Category: Žižek

Ruda hegel’s rabble reviews

Smith, Jason E. “Frank Ruda, Hegel’s Rabble: An Investigation into Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, with a preface by Slavoj Žižek.”2011. Book Review in Radical Philosophy. 177. (2013) 43-45.

What the rabble names or marks in Hegel’s thought is, to the contrary, the irruption of what Ruda calls, in an emphatic and seemingly redundant formulation, a ‘peculiarly singular logic of politics’ into the field of philosophy (and, a fortiori, political philosophy).

The looming up of this figure does not simply mark an impasse for Hegel’s philosophy of right and its task of exhibiting the immanent rationality of the ethical order, or even for his philosophy as a whole. Rather, it deforms the relation between philosophy and politics more generally, a torsion that necessitates, in turn, what Ruda calls a ‘restructuring’ and ‘transformation’ of philosophy.

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Whitt, Matt. “Indigence, Indignation, and the Limits of Hegel’s Political Philosophy – Ruda’s Hegel’s Rabble.” Theory & Event. 15:4 (2012)

Ruda is not alone in arguing that poverty and the rabble signal a failure of Hegel’s political philosophy. However, there are several aspects of his argument that make his book distinctly valuable. First, in addition to providing an exceptionally detailed account of the impoverished rabble, Ruda fully explores the possibility, briefly admitted by Hegel, that modern society also produces a rich rabble. This is the aggregate of financial “gamblers” who do not labor for their subsistence, exempting themselves from civil society’s primary relations of interdependence while nonetheless expecting to be provided with luxury (39–48). By elaborating this often overlooked aspect of Hegel’s thought, Ruda shows him to be a prescient diagnostician of modern capitalism, in spite of his apparent inability to come to terms with its central problem.

Second, Ruda helpfully connects the Philosophy of Right to important discussions of free will, habit, attitude, and language that occur in Hegel’s other texts. This results in an unusually rich and integrated view of Hegel’s political philosophy. Similarly, Ruda draws wide-ranging connections to other moments in the history of European thought. Not all of these are illuminating—for instance, the discussion of set theory in Chapter 12 is too long and too far afield for what it contributes to the overall argument. However, other connections are very instructive, such as the engagements with Luther and Rancière at the beginning and end of the book.

The discussions of contemporary post-Hegelian critical theory are especially welcome, although Ruda portrays this area as even more of a boys’ club than it actually is (perhaps illustratively, there are no female theorists listed in the short index, although Judith Butler, Seyla Benhabib, Susan Buck-Morss, and others have done important work in this area).

Most importantly, Ruda’s book goes beyond other studies by identifying the bases of an alternative, post-Hegelian politics latent in Hegel’s struggle with the rabble. Whereas other commentators are satisfied to interpret the unsolved problems of poverty and the rabble as the limits of Hegel’s political philosophy, Ruda argues that these limits inaugurate a moment when politics can no longer be led by philosophy. For Ruda, the rabble’s indignant and impossible demands motivate a materialist politics of equality that “bursts through” Hegel’s philosophy of freedom (168). To be clear, Ruda is not simply claiming that Hegel’s thought contains the groundwork for Marx’s dialectical materialism. Rather, Ruda makes the more controversial claim that Hegel’s own struggle with the problem of the rabble itself initiates the inversion of Hegelian philosophy that is normally attributed to Marx. According to Ruda, the materialist Aufhebung of Hegel’s theory of the state is already present in Part III of the Philosophy of Right.

Ruda limits himself to the important task of tracing the foundations of this post-Hegelian politics within Hegel’s own thought, so he does not articulate a full-blown post-Hegelian political theory. However, one aspect is particularly clear, and it makes a very valuable contribution to studies of the late Hegel and the early Marx. According to Ruda, the egalitarian counter-politics of the Hegelian rabble is more genuinely universal than the politics of the Hegelian state. This is because the state claims a universality (freedom for all) that masks a latent particularity (freedom for some, the non-rabble).

On the other hand, the condition of the impoverished rabble only appears limited to particular persons, but is in fact latently universal, because it can befall anyone in capitalist modernity. As Ruda puts it, “Anyone can sink into poverty and can consequently become rabble,” and thus “anyone at all is latently rabble” (55, 47). While the latent universalizability of indigence and indignation will be crucial to Marx’s theory of the proletariat, Ruda makes a convincing case that it originates with Hegel, whose theory of the state is motivated, at least in part, by this prescient insight into modern capitalism. However, the Hegelian state has no resources for effectively ameliorating poverty or assimilating the indignation of the very poor, and Ruda interprets this as a failure to effectively contain the universality of the rabble condition. For Ruda, this is sufficient evidence that Hegel’s political philosophy contains the engine of its own overcoming and an implicit “call for a sublation of the Hegelian state” (166).

While Ruda’s book undeniably shows that neither civil society nor the ethical state can eliminate poverty or the rabble, it is less convincing in its claim that this failure marks the site of the overcoming of Hegelian philosophy and the revolution of the Hegelian state.

This is because, although Ruda has definitively shown that Hegel does not ‘solve’ the problems of poverty and the rabble, he has not definitively shown that these problems are not in some way incorporated, as unsolved problems, by Hegel’s theory of the ethical state.

In other words, he shows us a disruption in the movement of the Philosophy of Right, but he has not yet shown this disruption to be fatal to a dialectic that normally proceeds by generating and subsuming its own disruptions. How are we to be convinced that the problem of the rabble cannot be incorporated, if not solved, by the dialectical development of the Hegelian state?

