Žižek – Page 16

Žižek in New York city lacan.com

liberal immigration is in interests of ruling class

capitalism has reinvented itself after 1968 with this pomo dynamic, with no left alternative

only original idea of the left return to Keynes, short-term hmm ok. But only global model seriously presented would have been the so-called “basic income” model and Negri-Hardt support it.

Žižek starts his criticism of Badiou according to Badiou: We no longer have a global social theory, just fragmented, all we can do is intervene locally, anti-capitalism has no meaning, capitalism is the air we breathe, historical reality is exerienced as symbolic fiction, he is more Kantian, advocates necessary fictions a very Kantian notion. No history with capital H, the only real is the real of a political act, you need symbolic a story to provide the illusory background to make meaningful the real of political engagment. You need a story to move you to political action, the idea of Communism, for him this is the necessary illusion, you need a story for the REAL of the political engagment. Z rejects this entirely. You need a leader like Lenin, Stalin, the cult of personality. You need to locate the Real is some narrative

criticism of Badiou pt 2 What Ž doesn’t like is Badiou’s idea that you need a symbolic illusion to propgate the real of an ethical committment. you have to tell a mythical story for the Real of ethical committment to work. Badiou wants dialectical materialism without historical materialism. This new stage of capitalism where cultural ideology and poltiical are intermixed, if we don’t confront this we are lost. We NEED more than ever a theory of what goes on today, where are we today, what is happening. We don’t know. It is still capitalism, its an open question: what is happening now in China. I don’t buy Badiou’s abstract ethics of the purity of the idea. He opposes, Dare to Win. The lesson of 21st century to win is to lose in a more radical way. All 3 defeats happened, because you dared to win. No subtraction, we should withdrawal. Žižek disagrees. Cultural production is part of the base today. If we will not do it, in 50 years we will live in a society I might prefer not to live in. Ž says, Dare to win!

I don’t think radical leftists today really want a change

Symbolic Castration So thank you for the castrating experience, less is more. You are much more than your title, you are also a warm human being.

Ž in Brazil

Žžek Sao Paulo Brazil 8 March 2013

Difference between Vampires and Zombies
Hugo Chavez and Citizen Kane
Legacy of Chavez

Something is happening for which we have models in the past they met they talked for 2 months and then they left. What in Hegel’s old terms the passage from in-itself (chaotic protest) to for-itself (organized program) why doesn’t this happen?

Negri multitude: participation, abolish hierarchy, local participation

The Leader and Transference People don’t know what they want, but every authentic revolutionary process is a transference at work, a ‘subject supposed to know’ what you want

We need large efficient structures, just think of how to deal with the ecological crisis.

But what about the “morning after” When things return to normal, bourgeois liberals like nothing more than temporary outbursts. Alain Badiou, even, a little bit of this dismissing of ordinary everyday life as “animal life” non-evental, NO. The thing is to change the normal everyday life, when things return to normal.

Stalin and Violence Violence as sign of impotence: when we criticize the 20th century left for its excessive violence (critiques of Stalinism) the usual mistake is to focus on violence, of course Stalin was wrong killing millions, but not otherwise Stalin was ok, just a mistake of violence. No brutal violence is a sign of impotence. The forced collectivization of farms of 1920-30s isn’t this brutal violence a sign of extreme inability to solve the problem. Which was the BIG problem of Russia, how to bring farmers into Socialism. A brutal acting out: passage a l’act

Violence against women Gang rapes in India, but way its reported is symptomatic. Arundati Roy, the rapists were poor ordinary people, in India there were much worse horror stories, prostitution houses in Bombay, rich people sending emissaries in Nepal, and buy girls from 4-5 yrs and bring them to bordellos. Everybody knows this, its done systematically. I would like to know about this. A collective re-assertion of masculinity in moments of panic, Suaraz, in Mexico south of the border: thousands of young independent woman in poorly paid jobs, this is a provocation to machismo, every year 100 are killed, local gangs kidnap. It’s a collective obscene ‘pseudo sacred’ event. What the police does? Is they call social workers who systematically try to re-interpret as cases of local family violence, systematically obliterating these cases.

Žižek mentions Canada less reported, Vancouver, the most liberal city, the big reservation of ‘natives’ and in their reservation were allowed to have their own police force, a group of white people go to reservation, kidnap a lone native girl, rape and kill her and dump her body just within the reservation, and if local police call Canadian police they are told, its on your reservation, and then reduce it to a matter of family violence etc and systematically try to obliterate render invisible, insitutional ritualistic function of this violence.

Church peodophilia Garry Wills from Chicago: being a priest made him a molester. It’s part of hidden church identity.

Eurocentrism (India story) Chavez, resisted the temptation of claiming the solution is to return indigenous roots, authentic collective being etc. Global modernization is here, there’s no way back. Famous INDIA story. It is true there was pre-modern India, then Brits came along and installed a foreign culture. BUT what India today wants: new open modern democratic post-colonial India, what they want as the goal of their fight against residues of colonization, is a dream which emerged with that very colonization.

Hegel saw this very clearly PARADOX: a universality is brutally imposed, experienced as a traumatic loss, but what you are really deprived of, is not what you really lost, pre-modern India, no the space of which was opened for this very brutal modernization.

The detailed book on caste system, it was put together as ancient classic by British colonizers, when they said we need some local ideology to keep Indians under our rule. Contrary to belief, Imperialists were always multicultural. In South Africa, the defence was, oh my god what an authentic world the Hotentot has, if we get rid of apartheid, they will get lost in Western society, we need their authenticity, to remind us of our loss. Mandela did not fall into this trap of returning to roots. Even Malcolm X, the X is loss of roots, not return to African roots, the X, as lack roots in tradition, as opportunity for liberation.

