Žižek – Page 14

Ž around May 2013

Žižek slamming Jameson
The Cynic. Do not need symptomal reading of ideology. Who needs complex theories, things are so obvious we just have to inform the people.
Pics from Guantonamo but Žižek showed these pics to friends and asked them “what is this?” answer: Avantgarde theatre. No. This is an intro to the Obscene underside of American culture.

The truly subversive thing today
Not to engage in any dreams, but brutal confrontation. Most of the critical analysis, whenever you talk about poverty, its much more mobilizing to talk about poverty in Africa, then the Bill Gates game, today, its precisely this need to present a terrifying situation, presenting a light at the end of the tunnel that prevents change.

Hegel and Literature
Point de capiton, Rebecca Comay hesitates here. What I think is no, Hegel is there totally consequent, he is applying the same logic all around the Phenomenology. You need a brutal regression at the. The theory of the Monarch. To get a modern state, does not depend on tradition, but a rational state, you need on the top a king, who is who he is by just a stupid biological fact. Hegel does not violate anything, this is a crucial mechanism of Hegel. To finish the mediation itself, you need a brutal return to immediacy.

What is the possible limitation of Hegel?
Can Hegel think negation of negation. Negate something into nothing, the second move is not “nothing is the subordinated moment you then get a complex” no nothing is even less than nothing ..”

Aaron Schuster on wierd optimism
The Joke by Milan Kundera.
Hegel cannot think pure repetition, he has a wonderful theory of repetition, but as an idealizing moment, second time sublation into iseal form.
He can’t think a purely mechanical repetition, a repetition without this moment of sublation.

A True post-Hegelian space
pure repetition. The problem is that the entire theory of exploitation by Marx is based on this model. When talk is returning to Marx, question, what happens to his labour theory of value and theory of exploitation. You know Marx is Capital when he emphasizes, that natural resources are not source of value, he give example of oil, if we apply Marx directly, Chavez is exploiting U.S. We have to do something different with Marx.
Second anniversary of Petrograd revolution where people played themselves. It was really a wierd moment. They repeated the attack on Winter Palace. How would Benjamin to account the urge to stage revolution itself as aesthetic itself. Ranciere tries to rehabilitate this type of aesthetics.
What do you mean by emanicpation, is it emancipation that Marx had in mind?

On Moshe Postone
Marx is not historicist enough, Marx emphasizes the definition of work. He does something strange. If we approach labour, its’ only worker on one side and object on other side. The moment we move to universal dimension the social dimension disappears???? In a communist society production will become automated, we will have collective worker, just manipulating the process. We have to think these limitations of Marx.

Disagrees with Badiou
extra state agency, the communist party which was undermining the state authority, Stalinism is not absolute state authority, it undermined state authority.
China pretends to be normal state, ministries blah blah, and then you have weird entity called Communist Party China, this party does not exist, there are no laws regulating it. The functioning of communist party, it controls the state, but has no full legal status. It is here we plead for Hegel, state socialism is precisely that the rule of law, the state was undermined. When Hegel says when some idea is actualized in wrong way, in some ways you have to blame the idea, you can’t say oh they misinterpreted Marx. What the world needs today is a good radical critique of Marx, only we can do it.

The Big Moment Will Never Arrive
Ok there was a crisis, do you hear any consistent proposal of radical left to get out of it. I’m not optimistic. The first duty of theory is to put into question this model, “there will be a true theory that will come …” As if we intellectuals will provide the true theory and people will learn it, NO. There will be dangerous moments, catastrophes, this big event, even what Benjamin was expecting, in a much more Hegelian way we must renounce this there will not be a big revolutionary moment. No program for future. in the sense in the complexity of history, you cannot include into the historical process the effects of your intervention … you HAVE TO TAKE A RISK AND INTERVENE.

But somehow the most subversive thing sometimes may appears as just a repetition.

Žižek on Hegel May 2013

Audio Link: Ž on Hegel May 12 2013.

Real is impossible and unavoidable. As long as we are subjects of market we are universal.

7:00 Universality, oh we can’t reach universality, imperialism imposing their universality.
8:00 India struggle for universal
8;30 desire is indestructable, it avoids you as such it always returns
9:00 Freedom in a hidden way there was a pathological motivation, even if your act was pure you did it maybe to boast to others. What causes true anxiety, is the prospect that our act truly was free and this trauma is domesticated by reducing it to the pathological. What’s traumatic for Kant is that its terrifying to accept a FREE act, so he reduces it to something pathological.
The unbearable fact is that we are immortal, responsible in the afterlife …
11:30 Hegel’s materialism: Can the Hegelian moment of negation of negation account for redoubled impossibilities.
I’m not free I negate freedom but this escape from freedom proves impossible.

