Category: universal

Žižek Derrida 3 concrete universal

Žižek, Slavoj. “A Plea for a Return to Différance (with a Minor Pro Domo Sua)” Critical Inquiry. 32.2 (2006): 226-249.

This logic of the “minimal difference,” of the constitutive noncoincidence of a thing with itself, provides the key to the central Hegelian category of concrete universality.

Let us take a “mute” abstract universality that encompasses a set of elements all of which somehow subvert, do not fit, this universal frame.

Is, in this case, the “true” concrete universal not this distance itself, the universalized exception?

And, vice versa, is the element that directly fits the universal not the true exception?

Universality is not the neutral container of particular formations, their common measure, the passive (back)ground on which the particulars fight their battles, but this battle itself, the struggle leading from one to another particular formation. 236

Take a look at this 2004 YouTube clip where Ž talks about universality/particularity

“Concrete universality” is a name for this process through which fiction
explodes from within documentary, that is, for the way the emergence of
fiction cinema resolves the inherent deadlock of the documentary cinema. 237

This brings us to the very heart of the concept of Concrete Universality.

It is not merely the universal core that animates a series of its particular
forms of appearance; it persists in the very irreducible tension, noncoincidence, between these different levels.

Hegel is usually perceived as an “essentialist historicist,” positing the spiritual “essence” of an epoch as a universal principle that expresses itself in a specific way in each domain of social life; say, the modern principle of subjectivity expresses itself in religion as Protestantism, in ethics as the subject’s moral autonomy, in politics as democratic equality, and so on.

What such a view misses is what one is tempted to call temporal parallax. In the complex dialectic of historical phenomena, we encounter events or processes that, although they are the actualization of the same underlying “principle” at different levels, cannot occur at the same historical moment.

Recall the old topic of the relationship between Protestantism, Kantian philosophical revolution, and the French political revolution. Rebecca Comay recently refuted the myth that Hegel’s critique of the French Revolution can be reduced to a variation of the “German” idea of how the Catholic French had to perform the violent “real” political revolution because they missed the historical moment of Reformation that already accomplished in the spiritual sphere the reconciliation between the spiritual Substance and the infinite subjectivity sought after in social reality by the revolutionaries.

In this standard view, the German ethico-aesthetic attitude “sublates” revolutionary violence in the inner ethical order, thus enabling the replacement of the abstract “terrorist” revolutionary freedom by the concrete freedom of the state as an aesthetic organic whole. However, already the temporality of this relationship between the French political revolution and the German spiritual reformation is ambiguous.

Three possible relations seem to overlap here. First, the idea of sublation points towards a succession; the French “immediate” unity of the Universal and the Subject is followed by its sublation, the German ethico-aesthetic mediation.

Then, there is the idea of a simultaneous choice (or lack thereof), which made the two nations follow different paths: the Germans opted for Reformation, while the French remained within the Catholic universe and had thus to take the tortuous route of violent revolution.

However, the empirical fact that Kant’s philosophical revolution precedes the French Revolution is also not just an insignificant accident; in the spectacle of revolutionary Terror, Kantian ethics itself encounters the ultimate consequence of its own “abstract” character, so that Kant’s philosophy should be read retroactively, through the prism of the French Revolution  which enables us to perceive its limitations:

[…]

Jameson’s critique of the notion of alternate modernities thus provides a model of the properly dialectical relationship between the Universal and the Particular; the difference is not on the side of particular content (as the traditional differentia specifica) but on the side of the Universal.

The Universal is not the encompassing container of the particular content, the peaceful medium background of  the conflict of particularities; the Universal as such is the site of anunbearable antagonism, self-contradiction, and (the multitude of) its particular species are ultimately nothing but so many attempts to obfuscate, reconcile, master this antagonism.

In other words, the Universal names the site of a problem-deadlock, of a burning question, and the particulars are the attempted but failed answers to this problem.

Say that the concept of state names a certain problem: how to contain the class antagonism of a society? All particular forms of state are so many (failed) attempts to propose a solution for this problem. 241-242

Ž begin at the beginning pt 1

The only true question today is: do we endorse the predominant naturalization of capitalism, or does today’s global capi­talism contain antagonisms powerful enough to prevent its indefinite reproduction? 212

Žižek, Slavoj. “How to Begin from the Beginning.” The Idea of Communism. Eds. Costas Douzinas, and Slavoj Žižek, New York: Verso, 2011. 209-226.  Print.