What Hegel saw clearly, from the Logic of Reflection: Absolute Recoil, or counter-punch, a thing DOES NOT precede its loss, it emerges ONLY THROUGH ITS LOSS. The illusion of putting the blame on English language, it prevent us from expressing ourselves, here I’m a Lacanian-Hegelian: every language is like this, a fundamental gap between human subject and language. It is not enough to be Heidegger, language is the house of being, no Lacan: Language is the torture house of being. Language by its nature is lying, we have to torture language to make it say the truth. oh but a humanist says, you start to torture language you end up torturing people. NO! its exactly the opposite

You either torture language or you torture people. Look at poetry. the greatest torture machine you can imagine. imagine writing a sonnet. There is a fundemental violence in language.

Apply the Hegelian Recoil How something emerges through its very loss: when we think we are returning to some roots, we are effectively creating in the very return, what we are returning to. Eric Hobsbawn, a wonderful book “Invented Traditions” in Scotland kilts, nothing in middle ages, but invented in late 19th century revival.

People never authentically believed, we believed by RECOIL. Cynicism is the greatest illusion. Those who are cynical realists are the most blind to what is going on. Back to Jameson, we are in a cynical era, those in power don’t even believe themselves, its only economic power interests. Today we do not need any longer exquisite critique of ideology, what is unsaid in what is said, absences, lacunae, not its all bluff. NO! The big less of Marx precisely such brutal thinking, no b.s. its just money power sex. THIS IS THE GREATEST ILLUSION

Remember the financial crisis of 2008. It was not done by welfare state idealist living in their illusions, it was done by most cynical banking guys, who said fuck ideas, its just about money and so on. Cynicism means PERVERT. The unconscious is most inaccessible to penetrate in perverts. They are the most oppressed, these perverts.

What is it then that cynics do NOT see? The material power of illusions themselves. This is the DEEPEST INSIGHT OF MARX: COMMODITY FETISHISM.

What Marx called CF, in the very heart of our real life the place of CF is REAL, the most brutal commodity exchange. We need critique of ideology more than ever, especially in an era that says its cynical post-ideological.

Maurizio Lazzarato The Making of the Indebted Man This book claims in todays global capitalism, the status of being indebted changed: what we are witnessing today, and this is IDEOLOGY at its purest, if we poor want to be consumers, we have to be in debt. This is conceptualized as entrepreneurship of the self, big or small we are all entrepreneurs of the self. This is your way to INVEST in yourself. It functions like capitalist investment. I want to educate my children, like a small enterprise, I go in debt to INVEST in their future.

This logic of being indebted and investment serves as a way of IDEOLOGICAL control. no longer do we need oppressive machines, the moment you are in debt you have to take care of yourself, it works at the level of individuals, companies and states. Argentina, through some loans, decided to pay back directly its debt to IMF. Instead of being glad, the bank was concerned, that now they might do something crazy, how do we control them now? SUPEREGO: precisely you are not supposed to meet this demand to do it, the point is NOT to repay the debt, the point is a means of control, to keep you permanently in debt. This is where we are today. Without this UNIVERSALIZATION of capitalism, where we are all capitalists, you are a small capitalist investing, this is a small example of how IDEOLOGY works. This is way to dismantle what remains of welfare state. Instead of state deciding, YOU should decide, You should invest. YOUR SLAVERY IS SOLD TO YOU AS YOUR FREEDOM. You are treated as small capitalist investor. This allegedly brutal modern financial world is the world of ILLUSIONS of DREAMING.

Brutal Tasteless Joke In order to go further, to criticize capitalism, one has to go through capitalism. Even concerning formal freedoms, Marx knew very well that formal freedom which is empty allows you to build a measure, from you can see how effectively NOT FREE you are. Reject Stalinist “all bourgeois freedom” If you are taken away formal freedom you lose even the chance to see your freedom. When I was in Palestine, Ramallah, I met a Christian Palestinian, he told an obscene joke about Jesus Christ, just when Christ, on the last night, and he know that next day he would be crucified, the apostles worried, he didn’t have any fun, shouldn’t he experience some fun before he dies, they call Mary Magdelene, go seduce Jesus … 5 minute comes running out, terrified. They ask What happened? She says: he started well, I danced, …. This is the liberation I don’t want, I want us to enjoy our wounds.

Question and Answer Session Less Than Nothing Close reading of Hegel, quantum physics, The basic message is political: FACE IT if we want to be Marxists today, we have to admit, the very fact that Stalinism emerged, the very fact of old style commies, as in China, the best managers of capitalism, we have to RETHINK critically the Marxist legacy to REPEAT Marx, his critique of political economy is breath-taking, it is the only serious description of the totality of capitalist reproduction. WHO IS THE AGENT OF REVOLUTIONARY change today. Working class??? I doubt it. Permenent wage workers, is almost a privileged position. The role of natural resources in exploitation, Marx was marked by his time, when he unambiguously claimed that natural resources are NOT a source of value, the irony he uses is OIL. Are we aware what this means, this means in so far as, when Chavez was selling oil to USA, if we mechanically apply Marx’s position, it would mean Chavez was exploiting USA, he was selling something that had in Marxist sense no value.

Heckler, interruption of Žižek The Year of Dreaming Dangerously The Minotaur, the Greek economist. Absolutely crucial to EXPAND the notion of EXPLOITATION. Include PERMANENTLY unemployed in the exploited. Unemployment isn’t what Marx was talking about, not today, more and more the whole strata, whole groups are getting permanently unemployed, whole countries in symbolic sense unemployed, rogue countries are excluded CONGO, crazy rogue state, but there isn’t a country more included in global capitalism than CONGO.

All I’m saying is that if you dogmatically insist on working class fundamentalism, only workers create value, then the moment its a problem how to account to for 3rd world state wanting to profit from their natural wealth. I develop year of Dreaming Dangerously, we are in a way partially returning from PROFIT TO RENT. More and more RENT IS THE SOURCE OF WEALTH. Bill Gates, privatized part of what Marx called GENERAL INTELLECT. collective intellectual substance, what we use to communicate with each other, the PRIVATIZATION of the collective substance of knowledge.