12:10 Lacan’s Alienation and Separation. Alienation in Symbolic order constitutive of the subject. The Subject is the RESULT of the process of alienation. It emerges as a result, alienation is not standard Hegelian view, no, alienation for Lacan is just re-doubled. Ancient Egyptians secrets, what we saw as secrets of Egyptians for us, were secrets for them as well. The secrets remain its just redoubled.

Self-negated pessimism. A form of optimism which is worse than pessimism.
15:00 optimism is negated, life is shit. but the very form of pessimists position is negated, life is shit is too much of a principled position, in a wierd optimistic way, life goes on……….
15:50 Aaron Schuster: subtracted from the nothingness of pessimism, violent peterbation of self-cancelling nothing
17:30 immortality, vampires undead.
Where does Hegel stand with regard to all of this. Can formal matrix of dialectic process account for this downward synthesis, the lowest of the lowest.

19:00 Where the danger is grows also what can save us. Where the danger is is also hope for a reversal. Hegel is usually taken as clearest case of this paradigm, NO, Hegel is not part of this paradigm.
20:00 textbook Hegel. It is Marx not Hegel who follows this logic. Precapitalist modes of economic production, the uniqueness of the CMP, labour is torn out of its primoridal condition into its objective conditions … the worker appears as objectless, purely subjective capacity of labour with its objective conditions of production.
22:50 Proletariat substanceless subjectivity
23:40 The true Hegel. Resolution misses its goal and turns into nightmare, how to remain faithful to goal of original liberation and not get conservative, oh a nihilistic mistake. How at the very moment is liberation goes wrong, how to nonetheless save the day through repetition and redeem its rational core. Our moment is still Hegelian. What Hegel called absolute Freedom and Terror was pretty mild compared to Stalin. The Jacobins were simply overthrown by a vote in Assembly National, ha do that to Stalin.
26:00 return from Marx to Hegel. From Marxist revolution eschatology, to Hegel’s tragic vision of history as open. The historical process always redirects are activity into an unexpected direction. Accepted the alienation of the historical process, we can’t control, not because we are puppets, no, there is no big Other. This acceptance of alienation. It implies a fully engaged position, aware of the risks involved. There is no higher historical necessity, only activity open to risks of open contingent history. The conclusive moment of the dialectic process is not synthetic unity, return at a higher level to some form of the One, for Hegel, alienation is also constitutive of the subject, subject does not pre-exist its alienation, but emerges through it. It’s only nature that only alienates itself from itself, the subject is the outcome of the self-alienation of nature.

The big Other doesn’t exist, no higher historical necessity, no World Spirit (forget Charles Taylor). Nonetheless, because self-alienation of nature is constitutive of subject, when you break out of alienation, you don’t get overblown narcissistic subject that appropriates the other, the GAP is displaced, we experience ourself as alienated from the other, we see how this alienation is displaced into the other itself, there is no substantial other to which we are alienated, the gap is redoubled.

