Night of World – Page 2

analyst discourse

Bryant, Levi R. “Žižek’s New Universe of Discourse: Politics and the Discourse of the Capitalist” International Journal of Žižek Studies (Vol 2, no. 4) 1-48.

Discourse of Critical Theory

a –> S1
S2 $

As Žižek writes in the introduction to The Sublime Object of Ideology,

In contrast to [the] Althusserian ethics of alienation in the symbolic ‘process without a subject’, we may denote the ethics implied by Lacanian psychoanalysis as that of separation. The famous Lacanian motto not to give way on one’s desire [ne pas céder sur son desir]– is aimed at the fact that we must not obliterate the distance separating the Real from its symbolization: it is this surplus of the Real over every symbolization that functions as the object-cause of desire. To come to terms with this surplus (or, more precisely, leftover) means to acknowledge the fundamental deadlock (‘antagonism’), a kernel resisting symbolic integration-dissolution (Žižek 1989: 3). 34

Are analysis and engaged political activity consistent with one another? As Lacan remarks at the end of The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, “[t]he analyst’s desire is not a pure desire. It is a desire to obtain absolute difference, a desire which intervenes when, confronted with the primary signifier, the subject is, for the first time, in a position to subject himself to it” (Lacan 1998: 276).

The analysand begins analysis in the dimension of the imaginary, treating everything and everyone as the Same. Over the course of analysis what emerges is an absolutely singular constellation of signifiers, specific to this subject and this subject alone as determinants of his unconscious (hence Lacan’s reference to
the subject being in a position to subject himself to this primary signifier).

Lacan goes so far as to suggest that the primary signifiers uncovered in analysis are pure non-sense. “…[T]he effect of interpretation is to isolate in the subject a kernel, a kern, to use Freud’s own term, of non-sense…” (Ibid: 250). If this primary signifier has the status of non-sense, then this is precisely because it is not common but particular to the subject and no other.

It is thus difficult to see how it is possible to get a politics out of the discourse of the analyst, for the discourse of the analyst does not aim at collective engagement or the common– which is necessary for politics –but the precise opposite.

Nonetheless, there is a kernal of truth in Žižek’s characterization of his own position in terms of the discourse of the analyst. Unlike the politics of the discourse of the master premised on the fantasy of imaginary organic totality, any revolutionary politics must speak not from the position of totality, but from the standpoint of the Real, of antagonism, of the remainder, or of that which the other social ties function to veil or hide from view.

In other words, revolutionary political engagement differs from the politics of the State and master in that it approaches the social from the perspective of the Real, treating this as the truth of social formations.

As Žižek remarks, All ‘culture’ is in a way a reaction-formation, an attempt to limit, canalize — to cultivate this imbalance, this traumatic kernel, this radical antagonism through which man cuts his umbilical cord with nature, with animal homeostasis.

It is not only that the aim is no longer to abolish this drive antagonism, but the aspiration to abolish it is precisely the source of totalitarian temptation: the greatest mass murders and holocausts have always been perpetrated in the name of man as harmonious being, of a New Man without antagonistic tension (Žižek 1989: 5).

Where the politics of the master treats this imbalance or traumatic kernel of radical antagonism as an accident to be eradicated and overcome, the critical-revolutionary politics treats the tension as the truth that allows a whole set of social symptoms to be discerned and engaged.

For example, Marx does not treat discontent among the proletariat as an anomalous deviation disrupting the social to be summarily dismissed, but rather as the key to the systematic organization of capitalism and the perspective from which capitalist production is to be understood, and as the potential for revolutionary transformation.

The mark of any critical-revolutionary political theory will thus be that objet a, the remainder, the gap, the traumatic kernel, occupies the position of the agent in the social relation.

death drive desire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The metonymy of desire is furthermore sustained by the fantasy fostered by the law that the ‘Thing’ is not really impossible (nothing but lack), but merely forbidden, and that it therefore at some point will be possible to obtain it; or in short, the fantasy that desire might actually be satisfied. But, as Žižek (AF 80) underlines: “desire is […] always and by definition unsatisfied, metonymical, shifting from one object to another, since I do not actually desire what I want.

