subjectivity – Page 6

mcgowan sacrifice subjectivity enjoyment

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. 2013.

…[Why do we think that] if people simply had all the facts, they would abandon either their religious belief or their investment in the capitalist mode of production.

But religious belief and ideological commitment are not reducible to knowledge. Both represent libidinal investments that provide adherents with a reward that no amount of knowledge can replace. … the enjoyment that derives from believing 247-248

Enjoyment has an inverse relationship to utility: we enjoy in proportion to the uselessness of our actions. …

Given the odds, belief represents a poor investment and should attract very few adherents. But if the driving force behind belief is not eternal bliss but the very act of sacrifice itself – a wasteful rather than a productive act – the arguments against belief would lose all of their force.

Wasteful sacrifice appeals to us because we emerge as subject through an initial act of ceding something without gaining anything in return. The creative power of the human subject stems from its ability to sacrifice.

Through sacrificing some part of ourselves, we create a privileged object that will constitute us as desiring subjects, but this object exists only as lost or absent and has no existence prior to the sacrificial act that creates it.

There is a fundamental dissatisfaction written into the very structure of subjectivity that no one can ever escape. But at the same time, the act of sacrifice allows us to create anew our lost object. 249

Especially in the contemporary world, religious belief provides respite – an oasis of enjoyment – for the subject caught up in the capitalist drive to render everything useful and banish whatever remains unproductive. 249

mcgowan death drive subject of loss 3

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. 2013.

If we locate the origin of the subject in the act where it loses nothing, this promises to revolutionize our thinking about the struggle between life and death or between Left and Right.

Privileging an originary loss allows us to see how death, rather than acting as an external limit, inheres in life itself for the subject.

There is no life for the subject that does not have its origin in death.

The subject begins its life with a death – a loss of what is most valuable to it – and no subsequent loss or death will ever be the equal of this originary one (which occurs only structurally, not empirically).

We do not have to seek out death in order to render life valuable; death is always already present within our lives and providing us value. We don’t recognize it because we resist the notion that we originate as subjects through loss and that loss is the only vehicle through which we can enjoy.

We can only give up the pursuit of death when we realize that we have already found it – or that it has found us at the moment of our emergence as subjects. 240

We embrace loss itself as the key to our freedom and our enjoyment rather than trying to flee the experience of loss through having. Recognizing the creative power of loss for us as subjects would imply a political transformation as well.

We cannot trace a through-line from the evolutionary development of animals to the emergence of subjectivity.

Subjectivity emerges through a break, through a moment in which death is injected into life and thereby throws life off its course. But in order for this disruption to be possible, a fundamental gap in the evolutionary process must have already been there. That is to say, if the evolutionary process moved forward without a hitch, there would have been no space for the emergence of language and subjectivity.

The very existence of a subject of the death drive – a being that doesn’t desire its own good – testifies to a profound lacuna within evolutionary theory. This reveals that even the movement of life in the natural world has an unnatural dimension to it, or else the death drive as such could never emerge. The natural world harbors death within it as an excess that permanently disrupts its forward movement. 241

[Subjectivity] persists only as long as it sustains the experience of loss and continues to return to this originary experience.

To recognize the excessive presence of death in life would result in a fundamental transformation of the social order. It would create neither the pure productivity of the Marxist utopia nor the strict prohibitions (and resulting ultimate enjoyment) of the fundamentalist’s dreams.

The world in which recognized death in life would contain at once more suffering and more enjoyment. We would see the trauma of loss as our only destiny, but we would also see loss as the site of our enjoyment. 242

Žižek ethics of the real

Ágota Kristóf’s The Notebook awoke in me a cold and cruel passion

Slavoj Žižek The Guardian, Monday 12 August 2013

The young twins are thoroughly immoral – they lie, blackmail, kill – yet they stand for authentic ethical naivety at its purest

There is a book through which I discovered what kind of a person I really want to be: The Notebook, the first volume of Ágota Kristóf’s trilogy, which was followed by The Proof and The Third Lie.

When I first heard someone talk about Ágota Kristóf, I thought it was an east European mispronunciation of Agatha Christie; but I soon discovered not only that Ágota is not Agatha, but that Ágota’s horror is much more terrifying than Agatha’s.

The Notebook tells the story of young twins living with their grandmother in a small Hungarian town during the last years of the second world war and the early years of communism. The twins are thoroughly immoral – they lie, blackmail, kill – yet they stand for authentic ethical naivety at its purest.

A couple of examples should suffice. One day they meet a starving deserter in a forest and bring him some things he asks them for.

When we come back with the food and blanket, he says: ‘You’re very kind.’
We say: ‘We weren’t trying to be kind. We’ve brought you these things because you absolutely need them. That’s all.’

If there ever was a Christian ethical stance, this is it: no matter how weird their neighbour’s demands, the twins naively try to meet them. One night, they find themselves sleeping in the same bed as a German officer, a tormented gay masochist. Early in the morning, they awaken and want to leave the bed, but the officer holds them back:

Don’t move. Keep sleeping.’
‘We want to urinate. We have to go.’
‘Don’t go. Do it here.’
We ask: ‘Where?’
He says: ‘On me. Yes. Don’t be afraid. Piss! On my face.’
We do it, then we go out into the garden, because the bed is all wet.

A true work of love, if there ever was one! The twins’ closest friend is a priest’s housekeeper, a young voluptuous woman who washes them, playing erotic games with them. Then something happens when a procession of starved Jews is led through the town on their way to the camp:

Right in front of us, a thin arm emerges from the crowd, a dirty hand stretches out, a voice asks: ‘Bread.’
The housekeeper smiles and pretends to offer the rest of her bread; she holds it close to the outstretched hand, then, with a great laugh, brings the piece of bread back to her mouth, takes a bite, and says: ‘I’m hungry too.’

