Category: Žižek

mcgowan democracy enjoyment excess

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. 2013.

Psychoanalysis suggests that enjoyment will almost always triumph over knowledge, even – or especially – when this enjoyment occurs at the expense of our self-interest. 190

[Psychoanalysis] represents an effort to mobilize our knowledge about enjoyment and its priority in order to make evident the identification of emancipation with enjoyment. … psychoanalysis reveals that enjoyment derives from emancipation from the power of authority. 191

As the existence of conservative populism shows, there is a conservative form of enjoyment, but this form borrows its structure from emancipatory politics. To be effective, conservative populists must convince their adherents that they are challenging social authority even at the moment when they cede themselves to it.

Enjoyment stems from an excess, from going beyond what social authority permits. … enjoyment is proper to the forces of emancipation who work to free us from social constraints imposed by authority figures. In this sense, democracy is the social arrangement organized around enjoyment and its excess.

But democracy has always been a signifier replete with enjoyment, an indication of an excess that no social structure can adequately contain. Democracy is excessive because it strips away all legitimacy justifying social authority.

Capitalism without democracy … Capitalism delivers the goods – and the good – just as efficiently, if not more so, without democracy as with it. … rather than being a good that we strive to attain without ever fully attaining it (an impossible justice to come), [:) DERRIDA ALERT] democracy becomes the lost object animating our desire, an object that impels us to act against our interest.

Democracy today does not help us to accumulate goods (or arrive at the good) but instead functions as a barrier on this path. Time spent insisting on freedom and equality, or even time spent engaged in democratic deliberation, is time that one cannot spend in the act of accumulation of goods. From the perspective of the service of goods, it is wasted time.

In fact, democracy requires that we sacrifice our interest on behalf of it: we must put at risk and even abandon the goods that global capitalism offers us in order to achieve it. This demand for sacrifice, far from lessening the appeal of democracy, actually constitutes it as desirable. 194

Ž on snowden

Freedom in the Cloud Assange, Manning and Snowden are the new heroes of the era of digitalized control.
August 13, 2013

Back in 1843, the young Karl Marx claimed that the German ancien regime “only imagines that it believes in itself and demands that the world should imagine the same thing.” In such a situation, to put shame on those in power becomes a weapon—or, as Marx goes on: “The actual pressure must be made more pressing by adding to it consciousness of pressure, the shame must be made more shameful by publicizing it.” And this, exactly, is our situation today: we are facing the shameless cynicism of the representatives of the existing global order who only imagine that they believe in their ideas of democracy, human rights, etc. What happens in Wikileaks disclosures is that the shame, theirs and ours for tolerating such power over us, is made more shameful by publicizing it. Continue reading “Ž on snowden”

Žižek ethics of the real

Ágota Kristóf’s The Notebook awoke in me a cold and cruel passion

Slavoj Žižek The Guardian, Monday 12 August 2013

The young twins are thoroughly immoral – they lie, blackmail, kill – yet they stand for authentic ethical naivety at its purest

There is a book through which I discovered what kind of a person I really want to be: The Notebook, the first volume of Ágota Kristóf’s trilogy, which was followed by The Proof and The Third Lie.

When I first heard someone talk about Ágota Kristóf, I thought it was an east European mispronunciation of Agatha Christie; but I soon discovered not only that Ágota is not Agatha, but that Ágota’s horror is much more terrifying than Agatha’s.

The Notebook tells the story of young twins living with their grandmother in a small Hungarian town during the last years of the second world war and the early years of communism. The twins are thoroughly immoral – they lie, blackmail, kill – yet they stand for authentic ethical naivety at its purest.

A couple of examples should suffice. One day they meet a starving deserter in a forest and bring him some things he asks them for.

When we come back with the food and blanket, he says: ‘You’re very kind.’
We say: ‘We weren’t trying to be kind. We’ve brought you these things because you absolutely need them. That’s all.’

If there ever was a Christian ethical stance, this is it: no matter how weird their neighbour’s demands, the twins naively try to meet them. One night, they find themselves sleeping in the same bed as a German officer, a tormented gay masochist. Early in the morning, they awaken and want to leave the bed, but the officer holds them back:

Don’t move. Keep sleeping.’
‘We want to urinate. We have to go.’
‘Don’t go. Do it here.’
We ask: ‘Where?’
He says: ‘On me. Yes. Don’t be afraid. Piss! On my face.’
We do it, then we go out into the garden, because the bed is all wet.

