Category: subjectivity

Neighbour Thing

Žžek. Living in End Times New York: Verso, 2010.

Žižek mentions neighbour in this talk here

face conceals the horror of the Neighbor-Thing. So it isn’t the Levinasian “that Otherness from which the unconditional ethical call emanates” no it isn’t that for Ž.  Semblance: is french term for just the ordinary Joe.  The face makes the Neighbor into a semblance with whom we can identify and empathize.

So why does the covered face cause anxiety for the rest of us?

“because it confronts us directly with the abyss of the Other-Thing, with the Neighbor in its uncanny dimension. The very covering-up of the face obliterates a protective shield, so that the Other-Thing stares at us directly (recall that the burqa has a narrow slit for the eyes; we don’t see the eyes, but we know there is a gaze there)”. 2

[Ž relates Salome’s dance, wonders if she could go further and take off the skin of her face itself so that we see smooth burqa-like surface with slit for gaze] “Love thy neighbor!” means, at its most radical, precisely the impossible — real love for this de-subjetivized subject, for this monstrous dark blot cut with a slit/gaze.

This is why, in psychoanalytic treatment, the patient does not sit face to face with the analyst: they both stare at a third point, since it is only this suspension of the face which opens up the space for the proper dimension of the Neighbor-Thing. 3

politics is the unconcsious: here the unconscious is elevated into the big Other: it is posited as a substance which really dominates and regulates political activity “… true driving force of our political activity … unconscious libidinal activity.”

the unconscious is politics: here the big Other itself loses its substantial character, it is no longer “THE Unconscious,” for it transforms into a fragile inconsistent field overdetermined by political struggles.”

neighbour

However, from a strict materialist standpoint, Laplanche’s notion of the “enigmatic signifier” should be critically supplemented: it is not a primordial fact, an “original trauma” which sets the human animal on the path of subjectivization; it is, rather, a secondary phenomenon, a reaction to the primordial fact of the over-proximity of the other, of his or her intrusive presence or bodily­ material too-much-ness. 543

It is this intrusive presence which is then interpreted as an “enigma,” as an obscure “message” from the other who “wants something” from me. In this sense, the “Neighbor” refers NOT primarily to the abyss of the Other’s desire, the enigma of “Che vuoi?” of “What do you really want from me?” but to an intruder who is always and by definition too near. This is why for Hitler the Jew was a neighbor: no matter how far away the Jews were, they were always too close; no matter how many were killed, the remnants were always too strong.” Chesterton made this point with utmost clarity: “The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.” 543

The properly Freudian materialist solution would be to turn this relationship around and to posit the paradox of an original excess, an excess “in itself” rather than in relation to a presupposed norm.The Freudian drive is just such an excess-in-itself: there is no “normal” drive. The formation of the Ego with its borderline between Inside (Ego) and Outside (non-Ego) is already a defense-formation, a reaction against the excess of the drive. In short, it is not the excess of the drive which violates the “norm” of the Ego, it is the “norm” (proper measure) itself which is a defense against the excess of the drive.

It is for this reason  that  intersubjectivity is not a primordial or “natural” state of  human being. 544

To find traces of a dimension “beyond intersubjectivity” in Hegel, one should look for them in the very place which is the central ref­erence for the partisans of recognition: the famous chapter on servitude and domination from the Phenomenology.

Malabou has noted perceptively that, in spite of the precise logical deduction of the plurality of subjects out of the notion of life, there is an irreducible scandal, something traumatic and unexpected, in the encounter with another subject, that is, in the fact that the subject (a self-consciousness) encounters outside itself, in front of it, another living being in the world which also claims to be a subject (a self-consciousness).

As a subject, I am by definition alone, a singularity opposed to the entire world of things, a punctuality to which all the world appears, and no amount of phenomenological description of how I am always already “together-with” others can cover up the scandal of another such singularity existing in the world. 544

So when I encounter in front of me another self-consciousness, there is something in me (not simply my egotism, but something in the very notion of self-consciousness) which resists the reduction of both myself and the opposed self-consciousness to simple members of the human species: what makes the encounter shocking is that in it, two universalities meet where there is room only for one. 545

In the original encounter, the Other is thus not simply another subject with whom I share the intersubjective space of recognition, but a traumatic Thing.  This is why this excess cannot be properly counted: subjects are never 1 + 1 + 1. .., there is always an objectal excess which adds itself to the series. … an alien monster which is less than One but more than zero.  (The psychoanalytic treatment recreates this scene; the analyst is not another subject, there is no face to face, s/he is an object which adds itself to the patient.) This excessive spectral object is, of course, a stand-in for the subject, the subject itself as object, the subject’s impossible-real objectal counterpart. 545

Two men, having had a drink or two, go to the theater, where they become thoroughly bored with the play. One of them feels an urgent need to urinate, so he tells his friend to mind his seat while he goes to find a toilet: “I think I saw one down the corridor outside.”  The man wanders down the cor­ridor, but finds no WC; wandering ever further into the recesses of the theater, he walks through a door and sees a plant pot. After copiously urinating into it and returning to his seat, his friend says to him: “What a pity! You missed the best part. Some fellow just walked on stage and pissed in that plant pot!” The subject necessarily misses its own act, it is never there to see its own appearance on the stage, its own intervention is the blind spot of its gaze.

What, then, divides the subject? Lacan’s answer is simple and radical: its (symbolic) identity itself — prior to being divided between different psychic spheres, the subject is divided between the void of its cogito (the elusively punc­tual pure subject of enunciation) and the symbolic features which identify it in or for the big Other (the signifier which represents it for other signifiers). 555

In Agnieszka Holland’s Europa, Europa, the hero (a young German Jew who passes as an Aryan and fights in the Wehrmacht in Russia) asks a fellow soldier who had been an actor prior to the war: “Is it hard to play someone else?” The actor answers: “It’s much easier than playing oneself.”

We encounter this otherness at its purest when we experience the other as a neighbor: as the impenetrable abyss beyond any symbolic identity.

