Category: concrete universal

Less Than Nothing

Oct 14, 2012

This brings us back to our original question: in what does the difference between animal and human habits consist? Only humans, spiritual beings, are haunted by spirits―why? Not simply because, in contrast to animals, they have access to universality, but because this universality is for them simultaneously necessary and impossible; that is, it is a problem. In other words, while for human subjects the place of universality is prescribed, it has to remain empty, it can never be filled in with its “proper” content. Continue reading “Less Than Nothing”

Less than nothing

Nov 30, 2012

Page 467

Hegel is the ultimate thinker of the process of the emergence of necessary features out of chaotic contingency of contingency’s gradual self-organization of the gradual rise of order out of chaos

How, then, can necessity arise out of contingency? The only way to avoid the obscurantism of “emergent properties” is to bring into play negativity: at its most radical, necessity is not a positive principle of regularity that overcomes contingency, but the negative obverse of contingency: what is “necessary” above all is that every contingent particular entity find its truth in its self-cancellation, disintegration, death. Continue reading “Less than nothing”

General Will by Rousseau

General Will:
that the laws decided upon by subjects will operate equally for all: ‘since each man gives himself to all, he gives himself to no one; and since there is no associate over whom he does not gain the same rights as others gain over him, each man recovers the equivalent of everything he loses, and in the bargain he acquires more power to preserve what he has’.

cited in Towards an Anthropology of Infinitude: Badiou and the Political Subject by Nina Power in The Praxis of Alain Badiou. Eds. Paul Ashton, A. J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens 2006

pluth logical time on badiou

Pluth, E. and Hoens, D. (2004) What if the Other is Stupid? Badiou and Lacan on ‘Logical Time’ In Think Again Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy. Edited by Peter Hallward. 182-190.

The enthusiast knows he or she is making claims that cannot be proved, but is courageous enough to proceed and is confident that the claim is true and that sufficient reasons for it will show up. The enthusiast is by definition modest. He or she has neither the modesty of someone who decides nothing (‘I cannot decide, there are not enough premises, I don’t have enough information, my knowledge is too limited’, etc.) nor the modesty of the fanatic who says that he or she is sure about a claim but that it is only a subjective point of view and that, of course, others may have another opinion (the contemporary, liberal ideology of tolerance, where everything is ‘an interesting opinion’).

The enthusiast is modest in making a claim precisely because of how he or she is positioned ‘on the way to’ truth. Or put differently, the enthusiast leaves the gap between the singular decision and a universal truth open until the situation changes in such a way that the singular can be universally assumed as ‘a given’.

Furthermore, the situation is limited by the way it is set up, and in particular by the fact that there are only two possibilities: either one is white or black. A’s entire reasoning process is based on these two possibilities. Whatever claim A then makes can already be verified within the terms of the situation.

While we have been trying to point out the similarities between Badiou’s theory of decision or intervention and the situation in ‘Logical Time’, the two don’t quite match, and the reason for this is very simple: there is no event in ‘Logical Time’. In the absence of an event, it is difficult to see what the act is based on.

Elsewhere in Badiou’s theory, of course, decisive acts, or truth-processes, are contingent upon events. By contrast, an event seems radically excluded from the situation of ‘Logical Time’, because there are only two signifiers, or two names, available (black or white), and they fully describe all the elements of the situation among which one has to choose.

Apart from these problems inherent to the situation described in ‘Logical Time’, the situation there does allow both Badiou and Lacan to show the importance of a singular moment of acting which precedes an intersubjective verification process.

This implies that the individual decision might be mistaken. What is important is what follows. Using the distinction between enthusiasm and fanaticism again, we see that there are two modes of acting: the enthusiast can enthusiastically make mistakes, but what will always differentiate the enthusiast from the fanatic is the way he or she fails.

The fanatic resembles a prisoner who might have learned the truth from a whisper in his ear by the prison warden. Like this prisoner, the fanatic does not go through the anxious moment of the act.

As Badiou formulates it, ‘only the intervener will know if there was something that happened’. A fanatic is not actually intervening, because he or she has not made a decision and therefore does not participate in a truth process.

Only someone who has decided can put a decision to the test. This reminds us of one of the commonly acknowledged features of enthusiasm: enthusiasm is contagious, it needs others with whom it can share its ‘divine insight’. The fanatic does not need others because in the end he or she is completely satisfied with a mystical union with supersensible truths.