What I actually desire is to sustain desire itself, to postpone the dreaded moment of its satisfaction.”

Muselmannen

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

from repetition to drive p.496 lost object to loss itself as object

What does the drive mean from a philosophical standpoint? In a vague general sense, there is a homology between the shift from Kant to Hegel and the shift from desire to drive: the Kantian universe is that of desire (structured around the lack, the inaccessible Thing-in-itself), of endlessly approaching the goal, which is why, in order to guarantee the meaningfulness of our ethical activity, Kant has to postulate the immortality of the soul (since we cannot reach the goal in our terrestrial life, we must be allowed to go on ad infinitum).

For Hegel, on the contrary, the Thing-in-itself is not inaccessible, the impossible does happen here and now―not, of course, in the naïve pre-critical sense of gaining access to the transcendent order of things, but in the properly dialectical sense of shifting the perspective and conceiving the gap (that separates us from the Thing) as the Real. With regard to satisfaction, this does not mean that, in contrast to desire which is constitutively non-satisfied, the drive achieves satisfaction by way of reaching the object which eludes desire. True, in contrast to desire, the drive is by definition satisfied, but this is because, in it, satisfaction is achieved in the repeated failure to reach the object, in repeatedly circling around the object. Following Jacques-Alain Miller, a distinction has to be introduced here between a lack and a hole: a lack is spatial, designating a void within a space, while a hole is more radical, it designates the point at which this spatial order itself breaks down (as in the “black hole” in physics).

Therein lies the difference between desire and drive: desire is grounded in its constitutive lack, while the drive circulates around a hole, a gap in the order of being. In other words, the circular movement of the drive obeys the weird logic of the curved space in which the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line, but a curve: the drive “knows” that the quickest way to realize its aim is to circulate around its goal-object. At the immediate level of addressing individuals, capitalism of course interpellates them as consumers, as subjects of desire, soliciting in them ever new perverse and excessive desires (for which it offers products to satisfy them); furthermore, it obviously also manipulates the “desire to desire,” celebrating the very desire to desire ever new objects and modes of pleasure. However, even if it already manipulates desire in a way which takes into account the fact that the most elementary desire is the desire to reproduce itself as desire (and not to find satisfaction), at this level, we do not yet reach the drive.

The drive inheres in capitalism at a more fundamental, systemic, level: the drive is that which propels forward the entire capitalist machinery, it is the impersonal compulsion to engage in the endless circular movement of expanded self-reproduction.

We enter the mode of the drive the moment the circulation of money as capital becomes an end in itself, since the expansion of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. (One should bear in mind here Lacan’s well-known distinction between the aim and the goal of drive: while the goal is the object around which the drive circulates, its true aim is the endless continuation of this circulation as such.)

The capitalist drive thus belongs to no particular individual―it is rather that those individuals who act as the direct “agents” of capital (capitalists themselves, top managers) have to display it.

Miller recently proposed a Benjaminian distinction between “constituted anxiety” and “constituent anxiety,” which is crucial with regard to the shift from desire to drive: while the first designates the standard notion of the terrifying and fascinating abyss of anxiety which haunts us, its infernal circle which threatens to draw us in, the second stands for the “pure” confrontation with the : objet petit a as constituted in its very loss.

Miller is right to emphasize here two features: the difference which separates constituted from constituent anxiety concerns the status of the object with regard to fantasy. In a case of constituted anxiety, the object dwells within the confines of a fantasy, while we get only the constituent anxiety when the subject “traverses the fantasy” and confronts the void, the gap, filled up by the fantasmatic object. Clear and convincing as it is, Miller’s formula misses the true paradox or, rather, ambiguity of the objet a, the ambiguity which concerns the question: does the objet a function as the object of desire or of the drive?

