universal – Page 3

taking deleuze from behind destitution concrete universal

Žižek. Organs without Bodies. Deleuze and Consequences. Routledge. 2004. (50-51)

Taking Deleuze from Behind

And, what is the Hegelian Begriff as opposed to the nominalist “notion,” the result of abstracting shared features from a series of particular objects?

Often, we stumble on a particular case that does not fully “fit” its universal species, that is “atypical”; the next step is to acknowledge that every particular is “atypical;’ that the universal species exists only in exceptions, that there is a structural tension between the Universal and the Particular.

At this point, we become aware that the Universal is no longer just an empty neutral container of its subspecies but an entity in tension with each and every one of its species. The universal Notion thus acquires a dynamics of its own. More precisely, the true Universal is this very antagonistic dynamics between the Universal and the Particular.

It is at this point that we pass from “abstract” to “concrete” Universal — at the point when we acknowledge that every Particular is an “exception,” and, consequently, that the Universal, far from “containing” its particular content, excludes it (or is excluded by it).

This exclusion renders the Universal itself particular (it is not truly universal, since it cannot grasp or contain the particular content), yet this very failure is its strength: the Universal is thus simultaneously posited as the Particular.

The supreme political case of such a gesture is the moment of revolutionary “councils” taking over – the moment of “ahistorical” collective freedom, of “eternity in time;’ of what Benjamin called “dialectic in suspense. ” Or, as Alain Badiou would have put it in his Platonic terms, in such historical moments, the eternal Idea of Freedom appears/transpires.

Even if its realization is always “impure,” one should stick to the eternal Idea, which is not just a “generalization” of particular experiences of freedom but their inherent Measure.

(To which, of course, Hegel would have retorted that the Thermidor occurs because such a direct actualization of freedom has to appear as Terror.)

One should insert this appearance of Freedom into the series of exceptional temporalities, together with the Messianic time first formulated by Paul — the time when “the end is near: the time of the end of time (as Giorgio Agamben puts it) when, in an ontological “state of emergency;’ one should suspend one’s full identification with one’s sociosymbolic identity and act as if this identity is unimportant, a matter of indifference.

(This exceptional temporality is to be strictly distinguished from the ecstatic-carnivalesque suspension of Order in which things are turned upside-down in a generalized orgy.)

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

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

152-154 obscene superego supplement

The determination of Judaism as the religion of the Law is to be taken literally: it is the Law at its purest, deprived of its obscene superego supplement.

Recall the traditional obscene figure of the father who officially prohibits his son casual sex, while the message between the lines is to solicit him to engage in sexual conquests — prohibition is here uttered in order to provoke its transgression.

And, with regard to this point, Paul was wrong in his description of the Law as that which solicits its own violation — wrong insofar as he attributed this notion of the Law to Jews: the miracle of the Jewish prohibition is that it effectively is just a prohibition, with no obscene message between the lines. It is precisely because of this that Jews can look for the ways to get what they want while literally obeying the prohibition. Far from displaying their casuistry and externally manipulative relationship to the Law, this procedure rather bears witness to the direct and literal attachment to the Law.

And it is in this sense that the position of the analyst is grounded in Judaism. Recall Henry James’s “The Lesson of the Master,” in which Paul Overt, a young novelist, meets Henry St. George, his great literary master, who advises him to stay single, since a wife is not an inspiration but a hindrance. When Paul asks St. George if there are no women who would “really understand—who can take part in a sacrifice,” the answer he gets is: “How can they take part? They themselves are the sacrifice. They’re the idol and the altar and the flame.” Paul follows St. George’s advice and renounces the young Marian, whom he passionately loves.

However, after returning to London from a trip to Europe, Paul learns that, after the sudden death of his wife, St. George himself is about to marry Marian. After Paul accuses St. George of shameful conduct, the older man says that his advice was right: he will not write again, but Paul will achieve greatness.

Far from displaying cynical wisdom, St. George acts as a true analyst, as the one who is not afraid to profit from his ethical choices, in other words, as the one who is able to break the vicious cycle of ethics and sacrifice.

It is possible to break this vicious cycle precisely insofar as one escapes the hold of the superego injunction to enjoy.

Traditionally, psycho-analysis was expected to allow the patient to overcome the obstacles which prevented him or her the access to “normal” sexual enjoyment. Today, however, when we are bombarded from all sides by the different versions of the superego injunction “Enjoy!”— from direct enjoyment in sexual performance to enjoyment in professional achievement or in spiritual awakening — one should move to a more radical level: psycho-analysis is today the only discourse in which you are allowed not to enjoy (as opposed to “not allowed to enjoy”). (And, from this vantage point, it becomes retroactively clear how the traditional prohibition to enjoy was sustained by the implicit opposite injunction.) 🙂 See McGowan’s book

This notion of a Law that is not sustained by a superego supplement involves a radically new notion of society — a society no longer grounded in shared common roots:

Every word is an uprooting. The constitution of a real society is an uprooting — the end of an existence in which the “being-at-home” is absolute, and everything comes from within. Paganism is putting down roots. . . . The advent of the scriptures is not the subordination of the spirit to a letter, but the substitution of the letter to the soil. The spirit is free within the letter, and it is enslaved within the root. It is on the arid soil of the desert, where nothing is fixed, that the true spirit descended into a text in order to be universally fulfilled.

Paganism is the local spirit: nationalism in terms of its cruelty and pitilessness. . . . A humanity with roots that possesses God inwardly, with the sap rising from the earth, is a forest or prehuman humanity…. A history in which the idea of a universal God must only be fulfilled requires a beginning. It requires an elite. It is not through pride that Israel feels it has been chosen.

It has not obtained this through grace. Each time the peoples are judged, Israel is judged. . . . It is because the universality of the Divine exists only in the form in which it is fulfilled in the relations between men, and because it must be fulfillment and expansion, that the category of a privileged civilization exists in the economy of Creation. This civilization is defined in terms not of prerogatives, but of responsibilities.

Every person, as a person — that is to say, one conscious of his freedom — is chosen. If being chosen takes on a national appearance, it is because only in this form can a civilization be constituted, be maintained, be transmitted, and endure. (DF,137–138)

Jews are constituted by the lack of land, of territory —however, this lack is reinscribed into an absolute longing (“Next year in Jerusalem!”). What about an unconditional uprooting, renunciation of territory? In other words, does the Jewish identity not involve the paradox of the being-uprooted itself functioning as the foundation of ethnic roots and identity?

Is there not, consequently, the next step to be accomplished, namely, that of forming a collective which no longer relies on an ethnic identity, but is in its very core the collective of a struggling universality?

Levinas is right in locating Jewish universalism in their very nonproselyte stance: Jews do not try to convert all others to Judaism, to impose their particular religious form onto all others; they just stubbornly cling to this form.

The true universalism is thus, paradoxically, this very refusal to impose one’s message on all others — in such a way, the wealth of the particular content in which the universal consists is asserted, while all others are left to be in their particular ways of life.

However, this stance nonetheless involves its own limitation: it reserves for itself a privileged position of a singularity with a direct access to the universal.

All people participate in the universality, but Jews are “more universal than others”: “The Jewish faith involves tolerance because, from the beginning, it bears the entire weight of all other men” (DF,173).

The Jewish man’s burden. . . . In other words, insofar as Jews are absolutely responsible, responsible for all of us, at a meta or reflexive level, are we not all doubly responsible to the Jews? Or, in an inverted way, if they are responsible for all of us, isn’t the way to get rid of our responsibility to annihilate them (those who condense our responsibility)?