Put in these terms, of course, no one would want to be a fanatic: fanaticism is pathological. Therefore, to avoid fanaticism, one might be inclined to think of the undecidable as something which ought to be preserved in its undecidability. The question then is whether such an advocate of the undecidable is really so very different from the fanatic.

Whereas the fanatic immediately embraces revelations that cannot be discussed, thereby negating the undecidable directly, the advocate of the undecidable would, in ‘Logical Time’, remain forever positioned in that uncomfortable, anxious moment of conclusion, never acceding to a process of verification, in fear of doing injustice to the truth-moment of anxiety.

The enthusiast goes through the truth-moment of anxiety, and remains faithful to that moment precisely by replying to it: by replying to it with an act. As Lacan puts it in his unpublished Seminar on anxiety: ‘to act is to pull a certitude out of anxiety’.

Put in these terms, of course, no one would want to be a fanatic: fanaticism is pathological. Therefore, to avoid fanaticism, one might be inclined to think of the undecidable as something which ought to be preserved in its undecidability.

The question then is whether such an advocate of the undecidable is really so very different from the fanatic. Whereas the fanatic immediately embraces revelations that cannot be discussed, thereby negating the undecidable directly, the advocate of the undecidable would, in ‘Logical Time’, remain forever positioned in that uncomfortable, anxious moment of conclusion, never acceding to a process of verification, in fear of doing injustice to the truth-moment of anxiety.

The enthusiast goes through the truth-moment of anxiety, and remains faithful to that moment precisely by replying to it: by replying to it with an act. As Lacan puts it in his unpublished Seminar on anxiety: ‘to act is to pull a certitude out of anxiety’.

At the opening of his discussion of ‘Logical Time’, Badiou declares that what is at stake for him is the fixing of an ‘irreducible gap’ between his theory and Lacan’s. We have shown that when it comes to an understanding of the act, both thinkers are quite similar. Where Badiou differs from Lacan is in his ability to draw explicit ethical and political lessons from the kind of act described in ‘Logical Time’. In political terms, Badiou’s conclusion implies adherence to a familiar Leninist principle:

When the popular insurrection bursts out, it is never because the calculable moment of this insurrection has come. It is because there is nothing left for it but to rise up, which is what Lenin said: there is a revolution when ‘those on the bottom’ no longer want to continue as before, and the evidence imposes itself, massively, that it is better to die standing than to live lying down. [Lacan’s] anecdote shows that it is the interruption of an algorithm that subjectivates, not its effectuation (TS 272–3).

Any revolutionary act must work with the troubling undecidability inherent to a symbolic universe, and acts precisely as a reply to the real of an event.

But as we have shown, Badiou nonetheless emphasizes the necessary struggle or work to be done to name this event. This process of naming eventually creates a new symbolic order whose operational closure, to use Lacanian terminology, will be ensured by other master signifiers.

Zupančič comedy #2

Zupančič. “The ‘Concrete Universal’ and What Comedy Can Tell Us About It.” Lacan The Silent Partners. Edited by Slavoj Žižek, New York and London: Verso. 2006. 171-197.

The Odd One In On Comedy. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. 2008

In psychoanalysis the main problem does not lie simply in the subject becoming conscious of her unconsciousness, of all that (often painfully) determines her actions and experiences.

This is insufficient: the main problem is precisely this unconsciousness is embodied outside ‘herself’, in the manner of rituals of her conduct, speech, relations to others — in certain situations that keep ‘happening’ to her.

In short, it is not simply that in analysis the subject has to shift her position (or even ‘adapt’ herself);

the major part of the analytic work consists precisely in shifting the ‘external practices’, in moving all those ‘chickens’ in which the subject’s unconsciousness (and her relation to herself) are externalized.

And one of the major obstacles that can occur in analysis is precisely that the subject can become all too eager to change herself and her perception fo the world, convinced that in analysis she will experience a kind of intimate revelation on account of which everything will be different and easier when she re-enters the world.

In other words, the subject is ready to do quite a lot, change radically, if only she can remain unchanged in the Other (in the Symbolic as the external world in which, to  put it in Hegel’s terms, the subject’s consciousness of herself is embodied, materialized as something that still does not know itself as consciousness). Continue reading “Zupančič comedy #2”

self-difference Žižek

Žižek reality of the Virtual 2004

UNIVERSAL and PARTICULAR
The category of the REAL is a purely formal category. REAL is not formless content disturbing order, it is a pure structural GAP.  It is ENTIRELY NONSUBSTANTIAL category.

