Category: Žižek

Ž interview 2008

Unbehagen and the subject: An interview with Slavoj Žižek  Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 15.4. 2010. 418–428

If beneath what you are asking me now is the big question, where does Freud really stand with regard to politics, I think the answer is pretty clear if you really look. I think Freud’s position was, to put it very simply, that psychoanalysis allows us, when you analyse a society, to formulate, to articulate Unbehagen in der Kultur literally, the uneasiness in culture, but more famously translated as Civilization and Its Discontents.

It does this basic symptomal job of showing how the failures, the pathological malfunctions, are symptomatic of the whole. I think that, for a true Freudian, it is totally wrong to distinguish the proper domain where you can use psychoanalysis. For the true Freudian it is not that Freud did his true job in his clinical analysis but then got a little bit crazy when he was writing Totem and Taboo and Unbehagen in der Kultur [Civilization and Its Discontents]. No, because the whole point of Unbehagen in der Kultur is that these pathological phenomena are conditioned by the truth.

They are the symptom, the result of what is wrong in the entire social body as such. In this sense, the two sides are necessarily connected. What is totally alien to Freud is this purely clinical idea that there is the normal functioning of society, then somebody doesn’t work, then the psychoanalyst would have been like the psychological mechanic, the repairman who will set me straight.

I think that Freud, to put it in fashionable terms, isolates a certain excess. He calls it death drive, a certain excess of destructability that is, as it were, undermining, destabilizing the social order, an excess that is ambiguous in the sense that it can be a source of constructive energy or it can be purely destructive.

The idea is that Freud isolates this space of excess, which then, of course, opens up the space for possible change. I think Freud’s basic answer would have been: psychoanalysis just does this elementary job of showing how there is a gap, a failure, a nonfunctioning excess in society. But then, about what to do, he leaves it open. We cannot jump from here directly to positive programs.

This then opens up all possible versions. You can have a conservative Freudian answer: the whole point is to control this threat. You can have a Reichian, naïve, Leftist answer: what is a threat is only a threat from the ruling perspective and we should identify ourselves with it. And you can have a liberal, middle-of-the-way game.

Žižek Cornel West 2005

Žižek and Cornel West at Princeton on 17 Nov 2005.
Chicken Joke
Commodity Fetishism
Christianity, Father why did you forsake me?

Cornel West on the n* word  The word is associated terrorizing, traumatizing and stigmatizing of people.   Anytime you terrorize, traumatize and stigmatize so that they lose self-respect.  In the case of Jay Z, who loves the people, Malcolm X if they want to use it, that’s fine.  But we have to be cautious if love is at the center of the word.  As long as the love is there, but most times the love isn’t there so I’m suspicious of the use of the word for the most part.   John Brown and Eminem have deep love and can use it.

Žižek israel palestine law/sin law/love totality

Žižek, Slavoj.  “The Jew Is Within You, But You, You Are in the Jew.”  Udi Aloni. What Does a Jew Want? Columbia University Press. 2011.   EBOOK

Ismail Kadare’s The Palace of Dreams tells the story of the Tabir Sarrail, the “palace of dreams” in the capital of an unnamed, vast nineteenth-century Balkan empire (modeled on Turkey). In this gigantic building thousands assiduously sift, sort, classify, and interpret the dreams of citizens systematically and continuously assembled from all parts of the empire. Their intense work of bureaucratic interpretation is Kafkaesque: intense yet a meaningless fake. The ultimate goal of their activity is identify the Master-Dream that will provide clues to the destiny of the empire and its sultan. This is why, although supposed to be a place of dark mystery exempted from the daily power struggles, what goes on in the Tabir Sarrail is caught in a violent power struggle—which dream will be selected (or, perhaps, even invented) as the Master-Dream is the outcome of intense dark intrigues.

“In my opinion,” Kurt went on, “it is the only organization in the State where the darker side of its subjects’ consciousness enters into direct contact with the State itself.”

He looked around at everyone present, as if to assess the effect of his words.

“The masses don’t rule, of course,” he continued, “but they do possess a mechanism through which they influence all the State’s affairs, including its crimes. And that mechanism is the Tabir Sarrail.”

“Do you mean to say,” asked the cousin, “that the masses are to a certain extent responsible for everything that happens, and so should to a certain extent feel guilty about it?”

“Yes,” said Kurt. Then, more firmly: “In a way, yes.”1

In order to interpret properly these lines, there is no need for any obscurantist themes like the “dark irrational link (or secret solidarity) between the crowd and its rulers.” The question to be raised is that of power (domination) and the unconscious: how does power work, how do subjects obey it? This brings us to the (misleadingly) so-called erotics of power: subjects obey power not only because of the physical coercion (or its threat) and ideological mystification, but because of their libidinal investment into power. The ultimate “cause” of power is objet a, the object-cause of desire, the surplus-enjoyment by means of which the power “bribes” those it holds in its sway. This objet a is given form in (unconscious) fantasies of the subjects of power, and the function of Kadare’s Tabir Sarrail is precisely to discern these fantasies, to learn what kind of (libidinal) objects they are for their subjects. These obscure “feedbacks” of the subjects of power to its bearers regulates the subjects’ subordination to power, so if they are disturbed the power edifice can lose its libidinal grip and dissolve. The Palace of Dreams is, of course, itself an impossible fantasy: the fantasy of a power that would directly try to deal with its fantasmatic support.

In European societies antisemitism is a key component of this obscure “feedback”; its fantasmatic status is clearly designated by the statement attributed to Hitler: “We have to kill the Jew within us.” A. B. Yehoshua provided an adequate comment to this statement: “This devastating portrayal of the Jew as a kind of amorphous entity that can invade the identity of a non-Jew without his being able to detect or control it stems from the feeling that Jewish identity is extremely flexible, precisely because it is structured like a sort of atom whose core is surrounded by virtual electrons in a changing orbit.” In this sense Jews are effectively the objet petit a of the Gentiles: what is “in Gentiles more than Gentiles themselves,” not another subject that I encounter in front of me but an alien, a foreign intruder, within me, what Lacan called lamella, the amorphous intruder of infinite plasticity, an undead “alien” monster who cannot ever be pinned down to a determinate form.

In a sense Hitler’s statement tells more than it wants to say: against its intention, it confirms that the Gentiles need the antisemitic figure of the “Jew” in order to maintain their identity. It is thus not only that “the Jew is within us”—what Hitler fatefully forgot to add is that he, the antisemite, his identity, is also in the Jew. What does this paradoxical entwinement mean for the destiny of antisemitism?

WHAT GOES ON WHEN NOTHING GOES ON?

It is against this background that one should approach the Middle East imbroglio. One cannot but respect the brutal honesty of the first-generation founders of the State of Israel who in no way obliterated the “founding crime” of establishing a new state: they openly admitted they had no right to the land of Palestina, it is just their force against the force of the Palestinians. On 29 April 1956 a group of Palestinians from Gaza crossed the border to plunder the harvest in the Nahal Oz kibbutz’s fields; Roi, a young Jewish member of the kibbutz who patrolled the fields, galloped toward them on his horse brandishing a stick to chase them away; he was seized by the Palestinians and carried back to the Gaza Strip; when the UN returned his body, his eyes had been plucked out. Moshe Dayan, then the chief of staff, delivered the eulogy at his funeral the following day:

“Let us not cast blame on the murderers today. What claim do we have against their mortal hatred of us? They have lived in the refugee camps of Gaza for the past eight years, while right before their eyes we have transformed the land and villages where they and their ancestors once lived into our own inheritance.

It is not among the Arabs of Gaza but in our own midst that we must seek Roi’s blood. How have we shut our eyes and refused to look squarely at our fate and see the destiny of our generation in all its brutality? Have we forgotten that this group of young people living in Nahal Oz bears the burden of Gaza’s gates on its shoulders?”4

Apart from the parallel between Roi and the blinded Samson (which plays a key role in the later mythology of the IDF), what cannot but strike the eye is the apparent non sequitur, the gap, between the first and the second paragraph: in the first paragraph Dayan openly admits that the Palestinians have the full right to hate the Israeli Jews, since they took their land; his conclusion, however, is not the obvious admission of one’s own guilt, but to fully accept “the destiny of our generation in all its brutality.” i.e., to assume the burden—not of guilt, but—of the war where might will be right, where the stronger will win. The war was not about principles or justice, it was an exercise in “mythic violence”—the insight totally obliterated by the recent Israeli’s self-legitimization. As in the case of feminism, which taught us to discover the traces of violence in what appears, in a patriarchal culture, as a natural authority (of a father), we should remember the grounding violence obliterated by today’s Zionism—Zionists should simply read Dayan and Ben-Gurion

The same violence goes on today, but disavowed, masked as multicultural tolerance. On August 2, 2009, after cordoning off part of the Arab neighborhood of Sheikh-Jarrah in East Jerusalem, Israeli police evicted two Palestinian families (more than fifty people) from their homes; permitted Jewish settlers immediately moved into the emptied houses. Although Israeli police cited a ruling by the country’s Supreme Court, the evicted Arab families had been living there for more than fifty years. The event, which, rather exceptionally, did attract the attention of the world media, is part of a much larger and mostly ignored ongoing process.