What is still missing here is the notion (and practice) of antagonistic universality, of the universality as struggle which cuts across the entire social body, of universality as a partial, engaged position.

The relationship between Judaism as a formal, “spiritual” structure and Jews as its empirical bearers is difficult to conceptualize. The problem is how to avoid the deadlock of the dilemma: either Jews are privileged as an empirical group (which means their spirituality, inaccessible to others, is also ultimately of no relevance to them), or Jews are a contingent bearer of a universal structure.

In this second case, the dangerous conclusion is at hand that, precisely in order to isolate and assert this formal structure, the “principle” of Jewishness, one has to eliminate, erase, the “empirical” Jews. Furthermore, the problem with those who emphasize how Jews are not simply a nation or an ethnic group like others and side by side with others is that, in this very claim, they define Jews in contrast to other “normal” groups, as their constitutive exception.

138-9 plea ethical violence Ž summary of B’s position

Here is Žižek’s interpretation of Butler’s ethics

The impossibility of fully accounting for oneself is conditioned by the irreducible intersubjective context of every narrative reconstitution: when I reconstruct my life in a narrative, I always do it within a certain intersubjective context, answering the Other’s call-injunction, addressing the Other in a certain way.

This background, including the (unconscious) motivations and libidinal investments of my narrative, cannot ever be rendered fully transparent within the narrative. To fully account for oneself in a symbolic narrative is a priori impossible; the Socratic injunction, “know thyself,” is impossible to fulfill for a priori structural reasons.

My very status as a subject depends on its links to the substantial Other: not only the regulative-symbolic Other of the tradition in which I am embedded, but also the bodily-desiring substance of the Other, the fact that, in the core of my being, I am irreducibly vulnerable, exposed to the Other(s). And far from limiting my ethical status (autonomy), this primordial vulnerability due to my constitutive exposure to the Other grounds it: what makes an individual human and thus something for which we are responsible, toward whom we have a duty to help, is his/her very finitude and vulnerability.

Far from undermining ethics (in the sense of rendering me ultimately nonresponsible: “I am not a master of myself, what I do is conditioned by forces that overwhelm me.”), this primordial exposure /dependency opens up the properly ethical relation of individuals who accept and respect each other’s vulnerability and limitation.

Crucial here is the link between the impenetrability of the Other and my own impenetrability to myself: they are linked because my own being is grounded in the primordial exposure to the Other. Confronted with the Other, I never can fully account for myself. And when Butler emphasizes how one should not close oneself off to this exposure to the Other, how one should not try to transpose the unwilled into something willed, is she not thereby opposing the very core of Nietzsche’s thought, the stance of willing the eternal return of the Same, which involves precisely the transposition of everything unwilled, everything we are thrown into as given, into something Willed?

The first ethical gesture is thus to abandon the position of absolute self-positing subjectivity and to acknowledge one’s exposure / thrownness, being overwhelmed by Other(ness): far from limiting our humanity, this limitation is its positive condition. This awareness of limitation implies a stance of fundamental forgiveness and a tolerant “live and let live” attitude: I will never be able to account for myself in front of the Other, because I am already nontransparent to myself, and I will never get from the Other a full answer to “who are you?” because the Other is a mystery also for him /herself.

To recognize the Other is thus not primarily or ultimately to recognize the Other in a certain well-defined capacity (“I recognize you as . . . rational, good, lovable”), but to recognize you in the abyss of your very impenetrability and opacity. This mutual recognition of limitation thus opens up a space of sociality that is the solidarity of the vulnerable. 🙂 Žižek is looking for an opening to insert something of his monstrous neighbor.

Page 139: Butler’s central “Hegelian” reflexive turn here is that it is not only that the subject has to adopt a stance toward the norms that regulate his activity — these norms in their turn determine who and what is or is not recognized as subject.

Relying on Foucault, Butler thus formulates the basic feature of critical tradition: when one criticizes and judges phenomena on behalf of norms, one should in the same gesture question the status of these norms. Say, when one holds something to be (un)true, one should at the same time question the criteria of “holding something to be true,” which are never abstract and ahistorical, but always part of a concrete context into which we are thrown.

This move, of course, is the elementary Hegelian move formulated in the introduction to the Phenomenology: testing is always minimally self-relating and reflexive, in other words, when I am testing the truth of a statement or an act, I am always also testing the standard of testing, so that if the test fails, the standard of success or failure should also be problematized. This reference to Hegel is mediated by Adorno’s critique of Hegel’s idealism, a critique which Butler submits to critical reading.

When Adorno claims that “the true injustice is always located at the place from which one blindly posits oneself as just and the other as unjust”, does he thereby not basically repeat Hegel’s old argument about the Beautiful Soul: “The true Evil is the very gaze which sees evil all around itself”? Recall the arrogance of many West Germans in 1990, when they condemned the majority of East Germans as moral weaklings corrupted by the Communist police regime — this very gaze which saw in East Germans moral corruption was corruption itself.

(Symptomatically, although many DDR files were opened to the public, the ones that remained secret are the files recording contact between East German and West German politicians — too much West sycophancy would be revealed here.)

[There is a double paradox in Butler’s establishing the link between Adorno’s critique of the ethical violence of the abstract universality imposed from outside upon a concrete life-world and Hegel’s critique of revolutionary terror as the supreme reign of the abstract universality.

First, one should bear in mind that Hegel here relies on the standard conservative motif (elaborated before him by Edmund Burke) of organic traditional ties which a revolution violently disrupts and that Hegel’s rejection of universal democracy is part of the same line of thought. So we have here Butler praising the “conservative” Hegel!

Furthermore, Hegel is not simply rejecting revolutionary terror. He is in the same gesture asserting its necessity: we do not have a choice between the abstract universality of terror and the traditional organic unity — the choice is here forced, the first gesture is necessarily that of asserting abstract universality.

universal bartleby

Daly, Glyn. “Politics of the political: psychoanalytic theory and the Left(s).” Journal of Political Ideologies (October 2009), 14(3), 279–300

In this sense our autonomy is at once more precarious and more radical. Today we are bombarded with all sorts of choices (consumption, lifestyles, customization of computers, cell-phones, iPods, MySpace, Facebook, etc.) that identify us as ‘free individuals’. Yet we also possess the capacity to refuse the field of choosing and freedom; to reject the very modality of making changes to our lives and to break with the terms and conditions that are implicit in the latter.

Along the lines of the famous monologue from Trainspotting, we are in a position in which we can choose ‘not to choose life’. This involves a more radical ethical freedom in which one can assume a certain position of ‘being impossible’: i.e. a position of refusing the terms of socio-political engagement and identitarian inscription; of refusing the terms of existing possibility.

In other words, what is needed is the development of forms of political subjectivity that do not embrace the conventions and protocol of existing hegemonic engagement.

Both Žižek’s Bartleybyan politics and Badiou’s politics of subtraction—i.e. the effective withdrawal from official political/participatory structures in such a way that it undermines simultaneously their symbolic purchase and constitutive logics—point in a different direction. Thus it is not so much a question of siding with the underdog in the game of existing democracy, but rather rejecting the very terms of the latter. In other words, it involves a critique of how democracy, through its mythologization of the idea that all underdogs are potential winners provided they play the game effectively, can become drawn into, and start to function on behalf of, the dominant politico-economic forces.

Second, and related, the political focus is placed not so much on marginalized groups/identities in general but rather on those whose position (or perhaps, more accurately, lack of position) embody the symptomal truths of our age — i.e. those whose situation appears naturalized as irresolvable, inert and beyond any feasible or direct solution.