The boys decide to punish her: they put some ammunition into her kitchen stove so that when she lights it in the morning, it explodes and disfigures her. Along these lines, it is easy for me to imagine a situation in which I would be ready, without any moral qualms, to murder someone, even if I knew that this person did not kill anyone directly.

Reading reports about torture in Latin American military regimes, I found particularly repulsive the (regular) figure of a doctor who helped the actual torturers conduct their business in the most efficient way: he examined the victim and monitored the process, letting the torturers know how much the victim will be able to endure, what kind of tortures would inflict the most unbearable pain, etc.

I must admit that if I were to encounter such a person, knowing that there is little chance of bringing him to legal justice, and be given the opportunity to murder him discreetly, I would simply do it, with a minimum of remorse about taking justice in my own hands.

What is crucial in such cases is to avoid the fascination of evil that propels us to elevate torturers into demonic transgressors who have the strength to overcome our petty moral considerations and act freely. Torturers are not beyond good and evil, they are beneath it. They do not heroically transgress our shared ethical rules, they simply lack them.

The two brothers also blackmail the priest: they threaten to let everybody know how he sexually molested Harelip, a girl who needs help to survive, demanding a weekly sum of money from him. The shocked priest asks them:

‘It’s monstrous. Have you any idea what you’re doing?’
‘Yes, sir. Blackmail.’
‘At your age … It’s deplorable.’
‘Yes, it’s deplorable that we’ve been forced to this. But Harelip and her mother absolutely need money.’

There is nothing personal in this blackmail: later, they even become close friends with the priest. When Harelip and her mother are able to survive on their own, they refuse further cash from the priest:

‘Keep it. You have given enough. We took your money when it was absolutely necessary. Now we earn enough money to give some to Harelip. We have also taught her to work.’

Their cold-serving of others extends to killing them if asked: when their grandmother asks them to put poison into her cup of milk, they say:

‘Don’t cry, Grandmother. We’ll do it; if you really want us to, we’ll do it.’

Naive as it is, such a subjective attitude in no way precludes a monstrously cold reflexive distance. One day, the twins put on torn clothes and go begging. Passing women give them apples and biscuits and one of them even strokes their hair. Another woman invites them to her home to do some work, for which she will feed them.

We answer: ‘We don’t want to work for you, madam. We don’t want to eat your soup or your bread. We are not hungry.’
She asks: ‘Then why are you begging?’
‘To find out what effect it has and to observe people’s reactions.’
She walks off, shouting: ‘Dirty little hooligans! And impertinent too!’
On our way home, we throw the apples, the biscuits, the chocolate, and the coins in the tall grass by the roadside.
It is impossible to throw away the stroking on our hair.

This is where I stand, how I would love to be: an ethical monster without empathy, doing what is to be done in a weird coincidence of blind spontaneity and reflexive distance, helping others while avoiding their disgusting proximity.

With more people like this, the world would have been a pleasant place in which sentimentality would be replaced by a cold and cruel passion.

mcgowan breaking from autoerotic state sacrifice

… the subject’s openness to alienation in language, its willingness to sacrifice a part of itself in order to become a speaking subject, suggests a lack in being itself prior to the entry into language.

That is, the act through which the subject cedes the privileged object and becomes a subject coincides with language but is irreducible to it. The subject engages in the act of sacrifice because it does not find its initial autoeroticism perfectly satisfying – the unity of the autoerotic being is not perfect – and this lack of complete satisfaction produces the opening through which language and society grab onto the subject through its alienating process.

If the initial autoerotic state of the human animal were perfectly satisfying, no one would begin to speak, and subjectivity would never form.

Speaking as such testifies to an initial wound in our animal being and in being itself.

But subjectivity emerges only out of a self-wounding. Even though others encourage the infant to abandon its autoerotic state through a multitude of inducements, the initial loss that constitutes subjectivity is always and necessarily self-inflicted. Subjectivity has a fundamentally masochistic form, and it continually repeats the masochistic act that founds it. The act of sacrifice opens the door to the promise of a satisfaction that autoerotic isolation forecloses, which is why the incipient subject abandons the autoerotic state and accedes to the call of sociality.

But the term “sacrifice” is misleading insofar as it suggests that the subject has given up a wholeness (with itself or with its parent) that exists prior to being lost.

In the act of sacrifice, the incipient subject gives up something that it doesn’t have. The initial loss that founds subjectivity is not at all substantial; it is the ceding of nothing. Through this defining gesture, the subject sacrifices its lost object into being.

But if the subject cedes nothing, this initial act of sacrifice seems profoundly unnecessary. Why can’t the subject emerge without it? Why is the experience of loss necessary for the subject to constitute itself qua subject? The answer lies in the difference between need and desire. While the needs of the human animal are not dependent on the experience of loss, the subject’s desires are. 28

critchley and cornel west

Critchley on deconstitution of subjectivity Love is not some kind of tepid contract, nor is it an act of spiritual daring eviscerates excoriate the old self so that a new seslf can come into being, hue and hack at old self large enough for love to enter, an enrichment through impoverishment
How to Live has become the question How to Love.
On Violence

critchley humour superego love and desire

Critchley EGS 2010

Superego I: Childish superego, takes on prohibitions of parent, you’re a worthless piece of …

Superego II: Humour This superego is potentially a friend, a tough friend, a friend that finds you ridiculous. This idea o

Whether the picture of Infinitely Demanding Ethics and Ethical Subject, infinite responsibility that divides me from myself leads to a form of self-hatred?
Sublimation not as tragic sublimation, but sumblimation as more assuaging form of sublimation, humour as self-mocking, I find myself laughably inauthentic, humour is a reminder of ones inauthenticity. The split is not masochistic self-flagellation, but a divided humourous self-relation.
One smiles at oneself and finds oneself ridiculous. Humour is the experience of the lack of self-coincidence. We do not coincide with ourselves. Humour is the eccentricity of ourself to ourselves.