Five months earlier, on March 1, 2009, it was reported that the Israeli government had drafted plans to build more than seventy thousand new housing units in Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank; if implemented, the plans could increase the number of settlers in the Palestinian territories by about three hundred thousand—a move that would not only severely undermine the chances of a viable Palestinian state but also hamper the everyday life of Palestinians. A government spokesman dismissed the report, arguing that the plans were therefore of limited relevance: the actual construction of new homes in the settlements required the approval of the defense minister and prime minister. However, fifteen thousand of the plans have already been fully approved; plus, almost twenty thousand of the planned units lie in settlements that are far from the “green line” that separates Israel from the West Bank, i.e., in the areas Israel cannot expect to retain in any future peace deal with the Palestinians.

The conclusion is obvious: while paying lip service to the two-state solution, Israel is busy creating the situation on the ground that will render a two-state solution de facto impossible. The dream that underlies this politics is best rendered by the wall that separates a settler’s town from the Palestinian town on a nearby hill somewhere in the West Bank. The Israeli side of the wall is painted with the image of the countryside beyond the wall—but without the Palestinian town, depicting just nature, grass, trees… is this not ethnic cleansing at its purest, imagining the outside beyond the wall as it should be, empty, virginal, waiting to be settled?

This process is sometimes covered in the guise of cultural gentrification. On October 28, 2008, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the Simon Wiesenthal Center can build its long-planned Center for Human Dignity–Museum of Tolerance on a contested site in the middle of Jerusalem. (Who but) Frank Gehry will design the vast complex consisting of a general museum, a children’s museum, a theater, conference center, library, gallery and lecture halls, caffeterias, etc. The museum’s declared mission will be to promote civility and respect among different segments of the Jewish community and between people of all faiths—the only obstacle (overturned by the Supreme Court’s ruling) being that the museum site served as Jerusalem’s main Muslim cemetery until 1948 (the Muslim community appealed to the Supreme Court that museum construction would desecrate the cemetery, which allegedly contained the bones of Muslims killed during the Crusades of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries).

This dark spot wonderfully enacts the hidden truth of this multiconfessional project: it is a place celebrating tolerance, open to all… but protected by the Israeli cupola, which ignores the subterranean victims of intolerance — as if one needs a little bit of intolerance to create the space for true tolerance. And as if this were not enough, as if one should repeat a gesture to make its message clear, there is another, even vaster similar project going on in Jerusalem: Israel is quietly carrying out a $100 million, multiyear development plan in the so-called holy basin, the site of some of the most significant religious and national heritage sites just outside the walled Old City, as part of an effort to strengthen the status of Jerusalem as its capital.

The plan, parts of which have been outsourced to a private group that is simultaneously buying up Palestinian property for Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem, has drawn almost no public or international scrutiny. As part of the plan, garbage dumps and wastelands are being cleared and turned into lush gardens and parks, now already accessible to visitors who can walk along new footpaths and take in the majestic views, along with new signs and displays that point out significant points of Jewish history—and, conveniently, many of the “unauthorized” Palestinian houses have to be erased to create the space for the redevelopment of the area. The “holy basin” is an infinitely complicated landscape dotted with shrines and still hidden treasures of the three major monotheistic religions, so the official argument is that its improvement is for everyone’s benefit—Jews, Muslims, and Christians—since it involves restoration that will draw more visitors to an area of exceptional global interest that has long suffered neglect.

However, as Hagit Ofran of Peace Now noted, the plan aimed to create “an ideological tourist park that will determine Jewish dominance in the area.” Raphael Greenberg of Tel Aviv University put it even more blundly: “The sanctity of the City of David is newly manufactured and is a crude amalgam of history, nationalism and quasi-religious pilgrimage… the past is used to disenfranchise and displace people in the present.” Another big Religious Venue, a “public” interfaith space under the clear domination and protective cupola of Israel…

What does all this mean? To get at the true dimension of news, it is sometimes enough to read two disparate news items together—meaning emerges from their very link, like a spark exploding from an electric short circuit. On the very same day the reports on the government plan to build seventy thousand new housing units hit the media (March 2), Hilary Clinton criticized the rocket fire from Gaza as “cynical,” claiming: “There is no doubt that any nation, including Israel, cannot stand idly by while its territory and people are subjected to rocket attacks.” But should the Palestinians stand idly while the West Bank land is taken from them day by day?

When Israeli peace-loving liberals present their conflict with Palestinians in neutral “symmetrical” terms, admitting that there are extremists on both sides who reject peace, etc., one should ask a simple question: what goes on in the Middle East when nothing goes on there at the direct politico-military level (i.e., when there are no tensions, attacks, negotiations)?

What goes on is the incessant slow work of taking the land from the Palestinians on the West Bank: the gradual strangling of the Palestinian economy, the parceling of their land, the building of new settlements, the pressure on Palestinian farmers to make them abandon their land (which goes from crop burning and religious desecration up to individual killings), all this supported by a Kafkaesque network of legal regulations.

Saree Makdisi, in Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, described how, although the Israeli Occupation of the West Bank is ultimately enforced by the armed forces, it is an “occupation by bureaucracy”: its primary forms are application forms, title deeds, residency papers, and other permits. It is this micromanagement of daily life that does the job of securing the slow but steadfast Israeli expansion: one has to ask for a permit in order to leave with one’s family, to farm one’s own land, to dig a well, to go to work, to school, to a hospital… One by one, Palestinians born in Jerusalem are thus stripped of the right to live there, prevented from earning a living, denied housing permits, etc. Palestinians often use the problematic cliché of the Gaza strip as “the greatest concentration camp in the world” — however, in the last year this designation has come dangerously close to truth. This is the fundamental reality that makes all abstract “prayers for peace” obscene and hypocritical. The State of Israel is clearly engaged in a slow process, invisible, ignored by the media, a kind of underground digging of the mole, so that, one day, the world will awaken and realize that there is no more Palestinian West Bank, that the land is Palestinian-frei, and that we can only accept the fact. The map of the Palestinian West Bank already looks like a fragmented archipelago.

In the last months of 2008, when the attacks of illegal West Bank settlers on Palestinian farmers grew into regular daily events, the State of Israel tried to contain these excesses (the Supreme Court ordered the evacuation of some settlements, etc.), but, as many observers noted, these measures cannot but appear halfhearted, counteracting a politics that, at a deeper level, IS the long-term politics of the State of Israel, which massively violates the international treaties signed by Israel itself. The reply of the illegal settlers to the Israeli authorities basically is: we are doing the same thing as you, just more openly, so what right do you have to condemn us? And the answer of the state basically is: be patient, don’t rush too much, we are doing what you want, just in a more moderate and acceptable way… The same story seems to go on from 1949: while Israel accepts the peace conditions proposed by international community, it counts that the peace plan will not work.

The wild settlers sometimes sound like Brunhilde, from the last act of Wagner’s Walküre, reproaching Wotan that, by counteracting his explicit order and protecting Sigmund, she was only realizing Wotan’s own true desire, which he was forced to renounce under external pressure, in the same way that the illegal settlers only realize the state’s true desire it was forced to renounce because of the pressure of the international community. While condemning the open violent excesses of “illegal” settlements, the State of Israel promotes new “legal” West Bank settlements, continues to strangle the Palestinian economy, etc. A look at the continuous changes on the map of East Jerusalem, where the Palestinians are gradually encircled and their space sliced, tells it all.

The condemnation of extrastatal anti-Palestinian violence obfuscates the true problem of state violence; the condemnation of illegal settlements obfuscates the illegality of the legal ones. Therein resides the two-facedness of the much-praised nonbiased “honesty” of the Israeli Supreme Court: by way of occasionally passing a judgment in favor of the dispossessed Palestinians, proclaiming their eviction illegal, it guarantees the legality of the remaining majority of cases.

THE “NAME OF THE JEW

And, to avoid any kind of misunderstanding, taking all this into account in no way implies an “understanding” for inexcusable terrorist acts. On the contrary, it provides the only ground from which one can condemn the terrorist attacks without hypocrisy. Furthermore, when Western liberal defenders of peace in the Middle East oppose, among Palestinians, the democrats committed to compromise and peace and the Hamas radical fundamentalists, they fail to see the genesis of these two poles: the long and systematic endeavor by Israel and the USA to weaken the Palestinians by way of undermining the leading position of Fateh, an endeavor that, up to five or six years ago, even included the financial support of Hamas.

The sad result is that Palestinians are now divided between Hamas fundamentalism and Fateh corruption: the weakened Fateh is no longer the hegemonic force that truly represents the substantial longings of the Palestinians (and is, as such, in a position to conclude peace); it is more and more perceived by the majority of Palestinians for what it is, a crippled puppet supported by the U.S. as the representative of the “democratic” Palestinians.

Similarly, while the U.S. worried about Saddam’s basically secular authoritarian regime in Iraq, the “talibanization” of their ally Pakistan progressed slowly but inexorably: Taliban’s control now already spreads over parts of Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city. There is a shared interest on both sides of the conflict to see “fundamentalists in control” in Gaza: this characterization enables the fundamentalists to monopolize the struggle and the Israelis to gain international sympathies.

Consequently, although everyone deplores the rise of fundamentalism, no one really wants secular resistance to Israel among the Palestinians. But is it really true that there is none? What if there are two secrets in the Middle East conflict: secular Palestinians and Zionist fundamentalists—we have Arab fundamentalists arguing in secular terms and Jewish secular Westerners relying on theological reasoning:

The strange thing is that it was secular Zionism that brought god to bear so much on religious ideas. In a way, the true believers in Israel are the nonreligious. This is so because for the religious life of an orthodox Jew god is actually quite marginal. There were times when for a member of the orthodox intellectual elite it was in a way “uncool” to refer too much to god: a sign that he is not devoted enough to the real noble cause of the polemical study of Talmud (the continual movement of expansion of the law and evasion from it). It was only the crude secular Zionist gaze that took god, which was a sort of alibi, so seriously. The sad thing is that now more and more orthodox Jews seem convinced that they indeed believe in god.