On late Heidegger: historicity goes all the way down, cannot be reduced to a non-historical absolute. His achievement is a transcendental historicism, different historicist modes of being. The ultimate horizon is the horizon of this play of different transcendental horizons. For Heidegger at much higher level, does same as west coast American pseudo-follower of Foucault, what is this table? we can only ask what discursive regime, the ontic question is subordinated to the ontological horizon, the ultmate catastrophe is the ontological one. The true catastrophe is not whether humanity will destroy itself ontically, the true catastrophe has already happened, humanity dwells in technology etc. From the beginning of zein and seit Heidegger was bothered, transcendental is not creation, objects appear within a horizon of being, what Nature would be without man? The past carries with it a temporal index, our coming was expected on earth, we should bring this logic to the end, later the last big revolution will retroactively redeem earlier revolution, human being and nature: that is to say, what is nature outside humanity with no relation to humanity 1929-1930, perhaps animals are in an unknown way aware of their lack, their poorness. The definition of animal as poor in the world, as stone without world, when Heidegger as animals as poor in the world he means that we as humans are dwelling within a world, and we cannot but experience animals as within this world, we can’t step outside our horizon of meaning, and simply look at reality. He doubts this transcendental reply, not that things are simply there, it is something that characterizes immanently, the sorrow of nature as Derrida, the animal that I am: our human exploded to redeem nature from its suffering. it raises the right question: NOt what is nature for language, can we grasp nature adequetely through language, but What is language for nature, how does emergence of language affect nature.
Aaron Schuster: on the one hand official position, symbolic order is ultimate horizon, all we can do is concoct invent beautiful stories, myths about what went on before, BUT the symbolic order is a reaction to some RADICAL deadlock (sorrow in nature) dislocation, that is already there in nature. So that the Freudian civilization and its discontents, nature is not homeostatic universe things in their own place and then human being displace nature NO. a displacement was already in place in nature.
Higher level of non-resolution. Lacan speculates on infinite pain of being a plant. on the one hand you have this eternal poetry of dislocation of sexuality in human species in contrast to poor animals who nonetheless have instincts that tell them when/how to copulate. The fascination of national Geographic, animals a universe that works, I think we should go here a step further, when you watch National Geographic, they report on human community which is treated as a small animal community, one should risk a step further, a secret awareness already in nature, no go further than New Age, maybe nature is the ultimate invented tradition, True Materialism begins when you transpose the gap as specifically human. when we transpose this gap back into nature itself. Sexuality, when Lacan introduces Lamella, Seminar XI. the deadlock is already there in nature, it means that human speech is not a fall from some natural balance but a reaction reacting to a fall that was already there.
The Wound can be healed only by the spear that Cut it.
The spirit is itself the wound it tries to heal. The spirit of human subjectivity is the power of tearing apart, spirit is nothing but the process of overcoming immediacy and organic unity.
a withdrawal the creates that which it withdraws from.
50:00 India

Žižek university of vermont Oct 2012

Tibetan Bhuddism: Canned laughter
Objectively you are praying, it doesn’t matter what you are thinking. The tv laughs for you. Something that is supposed to be spontaneous emotional reaction can be externalized. The function of canned laughter is to trigger in this Pavlovian reflex to trigger your laughter, NO! it laughs for you. I watch tv, like an idiot, at the end I feel relieved as if I was laughing.

Brevik an enigma: Pro-Zionist, yet anti-Semitic. What is happening here.

Levinas, smuggled into Judaism, pseudo Christian attitudes, the face of the Other, vulnerability of other’s face, this is profoundly NON-Jewish. From a Jewish standpoint, the zero-level ethical experience is single face of other is NON-Jewish. You see a weak child, oh my god, this is automatic reaction, ETHICS begins for me, when you ask a question: “Is it something that I don’t see which is the price for seeing this?”

But still I have respect for some insights of Levinas. When you read in the bible DON’T KILL it isn’t God addressing humans, the addressee is GOD HIMSELF. The big problem from the very beginning, is BRUTAL DIVINE VIOLENCE. re-read the Old Testament and see the incidents of brutal divine violence. God is like the castle in Kafka’s novel, it is the sublime object up there, but what appears from below is a majestic builing is only a couple of dirty cottages. The basic Jewish suspicion is this one, don’t get too close to God it won’t be bliss, it will be furor.

Marshal McCluhan scene in Annie Hall: this happens in the Talmud. Two rabbis debate theological point, the one who is losing, tries to pull Annie Hall trick. Let’s call God. Jehovah comes, an old man, but then the other Rabbi shouts at God, you old man beat it, you did your job, your created the world, you did it pretty god, now go away. The reply of God is My children have vanquished me and with a merry laughter walks away.
The danger of the proximity of God. How to keep God at a proper distance. The point is God should be only in dead letter not in images, images come to close, God should be dead.

Lacan: The only true atheists today are theologists
God dies in Auschwitz. how could he have allowed etc. In view of the horrors of 20th century, to describe them in secular terms is not strong enough, 6 million killed, words don’t match the horror, we need a dimension of the sacred. Not that God is behind, but an excessive sublime, its too much to explain away as small secular affair. Not only God did not die at Auschwitz, in Auschwitz God came back and was too close to us.

This terrifying Living God, the God if you know Greek Tragedy, Bachae, crazy woman exploding in orgy. Excessive sacred orgies. Where is this today. I see signs.