Distinction between Being and Having: An experiential gap between being the one is, and relationship I HAVE to that BEING. Eccentricty, I’m eccentric with regards to myself, I’m not at ONE with MYSELF. I’m in a different orbit with regards to myself.
Humour is the enactment of that ECCENTRICITY. Human beings are NATURAL beings, we’re bodies, we’re animals. We have a self-relation to ourselves which is not one of coincidence. There is an uneasy disjunction between the body and the experience of THOUGHT. What is self-consciousness, the consciousness of self. But what is that, consciousness is already divided, I’m divided from myself as far as I reflect.

Black Sun of melancholia at centre of the comic human experience. Humour is anti-depressant
Conscience: is the internalization of the ethical demand that splits open the subject between itself and a demand that it cannot miss
Conscience is work of human being on itself, this work could be excessively demanding, Foucault has idea in late work, the idea of technology of self are forms of work upon the self. But Critchley is not with Foucault, there is this stoicism in Foucault a paganism, autonomy or idea of self-legislation. Foucault died and worked incredibly hard on vol 2 and 3 before he died. Monastic discipline in Christianity, what new form of discipline is Christianity with regards to the self.
With Christian subjectivity we get Abstention of sexual desire, and this leads to a deepening of the subject, a deepening of his subjective matrix. We see this most radically in Augustine who was a frat boy, a party animal until he converted to Christianity.
There were 2 wills raging within me will of the Flesh and will of the Spirit. From abstention of sexual practices we get a DEEPENING of subjectivity.
Critchley on Faith of the Faithless: Simone Weil, Song of Songs (Psalms)[??] Female mystics, what you find sublimation of discourse of carnal love into a discourse in relationship to the Divine. How the experience of love is described in these discourses. The links the experience of love has to absention of sexual practices and chastity.
Sexual practice takes on different character in female mystics. A key thinker here is Ann Carson’s DECREATION. How these women tell love. Love for Polette is an act of not a union, not a contract between 2 people, Love is the act of radical spiritual daring which annilates the self in order to give itself to another in love (God). This comes full circle to Lacan and psychoanalysis, because the ethics of psychoanalysis, for me, what does Lacan mean by jouissance and Feminine Jouissance, the difference between Phallic Jouissance and Feminine Jouissance. The former is male, the universal tendency to debasement in love. The phenomenon (freud) in my male patients is psychical impotence, physically capable but incapable with their wives, partners??? There is a split between IDEALIZATION and Debased object. in Phallic Jouissance the phallic jouissance is incapable of love, and desire is only in relation to debased object. Separation of LOVE and DESIRE.

What the hope is to put LOVE AND DESIRE IN THE SAME PLACE. THIS IS THE QUESTION.

What is Feminine Jouissance: Female mysticism: an experience of feminine jouissance connected to TRANSGRESSION, it is a different form of sublimation. Kierkegaard: Love as a radical act of self-impoverishment, of trying to give oneself over.

Here is Critchley article on Kierkegaard in the times on love

How does one reconcile oneself with one’s being towards death. No Critchley is on to a different question: Not how to live, which is about moratlity, but how to LOVE, which is about immortality.
There is something engaged there, eternal, immortal, what does being immortal mean? The discourse around the question of Love historically, continues to raise that question, Love as that experience that attempts to transgress that experience of finitute, and we can call it immortal.
Question about humour, when Jon Stewart uses it Freud and psychoanalysis is a deeply conservative project, and Lacan even more. Lacan, “I never spoke about freedom.” Reich, R.D. Laing revolted against this conservatism. Satire might just be that pressure value that regulates the social order, let them poke fun at those in power and nothing will be done. There is no inherent emancipatory potential in the comedic.

Kant phenomenal noumenal split subject Johnston

Johnston, Adrian. Žižek‘s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity. Northwestern University Press, 2008.

That is to say, if psychoanalysis is indeed correct to maintain that the subject ontogenetically emerges through and comes to constitute itself by a sort of radical, primordial gesture of negating rejection (whether as Freud’s primal/primary repression as original Verwerfung or Verneinung, Lacan’s “cut” of symbolic castration, or Julia Kristeva’s abjection) , then feelings of revulsion toward the corporeal substratum of the mortal body essentially are indicative of the presence of a form of subjectivity resistant to being collapsed back into its material foundation. (Johnston ŽO 25)

The subject is inherently barred from any form of phenomenal self-acquaintance in which it would know itself as finite in the ontological-material sense. The nothingness fled from, the void that Kant allegedly labors so hard to avoid, is nothing other than the very absence of the subject itself, the negation of the insurmountable “transcendental illusion” of its apparent immortality. (31)

The split within the structure of the subject that Zizek credits Kant with having discovered is that between the phenomenal and noumenal dimensions of subjectivity, namely, between the subject as it appears to itself in an experiential fashion (i.e., through conceptual and spatio-temporal mediation) and the subject as it exists/subsists “in itself.”

The subject an sich that makes experience possible cannot itself fall, as a discrete experiential, representational element, within the frame of the field it opens up and sustains (a point already grasped by Descartes in his second meditation). Hence, Kant famously speaks of “this lor he or it (the thing) that thinks”. The noumenal subject is just as much of a permanently shrouded mystery as things-in-themselves. The entire thrust of the first Critique (particularly the “Dialectic of Pure Reason”) is to establish the epistemological grounds for forbidding any and every philosophical reference to the noumenal realm beyond the familiar limits of possible experience. (Johnston ŽO 30)

According to Zizek’s heterodox juxtaposition of Kant and Lacan, the psychoanalytic notion of fantasy has direct relevance to this splitting of subjectivity between, on the one hand, the noumenal subject of (unconscious) enunciation and, on the other hand, the phenomenal subject of utterances (as determinate signifier-predicates). [ŽO 32]