Maybe we should risk returning to HEGEL Maybe Hegel was more materialist than Marx, Hegel precisely much more open to the CONTINGENCY of historical development. He prohibited dreaming about future, its not for us to dream … Holderlin poet: where the danger is the greatest, there salvation potentially arises. We are at the lowest moment, but there is a chance of the biggest reversal. Proletarian position is lowest but greatest liberation. No. We had a great attempt of liberalization in 20th century it failed, but how to avoid so we should do nothing, become cynics, Hegel, says it has to FAIL the first time, the thing is NOT TO LOSE HOPE after the first failure. The American guy Stanley Cavell wrote a book about the comedies of REMARRIAGE. comedies who stories: couple are in love, marry, bliss is over, divorce, meet again, remarry, you have to marry twice to have the REAL marriage. Authentic revolutionary process, first it has to go wrong, then you have the true test.

Žižek gives his opinion of Latin American Left disagrees with Tariq Ali, “Europe should look to Latin America.” No way! Look at the countries, capitalism in its most violent: Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, China These are countries with an extremely strong regulative state. We need to distinguish ne0-liberalism in its ideology and what is really going on. The USA state apparatus was never stronger than today.

Philosophers misunderstand each other, Hegel misunderstood everyone: Philosophical dialogue doesn’t work. I read another philosopher, but my very misunderstanding is productive and I invent something new.

Democracy Badiou drops it. What to replace it? Justice?? everyone is for justice? I think that I am ready to keep the term democracy on condition that we accept that what we today call, democracy in the institutional sense of multi-party democracy, is simply not strong and efficient enough to deal with ecological and global problems we are facing today. Bolivia, adds local indigenous movements, but he has no illusions about them. There are new opportunities of corruption that open up, they send their chiefs, who get corrupted, fight for their own group against other group, there is NO easy solution. Parliamentary democracy will NOT suffice.

Ž begin at the beginning pt 1

The only true question today is: do we endorse the predominant naturalization of capitalism, or does today’s global capitalism contain antagonisms powerful enough to prevent its indefinite reproduction? 212

Žižek, Slavoj. “How to Begin from the Beginning.” The Idea of Communism. Eds. Costas Douzinas, and Slavoj Žižek, New York: Verso, 2011. 209-226. Print.

There are four such antagonisms:

the looming threat of ecological catastrophe,
the inappropriateness of the notion of private property for so-called ‘intellectual property’,
the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments(especially in biogenetics),
new forms of apartheid,new Walls and slums. 212-213

There is a qualitative difference between the last feature — the gap that separates the Excluded from the Included — and the other three, which designate the domains of what Hardt and Negri call the ‘commons’, the shared substance of our social being, the privatization of which involves violent acts which should also, where necessary, be resisted with violent means:

— the commons of culture, the immediately socialized forms of ‘cognitive’ capital, primarily language, our means of communication and education, but also the shared infrastructure of public transport, electricity, post, etc. (if Bill Gates were to be allowed a monopoly, we would have reached the absurd situation in which a private individual would literally own the software texture of our basic network of communication);

— the commons of external nature, threatened by pollution and exploitation (from oil to rain forests and the natural habitat itself);

— the commons of internal nature (the biogenetic inheritance of humanity); with new biogenetic technology, the creation of a New Man in the literal sense of changing human nature becomes a realistic prospect.

… one should give all weight to the terms ‘global citizenship’ and ‘common concern’ — the need to establish a global political organization and engagement which, neutralizing and channelling market mechanisms, expresses a properly communist perspective.

Today’s historical situation not only does not compel us to drop the notion of proletariat, of the proletarian position — on the contrary, it compels us to radicalize it to an existential level well beyond Marx’s imagination.

We need a more radical notion of the proletarian subject, a subject reduced to the evanescent point of the Cartesian cogito, deprived of its substantial content. 213

For this reason, the new emancipatory politics will no longer be the act of a particular social agent, but an explosive combination of different agents. What unites us is that, in contrast to the classic image of proletarians having ‘nothing to lose but their chains’, we are in danger of losing everything: the threat is that we will be reduced to an abstract empty Cartesian subject deprived of all substantial content, dispossessed of our symbolic substance, our genetic base heavily manipulated, vegetating in an unlivable environment.

This triple threat to our entire being makes us all in a way proletarians, reduced to ‘substanceless subjectivity’, as Marx put it in the Grundrisse.

The figure of the ‘part of no-part’ confronts us with the truth of our own position, and the ethico-political challenge is to recognize ourselves in this figure — in a way, we are all excluded, from nature as well as from our symbolic substance. Today, we are all potentially a homo sacer,and the only way to defend against actually becoming so is to act preventively. 214

There can be a socialist anti-Semitism, there cannot be a communist one. 214

Socialism wants to solve the first three antagonisms without the fourth one, without the singular universality of the proletariat.

The only way for the global capitalist system to survive its long-term antagonism and simultaneously to avoid the communist solution, will be to reinvent some kind of socialism — in the guise of communitarianism, populism, capitalism with Asian values, or whatever. The future will be communist… or socialist. 214

This is why we should insist on the qualitative difference between the last antagonism, the gap that separates the Excluded from the Included, and the other three: it is only the reference to the Excluded that justifies the term communism. There is nothing more ‘private’ than a State community which perceives the Excluded as a threat and worries how to keep them at a proper distance.

In other words, in the series of the four antagonisms, that between the Included and the Excluded is the crucial one: without it, all others lose their subversive edge. 214-215

Ecology turns into a problem of sustainable development,
intellectual property into a complex legal challenge,
biogenetics into an ethical issue.

One can sincerely fight to preserve the environment, defend a broader notion of intellectual property, oppose the copyrighting of genes, without confronting the antagonism between the Included and the Excluded.