There are four such antagonisms:

  1. the looming threat of ecological catastrophe,
  2. the inappropriateness of the notion of  private prop­erty for so-called ‘intellectual property’,
  3. the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments(especially in biogenetics),
  4. new forms of apartheid,new Walls and slums.   212-213

There is a qualitative difference between the last feature — the gap that separates the Excluded from the Included — and the other three, which designate the domains of what Hardt and Negri call the ‘commons’, the shared substance of our social being, the privatization of which involves violent acts which should also, where necessary, be resisted with violent means:

— the commons of culture, the immediately socialized forms of ‘cognitive’ capital, primarily language, our means of communication and educa­tion, but also the shared infrastructure of public transport, electricity, post, etc. (if Bill Gates were to be allowed a monopoly, we would have reached the absurd situation in which a private individual would liter­ally own the software texture of our basic network of communication);

— the commons of external nature, threatened by pollution and exploitation (from oil to rain forests and the natural habitat itself);

— the commons of internal nature (the biogenetic inheritance of human­ity); with new biogenetic technology, the creation of a New Man in the literal sense of changing human nature becomes a realistic prospect.

… one should give all weight to the terms ‘global citizenship’ and ‘common concern’ — the need to establish a global politi­cal organization and engagement which, neutralizing and channelling market mechanisms, expresses a properly communist perspective.

Today’s historical situation not only does not compel us to drop the notion of proletariat, of the proletarian position — on the contrary, it compels us to radicalize it to an existential level well beyond Marx’s imagination.

We need a more radical notion of the proletarian subject, a subject reduced to the evanescent point of the Cartesian cogito, deprived of its substantial content.  213

For this reason, the new emancipatory politics will no longer be the act of a particular social agent, but an explosive combination of differ­ent agents. What unites us is that, in contrast to the classic image of proletarians having ‘nothing to lose but their chains’, we are in danger of losing everything: the threat is that we will be reduced to an abstract empty Cartesian subject deprived of all substantial content, dispossessed of our symbolic substance, our genetic base heavily manipulated, vegetating in an unlivable environment.

This triple threat to our entire being makes us all in a way proletarians, reduced to ‘substanceless subjectivity’, as Marx put it in the Grundrisse.

The figure of the ‘part of no-part’ confronts us with the truth of our own position, and the ethico-political challenge is to recognize ourselves in this figure — in a way, we are all excluded, from  nature as well as from our symbolic substance. Today, we are all poten­tially a homo sacer,and the only way to defend against actually becoming so is to act preventively.  214

There can be a socialist anti-Semitism, there cannot be a communist one. 214

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 antagonism 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 whatever. The future will be communist… or socialist. 214

This is why we should insist on the qualitative difference between the last antagonism, the gap that separates the Excluded from the Included, and the other three: it is only the reference to the Excluded that justi­fies the term communism. There is nothing more ‘private’ than a State community which perceives the Excluded as a threat and worries how to keep them at a proper distance.

In other words, in the series of the four antagonisms, that between the Included and the Excluded is the crucial one: without it, all others lose their subversive edge. 214-215

  1. Ecology turns into a problem of sustainable development,
  2. intellectual property into a complex legal challenge,
  3. biogenetics into an ethical issue.

One can sincerely fight to preserve the environment, defend a broader notion of intellectual property, oppose the copyrighting of genes, without confront­ing the antagonism between the Included and the Excluded.

Whats more, one can even formulate some of these struggles in terms of the Included being threatened by the polluting Excluded. In this way, we get no true universality, only private’ concerns in the Kantian sense of the term. 215

In short, without the antagonism between the Included and the Excluded, we may well find ourselves in a world in which Bill Gates is the greatest humanitarian fighting poverty and diseases and Rupert Murdoch the greatest environmentalist, mobilizing hundreds of millions through his media empire. 215

Ž in south korea june 2012 buddha buddhism

Zizek Lecture  in South Korea Kyung Hee University in June 27 2012

Q and A Zizek in South Korea Kyung Hee University in June 27 2012

Universality is Universality of Struggle
Symbolic Castration
Father confused impotent person, but his symbolic identity you respect him
Famous Ninotchka Joke: Coffee Without Cream/Run Out of Cream/Only Have Milk/Coffee Without Milk
What you don’t have (negativity) is part of your identity. What is missing is part of your identity. Coffee without what it is.
I don’t drink coffee, that’s ok, I don’t have any. Today, the way ideology works today, is not as a direct lie, in the sense it directly tells something not true, ideology lies in not in what it says, it lies it says what it says, by generating in us implicit meaning, while it relies on the opposite meaning. To use the example of coffee, it is giving us coffee w/o milk, but it claims it is giving us coffee w/o cream. Be attentive to these implicit meanings, what is said w/o being said. In Europe, austerity, when those in power want to impose people austerity measures, they pretend they are offering coffee w/o milk, when they are really offering coffee w/o cream. Why is this so important?