If… one bears in mind the fact that, according to Lacan, the ego is an object, a substantial “res,” one can easily grasp the ultimate sense of Kant’s transcendental turn: it desubstantializes the subject (which, with Descartes, still remained “res cogitans,” i.e., a substantial “piece of reality”)—and it is this very desubstantialization which opens up the empty space (the “blank surface”) onto which fantasies are projected, where monsters emerge. To put it in Kantian terms: because of the inaccessibility of the Thing in itself, there is always a gaping hole in (constituted, phenomenal) reality, reality is never “all,” its circle is never closed, and this void of the inaccessible Thing is filled out with phantasmagorias through which the trans-phenomenal Thing enters the stage of phenomenal presence—in short, prior to the Kantian turn, there can be no black hulk at the background of the stage. (Zizek Enjoy Your Symptom 1992, 136) [Johnston ŽO 32]

Elsewhere Zizek draws out the consequences of this, maintaining that every mediated identity, all signifier-predicates appended to the original nothingness of subjectivity in its raw negativity, are “supplements” aiming to “fill out this void”:

Lacan’s point here is that an unsurmountable gap forever separates what I am “in the real” from the symbolic mandate that procures my social identity: the primordial ontological fact is the void, the abyss on account of which I am inaccessible to myself in my capacity as a real substance — or, to quote Kant’s unique formulation from his Critique of Pure Reason, on account of which I never get to know what I am as “I or he or it (the thing) which thinks [Ich, oder Er, oder Es (das Ding), welches denkt]”

Every symbolic identity I acquire is ultimately nothing but a supplementary feature whose function is to fill out this void. This pure void of subjectivity, this empty form of “transcendental apperception,” has to be distinguished from the Cartesian Cogito which remains a res cogitans, a little piece of substantial reality miraculously saved from the destructive force of universal doubt: it was only with Kant that the distinction was made between the empty form of “I think” and the thinking substance, the “thing which thinks.” (Zizek Metastases of Enjoyment 1994, 144) Johnston ŽO 32-33

Thus, the entire range of significations and images proposed by the subject to itself in response to the question of self-identity (“Who or what am I?”) falls under the heading of transcendental illusion. That is to say, these fantasmatic productions striving to seal this crack in reality are semblances. And yet they are the inevitable results of a structurally determined dynamic rooted in subjectivity’s internal division: “The subject is this emergence which, just before, as subject, was nothing, but which, having scarcely appeared, solidifies into a signifier” (SXH99). ŽO 33

subject-as-negativity two intersecting lacks

What if the negativity of Cartesian-Kantian-Hegelian subjectivity (as the monstrous cogito, the horrible void of the Thing, and the terrifying abyss of nocturnal dismemberment) is a symptomatic ideality-as-idealization derived from and conditioned by a contingent yet a priori material foundation (what, in psychoanalysis, would be designated as a violent “reaction-formation”) ?

Is the subject-as-negativity a response to its corporeal Grund (ground), to a primordially chaotic and discordant Real that produces its own negation immanently out of itself? Are Zizek’s otherwise inexplicably odd choices of adjectives here indicative of such a link, of a thinly concealed umbilical cord tethering the (pseudo)immateriality of the modern subject to a dark base rendered obscure through a forceful disavowal/abjection? 22

Lacan furthers this Freudian line of thought through his portrayal of the libido in the myth of the lamella (a myth Zizek cites repeatedly). Sexuality is depicted as a frightening monster-parasite that aggressively grafts itself onto the being of the individual and drives him or her toward death.

In the same seminar in which the lamella is invoked (the eleventh seminar), Lacan also sketches a logic of two intersecting lacks, a Real lack (introduced by the fact of sexual reproduction) and a Symbolic lack (introduced by the subject’s alienation via its mediated status within the defiles of the signifying big Other).

The Real lack is nothing other than the individual’s “loss” of immortality due to its sexual-material nature as a living being subjected to the cycles of generation and corruption, albeit as a loss of something never possessed except in primary narcissism and/or unconscious fantasy.

Symbolic lack serves, in away, as a defensive displacement of this more foundational lack in the Real.

Not only are psychoanalytic psychopathologies painful struggles with both of these lacks, but “it is this double lack that determines the ever-insistent gap between the real and the symbolico-imaginary, and thus the constitution of the subject” (Verhaeghe Collapse of Function of Father 2000, 147).

One possible manifestation of the neurotic rebellion against this fundamental feature of the corporeal condition is a strong feeling of disgust in the face of all things fleshly, of everything whose palpable attraction and tangible yet fleeting beauty smacks of a transience evoking the inexorable inevitability of death (an attitude that Freud comments on in his short 1916 piece “On Transience”). [Johnston ŽO 23]

barred real Being as incomplete internally inconsistent

Johnston, Adrian. Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity. Northwestern University Press, 2008

In Organs Without Bodies, Žižek insists,while discussing Kant, that freedom (in the form of autonomous subjectivity) is possible only if being, construed as whatever serves as an ultimate grounding ontological register, is inherently incomplete and internally inconsistent. … “Schelling was first and foremost a philosopher of freedom” [Indivisible Remainder, 15]

He goes on bluntly to assert that “either subjectivity is an illusion or reality is in itself (not only epistemologically) not-All (Organs Without Bodies 2004,115).

If being is entirely at one with itself, if material nature is a perfectly functioning machine in which each and every cog and component is organically coordinated into the single, massive whole of an uninterrupted “One-All,” then no space remains, no clearing is held open, for the emergence of something capable of (at least from time to time) transcending or breaking with this stifling ontological closure.

Being must be originally and primordially unbalanced in order for the subject as a (trans-)ontological excess to become operative.

As Schelling himself succinctly states, “Were the first nature in harmony with itself, it would remain so. It would be constantly One and would never become Two” . Those points and moments where being becomes dysfunctional (i.e.,when,to put it loosely, “the run of things” breaks down) signal the possibility for the genesis of subjectivity as that which cannot be reduced to a mere circuit in the machinery of a base material substratum in which everything is exhaustively integrated with everything else.

