Category: Žižek

ethics is not w/in framework of law

We might say that the ethical dimension of an action is ‘supernumerary’ to the conceptual pair legal/illegal.

This in turn suggests a structural connection with the Lacanian notion of the Real. As Alain Badiou has noted, Lacan conceives of the Real in a way that removes it from the logic of the apparently mutually exclusive alternatives of the knowable and the unknowable. The unknowable is just a type of the knowable; it is the limit or degenerate case of the knowable; whereas the Real belongs to another register entirely.

Analogously, for Kant the illegal still falls within the category of legality -they both belong to the same register, that of things conforming or failing to conform with duty. Ethics – to continue the analogy – escapes this register.

Even though an ethical act will conform with duty, this by itself is not and cannot be what makes it ethical. So the ethical cannot be situated within the framework of the law and violations of the law. Again, in relation to legality, the ethical always presents a surplus or excess. The question then becomes: ‘what exactly is the nature of this excess?’ The simple answer is that it has something to do with the Kantian conception of ‘form’. The exact meaning of this requires more careful consideration. EOR 12

ethical maxim discourse of master

The ethical maxim behind the discourse of the master is perhaps best formulated in the famous verse from Juvenal: ‘Summum crede nefas animam praeferre pudori, et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas‘

Count it the greatest of all sins to prefer life to honour, and to lose, for the sake of living, all that makes life worth living.

Another version of this credo might be found in Paul Claude!: ‘Sadder than to lose one’s life is it to lose one’s reason for living.’

In ‘Kant with Sade’ Lacan proposes his own ‘translation’ of this ethical motto:’desire, what is called desire, suffices to make life have no sense in playing a coward.’ (EOR 5)

Kant introduced dimension of desire into ethics

Kant was the one who introduced the dimension of desire into ethics, and brought it to its ‘pure state’. This step, crucial as it was, nevertheless needs another ‘supplementary’ step, which Kant — at least according to Lacan — did not take: the step that leads beyond desire and its logic, into the realm of the drive.

An ethics of the Real is not an ethics orientated towards the Real, but an attempt to rethink ethics by recognizing and acknowledging the dimension of the Real (in the Lacanian sense of the term ) as it is already operative in ethics. The term ethics is often taken to refer to a set of norms which restrict or ‘bridle’ desire – which aim to keep our conduct (or, say, the ‘conduct’ of science) free of all excess. Yet this understanding of ethics fails to acknowledge that ethics is by nature excessive, that excess is a component of ethics which cannot simply be eliminated without ethics itself losing all meaning. In relation to the ‘smooth course of events’, life as governed by the ‘reality principle’, ethics always appears as something excessive, as a disturbing ‘interruption’. (EOR 4)

zupancic ethics of real 1

By insisting on the fact that the moral imperative is not concerned with what might or might not be done, Kant discovered the essential dimension of ethics: the dimension of desire , which circles around the real qua impossible. This dimen­sion was excluded from the purview of traditional ethics, and could therefore appear to it only as an excess.

So Kant’s crucial first step involves taking the very thing excluded from the traditional field of ethics, and turning it into the only legitimate territory for ethics. If critics often criticize Kant for demanding the impossible, Lacan attributes an incontestable theoretical value to this Kantian demand. 3

zizek on malabou descartes malabranche autism

Žižek. S. “Descartes and the Post-Traumatic Subject.” Filozofski vestnik. 29. 2 (2008): 9-29.
Žižek. S. “Descartes and the Post-Traumatic Subject: On Catherine Malabou’s Les Nouveaux Blessés.” Qui Parle. 17.2 (2009): 123–147.
online
PDF download

Catherine Malabou Replies to Žižek

In the new form of subjectivity (autistic, indifferent, without affective engagement), the old personality is not “sublated” or replaced by a compensatory formation, but thoroughly destroyed — destruction itself acquires a form, becomes a (relatively stable) “form of life” – what we get is not simply the absence of form, but the form of (the) absence (of the erasure of the previous personality, which is not replaced by a new one).