– Hegelian Totality
precisely a totality of what there is, and what there is not.  in true dialectical analysis, the point is not to include particular events in larger harmonious totality, the point is not to look at phenomena isolated, look holistically, this is NOT enough, but include in concept all its failures and so on, take capitalism, to take it as a totality, it is not enough to say as a system it is good, NO we should look at all those points where it fails, inside a country and outside, i.e., APPLE as a country, oooh, see it as a success, but we say NO Apple without FOXCON.   or take the CONGO.  It is a state that is immensely mineral rich but the state doesn’t funciton, you simply have local warlords and directly deal with foreign companies.   Congo is not developed enough to be part of global capitalism NO.   There are child warriors, as such as this hell on earth, CONGO IS PART OF TODAY’S GLOBAL CAPITALISM.  global capitalism is also the dark side.
South Korea: One of your big companies, had intentions to buy all arable land in Madagascar. throw out local farmers. This is global capitalism. A proper dialectical analysis begins, you have a ideal universal notion, then look at failures and non-intended by-products, the dialectic will show these failures are NECESSARY failures, all mistakes, antagonisms are part of the UNIVERSAL NOTION.

The category which is more and more becoming crucial is the category of UNEMPLOYMENT
In standard Marxist story: Exploitation.  But today the unemployed are becoming more and more crucial, not just RESERVE ARMY.  but  the forever UNEMPLOYABLE.  Whole countries, Somalia, Congo, or whole regions in countries, in a sense Unemployed, excluded from world markets, you have people in advance that are Unemployable.  Millions of students who study, but realize there is no chance they will get a job in the domain of their studies.  We have somehow to expand the Domain of Proletarians.  It is NOT just who work and exploited, it is those who are not working.  Capitalism is more and more generating NECESSARY UNEMPLOYMENT.

Why don’t we see this more clearly?  This shows the strength of the ruling hegemonic ideology.  The omniprescence of anti-capitalism, look at any popular media, you have many anti-capitalist stories, but all these critiques are moralistic critiques, greedy bankers, polluting environment.  The problem is what changed in recent capitalism, that this greed can be realized with such catastrophic consequences.  The limit of this moralistic anti-capitalism, by blaming people, it prevents us from doing the crucial analysis of the SYSTEM. what is wrong with the SYSTEM as such.   Almost everyone today is a Fukuyamist.  Liberal democractic capitalism is the only game in town.  All we can do is make it a little better. a little more efficient.
We can easily imagine the end of the world, but a little change in capitalism we can’t imagine.

class struggle: antagonism deadlock is constitutive of society
multiculturalist where problem is recognition, how can we be recognized: gay, women etc.
I am still for BINARY logic against multiplicity of struggles.

Laclau critique   none of these struggles have apriori central position, all strategic consideration. There is no priority

Politico-economic antagonism is not at same level of these other struggles, it has a MORE SUBSTANTIAL position, of overdetermining, structuring other struggles.

Buddhism and Dalai Lama

Origin of fall of Buddhism.  Mahayama: Bhodisava, you were already there liberated, out of this compassion with humanity, you CAME back into this world of suffering, so you postponed your liberation until all others are liberated this is a SACRIFICIAL logic.  I don’t trust anybody that is willing to sacrifice themselves for you.

Communism will win There are miracles but only for those who believe in the miracle. Communism will win means that we who are engaged in the struggle, we can read events as signs of communism: Tahir Sq. etc, are all signs that point towards a possible communism but there is no guarantee, no objective necessity, communism will win for those who believe in communism, a bit of a tautology.