Shitty boring movie. PROJECT X. College kids organize a small party. House burns down etc. You can see how, in a nice strategy, it starts as jokes, at level of obscene Hollywood sex comedy, but then at a certain point you are transported, its too much, something ectasy, something sacred is going on. There is a demand for this sacred dimension, no I’m not America bashing, no in Europe, 3-4 weeks ago, a girl in Belgium, announced on Facebook a party, 40,000 people came. Its obvious this sacred dimension in SOCCER, trance and violence.

And before parents leave they give the rules, don’t touch this etc. At the end of the film when father returns, you expect him to explode, Father then returns, and says, ok, you did it, its damage, nonetheless I didn’t think you were able to do this, you are a man.
Lacan says, “Beyond the mother, stands out the image of the father … fundamentally to unite and not oppose a desire to the law.” while formerly prohibiting, discreetly not only tolerates, but solicits them, you are expected someway to violate the prohibitions. A permissive father can be much worse, a father who prohibits, by playing a game of do it but out of my site. The bible itself, in so far as God is father, in old Testament, of turning a blind eye, the prohibition don’t celebrate other gods, but if you look closely, don’t celebreate other gods in front of me, but what you do discreetly over there, is not my business.

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
Master and Servant: Servant not ready to risk his life, Master enjoys. Lacan turns it around. The Master is prohibited to enjoy. He enjoys in such a regulated way. The only enjoyment, is servant in marginal space, when Master turns his eye away. But Masters do have orgies, but only that they are overly regulated. Private life of ancient Indian masters, so fat barely able to walk, so how did they do it … What about normal permissive father. Permissivity You can do it, turns imperceptibly into you Have to do it, you Have to Enjoy. Enjoy! it turns oppressive. Healthy sex is promulgated in a terrifying utilitarian way, sex is good for your muscles etc. Is this sex? This medical assertion, it is much more liberating for Father to prohibit it, then he goes out and you bring in girlfriend.

In the area of generalized permissivity: we get so much anxiety impotence, etc.

Ž then begins on Gangnam style which I have recorded not here but in the Žižek Toronto 2012 posting.

To be Continued

johnston ethics desire Seminar VII part 2 das Ding

Johnston, Adrian. “The Vicious Circle of the Super-Ego: The Pathological Trap of Guilt and the Beginning of Ethics.” Psychoanalytic Studies. 3.3/4 (2001): 411-424.

🙂 Johnston does not agree with Žižek’s take on das Ding.

Žižek’s definition: das Ding doesn’t exist prior to the ‘backwards glance’ of the nostalgic subject of the Symbolic wishing to have lost something he/she never possessed in the first place (das Ding is a result of the fundamental strategy of fantasy, wherein the structural impossibility of the drives’ ‘full satisfaction’ qua ‘jouissance obtained’ is concealed from the subject by making it seem as if this enjoyment is hypothetically re-obtainable).

However, this is a misleading exaggeration that treats Lacan as wholly Hegelian.

The most misleading feature of virtually every extant commentary on Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis is the attribution to him of the imperative “Do not give way on your desire!”

In the seventh seminar, Lacan does not present the link between desire and guilt in the form of a command, an injunction to ‘persist’ in one’s desire.

Instead, he merely states that guilt is the result of ‘ceding on’ (i.e., not enacting in reality, refraining from concrete actualization ) one’s desires—“Je propose que la seule chose don t on puisse être coupable, au moins dans la perspective analytique, c’est d’avoir cédé sur son désir”.

At the beginning of this seminar, Lacan remarks that psychoanalysis is confronted , across the range of its analysands, with the omnipresence of guilt in human life.

Lacan is not so much interested in proposing a new prescriptive ethics as in comprehending the precise nature of ‘moral masochism’, in fully grasping how the constellation of the id, the super-ego, and the socio-symbolic Umwelt of reality ‘pathologize ’ the ethical field.

At most, this Lacanian analytic diagnosis of moral masochism should be interpreted as a preparatory clearing of the ground for a genuine ethics, as a mapping out of the obstacles hindering the construction and enactment of a non-pathological ‘metaphysics of morals’. 417

Lacan repeatedly makes reference to the Freudian super-ego as an excessive, greedy, and out-of-control agency. Echoing Freud, he observes that, “the more one sacrifices to it, the more it demands”.