A true work of love, if there ever was one! The twins’ closest friend is a priest’s housekeeper, a young voluptuous woman who washes them, playing erotic games with them. Then something happens when a procession of starved Jews is led through the town on their way to the camp:

Right in front of us, a thin arm emerges from the crowd, a dirty hand stretches out, a voice asks: ‘Bread.’
The housekeeper smiles and pretends to offer the rest of her bread; she holds it close to the outstretched hand, then, with a great laugh, brings the piece of bread back to her mouth, takes a bite, and says: ‘I’m hungry too.’

The boys decide to punish her: they put some ammunition into her kitchen stove so that when she lights it in the morning, it explodes and disfigures her. Along these lines, it is easy for me to imagine a situation in which I would be ready, without any moral qualms, to murder someone, even if I knew that this person did not kill anyone directly.

Reading reports about torture in Latin American military regimes, I found particularly repulsive the (regular) figure of a doctor who helped the actual torturers conduct their business in the most efficient way: he examined the victim and monitored the process, letting the torturers know how much the victim will be able to endure, what kind of tortures would inflict the most unbearable pain, etc.

I must admit that if I were to encounter such a person, knowing that there is little chance of bringing him to legal justice, and be given the opportunity to murder him discreetly, I would simply do it, with a minimum of remorse about taking justice in my own hands.

What is crucial in such cases is to avoid the fascination of evil that propels us to elevate torturers into demonic transgressors who have the strength to overcome our petty moral considerations and act freely. Torturers are not beyond good and evil, they are beneath it. They do not heroically transgress our shared ethical rules, they simply lack them.

The two brothers also blackmail the priest: they threaten to let everybody know how he sexually molested Harelip, a girl who needs help to survive, demanding a weekly sum of money from him. The shocked priest asks them:

‘It’s monstrous. Have you any idea what you’re doing?’
‘Yes, sir. Blackmail.’
‘At your age … It’s deplorable.’
‘Yes, it’s deplorable that we’ve been forced to this. But Harelip and her mother absolutely need money.’

There is nothing personal in this blackmail: later, they even become close friends with the priest. When Harelip and her mother are able to survive on their own, they refuse further cash from the priest:

‘Keep it. You have given enough. We took your money when it was absolutely necessary. Now we earn enough money to give some to Harelip. We have also taught her to work.’

Their cold-serving of others extends to killing them if asked: when their grandmother asks them to put poison into her cup of milk, they say:

‘Don’t cry, Grandmother. We’ll do it; if you really want us to, we’ll do it.’

Naive as it is, such a subjective attitude in no way precludes a monstrously cold reflexive distance. One day, the twins put on torn clothes and go begging. Passing women give them apples and biscuits and one of them even strokes their hair. Another woman invites them to her home to do some work, for which she will feed them.

We answer: ‘We don’t want to work for you, madam. We don’t want to eat your soup or your bread. We are not hungry.’
She asks: ‘Then why are you begging?’
‘To find out what effect it has and to observe people’s reactions.’
She walks off, shouting: ‘Dirty little hooligans! And impertinent too!’
On our way home, we throw the apples, the biscuits, the chocolate, and the coins in the tall grass by the roadside.
It is impossible to throw away the stroking on our hair.

This is where I stand, how I would love to be: an ethical monster without empathy, doing what is to be done in a weird coincidence of blind spontaneity and reflexive distance, helping others while avoiding their disgusting proximity.

With more people like this, the world would have been a pleasant place in which sentimentality would be replaced by a cold and cruel passion.

chomsky Ž debate

Žižek Chomsky debate

If one defines and uses this term the way I do (and I am not alone here: my understanding echoes a long tradition of so-called Western Marxism), then one has to conclude that what Chomsky is doing in his political writings is very important, I have great admiration and respect for it, but it is emphatically not critique of ideology. Continue reading “chomsky Ž debate”

Ž critique of Butler October 2010

Žižek Penn Humanities Forum 13 Oct. 2010
pure surface, frozen image, positive ethical utopia of eternity, this image is real and at the same time virtual. Plato has to corected, a Platonic ideal is not deeper, just an ethical act when it occurs, this is eternity, this is the Real. The Real as virtual.