More precisely, the new form is not a form of life, but, rather, a form of death – not an expression of the Freudian death drive, but, more directly, the death drive. 15

does she not forget to include herself, her own desire, into the observed phenomenon (of autistic subjects)? in an ironic reversal of her claim that the autistic subject is unable to enact transference, it is her own transference she does not take into account when she portrays the autistic subject’s immense suffering. This subject is primordially an enigmatic impenetrable thing, totally ambiguous, where one cannot but oscillate between attributing to it immense suffering and blessed ignorance.

What characterizes it is the lack of recognition in the double sense of the term: we do not recognize ourselves in it, there is no empathy possible, AND the autistic subject, on account of its withdrawal, does not enact recognition (it doesn’t recognize US, its partner in communication). 17

Žižek in Porto Alegro India story alternate modernities

Žižek in Porto Alegre March 5, 2013

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4
2:10 Fredric Jameson alternate modernities, no its just alternate capitalisms
3:30 There are certain antagonisms in capitalism which are immanent to capitalism as such!
4:00 Alternate Modernity (localize antagonism, as if they belong to certain versions of capitalism, oh Western capitalism has individualism, consumerism etc)
Do not forget that this different modes of capitalism are different way of trying to deal with the same fundamental deadlock of capitalism. Capitalism is genuinely global is not longer a eurocentric phenomenon, it can work with Hinduism, in China etc. It is the universal matrix of economic development.
6:00 Multiculturalism
7:00 India
8:30 Žižek now famous story while in India of being attacked for speaking English

Part 5 India
You lost something, you are trying to get, emancipated free India. Are you aware that what you lost through colonization is something that emerged through colonization, and has nothing to do with pre-colonial India, paradoxically engendered through this Imperialism.

2:00 The Thesis of Less Than Nothing In a proper dialectical process, yes you lose something, but what you lose does not precede the loss. It is not first you have something then you lose it, you lose something and retroactively the dream of what you have lost emerges … then dream not a return to your pre-colonial roots, if you play this you play a nasty colonialist game. It is as it were to beat the colonialist at their own game.

3:00 Malcolm X But this doesn’t mean I want back my African roots, the X is a new universalist freedom, I can define myself in a new universalism
4:30 Dirty obscene joke Yes the wound is closed, but I prefer the wound

7:20 When we talk about the fall from paradise, before Fall there is no Heaven, we don’t fall from Paradise, paradise is stupid animal kingdom, goodness is created in the Fall, the Fall creates what we fell from.
8:30 Australia the senior Muslim cleric. Uncovered meat. worst anti-feminism. But look, there is something strange. Only the women is treated as an ethical agent, that’s why they are to blame, men are treated as dogs.

Part 6
Islam, truth is accessible to a man in through mediation of a woman

Part 7

Short video Žižek in Brazil

This looks like Ž’s recent trip to Brazil in March 2013.

Part 1
Part 2 
Part 3 
Part 4

Our autonomy always was an illusion. Isn’t our language our symbolic system a kind of big dialisis machine, we need to link with it, we can’t survive without it. Daniell Dennet
Virtual Sex  In a way sex always was virtual.
Fantasy

Maybe we’ll lose just some narcissistic illusions. We should never forget that the most intelligent machines, work only with their connection with human intelligence.  We need always bear in mind the uniqueness of human subjectivity  Disagrees with Kurzweil  New collective mind blah blah, he still speaks as an ordinary human, we will still feel and reason and emotion as singular human beings.

Paul and Patricia Churchland: No free self, we are just neuronal machines.  The illusion of freedom is part of our biological nature. There will be forever a gap, between what we scientifically know, and a users illusion.  Then there is Habermas, then there is the Churchlands We can imagine a society which will succeed in making the scientific truth that we are simply neuronal mechanisms part of our daily self-experience. Thus it will be a softer society, one that does not punish etc.

Now Ž is more in line with Thomas Metzinger who wrote a book called, Being No One, The Self Model Theory of Subjectivity 2003. There is only one spiritual position which really elevates our self-experience to the level of brain science, it is Buddhist meditation. Thoughts without Thinker. It is only the radical Buddhist who goes through getting get rid of the illusion of free self who emerges at the level of todays sciences.