When a person I have known for a long time does something totally unexpected, disturbingly evil, so that I have to ask myself, “Did I really ever know him?” does he not effectively become “another person with the same name”?

badiou the subject

Badiou, Alain. Infinite Thought. Justin Clemens (Editor), Oliver Feltham (Editor) Continuum, 2004.

How can a modern doctrine of the subject be reconciled with an ontology?

When poststructuralists do engage with the problemof agency they again meet with difficulties, and again precisely because they merge their theory of the subject with their general ontology.  For example, in his middleperiod Foucault argued that networks of disciplinary power not only reach into the most intimate spaces of the subject, but actually produce what we call subjects. However, Foucault also said that power produces resistance. His problem then became that of accounting for the source of such resistance.

If the subject – right down to its most intimate desires, actions and thoughts – is constituted by power, then how can it be the source of independent resistance? For such a point of agency to exist, Foucault needs some space which has not been completely constituted by power, or a complex doctrine on the relationship between resistance and independence. However, he has neither. In his later works he deals withthis problem by assigning agency to those subjects who resist powerbymeans of anaesthetic project of self-authoring.  Again, the source of such privileged agency — why do some subjects shape themselves against the grain and not others? — is not explained.  5-6

For Badiou, the question of agency is not so much a question of how a subject can INITIATE an action in an autonomous manner but rather how a subject EMERGES through an autonomous chain of actions within a changing situation.

That is, it is not everyday actions or decisions that provide evidence of agency for Badiou. It is rather those extraordinary decisions and actions which ISOLATE an actor from their context, those actions which show that a human can actually be a free agent that supports new chains of actions and reactions. For this reason, not every human being is always a subject, yet some human beings BECOME subjects; those who act in FIDELITY to a chance encounter with an EVENT which disrupts the SITUATION they find themselves in. 6

The consequence of such a definition of the subject seems to be that only brilliant scientists, modern masters, seasoned militants and committed lovers are admitted into the fold. A little unfair perhaps? Is Badiou’s definition of the subject exclusive or elitist? On the one side, you have human beings, nothing much distinguishing them from animals in their pursuit of their interests, and then, on the other side, you have the new elect, the new elite of faithful subjects. This has a dangerous ring, and one could be forgiven for comparing it at first glance to Mormon doctrine.  7

However — and this is crucial — there is no predestination in Badiou’s account. There is nothing other than chance encounters between particular humans and particular events; and subjects MAY be born out of such encounters. There is no higher order which prescribes who will encounter an event and decide to act in relation to it. Thereis only chance. Furthermore, there is no simple distinction between subjects and humans. Some humans become subjects, but only some of the time, and often they break their fidelity to an event and thus lose their subjecthood.

Thus, Badiou displaces the problem of agency from the level of the human to the level of being. That is, his problem is no longer that of how an individual subject initiates a new chain of actions, since for him the subject only emerges in the course of such a chain of actions.

His problem is accounting for how an existing situation — given that BEING, for Badiou, is nothing other than multiple situations — can be disrupted and transformed by such a chain of actions. This displacement of the problem of agency allows Badiou to avoid positing some mysterious autonomous agent within each human such as ‘free will’. However, the direct and unavoidable consequence of the displacement is that the problem of agency becomes the ancient philosophical problem of how the new occurs in being. 8

In L’Etre et l’événement, Badiou’s solution IS SIMPLY TO ASSERT THAT ‘EVENTS HAPPEN’, events without directly assignable causes which disrupt the order of established situations. IF decisions are taken by subjects to work out the consequences of such events, NEW SITUATIONS emerge as the result of their work. 9

Ž EGS 2012 There is no original One Act evental enthusiasm

Slavoj Being and Subjectivity: Act and Evental Enthusiasm

16:19 Alenka Z

I would like a coffee, no cream.  Sorry we have run out of cream.  Can I bring you a coffee without milk?

For Badiou, 1 comes secondary, 1 is an operation, 1 is the effect of counting, multiplicity is there from the beginning.

For Alenka and me, of course there is no original 1, but this absence is inscribed in the multiplicity from the very beginning. It does NOT mean “we are multiple fuck the ONE” It means the 1 as absence is already here.  Ontologically the zero level is a barred 1, there is no ONE.  There is multiplicity because 1 cannot be 1.

Freud says somewhere “multiplicity in dreams is always a sign of CASTRATION” If you dream of many phalluses it means you don’t have one.  Multiplicity is always the blocked sabotaged impossibility of the ONE.

When Lacan primordial repression is the repression of the binary signifier. Lacan’s theory of sexual differentiation is not Ying Yang bullshit. There is only one signifier, Male, but this does not make woman, more but LESS. Why?

Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a parody of Tolstoy. Dostoevsky is missing. A scene in the movie, as if this absence of D. returns. The 2 guys talk and bring in all the D. titles. Did you meet the Idiot. Ah you mean the Brother K.

We are tempted to insist on the primacy of the barred ONE, the impossible ONE. There are ONEs of course, but the existing ONEs are an echo of their own impossibility. What there is is always originally multiplicity. But why do we then always start to count to 1? Because multiplicity is always marked from the beginning by the lack or impossibility of the ONE.

In Badiou there is no ontology of the EVENT. When Badiou announced program for Logics of the Worlds. In previous book Being and Event he didn’t really account for how a World emerges out of BEING. In this book he also does NOT do it.

23:00 He says there is multiplicity, then I don’t know from where, but ALL OF A SUDDEN THERE ARE WORLDS.

23:15 WHY DOES BEING QUA BEING (THIS PRE-REPRESENTATIVE MULTIPLICITY) WHY DOES IT ORGANIZE ITSELF INTO WORLDS?

WORLDS ARE MODES OF TRANSCENDENTAL APPEARANCE.  Each of the worlds is characterized by its transcendental a priori.

Alenka’s solution
Already the multiplicity from the very beginning is multiplicity because the ONE is impossible. This is the answer to why multiplicity, precisely to fill in this gap, has to appear to itself. WORLDS happen precisely to fill in this gap, to appear to itself.