The super-ego isn’t satisfied with mere external/behavioral conformity to ethico-moral precepts; it uncompromisingly insists upon the impossible purification of intentionality itself (thus, the super-ego is, in a manner of speaking, a spontaneous Kantian). 418

… when Lacan speaks about being guilty for having ‘ceded’ or ‘given ground’ relative to one’s desire, what he really means is the following: the more the subject surrenders (to) his/her desires by obeying the restrictions of the Law, the more guilty he/she feels, since such concessions only aggravate the (unconscious) volatility and intensity of these same desires (namely,‘internal’ repressed desires which never fail to escape the notice of the omniscient authority of the sadistic super-ego).

Near the end of his 1974 television interview, Lacan clearly advances this claim in saying that, “Freud reminds us that it’s not evil, but good, that engenders guilt” (Lacan, p. 45).
To be Continued …

Žižek in Toronto 2012

Žižek in Toronto Toronto 2 Oct. 2012.

Gangnam Style is exemplary of ideology today: it functions why? A quasi-religious rave experience, its not just this, its more making fun of yourself, ironic distance. Kung-fu Panda
The story in itself is ridiculously melodramatic, it is the form
What if a spiritual experience itself is disgusting, even if it is authentic.

Here is Ž talking about Gangnam in the United States at Todd McGowan’s place Oct 2012. IF there ever was a PURE IDEOLOGICAL phenomenon it is this. Rave, tech trance, repetitive. All the madness at Gangnam in South Korea is there. What fascinates me, it started as stupid song, it blew up into something SACRED. We haven’t seen something like this since early Beatles. 100,000 people in a stadium all dancing. They refer to him as messiah. It’s exploding everywhere. The words are obviously ironic, they make fun of the scene described by the song, but today’s functioning of ideology, you can make fun of it, not believe in it, but YOU ARE CAUGHT IN IT, IT WORKS.
Kungfu Panda: sacred warrior, it makes fun of its own ideology but it works. How does it functions?? How do you get caught in this song? You don’t like it … when you hear some totally disgusting song, but you can’t get rid of it .. it functions like this, my small son said it was disgusting, he ended up listening to it everyday. SINTHOME condensation of stupid enjoyment, you cannot get rid of it. This is authentically sacred. Not claiming this is false, there is ambiguity between sublime and ridicuoulsy, obsene compulsive enjoyment that is the sacred.

Returns of the sacred, what is it reacting against? Today’s society in which there is less and less space for dimension of the sacred, is the way to approach stupid returns of the sacred, ok ridiculous reactions but ask: WHICH FORM OF SPIRITUALITY FITS PERFECTLY, WOULD BE IDEAL FOR OUR GLOBAL CAPITALIST society? Is there a form of spirituality that would fit this society perfectly. Global capitalism, bio-genetic revolutions. I claim that a version of Bhuddism fits perfectly.

5 Nazi horror, transgression.
6 No ethnic cleansing without poetry, Levinas, Adorno, blame philosophers who do Totality, you brutally impose your vision on reality.
7 Edmund Burke, the revolutionaries were much more absolute, the reference to absolute can open up space of freedom
8 Poets, you need absolute mythic vision to function as a screen to kill people
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1 Cogito Ergo Sum: The mistake is at the very beginning, cogito is a process, totally non-substantial, but going to res cogitans, thing which thinks is wrong. Rennaisance is humanism, but lesson of Descartes, Kant, Hegel, the wealth of our personality is a mask, there is a VOID there. Transcendental tradition of modern philosophy, the wealth of human being is the mask of a VOID. I as a Cartesian am ready to sacrifice all my content, my emotions, what I can’t give away is the VOID itself.
2 Intelligent Cognitivists, like Daniel Dennett
3

johnston desire ethics Kant Antigone seminar VII

Johnston, Adrian. “The Vicious Circle of the Super-Ego: The Pathological Trap of Guilt and the Beginning of Ethics.” Psychoanalytic Studies. 3.3/4 (2001): 411-424.

🙂 In this article Johnston takes on Lacan’s “Do not give way on your desire!” What does this mean? It does not mean, “do not give way on your jouissance!”

AJ starts with Nietzsche. Why? Because Nietzsche is totally against Kant.

In the standard version of the Kantian schema, the subject’s intentions are most ethical when they are least tied to the particularity of the individual (i.e., his/her inclinations, desires, wishes, circumstances, etc.).

The categorical imperative (“I am never to act otherwise than so that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law”) functions as a kind of ‘sieve’ meant to strain out, as much as possible, these pathological materials tainting the intentional purity of duty.