That is to say, when Miller defines the objet a as the object which overlaps with its loss, which emerges at the very moment of its loss (so that all its fantasmatic incarnations, from breast to voice to gaze, are metonymic figurations of the void, of nothing), he remains within the horizon of desire―the true object-cause of desire is the void filled in by its fantasmatic incarnations. While, as Lacan emphasizes, the objet a is also the object of the drive, the relationship is here thoroughly different: although in both cases the link between object and loss is crucial, in the case of the objet a as the object-cause of desire, we have an object which is originally lost, which coincides with its own loss, which emerges as lost, while, in the case of the objet a as the object of the drive, the “object” is directly the loss itself―in the shift from desire to drive, we pass from the lost object to loss itself as an object.

That is to say, the weird movement called “drive” is not driven by the “impossible” quest for the lost object; it is a drive to directly enact the “loss”― the gap, cut, distance ― itself. There is thus a double distinction to be drawn here: not only between the objet a in its fantasmatic and post-fantasmatic status, but also, within this post-fantasmatic domain itself, between the lost object-cause of desire and the object-loss of the drive. 497

objet a death drive negativity

But there is a paradox which complicates this critique of Hegel: is not absolute negativity, this central notion of Hegelian thought, precisely a philosophical figure of what Freud called the “death drive”? Insofar as ― following Lacan ― the core of Kant’s thought can be defined as the “critique of pure desire,” is not the passage from Kant to Hegel then precisely the passage from desire to drive? The very concluding lines of Hegel’s Encyclopedia (on the Idea which enjoys repeatedly transversing its circle) point in this direction, suggesting that the answer to the standard critical question ― “Why does the dialectical process always go on? Why does dialectical mediation always continue its work?” ― is precisely the eppur si muove of the pure drive. 495

This structure of negativity also accounts for the quasi-“automatic” character of the dialectical process, for the common reproach concerning its “mechanical” character: belying all the assurances that dialectics is open to the true life of reality, the Hegelian dialectic is like a processing machine which indifferently swallows up and processes all possible contents, from nature to history, from politics to art, delivering them packaged in the same triadic form. 492

What further complicates the scheme are objects and signifiers which somehow overlap with their own lack: for Lacan, the phallus is itself the signifier of castration (this introduces all the paradoxes of the signifier of the lack of signifier, of how the lack of a signifier is itself “remarked” in a signifier of this lack), not to mention l’objet petit a,;the object-cause of desire which is nothing but the embodiment of lack, its place-holder. The relationship between object and lack is here turned around: far from lack being reducible to the lack of an object, the object itself is a spectral positivization of a lack. And one has to extrapolate this mechanism into the very (pre-)ontological foundation of all being: the primordial gesture of creation is not that of an excessive giving, of assertion, but a negative gesture of withdrawal, of subtracting, which alone opens up the space for the creation of positive entities. This is how “there is something rather than nothing”: in order to arrive at something, one has to subtract from nothing its nothing(ness) itself, that is, one has to posit the primordial pre-ontological Abyss “as such,” as nothing, so that, in contrast to (or against the background of) nothing, something can appear.

What precedes Nothing is less than nothing, the pre-ontological multiplicity whose names range from Democritus’s den to Lacan’s objet a,. The space of this pre-ontological multiplicity is not between Nothing and Something (more than nothing but less than something); den is, on the contrary, more than Something but less than Nothing. The relationship between these three basic ontological terms―Nothing, Something, den―thus takes the form of a paradoxical circle, like Escher’s famous drawing of the interconnected waterfalls forming a circular perpetuum mobile: Something is more than Nothing, den is more than Something (the objet a is in excess with regard to the consistency of Something, the surplus-element which sticks out), and Nothing is more than den (which is “less than nothing”). 495

