subjectivity – Page 8

Miller shame

Miller, Jacques-Alain. “On Shame.” SIC 6: Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Clemens, Justin, and Russell Grigg eds. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. 11 – 28. Print.

The disappearance of shame means that the subject ceases to be represented by a signifier that matters. 18

When one has come to the point at which every body tears up his visiting card, where there is no shame any more, the ethics of psychoanalysis is called into question. 19

The virtues of what has emerged as the modern man imply the renunciation of aristocratic virtue and of what it obliged in terms of braving death. One of the places this is brought about is in the work of Hobbes, which reveres aristocratic virtue while at the same time deducing that the social bond is above all established in the face of the fear of death, that is, the contrary of aristocratic virtue. Cultivated minds these days refer to this discourse in which one finds the foundation for the claim that security is essential for modern man. This is to affirm that heroism no longer means anything. 24

This is what psychoanalys is is able to point out, that the shameless are shameful. To be sure, they challenge the master’s discourse, the solidarity between the master and the worker, both being a part of the same system. He refers to the Senatus Populusque Romanus, the Senate and the Roman people, who each benefited from the master signifier.

He indicates to these students that they are placed with the others in excess, that is to say, the rejects of the system, not with the proletariat but with the lumpenproletariat. It is a very precise remark and it runs right across all the years we have lived through since. This enables him to deduce that this system that adheres to the master signifier produces shame.

The students, by placing them selves outside the system, put themselves in the place of impudence. [offensive boldness, insolent or impertinent, shameless]

This is where we can see what has changed since then.We are in a system that does not obey the same regulation because we are in a system that produces impudence and not shame, that is, in a system that annuls the function of shame.

We no longer apprehend it except in the form of insecurity — a form of insecurity that is imputed to the subject, who is no longer under the domination of a master signifier.

The present moment of this civilization is permeated by an authoritarian and artificial return of the master signifier. Every one must work in their place or be locked up. While in the system Lacan was in, it was still possible to say “make ashamed.”

Impudence has progressed greatly since, and today it has be come the norm. What does one obtain from saying to the subject,”You owe something to yourself”? There is no doubt that psychoanalysis must define its position in relation to the aristocratic reaction that I have referred to. This is indeed the question that haunts our practice: Is it for everyone? 26

Lacan’s fundamental debate — it is clear in The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, as it was already in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis — has always been a debate with civilization in so far as it abolishes shame, with the globalization that is in process, with Americanization or with utilitarianism, that is, with the reign of what Kojeve calls the Christian bourgeois.

The path that Lacan proposes is the signifier as vehicle of a value of transcendence. This is condensed into S1. Again, things have changed since The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, because the signifier has been affected. Speech itself has been reduced to the pair listening and chattering.

What one attempts to preserve in the analytic session is a space in which the signifier retains its dignity. 28

We can estimate the difference between today and the period of The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. We are at a point where the dominant discourse enjoins one not to be ashamed of one’s jouissance anymore.

Ashamed of all the rest, yes, of one’s desire, but not of one’s jouissance .

copjec shame pt 3

Copjec, Joan. “May ’68, the Emotional Month.” Lacan: The Silent Partners Ed. Slavoj Žižek. New York: Verso, 2009. Print.

Far from being an abstract idea, the insistent affirmation of a negative contrary is a central fact with which modern philosophy and politics tries to come to grips. I noted earlier that the historical proposition that everything, including man, is malleable implies that he is without foundation, without roots. Deterritorialization therefore reigns, or should be expected to reign, in the scientific/capitalist world. Yet no political fact has asserted itself with such ferocity than that man is ‘not without foundation’, ‘not without roots’. Something insists on disrupting the progress of deterritorialization, time and time again.

Now, to say that one is ‘not without roots’ is different from saying that one has roots in some racial, ethnic or national tradition, as those who engineered the turn to ‘identity politics’ are wont to say. But by way of exploring this critical difference, I want to return to Lacan’s myth of the lathouses, the non-objectified objects that appear from time to time in the alethosphere. Man, the prosthetic God of this alethosphere, is uprooted from every foundation, ungrounded, thus malleable or at one with the Other, but from time to time, and without warning, he encounters one of these lathouses, which provokes his anxiety. The chiasmic intertwining of man and Other, the absorption of the former in the latter, suddenly falters; man is pulled away, disengaged FROM his foundationless existence in the Other; he grows deaf or indifferent to the Other’s appeal. This disruption is not followed, however, by a retreat from the publicity of ‘pleasure-reality incorporated’ into privacy, simply. For what we encounter in this moment is not the privacy of a self, but the other within the alethospheric. This is the moment of extimacy in which we discover an ‘overpopulated’ privacy, where some alien excess adheres to us. 99

The phrase ‘riveted to being’ is revealing. Rather than simply and immediately being our being, coinciding with it, we are ineluctably fastened, stuck to it – or it to us. (Levinas describes this being ‘adhering to’ us, just as Lacan, in his own myth of the lamella, describes the object as ‘sticking to us’.)

The sentiment of being riveted to being is one of being in the forced company of our own being, whose ‘brutality’ consists in the fact that it is impossible either to assume it or to disown it. It is what we are in our most intimate core, that which singularizes us, that which cannot be vulgarized and yet also that which we cannot recognize.