Whats more, one can even formulate some of these struggles in terms of the Included being threatened by the polluting Excluded. In this way, we get no true universality, only private’ concerns in the Kantian sense of the term. 215

In short, without the antagonism between the Included and the Excluded, we may well find ourselves in a world in which Bill Gates is the greatest humanitarian fighting poverty and diseases and Rupert Murdoch the greatest environmentalist, mobilizing hundreds of millions through his media empire. 215

dean communist horizon

Jodi Dean interview on 13 Oct. 2012 here

In Žižek’s account, ideology is not a matter of what we know but what we do. So “false consciousness” isn’t the problem. The problem is what you’re doing, and how your actions repeat. We all know capitalism is a system that exploits the many for the benefit of the very few, and yet we continue in it. It’s not like we are deluded about it. Our contemporary problem is not that we are unaware that capitalism is unjust and wrecking the lives of billions. The problem is that we either don’t have the will to get out, or aren’t quite sure how to do so. It’s not a matter of changing people’s minds. It’s about changing their actions.

We need to ask ourselves: What is the attachment to democracy? What does that mean in left-wing discussions these days? I think it’s a failure of will, and even an attachment to the form of our subjection. Why do we keep arguing in terms of democracy when we live in a democracy that is the source of unbelievable inequality and capitalist exploitation? Why are we so attached to this? It makes no sense. Of course, it’s not like we should have a system where nobody votes.

The most fundamental things—namely, control over the economy—should be for the common, in the name of the common, and by the common (without being determined by something like voting). It should be known that there is no private property. Everything we own and produce is for the common good, and that is not up for grabs, it is a condition for the possibility of democracy.

It shouldn’t itself be subject to democracy, the same way that any kind of revolutionary moment or transition to communism can’t be understood as a democratic move. If we can get twenty percent of the people, we could do it. But it’s not democratic. Eighty percent of people don’t care.

Badiou is brilliant when he asks, “Why are people so intrigued by the so-called ‘independent voters?’ Why are people without a political opinion even allowed to decide, when they don’t even care?”

the real

Žižek, Slavoj. “Zizek_TheLacanianReal_Television” The Symptom 9 Summer 2008.

The usual idea of the Lacanian “real” is that of a hard kernel resisting symbolization, dialectization, persisting in its place, always returning to it. But this is just one side of the Lacanian real; it’s the side which predominates in the fifties, when we have the real – the brute, pre-symbolic reality which always returns to its place, then the Symbolic order, which structures our perception of reality, and finally the Imaginary, the level of illusory entities whose consistency is the effect of a kind of mirror-play, i.e., which have no real existence but are just a structural effect.

With the development of the Lacanian teaching in the sixties and seventies, what he calls “the real” more and more approaches what he called, in the fifties, the imaginary.

Let’s take the case of traumatism: in the fifties, in his first seminar, the traumatic event is defined as an imaginary entity which wasn’t yet fully symbolized, given a place in the symbolic universe of the subject.

In the seventies, the traumatism is real; it is a hard core resisting symbolization. But the point is that it doesn’t matter if it took place, if it “really occurred” in so-called reality; the point is just that it produces a series of structural effects (displacements, repetitions, etc.).

The real is an entity which should be constructed afterwards so that we can account for the distortions of the symbolic structure.

The most famous Freudian example of such a real entity is of course the primal parricide: it would be senseless to search for its traces in prehistoric reality, but it must nonetheless be presupposed if we want to account for the present state of things.

It’s the same as with the primal fight to death between the (future) master and servant in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind: it is senseless trying to determine when this event could have taken place; the point is just that it must be presupposed, that it constitutes a fantasy- scenario implied by the very fact that people are working – it is the intersubjective condition of the so-called “instrumental relation to the world of objects.”

The paradox of the Lacanian real is then that it is an entity which, although it doesn’t exist (in the sense of “really existing,” taking place in reality), has a series of properties.

It exercises a certain structural causality; it can produce a series of effects in the symbolic reality of subjects.

That’s why it can be illustrated by a multitude of well-known jokes based on the same matrix: “Is this the place where the Duke of Wellington spoke his famous words?” “Yes, this is the place, but he never spoke those words.” These never-spoken words are a Lacanian real.

“What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?”
“Oh, that’s a MacGuffin.”
“What’s a MacGuffin?”
“Well, it’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.”
“But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands.”
“Well, you see how efficient it is!”

That’s a MacGuffin, a pure nothing which is nonetheless efficient. It is needless to add that the MacGuffin is the purest case of what Lacan calls objet petit a: a pure void which functions as the object-cause of desire.

That would be, then, the precise definition of the real object: a cause which in itself doesn’t exist, i.e., which is present only in a series of its effects, but always in a distorted, displaced way. If the real is impossible, it is precisely this impossibility to be grasped through its effects. Laclau and Mouffe were the first to develop this logic of the real in its relevance for the social-ideological field in their concept of antagonism: antagonism is precisely such an impossible kernel, a certain limit which is in itself nothing, and which is only to be constructed retroactively, from a series of its effects, as the traumatic point which escapes them and prevents a closure of the social field.

We might reread this way even the classical notion of the “class struggle”: it is not the last signifier giving the meaning to all social phenomena (”all social processes are in the last instance expressions of the class struggle”), but quite the contrary a certain limit, a pure negativity, a traumatic limit which prevents the final totalization of the socio-ideological field. The “class struggle” is present only in its effects, in the fact that every attempt to totalize the social field, to assign to social phenomena a definite place in the social structure, is always doomed to failure.

If we define the real as such a paradoxical, chimerical entity which, although it doesn’t exist, has a series of properties and can produce a series of effects, it becomes clear that the real par excellence is jouissance: jouissance doesn’t exist; it is impossible, but it produces a lot of traumatic effects.

And this paradoxical nature of jouissance offers us also a clue to explain the fundamental paradox which unfailingly attests the presence of the real: the fact of the prohibition of something which is already in itself impossible. The elementary model of it is, of course, the prohibition of incest; but there are many other examples. Let’s just mention the usual conservative attitude towards child sexuality: it doesn’t exist, children are innocent beings, that’s why we must strictly control them and fight child sexuality.