The consequence of this unique ideological situation is the paradox of atheists defending Zionist claims in theological terms. Exemplary here is The Arrogance of the Present, Milner’s exploration of the legacy of 1968, which can also be read as a reply to Badiou’s The Century as well as to his exploration of the politico-ideological implications of the “name of the Jew.” In an implicit, but, for that reason, all the more intense, dialogue with Badiou, Milner proposes a radically different diagnosis of the twentieth century.

His starting point is the same as Badiou’s: “a name counts only as far as the divisions it induces go.” Master-Signifiers that matter are those that clarify their field by simplifying the complex situation into a clear division—yes or no, for or against.

Milner goes on: “But here is what happened: one day, it became obvious that names believed to bear a future (glorious or sinister) no longer divide anyone; and names dismissed as thoroughly obsolete began to bring about unbridgeable divisions” (21–22).

Names that today no longer divide, generate passionate attachment, but leave us indifferent, are those that traditionally were expected to act as the most mobilizing (“workers,” “class struggle”), while those that appeared deprived of their divisive edge violently reemerged in their divisive role—today, the name Jew “divides most deeply the speaking beings”: “Contrary to what knowledge predicted, the culminating point of the twentieth century did not take the form of social revolution; it took the form of an extermination. Contrary to what the Revolution has been promising, the extermination ignored classes and fixated on a name without any class meaning. Not even an economic one. Not a shadow of an objective meaning” (214).

Milner’s conclusion is that “the only true event of the twentieth century was the return of the name Jew” (212)—this return for an ominous surprise also for the Jews themselves. That is to say, with the political emancipation of the Jews in modern Europe, a new figure of the Jew emerged: the “Jew of knowledge” who replaces study (of Talmud, i.e., of his theological roots) with universal (scientific) knowledge.

We get Jews who excel in secular sciences, and this is why Marxism was so popular among Jewish intellectuals: it presented itself as “scientific socialism,” uniting knowledge and revolution (in contrast to Jacobins, who proudly said, apropos Laplace, that “the Republic doesn’t need scientists,” or millenarists who dismissed knowledge as sinful). With Marxism, inequality/injustice and its overcoming becomes an object of knowledge (201).

Enlightenment thus offers European Jews a chance to find a place in the universality of scientific knowledge, ignoring their name, tradition, roots. This dream, however, brutally ended with holocaust: the “Jew of knowledge” couldn’t survive Nazi extermination—the trauma was that knowledge allowed it, wasn’t able to resist it, was impotent in the face of it. (Traces of this impotence are already discernible in the famous 1929 Davos debate between Ernst Cassirer and Heidegger, where Heidegger treated Cassirer with impolite rudeness, refusing a handshake at the conclusion, etc.)

How did the European left react to this rupture? The core of Milner’s book is the close analysis of the Maoist proletarian left (la Gauche proletarienne), the main political organization emerging out of May 1968. When it fell apart, some of its members (like Benny Levy) opted for fidelity to the name of the Jew, others chose Christian spirituality. For Milner, the entire activity of the proletarian left was based on a certain disavowal, on a refusal to pronounce a name. Milner proposes a nice Magrittean image: a room with a window in the middle and a painting covering up and obstructing the view through the window; the scene on the painting exactly reproduces the exterior one would have seen through the window. Such is the function of ideological misrecognition: it obfuscates the true dimension of what we see (183).

In the case of the proletarian left this unseen dimension was the name of the Jew. That is to say, the proletarian left legitimized its radical opposition to the entire French political establishment as the prolongation of the Resistance against the Fascist occupation: their diagnosis was that the French political life was still dominated by people who stood in direct continuity with the Petainist collaboration. However, although they designated the right enemy, they kept silent on the fact that the main target of the Fascist regime was not the left, but the Jews. In short, they used the event itself to obfuscate its true dimension, similarly to the “Jew of knowledge” who tries to redefine his Jewishness so that he will be able to erase the real core of being a Jew.

Benny Levy’s transformation from a Maoist to a Zionist is thus indicative of a wider tendency. The consequence drawn by many from the “obscure disaster” of twentieth-century attempts at universal emancipation is that particular groups no longer accept “sublating” their own emancipation in the universal one (“we — oppressed minorities, women, etc. — can only attain our freedom through universal emancipation,” i.e., the Communist revolution): fidelity to the universal cause is replaced by fidelities to particular identities (Jewish, gay, etc.), and the most we can envisage is a “strategic alliance” between particular struggles.

Perhaps, however, the time has come to return to the notion of universal emancipation, and it is here that a critical analysis should begin. When Milner claims that the class struggle, etc. are no longer divisive names, that they are replaced by “Jew” as the truly divisive name, he describes a (partially true) fact, but what does this fact mean? Should it not also be interpreted in terms of the classic Marxist theory of antisemitism, which reads the antisemitic figure of the “Jew” as the metaphoric stand-in for class struggle?

The disappearance of the class struggle and the (re)appearance of antisemitism are thus two sides of the same coin, since the presence of the antisemitic figure of the “Jew” is only comprehensible against the background of the absence of class struggle. Walter Benjamin (to whom Milner himself refers as to an authority, and who stands precisely for a Marxist Jew who remains faithful to the religious dimension of Jewishness and is thus not a “Jew of knowledge”) said long ago that every rise of Fascism bears witness to a failed revolution — this thesis not only still holds today but is perhaps more pertinent than ever.

Liberals like to point out similarities between left and right “extremisms”: Hitler’s terror and camps imitated Bolshevik terror, the Leninist party is today alive in Al-Qaeda—yes, but what does all this mean? It can also be read as an indication of how Fascism literally replaces (takes the place of) the leftist revolution: its rise is the left’s failure, but simultaneously a proof that there was a revolutionary potential, dissatisfaction, that the left was not able to mobilize.

1 + 1 = 3

How are we to understand this reversal of an emancipatory thrust into fundamentalist populism? It is here that the materialist-dialectic passage from the Two to Three gains all its weight: the axiom of Communist politics is not simply the dualist “class struggle,” but, more precisely, the third moment as the subtraction from the Two of the hegemonic politics. That is to say, the hegemonic ideological field imposes on us a field of (ideological) visibility with its own “principal contradiction” (today, it is the opposition of market-freedom-democracy and fundamentalist-terrorist-totalitarianism: “Islamo-Fascism,” etc.), and the first thing to do is to reject (to subtract from) this opposition, to perceive it as a false opposition destined to obfuscate the true line of division. As we have already seen, Lacan’s formula for this redoubling is 1+1+a: the “official” antagonism (the Two) is always supplemented by an “indivisible remainder” that indicates its foreclosed dimension.

In other terms, the true antagonism is always reflective, it is the antagonism between the “official” antagonism and what is foreclosed by it (this is why, in Lacan’s mathematics, 1 + 1 = 3). Today, for example, the true antagonism is not the one between liberal multiculturalism and fundamentalism, but between the very field of their opposition and the excluded third (radical emancipatory politics).

Badiou already provided the contours of this passage from Two to Three in his reading of the Pauline passage from Law to love [St. Paul the Foundation of Universalism]. In both cases (in Law and in love) we are dealing with division, with a “divided subject”; however, the modality of the division is thoroughly different. The subject of the Law is “decentered” in the sense that it is caught in the self-destructive vicious cycle of sin and Law in which one pole engenders its opposite; Paul provided the unsurpassable description of this entanglement in Romans 7:

We know that the law is spiritual; but I am carnal, sold into slavery to sin. What I do, I do not understand. For I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I concur that the law is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. For I know that good does not dwell in me, that is, in my flesh. The willing is ready at hand, but doing the good is not. For I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil I do not want. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. So, then, I discover the principle that when I want to do right, evil is at hand. For I take delight in the law of God, in my inner self, but I see in my members another principle at war with the law of my mind, taking me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Miserable one that I am!

It is thus not that I am merely torn between the two opposites, Law and sin; the problem is that I cannot even clearly distinguish them: I want to follow the Law and I end up in sin. This vicious cycle is (not so much overcome as) broken, one breaks out of it, with the experience of love more precisely: with the experience of the radical gap that separates love from the Law.

Therein resides the radical difference between the couple Law/sin and the couple Law/love. The gap that separates Law and sin is not a real difference: their truth is their mutual implication or confusion — Law generates sin and feeds on it, etc., one cannot ever draw a clear line of separation between the two.

It is only with the couple Law/love that we attain real difference: these two moments are radically separate, they are not “mediated,” one is not the form of appearance of its opposite. In other words, the difference between the two couples (Law/sin and Law/love) is not substantial, but purely formal: we are dealing with the same content in its two modalities.

In its indistinction/mediation, the couple is the one of Law/sin; in the radical distinction of the two, it is Law/love. It is therefore wrong to ask the question “Are we then forever condemned to the split between Law and love? What about the synthesis between Law and love?” The split between Law and sin is of a radically different nature than the split between Law and love: instead of the vicious cycle of the mutual reinforcement, we get a clear distinction of two different domains[Law – love rt]. Once we become fully aware of the dimension of love in its radical difference from the Law, love has, in a way, already won, since this difference is visible only when one already dwells in love, from the standpoint of love.

In authentic Marxism, totality is not an ideal, but a critical notion — to locate a phenomenon in its totality does not mean to see the hidden harmony of the Whole, but to include into a system all its “symptoms,” antagonisms, inconsistencies, as its integral parts.