Conversely, the injunction of the eternal return—perhaps this injunction is capable of being rendered in the imperative form as “I am never to act otherwise than so that I could also will that my concrete, unique , and utterly individual act should be ‘universalized’, namely, should endlessly recur for all eternity ”—demands exactly the opposite of the categorical imperative.

In a Nietzschean ‘system of valuation’, rather than being the basest, most unworthy of intentional states , the particular, idiosyncratic desires of the individual subject are the highest standards by which to measure actions.

Only if an action expresses the strongest of subjective urges, urges so strong that the subject would will them to infinitely manifest themselves again and again in all their singular uniqueness, is it of any worth. 412

Most reading s of the Lacanian dictum “Do not give way on your desire!” understand him to be proposing something similar to Nietzsche: (pure) desire is conceived of as jouissance, as the uncompromising , unconditional thrust of Trieb once operative outside the confining consequentialist calculus of the pleasure principle.

The subjective particularity of pure desire is ethical precisely when its strength overwhelms the mitigating influence of the pleasure-oriented ego.

Various commentaries on the seventh seminar point to the tragic figure of Antigone as proof that this is exactly what Lacan intends to convey. Antigone’s passionate attachment to her dead brother Polyneices drives her to transgress Creon’s edict forbidding the burial of the corpse. Her excessive ‘love’ is then compared with the Todestrieb, since Antigone is compelled to disregard the tragic consequences that she is fully aware await her in the wake of her act.

A Real passage á l’acte (i.e., Antigone’s burial of her brother as a result of her desire) transgressively disrupts the reign of a Symbolic system of Law (i.e., Creon’s denial of funerary rites for Polyneices on the grounds of the interests of the polis).

Is this the distilled essence of Lacan’s ‘ethics of psychoanalysis?’ Is he, like Nietzsche, simply interested in turning Kant on his head, in unreservedly transforming Kant into Sade?

Lacan explicitly states that desire arises from the sacrifice of jouissance: <span style=”font-weight: bold; font-size: 11pt;”>not ceding on one’s desire</span> would seem to entail not surrendering to the siren-song of jouissance, not capitulating to the uncompromising demands of Trieb.

Lacan describes desire as opposing jouissance—“desire is a defense, a prohibition against going beyond a certain limit in jouissance” 413

Lacan means, then “not giving ground on desire” is a translation of Kant’s insistence on the exclusion of pathological drives from properly ethical intentionality, with the psychoanalytic qualification that the detachment from these drives is itself achieved through and sustained by a subl(im)ation of inclination, a ‘self-subversion’ of Trieb. 413

Lacanian Desire

One of the easiest ways to gain a preliminary understanding of Lacanian desire is by returning to the Freudian concepts of Trieb and sublimation. For Freud, sublimation is the typical means by which Trieb adapts itself to the constraints and obstacles it comes to encounter at the level of the reality principle. Reality forbids certain drive-aims qua the attainment of satisfaction linked to determinate drive-objects. Thus, reality is said to be responsible for what Freud designates as ‘aim-inhibition ’ (a catalyst for sublimation).

The aim-inhibited drive then seeks other forms of satisfaction via different objects; and, if these alternate modes of securing gratication are not at odd s with the various prohibitions of the reality principle (usually, socio-cultural laws and norms), then the new libidinal arrangement is dubbed a successful sublimation of the drive .

Furthermore in Civilization and Its Discontents, he argues that ‘instinctual renunciation’ (i.e., the aim-inhibition of the drives demanded by human reality) is, despite appearances to the contrary, an unavoidable libidinal fate for all subjects.

As such, the Freudian subject lives in a state of unsatisfactory compromise: sublimation provides pleasurable outlets for Trieb, but Trieb itself is incapable of ever being fully satisfied with these compromises, since they are, by the very definition of the mechanism of sublimation, deviations from the original cathetic trajectory (i.e., the ‘earliest state of affairs’ which all drives struggle in vain to recover; in the seventh seminar, Lacan designates this posited ‘ground zero’ of the libidinal economy das Ding). The libidinal life of the human being is therefore marked by certain constitutive ‘lacks’ or ‘absences’—as Lacan puts it, the ‘sovereign Good’ of das Ding is always missing from the reality of subjective ‘ex-sistence’ — and this condition of (non-)existence is precisely what Lacan intends for his notion of ‘desire’ to designate. 413

