate to cover up that she doesn’t.
Solution: She accepts her role as leader of group who believe in her.  A passage from eros to agape, from eros to political love.
Abyss of subjectivity: elementary reaction is FEAR, especially today, the inexistence of the big Other is more apparent than ever, not only language, but also ecology, is disappearing.  The moment through genome and bio manipulations, the moment you can manipulate nature this way, it is no l onger nature in the sense of dense impenatrability.
If somone fucks with your inner nature, they violate your freedom, no its much more radical … the ultimate horror, modern science can produce new forms of monstors, not just observe.
Nonetheless behind all this is fear of the neigbour.  The big problem today is to control this dimension of the neighbour.

The neighbour INTRUDES. Unlike Sam Harris who can happily promote torture because the dimension of the neighbour gets LOST. So Sam can just go ahead and treat humans as just a calculus of ok I toruture you here to prevent greater suffering.  the dimension of the neighbour gets lost.

All outbursts get lost, is outburst against the neighbour.  Since we are still neighbours within our own symbolic universes, own ways of enjoyment.  So what we need today is not more communication but more distance, a new code of discretion, to ignore others more.
Our solution to deal with proximity of the neighbour is Tolerance which Zizek HATES.
He criticizes Wendy Brown, but likes her book, Regulating Aversion.
He talks about Martin Luther King who didn’t use ‘tolerance’ as a category, same with feminism, they don’t ask to be ‘tolerated’.  Tolerance is a depoliticized politics.  MLK was inequality, poverty which demands political solutions.
Brown develops the culturalization of political differences, political differences translated into cultural differences, into different ways of life.
Fukuyama and Huntington Clash of Civilizations, are same don’t contribute, class of civilizations is politics at the ‘end of history’.  politics is rational administration, the only true passionate conflicts are conflicts of culture.

Critique of Brown: They remain caught in too primitive critique of ideology: denouncing the false universality
What appears to be a neutral notion, privledges a certain culture, human rights are not real human rights they privledge male straight males.  Zizek doesn’t subscribe to this.

Of course there is a gap, universal human rights and hwo they function.  this gap has POSITIVE aspects, we can REWRITE IT, mary wollstencraft rewrote it, the blacks in Haiti after the French Rev.

2. If you read closely Hegel it’s that this is only 1 side of the story, of denouncing universality as false universality, blah blah

– We also have the opposite mystification which is more interesting: something you percieve is only your particular interest is already universal dimension.

The cunning of reason, you think you are just following your narrow interests, you don’t see the universal dimension of your acts.

As capitalist subject, you are universal in your own individual self experience, you relate to yourself as self as universal.

My profession is being a knight or a serf, this is absurd they didn’t see themselves as a profession

you yourself experience yourself in the core of your being as universal, whenever capitalism spreads, from within it undermines each culture.  Chinese discovered this and now are using capitalism to destroy their culture instead of the primitive way of using guns that didn’t work.

Foreign cultures appear stupid to me, what from

Experience your own identity as ultimately contingent.  there is no authentic liberation, there is no feminism,

the way to break out of neighbour, abbyss otherness, should we tolerate it or not

EMBRACE this radical universality … in the form of a struggle.  Not that I’m in my culture and you in yours, it’s that what I want to share with you is our shared intolerances, the only universality I share with you is universality of struggle.  My own particular identity, I am not fully myself, in the very core of my identity is a universality that surpasses me, that’s what gives us some hope, that we are not only more particular than we think, even when you think you are immersed in your culture you are UNIVERSAL

SOLIPSISM is FALSE.

THE UNIVERSAL ETHICS IS KANTIAN ETHICS

IMMORAL ETHICS: It doesn’t matter what you do, by fully engaged. No that’s not Zizek.

Kantian Ethics is for Zizek.  there is no BIg other, you cant put on big other to tell you your duty, YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR IT.  A Good Kantian cannot say, what can I do I just obeyed my duty, you are NOT ALLOWED to use duty as excuse to do your duty.  No you have to fully stand behind your duty.  You can’t say I was only doing my duty.

Problem of tolerance:

TERROR!
Abandon that what you are afraid to lose, Accept the loss become UNIVERSAL

You are afraid to lose your particular identity, maybe what you are protecting is in itself worthless, ABANDON THAT

So what a minor disturbance in the solar system.

Don’t fear be calm, things will get better: NO it’s not this, there is no BIG OTHER, it doesn’t exist, we are in the abyss there are no guarantees.

ABC good radical ecology; there is no natural balance, there is no way to return.  Nature as balanced homeostasis HA, Nature is one big catastrophe, what is oil, one big catastrophe of unimaginable proportions.

If all human industry to stop, earth is so adapted to it, it would cause a catastrophe.

Violent Imposition of Universal Will: ecological crisis, other crisis, the way to beat phenomena like Bush, is not through local resistances, don’t buy the pomo poetry, no longer capitalism from top down, but decentralized, multiple agents, multiple sites of resistance.

NO we must reassert BIG COLLECTIVE decisions.  we have a struggle, you have a struggle, lets see if we can join our struggles, our universality is universality of struggles.
We will need to assert big collective decisions.  The capitalist state is getting bigger and stronger.  State mechanisms military spending, economy these are all state interventions.  More than ever the state is crucial.

If I were to choose American or Chinese model of capitalism,

adrian johnston review butler antigone

Adrian Johnston, “The Exception and the Rule” Continental Philosophy Review 35: 423–432, 2002.

[…]

She attacks Lacan for his structuralist transcendentalism, taking aim at what she understands to be the core tenets of his psychoanalytic theoretical system in its entirety. Butler begins this task by noting that, for Lacan, a distinction should be maintained between, on the one hand, the contingent, empirical field of historically variable “sociality,” and, on the other hand, the necessary, transcendental domain of invariant “symbolic” structures conditioning the social – “a social norm is not quite the same as a ‘symbolic position’ in the Lacanian sense, which appears to enjoy a quasi-timeless character” (p. 20). Continue reading “adrian johnston review butler antigone”

butler frames of war

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

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

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

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