Minimal self-difference

It is a difference but a pure difference. A difference which is paradoxically prior to what it is the difference between.

It is not that you have two terms and difference is the difference between the two terms. Paradoxically the two positive terms appear afterwards as attempts to dominate/cover-up  this difference.

If you ask a right-winger how the entire social field is structured you will get a totally different answer from a centrist and a left-winger.  There is no neutral way to define the difference between left and right, in itself it is just a VOID.   The point is that there is no neutral way to define the difference between left and right, you either approach it from the left or right.

Crucial philosophically is this ‘pure formalism’ and we should precisely insist on purely formal materialism, the minimal feature of materialism is that there is pure difference, an antagonism within the ONE, a primordial fact is pure self-difference. Self-Difference and not mythological polar opposites ying-yang man-woman light-dark

Deleuze asserts some kind of primordial multitude as ontological fact.  NO!

Multitude is already an effect of th inconsistency of the ONE with itself.  THE ONE CANNOT COINCIDE WITH ITSELF.  We don’t have primordial polarity between male-female etc.

No its more radical, as Lacan puts it, the binary signifier is primordially repressed, the second element is always missing. We have one but not the accompanying other.  This original imbalance sets in motion the generation of multiplicity.

Woody Allen
Tolstoy where is Dostoevsky (the other of Tolstoy) In one short scene, all the big titles of Dostoevsky’s novels appear.

ONE cannot coincide with itself, because of pure difference the multitude explodes.

Today’s idealism/spiritualism no wonder the greatest spiritual movie director Tarkovsky, was at the same time practically obsessed with matter in decay. When heroes pray, the litteraly immerse their heads in mud. Oppose spiritual materialism, the pure formalism of true radical materialism. Quantum physics, you don’t need positivity of matter you can do it all with theorems.

How to think difference which is prior to the elements which it is the difference of.

KANT: Negative Judgement/Infinite Judgement.

excess over humanity which is inherent to humanity itself.
UNDEAD: You are alive precisely as dead. Human freedom has exactly status, it is neither NATURE, NOR CULTURE. Culture is already symbolic laws, and symbolic regulation. The conclusion to be drawn cultural symbolic prohibitions try to regulate is not directly nature, but this EXTIMATE KERNEL OF HUMANITY, the inhuman, the undead, not external to humanity, some MONSTROUS EXCESS WHICH IS INHERENT TO HUMANITY ITSELF.

POLITICS OF PURE DIFFERENCE
it won’t be what emerges today, the so-called identity politics, recognizing tolerating differences. Recognizing differences

Hegel universal particular Strella Panos Koutras

June 2013 article by Žižek in IJZS Where Ž first mentions Strella.
Guardian Blog on Strella and family values

This is the missing chapter really, of Butler’s Antigone’s Claim

Žižek quotes from Marx

a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labor-power, are constrained only by their own free will. They contract as free agents, and the agreement they come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself. The only force that brings them together and puts them in relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interests of each.

Strella takes perversion to its ridiculously sublime end. Early in the film, Yiorgos traumatically discovers and accepts that the woman he desires is a transvestite. Strella simply tells Yiorgos: “I am a tranny. Do you have a problem with that?”, and they go on kissing. What follows is Yiorgos’s truly traumatic discovery that Strella knowingly seduced his father. His reaction is the same as when Fergus sees Dil’s penis in The Crying Game: disgust, escape in panic, wandering the city unable to cope with what he has discovered. Similarly to The Crying Game, A Woman’s Way depicts trauma being overcome through love; a happy family with a small son emerges.

However, the hero’s discovery that his transvestite lover is his son is not the actualisation of some unconscious fantasy; his disgust is only because he is surprised by an external event. We should resist the temptation to interpret the story as father-son incest.

There is nothing to interpret: the film ends with a completely normal and genuine happiness for the family. As such, it serves as a test for the advocates of Christian family values: embrace this authentic family of Yiorgos, Strella and the adopted child, or shut up about Christianity.

A proper sacred family emerges at the end of the film, a family something like God the father living with Christ – the ultimate gay marriage and parental incest.

The only way to redeem Christian family values is to redefine or reframe the idea of a family to include situations like the one at the end of Strella. In short, Strella is an Ernst Lubitsch film for today, for the “trouble in paradise” when you discover that your gay lover is your son. Even if the family violates all divine prohibitions, they will always find “a small room vacant in the annex” of heaven, as the good-humoured devil says to the hero of Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait.