BORING KANTIAN PROBLEM: We live in appearances but can we reach the THING-IN-ITSELF? THE REAL?  For Hegel the problem IS EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE.  The True enigma is OK there is BEING MULTIPLICITY OUT THERE BUT WHY DOES BEING START TO APPEAR TO ITSELF?  The true enigma is NOT how to see reality behind appearance. But why does the real begin to appear to itself?

THE TRUE FIGHT WITH BADIOU

Z remains a old-fashion transendentalist and Badiou is a dialectical materialist.

Žižek: When Badiou mentions World, the POINT as minimum of yes/no, I claim that all the coordinates are already the coordinates of symbolic universe with subjectivity included. There is NO WORLD OUTSIDE LANGUAGE AND SUBJECT.

Badiou FANATICALLY insists that WORLD is dialectics in NATURE. Animals, even rocks, a group of stars, can be a WORLD. Ž thinks this is totally illegitimate.

28:00 More Lacan than Badiou:

Lacan: Existence is absolutely NOT the same as BEING.  Existence is for Badiou, is a transcendental determination. Things exist within a transcendental world, you exist the more you are recognized within this transcendental space.

Even Hegel has this distinction in a nice way in Hegel’s LOGIC.  In Hegel, existence is a category of ESSENCE. Existence is BEING which is the APPEARANCE of some ESSENCE. What does NOT have an ESSENCE, IS, but does not EXIST.

FOR LACAN Neither the subject exists NOR the WOMAN.  Lacan does NOT say: Il n’ya pas de femme. But he says La Femme n’existe pas.

30:45 BRUCE FINK
IL N’YA PAS is much more radical than IL N”EXISTE PAS.

Lacan says Il n’ya pas de grand Autre. There is no big Other.  He doesn’t say the big Other doesn’t exist.

The Lacanian distinction between existence, and INSISTENCE  What doesn’t exist, INSISTS for LACAN: Subject doesn’t exist it just leaves TRACES in existence
DRIVE doesn’t exist it INSISTS

32:30 APPEARANCE AND PHENOMENON
the distinction is that appearance is an appearance of something. You look behind, what is appearing.

A phenomenon is an appearance behind which there is nothing

An appearance of something AND An appearance that just fills in the lack, that there is NOTHING behind it.

The two greek painters, who will do a more realistic painting the winner paints a curtain, ok pull apart the curtain to see what you painted

PHENOMENON evokes/raises the desire for something behind but there is nothing behind, it is appearance in the abyss

I would locate here the status of the subject.
Subject is for me an APPEARANCE BUT NO SUBSTANCE

The mystery of the SUBJECT: Appearance is not a simple appearance that can be SUBTRACTED. IT is NOT as if you can take away appearance and get things as they really are.

What if there is an apparance precisely as appearance is crucial for the consistency of that which appears. So that you take away appearance and you lose the thing-itself. The whole FREUD turns on this.

35:30 ENDS

36:00 The ultimate ambiguity, is Kant’s Transcendental appearance.
Kant can not accept appearance THAT ITS APPEARANCE AGAINST THE ABYSS OF NOTHING.

He still thinks there must be something substantial behind appearance which appears.

The Hegelian step is NO! Conclusion of first part of Phenomenology of Spirit, of course appearance is like a curtain we look behind, behind appearance is just a VOID, what we find there is what we put there. THIS DOES NOT MEAN THAT IN THE USUAL SENSE THAT EVERYTHING IS JUST AN APPEARANCE. EVERYTHING IS REAL BUT THIS IS NOT RELATIVISM.

38:15 BEST BOOK IS THEORY OF SUBJECT the breakthrough is there the rest of Badiou’s work is trying to catch up.

38:30 the best friendly shot at a friend (Bosteels) the best! from Belgians are well know for 2 things

He opposes Sophocles terror/anxiety ORestia courage/justice

subjective attitudes doesn’t JUSTICE stick out, replace JUSTICE WITH enthusiasm.
For reasons of consistency.
What does Terror mean here? He oscillates between 2 meanings. Bad superego terror represented by CREON. Fuck you we also need our own TERROR. THere is always a terrorist aspect in SUBTRACTION
ENTHUSIASM WILL BE CENTRAL CATEGORY OF HIS IMMANENCE OF TRUTH.

41:00 Question on ACT
44:00 Žižek replies
The problem of EVENT is Badiou seems to struggle about the relationship between Event and its nomination.

Sometimes he claims more radically, transcendentally, nomination is part of the EVENT, event becomes event only through its nomination,
Sometimes he adapts a pomo attitude, the event is traumatic excess and we try to but fail to find a proper name.

A communist struggle is going on but the Marxian names for it are not good names. We didn’t nominate the event in a correct way.

There is the danger of this pomo pseudo-Nietzche b.s. the real is the event/horror we try to nominate it, but it always fails on the other hand Badiou celebrating the Master Signifier.

46:00 Theoretical couple Badiou/Barbara Kassam

The Master Signifier, Badiou who is the Badiou of Master SIgnifier, is masculine Badiou. We have the event of Chrisianity, but Christ himeself was a feminine hysterical guy, the master who provides the NAME is ST. PAUL. It is Paul who provided the MASTER SIGNIFIER that created Christianity.

47:50 Badiou made a book with Roudinesco (Ž yikes!!!) He says: without a MASTER (Kant a human being is animal who needs master) to become a subject you need a master, Badiou goes very far here.

Here I agree with him, with a precise political stake, to rehabilitate the marxist tradition of cult of PERSONALITY. Che GUAvara, Mao, Stalin, Fidel, we need a name a MASTER. Neutral theory is not enough we need a NAME a master that introduces a NEW ORDER.

Sometimes Badiou links Psychoanalysis with LOVE. At the same time, His best example of evental structure is RELIGION, St. Paul We live in secular era, religion is not evental, I just use Paul as example of formal evental structure. But how was it possible to happen there? Z believes category of LOVE is much more mysterious.