Zizek makes the move of identifying the Schellingian-Lacanian subject with this inconsistency internal to the ontological edifice itself: “Subject designates the ‘imperfection’ of Substance, the inherent gap, self deferral, distance-from-itself, which forever prevents Substance from fully realizing itself, from becoming’ fully itself” (The Abyss of Freedom, 7)

neill lacanian subjectivity 2011 pt1

Neill, Calum. Lacanian Ethics and the Assumption of Subjectivity 2011

Against what one might characterise as the ‘common-sense’ notion that language (pre)exists as a tool to be utilised by a subject (or person) in the expression of their (pre-linguistic) needs, wants, beliefs etc., the notion of subjectivity in Lacan’s work posits a subject who only ever comes to be anything at all because of the signifying chain of language, because of the (pre)existence of a symbolic order in which it comes to operate.

What is crucial here is that, if it is the order of signifiers which takes logical precedence, then signifiers are not arsenal to be deployed between subjects, or, to oversimplify, words are not carriers of meaning between people, but, rather, it is the subject which is constituted in the movement of signifiance between signifiers. 45

It is in this sense that Lacan borrows Hegel’s dictum that ‘the symbol manifests itself first of all as the murder of the thing’ and adds that ‘this death constitutes in the subject the eternalization of his desire’ (Ibid.).

An example of this notion of the signifier representing the subject for another signifier is already apparent in Freud when he writes, in A Project for a Scientific Psychology, of a soldier’s willingness to sacrifice himself for his country’s flag or, as Freud emphasises it, for ‘a many coloured scrap of stuff’ (Freud, 1966: 349). Here, the soldier is clearly not concerned with the thing of the flag, the flag as material object. The flag only assumes its significance in relation to another signifier, in this instance, the ‘fatherland’ (Ibid.). The soldier, the subject, is given his subjectivity through the mediating representation between one signifier, ‘the flag’, and another, ‘the fatherland’. 45

Žižek May 9 2013 madness and Hegel

Žižek 9 May 2013 and broken down into 8 videos on YouTube
13.40 Antonio Damascio “Descartes Error” Cognitivist rejection of Descartes. Descartes draw a strict line of description neutral abstract thinking and animality, Descartes drew a strict distinction.
18:00 Smoking gun on Heidegger
21:25 Deleuze and Hegel: Hegel should simply be ignored. Forget Hegel.
28.00 Pittsburgh Hegelians

29:30 The Concept of Madness
Plato describes Socrates being seized by an idea. A description of someone in a hysterical seizure. Then we know Plato, the hypothesis of the evil spirit, universalized madness, debates between Derrida and Foucault. And Hegel dismissed as ultimate madman of philosophy.
31:20 Anti-Event Philosophers
Platonic Idea we have some eternal order/ideas existing in immutable way, nothing really happens, all that really happens is remembrance, rediscovering all that already is deep within ourselves, rediscovering truth that is already there. The ultimate philosopher of ANTI-EVENT.
Hegel has a system, dialectical movement, but in the course of dialectical movement, things are already becoming what they eternally are.

34:00 NO it isn’t like this says Ž. No event in Plato? Look at what actually happens in Plato, (see Badiou), the zero-level of the Platonic experience, we live ordinary daily life immersed in our daily shit, then we encounter an idea, Saul’s conversion in to St. Paul, something happens a radical cut and you discover another dimension. No wonder Plato was celebrating Love as Madness, Plato emphasized Love as the beginning of Wisdom.

We should never forget how it all begins for Plato: you are in your daily universe, thinking about daily shit, and then you confront someone who is your love, and your life is forever changed, you can feel this brutal encounter in Plato, if you are passionately in love then in your most intimate rational interests: parents, colleagues, children, can vanish, you experience a weird indifference to moral obligation to those around you. Falling in Love is the Platonic Event. This is missing in ‘Oriental’ thought. The oriental idea you are in undisturbed state of bliss, you get too engaged and fall into. Plato emphasizes this falling into as FULL engagement.

38:00 Descartes Cogito is precisely a PURE EVENT. Here Descartes misunderstands himself. Cogito is NOT a substance which is thinking. No. Cogito is this experience of a thing that exists only in sofar as it is thinking, only in the course of the process of thinking. What is CRUCIAL is not to forget that when he describes this pure experience of COGITO he’s not playing a intellectual game, he’s describing a concrete mystical/spiritual experience, you have this THE NIGHT OF THE WORLD, when you withdraw in a kind of psychotic reduction, you withdraw from reality into the abyss of your soul, the point of darkess, darkness as the absolute depth of your soul. What Descartes is describing as ‘Cogito Ergo Sum’ is precisely this thought disconnected from reality, this pure moment of inwardness which is at the same time the moment of MADNESS.

Hegel was well aware of how in order for Human Spirit, our Symbolic universe to develop we have to go through the zero-point of madness, Hegel is more Foucaultian than Foucault, madness is not just a possibility of things go wrong, but our rational world emerges only as a defence against the threat of madness. Even if most of us our not mad, the only way to understand human reason is as a reaction as a form of madness, a form of madness. Wonderful passage in Freud’s reading in his analysis of paranoia, Judge Schreber, Freud says that in a paranoiac system what we usually take as the sign of madness is on the contrary an attempt to get out of madness, the paranoiac construct is an ersatze normality, the true madness is the night of the World, the withdrawal from reality. The paranoiac is a crazy attempt to cure yourself. Lacan sometimes along these lines proposed there is a moment of madness in all rationality, every rationality is an attempt to get out of madness. Platonic Event, encounter the IDEA. We can formulate the basic Platonic experience independently of this idealist substantialist metaphysics. In authentic moments of LOVE, POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT, we encounter some kind of ABSOLUTE, something strikes you, morality can act as ABSOLUTE, did you see that bullshit the life of PI.