German neurologist: Thomas Metzinger  No such thing as a Self Something tremendously new may emerge, but it won’t be linked to intelligence. When we imagine the future, as in George Lucas’ Star Wars, we still imagine in categories of federation, Emperor all the medieval ideology has to return etc. It is really very hard to try to imagine a different future.

anti semitic

“The anti-Semitic figure of the Jew (to take THE example of this sublime object) bears witness to the fact that the ideological desire which sustains anti-Semitism is inconsistent, ‘self-contradictory’ (capitalist competition AND pre-modern organic solidarity, etc). In order to maintain this desire, a specific object must be invented which gives body to, externalizes, the cause of the non-satisfaction of this desire (the Jew who is responsible for social disintegration).

The lack of positive ontological consistency in this figure of the Jew is proved by the fact that the true relationship of causality is inverted with regard to the way things appear within the anti-Semitic ideological space: it is not the Jew who prevents Society from existing (from realizing itself as a full organic solidarity, etc); rather, it is social antagonism which is primordial, and the figure of the Jew comes second as a fetish which materializes this hindrance.

In this sense, one can also say that the Jew (not actual Jews, but the ‘conceptual Jew’ in anti-Semitism) is a Kantian ‘negative magnitude’: the positivization of the opposing force of ‘evil’ whose activity explains why the order of Good can never fully win. One of the most elementary definitions of ideology, therefore, is: a symbolic field which contains such a filler holding the place of some structural impossibility, while simultaneously disavowing this impossibility.”

Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies (1997)

Ž on Hegel Feb 2013

Slavoj Žižek giving a talk in Heidelberg, Germany presented by cultural institute DAI Heidelberg on Monday, February 25, 2013.
dai-heidelberg.de

15.00 Hegel

16:00 Franco “Bifo” Berardi (born November 2, 1948, Bologna, Italy) is an Italian Marxist theorist and activist in the autonomist tradition, whose work mainly focuses on the role of the media and information technology within post-industrial capitalism. Berardi has written over two dozen published books, as well as a more extensive number of essays and speeches. Never have we been so impotent, so unable to find a way for a NEW possible direction. The great loser of this crisis has been the radical left.

22:00 Terracota army which will awaken and do the big authentic revolution. Maybe we should break with this basic paradigm. Chritianity to Nietzsche to Heidegger, now we are at the moment of metaphysics of presence, exhausted this potential. Marx is part of this logic, the whole notion of proletarian revolution, pure zero point of radical alienation, but things may turn around. What we need today is a return from Marx to Hegel.

25:00 return to Hegel

Marx: precapitalist modes of production prehistory with substantial identity between workers and objective conditions of production are torn away from workers and in capitalism this process reaches its high point you have proletarians as pure substantial but precisely radical alienation provides opportunity outside substance and then creates point of collective subjectivity and can reapproapriate

29:00 Lukacs What Hegel is describing of Idea appropriating

Late Marx Reading in Capital: Hegel’s logic is not logic of liberation but idealist reproduction of capitalist alienation, so revolution is step outside dialectics, speculative dialectics is speculative movement of capital.

SUbstantial unity: alienation: precisely when subject is reduced to zero,

30:00 This is not Hegel
32:00 Islam uncovered meat

The cleric compares us men to ‘dogs’ when I see a naked woman, I will just jump her, we are dogs.

Implicitly women are the only ethical responsible ones, men are like dogs, the only one who can be addressed as a potential ethical subject is Woman.

Adam without Eve is an animal.

The innocence of paradise is another name for animal life, the Fall is animal life to properly human existence, the Fall itself creates what it is a fall from.

37:40 Jewish, sacred Talmud. two rabbis debate a theological point, and then one losing debate, “oh lets call God himself” so God comes. The other guy shouts at God, “listen old man, eff off, you did your job, you did it badly, now leave it to us to do some theological thinking.” And God say you are right, and runs away.