We do not comprehend or choose it, but neither can we gel rid of it; since it is not of the order of objects – but, rather, of the ‘not-without-object’ – it cannot be objectified, placed before us and confronted. 100

copjec the gaze

Copjec, Joan. “The Censorship of Interiority.” Umbra A Journal of the Unconscious. 2009. 165-186.

The gaze, he says, cannot be matched to an actual pair of eyes; it is not locatable in a person. The gaze has no bearer, belongs to no one. If, feeling a gaze rest upon me, I scan the subway car to try to pin it on some suspicious-looking person, the experience of the gaze will evaporate at each point on which my accusation alights.

There is a fantasmatic dimension of the gaze that suggests it cannot be contained within an intersubjective dialectic.

But, in the end, Sartre does not follow up on this suggestion and thus the a-personal dimension of the gaze serves in his account merely to enhance the power of the Other by effacing his limits.

The fact that I cannot attach it to the actual eyes of an objectified other gives the gaze all the more power to objectify and limit me. This is a point Val Lewton, the legendary producer of horror films, well understood: do not show the horrible thing directly embodied in a person, for this will only have the effect of attenuating the threat. 181

Lacan reads the fantasmatic dimension of the gaze differently. There is no warrant, he argues, for Sartre’s placement of the gaze exclusively on the side of an adversarial other. Detached from every observer, it is detached, too, from the voyeur and not only from the Other.

It is as if, through participation in the social or public field, the voyeur were lent a gaze by which he is permitted to see himself appear.

The gaze lends the subject the exteriority or detachment necessary to look back and see the one thing he was unable to see: his own appearance. What this recurvant gaze sees, however, is not merely the subject’s emergent image, but the detachment that permits it to emerge. My image is my disguise, my veil; it enables me to appear in public while preserving my privacy.

In a gesture of sleazy flattery, Behzad tries to establish some silly points of coincidence between Zeynab and Forugh, the leading Persian poet of the twentieth century. There is absolutely no sign, however, that Zeynab is interested in being like the poet. What interests Zeynab is dissimulation (the possibility of which is opened by the poem), the possibility of being able to present herself in public while remaining concealed.

copjec shame hejab

Copjec, Joan. “The Object-Gaze: Shame, Hejab, Cinema.”

Anxiety is rarely experienced in the raw; something like the “stem cell” of affects, it is more often encountered in another form, in one of the “social affects” of guilt or shame, which we can describe as two socially differentiated forms of anxiety accompanying two different organizations of our relation to our potentiality and to our past. In brief, anxiety can best be understood as the imperative to (escape into) sociality. Unable to discern our own desire, to know who we are, we feel compelled to flee into sociality in an attempt to find there some image of ourselves. The society of others serves a civilizing function not, as is usually said, because it tames primitive animal instincts, but because it colonizes our savage, inhuman jouissance by allowing us to acquire some self-image. 174

In other words, what the diegetic directors disregard while making their images is the very jouissance or unrealized surplus of self which makes each villager opaque to herself. The directors rob them of that and thus reduce them to disappearing phenomena.

The obscenity of the Abu Ghraib photographs, as with those taken by Behzad, consists in their implicit assumption that there is no obscene, no off-screen, that cannot be exposed to a persistent, prying look.

The two sets of photographs result from the same obscene denial: they deny that the prisoners and the villagers ARE exposed to their own otherness to ourselves.

This otherness to ourselves is what constitutes the only interiority we have; it is our privacy.

Thus the ultimate crime of the photographers is to proceed as if the prisoners and villagers have no privacy to invade. 175

At the close of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche expressed his scorn for his contemporaries’ stupid insistence on trying to “see THROUGH everything.” He protested the lack of reverence and discretion which fueled their tactless attempt to “touch, lick, and finger everything.” The phenomenon Nietzsche decried is the frenzied desire we still see all around us, the desire to cast aside every veil, penetrate every surface, transgress every barrier in order to get our hands on the real thing lying behind it. We seem to have installed in the modern world a new “beyondness,” a new untouchable, or a new secularized sacred, one that inspires a new desire for transgression. This secularized sacred originates not in a belief in the existence of another world, but from the belief that what we want in this world always lies behind a barrier which prevents our access to it.

The rough desire to brush aside barriers and veils arises through a specific structuring of our relation to our culture which we can call guilt. Common to the affects of anxiety, guilt, and shame is our sense of an inalienable and yet unintegratable surplus of self.

In guilt this surplus weighs on us no longer as the burden of an unfinished past, but as the unfinished business of the present. The sentiment of our opacity to ourselves is disavowed and in its place arises the sentiment of being excluded from ourselves by exterior barriers.

In short, we treat ourselves with the same measure of obscenity as we treat others, denying ourselves any privacy in the true sense. The mechanisms of this conversion of anxiety into guilt are the social and ego ideals which relieve us of the responsibility of having to invent a future without the aid of rules or scripts.

Ideals give our actions directions, goals to strive for, and thus alleviate the overwhelming sentiment of anxiety. But because ideals are unattainable, by definition, the (bitter) taste of the absolute is still discernible in them through the experience of the elusive beyond they bring into existence.

It is the expansion of capitalism and the prevalence of the structure of guilt supporting it which has made the all-but-extinct affect of shame seem primitive. It is also responsible for making the Islamic system of modesty, with its volatile disdain for the modern, capitalist passion for exposing everything, seem anachronistic, as it did to the author of The Arab Mind and it does to Behzad. Thus we return to the sequence in which he attempts to penetrate the darkness of the improbable grotto where Zeynab spends her days. My reading will focus not on the shamelessness of Behzad (which stoops to its depths here), but on the awakening of shame in Zeynab.