The underlying problem here is to determine which of the Freudian negations is the primordial one―which one opens up the space for all the others. From the Lacanian perspective, the most obvious candidate may appear to be the notorious “symbolic castration,” the loss which opens up and sustains the space of symbolization―recall, in relation to the Name-of-the-Father as the bearer of symbolic castration, how Lacan, as we have seen, plays on the French homophony between le Nom-du-Père and le Non-du-Père. But it seems more productive to follow a more radical path of thinking beyond the father (père) to what is even worse (pire). Again, the most obvious candidate for this “worse” is the (death) drive, a kind of Freudian correlate of what Schelling called the primordial “contraction,” an obstinate repetitive fixation on a contingent object which subtracts the subject from its direct immersion in reality. 495

comparison of freudian hegelian notions of negativity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

162-3 face neighbor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

death drive Ž’s reply to adrian johnston

Žižek’s reply to Johnston et. al. from a 2010 issue of Subjectivity

Something is missing here in this vision of the archaic natural substance, which is gradually, but never completely civilized or ‘mediated’ by the symbolic order. We find the first indication of this third dimension – neither nature nor culture – already in Kant, for whom discipline and education do not directly work on our animal nature, forging it into human individuality. As Kant points out, animals cannot be properly educated as their behavior is already predestined by their instincts. What this means is that, paradoxically, in order to be educated into freedom (qua moral autonomy and self-responsibility), I already have to be free in a much more radical – ‘noumenal’ or even monstrous – sense. The Freudian name for this monstrous freedom, of course, is death drive.

It is interesting to note how philosophical narratives of the ‘birth of man’ are always compelled to presuppose a moment in human (pre)history when (what will become) man, is no longer a mere animal and simultaneously not yet a ‘being of language’ bound by symbolic Law; a moment of thoroughly ‘perverted’, ‘denaturalized’, ‘derailed’ nature, which is not yet culture.

In his anthropological writings, Kant emphasized that the human animal needs disciplinary pressure in order to tame an uncanny ‘unruliness’ that seems to be inherent to human nature – a wild, unconstrained propensity to insist stubbornly on one’s own will, cost what it may. It is on account of this ‘unruliness’ that the human animal needs a Master to discipline him: discipline targets this ‘unruliness’, not the animal nature in man. … the most cruel barbarians; part of nature and yet thoroughly denaturalized; ruthlessly manipulating nature through primitive sorcery, yet simultaneously terrified by the raging natural forces; mindlessly brave cowards.

we, humans, no longer just make love for procreation, we get involved in a complex process of seduction and marriage by means of which sexuality becomes an expression of the spiritual bond between a man and a woman and so on. However, what Hegel misses is how, once we are within the human condition, sexuality is not only transformed/civilized, but, much more radically, changed in its very substance: it is no longer the instinctual drive to reproduce, but a drive that gets thwarted as to its natural goal (reproduction) and thereby explodes into an infinite, properly metaphysical, passion.

the excess of sexuality itself that threatens to explode the ‘civilized’ constraints, sexuality as unconditional Passion, is the result of Culture. … In this way, the civilization/Culture retroactively posits/transforms its own natural presupposition: culture retroactively ‘denaturalizes’ nature itself, and this is what Freud called the Id, libido.

So, back to Johnston, this retroactive excess of de-naturalized nature is missing in the image he proposes of a gradual cultural ‘mediation’ of nature.

subject of desire subject of drive

Žižek, The Lesbian Session Lacanian Ink 2000 And here too

What we get after “traversing the fantasy,” i.e. the pure being of drive which emerges after the subject undergoes “subjective destitution,” is NOT a kind of subjectless loop of the repetitive movement of drive, but, on the contrary, the subject at its purest; one is almost tempted to say: the subject “as such.” Saying “Yes!” to the drive, i.e. precisely to that which can never be subjectivized, freely assuming the inevitable (the drive’s radical closure), is the highest gesture of subjectivity.