These are the displaced and the destitute, the poverty-trapped, the vagrants, homeless and slum-dwellers. They are the radically excluded who are constitutively excessive, who cannot be accommodated and who present a kind of dysfunctional resistance that is nevertheless necessary to the functioning of the whole. They are the nameless ‘unfortunate’ who are passed over, treated with gentrified deliquescence and kept at a non-threatening distance through the ‘ethical’ concerns of charity and aid. What is needed is a politics that strives to overcome this distancing and to confront directly the primordial repressions that are central to the operation of capitalism as a global economic and socio-cultural system.

It is against this background that distinct approaches to the Lacanian traversing the fantasy emerge.

In radical democratic thought, the lesson of the traversal is one that tends to imply that we should assume a proper distancing in order to avoid getting caught up in the ‘cataclysmic desire of fantasy’. The problem therefore is one of adopting the right predisposition: to detach ourselves from objet (a) and to thereby affect a condition where we can ‘really enjoy our partial enjoyment’.

– Radical politics should consequently restrict itself to revolutionary-reform rather than revolution as such. In general, political engagement should not be excessive but should avoid substantial projects of overhaul in favour of the finite, provisional and pragmatic.

– Yet it is precisely in these terms that radical democracy appears to remain stuck in the register of desire: real emancipation is postponed eternally; we should be enthusiastic in the chase but never believe that we hold it in our grasp. This is a politics of desire, of infinite deferral. It becomes effectively ‘a constant search for something else… (with) no specifiable object that is capable of satisfying it’.

– Radical democratic desire, in this sense, is sustained by not having the ‘object’ of democracy. Democracy is always finally elsewhere. In this context, political subjectivity becomes one of establishing a kind of homoeostatic predisposition or proper distancing: one avoids excess in order to avoid disappointment in never attaining the real Thing.

Yet for Žižek traversing the fantasy does not mean to proceed to a non-fantasmatic or even a post-fantasmatic universe defined simply in terms of a containment and/or domestication of excess (this in itself would be something of a fantasy). There is no transcendence of the fantasmatic (the structuring of desire) as such.

Traversal in this sense is the opposite of exorcism. The point is not simply to expel excess but rather to inflect/assume the latter: to take responsibility for the inherency of excess that is integral to human drive.

Traversal, in this sense, puts one in touch with the object of drive — the hole presupposed by all demand and around which Being revolves.

To put it in the terms of Star Wars, the problem is not to bring balance to the force but to recognize that the force itself is the result of a certain (tilted) excess — a Real intervention/structuring — and that it is only through contingence with the latter that alternative possibilities (a different kind of force, or indeed political) can be shown.

The freedom which is gained here, which can be called post-fantasmatic, is thus not one of overcoming alienation but precisely a freedom through alienation in its most radical sense: i.e. the acceptance of the fact that imbalance/excess is our most basic condition towards which we cannot exercise any pre-given partiality or disposition.

Ž’s Lacanian radicalism can be thought of as something that tries to break out of the endless cycle of desire and to move towards a certain logic of love (involving both desire and drive).

While this may sound hopelessly sentimental, we should recall that in Lacan love is distinguished from desire in coming to terms with the non-ideal and the non-all and with accepting precisely the lack in the Other. Love is its own excess, an uncompromising ‘violence’ that goes beyond mere antagonism (i.e. it does not externalize blockage/failure but accepts this as the very condition of being). Through love one finds, and indeed makes, the universal-divine in all its contingent fragility and failing.

Perhaps a more appropriate way of thinking about this shift is in terms of opening the possibility of a politics of excess; a politics that effectively chooses ‘something else’ — i.e. something other than the current mode of choosing.

It refuses to embrace today’s alibis where social ‘problems’ are displaced onto charities, ethical committees, focus groups and all the institutions of political deferral up to and including existing democracy. In this way it places ‘us’ in the scene and refuses not to take responsibility for the contemporary totality and its symptoms. Such a politics is distinguished from radical democratic hegemony in that it does not give up on the real thing or view concrete projects as merely the ersatz fillers of the empty place.

The point is rather to see how this very division between the universal (as empty place) and particular (contingent filler) is inherent to the latter.

In other words, the universal-divine is manifested … through substantial engagement; through finding and making the universal in the particular and through ‘excessive’ commitment, without excuses or dependency on the Other. It is a politics that affirms that the only way out is the way in.

hegel death drive

LTN 197: Hegel was right to point out again and again that, when one talks, one always dwells in the universal—which means that, with its entry into language, the subject loses its roots in the concrete life-world. To put it in more pathetic terms, the moment I start to talk, I am no longer the sensually-concrete I, since I am caught into an impersonal mechanism which always makes me say something different from what I wanted to say—as the early Lacan liked to say, I am not speaking, I am being spoken by language. This is one of the ways to understand what Lacan called ‘symbolic castration’: the price the subject pays for its ‘transubstantiation’ from the agent of a direct animal vitality to the speaking subject whose identity is kept apart from the direct vitality of passions.

the Servant’s secured particular/finite identity is unsettled when, in experiencing the fear of death during his confrontation with the Master, he gets the whiff of the infinite power of negativity; through this experience, the Servant is forced to accept the worthlessness of his particular Self:

For this consciousness was not in peril and fear for this element or that, nor for this or that moment of time, it was afraid for its entire being; it felt the fear of death, the sovereign master. It has been in that experience melted to its inmost soul, has trembled throughout its every fibre, and all that was fixed and steadfast has quaked within it. This complete perturbation of its entire substance, this absolute dissolution of all its stability into fluent continuity, is, however, the simple, ultimate nature of self-consciousness, absolute negativity, pure self-relating existence, which consequently is involved in this type of consciousness.6

What, then, does the Servant get in exchange for renouncing

How, then, does the truly historical thought break with such universalized ‘mobilism’? In what precise sense is it historical and not simply the rejection of ‘mobilism’ on behalf of some eternal Principles exempted from the flow of generation and corruption?

Here, one should again differentiate historicity proper from organic evolution.

organic evolugion: In the latter, a universal Principle is slowly and gradually differentiating itself; as such, it remains the calm underlying all-encompassing ground that unifies the bustling activity of struggling individuals, their endless process of generation and corruption that is the ‘cycle of life’.

In history proper, on the contrary, the universal Principle is caught into the ‘infinite’ struggle with itself, i.e., the struggle is each time the struggle for the fate of the universality itself. This is why the eminently ‘historical’ moments are those of great collisions when a whole form of life is threatened, when the reference to the established social and cultural norms no longer guarantees the minimum of stability and cohesion; in such open situations, a new form of life has to be invented, and it is at this point that Hegel locates the role of great heroes. They operate in a pre-legal, stateless, zone: their violence is not bound by the usual moral rules, they enforce a new order with the subterranean vitality which shatters all established forms. According to the usual doxa on Hegel, heroes follow their instinctual passions, their true motifs and goals are not clear to themselves, they are unconscious instruments of the deeper historical necessity of giving birth to a new spiritual life form—however, as Lebrun points out, one should not impute to Hegel the standard teleological notion of a hidden Reason which pulls the strings of the historical process, following a plan established in advance and using individuals’ passions as the instruments of its implementation.