Surely one of the most famous scenes of shame is the one presented in Being and Nothingness where a voyeur is startled while peering through a keyhole by the sound of rustling leaves. Sartre makes the point that it is only at this moment when the voyeur feels himself being observed by another that he acquires the sentiment of self. Sartre insists also on a point Sedgwick later emphasizes in her discussion of shame: the gaze of the Other does not judge, condemn, or prohibit; the voyeur is NOT made to feel shame FOR himself nor FOR his act of lascivious looking. The gaze functions, rather, as an “indispensable mediator” between the voyeur and himself, the condition necessary for precipitating him out as subject from the act of looking in which he has until this point been totally absorbed (Sartre 369).

Without this intervention there would be no subject, only peering through a keyhole.

The meeting between Behzad and Zeynab invites us to reconsider Sartre’s point in the fullness of its political implications.

Zeynab requires an intervention, the presence of others as such, in order to emerge from the milking, from the gerundive form of her impoverished existence, as a subject. In the absence of this intervention she remains something less than that.

hegel democracy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

subject of truth death drive

Peter Karlsen The Grace of Materialism Theology with Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. Københavns Universitet 2010

In sum, according to Žižek (and Santner) the Freudian notion of death drive, and more generally Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis, would provide Badiou with an anti-humanist anthropology that, as a necessary supplement to his purely formal theory of the subject, would allow him to explain more precisely what it is about the human animal that makes it capable, in contrast to all other animals, of breaking with its immediate needs and desires in order to dedicate itself to a Cause beyond its own self-interests, in short, to become a subject of truth.

difference between Ž and Badiou on subject

Peter Karlsen The Grace of Materialism Theology with Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. Københavns Universitet 2010

What does the freedom that the death drive enables look like?

Žižek (FTKN 206; CWZ 94, 135; PV 202, 210, 231) clearly links death drive with freedom. The death drive as a ‘self-sabotaging structure’ is what enables a break with the determinism of both our natural instincts and our ‘second nature’ in terms of the cultural dialectic of law and desire in service of the pleasure principle. This rupture with the normal run of things made possible by the death drive represents, as Žižek (PV 231) puts it, ‘the minimum of freedom’. So, according to Žižek, freedom in its most elementary form is a rupture, a break with determinism.

“I am determined by causes (be it direct brute natural causes or motivations), and the space of freedom is not a magic gap in this first-level causal chain but my ability retroactively to choose/determine which causes will determine me.” Thus, a free act is not simply what sets off a new causal sequence; rather it is the retroactive act of endorsing which causal sequence will determine me. 207

Žižek explains the retroactive character of this ‘second level reflexive causality’ through a useful opposition between what he terms the ‘ordinary historical notion of time’ and the notion of time displayed in a passage in Henri Bergson’s Two Sources of Morality and Religion.

In the ‘ordinary historical notion of time’, possibilities precede their realization, whereas the Bergsonian notion of time is characterized by the assertion that an act (realization) retrospectively opens up its own possibility.

Rather than thinking of times as succeeding moments all loaded with multiple possibilities just waiting to be realized, according to the Bergsonian notion of time, an event only even becomes possible after it has happened, and so it is not determined by its past, rather it changes the past retrospectively by now appearing as a (realized) possibility. 207

In a brief excurse in his 2008 book In Defense of Lost Causes, Žižek offers two explanations for Badiou’s (mistaken) opposition to the notion of death drive. The first reason for Badiou’s reluctance is, according to Žižek, due to the fact that he relates the death drive to the ‘religious’ motif of finitude.

But, as we have just seen in the above, in Žižek’s view the death drive has nothing to do with the pathos of finitude and obsession with mortality, on the contrary. So, as Žižek (IDLC 395) puts it, “What Badiou misses here is the fact that ‘death drive’ is, paradoxically, the Freudian name for its very opposite, for the way immortality appears within psychoanalysis: for an uncanny excess of life, for an ‘undead’ urge which persists beyond the (biological) cycle of life and death, of generation and corruption.”

The second reason for Badiou’s dismissal of the death drive is, according to Žižek (IDLC 394), an all too crude opposition in Badiou’s (e.g. IT 62; D 91-92) philosophy between the rupture of the event as the introduction of genuine novelty and repetition as an obstacle for the rise of anything truly new.

As demonstrated by Adrian Johnston (2007d, 165) in an article on Žižek’s reading of Badiou, the heart of the matter in Žižek’s critique of Badiou’s hostility to the notion of death drive is not this hostility as such, but a more fundamental matter concerning the very core of Badiou’s theory of the subject, namely the question of how Badiou explains what makes a mere human animal, caught up in a life dictated entirely by its self-interests and desire, capable of suddenly taking the decision to be true to an event and thus becomes a subject of truth. Or, to put it in terms of Badiou’s Pauline formula of ‘not…but’:

What is it that enables the individual under the law to withdraw from (‘not’) the law, from the path of the flesh, in order to affirm (‘but’) the exception of the gracious event and thus becomes a subject, entering the path of the spirit? Žižek touches upon this matter in his extensive discussion in The Ticklish Subject of the differences between Badiou’s philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis. In the section entitled ‘The Lacanian Subject’, Žižek (TTS 159) outlines what he takes to be the core of the matter:

“That is the difference between Lacan and Badiou: Lacan insists on the primacy of the (negative) act over the positive establishment of a ‘new harmony’ […] while for Badiou, the different facets of negativity […] are
reduced to so many versions of ‘betrayal’ of (or infidelity to, or denial of) the positive Truth-event.” It is undoubtedly correct that Badiou, at least prior to Logics of Worlds, seems to describe any negative mode of relationship to an event as a disqualification for being a subject; that is, anyone who denies an event can of course never become a subject, and anyone who betrays his fidelity to an event is no longer a subject.