Kant = Science
Fichte = Politics
Schelling = Art supreme medium of truth is art
Hegel = LOVE category of life is central

51:50 NIGHT OF WORLD

Alenka accepts Badiou’s claim that event as real in its brutality is not enough, you need to nominate the EVENT.

She does something he doesn’t do. She introduces distinction between master signifier and signifier of the barred other. Signifier of barred other.
when you present the signifier of the inconsistent Other
when you name properly the antagonism, the real the defines a certain field: class struggle, when this turns into a Master signifier you already de-eventalize it, you lose it.

CHIESA: fuck it there will always be Master signifier obscene super ego fantasy etc.

Communist Hypothesis, the link to a master is not the ultimate social link there is a possibility of being together collectively that is not sustained by a MASTER.
If we drop this we are back to J.A. Miller

54:20 Let’s say a political system is in a crisis. If we take this crisis in a pre-evental way: It means we inscribe it, the system fails blah blah, the crucial pt. is NO! This failure, is not simply failure of the system, in this FAILURE THE TRUTH OF THE SYSTEM APPEARS.

For Freud/Marx crises, the basic antagonism of capitalism appears, symptoms are the truth of normality

To provide the name for this NECESSITY, why failures are structurally necessary, the big other itself is Barred. this is the politics of NOMINATION

55:50 Laclau
populist politics is always the politics of failure, things are basically ok, but jews traitors foreigners always fuck it up. scapegoats. corrupted the old order, the crack, the failure is not in the order as such, its an accidental corruption, you need to re-establish the proper order. NO

The EVENT IS TO FIND A NAME social antagonism, class struggle, which clearly locates the failure in the ORDER ITSELF.

 

58:20 Foucault

Big shift History Sex vol 1 is different from vol 2 and 3.  This tension is already in his early works on Madness.  Already described in Derrida.

Even in early works on madness.
The oscillation in early Foucault, on one hand he says I want to describe till now MADNESS was described by the external standpoint of science/power. I want madness itself to SPEAK. At the same time he makes it clear, that madness, substantially in-itself, is not an in-itself which is described differently, madness is an affect of mechanisms of madness. Madmen prior to modernity, was located in hermeneutics, you were devil, or divine that spoke through you. Madness was hermeneutics, a madman is that which a higher truth speaks through you. With moderinity it become POSITIVIST science. Something is wrong with brain, we incarcerate them.
In Vol 1. accent is power generates resistence to itself, resistance to power is way for power to reproduce itself more effectively

Beware, if a girl pretends to be shameful, she rejects you, but this rejection is already … they give you an entire classification of techniques

so again Foucault goes fo far as to say, power itself generates the man to be liberated. Resistance is part of power, the circle is closed.
NO LIBERATION, no space for liberation. resistance in advance is incorporated.

IN vol 2 and vol 3, he is looking for islands of resistance. He has here also rehabilitates the subject, the idea through some kind of self-education, self-relating you can acquire a distance, a resistance. No longer this co-optive pessimism.

1:04 BUTLER

This is my problem with Judith Butler. She always speaks the language of resistance.  We can just occupy spaces and resist, the big OTHER OF POWER is here, but there are spaces of resistance. What if we play off the early and late Foucault. How can we have resistances which are not just caught up in counter-power.  Sexuality is not the expression of sex, real sex is an effect of the discourses we have on sexuality.  With these discourses, disciplinary discourses.  Discourses, disciplinary discourses, a Paulian theory of transgression, every discourse of power generates the transgression it fights.

For Ž, he disagrees with all this FOUCAULT. I don’t like RESISTANCE the term. It has all this marginalist connotation, ooh the big Other is there, we can just screw it a bit, irony, displacement, performative fun, repetitiveness.

1:06 Adrian Johnson critique of Badiou where latter just focuses on Event and reactions to event.

There is a whole pre-evental strategy.

1:09 Tahir sq. Occupy wall st.
I don’t share his naive optimism. It’s still open. There are things which I am ready to extend retroative logic here. Something happens and retroactively we decide if it is an Event or not.

When Badiou was explaining FORCING event, for him forcing an event, is to impose the logic of event as immediately logic of Being. THIS IS STALINISM.

What Z doesn’t like, this is the “totalitarian temptation” says Badiou. I think there is something totally wrong in saying Stalin instead of treating communist vision as Evental, this idea, don’t translate the Event immediately into Being this is KANT.

Regulative use of idea, stalinst arrogant mistake, to take something as regulative as CONSTITUTIVE as making up reality. THIS IS KANT. Badiou makes an explicit reference to Kant’s REGULATIVE IDEA.

Here I”m more Hegelian, to explain horrors of Stalin, its’ too simply to claim that Stalin was too faithful to commie idea. No the problem is not Stalin wanted to impose to immediately Communist idea as order of being.  NO THE IDEA itself was not correct. What’s the problem with forcing if you have a GOOD idea, fuck it force it if you want.  But Stalin had a bad idea.

1:14 Master signifier which introduces a NEW ORDER, but there was no point de capiton. RESTRUCTURES THE WHOLE FIELD
Occupied Mexico City, they had power, they debated and talked for week or two then they said let’s go home.

1:18 HARDT NEGRI
Maybe events function in a different way, authentic political events. TJ Clark, he says this doesn’t mean system is powerful is going to go on, what he is saying is that there will not be a magic moment, where terracotta armies will emerge. Maybe we should change here the field.

subjective destitution 514

The status of prosopopoeia in Lacan changes radically with the shift in the status of the analyst from being the stand-in for the “big Other” (the symbolic order) to being the “small other” (the obstacle which stands for the inconsistency, failure, of the big Other).

The analyst who occupies the place of the big Other is himself the medium of prosopopoeia: when he speaks, it is the big Other who speaks (or, rather, keeps silence) through him; in the intersubjective economy of the analytic process, he is not just another subject, he occupies the empty place of death.