The real is then at the same time the hard, impenetrable kernel resisting symbolization and a purely chimerical entity which has in itself no ontological consistency. To use Kripkean terminology, the real is the rock upon which every attempt at symbolization stumbles, the hard core which remains the same in all possible worlds (i.e., symbolic universes); but at the same time its status is thoroughly precarious: it’s something that persists only as failed, missed, in a shadow, and dissolves itself as soon as we try to grasp it in its positivity. As we have already seen, this is precisely what defines the notion of a traumatic event: a point of failure of symbolization, but at the same time never given in its positivity.

It can only be constructed backwards, from its structural effects. All its efficacy lies in these effects, in the distortions it produces in the symbolic universe of the subject The traumatic event is ultimately just a fantasy-construct filling out a certain void in a symbolic structure and as such the retroactive effect of this structure.

the real is not a transcendent positive entity, persisting somewhere beyond the symbolic order like a hard kernel inaccessible to it, some kind of Kantian “Thing-in-itself.” 17

death drive in the early middle late Lacan barred subject vs. subject positions

Žižek, Slavoj. “Zizek_TheLacanianReal_Television” The Symptom 9 Summer 2008.

That’s why the Stalinist victim is the perfect example of the difference between the sujet d’énoncé (subject of the statement) and the sujet d’énonciation (subject of the enunciating). The demand that the Party addresses to him is: “At this moment, the Party needs the process to consolidate the revolutionary gains, so be a good communist, do a last service to the Party and confess.”

Here we have the division of the subject in its purest form: the only way for the accused to confirm himself as a good communist at the level of the sujet d’énonciation, is to confess, i.e., to determine himself, at the level of the sujet d’énoncé, as a traitor.

Ernesto Laclau was perhaps right when he once remarked that it isn’t only Stalinism which is a language-phenomenon; it is already language itself which is a Stalinist phenomenon. 2

Here, however, we must carefully distinguish between this Lacanian notion of the divided subject and the “post-structuralist” notion of the subject-positions. In “post-structuralism,” the subject is usually reduced to subjection.

He is conceived as an effect of a fundamentally non-subjective process: the subject is always caught in, traversed by, the pre-subjective process (of “writing,” of “desire,” etc.), and the accent is put on different modes of how individuals “experience,” “live,” their positions as “subjects,” “actors,” “agents” of the historical process.

For example, it is only at a certain point in European history that the author of works of art, a painter or a writer, began to see himself as a creative individual who, in his work, is giving expression to his interior subjective richness. The great master of such analysis was, of course, Foucault: one might say that the main point of his late work was to articulate the different modes of how individuals assume their subject-positions.

But with Lacan, we have quite another notion of the subject. To put it in a simple way: if we abstract, if we subtract all the richness of the different modes of subjectivization, all the fullness of experience present in the way individuals “live” their subject-positions, what remains is an empty place which was filled out with this richness; and this original void, this lack of the symbolic structure is the subject, the subject of the signifier.

The subject is therefore to be strictly opposed to the effect of subjectivation: what the subjectivation masks is not a pre- or trans-subjective process of writing but a lack in the structure, a lack which is the subject.

Our predominant idea of the subject is, in Lacanian terms, that of the “subject of the signified,” the active agent, the bearer of some signification who is trying to express himself in the language. The starting point of Lacan is, of course, that the symbolic representation represents the subject always in a distorted way, that it is always a displacement, a failure, i.e., that the subject cannot find a signifier which would be “his own,” that he is always saying less or too much, in short: something other than what he wanted, intended to say.

The usual conclusion from this would be that the subject is some kind of interior richness of meaning which always exceeds its symbolic articulation: “language cannot express fully what I’m trying to say…”

The Lacanian thesis is its exact opposite: this surplus of signification masks a fundamental lack. The subject of the signifier is precisely this lack, this impossibility to find a signifier which would be “his own”: the failure of his representation is a positive condition.

The subject tries to articulate himself in a signifying representation, and the representation fails; instead of a richness we have a lack, and this void opened by the failure is the subject of the signifier.

To put it in a paradoxical way: the subject of the signifier is a retroactive effect of the failure of his own representation; that’s why the failure of representation is the only way to represent him adequately. 3-4

It is at the level of this difference between the two deaths, of this empty place in the very heart of the Other, that we must locate the
problematic of the death drive.

The connection between the death drive and the symbolic order is a constant with Lacan, but we can differentiate the various stages of his teaching precisely by reference to the different modes of articulation of the death drive and the signifier.

In the first period (the first seminar, “The Function and the Field of Speech and Language…”), it is the Hegelian phenomenological idea that the word is a death, a murder of a thing: as soon as the reality is symbolized, caught in a symbolic network, the thing itself is more present in a word, in its concept, than in its immediate physical reality.

More precisely, we cannot return to the immediate reality:even if we turn from the word to the thing, from the word “table” to the table in its physical reality, for example, the appearance of the table itself is already marked with a certain lack. To know what a table really is, what it means, we must have recourse to the word, which implies an absence of the thing.

In the second period (the Lacanian reading of Poe’s Purloined Letter), the accent is shifted from the word, from speech, to language as a synchronic structure, a senseless autonomous mechanism which produces meaning as its effect If, in the first period, the Lacanian concept of language is still basically the phenomenological one (Lacan is repeating all the time that the field of psychoanalysis is the field of meaning, la signification), here we have a “structuralist” conception of language as a differential system of elements.

The death drive is now identified with the symbolic order itself: in Lacan’s own words, it is “nothing but a mask of the symbolic order.” The main thing here is the opposition between the imaginary level of the experience of meaning and the meaningless signifier/signifying mechanism which produces it.