I am against the notion of Otherness Universal solidarity of struggle. India I had a wonderful time. I was in a taxi with my friend and the driver asked in his language to Ž’s friend … dirty joke as entry exchange of obscenity as moment of solidarity, we are not politically correct b.s., to have authenticate relation to other you need a surplus enjoyment, and then you can go on to talk seriously.   I don’t understand my culture, I don’t understand yours, ditto for you, but we have a common universality of struggle.  we are eternal.  this is a sublime moment.

Real as virtual
flesh, blood veins, repuslive body of decay, we take recourse in decaying body in order to avoid fascination of the Real.
real that emerges in the guise of an illusory spectacle, this is what we deny when we cut up chickens on stage, directly address the audience etc.
There is nothing transgressive talking about veins, shit underneath, aging bodies, gas, there is nothing sublime going on here.
Ethical Experience and critique of Judith Butler
This dimension of eternity is necessary to supply the big motive of pomo ethics, the precarious fragility of human being
caught in decentred representations, this precarious state of subjectivity which for Butler and Levinas accounts for zero level of all ethics.
The others face makes an unconditional demand on me. The encounter with the other which opens up the space for discourse, the Real of a violent encounter which throws me off my existence as a simple human animal.
Crux of the difference between Žižek and Butler
Desire is desire of the other.
dimension of ethical in psychoanalytic experience.
In my unconditional responsibility, I assume supremacy over the other (acts of charity, bombard us with images of starving children).  Butler explains which faces are worthy of grief and which are not, the pictures dying of napalm, helped end Vietnam war.  But Ž says images of sick and starving children, fragility of other staring back at you has the obverse, the moment the other doesn’t want to play this role, we all love this weak other, like Starbucks ads say we can save by buying a capuccino, but the minute they the other organize, they become terrorists.  Who cares about computers when kids are starving in Africa says Bill Gates.  This is an effort at depoliticization. Forget about politics and ideology, and get together, business and charity and don’t think.
Starbucks is today the example of Levinasian ethical paradigm
This vulnerable precarious other
Žižek goes into the animal that I am. Another gaze excluded by Levinas, the gaze of a wounded suffering animal.
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Monstrosity of the HUMAN
What are we for animals?  This is not New Age b.s.  If you turn around the perspective and ask simply not what does it mean the gaze of the frightened animal, but what do you see in the animals gaze, you see your own monstrosity, this is what philosophers don’t want to talk about.  What?  DEATH DRIVE.
Kant: Man is an animal that needs a master, wild irrational excess of violent freedom in man, which animals don’t have, which is why animals don’t need education, it is nature “turned against itself”an excess of wild freedom.
What were the first Christians in the eyes of the Jewish establishment. What kind of monsters were they?

Locate properly our Monstrosity
So called fundamentalists are not egotists, but are ready to sacrifice their lives, same with capitalists, MEME, spreads like a computer virus, it programs its own retransmission, we humans are nonetheless are unwitting victims of a thought contagion.  Daniel Dennett too. we are dealing with a parasite that occupies the individual and uses it for its own purposes.  An idea can spread even if in the long term it can only bring destruction to its bearers.  CAPITAL: like a meme, they use us to reproduce and multiply itself, the productive force, the capitalist process of production is development of productive forces, capitalism is NOT sustained by greed of capitalists, greed is subordinated to impersonal power of capital.  What we need is MORE not less EGOTISM.  In Lacanian terms, individual greed and striving of capital to expand is difference between DESIRE AND DRIVE.  Krugman says most of would still follow the herd even knowing there would be a breakdown.  Memetic functioning of capitalist drive.
Fetishist Disavowal
Marx’s key insight remains valid  Freedom is not located in political sphere proper, are human rights respected, is there free judiciary etc.  The key to freedom for Marx is apolitical network of social relations from market to family, a change in social relations which appear apolitical, a change that can’t be done through elections in narrow sense, we don’t vote about who owns what, about relations in factory.  Radical changes in this domain have to be done outside legal sphere.  This limitation of legal democratic approach was shown in Obama’s reaction to BP oil spill.  Sue them! it is all held within a narrow legalistic frame. The true task is not COMPENSATION, but to change situation so that they won’t be in situation to cause damage
They tell you about global warming and then you go outside and see the sun and the birds chirping and you say “my god can this be true”
Humanity should get ready to live in a more plastic nomadic way.  Large population migrations will be necessary, desertification, global warming, large population movements who will organize it. Trans-state global mechanism to do it.
Sometimes the impossible happens: The Act  You do something which within the existing ideological universe appears impossible, but while doing it it creates its own possibility, through the act itself it becomes possible.  This is what we need.
Future: continuation of the present, full actualization of the tendencies already here.