It is thus only after assuming a fundamental indifference towards the Other’s desire, getting rid of the hysterical game of subjectivization, after suspending the intersubjective game of mutual (mis)recognition, that the pure subject emerges …

We have thus Roark as the being of pure drive in no need of symbolic recognition (and as such uncannily close to the Lacanian saint

Roark displays the perfect indifference towards the Other characteristic of drive, while Dominique remains caught in the dialectic of desire which is the desire of the Other: she is gnawed by the Other’s gaze, i.e. by the fact that others, the common people totally insensitive to Roark’s achievement, are allowed to stare at it and thus spoil its sublime quality. The only way for her to break out of this deadlock of the Other’s desire is to destroy the sublime object in order to save it from becoming the object of the ignorant gaze of others

Roark, of course, is well aware of how her attempts to ruin him result from her desperate strategy to cope with her unconditional love for him, to inscribe this love in the field of the big Other; so, when she offers herself to him, he repeatedly rejects her and tells her that the time is not yet ripe for it: she will become his true partner only when her desire for him will no longer be bothered by the Other’s gaze — in short, when she will accomplish the shift from desire to drive.

What the hystericized prime mover must accept is thus the fundamental existential indifference: she must no longer be willing to remain the hostage of the second-handers’ blackmail “We will let you work and realize your creative potential, on condition that you accept our terms,”

… she must be ready to give up the very kernel of her being, that which means everything to her, and to accept the “end of the world,” the (temporary) suspension of the very flow of energy which keeps the world running.

In order to gain everything, she must be ready to go through the zero-point of losing everything. And far from signalling the “end of subjectivity,” this act of assuming existential indifference is perhaps the very gesture of absolute negativity which gives birth to the subject.

What Lacan calls “subjective destitution” is thus, paradoxically, another name for the subject itself, i.e. for the void beyond the theatre of hysterical subjectivizations.

Ayn Rand’s work thus contains two radically different narratives which are not to be confused:

1) the standard masculine narrative of the struggle between the exceptional One (Master, Creator) and the “crowd” which follows the universal norm,

2) as well as the feminine narrative of the shift from desire to drive, i.e. from the hysteric’s entanglement in the deadlocks of the Other’s desire to the fundamental indifference of the desubjectivized being of drive.

For that reason, the Randian hero is not “phallocratic” — phallocratic is rather the figure of the failed Master (Wynand in The Fountainhead, Stadler in Atlas Shrugged): paradoxical as it may sound, with regard to the formulas of sexuation, the being of pure drive which emerges once the subject “goes through the fantasy” and assumes the attitude of indifference towards the enigma of the Other’s desire is a feminine figure.

What Rand was not aware of was that the upright, uncompromising masculine figures with a will of steel that she was so fascinated with, are, effectively, figures of the feminine subject liberated from the deadlocks of hysteria.

Such a reading also enables us to draw a crucial theoretical conclusion about the limits of subjectivity: hysteria is not the limit of subjectivity — there is a subject beyond hysteria.

What we get after “traversing the fantasy,”i.e. pure being of drive which emerges after the subject undergoes “subjective destitution” is not a kind of subjectless loop of the repetitive movement of drive, but, on the contrary, the subject at its purest; one is almost tempted to say: the subject “as such.”

Saying “Yes!” to the drive, i.e. precisely to that which can never be subjectivized, freely assuming the inevitable (the drive’s radical closure), is the highest gesture of subjectivity. It is thus only after assuming a fundamental indifference towards the Other’s desire, getting rid of the hysterical game of subjectivization, after suspending the intersubjective game of mutual (mis)recognition, that the pure subject emerges.

One can see, now, in what precise sense, the struggle between the hysterical feminine heroine and the persistent male hero, which forms the center of Ayn Rand’s both great novels, can be conceived as a barely concealed presentation of a lesbian (psychoanalytic) session: of the painful process in the course of which the feminine analysand traverses her fantasy and thus overcomes her hysterical position.

todestrieb

Johnston, Adrian. Badiou, Zizek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change. Northwestern University Press, 2009.