But, the question is, whether Badiou, as Žižek seems to imply, refuses negativity as such in regard to the subject. Nevertheless, Žižek (TTS 159) is completely right, when he in the succeeding paragraph states that: “This difference between Badiou and Lacan concerns the precise statusof the subject: Badiou’s main point is to avoid identifying the subject with the constitutive void of the structure […].” (BE 432; C 202-203; IT 86) Badiou has himself on more than one occasion declared this as the crucial difference between Lacanian psychoanalysis and his own philosophy.

Žižek (TTS 159-160) elaborates further on this difference between Lacan and Badiou concerning the subject in the following way:

For Badiou […] the subject is consubstantial with a contingent act of Decision; while Lacan introduces the distinction between the subject and the gesture of subjectivization: what Badiou […] describe[s] is the process of subjectivization – the emphatic engagement, the assumption of fidelity to the Event […] while the subject is the negative gesture of breaking out of the constraints of Being that opens up the space of possible subjectivization.

In Lacanese, the subject prior to subjectivization is the pure negativity of the death drive […]

In other words, according to Žižek, Badiou wrongly equates the subject with the process of subjectivization, that is, to put it in Badiou’s terms, with the ‘operation’ of decision, fidelity and forcing by means of which we pass from being a mere human animal to becoming a subject of truth. What Badiou misses here is … the negative moment or dimension that grounds the decision to affirm the event, the dimension that makes it possible to engage in a fidelity to an event in the first place. And this dimension is precisely the self-sabotaging dimension of the death drive. (TTS 160)

freedom death drive

Peter Karlsen The Grace of Materialism Theology with Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. Københavns Universitet 2010

As Žižek (PV 61) emphasizes elsewhere, the difference between desire and drive is precisely that “[…] desire is grounded in its constitutive lack, while drive circulates around a hole, a gap in the order of being.” note 275 page 204

It is however, as Žižek (OB 92-98; PV 60-63) emphasizes, paramount to distinguish between the gap of the drive and the gap of desire, if we want to avoid a highly misleading confusion between drive and desire. The gap that characterizes desire is, as I have already hinted, the external gap between the substitutable object (that I want) and the forbidden/lost Thing (that I desire). In contrast, the gap that characterises the drive is, according to Žižek (OB 92; PV 61), the inherent gap between its ‘goal’ and its ‘aim’. That is, the gap between the object around which the drive circulates endlessly (goal) and this very endless circulation around the object itself (aim).

This finally brings us back to the issue of theology. In On Belief, Žižek explicitly relates this discussion of the difference between desire and drive to Christianity. In the section entitled ‘God Resides in Detail’, Žižek applies the contrast between Judaism and Christianity to illustrate this difference (and vice-versa).

Following Hegel, Žižek (OB 89; cf. SOI 201-207; FTKN xxx-xxxi) suggests that Judaism is the religion of the Sublime, insofar that it perceives God as the transcendent irreprehensible wholly Other, or in Lacanian terms, as the impossible God-Thing. In other words, Judaism follows the logic of desire.

In contrast, Christianity renounces this transcendent God-Thing of the Beyond with its fundamental
message that Christ (this miserable human-being) is God (the Sublime).

By claiming the absolute identity between God and man, Christianity acknowledges that there is really nothing (no Thing) beyond appearance, or more correctly, as Žižek (OB 89) puts it “[…] Nothing BUT the imperceptible X that changes Christ, this ordinary man, into God.”

That is to say, although Christianity ‘inverses the Jewish sublimation into a radical desublimation’, this inversion is not merely a (Feuerbachian) reduction of God to man, but rather the manifestation of the divine dimension in man (OB 90).

So, in what does this X, this divine dimension in man, consist? Žižek’s (OB 90) answer is that:

[…] far from being the Highest in man, the purely spiritual dimension towards which all humans strive, the ‘divinity’ is rather a kind of obstacle, of a ‘bone in the throat’ – it is something, that unfathomable X, on account of which man cannot ever fully become MAN, self-identical. The point is not that, due to the limitation of his mortal sinful nature, man cannot ever become fully divine, but that, due to the divine spark in him, man cannot ever fully become MAN.

As we know by now this ‘imperceptible X’ (the inherent ‘minimal difference’) that Christ manifests, which according to Žižek is what prevents man from becoming fully man, is of course that which also goes under the name of the subject, the Cartesian Cogito, the self-relating negativity of German idealism, the Lacanian $ or the Freudian death drive.

In Žižek‘s words, Christ “[…] stands for the excess of life, for the ‘undead’ surplus which persists over the cycle of generation and corruption […].” In terms of the issue of the difference between desire and drive and God into God himself, conforms to the transposition of the external gap between the substitutable object (that I want) and the forbidden/lost Thing (that I desire) into an inherent gap in the object itself around which the drive circulates.