Truth is not a neutral objective truth. Truth is universal: but it is nonetheless PARTIAL.  No if you look neutrally you see nothing, you only see truth if you are interested in truth, an emancipatory truth.   Communism will come as an unintended consequence  We Chinese commies are the best managers of capitalism.   It less and less needs democracy. This should worry us.  In Lacanian the gap between what you want and what you desire.  People desire communism but they don’t want.  What people usually desire they don’t want. People all the time think they desire something, but when they come close to it, they think its horrible and don’t want it.  What you want is not the same is what you desire.  Communism will come but people will not want it.

Why still keep the stupid name?

on Egypt

on Greece

On Marx  To be a Marxist today, means not to return to Marx, in a radically critical way, totally reconstruct radically his analysis.  A fundamental flaws we can see today in his notion of communism.  His notion of communism is still a capitalism, that is, capitalism without the private property, then this wild development will continue.  He didn’t see that this dynamism is only possible within the capitalist frame.  Second limitation, he had ingenious insights 1848 revolution, 18th Brumaire, but in terms of analysis of power, he didn’t develop it properly.  The horrors of 20th Century communism you can’t explain through a critical Marxism.  Stalinism occured because communsm developed in the wrong place.  No. This is wrong.

I don’t like the term Third Way.  If you want the Third way, what is Second way: Fascism, Communism, the Second way failed because they stayed within capitalism, total productivity, efficiency and so on.  I don’t like to talk about the Third way because the Second way wasn’t a serious second way.  Too much of this we have extremes and we need proper balance.  I don’t like balance, I like extremes.

on Violence:  Hitler and Ghandi, the quote that got him in a lot of trouble

Hitler was afraid to do real social change.  Tahir Sq. they stopped the entire functioning of the state. Mubarak’s violence was a violence aimed at restoring social order.  It’s not that we live in peaceful times and some crazy revolutionary starts violence, but what about violence in Congo?  Structural violence, the violence that is here as part of NORMAL state of things.  The positive violence is violence of just occupying space and preventing things from going on as normal. Ghandi was much more violent than Hitler, because his aim was to stop the state from functioning.  It was an anti-systemic violence.

Ž lectures on Hegel at the egs 2009

Death Drive 1
this is starting point but at the end we have perfect reconciliation.  Hegel was well aware that this excess of negativity could never be culturalized.  In contrast to Kant Hegel never believed in perpetual peace.  Hegel thinks that this radical negativity, this excess will explode again.  This excess is neither Nature nor Culture.  Hegelian progress, once you are in culture, retroactively you de-naturalize nature.  The price we pay to move into culture, what before was a natural instinct becomes an absolute eternal repetitive drive.  That is a REPETITIVE drive.

Aim the true satisfaction of the drive is the circular movement of the drive itself.
Goal is what you official want

Concrete Universality
outlines Schuman and then exposes his source as Charles Rosen

Maybe the true ideological revolution is not a chang in the explicit rules, but the revolution in this background, I’m saying the same thing but the virtual resonance, the virtual background has changed. The implicit, you can’t pin it down, but somehow everything is different.

Billy Bathgate This is a good discussion

Doctorow’s novel and the movie.  The novel must have been better after seeing the movie.  We have a failed novel, we have a failed repetition (movie) but the repetition, generates retroactively a truly spectral presence of what the novel should have been.  It is a virtual object of another kind, the film does not repeat the novel on which it is based, rather they both repeat the virtual X.

Retroactive movement: a movement described it is something which was first conceptualized by Bergson,  in spite of my turmoil, I experienced a feeling of admiration for the facility of the passage from abstract to concrete.  THe war exploded, what happened, before at the level of abstract knowledge everybody knew about it, expected it, but nonetheless nobody believed it really could happen, a fetishist disavowal, I know very well but nonetheless I don’t believe it could really happen.  FIrst it was probable but impossible, but then when it happend it suddenly become REAL and possible.  When it really happened, it retroactively became totally possible and acceptable.

The logic we have here is not standard linear logic of possibility.  i.e., we have a sitatuation A, with certain possibilities, and one possiblity is realized. NO.  we have something that is considered impossible HAPPENS and then retroactively it becomes possible.  THIS IS THE LACANIAN ACT.

the ACT it retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility.

Get’s back to Hegel here

The Hegelian temporality, eternity it’s always done this way.   You may think Hegel is closure, in development thing becomes what it always already was. … Hegel may appear to be a totally closed structure.  NO. We should read the Hegelian notion of totality in this Bergson way.