Žižek december 2011 Berlin

Slavoj Žižek: “The Animal Doesn’t Exist” (respondent: Lorenzo Chiesa) The Human Animal in Politics, Science, and Psychoanalysis
Organised by: Lorenzo Chiesa (Reader in Modern European Thought, University of Kent) and Mladen Dolar (Professor of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana; Advising Researcher, Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht)  KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 16 — 17 December 2011

Part 2

New Guinea Tribe
Rejection of binary logic is a cover-up of a central antagonism Retroactive totalization, a violent cut, a violent impostition of a totality, there is a truth in it.  What emerges through the animal, it is only through this minimal distance of speech that retroactively we can formulate not an eternal essence of animality but the deadlock of animality.  Redefine the notion of essence, do not reject it.

UNIVERSAL and PARTICULAR: the first antagonism is not between particularities, but universality and particular are deal with this antagonism.
Corporate capitalism, liberal capitalism, capitalism with Asian values.  There are only different capitalism, but they all try to obfuscate control a central deadlock.

Big Rule of Hegelian Dialectics
In each Hegelian totality or concrete universality, universality is one of its own species, it encounters itself as one of its own species.  RABBLE, sticks out the only point of universality.  In Rabble human as a social being exists, as an outcast universality comes to exist as such.  A species which relates to itself as a universal being.  What if this animal as such does exist and this is we humans.  and this is the HORROR animals see in us.  We are the ANIMAL for other animals.
Animals are immediately caught in their environment, speechless instinct NO! this is wrong.   This is retroactive projection … I think that the true mystification in this standard opposition between human-animal, what effectively disappears here, what we miss is the most radical dimension of what WE humans are.
Becoming — Being.  We are already constituted reason, speech and then measure animals.  WHat this can’t think is HUMAN IN ITS BECOMING, it can’t think human from animal standpoint.

Psychoanalysis:  Zupancic Freudian DRIVE which is NOT YET CULTURE BUT NO LONGER ANIMAL INSTINCT.
Not animal life but not yet human culture.  Meillassoux After Finitude.  Alenka elaborated a nice Lacanian answer to Meillassoux.  NON-ALL Meillassoux reads in the masculine logic.  You get a more provocative result if you read contingency along the FEMININE LOGIC OF SEXUATION. Contingency is non-all, precisely because you can’t totalize it through exception.

Fossils: Transcendental Kantian legacy can’t provide clear answer to status of FOSSILS.  If you take this ontologically seriously, it refers before transcendental horizon.  Meillassoux demonstrates transcendental tricks don’t work here.  If we want to isolate the dimension Darwin didn’t see, I would like to rehabilitate, who said regarding fossils, that God planted those fossils.     And Ž wants to dialectically incorporate this story
The true problem brings us to object (a).  The true problem is not the fossil out there, was there life on earth before human beings, the true fossil are human beings, we are UNABLE TO SEE OURSELVES IN BECOMING.   The problem is we cannot see ourselves as in-itself as it were.   Its easy to claim tha we Christians can’t read pagan religions we reduce them to our perspective, you miss what Judaism is … what we miss even more what was Christ before he became a Christian, are we aware what a MONSTROSITY JESUS CHRIST WAS FOR THE JEWS.   We have to see the past in its BECOMING.  What was Christ before he became a Christian.

Part 2

The whole of Christianity as an instution is not a fight against paganism but its own excess, the struggle of being human is not fight against animal nature, but fight against EXCESS that marks our break with NATURE.  There is a wonderful text in Kant about education and humans, to control their excess.  Man is an ANIMAL WHO NEEDS A MASTER.   Only humans have a certain WILD UNRULINESS.
The BRUTALITY IS THE FREUDIAN DRIVE, not animal nature.  We are not fighting animal nature, we are fighting the Freudian Drive.

The excess that needs to be explained is the OTHER SIDE of what we humans are in ourselves, what was lost the moment we got caught in our ideological self-perception.
I diagree with vulgar Darwinians when they look for solution in what human mind can do its complexities, talk, infinitesimal mathametics.  No begin with Badiou, what defines a WORLD, are not its positive features, but the way a structure of a world relates to its OWN INHERENT POINT OF IMPOSSIBILITY.  the true changes in world, are changes in the status of this impossibility.