First, since the meaning of one’s acts is a priori inaccessible to individuals who accomplish them, heroes included, there is no ‘science of politics’ able to predict the course of events: ‘nobody has ever the right to declare himself depositary of the Spirit’s self-knowledge’17, and this impossibility ‘spares Hegel the fanaticism of ‘objective responsibility’’18 — in other words, here is no place in Hegel for the Marxist-Stalinist figure of the Communist revolutionary who knows the historical necessity and posits himself as the instrument of its implementation. However, it is crucial to add a further twist here: if we merely assert this impossibility, we are still ‘conceiving the Absolute as Substance, not as Subject’— we still surmise that there is some pre-existing Spirit imposing its substantial Necessity on history, we just accept that the insight into this Necessity is inaccessible to us.

From a consequent Hegelian standpoint, one should go a crucial step further and realize that no historical Necessity pre-exists the contingent process of its actualization, i.e., that the historical process is also in itself ‘open’, undecided — this confused mixture ‘generates sense insofar as it unravels itself’:

[…]

LTN 218: This is how one should read Hegel’s thesis that, in the course of the dialectical development, things ‘become what they are’: it is not that a temporal deployment merely actualizes some pre-existing atemporal conceptual structure — this atemporal conceptual structure itself is the result of contingent temporal decisions.

But why shouldn’t we then say that there is simply no atemporal conceptual structure, that all there is is the gradual temporal deployment?

Here we encounter the properly dialectical paradox which defines true historicity as opposed to evolutionist historicism, and which was much later, in French structuralism, formulated as the ‘primacy of synchrony over diachrony’. Usually, this primacy was taken to mean the ultimate denial of historicity in structuralism: a historical development can be reduced to the (imperfect) temporal deployment of a pre-existing atemporal matrix of all possible variations/combinations.

This simplistic notion of the ‘primacy of synchrony over diachrony’ overlooks the (properly dialectical) point, made long ago by (among others) T.S. Eliot in his ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’,on how each truly new artistic phenomenon not only designates a break from the entire past, but retroactively changes this past itself.

At every historical conjuncture, present is not only present, it also encompasses a perspective on the past immanent to it — say, after the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, the October Revolution is no longer the same historical event, i.e., it is (for the triumphant liberal-capitalist view) no longer the beginning of a new progressive epoch in the history of humanity, but the beginning of a catastrophic mis-direction of history which reached its end in 1991.

Or, back to Caesar, once he crossed Rubicon, his previous life appeared in a new way, as a preparation for his later world-historical role, i.e., it was transformed into the part of a totally different lifestory. This is what Hegel calls ‘totality’or what structuralism calls ‘synchronic structure’:

a historical moment which is not limited to the present but includes its own past and future, i.e., the way the past and the future appeared to and from this moment.

Gerard Lebrun whom Ž loves but disagrees with in spots

It is, however, at this very point, after fully conceding Hegel’s radical break with traditional metaphysical theodicy, that Lebrun’s makes his critical move. The fundamental Nietzschean strategy of Lebrun is first to admit the radicality of Hegel’s undermining of the traditional metaphysics, but then, in the crucial second step, to demonstrate how this very radical sacrifice of the metaphysical content saves the minimal form of metaphysics. The accusations which concern Hegel’s theodicy, of course, fall too short: there is no substantial God who writes in advance the script of History and watches over its realization, the situation is open, truth emerges only through the very process of its deployment, etc., etc. — but what Hegel nonetheless maintains is the much deeper presupposition that, at the end, when the dusk falls over the events of the day, the Owl of Minerva will take flight, i.e., that there always is a story to be told at the end, the story which (‘retroactively’ and ‘contingently’as much as one wants) reconstitutes the Sense of the preceding process.

Or, with regard to domination, Hegel is of course against every form of despotic domination, so the critique of his thought as the divinization of the Prussian monarchy is ridiculous; however, his assertion of subjective freedom comes with a catch: it is the freedom of the subject who undergoes a violent ‘transubstantiation’ from the individual stuck onto his particularity to the universal subject who recognizes in the State the substance of his own being. The mirror-obverse of this mortification of individuality as the price to be paid for the rise of the ‘truly’ free universal subject is that the state’s power retains its full authority—what only changes is that this authority (as in the entire tradition from Plato onwards) loses its tyrannical-contingent character and becomes a rationally-justified power.

Is there nonetheless not a grain of truth in Lebrun’s critical point—does Hegel effectively not presuppose that, contingent and open as the history may be, a consistent story can always be told afterwards? Or, to put it in Lacan’s terms, is the entire edifice of the Hegelian historiography not based on the premise that, no matter how confused the events, a subject supposed to know will emerge at the end, magically converting nonsense into sense, chaos into new order?

Recall just his philosophy of history with its narrative of world history as the story of the progress of freedom …. And is it not true that, if there is a lesson of the twentieth century, it is that all the extreme phenomena that took place in it cannot ever be unified in a single encompassing philosophical narrative?

One simply cannot write a ‘phenomenology of the twentieth century Spirit’, uniting technological progress, the rise of democracy, the failed Communist attempt with its Stalinist catastrophe, the horrors of Fascism, the gradual end of colonialism …. But why not? Is it really so?

What if, precisely, one can and should write a Hegelian history of the twentieth century, this ‘age of extremes’ (Eric Hobsbawm), as a global narrative delimited by two epochal constellation: the (relatively) long peaceful period of capitalist expansion from 1848 till 1914 as its substantial starting point whose subterranean antagonisms then exploded with the First World War, and the ongoing global-capitalist ‘New World Order’ emerging after 1990 as its conclusion, the return to a new all-encompassing system signaling to some a Hegelian ‘end of history’, but whose antagonisms already announce new explosions?

Are the great reversals and unexpected explosions of the topsy-turvy twentieth century, its numerous ‘coincidences of the opposites’—the reversal of liberal capitalism into Fascism, the even more weird reversal of the October Revolution into the Stalinist nightmare — not the very privileged stuff which seems to call for a Hegelian reading? What would Hegel have made of today’s struggle of Liberalism against fundamentalist Faith? One thing is sure: he would not simply take side of liberalism, but would have insisted on the ‘mediation’of the opposites.

The way one usually reads the Hegelian relationship between necessity and freedom is that they ultimately coincide: for Hegel, true freedom has nothing to do with capricious choices; it means the priority of self-relating to relating-to-other, i.e., an entity is free when it can deploy its immanent potentials without being impeded by any external obstacle. From here, it is easy to develop the standard argument against Hegel: his system is a fully ‘saturated’ set of categories, with no place for contingency and indeterminacy, i.e., in Hegel’s logic, each category follows with inexorable immanent-logical necessity from the preceding one, and the entire series of categories forms a self-enclosed Whole… We can see now what this argument misses: the Hegelian dialectical process is not such a ‘saturated’ self-contained necessary Whole, but the open-contingent process through which such a Whole forms itself. In other words, the reproach confuses being with becoming: it perceives as a fixed order of Being (the network of categories) what is for Hegel the process of Becoming which, retroactively, engenders its necessity.

[…]

This is how one should read Marx’s well-known statement, from his introduction to the Grundrisse manuscripts, about the anatomy of man as a key to the anatomy of ape: it is profoundly materialist, i.e., it does not involve any teleology (man is ‘in germ’ already present in ape, ape immanently tends towards man). It is precisely because the passage from ape to man is radically contingent/imprévisible, because there is no inherent ‘progress’ in it, that one can only retroactively determine/discern the conditions

(not ‘sufficient reasons’) for man in ape. And, again, it is crucial to bear in mind here that the non-All is ontological, not only epistemological: when we stumble upon ‘indeterminacy’ in nature, when the rise of the New cannot be fully accounted for by the set of its preexisting conditions, this does not mean that we encountered the limitation of our knowledge, our inability to understand the ‘higher’ reason at work here, but, on the contrary, that we demonstrated the ability of our mind to grasp the non-All of reality: …

For us Hegelians the crucial question here is: where is Hegel with regard to this distinction between potentiality and virtuality? In a first approach, there is massive evidence that Hegel is the philosopher of potentiality: is not the whole point of the dialectical development as the development from In-itself to For-itself that, in the process of becoming, things merely ‘become what they already are’ (or, rather, were from all eternity)?