Thus, the Christian ‘inversion of Jewish sublimation into a radical desublimation’ is not merely the demythologization of desire; it is the manifestation of the dimension of drive in man. Or, to put it in other words: by manifesting the divine dimension in man through its message of Christ on the cross as the death the God, Christianity makes it possible to (re)enter the domain of drives.

By making manifest through his sacrifice on the Cross of the absolute identity between the sublime Thing and miserable human-being (the everyday object) Christ suspends the gap of desire and (re)closes the loop of drive.
At the end the same section in On Belief, Žižek (OB 105) indicates that the fundamental narrative of Christianity, the story of the Fall, could be read as a parallel to the psychoanalytical conception of the emergence of the death drive:

“The story of the (Adam’s) Fall is evidently the story of how the human animal contracted the excess of Life which makes him/her human – ‘Paradise’ is the name for the life delivered of the burden of this disturbing excess.”

So, perhaps we should reverse – in an admittedly completely anachronistic manner – the suggestion made by the German philosopher, Jakob Taubes (1957, 137), that Freud was the last great advocate of the Christian doctrine of Original Sin. Is not the Christian doctrine of Original Sin the first great advocacy of the Freudian notion of death drive? Is this not what Žižek hints at? 205

Christianity also releases or ‘redeems’ man from the excessiveness of the death drive: “Out of love for humanity, Christ then freely assumes, contracts onto himself, the excess (‘Sin’) which burdened the human race.” Yet, this redemption (rescue, deliverance from sin, salvation) does certainly not consist in the obliteration of this excess.

The ‘redemption’ from the excess of death drive offered by Christianity is not a ‘healing of the wound’, but rather the possibility of accepting it. In short, in Žižek’s Hegelian reading, the redemption is the wound, the Fall, itself.

“God does not first push us into sin in order to create the need for Salvation, and then offer himself as the Redeemer from the trouble into which he got us in the first place; it is not that the Fall is followed by redemption: the Fall is identical to Redemption, it is “in itself” already Redemption.”

So, what exactly is this redemption, this possibility that Christ opens up with his death, which is already the Fall itself? Žižek’s (MC 273) answer is:

“The explosion of freedom, the breaking out of the natural enchainment — and this, precisely, is what happens in the Fall.”

Or, as he (PD 86) puts it elsewhere:

“[…] for Christianity, the Fall is really not a Fall at all, but ‘in itself’ its very opposite, the emergence of freedom. There is no place from which we have fallen; what came before was just stupid natural existence.”

What does the freedom that the death drive enables look like?

death drive desire

Peter Karlsen The Grace of Materialism Theology with Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. Københavns Universitet 2010

It is this thrust to go (on) beyond biological life (and death) that Žižek (PV 62) identifies with human immortality: “The paradox of the Freudian “death drive” is therefore that it is Freud’s name for its very opposite, for the way immortality appears within psychoanalysis, for an uncanny excess of life, for an ‘undead’ urge which persists beyond the (biological) cycle of life and death, of generation and corruption.”

Thus, in the most basic sense, what the strange assertion of immortality of man frequently advanced by Žižek in his more recent work refers to is this unnatural urge to live life in an excessive way beyond biological self-preservation, ‘beyond the pleasure principle’, towards something which cannot be reduced to mere biological life. 199

Thus, paradoxically, in Žižek’s view the automatism of the death drive does not designate an additional kind of natural function determining the cause of man, rather it designates a dimension of autonomy in man that since Descartes has been associated with the term ‘subject’. 199

In his discussion in The Ticklish Subject of the transition from nature to culture, Žižek (TTS 37) underlines … the role of the law (culture) is, in service of the ‘pleasure principle’, to pacify, not man’s natural instincts, but “[…] his excessive love for freedom, his natural ‘unruliness’, which goes far beyond obeying animal instinct […]”, or in short, the death drive.

The law does this by prohibiting the object to which the drive is excessively attached, which forces open the closed loop of the drive, replacing the continuous circulation around one object with a successive movement from one substitute object to another.

Another way to put it is that the law’s prohibition of the object introduces a lack which constitutes what Lacan terms the metonymy of desire; that is, the infinite sliding from one substitute object to another, driven by the loss of the original object, which is in fact nothing but is own lack.

Desire, as the endless transgressing thrust toward the ‘Thing’ (Lacan’s term for the lost/forbidden object of desire), is therefore not prior to the law, but, as Paul already knew, instituted by the law itself (HTRL 42; Evans 2010, 99).

The law is thus not aimed at regulating man’s desire, rather desire is a product of the law’s attempt to regulate the drives and thus in a certain sense part of this regulation.

The metonymy of desire is furthermore sustained by the fantasy fostered by the law that the ‘Thing’ is not really impossible (nothing but lack), but merely forbidden, and that it therefore at some point will be possible to obtain it; or in short, the fantasy that desire might actually be satisfied. But, as Žižek (AF 80) underlines: “desire is […] 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.”

difference between instincts and death drive

Peter Karlsen The Grace of Materialism Theology with Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. Københavns Universitet 2010

In … in the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Work of Sigmund Freud, there has been an unfortunate tendency to translate both ‘drive’ (Trieb) and ‘instinct’ (Instinkt) as instinct (Evans 2010, 46). However, as Žižek (like many others before him) repeatedly insists, we must not ignore this important distinction made by Freud. ‘Instincts’ have to do with biological needs such as the need to eat or the need to propagate. Another key feature is that instincts are relatively fixed and directly related to their objects (Evans 2010, 85). Furthermore, and most importantly, an instinct can be satisfied, for instance by eating or copulating, thus once a need is fulfilled the instinct finds peace (OB 94). In contrast to biological instincts, ‘drives’ are not directly bound to a specific object. As Dylan Evans (2010, 46, cf. OB 93-94) puts it: “The drives differ from biological needs in that they can never be satisfied, and do not aim at an objectbut rather circle perpetually around it.”