Let me take a contemporary example. In this sense, liberalism and fundamentalism form a “totality”: the opposition of liberalism and fundamentalism is structured in exactly the same way as the one between Law and sin in Paul, i.e., liberalism itself generates its opposite. So what about the core values of liberalism: freedom, equality, etc.? The paradox is that liberalism itself is not strong enough to save them — i.e., its own core — against the fundamentalist onslaught. Why?

The problem with liberalism is that it cannot stand on its own: there is something missing in the liberal edifice; liberalism is in its very notion “parasitic,” relying on a presupposed network of communal values that it is itself undermining its own development. Fundamentalism is a reaction — a false, mystifying, reaction, of course — against a real flaw of liberalism, and that is why it is again and again generated by liberalism. Left to itself, liberalism will slowly undermine itself — the only thing that can save its core is a renewed left. Or, to put it in the well-known terms from 1968, in order for its key legacy to survive, liberalism needs the brotherly help of the radical left.

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 love as political category may 2013 colonialism India

Žižek in Croatia at Subversive Festival, 16 May 2013.

EROS: Postmodern economy dissuades against stable love, quotes from Badiou In Praise of Love, you “fall” in love.  It is a Platonic experience.
Passionate fall in love, the entire balance of your life is lost.  It is a violent experience.  All the advisors we have today are trying to DOMESTICATE or erase this EXCESS of love.  How to find yourself in love without falling love.

AGAPE functions in a holy different way.   WHich political regimes in the 20th century consolidated their power by invoking ‘love’ of their leader.  North Korea.

Buddhism discipline sacrifice. Suzuki in the 1960s supported in his youth Japanese military expansion.  The attitude of total immersion into selfless now.  Anonymous impassive observer of life, you simply observe your knife hitting the body of another. Even the most radical spirituality is no guarantee that we won’t be doing awful things in our daily life.

Praise of Christian Love Buddhism all encompassing passion is one of indifference, quenching all passion which strive to install differences, while the Christian love, intolerant violent love, privilege one object above others.

Violent accept of LOVE. Get ride of Platonic Love of EROS, love of form, love of supreme good … THis is not true love, true love is going for a single person, the highest ethical act, not forsake all terrestial things for eternity, love is I know you are a miserable human being but I’m ready to forsake eternity for this

It is the of Christianity, a sword which separates and sets free, God rejoices in separation of universe into difference

Love your Neighbour  Jesus says, I did not bring peace but a sword, he who loves father and mother more than me is not worthy of me, if anyone comes to me and does not hate his mother and sisters and yes even himself … I have come to cause conflicts on earth, father against son, son against father.

How are we to read these statements?  Pagan: global balance ying-yang, cosmic balance. An individual is good when they act in accordance with social edifice, respect for his superiors, cares for his children etc.  Evil is defined when individual is no longer satisfied with their place.   This ethics is re-emerging in New Age Wisdom, Holistic approach.

Christianity does absolutely the opposite.  Each individual has immediate access to universality, universality of human rights, freedoms, I can particpate in this universal dimension directly irrespective of my place in global social order.   When God says if you do not hate your mother/father you can’t be my follower, father/mother here condense the entire hierarch socal order, the network of domination, the hatred Christ mentions is the hatred of established social hierarchical order.

Core of Christian Insight: Neither men nor woman, neither Jew nor Greeks, Christ dies God dies, all that survives is Holy Spirit which is a radically egalitarian society that opposes social hierarchy and social inequality

Che Guevara Revolutionaries as killing machines, hatred is a element of struggle. What you need is to love with hatred.  Toughen yourself, harden yourself without losing tenderness. What makes love angelic, elevates it over pathetic sentimentality is cruelness itself.

Agape as political love (Eagleton) unconditional egalitarian love for the NEIGHBOUR can serve as foundation for a new social order. Form of appearance of love is communism, the urge to realize an egalitarian social order of solidarity, love is the force of this universal link, which in an emanicpatory collective links bypassing particularistic determinations.

Reply to terrorists: you shirk from authentic terror of the work of love.

Charity is a form of NON-LOVE today.  Starbucks … don’t think, just act buy a coffee contribute money, you can continue your ignorant pleasurable life and feel good you contributed in struggle against suffering, you feel good, see I’m helping all the children starving ….

Authentic Violent Love: If Europe is in gradual decay what is replacing its hegemony?
Capitalism with Asian Values, the clear and present tendency of capitalism to restrain democracy.  What is the hidden price of progress.  This very success engenders antagonisms, keep in view its dark underside.

Universality   Yes every universality can be false, it is always overdetermined by some particular content, Human Rights yes, but it secretly privileges white property male.
But this historicist relativism, beware universality is false universality, Marx is saying something, we are not only less universal than we think, we are also much MORE universal than we think we are.   As agents on a market, we as individuals occupy a universal position, we relate to ourselves as universal subjects, we are no longer identify ourselves, I relate to myself as engineer, today, I lose my job, I become an taxi driver etc.  Universality is a way of life, it is a mode of our immediate experience.

Capitalism force of capitalism to dissolve all particular modes of life.  I want to rehabilitate 2 texts of Marx usually dismissed as case of Marx’s racism and Eurocentrism.  British Rule in India and future results of British rule in India Žižek begins his defense of Marx  All Marx claims is that British Colonisation of India unintended created conditions for double liberation of India.  British knew if caste system collapsed that would create revolutionary conditions, so they put hard work into re-establishing and resusitating old ideological religious systems, so as to keep it stable and inert so it would remain ripe for exploitation.  Respect for local cultures was a crucial component of process of colonialization, British rule wanted India to remain with local religious cultural conditions, Yes we bring progress to India,  false respect for the Other is crucial to colonization, if you remove this you lose colonialism itself.  Radical ambiguity of colonization, the very power of social disintegration unleashed by colonization, which at the same time opens up the space for liberation and ANTI-COLONIAL liberation

Žižek pulls out his India story about English blah blah  But this is his most formal presentation of this story, he even has a quote.  Brahmin intellectuals yelled out Žižek is a colonizer, the lower Dallics Untouchables immediately accepted my message.  Message: It’s true when a foreign language is imposed, you feel deprived of the very core of your identity, but that which you feel deprived of is a specter engendered by this very colonialist imposition of a foreign language.  The very loss of something creates the lost dimension.

We don’t have a pre-colonial India and then brutal colonization which makes the people aware of what they lost and then in anti-colonial struggle they are trying to regain what they lost. NO! The pre-colonial India was something totally different, its irredemiably lost. In so far as it is not lost, it precisely serves colonizers. This ‘new’ dimension that you are craving for, A New Modern Democratic India, the very program of de-colonialization is something engendered by colonialization itself as a reaction to it.

Malcolm X  Not let’s return to those roots.  We don’t have any genuine tradition to rely on, we have to collectively re-invent our identity as condition of our freedom.  He found the new universalist frame in Islam.  He had no dreams of returning to origins.
The greatness of ANC rejected the bullshit of returning to African roots, the one who wanted to return to roots was King Buthelzi who was in cohoots and supported by the brutal Apartheid state.   MANDELA we should be white people at own game, by being more universal than they are.

Decolonization: India has a chance of achieving a more egalitarian democratic society.  Western conservative are aware of this.  WE shouldn’t be too glad about primacy of English language, it is no longer the english of true British people, but spoken by Mumbai and bankers in Bombay.    I don’t believe in anti-colonial resistance in name of LOST ROOTS, if anything advocate a FURTHER LOSS OF OUR ROOTS.
asdf
WHERE THE DANGER IS GROWS ALSO WHAT CAN SAVE US   Friedrich Holderlin
This point of extreme loss is opportunity for REVERSAL.  The whole eschatology of Marx, capitalism is utter alienation, workers are deprived of all substantial objective conditions of their work but this VERY DEPRIVATION LIBERATES THEM FROM  ALL PARTICULAR roots and creates them as universal subjects who may re-approapriate universal SUBSTANCE.

We had a revolution, for Hegel it was French revolution, for us it was the commie revolutions, and things went terribly wrong.  The whole problem of HEgel, is how in these conditions of failure, commie how we experienced in 20th century was a fiasco, how to remain faithful to commie idea, there is a big unease with modernity, strange bedfellows: conservatives up to Eva Morales who said capitalism killed Mother Nature   NO!  when we are faced with horrors of global capitalism we must remain faithful to Marxist insight that modernization is an ambiguous process, the only way out is to bring modernization to its end.

The crude Mary Magdalen joke
Beware of the people too intent on healing other people’s wounds.  People found themselves in actual pre-colonial reality, they would scream as Mary M. There is no way back, we have to play the game of modernist project.  I am totally against imperialism, but anti-imperialism is a misused word.  When Japanese and Germans were fighting they used the words anit-imperialism, so I am no ready to sacrifice Eurpean modernity, AGAPE, universal love, not the wisdom of keeping a distance, fully following into love, full engagement, losing oneself without reserve.  I don’t agree with that so-called Wisdom which says: Don’t attach yourself to worldly objects, NO,  I say, Attach yourself to the end with worldly object with all the risks this involves.

Joke about Tiger Woods

Questions and Answer Session
In matters of love, miracles do happen, LOVE WHICH LUSTS FOR LIFE.  André Gorz wrote book, he fell passionately in love, for 58 years they were absolutely in love, in the end when she was dying of cancer, he killed himself with her together. The mass media propoganda, everything is changing you have to experience life, no when I meet the right person I don’t want to experience too much of life … A certain dismissal of ‘ordinary’ people.  I found nothing dismissive or cheap in the fact that an ordinary person wants his peaceful life. I’m not ready to betray this as some form of alienation. The only changes which truly count are those at the everyday level, these are the hardest to change.  Maybe we no longer live in an ideological in a big sense, projects to die for, ideology is in the everyday sense.  What is happening in Greece is not just political change, but a change in everyday ethics.