Square root of minus one, before it was dismissed as nonsense.  Even Marx said this, dismisses this.  But revolution of math, even if square root of minus one, even if nonsensical you can integrate it and it functions.    What is great about democracy, it takes traumatic impossibility, my God throne is EMPTY …Leader dies, VOID must be filled immediately, Democracy integrates it, and makes it the instrument of its relative stability.  Capitalism, the impossibility of stability, makes it the very mode of its functioning.  WHAT IF WE SHOULD LOOK for what makes us Humans, at this level, not at what we can do, but a changed status of what we can’t do, the changed status of impossibility.

How is it we humans obsessively care again and again about something with NO ADAPTIVE VALUE?

Objective reality is ontologically not-all   I’m totally materialist.  Quantum physics, reality in-itself is not fully ontologically constituted, there are gaps in reality.   I would like to supplement Alain Badiou, his quote is problematic, his english theoretical writings.  Where does Event come from if all there is is the order of Being?

An event is nothing but the part of a given situation, a fragment of Being.  If an event is nothing but a fragment of Being, why asks Ž can we not describe it as such.   Here is Badiou’s Kantianism.  We are only free from our finitude, Kant tries to imagine what would happen to us if we gained full access to thing-in-itself.  We would turn into puppets.  So our freedom and ethical activity only emerges from standpoint of our finitude.  That’s Kant.  If event is nothing but fragment of being, why can’t we then reduce it to Being.  Badiou says because of our finitude.  Z says no, its because Being in incomplete, you must introduce the non-all of BEING.

Žižek Nov 2010

Žižek in Nov 2010 London.

Multiculturalism each particular culture and some legal space separate from each other
Here is the story of Jewish Lesbians with purple hair and Muslim women together in Bilan as an example of universality, solidarity in struggle.

Tragedy of Multiculturalism
The whole space is constructed with a clear class dimension.  The middle class blaming poor red neck working class.  The problem when we fight racism don’t focus on the poor confused guys, his son comes home beaten, things are getting stolen from the field and so on … nothing is offered them but just blame.  Then we get new rise of anti-immigrant politics with a strong base in poor and working class.  We need to break this alliance with anti-immigrant nationalism and working class.

An example of a dirty joke in order to make the point that this is how you reach out to the other, the gypsy.  Its not just being open to the other, we should be open to the other in the sense of participating in the same shared struggle.

Anti-Capitalism
fake moral anti-capitalism

Ruthless presentation of actual deadlock: Jack Bauer 24.  Season 7.  Shift from external to internal enemy.  In final episode, Bauer thinks he’s dying, and asks a Muslim priest to his death bed, and says with simple dignity, he’s my friend.  What I like it renders open Jack Bauer’s ethical confusion.  There is no easy solution offered, no I was doing it for the common good.  There is no humanizing, not its a tough job somebody has to do it, we pay the price for it, NO.   Ethical political contradiction, legal power and obscene counterpart, there is no way out, no way to feel good morally, I just have to live with it, all humanization is disgusting like Speilberg’s Munich.  If we remain within framework of existing coordinates thare is no way out.  Present total ethical confusion, noone is covered here.

I agree with Tariq Ali’s critique of Obama, but its a leftist cheap shot, making left feel good, look Obama didn’t do anything, ha this is typical.  But Žižek says this is too easy.
Animal Rights  Derrida, primordial scene, the primordial gaze of the other, Levinas excludes animals.  Žižek I saw a photo of a cat …
What kind of a monster did the cat sees, what were we for the cat, this monstrosity is something to think about.  What are we humans for animals.  What kind of monsters are we for them. 

Critique of Badiou  politics of subtraction, establish free territories outside of state power and use violence only as a defensive measure.  Badiou goes one step too far, when you don’t have violence in a society, you already have violence to maintain this non-violence.  Badiou is conceding too much to the enemy.  Class struggle is already violence, peace in capitalism is violence.  We should become aware of seeing this violence, which complicates things, we cannot get out of violence.

Žižek’s Jon Holloway story that he repeats again in Zagreb 2013.  Capitalists love these non-commercial zones where people relax.   Liberated zones.  Chiapas non-violent moral authority, now everyone loves them because they are no longer a threat.  Islands outside brutal commodification makes capitalism happy.