The imaginary level is governed by the pleasure principle; it strives for a homeostatic balance. The symbolic order in its blind automatism is always troubling this homeostasis: it is “beyond the pleasure principle.” When the human being is caught in the signifier’s network, this network has a mortifying effect on him; he becomes part of a strange automatic order disturbing his natural homeostatic balance (through compulsive repetition, for example).

In the third period, where the main accent of Lacan’s teaching is put on the real as impossible, the death drive again radically changes its signification. This change can be most easily detected through the relationship between the pleasure principle and the symbolic order.

Till the end of the fifties, the pleasure principle was identified with the imaginary level: the symbolic order was conceived as the real “beyond the pleasure principle.” But starting from the late fifties (the seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis) it is on the contrary the symbolic order itself which is identified with the pleasure principle: the unconscious “structured like a language,” its “primary process” of metonymic-metaphoric displacements, is governed by the pleasure principle; what lies beyond is not the symbolic order but a real kernel, a traumatic core. To designate it, Lacan uses a Freudian term das Ding, the Thing as an incarnation of the impossible jouissance (the term Thing is to be taken here with all the connotations it possesses in the domain of horror science-fiction: the “alien” from the movie of the same name is a pre-symbolic, maternal Thing par excellence).

The symbolic order strives for a homeostatic balance, but there is in its kernel, in its very centre, some strange, traumatic element which cannot be symbolized, integrated into the symbolic order: the Thing.

Lacan coined a neologism for it: l’extimité — external intimacy, which served as a title for one of the seminars of Jacques-Alain Miller. And what is, at this level, the death drive

Exactly the opposite of the symbolic order: the possibility of what was named by de Sade “the second death,” the radical annihilation of the symbolic texture through which so-called reality is constituted. The very existence of the symbolic order implies a possibility of its radical effacement, of the “symbolic death” … the obliteration of the signifying network itself.

This distinction between the different stages of Lacan’s teaching is not of merely theoretical interest; it has very definite consequences for the determination of the final moment of the psychoanalytic cure.

In the first period, where the accent is laid on the word as a medium of the intersubjective recognition of desire, symptoms are conceived as white spots, non-symbolized imaginary elements of the history of the subject, and the process of analysis is that of their symbolization, i.e., of their integration into the symbolic universe of the subject: the analysis gives meaning, retroactively, to what was in the beginning a meaningless trace. So the final moment of analysis is here reached when the subject is able to narrate to the other his own history in its continuity, when his desire is integrated, recognized in a “full speech” (parole pleine).

In the second period, where the symbolic order is conceived as having a mortifying effect on a subject, i.e., as imposing on him a traumatic loss – and the name of this loss, of this lack, is of course the symbolic castration – the final moment of analysis is reached when the subject is made ready to accept this fundamental loss, to consent to symbolic castration as a price to pay for access to his desire.

In the third period, we have the great Other, the symbolic order, with a traumatic element in its very heart; and in Lacanian theory, fantasy is conceived as a construction allowing the subject to come to terms with this traumatic kernel. At this level, the final moment of analysis is defined as “going through a fantasy” (la traversée du fantasme): not its symbolic interpretation but the experience of the fact that the fantasy-object, by its fascinating presence, just fills out a lack, a void in the Other. There is nothing “behind” the fantasy; the fantasy is precisely a construction the function of which is to hide this void, this “nothing,” i.e., the lack in the Other. The crucial element of this third period of Lacan’s teaching is then the shift of the accent from the symbolic to the real.

spirit is a bone rabinovitch

Žižek, Slavoj. “Zizek_TheLacanianReal_Television” The Symptom 9 Summer 2008.

The Spirit is a Bone.

“the spirit (the subject) is a bone, a skull (der Geist ist ein Knochen).”
If we read this proposition literally, it is vulgar-materialistic nonsense, reducing the subject to his immediate material reality. But where lies, in Hegel’s words, the speculative truth of this proposition? The effect of the phrase, “the spirit is a bone.” On the listener is the feeling of its utter inadequacy, of its absolute contradiction: it is total nonsense – how can we reduce the spirit, its dialectical movement, to an inert presence of a dead object,
of a skull?

The Hegelian answer is precisely this absolute contradiction, this absolute negativity that we feel when we experience the uttermost inadequacy of the proposition, “the spirit is the bone.”

We have here a kind of dialogic economy: we articulate a proposition defining the subject, and our attempt fails; we experience the absolute contradiction, the extreme negative relationship between the subject and the predicate – and it’s precisely this absolute discordance which is the subject as absolute negativity.

It is the same as with a well-known joke from the Soviet Union about Rabinovitch, a Jew who wants to emigrate. The bureaucrat at the emigration office asks him why; Rabinovitch answers: “There are two reasons why. The first is that I’m afraid that in the Soviet Union, the communists will lose power, there will be a counter-revolution, and the new power will put all the blame for the communist crimes on us Jews – and there will be again the anti-Jewish pogroms…” “But,” interrupts the bureaucrat, “this is pure nonsense; nothing can change in the Soviet Union – the Soviet power will last eternally!” “Well,” responds Rabinovitch calmly, “that’s my second reason.”

The logic is here the same as with the Hegelian proposition, “the spirit is a bone”: the failure itself of a first reading gives us the true meaning.

subject versus subject-position

Žižek, Slavoj. “Zizek_TheLacanianReal_Television” The Symptom 9 Summer 2008.

Here, however, we must carefully distinguish between this Lacanian notion of the divided subject and the “post-structuralist” notion of the subject-positions.

In “post-structuralism,” the subject is usually reduced to subjection. He is conceived as an effect of a fundamentally non-subjective process: the subject is always caught in, traversed by, the pre-subjective process (of “writing,” of “desire,” etc.), and the accent is put on different modes of how individuals “experience,” “live,” their positions as “subjects,” “actors,” “agents” of the historical process. For example, it is only at a certain point in European history that the author of works of art, a painter or a writer, began to see himself as a creative individual who, in his work, is giving expression to his interior subjective richness. The great master of such analysis was, of course, Foucault: one might say that the main point of his late work was to articulate the different modes of how individuals assume their subject-positions.