Erotic love passionate love, and political passion, the latter is limited, temporary, the former,EROTIC LOVE is not. Even if it doesn’t last, when you engage it should be withing the prospect of eternity. IT must be the prospect of eternity.

It’s a very dangerous game to engage in cultural thinking, this is western thinking, Yugoslave commies, Russia is slavic barbarian, so revolution happened in stupid despotic Asiatic country etc. What surprised me in Russia, some conservative told me opposite, Russia was good, all the evil came from western modernizers Peter the Great up to Stalin. Communism was a western brutal imposition. In China, you can’t call Mao a great Christian. The Great Leap Forward of late 1950s which is brutal event beyond imagination, over 50 millions died from 1958 – 1961.

The point of my negative reference to Buddhism, I reject that Christianity is totalitarian and Buddhism is peaceful. NO. UNIVERSAL LOVE: an authentic commie perspective is NOT Love for Humanity. No. All Men are Brothers. No thanks there are people I don’t want to love or be my brother etc. IT is always something wrong in proclaiming Universal love in all-encompassing love, I love you all, I love you all so much that I’m ready to kill who undermine this universal welfare, the ultimate example of this kind of Universal Love in East Germany the last session of commie party, boss of Stazi when people shouted to shout at him, he looked surprised, But I Love You All. Terror is for me always grounded in a false Universal Love. Authentic Love the majority of people are stupid, but I love you, and you. Agape. Love as a category of Political Struggle. Let’s establish solidarity. The only UNIVERSALITY is the UNIVERSALITY OF STRUGGLE. WE have problems here, there they have problems, is there a common front in each of our coutnries fighting against enemy. love as universal struggle.

And of course Žižek now standard explanation of his infamous claim that “Hitler wasn’t violent enough” He killed millions because he was afraid of making social change, it was a reactive violence.  Stalin: The violence was enactment of utter failure of how to include farmers in socialism. Brutal direct violence is sign of impotence.

An important philosophical point on nature of Truth  Jews are seducing our German girls, exploiting German workers.  The moment you accept the debate at this point you are lost.   Where, in what do you see the solution, neo-Keynsian solution?  Varvougis REPLIES:   We need a Keynsian stablization, it buys us breathing space to dream about the good society.

Question on the film The Lives of Others

Bertolt Brecht: Humans are by natures evil, you can’t change humans, you can only change conditions to take away opportunity to do evil. We have maybe a certainty propensity for violence for acting out, which can be put to different uses. I don’t see a problem here. I’m totally the most brutal realist you can imagine. I didn’t use the word ideal, I used the word miracle. Life is shit, but miracles happen. Some people are just waling around being consumers working, boring and all of a sudden they same, ENOUGH. I cannot go on with this anymore. and risk his life to change something. I believe in miracles, life is generally shit, miracles happen, once here and there we find Andre Gorz.

Žžek thanks his translators and is very funny story about Haiti

Last question  I don’t believe in intimate self-experience, vulnerable fragile person, the lie he invented for himself so he could do the horrors he did.  I’m sure he played with kids and served cookies, the more brutal they are the more they need a private fetish, big bank managers who destroy lives of millions, the same role with private charities, let me give 2% of my wealth to them to Somalia.   We lie to ourselves.  We need a private myth.  Maybe the fundamental form of ideology today, is I’m not just embodiment of economic or ideological categories I”m also a warm fragile person.  That’s the lie.   Brecht precisely reduces capitalist to their social roles, don’t give me the bs that you are a warm caring person.  This isn’t just commie, this is the great legacy of Jewish ethics.   The total EXTERNALIZATION, the truth is how you INTERACT WITH OTHERS.  Not how does it mean to your spiritual growth, inner spiritual growth, authentic self-experience is b.s.  I believe in total externality.

A black lady in South Africa running away from a policeman, her heel breaks on her shoe and falls off. The policeman stops picks up her show and gives it to her. They both look at each other and feel foolish, should she put the shoe back on and they continue chasing each other, the policeman give her the shoe, bids her a good day and turns around and leaves. Now this is the morality I believe in. The policeman probably inside was an incredible racist, but it was what he did on the outside, how he treats other people. Superficial manners can do miracles. Do this 10 times and you might change. Huck Finn help a runaway black slave … their inner bad feeling is what is non-authentic. I believe in surfaces in good manners. what they did externally was right, on the outside on the surface … they did a good thing.

We should hate them, we should just learn to pretend to act like we like them. and to maintain a proper distance. Respectful distance, we should know the other, how can we know the other when we don’t know ourselves, and neither does the other, I believe in superficial manners.

Terror – Anxiety

Žižek the VOIDED SUBJECT always has something, I don’t believe in this pure existentialist bull shit, I am just a void.  Object and subject small a, doesn’t

Is there a place in Badiou’s ediface for DRIVE in the Freudian sense.  Badiou says death drive is decadent, wish for death etc.  Oops.  Hegel on Madness.  Hegel has this idea of how the possibility of madness, radical negativity of madness is constitutive of being mad.  It doesn’t mean we all have to be mad, but the only way to account for terror is a reaction against the threat of madness.  Death drive, radical negativity, for something to emerge.

Negativity has to emerge from time to time to remind us of our pure subjectivity to prevent it from falling into social order complacency.

In order to have anxiety and terror there must be at least a perspective of the event.  Anxiety and terror is the shadow of how an event affects animal life.  NO!

Where, what do we mean by subject?

Badiou promises to do in Logics of Worlds, to elaborate how multiplicity of being structures itself into multiplicity of worlds.  No passage from pure mathematized infinity into different worlds.  How can something like a world emerge within the multiplicity of multiplicity of Being.

Badiou’s ontology, multiplicity of multiplicities is TOO FLAT there is no inherent antagonism, tension.

Multiplicity of multiplicity of multiplicity … ontology is the discourse of the VOID, but why then isnt an event simply the order of BEING, why is it an exception.

Secretly he introduces another order of Being.  The EVENT IS AN EXCEPTION but not with regard to order of BEING as such.  Here he cheats.

when he speaks about EXCEPTION, there are only language and bodies with the exception of EVENTS.  Not far enough There is something which is NOT.  There are only bodies and languages BUT there are occurences which break with this logic.

The true problem with Alain, his ontology relies too much on the opposition between presence and representation.  Anti-statist As if we have some AUTHENTIC presentation: mass movement, and then you have some form of state,  Here I am for REPRESENTATION.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Žižek the Real Winnebago Tribe

Here is a version from Parallax View I think
Short 6 minute video on the Real, Birkbeck 29 June, 2011

The real is at the same time the obstacle that makes reality inaccessible.

Recall Claude Levi-Strauss’s exemplary analysis, from his Structural Anthropology, of the spatial disposition of buildings in the Winnebago, one of the Great Lake tribes, might be of some help here. The tribe is divided into two sub-groups (“moieties”), “those who are from above” and “those who are from below”; when we ask an individual to draw on a piece of paper, or on sand, the ground-plan of his/her village (the spatial disposition of cottages), we obtain two quite different answers, depending on his/her belonging to one or the other sub-group.

Both perceive the village as a circle; but for one sub-group, there is within this circle another circle of central houses, so that we have two concentric circles, while for the other sub-group, the circle is split into two by a clear dividing line. In other words, a member of the first sub-group (let us call it “conservative-corporatist”) perceives the ground-plan of the village as a ring of houses more or less symmetrically disposed around the central temple, whereas a member of the second (“revolutionary-antagonistic”) sub-group perceives his/her village as two distinct heaps of houses separated by an invisible frontier… 20

The point Levi-Strauss wants to make is that this example should in no way entice us into cultural relativism, according to which the perception of social space depends on the observer’s group-belonging: the very splitting into the two “relative” perceptions implies a hidden reference to a constant – not the objective, “actual” disposition of buildings but a traumatic kernel, a fundamental antagonism the inhabitants of the village were unable to symbolize, to account for, to “internalize”, to come to terms with, an imbalance in social relations that prevented the community from stabilizing itself into a harmonious whole.

The two perceptions of the ground-plan are simply two mutually exclusive endeavors to cope with this traumatic antagonism, to heal its wound via the imposition of a balanced symbolic structure. It is here that one can see it what precise sense the Real intervenes through anamorphosis. We have first the “actual,” “objective,” arrangement of the houses, and then its two different symbolizations which both distort in an anamorphic way the actual arrangement. However, the “real” is here not the actual arrangement, but the traumatic core of some social antagonism which distorts the tribe members’ view of the actual arrangement of the houses in their village.

The Real is thus the disavowed X on account of which our vision of reality is anamorphically distorted; it is SIMULTANEOUSLY the Thing to which direct access is not possible AND the obstacle which prevents this direct access, the Thing which eludes our grasp AND the distorting screen which makes us miss the Thing.

More precisely, the Real is ultimately the very shift of perspective from the first to the second standpoint. Recall the old well-known Adorno’s analysis of the antagonistic character of the notion of society: in a first approach, the split between the two notions of society (Anglo-Saxon individualistic-nominalistic and Durkheimian organicist notion of society as a totality which preexists individuals) seems irreducible, we seem to be dealing with a true Kantian antinomy which cannot be resolved via a higher “dialectical synthesis,” and which elevates society into an inaccessible Thing-in-itself; however, in a second approach, one should merely take not of how this radical antinomy which seems to preclude our access to the Thing ALREADY IS THE THING ITSELF – the fundamental feature of today’s society IS the irreconcilable antagonism between Totality and the individual.