Here is the Question and Answer   The infamous quote about Hitler not being violent enough.  And here is Ghandi

Attracting attention, Žižek on himself

belief materialism subjectivity neighbour no big Other

Simon Critchley on love and self-loss

spiritual daring that attempts to eviserate and excoriate the old self, love dares the self to leave the self behind, to hue and hack to make a space large enough for love to enter love is an enrichment through impoverisment.

Slavoj Žižek, Tilton Gallery, New York City, 19 Nov. 2006

Belief

Steve Martin in Leap Of Faith: He really produced a miracle and breaks down
Atheism is secret inner conviction of believers. Internal doubt, but believe in external rituals.
Either we are alone in universe or there are aliens/God. Both situations are toally unbearable. WE would break down if aliens visited us, but we can’t stand that nobody is there too.
Ecology We can’t be sure or its the big multinationals. No we know but we are not ready to believe, you know global warming, but you look outside and see the sun and flowers. WE are wired, we can’t accept because our BEING itself disappears.
Free is a true human who is ready to make this step. One guy did it Mao in 1955. Why chinese people should not be afraid of American Atom Bomb. “But eve in atom bombs so powerful, they would blow the earth up, it would just be a minor event for the solar system.” This totally crazy position where you are ready to put everything at risk is the true radical position.

In order to truly confront global warming, we must cut our organic embeddedness. Gap between poetic universe and scientific results. Even if we know something to be NOT true, our poetry is naive. WE know there is no sunset, the earth rotation which moves, not sun, not sunset. The true tasks of poetry today is to make poetry at level of results. Oh my darling let’s meet a last quarter turn of earth.

Only in Christianity God himself for a moment becomes an atheist.
This idea of imperfect God. Wait a minute let’s call God. Wait a minute this is a old stupid man who screwed up creation. God accepts, yes you are right … What is the underlying message?
What is materialism
A particle position/velocity. REALITY IS IN-ITSELF UNDETERMINED. THINGS GET FUZZY as if they disappear into nothingness.  Here he uses the famous video game analogy but doesn’t mention or credit that guy Nicholas somebody’s book.

We should read reality like this computer game?  What if God underestimated us.  God thought when he programmed the universe, a don’t have to program all the way down, I ‘ll go so far as atoms.  God was too lazy to program further.  He cheated a bit.

Materialism at its purest

The movie 13th floor.  You reach the end, earth is no longer earth, it slowly moves into digital coordinates.  Now this would be the true materialism.  To think the unfinished character of reality, we don’t need God to imagine it.  Reality is in-itself unfinished.

When you approach too close an image, all you see are stains.     Modernism is an event, postmodernism is NOT.

Badiou and Multiplicity
His ontology of multiplicity, this dispersal multiplicity is fundamental of ontology, but it is not a multiplicity of ONES, his ontology is an ontology the oppositie of zero is not ONE, the primoridal fact is multiple in a void and then comes ONE.

What are the consequences for subjectivity, what kind of subjectivity fits this universe?
It is an EMPTY SUBJECTIVITY.  Recently a publisher asked me to do what I hate.  Books have on the back cover, personal idiosyncracies, John Irving is a wrestler and gardens in his spare time … Ž wanted to test them: in his free time Ž surfs internet for child porn and teaches his son to pull the legs off of spiders.  This supplement is a FUNDAMENTAL LIE.
The core of the subject is the THING and that’s the neighbour.

Neighbour is a THING. THING is the Impenetrable abyss of the Other’s desire. Everything else like gardening is to cover it up.

Here is the famous phone call on the plane about to crash
You call your beloved and say “I love you.” when the whole world is falling apart, what remains is love.  No, I am more a pessimist.  I claim that in that totally desperate scary position, you lie to yourself, you want to die with a clear account in good memory, at that point you lie.