The ultimate horizon of the future, some ecological breakdown, zero-point, a virtual attractor to which our reality if left to itself tends.  We have to break with this through acts, there is no future in future, there is something in avenir.

Avenir: what is to come, a break with the present

We should adopt catastrophe as virtual point.  Bring logic of existing system to end, there is ecological breakdown.  OK this is our destiny, but we can indefinitely postpone it, and slowly undermine it.  Admit the catastrophe as a destiny, but not as natural necessity, but as symbolic destiny, this does not mean it will really arrive, it is a dialectical point, destiny is inevitable, but what we can change is the inevitability of destiny.  If everything is predestined why work, why not sit and masterbate, no if there is a concept marxists should take from theology it is predestination.  It is predestined, we are not free within this predestiny but we are free to change destiny itself.

Every new work of art changes the entire past.   Kafka created his own predecessors.
Commodity Fetishism

For Lacan the crucial question is how can we preserve within our symbolisations a space for the recognition of the impossibility of their closure?

The Lacanian system is perhaps the closest we can get to a discourse opening itself up to what exceeds its limits.

Besides, the ethics of psychoanalysis, as formulated in the Lacanian tradition, point to the possibility and the ethical superiority of a symbolic recognition and institutionalisation of the political moment of real lack and this opens a huge field of creation of which the democratic revolution constitutes only one example—perhaps the most important.

Even if this move is possible—encircling the unavoidable political modality of the real—is it really desirable, is it ethically and politically satisfactory?

the ethics of the real entails a recognition of the irreducibility of the real and an attempt to institutionalise social lack. Thus it might be possible to achieve an ethically and politically satisfactory institution of the social field beyond the fantasy of closure which has proved so problematic, if not catastrophic. In other words, the best way to organise the social might be one which recognises the ultimate impossibility around which it is always structured.

stavrakakis dislocation the real

The objective in Lacan includes the symbolic Other as a lacking structure, the pre-symbolic real which escapes this Other and the symbolic and fantasmatic ways through which we are compensated for this lack and attempt to repress it, to make it bearable. Only thus is social reality constructed—as an attempt to master the real through symbolisation.

On the one hand, acknowledging the symbolic and fantasmatic dimensions of this and every reality disrupts essentialist objectivism while, on the other hand, recognising, within the objective level, the trace of an unrepresentable kernel of the extra-discursive real disrupts constructionist objectivism.

To return to our example, it is now possible to identify two different natures: nature as reality, as a social construction, and nature as real, as that which is always located outside the field of construction and has the ability to dislocate it by revealing its limits.

When we encounter the real of nature … when what was excluded from our symbolisations of reality is resurfacing, then our constructions are dislocated. The real dislocates social objectivity. 69

Žižek Croatia May 2013, Brazil July 2, Greece

July 8, 2013 Only 14 minutes and mostly a gloss on his ideas developed in Zagreb, Croatia

May 16, 2013 Croatia

June 2013 Greece with Costas

How do we experience ourselves as persons, we are now directly linking our thoughts directly to things, a wheelchair that runs directly on thoughts.  What will become of us, our very identity is based on this difference between my inner life and outer life.
Greatest philosophical book of all times, a story but a crazy story, Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit.  We should let readers discover for themselves why big fat book is relevant.
To return to Hegel is answer to deadlock failure of today’s left. Stalinist commie failed, I told Fukuymama, maybe capitalism won, but did commies prove they are best managers. We should not play boring game, idea is good they just did it wrong in Russia, no Hegel says if idea goes wrong in reality, there is something wrong with the idea itself.
Hegel was fully aware for logical conceptual necessity to realize itself, it has to attach itself to contingent moment. Monarch, he is not divine, he is idiot like all of us, if you have a government justified by higher right, divine right, you get alienation, no at the top there must be an idiot like all of us.  We need a jury for example, selected from our peers, the Monarch is just representation of utter contingency.
LOVE
Retroactive reversal of contingency into necessity, something contingently happens but once its here it is necessary.
Subject is reduced to point of emptiness, but at this moment there is a possibility of reversal
what crisis? East Asia is growing, Africa in some parts is progressing.  There is only a crisis in western Europe.  You leftists love to be anti-Euro, but hey … yes I agree, first at this immediate economic level, its only west Europe in crisis, what this NEW FORM of capitalism, WHAT WILL IT BE?  This new capitalism will be more and more capitalism with Asian values, not despotism, simply autocratic capitalism.  Eternal marriage of democracy and capitalism is on deathbed.  Lee Quan Yew founder of modern Singapore.
Gradual opening gives rise to expectations, not in darkess Stalinism, its when relative expansion of capitalism will render situation even more destabilizing
Hegel’s refined dialectical paradox This is my message in India, in strict correlation to their class status. The very loss of something creates the lost dimension. We don’t have pre-colonial india then brutal colonization which makes them aware of what they lost and then they struggle to get it back.  NO!  This new dimension that they are craving for, new modern democratic India, the very program of decolonization is engendered by colonialism itself.
Malcolm X and Buthelezi in South Africa, fake multiculturalism
Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin: an important thinker in the development of German Idealism, particularly his early association with and philosophical influence on his seminary roommates Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
Mandel: No we should beat whites at their own game BY BEING MORE UNIVERSAL THAN THEY ARE.
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Ž strategy protests