What this means is that, ultimately, the status of the Real is purely parallactic and, as such, non-substantial: is has no substantial density in itself, it is just a gap between two points of perspective, perceptible only in the shift from the one to the other.

The parallax Real is thus opposed to the standard (Lacanian) notion of the Real as that which “always returns at its place,” i.e., as that which remains the same in all possible (symbolic) universes: the parallax Real is rather that which accounts for the very multiplicity of appearances of the same underlying Real – it is not the hard core which persists as the Same, but the hard bone of contention which pulverizes the sameness into the multitude of appearances.

In a first move, the Real is the impossible hard core which we cannot confront directly, but only through the lenses of a multitude of symbolic fictions, virtual formations. In a second move, this very hard core is purely virtual, actually non-existing, an X which can be reconstructed only retroactively, from the multitude of symbolic formations which are “all that there actually is.”

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

Žižek Dec 2010 princeton u. belief big Other chicken joke neils borg commodity fetishism ethnic dances

Žižek, S. Why Only an Atheist Can Be A True Christian  Wilson College, Princeton University.  12 Dec. 2010.
Here is the talk on YouTube

Eppur Si Muove: Although someone possesses true knowledge is forced to renounce it, this does not stop it from being true. It can also be used in the opposite sense, assert the deeper symbolic truth, make a statement its obviously false but nonetheless, even if its not true, in a deeper sense, the message has metaphorical truth.
Although he knows that there is no God, the idea of a god still moves him. This is nothing mystical, how does it evoke emotion? The well known conservative idea: IF THERE IS NO GOD THEN EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED.
Lacan inverts this: If there is no god then everything is prohibited, everything is regulated.
I visited Belgrade, there I encountered Nationalists engaged in ethnic cleansing: for them modern hedonist liberal society was not too much freedom, but too regulated, I can’t beat my wife I can’t rape, for them being a nationalist, I can steal, rape, kill. Hitler is false permissivity, pretend to sacrifice yourself and beneath this surface we can have lots of fun.

Sound of Music: Sister Maria, Julie Andrews, goes to Mother Superior in the monastery, I’m still in love, repent? Mother Superior sings Climb every mountain, go back and screw

Pretend to be one of us, Catholic priest and you can have all the boys you want.  It isn’t superfically follow the ritual and then do secret stuff, no you are obliged to particpate in obscene transgressions, take the KKK in Alabama 1950.  If you were against the church you would be teased, but if you spoke against the KKK, to be a real member of the white community you had to participate in these rituals.  When I was young in the Yugoslav army, you had to do fragging, it is there solidarity is asserted.

Stalinist commies were NOT atheists, commies had their own GODS which is why everything was permitted, commies did not perceive themselves as hedonists, but instruments of a historical necessity, perceiving yourself as instrument of historical necessity which permitted them to do whatever they wanted.  In 1956 when Kruschev denounced Stalin’s crimes, they had psychiatrists, delegated had heart attacks, hospitalized, Why?  They didn’t find out anything new, no, they all knew it, the point is that what in Lacanian theory we call the big Other, the public space, there it was admitted.

The big Other, I claim we believe more than ever.

CHICKEN JOKE
crazy as this sounds, this is how ideology functions today
Neils Borg joke: We don’t have to believe in it, it works objectively.  we don’t believe in democracy, justice

Commodity Fetishism
Of course we know that there is nothing magical about money, in our everyday ideology we are rational utilitarians, fetishism is not in what we think but WHAT WE DO.   They don’t know what they are doing but they are doing it.  They don’t know what they don’t know.  They don’t know the illusions they follow in their real social actions.  My father is a jerk.  If you observe the same teen interacting with his father, you see a different attitude.  It is not simply what you think and how things really are, OBJECTIVE BELIEF even if you don’t you believe, you believe without believing subjectively, you believe in your ACTS.

This is how RELIGION functions, we believe much more, even if we say we don’t, we believe through our acts.
INTERPASSIVITY: Weepers, Tibetan Prayer Wheel: objectively you are praying, think about sex whatever. Canned Laughter The TV set laughs. At the end of the show I feel relaxed as if I had laughed. The tv literally laughs for you.

Religion: we don’t need to, we need an other one Subject Supposed to Believe, exist as a presupposition, Xmas time, why did you buy present for kid, I don’t believe in Santa Claus, but the child pretend to believe in it to get presents and not disappoint parents. A belief can be objective without anyone believing in it.
Age of Innocence, movie: Winona Ryder, hero has a love affair with Michelle Pfeiffer. The young wife dies, he thinks he is free to marry Pfeiffer, but his son says that mother knew it all the time, she just pretended, everything is ruing for Daniel Day Lewis. Nothing changed, he just learned that the OTHER was not ignorant. We need another agent/group/subject that through their/his/her belief COVERS US. Have orgies, but there should be someone who does not know. MOLESTATION OF small children, children’s sexuality disappeared, to be transgressive, do what you want but there needs to be an appearance, a big Other who doesn’t know.

Everyone knows it but everyone pretends not to know it, and it works.
Life is Beautiful: holocaust was so brutal and violent it was too strong for a tragedy, a minimal of dignity of victim should be maintained. To imagine such a confrontation in Auschwitz is to presupposes a level of dignity which was not given to them. Comedy, not where you laugh, but a total ridicule of a scene. Primo Levi. In the movie Life is Beautiful, the son should know all along that father was lying, but was just playing the game so not to hurt his father. This would make the situation tragic.

Capitalism is a religion: Usually we say capitalism is brutal egotism, utilitarian, profiteering. NO. It is clear a capitalist works as a monk, what matters to him is to totally sacrifice himself to capital, so that just capital should circulate.
Christianity: A religion functions without people really believing in it. It can function objectively.

Nobody believed, not taking it seriously was a condition for taking part in nomenklatura, if you take the ruling ideology seriously you are close to being a dissident. The chicken should know that you are not corn, not you. It is not enough for us that there is no god, the illusion must be broken from within. This whole history of Christianity is dealing with this, Napoleon forced the Pope to crown him, Pope told him, you want to destroy Christianity, but we the church have been trying for 2000 yrs and have not succeeded.

Judaism God is dead. Woody Aloni, God is speaking to his people, you have made me a single entity in the world through your prayers. Marshal Mcluhan, the other rabbi says God go away, god runs away. The structure of illusion, what you still have here, we know its an illusion but it still fully functions as an illusion.
On that moment on the Cross for Christianity, Father why did you abandon me, God himself becomes for a moment an atheist, what dies on the Cross is not the terrestial rep of Divinity, but God dies himself and Holy spirit is the community of believers.

Book of Job. And then 3 theological friends come. Your suffering has a deeper meaning. He rejects the idea that his calamity has deeper meaning. God comes everything that Job says is true, Chesterton says it is supreme moment of blasphemy, God becomes for an instant an atheist, the maker is astonished at the things he made, I don’t control anything, all is a mess.

What dies on the CROSS? God as the big Other, God as such.

Death of Christ: radical renunciation, God is saying NO YOU SHOULD NOT TRUST ME, there is no meaning guaranteed, don’t trust me, I trust you, where there is love between two of you I will be there. We are condemned to our freedom. RUINING THE STRUCTURE OF ILLUSION FROM WITHIN, this atheist message is the Christian message, God dies on the cross we are condemned to freedom.

Levinasian Ethics: Experience of the Other as vulnerable, the wounded perplexed suffering face. We are still in a position of Masters, it is the other who is fragile not ourselves, when the other addresses us, I don’t accept it, the problem of animals, as Derrida demonstrated, the Animal that I am, how Levinas with all his celebration of otherness, the face, EXPLICITLY excludes animals. If there is a paradigm case of confronting wounded other, it is the animal, all philosophy disavows this, rationally you accept it, but nonetheless you ignore it. A photo of a cat submitted to a lab experiment, broken bones, without fur, helplessly looking into camera. Jeremy Bentham, instead of asking can animals talk/reason/think, denying things to animals, half blind pigs fattened and slaughtered, philosophical way to deny this is Cartesian notion of animals as machines, cries of pain should not disturb us, just imagine malfunction of machine there is nothing behind it. What do we see in the perplexed gaze of tortured animal, I claim that instead of just asking the standard philosophical questions what are animals for us, but what are WE for animals, what does the tortured animal see when the see us, inhuman dimension of human being, Freud said it was DEATH DRIVE. This excessive monstrosity of being HUMAN, some philosophers got it, Kant, in his unknown text on education, human is an animal who needs a master. Human nature is explosive radical crazy freedom, it is to control this excess that humans need education not animals. I see in the animals gaze is my MONSTROSITY.

I claim that some things, ordinary things we do, could be read against this background, how to cope/control this other as neighbour. A kiss is clumsy but tender answer to a question that eludes the power of language. A kiss is by the mouth, it is as if the message of a kiss is, I know that there is a monstrosity in you beyond language, an abyssal potential evil, but with my kiss in you, I accept you in this dimension, and by kissing we can reach a momentary peace.

I don’t care about your ethnic dances, I want to hear your dirty jokes.