Moreover, as Žižek also importantly explains in his discussion of the neurosciences, the possibility condition for the death drive to emerge is the not-All character of reality itself. It is the incompleteness of being/nature that makes possible its own derailing/malfunctioning. As Adrian Johnston (2007d, 8) puts it in his review of the book: “Relatively early in The Parallax View, Žižek appeals […] to a notion of being as shot through with holes and void; […] This perforation of being provides the minimal opening needed for the introduction of the psychoanalytic motif of conflict into ontology itself […].”

Another serious mistake in the reception of the notion of death drive is, according to Žižek, to read it in terms of Freud’s own dualistic framework of Thanatos and Eros as part of a conflict between two different forces. As he stresses in his discussion of Catherine Malabou’s book Les nouveaux blesséson Freud and neuroscience: “When Malabou varies the motif that, for Freud, Eros always relates to and encompasses its opposite Other, the destructive death drive, she […] conceives this opposition as the conflict of two opposed forces, not, in a more proper sense, as the inherent self-blockade of the drive: ‘death drive’ is not an opposite force with regard to libido, but a constitutive gap which makes drive distinct from instinct […].” For a reading inline with the one suggested by Žižek see Gilles Deleuze (2004, 18-19) Difference and Repetition.

according to Žižek (SOI 4): “[…] we have to abstract Freud’s biologism: ‘death drive’ is not a biological fact, but a notion indicating that the human psychic apparatus is subordinated to a blind automatism of repetition beyond the pleasure-seeking, self-preservation, accordance between man and his milieu.” 196

The inaccessible object becomes an ‘obsession’, something to which the rat is excessively attached, something to which it returns again and again seeking to obtain it. According to Žižek (OB 94), it is exactly this ‘closed loop’ of perpetual repetition of the same failed gesture which characterises the drive. It is this gesture of ‘stubborn attachment’ that makes man the maladaptive animal;

or, as Žižek (PV 231) underscores in The Parallax View: […] we should bear in mind the basic anti-Darwinian lesson of psychoanalysis repeatedly emphasized by Lacan: man’s radical and fundamental dis-adaptation, mal-adaptation, to his environs. At its most radical, ’being-human’ consists in an ‘uncoupling’ from immersion in one’s environs, in following a certain automatism which ignores the demands of adaptation—this is what the ‘death drive’ ultimately amounts to. […]

‘death drive’ as a self-sabotaging structure represents the minimum of freedom, of a behavior uncoupled from the utilitarian-survivalist attitude.

Although man is thus in a certain sense determined by a malfunction, a failure to adapt to his surroundings, it is, as implied in the last part of the quote, also (though it might seem counter-intuitive) this very mal-adaptive automatism of the death drive that due to its ‘uncoupling’ from the normal run of things, grounds a break with determinism and thus enables a genuine act of freedom 197

moment of madness between nature and culture death drive

Peter Karlsen The Grace of Materialism Theology with Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. Københavns Universitet 2010.

Freud formulated his thesis on the death drive precisely in response to phenomena which could not be explained on the basis of the ‘pleasure principle’, phenomena that were ‘beyond the pleasure principle’, and its directive of self-preservation. In Žižek’s (CWZ 61) words:

“In trying to explain the functioning of the human psyche in terms of the pleasure principle, reality principle and so on, Freud became increasingly aware of a radical non-functional element, a basic destructiveness and excess of negativity, that couldn’t be accounted for. And thatis why Freud posed the hypothesis of death drive.”

How did man go from being a mere animal to a being of language bound by the symbolic order? How was the passage from a natural into a civil or cultural state brought about? The answer given by classical Political Philosophy is of course the famous narrative of the ‘social contract’.

But in Žižek’s (FTKN 205) view this is an inconsistent explanation insofar that “[…] the fiction of a ‘social contract’ presupposes in advancewhat is or should be its result, its final outcome – the presence of individuals who act according to rules of a civilized rational order […].” According to Žižek (TTS 36; FTKN 206), the passage from a natural to a cultural state cannot be accounted for in terms of a smooth continuous transition, something has to intervene between these two states. What the evolutionary narratives of social contract silently presuppose is, according to Žižek (TTS 36), a kind of ‘vanishing mediator’ which is neither nature nor culture. So, what is this vanishing mediator? 193

Man did not become what he is through a “[…] spark of logos magically conferred on Homo sapiens[…].” Instead, Žižek’s (CWZ 80) claim is that the transition from nature to culture is enabled by a ‘malfunction’, a failure, in nature itself. As he (CWZ 65) puts it in one of his conversations with Glyn Daly: “We cannot pass directly from nature to culture. Something goes terribly wrong innature: nature produces an unnatural monstrosity and I claim that it is in order to cope with, to domesticate, this monstrosity that we symbolize.”