London Review of Books, 28 June 2013
Trouble in Paradise Slavoj Žižek on the protests in Turkey and Greece

It is also important to recognise that the protesters aren’t pursuing any identifiable ‘real’ goal. The protests are not ‘really’ against global capitalism, ‘really’ against religious fundamentalism, ‘really’ for civil freedoms and democracy, or ‘really’ about any one thing in particular. What the majority of those who have participated in the protests are aware of is a fluid feeling of unease and discontent that sustains and unites various specific demands. The struggle to understand the protests is not just an epistemological one, with journalists and theorists trying to explain their true content; it is also an ontological struggle over the thing itself, which is taking place within the protests themselves. Is this just a struggle against corrupt city administration? Is it a struggle against authoritarian Islamist rule? Is it a struggle against the privatisation of public space? The question is open, and how it is answered will depend on the result of an ongoing political process.

Today’s protests and revolts are sustained by the combination of overlapping demands, and this accounts for their strength: they fight for (‘normal’, parliamentary) democracy against authoritarian regimes; against racism and sexism, especially when directed at immigrants and refugees; against corruption in politics and business (industrial pollution of the environment etc); for the welfare state against neoliberalism; and for new forms of democracy that reach beyond multi-party rituals. They also question the global capitalist system as such and try to keep alive the idea of a society beyond capitalism.

Two traps are to be avoided here: false radicalism (‘what really matters is the abolition of liberal-parliamentary capitalism, all other fights are secondary’), but also false gradualism (‘right now we should fight against military dictatorship and for basic democracy, all dreams of socialism should be put aside for now’). Here there is no shame in recalling the Maoist distinction between principal and secondary antagonisms, between those that matter most in the end and those that dominate now. There are situations in which to insist on the principal antagonism means to miss the opportunity to strike a significant blow in the struggle.

Only a politics that fully takes into account the complexity of overdetermination deserves to be called a strategy. When we join a specific struggle, the key question is: how will our engagement in it or disengagement from it affect other struggles? The general rule is that when a revolt against an oppressive half-democratic regime begins, as with the Middle East in 2011, it is easy to mobilise large crowds with slogans – for democracy, against corruption etc.

But we are soon faced with more difficult choices. When the revolt succeeds in its initial goal, we come to realise that what is really bothering us (our lack of freedom, our humiliation, corruption, poor prospects) persists in a new guise, so that we are forced to recognise that there was a flaw in the goal itself. This may mean coming to see that democracy can itself be a form of un-freedom, or that we must demand more than merely political democracy: social and economic life must be democratised too.

In short, what we first took as a failure fully to apply a noble principle (democratic freedom) is in fact a failure inherent in the principle itself. This realisation – that failure may be inherent in the principle we’re fighting for – is a big step in a political education.

[…]

In a more directly political sense, the US has consistently pursued a strategy of damage control in its foreign policy by re-channelling popular uprisings into acceptable parliamentary-capitalist forms: in South Africa after apartheid, in the Philippines after the fall of Marcos, in Indonesia after Suharto etc.

This is where politics proper begins: the question is how to push further once the first, exciting wave of change is over, how to take the next step without succumbing to the ‘totalitarian’ temptation, how to move beyond Mandela without becoming Mugabe.