Is the dialectical process not the temporal deployment of an eternal set of potentialities, which is why the Hegelian System is a self-enclosed set of necessary passages? However, this mirage of overwhelming evidence dissipates the moment we fully take into account the radical RETROACTIVITY of the dialectical process: the process of becoming is not in itself necessary, but the BECOMING (the gradual contingent emergence) OF NECESSITY ITSELF.

This is (also, among other things) what ‘to conceive substance as subject’ means: subject as the Void, the Nothingness of self-relating negativity, is the very NIHIL out of which every new figure emerges, i.e., every dialectical passage/reversal is a passage in which the new figure emerges ex nihilo and retroactively posits/creates its necessity.

The key question is thus: is the Holy Spirit still a figure of the big Other, or is it possible to conceive it outside this frame? If the dead God were to morph directly into the Holy Ghost, then we would still have the symbolic big Other. But the monstrosity of Christ, this contingent singularity interceding between God and man, is the proof that the Holy Ghost is not the big Other which survives as the spirit of the community after the death of the substantial God, but a collective link of love without any support in the big Other. Therein resides the properly Hegelian paradox of the death of God: if God dies directly, as God, he survives as the virtualized big Other; only if he dies in the guise of Christ, his earthly embodiment, he also disintegrates as the big Other.

Therein resides what Hegel calls the ‘monstrosity’ of Christ: the insertion of Christ between God and man is strictly equivalent to the fact that ‘there is no big Other’—Christ is inserted as the singular contingency on which the universal necessity of the ‘big Other’ itself hinges.

[…]

Christ is such a figure which ‘inserts itself ’ between God and its creation. Natural development is dominated-regulated by a principle, arkhe, which remains the same through the movement of its actualization, be it the development of an organism from its conception to its maturity or the continuity of a species through generation and decay of its individual members—there is no tension here between the universal principle and its exemplification, the universal principle is the calm universal force which totalizes/encompasses the wealth of its particular content; however, ‘life doesn’t have history because it is totalising only externally’—it is a universal genus which encompasses the multitude of individuals who struggle, but this unity is not posited in an individual. In spiritual history, on the contrary, this totalization occurs for itself, it is posited as such in the singular figures which embody universality against its own particular content.

Or, to put it in a different way, in organic life, substance (the universal Life) is the encompassing unity of the interplay of its subordinate moments, that which remains the same through the eternal process of generation and corruption, that which returns to itself through this movement; with subjectivity, however, PREDICATE PASSES INTO SUBJECT: substance doesn’t return to itself, it is re-totalized by what was at the beginning its predicate, its subordinated moment. This is how the key moment in a dialectical process is the ‘transubstantiation’ of its focal point: what was first just a predicate, a subordinate moment of the process (say, money in the development of capitalism), becomes its central moment, retroactively degrading its presuppositions, the elements out of which it emerged, into its subordinate moments, elements of its self-propelling circulation. And this is also how one should approach Hegel’s outrageously ‘speculative’ formulations about Spirit as its own result, a product of itself: while ‘Spirit has its beginnings in nature in general’, the extreme to which spirit tends is its freedom, its infinity, its being in and for itself. These are the two aspects but if we ask what Spirit is, the immediate answer is that it is this motion, this process of proceeding from, of freeing itself from, nature; this is the being, the substance of spirit itself. 31

Spirit is thus radically de-substantialized: Spirit is not a positive counter-force to nature, a different substance which gradually breaks and shines through the inert natural stuff, it is nothing but this process of freeing-itself-from. Hegel directly disowns the notion of Spirit as some kind of positive Agent which underlies the process:

Spirit is usually spoken of as subject, as doing something, and apart from what it does, as this motion, this process, as still something particular, its activity being more or less contingent […] it is of the very nature of spirit to be this absolute liveliness, this process, to proceed forth from naturality, immediacy, to sublate, to quit its naturality, and to come to itself, and to free itself, it being itself only as it comes to itself as such a product of itself; its actuality being merely that it has made itself into what it is.32

If, then, ‘it is only as a result of itself that it is spirit’, this means that the standard talk about the Hegelian Spirit which alienates itself to itself and then recognizes itself in its otherness and thus reappropriates its content, is deeply misleading:

the Self to which spirit returns is produced in the very movement of this return, or, that to which the process of return is returning to is produced by the very process of returning. In a subjective process, there is no ‘absolute subject’, no permanent central agent which plays with itself the game of alienation and disalienation, losing/dispersing itself and then reappropriating its alienated content: after a substantial totality is dispersed, it is another agent — previously its subordinated moment — which re-totalizes it.

It is this shifting of the center of the process from one to another moment which distinguishes a dialectical process from the circular movement of alienation and its overcoming; it is because of this shift that the ‘return to itself ’ coincides with accomplished alienation (when a subject re-totalizes the process, its substantial unity is fully lost). In this precise sense, substance returns to itself as subject, and this trans-substantiation is what substantial life cannot accomplish.

MARX QUOTATION

…in the circulation M-C-M, both the money and the commodity represent only different modes of existence of value itself, the money its general mode, and the commodity its particular, or, so to say, disguised mode. It is constantly changing from one form to the other without thereby becoming lost, and thus assumes an automatically active character. If now we take in turn each of the two different forms which self-expanding value successively assumes in the course of its life, we then arrive at these two propositions: Capital is money: Capital is commodities. In truth, however, value is here the active factor in a process, in which, while constantly assuming the form in turn of money and commodities, it at the same time changes in magnitude, differentiates itself by throwing off surplus-value from itself; the original value, in other words, expands spontaneously. For the movement, in the course of which it adds surplus-value, is its own movement, its expansion, therefore, is automatic expansion. Because it is value, it has acquired the occult quality of being able to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.

Value, therefore, being the active factor in such a process, and assuming at one time the form of money, at another that of commodities, but through all these changes preserving itself and expanding, it requires some independent form, by means of which its identity may at any time be established. And this form it possesses only in the shape of money. It is under the form of money that value begins and ends, and begins again, every act of its own spontaneous generation.

[http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch04.htm.]

Žižek’s Commentary:

Note how Hegelian references abound here: with capitalism, value is not a mere abstract ‘mute’ universality, a substantial link between the multiplicity of commodities; from the passive medium of exchange, it turns into the ‘active factor’ of the entire process.

Instead of only passively assuming the two different forms of its actual existence (money—commodity), it appears as the subject ‘endowed with a motion of its own, passing through a life-process of its own’: it differentiates itself from itself, positing its otherness, and then again overcomes this difference—the entire movement is ITS OWN movement. In this precise sense, ‘instead of simply representing the relations of commodities, it enters […] into private relations with itself ’: the ‘truth’ of its relating to its otherness is its self-relating, i.e., in its self-movement, the capital retroactively ‘sublates’ its own material conditions, changing them into subordinate moments of its own ‘spontaneous expansion’—in pure Hegelese, it posits its own presuppositions.