The patient talks, and the analyst’s silence stands for the absent meaning of the patient’s talk, the meaning supposed to be contained in the big Other.  The process ends when the patient can himself assume the meaning of his speech.

The analyst as the “small other,” on the contrary, magically transforms the words of the analysand into prosopopoeia, de-subjectivizing his words, depriving them of the quality of being an expression of the consistent subject and his intention-to-mean.

The goal is no longer for the analysand to assume the meaning of his speech, but for him to assume its non-meaning, its nonsensical inconsistency, which implies, with regard to his own status, his de-subjectivization, or what Lacan calls “subjective destitution.”

Prosopopoeia is defined as “a figure of speech in which an absent or imaginary person is represented as speaking or acting.” The attribution of speech to an entity commonly perceived to be unable to speak (nature, the commodity, truth itself …) is for Lacan the condition of speech as such, not only its secondary complication.

Does not Lacan’s distinction between the “subject of enunciation” and the “subject of enunciated”point in this direction?

When I speak, it is never directly “myself” who speaks ― I have to have recourse to a fiction which is my symbolic identity.

In this sense, all speech is “indirect”: “I love you” has the structure of: “my identity as lover is telling you that it loves you.”

The implication of prosopopoeia is thus a weird split of which Robert Musil was aware: the “man without properties” (der Mann ohne Eigenschaften) has to be supplemented with properties without man (Eigenschaften ohne Mann), without a subject to whom they are attributed.

There are two correlative traps to be avoided here, the rightist and the leftist deviations. The first, of course, is the pseudo-Hegelian notion that this gap stands for a “self-alienation” which I should strive to abolish ideally and then fully assume my speech as directly my own.

Against this version, one should insist that there is no I which can, even ideally, assume its speech “directly,” by-passing the detour of prosopopoeia.

Wearing a mask can thus be a strange thing: sometimes, more often than we tend to believe, there is more truth in the mask than in what we assume to be our “real self.”

Think of the proverbial shy and impotent man who, while playing an interactive video game, adopts the screen identity of a sadistic murderer and irresistible seducer―it is all too simple to say that this identity is just an imaginary supplement, a temporary escape from his real-life impotence.

The point is rather that, since he knows that the video game is “just a game,” he can “reveal his true self,” do things he would never do in real-life interactions―in the guise of a fiction, the truth about himself is articulated.

Therein lies the truth of a charming story like Alexandre Dumas’s The Man in the Iron Mask: what if we invert the topic according to which, in our social interactions, we wear masks to cover our true face?

What if, on the contrary, in order for us to interact in public with our true face, we have to have a mask hidden somewhere, a mask which renders our unbearable excess, what is in us more than ourselves, a mask which we can put on only exceptionally, in those carnivalesque moments when the standard rules of interaction are suspended? In short, what if the true function of the mask is not to be worn, but to be kept hidden?

Ž and Badiou

This essay is located here  However I think this is basically his essay in Hallward’s Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy 2004

Insofar as, for Badiou, the science of love – this fourth, excessive, truth-procedure – is psychoanalysis, one should not be surprised to find that Badiou’s relationship with Lacan is the nodal point of his thought. How, exactly, does Badiou’s philosophy relate to Lacan’s theory? One should begin by unequivocally stating that Badiou is right in rejecting Lacan’s “anti-philosophy.” In fact, when Lacan endlessly varies the motif of how philosophy tries to “fill in the holes,” to present a totalizing view of the universe, to cover up all the gaps, ruptures and inconsistencies (say, in the total self-transparency of self-consciousness), and how, against philosophy, psychoanalysis asserts the constitutive gap/rupture/inconsistency, etc.etc., he simply misses the point of what the most fundamental philosophical gesture is: not to close the gap, but, on the contrary, to OPEN UP a radical gap in the very edifice of the universe, the “ontological difference,” the gap between the empirical and the transcendental, where none of the two levels can be reduced to the other (as we know from Kant, transcendental constitution is a mark of our – human – finitude and has nothing to do with “creating reality”; on the other hand, reality only appears to us within the transcendental horizon, so we cannot generate the emergence of the transcendental horizon from the ontic self-development of reality). 3

This general statement does not allow us to dispense with the work of a more detailed confrontation. It was Bruno Bosteels who provided the hitherto most detailed account of the difference between Badiou’s and the Lacanian approach. What the two approaches share is the focus on the shattering encounter of the Real: on the “symptomal torsion” at which the given symbolic situation breaks down. What, then, happens at this point of the intrusion of utmost negativity?

According to Badiou, the opposition is here the one between impasse and passe.

For Lacan, the ultimate authentic experience (the “traversing of fantasy”) is that of fully confronting the fundamental impasse of the symbolic order; this tragic encounter of the impossible Real is the limit-experience of a human being: one can only sustain it, one cannot force a passage through it. The political implications of this stance are easily discernible: while Lacan enables us to gain an insight into the falsity of the existing State, this insight is already “it,” there is no way to pass through it, every attempt to impose a new order is denounced as illusory: “From the point of the real as absent cause, indeed, any ordered consistency must necessarily appear to be imaginary insofar as it conceals this fundamental lack itself.” Is this not the arch-conservative vision according to which, the ultimate truth of being is the nullity of every Truth, the primordial vortex which threatens to draw us into its abyss? All we can do, after this shattering insight, is to return to the semblance, to the texture of illusions which allow us to temporarily avoid the view of the terrifying abyss, humbly aware of the fragility of this texture… While, for Lacan, Truth is this shattering experience of the Void – a sudden insight into the abyss of Being, “not a process so much as a brief traumatic encounter, or illuminating shock, in the midst of common reality” -, for Badiou, Truth is what comes afterward: the long arduous work of fidelity, of enforcing a new law onto the situation. 5 The choice is thus: “whether a vanishing apparition of the real as absent cause (for Lacan) or a forceful transformation of the real into a consistent truth (for Badiou)”:

is Lacan really unable to think a procedure which gives being to the very lack? Is this not the work of sublimation? Does sublimation not precisely “give being to this very lack,” to the lack as/of the impossible Thing, insofar as sublimation is “an object elevated to the dignity of a Thing” (Lacan’s standard definition of sublimation from his Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis)? This is why Lacan links death drive and creative sublimation: death drive does the negative work of destruction, of suspending the existing order of Law, thereby as it were clearing the table, opening up the space for sublimation which can (re)starts the work of creation. Both Lacan and Badiou thus share the notion of a radical cut/rupture, “event,” encounter of the Real, which opens up the space for the work of sublimation, of creating the new order

Descartes

Wood, Kelsey. Žižek A Reader’s Guide.  Wiley/Blackwell. 2012.