A truly atheist crazy thing: imagine somebody who, the plane is falling down you are married, Honey just so that it is clear, the marriage was hell I want to divorce you. Bye.  That would be an act.
Decentrement of subjectivity
When you are at your innermost yourself, you are NOT yourself, you are LYING. You are at a distance from TRUTH.
Woman is a SYMPTOM OF MAN. It means for Lacan the symptom pre-exists what it is a symptom of. If woman is a symptom, imagine a woman walking around, do you want me to be your symptom. TO be an empty pure symptom, a NUN, A truly AUTHENTIC position, it could be a radical feminine position, I will remain a pure symptom. Woman can do it, man can’t do it. Man needs a symptom.
DaVINCI Code the movie
X-files of Darian Leader.  Why do some many things happen OUT THERE. To cover up the fact that nothing happens here.  Nothing happens here, no sex between the characters.
Abyss of subjectivity
Openness, our elementary reaction is FEAR, especially today the inexistence of the big OTHER is more marked than ever.  Not just symbolic, but what is truly horrifying, in ecology, that nature itself as ultimate big Other is disappearing.  NATURE is impenetrable density of our background, but the moment through genome and bio-genetic manipulations, NATURE itself turns into something else, it is no longer nature in terms of dense impenetrability.
Predominant mode of politics FEAR
Expert administration, to go a little bit up, to mobilize people, is to mobilize them with some kind of a fear, fear of immigrants/state/crime/terrorists
PReviously science nonetheless wanted to understand reproduce, now it can reproduce new forms of monsters. Cows with 2 heads, freaks of nature. Things will explode out of control. YET Behind all this is FEAR OF THE NEIGHBOUR
Control the explosive dimension of the neighbour.

Sam Harris the End of Belief; justifies torture.  Truth Pill, a de-caffeinated torture.  Subjectively the person who takes the pill would suffer incredibly, but outwardly it looks like he just took a nap.  Fat-free cakes, alcohol without beer.

Why is this reasoning wrong.  When Sam Harris talks about this proximity, is the Other too close to us or not.  He’s too short there. This proximity is not physical proximity. It’s the proximity precisely of the neighbour who can be too close even if he is far away.   That’s the definition of the neighbour.  The neighbour INTRUDES.  So I claim that this argument only works if the Other human beings are no longer treated as neighbours, they simply become objectivized in this field of calculation where you can say Ok I can torture you here to prevent a greater number of suffering …  The dimension of the neighbour gets lost.  For Sam Harris the dimension of the neighbour gets lost.

All our outbursts of violence are ultimately outbursts against the neighbour. The neighbour being not simply the other person in front of us but the ABYSS of the OTHER which can be detected from our fantasmatic symbolic space.

It’s easy to praise today’s global capitalism, oh a big village, but we are still Neighbours, with our own symbolic universe, our own way of enjoying, what we need today is not more communication, but more distance, we need a NEW CODE OF DISCRETION. We need to ignore others more. This is the great art today.

SOLUTIONS to proximity of neighbour is TOLERANCE. Ž criticizes new book by Wendy Brown. Tolerance as a solution to the neighbour is a problem.

Culturalization of politics, politics is culturalized.  Fukuyama and Huntington, Clash of Civilizations is not opposed to End of History.  Politics as rational administration, the only true conflicts are ones of culture.

Part 8 is a good discussion by Žižek
Good discussion of Amish and subjectivity
The moment you change them substantially, the whole attitude to community changes, you undermine communal identity and change into liberal subject, he made have freedom of choice but its no longer Amish culture.

Problem with Wendy Brown: They remain caught in pseudo-Marxist denouncing false universality, it goes like this, what appears to be a neutral universality really privleges a certain strata. Human rights not really universal human rights, the privlege male white of certain property, human rights are natural to every man, insofar as they are resonable human man, woman nope to passionate, workers have no time, criminals are out, savages are out …

I claim two things should be opposed, of course there is a GAP between universal human rights and how they truly function.  Nonetheless this very GAP has its positive aspects

It allows for a re-writing of it.  Mary Wollstencraft, Haiti revolution.

if you read closely the great idealist tradition of Hegel, its that this is only one side of the story, this denouncing universality as false universality.  We also have the opposite mystification which is much more interesting: your particular interests is already the tool for the actualization of universality.

Its not that formal universality masks you particular interests, its the opposite, your particularity you are not aware of the universal dimension of what you are doing, you think you are following particular interests, but you don’t see the universal nature of you acts.

So it is totally wrong to play the game capitalism is Eurocentric

As a capitalist subject, in your OWN INDIVIDUAL SELF-EXPERIENCE, you relate yourself to yourself as UNIVERSAL.

I am in myself an abstract universal, what I am in my particular identity, a teacher is something contingent, not part of my nature.  You experience yourself in the core of your being as universal.  Capitalist is universal in this way, it undermines the culture from within.

Example TIBETAN CULTURE and the Chinese onslaught
Descartes At first foreign cultures appeared strange, but then I asked myself, what if I’m viewed from foreign gaze, I must appear to them stupid idiosyncratic. Core of modernity, when you see your core of your identity as something as ultimately something contingent.
Feminism outside of modernity as Ying-Yang, we should reassert the feminine aspect etc.