Crucial in the quoted passage is the expression ‘an automatically active character’, an inadequate translation of the German words used by Marx to characterize capital as ‘automatischem Subjekt’, an ‘automatic subject’, the oxymoron uniting living subjectivity and dead automatism. This is what capital is: a subject, but an automatic one, not a living one — and, again, can Hegel think this ‘monstrous mixture’, a process of subjective self-mediation and retroactive positing of presuppositions which as it were gets caught in a substantial ‘spurious infinity’, a subject which itself becomes an alienated substance? (This, perhaps, is also the reason why Marx’s reference to Hegel’s dialectics in his ‘critique of political economy’ is ambiguous, oscillating between taking it as the model for the revolutionary process of emancipation and taking it as the mystified expression of the logic of the Capital.)

DEATH DRIVE

But there is a paradox which complicates this critique of Hegel: is the absolute negativity, this central notion of Hegel’s thought, not precisely a philosophical figure of what Freud called ‘death drive’? Is, then, insofar as—following Lacan—the core of Kant’s thought can be defined as the ‘critique of pure desire’, the passage from Kant to Hegel not precisely the passage from desire to drive? Do the very concluding lines of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia (on the Idea which enjoys to repeatedly transverse its circle) not point in this direction? Is the answer to the standard critical question addressed to Hegel—‘But why does dialectical process always go on? Why does dialectical mediation always continue its work?’—not precisely the eppur si muove of pure drive? This structure of negativity also accounts for the quasi-’automatic’ character of the dialectical process—one often reproaches Hegel the ‘mechanical’ character of dialectics: belying all the assurances that dialectics is open to the true life of reality, the dialectical process is like a processing machine which indifferently swallows and processes all possible contents, from nature to history, from politics to art, delivering them packed in the same triadic form ….

The underlying true problem is the following one: the standard ‘Hegelian’ scheme of death (negativity) as the subordinate/mediating moment of Life can only be sustained if we remain within the category of Life whose dialectic is that of the self-mediating Substance returning to itself from its otherness. The moment we effectively pass from Life(-principle) to Death(-principle), there is no encompassing ‘synthesis’, death in its ‘abstract negativity’ forever remains as a threat, an excess which cannot be economized.

In social life, this means that Kant’s universal peace is a vain hope, that war forever remains a threat of total disruption of organized state Life; in individual subjective life, that MADNESS always lurks as a possibility.

Does this mean that we are back at the standard topos of the excess of negativity which cannot be ‘sublated’ in any reconciling ‘synthesis’, or even at the naïve Engelsian view of the alleged contradiction between the openness of Hegel’s ‘method’ and the enforced closure of his ‘system’? There are indications which point in this direction: as was noted by many perspicuous commentators, Hegel’s ‘conservative’ political writings of his last years (like his critique of the English Reform Bill) betray a fear of any further development which will assert the ‘abstract’ freedom of the civil society at the expense of the State’s organic unity, and open up a way to new revolutionary violence. 38 Why did Hegel shirk back here, why did he not dare to follow his basic dialectical rule, courageously embracing ‘abstract’ negativity as the only path to a higher stage of freedom? Furthermore, do Hegel’s clear indications of the historical limitations of his system (things to be discovered in natural sciences; the impossibility of grasping the spiritual essence of countries like North America and Russia which will deploy their potentials only in the next century) not point in the same direction?

Hegel may appear to celebrate the prosaic character of life in a well-organized modern state where the heroic disturbances are overcome in the tranquility of private rights and the security of the satisfaction of needs: private property is guaranteed, sexuality is restricted to marriage, the future is safe …. In this organic order, universality and particular interests appear reconciled: the ‘infinite right’ of subjective singularity is given its due, individuals no longer experience the objective state order as a foreign power intruding onto their rights, they recognize in it the substance and frame of their very freedom. Lebrun asks here the fateful question: ‘Can the sentiment of the Universal be dissociated from this appeasement?’ Against Lebrun, our answer should be:

yes, and this is why war is necessary—in war, universality reasserts its right against and over the concrete-organic appeasement in the prosaic social life. Is thus the necessity of war not the ultimate proof that, for Hegel, every social reconciliation is doomed to fail, that no organic social order can effectively contain the force of abstract-universal negativity? This is why social life is condemned to the ‘spurious infinity’ of the eternal oscillation between stable civic life and wartime perturbations.

property is theft

Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage. Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fullness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other people’s … The common criminal is a bad man, but at least he is, as it were, a conditional good man. He says that if only a certain obstacle be removed―say a wealthy uncle―he is then prepared to accept the universe and to praise God. He is a reformer, but not an anarchist. He wishes to cleanse the edifice, but not to destroy it. But the evil philosopher is not trying to alter things, but to annihilate them

This provocative analysis demonstrates the limitation of Chesterton, and the inadequacy of his Hegelianism: what he does not grasp is that universal(ized) crime is no longer a crime―it sublates (negates/overcomes) itself as crime and turns from transgression into a new order. He is right to claim that, compared to the “entirely lawless” philosopher, burglars, bigamists, murderers even, are essentially moral: a thief is a “conditionally good man,” he does not deny property as such, he just wants more of it for himself and is then quite ready to respect it.

However, the conclusion to be drawn from this is that crime is as such “essentially moral,” that it desires simply a particular illegal reordering of the global moral order which itself should remain unchanged.

And, in a truly Hegelian spirit, one should take this proposition (of the “essential morality” of the crime) as far as its immanent reversal: not only is crime “essentially moral” (in Hegelese: an inherent moment of the deployment of the inner antagonisms and “contradictions” of the very notion of moral order, not something that disturbs moral order from outside, as an accidental intrusion); but morality itself is essentially criminal―again, not only in the sense that the universal moral order necessarily “negates itself” in particular crimes, but, more radically, in the sense that the way morality (and, in the case of theft, property) asserts itself is already in itself a crime―“property is theft,” as they used to say in the nineteenth century.

That is to say, we should pass from theft as a particular criminal violation of the universal form of property to this form itself as a criminal violation: what Chesterton fails to perceive is that the “universalized crime” he projects onto “lawless modern philosophy” and its political equivalent, the “anarchist” movement that aims at destroying the totality of civilized life, already exists in the guise of the existing rule of the law, so that the antagonism between the law and crime reveals itself to be inherent to crime, as the antagonism between universal and particular crime. 296

True adultery is not copulating outside marriage, but copulating in marriage without love: simple adultery just violates the Law from outside, while marriage without love destroys it from within, turning the letter of the Law against its spirit. So, to paraphrase Brecht once again: what is simple adultery compared to the adultery that is a loveless marriage?

as a properly Hegelian “negation of negation,” which resides in the decisive shift from the distortion of a notion to a distortion constitutive of this notion, that is, to this notion as a distortion-in-itself. Recall again Proudhon’s dialectical motto “property is theft”: the “negation of negation” is here the shift from theft as a distortion (“negation,” violation) of property to the dimension of theft inscribed into the very notion of property (nobody has the right to fully own the means of production; they are by nature inherently collective, so every claim “this is mine” is illegitimate). As we have just seen, the same goes for crime and law, for the passage from crime as the distortion (“negation”) of the law to crime as sustaining the law itself, the idea of the law itself as universalized crime. We should note that, in this notion of the “negation of negation,” the encompassing unity of the two opposed terms is the “lowest,” “transgressive” one: it is not crime which is a moment of law’s self-mediation (or theft which is a moment of property’s self-mediation); the opposition of crime and law is inherent to crime, law is a subspecies of crime, crime’s self-relating negation (in the same way that property is theft’s self-relating negation).