Descartes’ effort to erase the entirety of reality and to start with a clean slate, … In the Ticklish Subject, Žižek showed the functional role of the Caresian cogito (“I think, therefore I exist”) within the broader project of methodic doubt and developed Lacan’s insight that the subject of psychoanalysis is none other than Descartes’ cogito.

Žižek disclosed the “empty place” of Lacanian subjectivity as a pure structural function that emerges only through a withdrawal from one’s substantial identity.  This means that true subjectivity arises only through encountering the Real, and through the subsequent disintegration of the self that had been constituted within a communal universe of meaning.

In other words, as opposed to the “self” produced by the process of ideological subjectivization, the subject as such involves the hysterical questioning of the feminine subject.  To summarize, The Ticklish Subject articulated and clarified Lacan’s account of subjectivity in order to assert the emancipatory potential o f the subject against capitalist ideology. 241

187-190 judaism christianity protestant universal singular

Slavoj, Žižek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence.” The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard. 2006. 134-190.

One should avoid the same mistake in dealing with Judaism: setting the “good” Levinasian Judaism of justice, respect for and responsibility to-ward the other, and so on, against the “bad” tradition of Jehovah, his fits of vengeance and genocidal violence against the neighboring people Judaism is the moment of unbearable absolute contradiction, the worst (monotheistic violence) and the best (responsibility toward the other) in absolute tension— the two are identical and simultaneously absolutely incompatible.

Christianity resolves the tension by way of introducing a cut: the Bad itself (finitude, cut, the gesture of difference, “differentiation,” as the Communists used to put it —“the need for ideological differentiation”) as the direct source of Good. In a move from In-Itself to For-Itself, Christianity merely assumes the Jewish contradiction. So if I seem to argue for the step from Judaism to Paulinian Christianity, one should be fully aware that Paul is here conceived as “the first great German-Jewish thinker, equal in stature to Rosenzweig, Freud, and Benjamin.”

At what point in the historical development of Christianity did this Paulinian moment reemerge most forcefully?

Do the three main versions of Christianity not form a kind of Hegelian triad? In the succession of Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Protes-tantism, each new term is a subdivision, split off of a previous unity.

This triad of Universal-Particular-Singular can be designated by three representative founding figures ( John, Peter, Paul) as well as by three races (Slavic, Latin, German).

In the Eastern Orthodoxy, we have the substantial unity of the text and the corpus of believers, which is why the believers are allowed to interpret the sacred Text. The Text goes on and lives in them; it is not outside the living history as its exempted standard and model. The substance of religious life is the Christian community it-self.

Catholicism stands for radical alienation: the entity which mediates between the founding sacred Text and the corpus of believers, the Church, the religious Institution, regains its full autonomy. The highest authority resides in the Church, which is why the Church has the right to interpret the Text; the Text is read during the mass in Latin, a language which is not understood by ordinary believers, and it is even considered a sin for an ordinary believer to read the Text directly, bypassing the priest’s guidance.

For Protestantism, finally, the only authority is the Text itself, and the wager is on every believer’s direct contact with the Word of God as it was delivered in the Text; the mediator (the Particular) thus disappears, withdraws into insignificance, enabling the believer to adopt the position of a “universal singular,”the individual in direct contact with the divine Universality, bypassing the mediating role of the particular Institution. This reconciliation, however, becomes possible only after alienation is brought to the extreme: in contrast to the Catholic notion of a caring and loving God with whom one can communicate, negotiate even, Protestantism starts with the notion of God deprived of any “common measure” shared with humans, of God as an impenetrable Beyond who distributes grace in a totally contingent way.

One can discern the traces of this full acceptance of God’s unconditional and capricious authority in the last song Johnny Cash recorded just before his death, “The Man Comes Around,” an exemplary articulation of the anxieties contained in Southern Baptist Christianity:

There’s a man goin’ ’round taking names
And he decides who to free and who to blame
Everybody won’t be treated all the same
There will be a golden ladder reaching down
When the man comes around

The song is about Armageddon, the end of days, when God will appear and perform the Last Judgment, and this event is presented as pure and arbitrary terror: God is presented almost as Evil personified, as a kind of political informer, a man who “comes around” and provokes consternation by “taking names,” by deciding who is saved and who lost. If anything, Cash’s description evokes the well-known scene of people lined up for a brutal interrogation, and the informer pointing out those selected for torture. There is no mercy, no pardon of sins in it, no jubilation in it.

We are all fixed in our roles: the just remain just and the filthy remain filthy. In this divine proclamation, we are not simply judged in a just way. Rather, we are informed from outside, as if learning about an arbitrary decision, whether we were righteous or sinners, whether we are saved or condemned. This decision appears to have nothing to do with our inner qualities. And, again, this dark excess of the ruthless divine sadism — excess over the image of a severe, but nonetheless just, God — is a necessary negative, an underside, of the excess of Christian love over the Jewish Law: love that suspends the Law is necessarily accompanied by arbitrary cruelty that also suspends the Law.

This is also why it is wrong to oppose the Christian god of Love to the Jewish god of cruel justice: excessive cruelty is the necessary obverse of Christian Love.

And, again, the relationship between these two is one of parallax: there is no “substantial” difference between the god of Love and the god of excessive-arbitrary cruelty; it is one and the same god who appears in a different light only due to a parallactic shift of our perspective.