Not saying the Fall precedes, not saying you have to fall, then to get it back NO

Malbranche: Chritianity at its craziest, rvealed secret of Christianity

Why did God create the world? So that God could bask in the glory of being celebrated, so he created the world out of pure selfish vanity, he wanted to be praised,a nd people to celebrate him. it was not that Christ came to earth to deliver us from sin the saintly figure who sacrifices himself, secretly wants the others to suffer mmisery so that he can help them. Man helps crippled wife but would leave her if she was successful

Good and sacrificial: narcissitic satisfaction, God also loves only himself, he pushes humans into misery so he could save them and be celebrated by them  Without Christ coming, nobody would have been lost, every human had to fall, so that Christ could come and deliver some of us.  At no time was God the father happier when he saw his son dying on the cross, God was so happy to see this.

We have to fall so we can tgriumphly return to ouselves.

44:00 BUT! Its not that there had to be Holocaust so that we could get the State of Israel.

There is no retroactive justification here.

46:00  A Joke.  Taken from a Christian Palestinian in Ramallah.

The way out of the wound, is to accept fully the wound itself.  In the very return to it they created it, the return to the tradition that they themselves create in their very return to it.

51:20  The FAMOUS INDIA ANECDOTE that will make this Hegelian point clear
55:00 It takes him time to get to the Hegelian point of this anecdote

imposition of English
The pre-colonial India was a terrifying mess
Through colonization, you lose something that is only created through this colonial oppression.

1:10 Hegel’s unification of Subject and Substance

Of course there is no in-itself, a substantial higher destingy that controls us, but this does not make us masters of the universe, there is no big Other, no higher power, we are condemned to contingency, condemned to freedom. We have to accept a basic alienation, but not Marx’s alienation

Necessity of the Illusion: you cannot just drop the illusion, and he cites Jameson here again, and claims against Jameson that we are not in a cynical era, the thesis of Marx, our freedom privilges our values, yes one side, were are not only more particular than we appear, we are also much more universal than we appear.
It’s totally wrong to think this is brutal power discourse (Screw ideology its all about money). Read Hitler, did he really believe in what he was writing? Yes and No. He was manipulated. But what is terrifying, the passages where he falls into his own trap and believes it. The financial crisis of 2008, who caused it, the most CYNICAL capitalists, brutal cynics don’t see, is that in their egoist brutality they are following fictions about money etc.
Hegel does not renounce emancipatory activity, do what you want but be aware that history is an open process whose meaning is decided retroactively, you cannot control in advance the symbolic intent the of what you are doing.

You want to say womthing, yo uget lost, you try to climb out of trap you fall into, you say too much, then you have to improvise, All Great Thoughts Emerge By Chance. This is deeply Hegelian.

1:19   Hegel’s reading of Antigone: I like this, retroactivity of meaning. Antigone in Hegelian way, discovers that she is doing what she is doing only by doing it. At first there are immortal laws blah, only later that she gives the real reason, the dramatic part … which is such a trauma for humanitarian readers … its only her brother. She discovers this only through doing it. This is the lesson of HEgel, we have to toake the risk by doing it. without this teleological necessity.

I think that Hegel missed something. A Hegelian re-writing of Anigone. Brecht, 3 versions of the story. Both Creon and Antigone are arrested and Chorus becomes revolutionary people party for democracy.

Malcolm X: He adopted X as the name, this X, is what we lost in being slaved, colonized, not our African roots, it is X, as universal.

The way for you to truly emancipate yourselves, is not drop English and go back to some archaic unity, but to beat the colonizers in their own language.

GLobal capitalism: Even English language itself is taken from the English and spoken by some street vendor in Singapore.

Language is not our spontaneous mode of expression, there is a traumatic gap, symbolic castration, language hurts there is no spontaneous symbiosis

English as imposed language is you obfuscate that no language is natural. Every language is torture.

1:03 In Hegel there is no immediate identity, it is the loss itself.
First you experience a loss, but you live in illusion that you return to what you have lost,
what Hegel calls reconciliation is that you accept the loss itself.