Pure Past: T.S. Elliot, every new work of art retroactively changes the past.  After a certain new work of art, classical works of art are perceived in a different way. The priority of synchrony over diachrony.  Yes this is a good 10 minutes

Dostoevsky didn’t only influence Kafka, only through Kafka are we able to note this dimension in Dostoevsky that has become discernible to us.

This retroactive structure in the sense, in every historical point we live in a totality which is necessary, but this totality is retroactively

… Hegel deduces the necessity of contingency. Not only the necessity of contingency but the contingency of necessity.  Things become necessary in a way that is ultimately contingent.

Hegel’s narrative is about the very rise of necessity.  This is why for Hegel, he insists on Monarchy, Constitutional Monarchy.  Hegel was very aware that exactly what people attribute to him, total rational State, where everything is rationally regulated is nonsense, Hegel was aware that in order to have a rational totality you have to have a contingent element on top.  The function of the King is to sign his name, the less he knows all the better.

Hegel’s point is that you have state as rational totality, at the top you need an element of radical contingency

Reality is ontologically incomplete

Reality is not fully constituted.  Great works of art are like shots on a film, but the film wasn’t developed.  If you come later it isn’t an obstacle, there are things you can only understand with a delay.  How I perceive this ontological openness, how to interpret quantum physics.  Ž quotes the shitty book by Nicholas Fearn.  BUt he makes the point of the ontological incompleteness of reality.  He uses the video game analogy.

The difficult reality is incomplete but doesn’t collapse into itself, if you look closely enough it is blurred, there is no zero level, the closer you get is blurred.

The basic operation of Hegel, you have a certain epistemological limitation, you solve the problem, by showing how the problem is its own solution.

Adorno, you have 2 irreducible levels: Its wrong to ask oneself, can we get a unified theory, does this mean that we can’t know society. The result of this individual deadlock between  individual psychic intersubjective experience and autonomous social structures, this gap.  What we misperceive as the limitation of our knowledge of reality, is a basic feature of social reality itself.

Fredric Jameson alternate Modernities

back to Concrete Universal

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.

subkulak subjectivization

What all  this points towards is the dialectical mediation of the “subjective” and “objective” dimension: “subkulak” no longer designates an “objective” social category but rather the point at which objective social analysis breaks down and the subjective political attitude directly inscribes itself into the “objective” order — in Lacanese, “subkulak” is the point of subjectivization of the “objective” chain: poor peasant—middle peasant—kulak.  It is not an “objective” sub-category (or sub-division) of the class of “kulaks” but simply the name for the subjective political attitude of the “kulak.”

This accounts for the  paradox that, although it appears as a subdivision of the class of “kulaks,” “subkulaks” is a species that overflows its own genus  (that of  kulaks), since “subkulaks” are also to be found among middle and even poor farmers. In short,”subkulak” names political division as such, the Enemy whose presence traverses the entire social body of peasants, which is why he can be found everywhere, in all three peasant classes.

This brings us back to the procedure of Stalinist dieresis: “subkulak” names the excessive element that traverses all classes, the outgrowth which has to be eliminated.

There is, in every “objective” classification of social groups, an element which functions like “subkulak” — the point of subjectivization masked as a subspecies of “objective” elements of the social body.

It is this point of subjectivization  which, in the strictest sense of the term, sutures the “objective” social structure … What this also means is that the procedure of dieresis is not endless: it reaches its end when a division is no longer a division into two species, but a division into a species and an excremental leftover, a formless stand-in for nothing, a “part of no-part.” At this final point, the singular excrement reunites with its opposite, the universal; that is, the excremental leftover functions as a direct stand-in for the Universal.

In his polemic against Badiou’s reading of Paul, Agamben defines the singu­larity of the Christian position with regard to the opposition between Jews and Greeks (pagans) not as a direct affirmation of an all-encompassing universality (“there are neither Jews nor Greeks”), but as an additional divide that cuts diagonally across the entire social body and as such suspends the lines of separa­tion between social groups: a (“Christian’) subdivision of each group is directly linked with a (“Christian’) subdivision of all other groups.

(The difference between Badiou and Agamben is that, for Badiou, this new “Christian’ collective is the site of singular universality, the self-relating universality of naming, of subjective recognition in a name, while Agamben rejects the title of universality.)

The common-sense classificatory approach would say, what’s the big deal? Being Christian or non-Christian is simply another classification that cuts across and overlaps with other classifications, like the fact that there are men and women, which also cuts across all ethnic, religious, and class divides.