Contra Lacan, the sole dimension of one`s being to be sacrificed in a properly political gesture is the axis of individuality qua selfish, mortal animality; through this gesture, Badiou claims, an immortalization-effect transpires in which one thereby becomes a fragmentary moment of eternal justice for all, in which one fully lives. (In Logiques des mondes, Badiou defines true life as more than mere existence as a non-subjectifed person embedded within the statist transcendental regime of a truthless world; Ž is quite sympathetic to this Badiouian definition of what it is to live.) Rather than destroying one`s subjectivity, passing through the act (in this case, through answering the call of a political event) makes one into a more-than-finite, more-than-mortal subject. 156-157

Todestrieb, instead of designating something thoroughly bound up with the human animal`s physical finitude, is a psychoanalytic term referring to certain immortal, “metaphysical” facets of psychical being operating with a supreme, serene disregard for the finite, mortal animality of the human individual`s weak flesh. This death drive is a sort of “vanishing mediator,”… Todestrieb … is a name for subjectivity qua the void of a radical negativity irreducible to any and every form of positive inscription or representation, Ž insists on distinguishing between “subject” (as this negative X) and “subjectification” (in this case, Badiou’s subject-of-the-event as a positivized incarnation of an event-driven truth-trajectory — with Ž alleging this to be a secondary crystallization, at the level of inscriptions and representations, of the subject-as-void) serving as a precondition for the positive instantiations of event-revealed truths embodied and enacted by subjects-of-events (i.e., those “subjectified” by the interpellation of events). 156-157

substance is subject johnston

Johnston Review of Zizek’s Parallax View diacritics Spring 2007, 37.1: 3–20

substance is subject

material being, as incomplete and inconsistent, contains within itself the potentials for the creative genesis of modes of subjectivity exceeding this same ontological foundation.

Žižek’s dialectical materialism conversely but correlatively proclaims that subject is substance. Žižek declares, “a truly radical materialism is by definition nonreductionist: far from claiming that ‘everything is matter,’ it confers upon ‘immaterial’ phenomena a specific positive nonbeing” [Pv168]. in fact, as can be seen clearly at this juncture, Žižekian materialism is nonreductive in two distinct senses:

first, it depicts material being as an autorupturing absence of cosmic-organic wholeness prone to produce immanently out of itself precisely those parallax-style splits supporting transontological, more-than-material subjectivities;
second, these thus-produced subjective structures acquire a being of their own in the form of a certain type of incarnate existence (examples of this special sort of dematerialized matter integral to the constitution of subjectivity include Schelling’s “bodily spirituality”and the strange “materiality” of the signifiers spoken of by Lacan)

Žižek speculatively ponders whether “the emergence of thought is the ultimate Event” [Pv178]. By “Event,” he’s alluding to Alain Badiou’s notion of the evental as distinct from the ontological.

Žižek is suggesting that, like the irruption of the Event out of being, the emergence of the mental (that is, “thought”), although arising from within the neuronal, nonetheless comes to break away from being determined by the electrochemical inner workings of the wrinkled matter of the central nervous system (and, connected with the brain, the evolutionary-genetic factors shaping the human body as a whole).

This is to claim that the mental phenomena of thought achieve a relatively separate existence apart from the material corporeality serving as the thus-exceeded ontological underbelly of these same phenomena. 9

Consciousness is “phenomenal” in contrast to “real” brain processes, but therein lies the true (Hegelian) problem: not how to get from phenomenal experience to reality, but how and why phenomenal experience emerges/explodes in the midst of “blind”/wordless reality. There must be a non-All, a gap, a hole, in reality itself, filled in by phenomenal experience. [Pv197]

In this vein, if one reasonably grants that the brain is, at a minimum, a necessary condition for the mind, one is prompted, as Žižek’s reflections indicate, to wonder

what kind of matter can and does give rise to something that then, once arisen, seems to carve a chasm of inexplicable irreducibility between itself and its originary material ground/source.

Phrased differently, if mind is, at least partially, an effect of brain, what is the ontological nature and status of a cause capable of causing such an effect (that is, an effect appearing to establish an unbridgeable divide between itself and its supposed prior cause)?