Desire is the residual remainder/by-product of the subjection of jouissance (i.e., Trieb an sich, the unconditional attachment to das Ding) to the ego-mediated negotiations between the pleasure and reality principles. 414

In other words, desire is symptomatic of the drives’ dissatisfaction with the pleasure-yielding compromises of sublimation. 414

Lacan’s seventh seminar contains two separate lines of argumentation:

1. Lacan seeks to clarify and further develop Freud’s analyses of conscience as a manifestation of a pathological ‘moral masochism’ fueled by an insatiable super-ego;

2. Lacan lays down the preliminary groundwork for a psychoanalytic meta-ethical theory based on the possibility of desire coming to function in a ‘pure’, properly ethical fashion.

These two dimensions of Lacan’s so-called ‘ethics of psychoanalysis’ must not be conflated, since doing so results in either muddleheaded confusion or outright error.

To be continued …

brilliant lecture Ž limits of Hegel 2011 Lebrun rips off Sekine and Albritton

The Limits to Hegel 26 March 2011. The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities

Hegel and Marx
Passage from money to capital is clearly formuated in Hegelian terms: Substance and Subject

Oh here what does Žižek say but only the capital is the SUBJECT, as self-positing, self-mediating agent and AUTOMATIC subject, just wants more, more profit, just blindly repeats itself. What Hegel was no able to think was this weird unity dead blindly repetitive, conceptual self mediation and blind repetition.

When Marx describes the dance of capital, as the Hegel value of , but for Marx this is not the ultimate truth, the autonomy of this process, the self-generation of value is an ideological myth, it feeds on exploitation of workers and so on.

But we can say what Hegel describes here is not simply ideology, but its not also the brutal reality, it is something in-between the objective fantasy of capital. The ambiguous status of the reference to Hegel’s dialectic in Marx. there are two fundamentally different references: Grundrisse its the model of liberation, unity, reconciliation, subjectivy reconciled with substance.

Hegelian Dialectic in Capital not a model for process of liberation, but alienated capitalist reproduction, the big question here was the late Marx simply right? Lukacs is the model of the first reading, liberation, Hegel was right he just applied his dialectic matrix on wrong subject, replace Absolute Spirit with working class you got it, Adorno, dialectic is not dialectic of liberation but the very form of reproduction of alienated society. This idea that liberation will be a step OUT of dialectics. Dialectics is logic of alienated society. Ž says which should be much more DARING. Both Lukacs and Adorno is their reading of Hegel, is reconcilation is simply appropriation of the substance. If you really want to understand Hegel, you should see that reconcilation is not collective subject swallows reality, it is much more pessimistic mood.

DISGRACE one of the darkest novels that I know. It is not simple reaction of a deceived liberal to the new South Africa. But the final situation of the hero, this total loss, is maybe the closest we get to Hegelian reconciliation.

Maybe the way to go back to Hegel, is to ABANDON hyper idealist subjectivity reading where subject swallows everything, not its closer to Christian notion is that you get out of alienation not by overcoming it, you get out of alienation by redoubling it. The formula for me

The secrets of the Egyptians for us were secrets to the Egyptians themselves.

To go beyond Hegel, is to discover Hegelian dimension precisely in what Hegel was unable to grasp.

What Hegel could not have imagined is basic paradox of capitalist societies, is that you have formal legal equality, but that relationship of domination reproduces itself precisely under the form of equality. Domination that remains even when you abolish all direct forms of domination. In a modern democracy, certainly does not exclude the emergence of wealth and profound distinctions of rich and poor, there are still workers and managers, still profit and exploitation, but the new cultural equality, is infused with a powerful hatred of hierarchies and class caste distinctions, it is in our socieities permitted to be wealthy so long as the rich man is as vulgar as everyone else.

Possibility of a genuine reappropriation of HIGH culture.

RABBLE, the part of no-part

To be continued …

belief materialism subjectivity neighbour no big Other

Simon Critchley on love and self-loss

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

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

Belief

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

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

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

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

Materialism at its purest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ethics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chinese Model of Capitalism

Žižek Derrida 4 christian universality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Žižek Derrida 3 concrete universal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

Žižek Derrida 2 lesson of Hegel

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

What, then, would be this differénce that precedes the ethical commit-ment to the abyss of Otherness?