And, ultimately, does not the same go for nature itself? Here, the “negation of negation” is the shift from the idea that we are violating some natural balanced order to the idea that imposing on the Real such a notion of balanced order is in itself the greatest violation―which is why the premise, the first axiom even, of every radical ecology is “there is no Nature.”

part of no-part

Ž’s best explanation of PART OF NO-PART at 2:05 mark
Ambedkar’s “no caste without outcasts”. I am for Ambedkar’s radical approach towards the caste issue.

sexual difference from LTN

“There is no sexual relationship” does not mean that there is a multiplicity of unbound or unrelated sexual positions, i.e., that there is no common measure between the masculine and the feminine positions; sexual difference is rather “impossible” because it is, in a sense, prior to both positions: masculine and feminine are the two ways to symbolize the deadlock of sexual difference. Ž LTN

How, then, does the Badiouian Event stand with regard to formulae of sexuation?

Some Lacanian feminist critics claim that the exceptional status of the Event with regard to ordinary “human-animal” life, its status as the exception to universality, compels us to locate it on the male side of the formulae―and, indeed, is not this logic of exception to universality confirmed by Badiou’s own formulations, such as when he says: “There is nothing but bodies and languages …,” to which materialist dialectics adds “…with the exception of truths” (Alain Badiou, Logiques des mondes, Paris: Seuil 2006, p. 9)?

Furthermore, does not the heroic-phallic connotation of the fidelity to an Event (the idea of “enforcing” the truth) also bear witness to its masculine nature?

There is nonetheless a key feature which renders such a reading problematic, convincing as it may appear: on the male side of Lacan’s formulae of sexuation, the exception is the exception to universality (all but x are …) which, as such, grounds this universality, while in the case of the Badiouian Truth-Event, the evental Truth is universal; i.e., here, exception does not ground universality (with regard to which it is an exception), the exception (an evental Truth) is universality.

Or, to put it in another way, universality is here singular, it is what Hegel called a universality “for itself,” a universality posited as such in a singular point. Or, to put yet another way,

universality is here not the outcome of a neutral view to which we gain access after elevating ourselves above particular or partial engaged positions; universality is, on the contrary, something which is accessible only to an engaged subjective position.

The supreme case here is the Marxian proletariat which stands for the exception, the “part of no-part,” of the social body, and is precisely as such the “universal class.” Ž LTN 812

Butler on Levinas, Arendt

Judith Butler with Bracha Ettinger At European Graduate School in 2011

The first is whether any of us have the capacity or inclination to respond ethically to suffering at a distance, and what makes that ethical encounter possible, when it does take place.

The second is what it means for our ethical obligations when we are up against another person or group, find ourselves invariably joined to those we never chose and responding to solicitations and languages we may not understand or even wish to understand.

… I am trying to underscore that something impinges upon us, without our being able to anticipate or prepare for it in advance, and this means that we are in such moments affronted by something that is beyond our will, not of our making, that comes to us from the outside, as an imposition, but also as an ethical demand. I want to suggest that these are ethical obligations which do not require our consent, and neither are they the result of contracts or agreements into which any of us have deliberately entered.

Can we understand the working of an ethical obligation upon our sensibilities. Indeed this word sensibility is one that Levinas reserves for that region of responsiveness that precedes the ego. A kind of response that therefore is and is not my response. To say it is my response is to lodge the ego as its source. But what we’re trying to talk about here is a form of responsiveness that implies a dispossession of the egological.

Ethical obligations that impose themselves upon us without our consent.

It is, of course, one thing to claim this in the abstract, but quite another to understand what the difficulties are in struggling for social and political forms that are committed to fostering a sustainable interdependency on egalitarian terms. When any of us are affected by the sufferings of others, we recognize and affirm an interconnection with them, even when we do not know their names or speak their language. At its best, some media representations of suffering at a distance compel us to give up our more narrow communitarian ties, and to respond, sometimes in spite of ourselves, sometimes even against our will, to a perceived injustice. Such presentations can bring the fate of others near or make it seem very far away, and yet, the kind of ethical demands that emerge through the media in these times depend on this reversibility of the proximity and distance. Indeed, I want to suggest that certain bonds are actually wrought through this very reversibility. And we might find ways of understanding the interdependency that characterizes co-habitation precisely as these bonds.

My own thesis is that the kind of ethical demands that emerge through the global circuits in these times depends on this reversibility of the proximity and distance. Indeed, I want to suggest that certain bonds are actually wrought through this very reversibility. If I am only bound to those who are close to me, already familiar, then my ethics are invariably parochial, communitarian, and exclusionary.

If I am only bound to those who are “human” in the abstract, then I avert every effort to translate culturally between my own situation and that of others. If I am only bound to those who suffer at a distance, but never those who are close to me, then I evacuate my situation in an effort to secure the distance that allows me to entertain ethical feeling.

But if ethical relations are mediated – and I use that word deliberately here – confounding questions of location such that what is happening “there” also happens in some sense “here” and if what is happening “there” depends on the event being registered in several “elsewheres”, then it would seem that the ethical claim of the event takes place always in a “here” and “there” that are fundamentally bound to one another.

In one sense, the event is emphatically local, since it is precisely the people there whose bodies are on the line. But if those bodies on the line are not registered elsewhere, there is no global response, and also, no global form of ethical recognition and connection, and so something of the reality of the event is lost. It is not just that one discrete population views another through certain media moments, but that such a response makes evident a form of global connectedness, however provisional, with those whose lives and actions are registered in this way. In short, to be unprepared for the media image that overwhelms can lead not to paralysis but to a situation of (a) being moved, and so acting precisely by virtue of being acted upon and (b) being at once there and here, and in different ways, accepting and negotiating the multi-locality of ethical connections we might rightly call global.

Can we, then, turn to some versions of ethical philosophy in order to reformulate what it means to register an ethical demand during these times that is reducible neither to consent nor to established agreement and that takes place outside of established community bonds?

I am trying to articulate a version of cohabitation that follows from the account of ethical obligation I am describing. Turning to Palestine/Israel to suggest a set of Jewish views of cohabitation that demand a departure from communitarianism and even Jewish communitarianism and that may serve as a critical alternative during this time that state of Israel seeks to secure its claim to represent Jewishness.

Levinas’s position allows us the following conclusion: that the set of ethical values by which one population is bound to another in no ways depends on those two populations bearing similar marks of national, cultural, religious, racial belonging. It is interesting that Levinas insisted that we are bound to those we do not know, and even those we did not choose, could never have chosen, and that these obligations are, strictly speaking, pre-contractual.

Of course, this raises a question of how there can be an ethical relation to those who cannot appear within the horizon of ethics, who are not persons, or are not considered to be the kind of beings with whom one can or must enter into an ethical relation.

Here is where a most painful division within Levinas’s work continues to haunt those of us who seek ethical resources there. On the one hand, he tells us that we are claimed by others, including those we have never known, those we still don’t know, and that we are born into this situation of being compelled to honor the life of the other, every other, whose claim on life comes before our own.

On the other hand, he claims that this very ethical relation depends upon a specific set of religious and cultural conditions, Judaeo-Christian, and that those who are not formed within this tradition are not prepared for ethical life, and are not included as those who can make a claim upon those who belong to a narrow conception of the West. It is an agonizing contradiction at the heart of Levinas’s writing. But is it possible to take the ethical philosophy formulated there and deploy it against the very exclusionary assumptions by which it is sometimes supported? Can we, in other words, use Levinas against himself to help in the articulation of a global ethics that would extend beyond the religious and cultural communities that he saw as its necessary condition and limit?