As the last part of the quote suggests, and as Žižek (TTS 37) explicitly underlines in his discussion in The Ticklish Subject, the symbolic order of law (culture) is thus not, as it is usually asserted, aimed at controlling our natural instincts and inclination (nature) but, rather directed against something in us which is not natural, namely this moment of thoroughly derailed, malfunctioning, denaturalized ‘nature’.

Indeed in the effort to domesticate this malfunctioning (de)nature “[…] man’s natural propensities are, rather, on the side of moral law against the excess of ‘unruliness’ that threatens his well-being” (TTS 37). As Žižek (TTS 289) emphasizes later in the same book, one should never forget that the law is ultimately in the service of the ‘pleasure principle’ which dictates our daily functioning in accordance with the upholding of our welfare; that is to say, the law is not opposed to our natural instincts as it is claimed in the standard story of ‘nature versus culture’, rather the law and the natural instincts are united in their attempt to constrain the derailed (de)nature of man endangering his self-preservation.

This mediating moment of malfunction, this intersection between nature and culture, which made possible the transition between these two states, only to ‘vanish’ under the domesticating reign of symbolic law and the ‘pleasure principle’, is, according to Žižek (TTS 36; FTKN 207; CWZ 65), nothing less than the emergence of the (death) drive.

Universality vertigo objet a

Žižek, S. Living in End Times New York: Verso, 2010.

Christian church faced with dilmemma starting in 4th century: how to reconcile feudal class society where rich lords ruled over impoverished peasants WITH Egalitaran poverty of the collective of believers as described in Gospels?

Thomas Aquinas believes that while in principle shared property is better, this only holds for perfect humans, majority of us dwell in sin etc. so private property and difference in wealth are natural and it is sinful to demand egalitarianism or abolish private property in “our fallen societies, i.e., to demand for imperfect people what befits only the perfect.”

Is this supplmenting of universality with exceptions a case of the concrete universal?

Structure of universal law and Hegelian “concrete universality” mobilize the gap between the pure universal principle or law and the pragmatic consideration of paritcular circumstances , i.e., the (ultimately empiricist) notion of the excess of the wealth of concrte partiuclar content over any abstract principle — in other words, here, unversality precisely REMAINS ABSTRACT, which is why it has to be twisted or adapted to particular circumstances in order to become operative in real life.

In the second case, on the contrary, the tension is absolutely immanent, inherent to universality itself: the fact that a universality actualizes itself in a series of exceptions is an effect of this universality being at war with itself, marked by an inherent deadlock or impossibility. … The idea’s imperfect [or, rather, catastrophic as in the case of Communism] actualizations bear witness to an “inner contradiction” at the very heart of the idea.

“concrete universality” an example:

Jewish story about death penalty and God who ordained it. devised a practical solution: “one should not directly overturn the divine injunction, that would have been blasphemous; but one should treat it as God’s slip of tongue, thismoment of madness, and invent a complex network of sub-regulations and conditions which, while leaving the possibility of a death penaly intact, ensure that this possibility will never be realized. The beqauty of this procedure is that it turns around the standard trick of prohibiting something in principle (torture, for instance), but then slipping in enough qualifications (“except in specified extreme circumstancess…”) to ensure it can be done whenever one really wants to do it.

It is thus either “In principle yes, but in practice never” or “In principle no, but when exceptional circumstances demand it, yes.”

Note the asymmetry between the two cases: the prohibition is much stronger when one allows torture in principle — in this case, the principled “yes” is NEVER allowed to realize itself; while in the other case, the principled “no” is EXCEPTIONALLY allowed to realize itself.

In other words, the only “reconciliation” between the universal and particular is that of the UNIVERSALIZED EXCEPTION: only the stance which re-casts every particular case as an exception treats all particular cases WITHOUT EXCEPTION in the same way.

And it sould be clear now why this is a case of “concrete universality”: the reason we should find a way to argue, in each particular case, that the death penalty is not deserved, lies in our awareness that there is something wrong with the very idea of the death penalty, that this idea is an injustice masked as justice. 20-21

Ambedkar saw how the structure of four castes does not unite four elements belonging to the same order: while the first three castes (priests, warrior-kings, merchant producers) form a consistent All, an organic tgriad the Untouchables, like Marx’s “Asiatic mode of production,” the “part of no part,” the INCONSISTENT ELEMENT WITHIN THE SYSTEM WHICH HOLDS THE PLACE OF WHAT THE SYSTEM EXCLUDES — as as such the Untouchables STAND FOR UNIVERSALITY.

As long as there are castes, there will be an excessive excremental zero-value element which, while formally part of the system, has no proper place within it. This is why the properly dialectical parados is that, if one is to break out of the caste system, it is not enough to reverse the status of the Untouchables, elevating htem into the “children of god” — the first step should rather be exactly the opposite one: to UNIVERSALIZE their excremental status to the whole of humanity.

Martin Luther directly proposed just such an excremental identity for man: man is like a divine shit, he fell out of God’s anus — and, effectively, it is only within this Protestant logic of man’s excremental identity that the true menaing of Incarnation can be formulated. 23

Protestantism, finally, posits the relationship as real, conceiving Christ as a God who, in His act of Incarnation, freely IDENTIFIED HIMSELF WITH HIS OWN SHIT, with the excremental real that is man — and it is only at this level that the properly Christian notion of divine love can be apprehended, as the love for the miserable excremental entity called “man.”

We are dealing here with what can be ironically referred to as the cosmic-theological proletarian position, whose “infinite judgment” is the identity of excess and universality: the shit of the earth is the universal subject.