On the southern side of the demilitarized zone in Korea, there is a unique visitor’s site: a theater building with a large screenlike window in front, opening up onto theNorth. The spectaclepeo-ple observe when they take seats and look through the window is reality itself (or, rather, a kind of “desert of the real”): the barren demilitarized zone with walls, and so on, and, beyond, a glimpse of North Korea. (As if to comply with the fiction, North Korea has built in front of this theater a fake, a model village with beautiful houses; in the evening, the lights in all the houses are turned on at the same time, although nobody lives in them.)

Is this not a pure case of the symbolic efficiency of the frame as such? A barren zone is given a fantasmatic status, elevated into a spectacle, solely by being enframed. Nothing substantially changes here; it is merely that, viewed through the frame, reality turns into its own appearance.

A supreme case of such an ontological comedy occurred in December 2001 in Buenos Aires, when Argentinians took to the streets to protest against their government and, especially, against Cavallo, the economy minister. When the crowd gathered around Cavallo’s building, threatening to storm it, he escaped wearing a mask of himself (sold in disguise shops so that people could mock him by wearing his mask).

It thus seems that at least Cavallo did learn something from the widely spread Lacanian movement in Argentina — the fact that a thing is its own best mask. What one encounters in tautology is thus pure difference, not the difference between the element and other elements, but how the element is different from itself. 234

The fundamental lesson of Hegel is that the key ontological problem is not that of reality but that of appearance: not, Are we condemned to the interminable play of appearances, or can we penetrate through their veil to the underlying true reality?

but, How could — in the middle of flat, stupid reality, which is just there — something like appearance emerge?

The minimal ontology is therefore that of the Möbius strip, of the curved space that is bent onto itself; all that has to intervene into the Real is an empty frame so that the same things we saw “directly” before are now seen through the frame.

A certain surplus-effect is thus generated, which cannot simply be cancelled through demystification. It is not enough to display the mechanism behind the frame; the stage-effect within the frame becomes autonomous. How is this possible?

There is only one conclusion that can account for this gap: there is no “neutral” reality within which gaps occur, within which frames isolate domains of appearances.

Every field of “reality” (every “world”) is always already enframed, seen through an invisible frame. However, the parallax of the two frames is not symmetrical, composed of two incompatible perspectives on the same x: there is an irreducible asymmetry between the two perspectives, a minimal reflexive twist.

We do not have two perspectives; we have a perspective and what eludes it, and the other perspective fills in this void of what we could not see from the first perspective. 235

Žižek Derrida

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

Here we get the difference betweenHegel and Derrida at its purest.

Derrida accepts Hegel’s fundamental lesson that one cannot assert the innocent ideal against its distorted realization. This holds not only for democracy but also for religion.

The gap that separates the ideal concept from its actualization is already inherent to the concept itself.

However, againstHegel, Derrida insists on the irreducible excess in the ideal concept that cannot be reduced to the dialectic between ideal and its actualization: the messianic structure of “to come,” the excess of an abyss that cannot ever be actualized in its determinate content.Hegel’s own position is here more intricate than it may appear: his point is not that, through gradual dialectical progress, one can master the gap between concept and its actualization and achieve the concept’s full self-transparency (“Absolute Knowledge”).

Rather, to put it in speculative terms, his point is to assert a “pure” contradiction that is no longer the contradiction between the “undeconstructible” pure Otherness and its failed actualizations/determinations, but the thoroughly immanent “contradiction” that precedes any Otherness. 232

Actualizations and/or conceptual determinations are not traces of the undeconstructible” divineOtherness, but just traces marking their in-between.

Or, to put it in yet another way, in a kind of inverted phenomenological epoche, Derrida reduces Otherness to the “to come” of a pure potentiality, thoroughly deontologizing it, bracketing its positive content, so that all that remains is the specter of a promise; and what if the next step is to drop this minimal specter of Otherness itself, so that all that remains is the rupture, the gap as such that prevents entities from reaching their self-identity? 232

What if the idea of infinitemes-sianic justice that operates in an indefinite suspension, always to come, as the “undeconstructible” horizon of deconstruction, already obfuscates the
“pure”différance, the pure gap that differs an entity from itself?

Is it not possible to think this pure in-between prior to any notion of messianic justice? Derrida acts as if the choice is between the positive ontoethics, the gesture of transcending the existing order towards another higher positive Order, and the pure promise of spectral Otherness. However, what if we drop this reference to Otherness altogether? 233