The Neighbour
The way to break out this eternal Levinasian problematic, oh neighbour, abyss, otherness, should we respect/tolerate the other or not, This is a false problem
We should embrace this RADICAL UNIVERSALITY, Not i’m difference, we share common concerns
What interests me is my culture has some fights in it, your culture has some fights, what I want to share with you is the universality of our struggles.

Cultural solipsism: how can I be sure I’m not imposing, I am not fully myself, and can I share it with you
I am not myself, there is in the very core of myself a universality that surpasses me.

Ethics

Lacan: Have you acted in conformity with your desire, do not compromise/betray your desire.  THIS IS AMBIGUOUS.
Psychoanalysis can justify anything.  Stupid psychoanalysts, oh end oppression, liberate it and everything will be ok.
Israel Defense Forces: main theoretical references is Deleuze Guttari.  Strange things are happening.

Immoral Ethics: Nietzschean ethics
It doesn’t matter what you do, be authentic, be engaged.

Kantian Ethics: you not only responsible to do you duty, but you are responsible to determine what is your duty

There is no big Other, you can’t put on the big Other to tell you what is your duty, you have to be fully responsible for it.  Hannah Arendt is wrong, Eichmann said I just did my duty.  No you can’t do this.  YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED to use duty as an excuse to do my duty.  You have to FULLY STAND BEHIND your duty. No Guarantee behind the big Other.

Questions
Violent imposition of a universal will
Native Americans and white stupidity

Abandon that which you are afraid to lose Accept the loss, become universal. You are afraid to lose you particular identity, my solution is NOT identity politics. What if what you are so passionately protecting is in itself worthless, abandon that. As an attitude, I refer to Mao, “So what, a minor disturbance in the solar system.”
I think that again, the solution is don’t fear, be calm enjoy your life.  No the solution is more radical, accept that the big Other does NOT exist.

Nature, there is no balanced nature
There is no way to return.
We need to re-assert BIG COLLECTIVE decisions. without this we are lost

We have a struggle you have a struggle, let’s see how we can join our struggles. Universality is the universality of struggle.

Chinese Model of Capitalism

Žižek Derrida 4 christian universality

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

This is how one should answer the standard critique of Christian universalism:what this all-inclusive attitude

(recall St.Paul’s famous statement, “Where there is neither Greek nor Jew” [Col. 3:11])

involves is a thorough exclusion of thosewho do not accept Christianity. In other “particularistic” religions (and even in Islam, in spite of its global expansionism), there is a place for others, they are tolerated, even if they are condescendingly looked upon.

The Christian motto, All Men Are Brothers, however, means also that those who are not my brothers are not (even) men. Christians usually praise themselves for overcoming the Jewish exclusivist notion of the ChosenPeople and encompassing the entirety of humanity—the catch here is that, in their very insistence that they are the Chosen People with the privileged direct link to God, Jews accept the humanity of the other people who celebrate their false gods, while Christian universalism tendentiously excludes nonbelievers from the very universality of humankind.

Thus Christian universality is not the all-encompassing global medium where there is a place for all and everyone. It is rather the struggling universality, the site of a constant battle.

Which battle, which division? To follow Paul: not the division between Law and sin, but between, on the one side, the totality of Law and sin as its supplement and, on the other side, the way of Love.

Christian universality emerges at the symptomal point of those who are “part of no-part” of the global order. This is where the reproach of exclusion gets it wrong: Christian universality, far from excluding some subjects, is formulated from the position of those excluded, of those for whom there is no specific place within the existing order, although they belong to it; universality is strictly codependent with this lack of specific place/determination.

Or, to put it in a different way, the reproach to Paul’s universalism misses  the true site of universality. The universal dimension he opened up is not  the “neither Greeks nor Jews but all Christians,” which implicitly excludes  non-Christians; it is rather the difference Christians/non-Christians itself which, as a difference, is universal; that is, it cuts across the entire social body, splitting, dividing from within every kind of ethnic identity: Greeks are cut into Christians and non-Christians, as well as Jews.

The standard reproach thus in a way knocks on an open door. The whole point of the Paulinian notion of struggling universality is that true universality and partiality do not exclude each other and also that universal Truth is only accessible from a partial, engaged, subjective position. 242

Žižek Derrida 3 concrete universal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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