The Phenomenology of Spirit, between the two readings of “the Spirit is a bone” which Hegel illustrates by way of the phallic metaphor (the phallus as organ of insernination or as the organ of urination). Hegel’s point is NOT that, in contrast to the vulgar empiricist mind which sees only urination, the proper speculative attitude has to choose insemination.

The paradox is that making the direct choice of insemination is the infallible way to miss the point: it is not possible directly to choose the “true meaning,” for one HAS to begin by making the “wrong” choice (of urination) — the true speculative meaning emerges only through the repeated reading, as the after-effect (or by-product) of the first, “wrong,” reading.

And the same goes for social life in which the direct choice of the “concrete universality”of a particular ethical Iifeworld can end only in a regression to a pre-modern organic society that denies the infinite right of subjectivity as the fundamental feature of modernity.

Since the subject-citizen of a modern state can no longer accept immersion in some particular social role that would confer on him a determinate place within the organic social Whole, the construction of the rational totality of the modern state leads to Revolutionary Terror: one should ruthlessly tear up the constraints of the pre-modern organic “concrete universality” and fully assert the infinite right of subjectivity in its abstract negativity.

In other words, the point of Hegel’s analysis of the Revolutionary Terror is not the rather obvious insight into how the revolutionary project involved the unilateral and direct assertion of abstract universal reason, and as such was doomed to perish in self-destructive fury since it was unable to channel the transposition of its revolutionary energy into a concrete, stable and differentiated social order; Hegel’s point turns rather on the enigma of why, in spite ofthe fact that the Revolutionary Terror was a historical deadlock, we have to pass through it in order to arrive at the modern rational state. 26-27

This is why Hegelian dialectics is not a vulgar evolutionism claiming that while a phenomenon may be justified in its own time, it deserves to disappear when its time passes: the “eternity” of dialectics means that the de-legitimization is always retroactive, what disappears “in itself” always deserves to disappear.

Recall also the paradox of the process of apologizing: if I hurt someone with a rude remark, the proper thing for me to do is to offer a sincere apology, and the proper thing for the other party to do is to say something like “Thanks, I appreciate it, but I wasn’t offended, I knew you didn’t mean it, so you really owe me no apology!”

The point is, of course, that although the final result is that no apology is needed, one has to go through the elaborate process of offering it -“you owe me no apology” can only be said once I have actually offered an apology, so that, although formally “nothing happens,” and the offer of apology is proclaimed unnecessary, there is still a gain at the end of the process (perhaps, even, the friendship is saved).

Is it not that, here also, one has to do something (offer an apology, choose terror) in order to see how superfluous it is? This paradox is sustained by the distinction between the “constative” and the “performative,” between the “subject of the enunciated” and the “subject of the enunciation”: at the level of the enunciated content, the whole operation is meaningless (why do it -offer an apology, choose terror – when it is superfluous?);

but what this commonsensical insight overlooks is that it was only the “wrong” superfluous gesture which created the subjective conditions that made it possible for the subject to really see why this gesture was indeed superfluous. The dialectical process is thus more refined than it may appear; the standard notion is that one can only arrive at the final truth at the end of a series of errors, so that these errors are not simply discarded, but are “sublated” in the final truth, preserved therein as moments within it. What this standard notion misses, however, is how the previous moments are preserved PRECISELY AS SUPERFLUOUS. 28

This is why the obvious response “But is this idea ofretroactively canceling the contingent historical conditions, of transforming contingency into Fate, not ideology at its formally purest, the very form of ideology?” misses the point, namely that this retroactivity is inscribed into reality itself:

what is truly “ideological” is the idea that, freed from “ideological illusions,” one can pass from moment A to moment B directly, without retroactivity — as if, for instance, in an ideal and authentic society, I could apologize and the other party could respond “I was hurt, an apology was required, and I accept it” without breaking any implicit rules. Or as if we could reach the modern rational state without having to pass through the “superfluous” detour of the Terror. 28

…when something radically New emerges it retroactively creates its own possibility, its own causes or conditions. 28

Falling in love changes the past: it is as if I ALWAYS ALREADY loved you, our love was destined to be, is the “answer of the real.” 28 In Vertigo, it is the opposite that occurs: the past is changed so that it loses the ohjet a. What Scottie first experiences in Vertigo is the LOSS of Madeleine, his fatal love; when he recreates Madeleine in Judy and then discovers that the Madeleine he knew was actually Judy already pretending to be Madeleine, what he discovers is not simply that Judy was a fake (he knew that she was not the true Madeleine, since he had used her to recreate a copy of Madeleine), but that, BECAUSE SHE WAS not A FAKE — SHE is MADELEINE — MADELEINE HERSELF WAS ALREADY A FAKE — the objet a disintegrates, the very loss is lost, and we have a “negation of the negation.” His discovery CHANGES THE PAST, deprives the lost object of the objet a. 29

OBJECT A 2012, Žižek at the EGS

What Judy was doing in playing Madeleine was TRUE LOVE.

In Vertigo Scottie does NOT love Madeleine-the proof is that he tries to recreate her in Judy, changing Judy’s properties to make her resemble Madeleine. Similarly, the idea ofcloning a dead child for bereaved parents is an abomination: if the parents are satisfied by this, it is proof that their love was not genuine — love is not love for the properties of the object, but for the abyssal X, the JE NE SAIS QUOI, in the object. 29-30