One might designate this intrusion of radical negativity as the “return of the Jewish repressed” within Christianity: the return of the figure of Jehovah, the cruel God of vengeful blind justice. And it is when one is faced with this violent return that one should assert the ultimate speculative identity of Judaism and Christianity: the “infinite judgment” is here “Christianity is Judaism.”

183-4 anti-levinasian conclusion beyond the face of the other

Slavoj, Žižek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence.” The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard. 2006. 134-190.

This brings us to the radical anti-Levinasian conclusion: the true ethical step is the one beyond the face of the other, the one of suspending the hold of the face, the one of choosing against the face, for the Third. This coldness is justice at its most elementary.

Every preempting of the Other in the guise of his or her face relegates the Third to the faceless background.

And the elementary gesture of justice is not to show respect for the face in front of me, to be open to its depth, but to abstract from it and refocus onto the faceless Thirds in the background.

It is only such a shift of focus onto the Third that effectively uproots justice, liberating it from the contingent umbilical link that renders it “embedded” in a particular situation.

In other words, it is only such a shift onto the Third that grounds justice in the dimension of universality proper.

When Levinas endeavors to ground ethics in the Other’s face, is he not still clinging to the ultimate root of the ethical commitment, afraid to accept the abyss of the rootless Law as the only foundation of ethics?

Thus, truly blind justice cannot be grounded in the relationship to the Other’s face, in other words, in the relationship to the neighbor. Justice is emphatically not justice for —with regard to— the neighbor.

since the limitation of our capacity to relate to Others’ faces is the mark of our very finitude. In other words, the limitation of our ethical relation of responsibility toward the Other’s face which necessitates the rise of the Third (the domain of regulations) is a positive condition of ethics, not simply its secondary supplement.

“When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity — that was a quality God’s image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how their hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.”

However, what this means is that, in order to practice justice, one has to suspend one’s power of imagination; if hate is a failure of imagination, then pity is the failure of the power of abstraction.

the face is the ultimate ethical lure, and the passage from Judaism to Christianity is not the passage from blindly applying the harsh law to displaying love and pity for the suffering face.

It is crucial that it was Judaism, the religion of the harsh letter of the Law, that first formulated the injunction to love thy neighbor: the neighbor is not displayed through a face; it is, as we have seen, in his or her fundamental dimension a faceless monster.

It is here that one has to remain faithful to the Jewish legacy: in order to arrive at the “neighbor” we have to love, we must pass through the “dead” letter of the Law, which cleanses the neighbor of all imaginary lure, of the “inner wealth of a person” displayed through his or her face, reducing him or her to a pure subject.

Levinas is right to point out the ultimate paradox of how “the Jewish consciousness, formed precisely through contact with this harsh morality, with its obligations and sanctions, has learned to have an absolute horror of blood, while the doctrine of non-violence has not stemmed the natural course towards violence displayed by a whole world over the last two thousand years. . . . Only a God who maintains the principle of Law can in practice tone down its severity and use oral law to go beyond the inescapable harshness of Scriptures” (DF,138).

But what about the opposite paradox? What if only a God who is ready to subordinate his own Law to love can in practice push us to realize blind justice in all its harshness? Recall the infamous lines from Che Guevara’s testamentary “Message to the Tricontinental” (1967): “Hatred is an element of struggle; relentless hatred of the enemy that impels us over and beyond the natural limitations of man and transforms us into effective, violent, selective, and cold killing machines. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy.”

And it is crucial to read these lines together with Guevara’s notion of revolutionary violence as a “work of love”: “Let me say, with the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love. It is impossible to think of an authentic revolutionary with-out this quality.”

One should confer to the words “beyond the natural limitations of man” their entire Kantian weight: in their love/hatred, revolutionaries are pushed beyond the limitations of empirical “human nature,” so that their violence is literally angelic.

Therein resides the core of revolutionary justice, this much misused term: harshness of the measures taken, sustained by love. Does this not recall Christ’s scandalous words from Luke (“if anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and his mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes even his own life —he cannot be my disciple” [Luke 14 : 26]), which point in exactly the same direction as another famous quote from Che? “You may have to be tough, but do not lose your tenderness. You may have to cut the flowers, but it will not stop the Spring.” 54

This Christian stance is the opposite of the Oriental attitude of nonviolence, which —as we know from the long history of Buddhist rulers and warriors— can legitimize the worst violence. It is not that the revolutionary violence “really” aims at establishing a nonviolent harmony; on the contrary, the authentic revolutionary liberation is much more directly identified with violence — it is violence as such (the violent gesture of discarding, of establishing a difference, of drawing a line of separation) which liberates.

Freedom is not a blissfully neutral state of harmony and balance, but the violent act which disturbs this balance.

164 Kafka odradek

Žžek, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard. 2006

Odradek, as an object that is transgenerational (exempted from the cycle of generations), immortal, outside finitude (because outside sexual difference), outside time, displaying no goal-oriented activity, no purpose, no utility, is jouissance embodied: “Jouissance is that which serves nothing,” as Lacan put in his seminar 20, Encore.

There are different figurations of Thing-jouissance— an immortal (or, more precisely, undead) excess — in Kafka’s work: the Law that somehow insists without properly existing, making us guilty without us knowing what we are guilty of; the wound that won’t heal yet does not let us die; bureaucracy in its most “irrational” aspect; and, last but not least, “partial objects” like Odradek.

They all display a kind of mock-Hegelian nightmarish “bad infinity” — there is no Aufhebung, no resolution proper; the thing just drags on. We never reach the Law; the Emperor’s letter never arrives at its destination; the wound never closes (or kills me). The Kafkan Thing is either transcendent, forever eluding our grasp (the Law, the Castle), or a ridiculous object into which the subject is metamorphosed and which we cannot ever get rid of (like Gregor Samsa, who changes into an insect). The point is to read these two features together: jouissance is that which we cannot ever attain and that which we cannot ever get rid of.