There is, however, a crucial difference here: for Paul, “Christian” does not designate yet another predicate (property or quality) of the individual, but a “performative” self-recognition grounded only in its own naming; in other words, it is a purely subjective feature — and, Badiou adds, only as such can it be truly universal.

The opposition between the objective-neutral universal approach and the subjective­ partisan approach is false: only a radical subjective engagement can ground true universality.

The constellation here is therefore exactly the same as that of the “subkulaks” in the Stalinist discourse: “subkulaks” are also tbe “remainder” of kulaks which cuts across the entire field, a subjective-political category masked as a social-objective quality.

So, when Agamben defines “Christians” not directly as “non-Jews” but as “non-non-Jews,” this double negation does not bring us back to the starting positive determination; it should rather be read as an example of what Kant called “infinite judgment” which, instead of negating a predicate, asserts a non-predicate:

instead of saying that Christians aren’t Jews, one should say that they are non-Jews, in the same sense that horror fiction talks about the “undead.”

The undead are alive while dead, they are the living dead; in the same way, Christians are non-Jews while remaining Jews (at the level of their pre-evental, positive social determination) — they are Jews who, as Paul put it, “died for [in the eyes of] the [Jewish] Law.” 74-75

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

Muselmannen

Muselmannen   Here we touch on the topic of Heidegger and psychiatric clinics: what about that withdrawal from engagement which is not death but the psychotic breakdown of a living human being? What about the possibility of “living in death” of vegetating with no care, like the Muselmannen in the Nazi camps?   note 40 529

badiou 2007

Critical Inquiry 2008 interview with Alain Badiou conducted in Los Angeles 7 Feb. 2007.  (the pdf has been uploaded)

Question: What, today, on the eve of the presidential election, is the “postcolonial” situation of the French banlieues? More generally, how do you see the relationship between politics and violence in the “banlieue – monde”— what Mike Davis has recently called a “planet of slums”—that is in the process of globalizing itself in the twenty-first century?

BADIOU: Here we encounter a problem that we might call, in the Leninist tradition, the problem of the masses. That is, how can the political come to really organize or be present among the great masses of the planet? The fundamental problem is how we might enter into relations with this gigantic mass, with a population that is disorganized and chaotic, poor and deprived of everything, and often prey to criminal organizations, religious messianisms, and unchecked destructive violence. This is the calling and task of every contemporary emancipatory politics. After all, we are speaking of billions of people; address this problem or our horizon will remain too narrow.

In the nineteenth century, the problem was the arrival of the new proletarian masses on the political scene; in the twentieth century, it was the political emancipation of colonized peoples. In the first case we have the workers’ movement, the Paris Commune, and, finally, the revolution of1917; in the second, the wars of national liberation, Algeria, Vietnam, and the Chinese popular war. But today we can no longer speak either of the working masses, forged in the discipline of the factory, or of the peasant masses, localized and orga-nized on the basis of agrarian relations. The masses we speak of are profoundly atomized by capitalism. They are, for the most part, delivered over to conditions of existence that are precarious and chaotic.

They are a collective figure that still has no name. The category of the subproletariat doesn’t work in this case, since that category still presupposes the existence of an organized proletariat — which, in this case, does not exist. These masses are not organized according to the traditional categories of class, and so for the moment they are more or less entirely abandoned to the nihilism of capitalism.

Here the link with the French banlieues becomes clear. The distinc-tion between the Third World and the developed countries is increasingly less important. We have our Third World within the developed states. This is why the so-called question of immigration has become so important for us. The United States, for example, this nation of immigrants, is today constructing a wall and reinforcing its border security system against immigration, an action largely agreed upon by the Democrats — not necessarily concerning the wall but the need for a substantial increase in the border patrol.

In France, this rhetoric has poisoned political life for some time now. It feeds the extreme Right, but, ultimately, the Left always aligns itself with this rhetoric. It’s a very interesting phenomenon because it shows that these destructured masses, poor and deprived of everything, situated in a nonproletarianized urban environment, constitute one of the principal horizons of the politics to come. These masses, therefore, are an important factor in the phenomenon of globalization. The true globalization, today, would be found in the organization of these masses — on a worldwide scale, if possible — whose conditions of existence are essentially the same. Whoever lives in the banlieues of Bamako or Shanghai is not essentially different from someone who lives in the banlieues of Paris or the ghettos of Chicago. They might be poorer and in worse conditions, but they are not essentially different. Their political existence is characterized by a distance from the state — from the state and its clients, the dominant classes but also the middle classes, all of whom strive to maintain this distance. On this political problem, I have only fragmentary ideas.  It’s a question that is as difficult as the problem of organizing workers in the nineteenth century. I am convinced it is the fundamental problem today.