Doctor jokes: The bad news is the same as good news from different Bad news you have cancer good news is that you have also have Alzheimers, you’ll forget the bad news as soon as you return home Bad news cancer in 2 months you are dead Good news: f***ing the nurse Good news: Your name wil be soon a household name they’ll name a disease after you

we begin with a fall, and then we end up by fulling accepting the fall, you don’t overcome it. you fully accept the wound

1:07 Hegel Politics
Things were bad you get French Revolution and then things get worse

Hegel: how to find victory in defeat itself. Hegel was much more a thinker of contingency than Marx, for Hegel, it would never habe been permitted to occupy position of Marx, I know the logic of history which gives the objective possiblity of communism, and I perceive myself the agent of history, I can step on my own shoulders and see where I am in history and act accordingly.
Hegel, said grey in grey

1:09:55 Shout out to Rebecca Comay

god

A man asked Herr. Keuner if there is a God. Herr Keuner said: “I advise you to consider whether, depending on the answer, your behavior would change.  If it would not change, then we can drop the question. If it would change, then I can help you at least insofar as I can tell you: You have already decided: You need a God.

Ž Interrogating the Real

Ž politics between fear and terror the act 2006

Slavoj Zizek.  Politics between Fear and Terror Atkinson Hall, University of California, San Diego. November 15, 2006.

Ethics of the Real, an act.

Here it is!  What would be a more AUTHENTIC ACT?

The lie is the form of tragedy itself. The true horror, Gulag, Holocaust is that they are more tragic than tragedy.  Tragedy still presupposes a minimum of dignity.

What dies on the cross is God himself. The catastrophe of the Holocaust was a catastrophe for God himself.

What we know, known knowns, there are known unknowns.

There is always a minimal tension in us between belief and disbelief. Did the ancient Greeks believe in their myths?

How social groups work We never simply have rules.  You obey you’re in, you disobey you’re out.  No, if you obey rules, sometimes you’re seen as an idiot.  Not simply obey the rules, but to know which rules to violate.   The first question you ask yourself, “Is it really prohibted, do it but do it discreetly, or is it really prohibited.”  Or the opposite, something is secretly a call to do it, but in a certain way: You are allowed, permitted to do it, a freedom of choice on condition you do not do what you are permitted.  Japan in workers can use 40 days of holiday, but they are expected not to use the right in its full extent.

The famous Judith Butler anecdote: You Owe Me No Apology! I used vulgar words. So I saw I did something terribly wrong, and called her later to apologize. Our entire ethical substance hangs on these implicit rule, cannot be normalized or canonized. This is one of the problems of political correctness, it tends to legalize what should function as spontaneous set of rules. The moment you have to do it the battle is already lost. It is obscene to say, “I oppose to rape” and then to give arguments. I want to live in a society where the I don’t have to argue for this.

Žižek poetry Midsummer nights dream 2009 and 2012

Madman, Lover and the Poet Midsummer’s Night Dream Act 5

THESEUS
A gap between ordinary reality and some ethereal dimension, but this gap is gradually reduced starting with madman, then lover and then finally closed?? with the Poet.

The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman:
[A madman simply sees madmen, devils everywhere. He misperceives a bush for a bear]

the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt:
[Transubstantiated into appearance of sublime dimension, the face appears as it is, but still the lover its sees beauty as you are as such, at the same time you are something sublime, true love doesn’t idealize. Lover sees beauty in an ordinary face.]

The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

[Transcendence is reduced to zero. Empirical reality is not transubstantiated into a materialization of a higher reality, but into materialization of nothing. In ordinary life appearance means the appearance of something behind. Poetry is appearance against the background of nothing, the moment you are looking for something behind as it were, you lose the point. ]

Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

Ž in Iran 2012
Talks about Shakespeare’s Midsummer here
We have a gap between ordinary reality and some transcendent ethereal dimension.  But in all 3 cases this distance is reduced.

Madman false realty misperceived as reality, bush misperceived as bear.
Lover retains the transubstantiated appearance into a sublime dimension. This imperfect frail being is the absolute.
The Poet we also get appearance, but we don’t misperceive it, its not transcendence in ordinary as in love, it is a MATERIALIZATION OF NOTHING.  You have an appearance, it is not some substantial X that appears, its nothing, nothing appears.  This is a nice formula for political revolution.  To give shape to nothing.  The opening of the new.