44:00 Ang Lee wants to meet Ž. But in the novel, when you must do something, when you experience something as ethical pressure, you must do it because you cannot NOT do it. You CANNOT NOT DO IT. Absolute is something much more fragile something that belongs to the order of appearance than ordinary reality, Absolute is you have a duty, you can say fuck off if you are an unethical person. You cannot not do it. An entity totally powerless fragile, but nonetheless you CANNOT get rid of it. The more fragile the more it has a hold over you.

I think therefore I am, I am only so far as I am caught in the process of thinking.

46:00 HEGEL Philosopher of the EVENT

In what sense for Hegel is TRUTH itself evental? Appearance misleading false appearance is immanent to TRUTH. Yes of course first you cling to one idea its partially true, the other side is partial, then a higher synthesis NO NO. The ABC in the conflict between appearance and reality, the truth is in appearance. Innocent bystander, you are in a certain situation, what matters is not what you sincerely think deep in yourself, but how your situation appears to an observer, even if appearance is false, it is socailly determining, it is stronger. The drama of false appearances. There can be more truth in superficial appearances. Through totally invented accusation, the two women discover that they are attached. Inner self-experience doesn’t get it all, it is the 3rd party external observation.

1:05 Derrida started to imitate his American followers who misunderstood him. The TRUTH CAN ARISE OUT OF A MISRECOGNITION.
Immanence of Appearance to TRUTH. Something starts as misleading appearance but triggers a process making it true. This is Hegelian dialectic. Alenka Zupancic: Evental Status of a TRUTH. The truth emerges out of a series of EVENTS, out of an evental process, what begins as a misleading process becomes a TRUTH. This holds at a fundamental level of SEXUALITY.

1:10 infantile sexuality this notion is oppressed today, it is as if this is the price we are paying for our permissivity. Everything is permitted today, do it with dogs, but children are innocent, pedophilia is the ultimate crime. Innocent child as returned with a vengence. Children are the innocent observers, we can participate in orgies etc, but children must not know about it, parents who are swinging, if you mention this to my son but don’t tell my son, on condition that the child doesn’t know it, we need an innocent gaze.

So we should ask: Who are the typical bad guys. Fred Jameson says this about WIRE the HBO series, today the only acceptable bad guys in movies are terrorists, serial killers and pedaphiliacs. House of Cards, with Kevin Spacey, you can still be the point of identification as a murderer, all other murderers are relativized. Copjec told me there was that hit series HOME ALONE, a celebration of children, invincible, they always win, a protection of the innocence. Let’s go a step further.

What is so scandalous about infantile sexuality?

The scandal resides in 2 features:

1. Alenka Zupancic, infantile sexuality is something weird, its neither biologically grounded, nor fitting symbolic cultural norms. Biologically sexuality is made for copulation. It invades before biologically mature sexuality. The problem here is its not we have first infantile, then once puberty enter we can start fucking in a normal way, no it ruins the entire field. The way infantile sexuality approaches sexual topic remains in power to the end.

Quote from Laplanche: drives precede what is innate and instinctual. Instinctually biologically fucking with genitals, but you don’t start at biologically and then get cultural, no you start with unnatural sexuality,

It is instinctual sexuality (fuck to get children) which is adaptaive, it has evolutionary function, infantile drives already present in the unconscious. why this strange intrusion in children neither biology (biologically infantile sexuality is meaningless), nor culture, normativity. But some wierd in-between.

The reason for this strange excess, is the link between sexuality and cognition. Against the standard idea of sexuality as instinctual force which is sublimated though culture, one should assert the link between sexuality and cognition.

1:20 Childrens’sexuality is not masturbatory pre-genital, it is deeply cognitive, where do babies come from? And it is deeply embedded in fantasies, the small child sees some strange things, the enigma of the other’s desire, he feels something obscene in adults, what do they want from me, This is for Laplanche, the original experience of subjectivity, what do the others see in me? I have something in me that others see in me but I don’t know what. Children’s sexuality is grounded in such a cognitive search, but there is always a missing link you never get the answers, that why you have fantasies.

1:24 What I’m saying is 2 things: 1. these are childish fantasies, when you reach puberty you know answers, NO. You need Fantasies to the end. THis is what Lacan means by there is no sexual relation. To get aroused you need fantasy excess. The problem for psychoanalysis, is not vulgar pan-sexualism, the enigma of psycho-analysis is the opposite, what are we thinking when we are doing sex, there has to be some detail, you imagine the curl of the hair: somebody observing you, the scent of her hair, her calves.

The structure of infantile sexuality which is a cognitive missing link remains here to the end. We never reach maturity. The structure of sexuation through cognitive missing link and fantasy, this structure remains to the end.

1:27 Did you see David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. This is a nice fantasy structure. The best scene, Kyle observes from the closet Dennis Hopper, breathing through oxygen mask etc. Chion said only way to read the scene is a visualized audio hallucination. Oxygen breathing, this is a child listening to parent’s copulating, he hears strange sounds, the parent’s fucking but he doesn’t know what fucking is, so makes up scenario, imagines daddy breathing etc.

1:29 Judith Butler Narrative
There is normal sex, heterosexual, straight, and then we have this childish games, that if not refocused on heterosex, they are used as subordinated moments for genital sex. If I like to look at you it is ok only if its foreplay to proper penetration its okay.

Butler/Deleuze Version: we have polymorphous perverse paradise of plural practices which is violently normativized to a genital paradigm. This is also false. There is no plurality of perversions and then bad patriarchy which subordinates it. NO wrong. It is not enough to reassert infantile sexuality which is polymorphous perverse sexuality which is then totalized regulated by the Oedipal genital norm. Infantile sexuality is not the original base of sexuality which is then captured and regulated by the heterosex norm.

The idea here is that Alenka Zupancic, copulation fucking is a central point but precisely as such it ESCAPES normativity. THERE IS NO SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP.