But with Lacan, we have quite another notion of the subject. To put it in a simple way: if we abstract, if we subtract all the richness of the different modes of subjectivization, all the fullness of experience present in the way individuals “live” their subject-positions, what remains is an empty place which was filled out with this richness; and this original void, this lack of the symbolic structure is the subject, the subject of the signifier.

The subject is therefore to be strictly opposed to the effect of subjectivation: what the subjectivation masks is not a pre- or trans-subjective process of writing but a lack in the structure, a lack which is the subject.

The Lacanian thesis is its exact opposite: this surplus of signification masks a fundamental lack.

The subject of the signifier is precisely this lack, this impossibility to find a signifier which would be “his own”: the failure of his representation is a positive condition.

The subject tries to articulate himself in a signifying representation, and the representation fails; instead of a richness we have a lack, and this void opened by the failure is the subject of the signfier.

To put it in a paradoxical way: the subject of the signifier is a retroactive effect of the failure of his own representation; that’s why the failure of representation is the only way to represent him adequately.

Ž in south korea june 2012 buddha buddhism

Zizek Lecture in South Korea Kyung Hee University in June 27 2012

Q and A Zizek in South Korea Kyung Hee University in June 27 2012

Universality is Universality of Struggle
Symbolic Castration
Father confused impotent person, but his symbolic identity you respect him
Famous Ninotchka Joke: Coffee Without Cream/Run Out of Cream/Only Have Milk/Coffee Without Milk
What you don’t have (negativity) is part of your identity. What is missing is part of your identity. Coffee without what it is.
I don’t drink coffee, that’s ok, I don’t have any. Today, the way ideology works today, is not as a direct lie, in the sense it directly tells something not true, ideology lies in not in what it says, it lies it says what it says, by generating in us implicit meaning, while it relies on the opposite meaning. To use the example of coffee, it is giving us coffee w/o milk, but it claims it is giving us coffee w/o cream. Be attentive to these implicit meanings, what is said w/o being said. In Europe, austerity, when those in power want to impose people austerity measures, they pretend they are offering coffee w/o milk, when they are really offering coffee w/o cream. Why is this so important?

– Hegelian Totality
precisely a totality of what there is, and what there is not. in true dialectical analysis, the point is not to include particular events in larger harmonious totality, the point is not to look at phenomena isolated, look holistically, this is NOT enough, but include in concept all its failures and so on, take capitalism, to take it as a totality, it is not enough to say as a system it is good, NO we should look at all those points where it fails, inside a country and outside, i.e., APPLE as a country, oooh, see it as a success, but we say NO Apple without FOXCON. or take the CONGO. It is a state that is immensely mineral rich but the state doesn’t funciton, you simply have local warlords and directly deal with foreign companies. Congo is not developed enough to be part of global capitalism NO. There are child warriors, as such as this hell on earth, CONGO IS PART OF TODAY’S GLOBAL CAPITALISM. global capitalism is also the dark side.
South Korea: One of your big companies, had intentions to buy all arable land in Madagascar. throw out local farmers. This is global capitalism. A proper dialectical analysis begins, you have a ideal universal notion, then look at failures and non-intended by-products, the dialectic will show these failures are NECESSARY failures, all mistakes, antagonisms are part of the UNIVERSAL NOTION.

The category which is more and more becoming crucial is the category of UNEMPLOYMENT
In standard Marxist story: Exploitation. But today the unemployed are becoming more and more crucial, not just RESERVE ARMY. but the forever UNEMPLOYABLE. Whole countries, Somalia, Congo, or whole regions in countries, in a sense Unemployed, excluded from world markets, you have people in advance that are Unemployable. Millions of students who study, but realize there is no chance they will get a job in the domain of their studies. We have somehow to expand the Domain of Proletarians. It is NOT just who work and exploited, it is those who are not working. Capitalism is more and more generating NECESSARY UNEMPLOYMENT.

Why don’t we see this more clearly? This shows the strength of the ruling hegemonic ideology. The omniprescence of anti-capitalism, look at any popular media, you have many anti-capitalist stories, but all these critiques are moralistic critiques, greedy bankers, polluting environment. The problem is what changed in recent capitalism, that this greed can be realized with such catastrophic consequences. The limit of this moralistic anti-capitalism, by blaming people, it prevents us from doing the crucial analysis of the SYSTEM. what is wrong with the SYSTEM as such. Almost everyone today is a Fukuyamist. Liberal democractic capitalism is the only game in town. All we can do is make it a little better. a little more efficient.
We can easily imagine the end of the world, but a little change in capitalism we can’t imagine.

class struggle: antagonism deadlock is constitutive of society
multiculturalist where problem is recognition, how can we be recognized: gay, women etc.
I am still for BINARY logic against multiplicity of struggles.

Laclau critique none of these struggles have apriori central position, all strategic consideration. There is no priority

Politico-economic antagonism is not at same level of these other struggles, it has a MORE SUBSTANTIAL position, of overdetermining, structuring other struggles.

Buddhism and Dalai Lama

Origin of fall of Buddhism. Mahayama: Bhodisava, you were already there liberated, out of this compassion with humanity, you CAME back into this world of suffering, so you postponed your liberation until all others are liberated this is a SACRIFICIAL logic. I don’t trust anybody that is willing to sacrifice themselves for you.

Communism will win There are miracles but only for those who believe in the miracle. Communism will win means that we who are engaged in the struggle, we can read events as signs of communism: Tahir Sq. etc, are all signs that point towards a possible communism but there is no guarantee, no objective necessity, communism will win for those who believe in communism, a bit of a tautology.

Truth is not a neutral objective truth. Truth is universal: but it is nonetheless PARTIAL. No if you look neutrally you see nothing, you only see truth if you are interested in truth, an emancipatory truth. Communism will come as an unintended consequence We Chinese commies are the best managers of capitalism. It less and less needs democracy. This should worry us. In Lacanian the gap between what you want and what you desire. People desire communism but they don’t want. What people usually desire they don’t want. People all the time think they desire something, but when they come close to it, they think its horrible and don’t want it. What you want is not the same is what you desire. Communism will come but people will not want it.