Kafka’s genius was to eroticize bureaucracy, the nonerotic entity if there ever was one. 164-165

Back to Odradek: in his concise analysis of the story, Jean-Claude Milner first draws attention to a peculiarity of Odradek: he has two legs, he speaks, laughs; in short, he displays all the features of a human being. Al-though he is human, he does not resemble a human being, but clearlyappears inhuman.

As such, he is the opposite of Oedipus, who (lamenting his fate at Colonus) claims that he became nonhuman when he finally acquired all properties of an ordinary human: in line with the series of Kafka’s other heroes, Odradek becomes human only when he no longer resembles a human being (by metamorphosing himself into an insect, or a spool,or whatever).

He is, effectively, a “universal singular,” a stand-in for humanity by way of embodying its inhuman excess, by not resembling anything “human.” The contrast with Aristophanes’ myth (in Plato’s Symposium) of the original spherical human being divided into two parts, eternally searching for its complementary counter-part in order to return to the lost Whole, is crucial here: although also a “partial object,” Odradek does not look for any complementary parts, he is lacking nothing. It may be significant, also, that he is not spherical.

Odradek is thus simply what Lacan, in his seminar 11 and in his seminal écrit “Positions de l’inconscient,” developed as lamella, libido as an organ, the inhuman-human “undead” organ without a body, the mythical pre-subjective “undead” life-substance, or, rather, the remainder of the life-substance which has escaped the symbolic colonization, the horrible palpitation of the “acephal” drive which persists beyond ordinary death, outside the scope of paternal authority, nomadic, with no fixed domicile.

The choice underlying Kafka’s story is thus Lacan’s “le père ou pire,” “the father or the worse”: Odradek is “the worst” as the alternative to the father.  166-167

162-3 face neighbor

Slavoj, Žižek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence.” The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology. Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard. 2006. 134-190.  Here is Ž in Oct 2010 at Princeton in a great lecture outlining these points

This dimension is missing also in Levinas. In a properly dialectical paradox, what Levinas (with all his celebration of Otherness) fails to take into account is not some underlying Sameness of all humans but the radical, “inhuman” Otherness itself: the Otherness of a human being reduced to inhumanity, the Otherness exemplified by the terrifying figure of the Muselmann, the “living dead” in the concentration camps.

This is why, although Levinas is often perceived as the thinker who endeavored to articulate the experience of the Shoah, one thing is self-evident apropos his questioning of one’s own right to be and his emphasis on one’s unconditional asymmetrical responsibility: this is not how a survivor of the Shoah, one who effectively experienced the ethical abyss of Shoah, thinks and writes. This is how those think who feel guilty for observing the catastrophe from a minimal safe distance.

That is to say, insofar as, in his description of the ethical call, Levinas reproduces the basic coordinates of ideological interpellation (I become an ethical subject when I respond with “Here I am!” to the infinite call emanating from the vulnerable face of the other), one could say that the Muselmann is precisely the one who is no longer able to say “Here I am!” (and in front of whom I can no longer say “Here I am!”).

Recall the big gesture of identification with the exemplary victim: “We are all citizens of Sarajevo!” and such; the problem with the Muselmann is that this gesture is no longer possible. It would be obscene to proclaim pathetically, “We are all Muselmänner!”

When confronted with a Muselmann, one cannot discern in his face the trace of the abyss of the Other in his/her vulnerability, addressing us with the infinite call of our responsibility. What one gets instead is a kind of blind
wall, a lack of depth. Maybe the Muselmann is thus the zero-level neighbor, the neighbor with whom no empathetic relationship is possible.

However, at this point, we again confront the key dilemma: what if it is precisely in the guise of the “faceless” face of a Muselmann that we encounter the Other’s call at its purest and most radical? What if, facing a Muselmann, one hits upon one’s responsibility toward the Other at its most traumatic?

In short, what about bringing together Levinas’s face and the topic of the “neighbor” in its strict Freudo-Lacanian sense, as the monstrous, impenetrable Thing that is the Nebenmensch,the Thing that hystericizes and provokes me?

What if the neighbor’s face stands neither for my imaginary double/semblant nor for the purely symbolic abstract “partner in communication,” but for the Other in his or her dimension of the Real?

What if, along these lines, we restore to the Levinasian “face” all its monstrosity: face is not a harmonious Whole of the dazzling epiphany of a “human face,” face is something the glimpse of which we get when we stumble upon a grotesquely distorted face, a face in the grip of a disgusting tic or grimace, a face which, precisely, confronts us when the neighbor “loses his face”? To recall a case from popular culture, “face” is what, in Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera, the heroine gets a glimpse of when she sees for the first time the Phantom without his mask (and, as a reaction to the horror that confronts her, immediately loses her consciousness and falls to the ground).

far from standing for absolute authenticity, such a monstrous face is, rather, the ambiguity of the Real embodied, the extreme/impossible point at which opposites coincide, at which the innocence of the Other’s vulnerable nakedness overlaps with pure evil. 162

That is to say, what one should focus on here is the precise meaning of the term neighbor: is the “neighbor” in the Judeo-Freudian sense, the neighbor as the bearer of a monstrous Otherness, this properly inhuman neighbor, the same as the neighbor that we encounter in the Levinasian experience of the Other’s face?

Is there not, in the very heart of the Judeo-Freudian inhuman neighbor, a monstrous dimension which is already minimally “gentrified,” domesticated, once it is conceived in the Levinasian sense?  What if the Levinasian face is yet another defense against this monstrous dimension of subjectivity?

And what if the Jewish Law is to be conceived as strictly correlative to this inhuman neighbor?

In other words, what if the ultimate function of the Law is not to enable us not to forget the neighbor, to retain our proximity to the neighbor, but, on the contrary, to keep the neighbor at a proper distance, to serve as a kind of protective wall against the monstrosity of the neighbor?

In short, the temptation to be resisted here is the ethical “gentrification” of the neighbor, the reduction of the radically ambiguous monstrosity of the Neighbor-Thing into an Other as the abyssal point from which the call of ethical responsibility emanates. 163