We do have this perverse polymorphous mastabatory practices, but always against the background of a cogntive hole, could have been filled in by a full genital sex, but this can’t be done there is no formula here. There is no knowledge here, there is no formula for sex. Full sex copulation, its space has be sustained by perverse scenarios.

Already Lacan says Seminar XX, simple observation, turns around completely the standard idea that Catholic church its sexual teaching privileges normative genital sexuality at the expense of oppressed perverse infantile drives etc. As if the only thing church tolerates is genital straight heterosexuality NO. Absolutely NOT TRUE.

If you look at the church imaginary it is full or oral/anal drives and art, saints eating shit, fondling each other, but never fucking, copulation is prohibited in the church imaginary. Reject Catholic sexual morality imposes normative sexuality on polymorphous perverse sexuality of humans.

One should insist that there is nothing necessarily asocial in partial drives, they function as glue as society, in contrast to the sexual straight couple.

Pre-genital oral, anal drives, the Church and Army is full of this. What they feel threatened by is copulation, the couple.

Zupancic there is something profoundly disruptive at stake in copulation, the kind of social bond it proposes (copulation) that Christianity proposes, it doesn’t need copulation, natural copulation is utterly banned from the religious imaginary.

Christianity is all about jouissance of the body, the body of God as constituting another person’s jouissance, partial drives and the satisfaction they procure are abundantly present. In its libidinal aspect, satisfaction and bonding by way of partial objects with the exclusion of sexual coupling. Infantile sexuality is part of Christianity. The pure enjoyment, enjoyment for sake of enjoyment is not banned, what is banned is sexuality in form of copulation. Christianity fully acknowledges the polymorphous perverse satisfaction of drives but Christianity desexualizes the pleasure they provide. Why this oppression of Sexuality in Church?

1:41 What happens in copulation is precisely a certain link, coupling of 2 dimension which make it problematic for Church. On the one hand sexuality in sense of partial drives, you can’t find satisfaction put finger up here, squeeze here, technical stuff of how to do it then we have the inter-subjective LINK, but isn’t the tendency today that the 2 should be kept apart.

If you are frigid = problem of partial drives. Sexual topic is reduced to question of partial drives. Sexual topic is reduced to topic of partial drives, if you can’t get erection do this … sexuality is subordinated to, does it contribute to your relation to other. What happens in intense copulation the 2 dimensions go together.

The mystery of sexuality is intense bodily enjoyment and connection with Other, not in this metaphysical sense, communicating with sould no fuck soul, it is brutally concrete, not connecting with souls, the more you reduce the other to an object, the more you have spiritual surrender.

The Church prefers missionary position, this is way to maintain distance from other, in other words the Church wants to protect us from the miraculous EVENTAL, traumatic event of SEXUALITY. a traumatic event that can’t be reduced to reproductive copulation.

1:44.20 This missing link, no sexual relationship, the last trap here. If you read Lacan, you must notice AMBIGUITY. 1. massively endorses philosophic topic, division between animal and humans. Animals=instinct you know when to copulate. Humans we need fantasies, poetry it doesn’t function. This idea of Opposing nature as domain of immediate BALANCE, no, we have to do a step: This idea that it’s not enough to say man is de-natured animal, Nature is already de-natured it doesn’t know it.
Alenka Zupancic: are you aware of something, conscious of something. UNCONSCIOUS of something. Both nature and man don’t know how to do it. Nature doesn’t know that it doesn’t know. Lacan gives some hints in Seminar II. LAMELLA undead object. at the level of animal sexuality. Oscillates Lacan between simple celebration of humanity, Man doesn’t have instinctual coordinates, which is why has to invent things NO Nature has gap itself, The battler is DENATURALIZING nature. The ultimae idealist resistance, we have nature, then somehow things go wrong with humans.

This wonderful idea in Shcelling, Benjamin, this idea human language was created to give words to the pain that is already in nature, to redeem the pain in nature. If we drop this mystical topic, and say radical discord that is ALREADY IN NATURE. with humanity nature becomes UNCONSCIOUS of its own DISCORD. THis is the way I read quantum physics, the latter denaturalizes nature, what we get is not culture but not nature in the usual way we understand it.
151:00 What would be materialist theology. Kierkargards idea of anxiety: tried to develop logical proof of God, while he’s trying to deduce existence of God, God himself is watching with anxiety, because if he fails, then God himself like the cat walking over the cliff on thin air, will suddenly drop. Will god’s existence depend on philosophy proving his existence.

Like monarch anxiety if General Assembly deciding if partial or absolute monarch.
Crazy as it may sound, each of us as subjects are in position of GOD, our existence depends on the other, fuck it, I exist if the whole world disappears, for you to exist you depend radically on the others.

The lesson of Quantum physics, at the micro level, things can go on, you can cheat ontologically. Einstein answer to Borg, God does not cheat. Ok, maybe God doesn’t cheat but he can be cheat, at quantum level things can happen that God doesn’t know about. IT isn’t is God cheating, NO. We can cheat on GOD.

Žižek on Hegel May 2013

Audio Link: Ž on Hegel May 12 2013.

Real is impossible and unavoidable. As long as we are subjects of market we are universal.

7:00 Universality, oh we can’t reach universality, imperialism imposing their universality.
8:00 India struggle for universal
8;30 desire is indestructable, it avoids you as such it always returns
9:00 Freedom in a hidden way there was a pathological motivation, even if your act was pure you did it maybe to boast to others. What causes true anxiety, is the prospect that our act truly was free and this trauma is domesticated by reducing it to the pathological. What’s traumatic for Kant is that its terrifying to accept a FREE act, so he reduces it to something pathological.
The unbearable fact is that we are immortal, responsible in the afterlife …
11:30 Hegel’s materialism: Can the Hegelian moment of negation of negation account for redoubled impossibilities.
I’m not free I negate freedom but this escape from freedom proves impossible.