Let us take as an example his argument that ethical relations are asymmetrical. In his work, the Other has priority over me. What does that concretely mean? Does the other not have the same obligation toward me? Why should I be obligated toward another who does not reciprocate in the same way toward me?

For Levinas, reciprocity cannot be the basis of ethics, since ethics is not a bargain: it cannot be the case that my ethical relation to another is contingent on their ethical relation to me, since that would make that ethical relation less than absolute and binding; and it would establish my self-preservation as a distinct and bounded sort of being as more primary than any relation I have to another. For Levinas, no ethics can be derived from egoism; indeed, egoism is the defeat of ethics itself.

I take distance from Levinas here, since though I agree in the refutation of the primacy of self-preservation for ethical thinking, I want to insist upon a certain intertwinement between that other life, all those other lives, and my own — one that is irreducible to national belonging or communitarian affiliation.

In my view (which is surely not mine alone) the life of the other, the life that is not our own, is also our life, since whatever sense “our” life has is derived precisely from this sociality, this being already, and from the start, dependent on a world of others, constituted in and by a social world.

In this way there are surely others distinct from me whose ethical claim upon me is irreducible to an egoistic calculation on my part. But that is because we are, however distinct, also bound to one another.

And this is not always a happy or felicitous experience. To find that one’s life is also the life of others, even as this life is distinct, and must be distinct, means that one’s boundary is at once a limit and a site of adjacency, a mode of spatial and temporal nearness and even boundedness.

Moreover, the bounded and living appearance of the body is the condition of being exposed to the other, exposed to solicitation, seduction, passion, injury, exposed in ways that sustain us but also in ways that can destroy us. In this sense the exposure of the body points to its precarity [precariousness].

At the same time, for Levinas, this precarious and corporeal being is responsible for the life of the other, which means that no matter how much one fears for one’s own life, preserving the life of the other is paramount.

If only the Israeli army felt this way! Indeed, this is a form of responsibility that is not easy while undergoing a felt sense of precarity. Precarity names both the necessity and difficulty of ethics.

It is surely hard to feel at once vulnerable to destruction by the other and yet responsible for the other, and readers of Levinas object all the time to his formulation that we are, all of us, in some sense responsible for that which persecutes us. He does not mean that we bring about our persecution – not at all. Rather, “persecution” is the strange and disconcerting name that Levinas gives for an ethical demand that imposes itself upon us against our will. We are, despite ourselves, open to this imposition, and though it overrides our will, its shows us that the claims that others make upon us are part of our very sensibility, our receptivity, and our answerability. We are, in other words, called upon, and this is only possible because we are in some sense vulnerable to claims that we cannot anticipate in advance, and for which there is no adequate preparation.

For Levinas, there is no other way to understand the ethical reality; ethical obligation not only depends upon our vulnerability to the claims of others, but establishes us as creatures who are fundamentally defined by that vulnerability and by that ethical relation. This ethical relation is not a virtue that I have or exercise; it is prior to any individual sense of self. It is not as a discrete individual that we honor this ethical relation. I am already bound to you, and this is what it means to be the self I am, receptive to you in ways that I cannot fully predict or control. This is also, clearly, the condition of my injurability as well, and in this way my answerability and my injurability are bound up with one another. In other words, you may frighten me and threaten me, but my obligation to you must remain firm.

This relation precedes individuation, and when I act ethically, I am undone as a bounded being. I come apart. I find that I am my relation to the “you” whose life I seek to preserve, and without that relation, this “I” makes no sense, and has lost its mooring in this ethics that is always prior to the ontology of the ego.

Another way to put this point is that the “I” becomes undone in its ethical relation to the “you” which means that there is a very specific mode of being dispossessed that makes ethical relationality possible. If I possess myself too firmly or too rigidly, I cannot be in an ethical relation to you. The ethical relation means ceding a certain egological perspective for one which is structured fundamentally by a mode of address: you call upon me, and I answer. But if I answer, it was only because I was already answerable; that is, this susceptibility and vulnerability constitutes me at the most fundamental level, and is there, we might say, prior to any deliberate decision to answer the call. In other words, one has to be already capable of receiving the call before actually answering it. In this sense, ethical responsibility presupposes ethical responsiveness.

Why bring a discussion of Levinas together with one regarding Arendt? Both Levinas and Arendt take issue with the classically liberal conception of individualism, that is, the idea that individuals knowingly enter into certain contracts, and their obligation follows from having deliberately and volitionally entered into agreements with one another. This view assumes that we are only responsible for those relations, codified by agreements, into which we have knowingly and volitionally entered.

And Arendt disputes this view. Indeed, it was the substance of the argument that she made against Eichmann. He thought he could choose which populations should live and die, and in this sense he thought he could choose with whom to co-habit the earth. What he failed to understand, according to Arendt, is that no one has the prerogative to choose with whom to co-habit the earth.

There is no one part of the population that can claim the earth for itself, no community or nation-state or regional unit, no clan, no party, and no race. As I have suggested, to make such a claim is to enter into a policy of genocide. This means that unwilled proximity and unchosen cohabitation are preconditions of our political existence, the basis of her critique of nationalism, the obligation to live on the earth and in a polity that establishes mode of equality for a necessarily and irreversibly heterogenous population.

Indeed, unwilled proximity and unchosen cohabitation serve as well as the basis of our obligations not to destroy any part of the human population, and to outlaw genocide as a crime against humanity, but also to invest institutions with the demand to seek to make all lives liveable.

Thus, from unchosen co-habitation, Arendt derives notions of universality an equality

that commit us to institutions that seek to sustain human lives without regarding some part of the population as socially dead, as redundant, or as intrinsically unworthy of life and therefore ungrievable.

But what is evident is that her views on cohabitation, federated authority, equality, and universality were in stark contrast to those who were defending nationalist forms of Jewish sovereignty, differential classifications for Jewish and non-citizens, military policies to uproot Palestinians from their lands, and efforts to establish a Jewish demographic majority for the state.

Although it is so often taught that Israel became an historical and ethical necessity for the Jews during and after the Nazi genocide, and that anyone who questions the founding principles of the Jewish state shows an extraordinary insensitivity to the plight of the Jews, there were Jewish thinkers and political activists at the time, including Arendt, Martin Buber, Hans Kohn, and Judah Magnus, who thought among the most important lessons of the Holocaust was an opposition to illegitimate state violence, to any state formation that sought to give electoral priority and citizenship to one race or religion, and that nation-states ought to be internationally barred from dispossessing whole populations who fail to fit the purified idea of the nation.

For those who extrapolated principles of justice from the historical experience of internment and dispossession, the political aim is to extend equality regardless of cultural background or formation, across languages and religions, to those none of us ever chose (or did not recognize that we chose) and with whom we have an enduring obligation to find a way to live.

For whoever “we” are, we are also those who were never chosen, who emerge on this earth without everyone’s consent and who belong, from the start, to a wider population and a sustainable earth. And this condition, paradoxically, yields the radical potential for new modes of sociality and politics beyond the avid and wretched bonds formed through settler colonialism and expulsion.

We are all, in this sense, the unchosen, but we are nevertheless unchosen together. It is not uninteresting to note that Arendt, herself a Jew and refugee, understood her obligation not to belong to the “chosen people” but rather to the unchosen, and to make mixed community precisely among those whose existence implies a right to exist and to lead a liveable life.

In Sweden on May 27 2011 at the Nobel Museum Butler gave a similar talk and this is her paper here. IF you want to download it click here. Download a copy of Butler’s talk