Ž Syriza Greece

6th Subversive festival
15 May, 2013.  Alexis Tsipras and Slavoj Žižek, The Role of the European Left Moderator: Srećko Horvat
Žižek starts here
If Syriza wins nothing will be the same.  Al Gore that dummy, everyone expected him to win, “I am the guy who once was the future American President”  All history will be read as pointing towards the Syriza victory.   If Syriza wins and does something it will be the end of the old Europe.  The very soul of Europe will change.
Radical egalitarianism, radical democracy this is at the core of European identity and this is at stake today.  Brussels technocrats, anti-immigrant fascists they are the true threat to Europe.  You have economic neo-liberalism combined with anti-immigrant populism, this is not Europe.  Syriza stands for Europe, what Europe stands for, not just the marginals etc.
Syriza is the voice of true reason and moderation, the dangerous experimenters are in power, what is attributed to Syriza is what the Euro-technocrats are doing. asdf
Žižek pt 2
After 1968, capitalism welfare state wasn’t in total crisis. While today the systemic crisis is here, so return to social democratic welfare state is not the solution, for all our sympathies for Latin America, we can’t simply follow the Latin American way.
Alliances, I’m not fascinated with Tahir Sq.  What about the morning after What will your victory mean in the lives of ordinary people when life returns back to nomral.  Its a question of intelligent alliances.  Its not simple redistribution, since for a couple decades we’ll still live within capitalism. In the old commie days, patriotic bourgeoisie, genuine interest to produce for the people, its not just strike at the rich, but a carefully planned strategy, competition, small level prod’n of consumerist goods.  Crazy as it will sound, a dream of what Syriza will be, within global distribution, should make life easier for truly productive capitalists, its the link with State clientelism with international banks, this is bad even for productive capitalist classes.  If you are a good honest capitalist you can still vote for us.
Golden Dawn one aspect of unfortunately a trend all around Europe.  Croatia and Slovenia the discourse is changing, in the last decades there is a subtle re-writing of WWII.  It wasn’t simply that the good side one, a subtle rehabilitation of soft fascism.  Things that were unthinkable in Europe 30 years ago are back, before fascists were not tolerated.
Banking System Today’s economy needs banks.  Not Wall St. but Main St.  too simplistic.  If you look really closely how indebted countries works, this structure of debts, 80% of money is speculative money.  Iceland, a couple of private speculators ruined everything.  Simply in the interests of capitalist production, the ongoing global banking system cannot do its function, a more popular democratic banking system is necessary simply for capitalist prod’n to survive.  Syriza should not just a crazy leftist solution, but make it a better bourgeois state.  You will have to do, what capitalist ruling class could not do themselves.

Žižek pt 3 If you want to have a real popular mobilization beyond, above the standard bureacratic politics, you need a charismatic leader look at Chavez, there are genuine charismatic leaders that are not Stalin.  Its first time in my life I’m accused of being a social democrat.  The so-called Stalinist State Socialism was also a catastrophe.  I don’t believe that local forms of self-organization, have the potential to universalize themselves.  I am shameless saying back to Marx from Hegel, we have to re-invent the state.  I’m totally opposed to John Holloway, who said I was in Greece, a park was proclaimed a liberated zone, entrance prohibited to capitalism.  that’s crazy.  This idea of some type of immediate self-transparent direct democracy.   I don’t like enthusiastic moments, where after you have nostalgic moments, then your phone rings I have to go back to the bank my boss is calling.  When the enthusiasm is over I want the Left to change things at the everyday common-sense level.   Don’t fall in love with enthusiastic moments.  It lasts for 2 months.   I’m not talking about bourgeois state, we should re-invent these large scale mechanisms.
Žižek pt 4 The old Ricardo dream, you will get the good function of money.   There are differences up and down but I don’t believe there was a Golden Era.  American Leftists it was the 1950s, I’m skeptical.  Argentinian cooperatives, I’m skeptical.  Latin American countries like to point out factories taken over by workers, but re-visit the same factories a year later.  You can’t universalize the cooperatives.  Maurizio Lazzarato’s book The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition did something very important.  Capitalism can less and less globally afford even these formal freedoms.  What I like in Lazzarato’s work, all the ideological networks that make us accept this form of slavery, the universalization of capitalism, in a way a different levels we are all capitalists.  Aren’t you acting as a self-entrepreneur, we are all capitalists.  As all efficient forms of ideology, if I decide to economize and invest in education, am I not treating myself as object of investment, this change of everyday attitudes, everyday forms perceived as apolitical.  Ideology which matters is everyday, how you preceive your everyday situation.  Never underestimate the power of ideology today.

Žižek May 9 2013 madness and Hegel

Žižek 9 May 2013 and broken down into 8 videos on YouTube
13.40 Antonio Damascio “Descartes Error” Cognitivist rejection of Descartes.  Descartes draw a strict line of description neutral abstract thinking and animality, Descartes drew a strict distinction.
18:00 Smoking gun on Heidegger
21:25 Deleuze and Hegel: Hegel should simply be ignored. Forget Hegel.
28.00 Pittsburgh Hegelians

29:30 The Concept of Madness
Plato describes Socrates being seized by an idea.  A description of someone in a hysterical seizure.  Then we know Plato, the hypothesis of the evil spirit, universalized madness, debates between Derrida and Foucault.  And Hegel dismissed as ultimate madman of philosophy.
31:20 Anti-Event Philosophers
Platonic Idea we have some eternal order/ideas existing in immutable way, nothing really happens, all that really happens is remembrance, rediscovering all that already is deep within ourselves, rediscovering truth that is already there. The ultimate philosopher of ANTI-EVENT.
Hegel has a system, dialectical movement, but in the course of dialectical movement, things are already becoming what they eternally are.

34:00 NO it isn’t like this says Ž.  No event in Plato? Look at what actually happens in Plato, (see Badiou), the zero-level of the Platonic experience, we live ordinary daily life immersed in our daily shit, then we encounter an idea, Saul’s conversion in to St. Paul, something happens a radical cut and you discover another dimension. No wonder Plato was celebrating Love as Madness, Plato emphasized Love as the beginning of Wisdom.

We should never forget how it all begins for Plato: you are in your daily universe, thinking about daily shit, and then you confront someone who is your love, and your life is forever changed, you can feel this brutal encounter in Plato, if you are passionately in love then in your most intimate rational interests: parents, colleagues, children, can vanish, you experience a weird indifference to moral obligation to those around you. Falling in Love is the Platonic Event. This is missing in ‘Oriental’ thought. The oriental idea you are in undisturbed state of bliss, you get too engaged and fall into. Plato emphasizes this falling into as FULL engagement.

38:00 Descartes Cogito is precisely a PURE EVENT. Here Descartes misunderstands himself. Cogito is NOT a substance which is thinking. No. Cogito is this experience of a thing that exists only in sofar as it is thinking, only in the course of the process of thinking. What is CRUCIAL is not to forget that when he describes this pure experience of COGITO he’s not playing a intellectual game, he’s describing a concrete mystical/spiritual experience, you have this THE NIGHT OF THE WORLD, when you withdraw in a kind of psychotic reduction, you withdraw from reality into the abyss of your soul, the point of darkess, darkness as the absolute depth of your soul. What Descartes is describing as ‘Cogito Ergo Sum’ is precisely this thought disconnected from reality, this pure moment of inwardness which is at the same time the moment of MADNESS.

Hegel was well aware of how in order for Human Spirit, our Symbolic universe to develop we have to go through the zero-point of madness, Hegel is more Foucaultian than Foucault, madness is not just a possibility of things go wrong, but our rational world emerges only as a defence against the threat of madness. Even if most of us our not mad, the only way to understand human reason is as a reaction as a form of madness, a form of madness. Wonderful passage in Freud’s reading in his analysis of paranoia, Judge Schreber, Freud says that in a paranoiac system what we usually take as the sign of madness is on the contrary an attempt to get out of madness, the paranoiac construct is an ersatze normality, the true madness is the night of the World, the withdrawal from reality. The paranoiac is a crazy attempt to cure yourself. Lacan sometimes along these lines proposed there is a moment of madness in all rationality, every rationality is an attempt to get out of madness. Platonic Event, encounter the IDEA. We can formulate the basic Platonic experience independently of this idealist substantialist metaphysics. In authentic moments of LOVE, POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT, we encounter some kind of ABSOLUTE, something strikes you, morality can act as ABSOLUTE, did you see that bullshit the life of PI.

44:00 Ang Lee wants to meet Ž. But in the novel, when you must do something, when you experience something as ethical pressure, you must do it because you cannot NOT do it. You CANNOT NOT DO IT. Absolute is something much more fragile something that belongs to the order of appearance than ordinary reality, Absolute is you have a duty, you can say fuck off if you are an unethical person. You cannot not do it. An entity totally powerless fragile, but nonetheless you CANNOT get rid of it. The more fragile the more it has a hold over you.

I think therefore I am, I am only so far as I am caught in the process of thinking.

46:00 HEGEL Philosopher of the EVENT

In what sense for Hegel is TRUTH itself evental? Appearance misleading false appearance is immanent to TRUTH. Yes of course first you cling to one idea its partially true, the other side is partial, then a higher synthesis NO NO. The ABC in the conflict between appearance and reality, the truth is in appearance. Innocent bystander, you are in a certain situation, what matters is not what you sincerely think deep in yourself, but how your situation appears to an observer, even if appearance is false, it is socailly determining, it is stronger. The drama of false appearances. There can be more truth in superficial appearances. Through totally invented accusation, the two women discover that they are attached. Inner self-experience doesn’t get it all, it is the 3rd party external observation.