12:10 Lacan’s Alienation and Separation. Alienation in Symbolic order constitutive of the subject. The Subject is the RESULT of the process of alienation. It emerges as a result, alienation is not standard Hegelian view, no, alienation for Lacan is just re-doubled. Ancient Egyptians secrets, what we saw as secrets of Egyptians for us, were secrets for them as well. The secrets remain its just redoubled.

Self-negated pessimism. A form of optimism which is worse than pessimism.
15:00 optimism is negated, life is shit. but the very form of pessimists position is negated, life is shit is too much of a principled position, in a wierd optimistic way, life goes on……….
15:50 Aaron Schuster: subtracted from the nothingness of pessimism, violent peterbation of self-cancelling nothing
17:30 immortality, vampires undead.
Where does Hegel stand with regard to all of this. Can formal matrix of dialectic process account for this downward synthesis, the lowest of the lowest.

19:00 Where the danger is grows also what can save us. Where the danger is is also hope for a reversal. Hegel is usually taken as clearest case of this paradigm, NO, Hegel is not part of this paradigm.
20:00 textbook Hegel. It is Marx not Hegel who follows this logic. Precapitalist modes of economic production, the uniqueness of the CMP, labour is torn out of its primoridal condition into its objective conditions … the worker appears as objectless, purely subjective capacity of labour with its objective conditions of production.
22:50 Proletariat substanceless subjectivity
23:40 The true Hegel. Resolution misses its goal and turns into nightmare, how to remain faithful to goal of original liberation and not get conservative, oh a nihilistic mistake. How at the very moment is liberation goes wrong, how to nonetheless save the day through repetition and redeem its rational core. Our moment is still Hegelian. What Hegel called absolute Freedom and Terror was pretty mild compared to Stalin. The Jacobins were simply overthrown by a vote in Assembly National, ha do that to Stalin.
26:00 return from Marx to Hegel. From Marxist revolution eschatology, to Hegel’s tragic vision of history as open. The historical process always redirects are activity into an unexpected direction. Accepted the alienation of the historical process, we can’t control, not because we are puppets, no, there is no big Other. This acceptance of alienation. It implies a fully engaged position, aware of the risks involved. There is no higher historical necessity, only activity open to risks of open contingent history. The conclusive moment of the dialectic process is not synthetic unity, return at a higher level to some form of the One, for Hegel, alienation is also constitutive of the subject, subject does not pre-exist its alienation, but emerges through it. It’s only nature that only alienates itself from itself, the subject is the outcome of the self-alienation of nature.

The big Other doesn’t exist, no higher historical necessity, no World Spirit (forget Charles Taylor). Nonetheless, because self-alienation of nature is constitutive of subject, when you break out of alienation, you don’t get overblown narcissistic subject that appropriates the other, the GAP is displaced, we experience ourself as alienated from the other, we see how this alienation is displaced into the other itself, there is no substantial other to which we are alienated, the gap is redoubled.

On late Heidegger: historicity goes all the way down, cannot be reduced to a non-historical absolute. His achievement is a transcendental historicism, different historicist modes of being. The ultimate horizon is the horizon of this play of different transcendental horizons. For Heidegger at much higher level, does same as west coast American pseudo-follower of Foucault, what is this table? we can only ask what discursive regime, the ontic question is subordinated to the ontological horizon, the ultmate catastrophe is the ontological one. The true catastrophe is not whether humanity will destroy itself ontically, the true catastrophe has already happened, humanity dwells in technology etc. From the beginning of zein and seit Heidegger was bothered, transcendental is not creation, objects appear within a horizon of being, what Nature would be without man? The past carries with it a temporal index, our coming was expected on earth, we should bring this logic to the end, later the last big revolution will retroactively redeem earlier revolution, human being and nature: that is to say, what is nature outside humanity with no relation to humanity 1929-1930, perhaps animals are in an unknown way aware of their lack, their poorness. The definition of animal as poor in the world, as stone without world, when Heidegger as animals as poor in the world he means that we as humans are dwelling within a world, and we cannot but experience animals as within this world, we can’t step outside our horizon of meaning, and simply look at reality. He doubts this transcendental reply, not that things are simply there, it is something that characterizes immanently, the sorrow of nature as Derrida, the animal that I am: our human exploded to redeem nature from its suffering. it raises the right question: NOt what is nature for language, can we grasp nature adequetely through language, but What is language for nature, how does emergence of language affect nature.
Aaron Schuster: on the one hand official position, symbolic order is ultimate horizon, all we can do is concoct invent beautiful stories, myths about what went on before, BUT the symbolic order is a reaction to some RADICAL deadlock (sorrow in nature) dislocation, that is already there in nature. So that the Freudian civilization and its discontents, nature is not homeostatic universe things in their own place and then human being displace nature NO. a displacement was already in place in nature.
Higher level of non-resolution. Lacan speculates on infinite pain of being a plant. on the one hand you have this eternal poetry of dislocation of sexuality in human species in contrast to poor animals who nonetheless have instincts that tell them when/how to copulate. The fascination of national Geographic, animals a universe that works, I think we should go here a step further, when you watch National Geographic, they report on human community which is treated as a small animal community, one should risk a step further, a secret awareness already in nature, no go further than New Age, maybe nature is the ultimate invented tradition, True Materialism begins when you transpose the gap as specifically human. when we transpose this gap back into nature itself. Sexuality, when Lacan introduces Lamella, Seminar XI. the deadlock is already there in nature, it means that human speech is not a fall from some natural balance but a reaction reacting to a fall that was already there.
The Wound can be healed only by the spear that Cut it.
The spirit is itself the wound it tries to heal. The spirit of human subjectivity is the power of tearing apart, spirit is nothing but the process of overcoming immediacy and organic unity.
a withdrawal the creates that which it withdraws from.
50:00 India