Why still keep the stupid name?

on Egypt

on Greece

On Marx To be a Marxist today, means not to return to Marx, in a radically critical way, totally reconstruct radically his analysis. A fundamental flaws we can see today in his notion of communism. His notion of communism is still a capitalism, that is, capitalism without the private property, then this wild development will continue. He didn’t see that this dynamism is only possible within the capitalist frame. Second limitation, he had ingenious insights 1848 revolution, 18th Brumaire, but in terms of analysis of power, he didn’t develop it properly. The horrors of 20th Century communism you can’t explain through a critical Marxism. Stalinism occured because communsm developed in the wrong place. No. This is wrong.

I don’t like the term Third Way. If you want the Third way, what is Second way: Fascism, Communism, the Second way failed because they stayed within capitalism, total productivity, efficiency and so on. I don’t like to talk about the Third way because the Second way wasn’t a serious second way. Too much of this we have extremes and we need proper balance. I don’t like balance, I like extremes.

on Violence: Hitler and Ghandi, the quote that got him in a lot of trouble

Hitler was afraid to do real social change. Tahir Sq. they stopped the entire functioning of the state. Mubarak’s violence was a violence aimed at restoring social order. It’s not that we live in peaceful times and some crazy revolutionary starts violence, but what about violence in Congo? Structural violence, the violence that is here as part of NORMAL state of things. The positive violence is violence of just occupying space and preventing things from going on as normal. Ghandi was much more violent than Hitler, because his aim was to stop the state from functioning. It was an anti-systemic violence.

Ž responds to his critics

February 28 2013 A Reply to My Critics.

Room B01
Clore Management Centre
Birkbeck, University of London
Torrington Square
London WC1E 7HX

If we cannot imagine a society which is not held together by a Master figure but in a different way then we can pack our luggage and just say ok let’s play pragmatic politics. The challenges are great here. I think that in this debate Badiou versus postmodern fluid plural multitude figures of authority I think that both poles are wrong. The structure of a Master as well as this polymorphous multitude structure doesn’t function. There are some hints in Lacan or somewhere you can have a social link which is not founded on the figure of the Master.

large want to be passive, permanent participation, engagement, I much perfer to be passive citizen, I want a state that does its work. I don’t despise ordinary people. Engaged people don’t know what they want

Rehabilitate an ‘elite’ A good politician tells the people what they want, if he’s good, people have this “oh my god, yes now I know what I want.”

Molecular self-organizing multitude against hierarchical order:

2009 Žižek on liberalism and what does it mean to be human

Tuesday 24th November 2009 – 2.30 pm Clore Lecture Theatre (B01), Clore Management Centre, Torrington Sq.

As long as we have liberalism as we have it, it will always generate fundamentalism

Fundamentalism is the SYMPTOM of Liberalism. LIBERALISM IS THE DETERMINING FACTOR. As long as we have liberalism the way we have it, it will generate fundamentalism.

Afghanistan was the singular most secular and tolerant Muslim country. The Fundamentalization of Afghanistan was the product of the way Afghanistan was caught in the global capitalist process. Kansas 30 years ago was the state with the greatest number of populist leftists, the home of John Brown. What happened in 30-40 this bedrock of progressivism turned into a bible thumping belt.

The solution to the opposition of Liberalism-Fundamentalism, this opposition is a real opposition but a FALSE opposition.

Mode of inclusion of Congo in the global market

The Hegelian Aufhebung

Every Fascism is the sign of a failed revolution. “Islamofascism” is there because the Left wasn’t there.

ooh we’re becoming robots, we’re getting post-human, are symptoms, How do we re-define humanity outside of this panic pseudo nightmares and Catholic Church

humanitarian panic or new age optimism, reject both sides. total rehabilitation of alienation, celebrate the LOSS the DISTANCE

The true threat to our survival is holistic civilzation, we need to restore the balance, NO we human introduced imalance, that is what makes us.

animal to subject

Žižek “Notes on a Debate ” Criticism. 46:4 (2004) 661-666.

On Badiou and Deleuze:

However, what unites them above this difference is that both perform the same paradoxical philosophical gesture of defending, as materialists, the autonomy of the “immaterial” order of the Event. As a materialist, and in order to be thoroughly materialist, Badiou focuses on the idealist topos par excellence: How can a human animal forsake its animality and put its life in the service of a transcendent Truth? How can the “transubstantiation” from the pleasure-oriented life of an individual to the life of a subject dedicated to a Cause occur?

In other words, how is a free act possible? How can one break (out of) the network of the causal connections of positive reality and conceive of an act that begins by and in itself?

In short, Badiou repeats within the materialist frame the elementary gesture of idealist anti-reductionism: human Reason cannot be reduced to the result of evolutionary adaptation; art is not just a heightened procedure of providing sensual pleasures, but a medium of Truth; and so on. Additionally, against the false appearance that this gesture is also aimed at psychoanalysis (is not the point of the notion of “sublimation” that the allegedly “higher” human activities are just a roundabout “sublimated” way to realize a “lower” goal?), therein resides already the significant achievement of psychoanalysis: its claim is that sexuality itself, sexual drives pertaining to the human animal, cannot be accounted for in evolutionary terms.

This makes clear the true stakes of Badiou’s gesture: in order for materialism to truly win over idealism, it is not enough to succeed in the “reductionist” approach and demonstrate how mind, consciousness, and so forth can nonetheless somehow be accounted for within the evolutionary-positivist frame of materialism. On the contrary, the materialist claim should be much stronger: it is only materialism that can accurately explain the very phenomena of mind, consciousness, and so forth; and, conversely, it is idealism that is “vulgar,” that always already “reifies” these phenomena. 665