1:05 Derrida started to imitate his American followers who misunderstood him. The TRUTH CAN ARISE OUT OF A MISRECOGNITION.
Immanence of Appearance to TRUTH. Something starts as misleading appearance but triggers a process making it true. This is Hegelian dialectic. Alenka Zupancic: Evental Status of a TRUTH. The truth emerges out of a series of EVENTS, out of an evental process, what begins as a misleading process becomes a TRUTH. This holds at a fundamental level of SEXUALITY.

1:10 infantile sexuality this notion is oppressed today, it is as if this is the price we are paying for our permissivity. Everything is permitted today, do it with dogs, but children are innocent, pedophilia is the ultimate crime. Innocent child as returned with a vengence. Children are the innocent observers, we can participate in orgies etc, but children must not know about it, parents who are swinging, if you mention this to my son but don’t tell my son, on condition that the child doesn’t know it, we need an innocent gaze.

So we should ask: Who are the typical bad guys. Fred Jameson says this about WIRE the HBO series, today the only acceptable bad guys in movies are terrorists, serial killers and pedaphiliacs. House of Cards, with Kevin Spacey, you can still be the point of identification as a murderer, all other murderers are relativized. Copjec told me there was that hit series HOME ALONE, a celebration of children, invincible, they always win, a protection of the innocence. Let’s go a step further.

What is so scandalous about infantile sexuality?

The scandal resides in 2 features:

1. Alenka Zupancic, infantile sexuality is something weird, its neither biologically grounded, nor fitting symbolic cultural norms.  Biologically sexuality is made for copulation. It invades before biologically mature sexuality.  The problem here is its not we have first infantile, then once puberty enter we can start fucking in a normal way, no it ruins the entire field. The way infantile sexuality approaches sexual topic remains in power to the end.

Quote from Laplanche: drives precede what is innate and instinctual. Instinctually biologically fucking with genitals, but you don’t start at biologically and then get cultural, no you start with unnatural sexuality,

It is instinctual sexuality (fuck to get children) which is adaptaive, it has evolutionary function, infantile drives already present in the unconscious. why this strange intrusion in children neither biology (biologically infantile sexuality is meaningless), nor culture, normativity.  But some wierd in-between.

The reason for this strange excess, is the link between sexuality and cognition. Against the standard idea of sexuality as instinctual force which is sublimated though culture, one should assert the link between sexuality and cognition.

1:20 Childrens’sexuality is not masturbatory pre-genital, it is deeply cognitive, where do babies come from? And it is deeply embedded in fantasies, the small child sees some strange things, the enigma of the other’s desire, he feels something obscene in adults, what do they want from me, This is for Laplanche, the original experience of subjectivity, what do the others see in me?  I have something in me that others see in me but I don’t know what.  Children’s sexuality is grounded in such a cognitive search, but there is always a missing link you never get the answers, that why you have fantasies.

1:24 What I’m saying is 2 things: 1. these are childish fantasies, when you reach puberty you know answers, NO.  You need Fantasies to the end.  THis is what Lacan means by there is no sexual relation.  To get aroused you need fantasy excess.  The problem for psychoanalysis, is not vulgar pan-sexualism, the enigma of psycho-analysis is the opposite, what are we thinking when we are doing sex, there has to be some detail, you imagine the curl of the hair: somebody observing you, the scent of her hair, her calves.

The structure of infantile sexuality which is a cognitive missing link remains here to the end. We never reach maturity. The structure of sexuation through cognitive missing link and fantasy, this structure remains to the end.

1:27  Did you see David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. This is a nice fantasy structure. The best scene, Kyle observes from the closet Dennis Hopper, breathing through oxygen mask etc. Chion said only way to read the scene is a visualized audio hallucination. Oxygen breathing, this is a child listening to parent’s copulating, he hears strange sounds, the parent’s fucking but he doesn’t know what fucking is, so makes up scenario, imagines daddy breathing etc.

1:29  Judith Butler Narrative
There is normal sex, heterosexual, straight, and then we have this childish games, that if not refocused on heterosex, they are used as subordinated moments for genital sex. If I like to look at you it is ok only if its foreplay to proper penetration its okay.

Butler/Deleuze Version: we have polymorphous perverse paradise of plural practices which is violently normativized to a genital paradigm. This is also false.  There is no plurality of perversions and then bad patriarchy which subordinates it. NO wrong. It is not enough to reassert infantile sexuality which is polymorphous perverse sexuality which is then totalized regulated by the Oedipal genital norm.  Infantile sexuality is not the original base of sexuality which is then captured and regulated by the heterosex norm.

The idea here is that Alenka Zupancic, copulation fucking is a central point but precisely as such it ESCAPES normativity. THERE IS NO SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP.

We do have this perverse polymorphous mastabatory practices, but always against the background of a cogntive hole, could have been filled in by a full genital sex, but this can’t be done there is no formula here.  There is no knowledge here, there is no formula for sex. Full sex copulation, its space has be sustained by perverse scenarios.

Already Lacan says Seminar XX, simple observation, turns around completely the standard idea that Catholic church its sexual teaching privileges normative genital sexuality at the expense of oppressed perverse infantile drives etc.  As if the only thing church tolerates is genital straight heterosexuality NO. Absolutely NOT TRUE.

If you look at the church imaginary it is full or oral/anal drives and art, saints eating shit, fondling each other, but never fucking, copulation is prohibited in the church imaginary. Reject Catholic sexual morality imposes normative sexuality on polymorphous perverse sexuality of humans.

One should insist that there is nothing necessarily asocial in partial drives, they function as glue as society, in contrast to the sexual straight couple.

Pre-genital oral, anal drives, the Church and Army is full of this.  What they feel threatened by is copulation, the couple.

Zupancic there is something profoundly disruptive at stake in copulation, the kind of social bond it proposes (copulation) that Christianity proposes, it doesn’t need copulation, natural copulation is utterly banned from the religious imaginary.

Christianity is all about jouissance of the body, the body of God as constituting another person’s jouissance, partial drives and the satisfaction they procure are abundantly present. In its libidinal aspect, satisfaction and bonding by way of partial objects with the exclusion of sexual coupling.  Infantile sexuality is part of Christianity. The pure enjoyment, enjoyment for sake of enjoyment is not banned, what is banned is sexuality in form of copulation. Christianity fully acknowledges the polymorphous perverse satisfaction of drives but Christianity desexualizes the pleasure they provide.  Why this oppression of Sexuality in Church?

1:41 What happens in copulation is precisely a certain link, coupling of 2 dimension which make it problematic for Church. On the one hand sexuality in sense of partial drives, you can’t find satisfaction put finger up here, squeeze here, technical stuff of how to do it  then we have the inter-subjective LINK, but isn’t the tendency today that the 2 should be kept apart.

If you are frigid = problem of partial drives.  Sexual topic is reduced to question of partial drives. Sexual topic is reduced to topic of partial drives, if you can’t get erection do this … sexuality is subordinated to, does it contribute to your relation to other. What happens in intense copulation the 2 dimensions go together.

The mystery of sexuality is intense bodily enjoyment and connection with Other, not in this metaphysical sense, communicating with sould no fuck soul, it is brutally concrete, not connecting with souls, the more you reduce the other to an object, the more you have spiritual surrender.

The Church prefers missionary position, this is way to maintain distance from other,  in other words the Church wants to protect us from the miraculous EVENTAL, traumatic event of SEXUALITY. a traumatic event that can’t be reduced to reproductive copulation.

1:44.20 This missing link, no sexual relationship, the last trap here. If you read Lacan, you must notice AMBIGUITY. 1. massively endorses philosophic topic, division between animal and humans. Animals=instinct you know when to copulate. Humans we need fantasies, poetry it doesn’t function. This idea of Opposing nature as domain of immediate BALANCE, no, we have to do a step: This idea that it’s not enough to say man is de-natured animal, Nature is already de-natured it doesn’t know it.
Alenka Zupancic: are you aware of something, conscious of something. UNCONSCIOUS of something. Both nature and man don’t know how to do it. Nature doesn’t know that it doesn’t know. Lacan gives some hints in Seminar II. LAMELLA undead object. at the level of animal sexuality. Oscillates Lacan between simple celebration of humanity, Man doesn’t have instinctual coordinates, which is why has to invent things NO Nature has gap itself, The battler is DENATURALIZING nature. The ultimae idealist resistance, we have nature, then somehow things go wrong with humans.

This wonderful idea in Shcelling, Benjamin, this idea human language was created to give words to the pain that is already in nature, to redeem the pain in nature. If we drop this mystical topic, and say radical discord that is ALREADY IN NATURE. with humanity nature becomes UNCONSCIOUS of its own DISCORD. THis is the way I read quantum physics, the latter denaturalizes nature, what we get is not culture but not nature in the usual way we understand it.
151:00 What would be materialist theology. Kierkargards idea of anxiety: tried to develop logical proof of God, while he’s trying to deduce existence of God, God himself is watching with anxiety, because if he fails, then God himself like the cat walking over the cliff on thin air, will suddenly drop. Will god’s existence depend on philosophy proving his existence.

Like monarch anxiety if General Assembly deciding if partial or absolute monarch.
Crazy as it may sound, each of us as subjects are in position of GOD, our existence depends on the other, fuck it, I exist if the whole world disappears, for you to exist you depend radically on the others.

The lesson of Quantum physics, at the micro level, things can go on, you can cheat ontologically. Einstein answer to Borg, God does not cheat. Ok, maybe God doesn’t cheat but he can be cheat, at quantum level things can happen that God doesn’t know about. IT isn’t is God cheating, NO. We can cheat on GOD.