There have been important political experiments in this field — with the sans papiers in France, for example. But this is only one part of a problem that is extremely vast. We have no relations with the young people in revolt in the banlieues. It is once again a dimension of the crisis of negation. We should absolutely be able to think a subtractive form, however minimal, for this type of population. The sans papiers, for example, should have some form of minimal workers’ organization, since they often work in restaurants or in construction. This is why it is possible to make some progress in their struggle.

rabble singular universality

Žižek also talks here about rabble at Birkbeck March 26, 2011

What makes the notion of the rabble symptomatic is that it describes a necessarily produced “irrational” excess of modern rational state, a group of people for which there is no place within the organized totality of the modern state, although they formally belong to it — as such, they perfectly exemplify the category of singular universality (a singular which directly gives body to a universality, bypassing the mediation through the particular), of what Ranciere called the “part of no-part” of the social body.

Hegel fails to take note how the rabble, in its very status of the destructive excess of social totality is the “reflexive determination” of the totality as such, the immediate embodiment of its universality, the particular element in the guise of which the social totality encounters itself among its elements, and, as such, the key constituent of its identity.

We can easily perceive here the link between the eminently political topic of the status of the rabble and Hegel’s basic ontological topic of the relationship between universality and particularity, i.e., the problem of how to understand the Hegelian “concrete universality.”

If we understand “concrete universality” in the usual sense of the organic subdivision of the universal into its particular moments, so that universality is not an abstract feature in which individuals directly participate, and the participation of the individual in the universal is always mediated through the particular network of determinations, then the corresponding notions of society is a corporate one: society as an organic Whole in which each individual has to find its particular place, i.e., in which I participate in the State by fulfilling my particular duty or obligation.

There are no citizens as such, one has to be a member of a particular estate ( a farmer, a state official, mother in a family, teacher, artisan …) in order to contribute to the harmony of the Whole. This is the Bradleyian proto-Fascist Hegel who opposes atomistic liberalism (in which society is a mechanic unity of abstract individuals) on behalf of the State as a living organism in which each part has it function, and within this space, the rabble has to appear as the irrational excess, as the threat to social order and stability, as outcasts excluded and excluding themselves from the “rational” social totality.

comparison of freudian hegelian notions of negativity

What Freud aimed at with his notion of death-drive — more precisely, the key dimension of this notion for which Freud himself was blind, unaware of what he discovered, is the “non-dialectical” core of the Hegelian negativity, the pure drive to repeat without any movement of sublation/idealization.

The paradox here is that pure repetition (in contrast to repetition as idealizing sublation) is sustained precisely by its impurity, by the persistence of a contingent “pathological” element to which the movement of repetition remains stuck.

In the Kierkegard-Freudian pure repetition, the dialectical movement of sublimation thus encounters itself, its own core, outside itself, in the guise of a “blind” compulsion-to-repeat.

And it is here that one should apply the great Hegelian motto about the internalizing of the external obstacle: in fighting its external opposite, the blind nonsublatable repetition, the dialectical movement is fighting its own abyssal ground, its own core;

in other words, the ultimate gesture of reconciliation is to recognize in this threatening excess of negativity the core of the subject itself. This excess has different names in Hegel: the “night of the world,” the necessity of war, of madness, etc.

And perhaps, the same holds for the basic opposition between the Hegelian and the Freudian negativity: precisely insofar as there is a unbridgeable gap between them (the Hegelian negativity is idealizing, mediatizing/”sublating” all particular content in the abyss of its universality, while the negativity of the Freudian drive is expressed as being-stuck onto a contingent particular content),

the Freudian negativity provides (quite literally) the “material base” for the idealizing negativity — to put it in somewhat simplified terms, every idealizing/universalizing negativity has to be attached to a singular contingent “pathological” content which serves as its “sinthom” in the Lacanian sense (if this sinthom is unravelled/disintegrated, universality disappears).

The exemplary model of this link is, of course, Hegel’s deduction of the necessity of hereditary monarchy: the rational state as universal totality mediatizing all particular content has to be embodied in the contingent “irrational”figure of the monarch.