This is a crucial question because there is at least one moment in which Hegel clearly puts the unsolved problems of poverty and the rabble into the service of the ethical state, such that they contribute to its development rather than its dissolution.

In the Philosophy of Right and in his lectures, Hegel directly links poverty and colonization, attributing the need for colonial expansion to “the emergence of a mass of people who cannot gain satisfaction for their needs by their work when production exceeds the needs of consumers.” Ruda discusses colonization just long enough to show that it does not effectively eliminate poverty or the rabble, because it merely postpones their growth (20). This is correct, but Ruda does not fully appreciate what Hegel has done here.

For Hegel, colonization is not meant to solve the problems of poverty and the rabble. Rather, poverty and the rabble spur colonial expansion, through which the ethical state is eventually reproduced on foreign soil. In late modernity, it is not only foreign adventures of the military, but also the internal crisis of the rabble, that drives the Hegelian state across the globe.3 Regardless of Hegel’s dispositions toward colonialism, poverty, and the rabble, it is clear that he understands these social phenomena to work together in reproducing a particular form of the modern state.

Thus, instead of ‘solving’ the problems of poverty and the rabble, or being overwhelmed by them, Hegel’s theory incorporates them. It acknowledges that poverty and the rabble disrupt established society, but it turns this disruption itself into an engine of the state’s reproduction, rather than its dissolution.

This dialectical twist, by which the outstanding problems of Hegel’s theory are made to play a constructive role within it, suggests that the Hegelian state may not merely survive the rabble, but may actually thrive because of it. Elsewhere, I have argued that the rabble plays an even more deeply constructive role in Hegel’s account of the state’s organic constitution.4 On that reading, rather than eliminate the internally disruptive force of the rabble, the various elements of civil society and the state may unite in ongoing opposition to that force, securing the freedom of their members in much the same way that they might rally against an external enemy in the event of war. I cannot defend this interpretation here, but I suggest it in order to illustrate the kind of engagement that Ruda’s interpretation requires if it is to be finally convincing.

In order to claim the rabble as “an indeterminacy which decomposes the state,” it is not enough to show that its lack of freedom and indignant demands disrupt the development of the Hegelian social order, or even that civil society and the state cannot alleviate this disruption (164).

Rather, Ruda must also show that this disruption itself does not, through the cunning of reason, end up contributing to the social order it antagonizes—in other words, that the indeterminacy is not transformed into yet another determination. This will require more fully engaging those moments where Hegel’s theory does not deny the disruptive potential of the rabble, nor seek to eliminate it, but instead attempts to incorporate it into the dialectical development of the state.

In sum, Hegel’s Rabble is a valuable and impressive contribution to the scholarship on Hegel’s treatment of poverty, as well as his political philosophy at large. It also sheds light on Hegelian legacies within contemporary Marxist and post-Marxist theory. Ruda’s exegesis is always thorough, generally careful, and above all successful in its attempt to locate the problem of the rabble at the heart of Hegel’s theory of the state. However, in portraying this problem as the site where Hegel’s political philosophy can be overcome, Ruda downplays the ways that Hegel’s philosophy might incorporate the disruption of the rabble, making it instrumental to the very social order that denies its freedom. Like Marx’s proletariat, Hegel’s rabble is not only a limit, but also a constitutive component, of the social order that does violence to it. As such, the rabble’s presence—and even its antagonism—may contribute to either the conservation or the transformation of the society and state that Hegel theorizes. This theoretical ambivalence should be more acutely described, especially if, as Ruda seems to suggest, its resolution is a matter of political action rather than political theory.

See Whitt, “The Problem of Poverty and the Limits of Freedom in Hegel’s Theory of the Ethical State,” Political Theory, forthcoming in 2013. This article was developed and submitted for review prior to the publication of Ruda’s book. While my reading of Hegel would have benefitted much from consulting Ruda’s clear and detailed exegesis, my argument differs greatly from Ruda’s and would have remained unchanged.

Matt S. Whitt is a Lecturer in Philosophy at Warren Wilson College. He earned his doctorate in Philosophy from Vanderbilt University in 2010. His research interests include theories of sovereignty and authority, problems of political exclusion, and the philosophy of Hegel and Marx. His recent work is forthcoming in Political Theory and Constellations. Matt’s online dossier is available at www.mattswhitt.net, and he can be reached at mwhitt AT warren-wilson.edu

riha sumic Bartleby

Jelica šumič (2011): “Giorgio Agamben’s Godless Saints.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. 16:3 (2011). 137-147.

Institute of Philosophy
Novi trg 2
1000 Ljubljana
Slovenia
E-mail: jsumr AT zrc-sazu.si

It is the simple fact of one’s own existence as possibility or potentiality.  Agamben The Coming Community 40

Put otherwise, instead of seeking to accomplish some definite task or goal, the subject must be nullified. Indeed, it is only through the destitution of the subject that man’s capacity to be pure potentiality can be restored.

Attributing all transformative force to sovereign power alone, Agamben’s solution, whose ultimate aim is to restore contingency at the heart of necessity, consists in directly valorising the ‘‘not happening’’ or rather the “nothing of happening” in order to consign change to a radical transformation in the subjective status, achieved by means of an operation of disidentification that aims, to use Agamben’s vocabulary, at revoking all vocations.

Agamben can recognise resistance only in terms of potentiality, which is to say, as passivity or inoperativeness, since, for him, ‘‘the potential welcomes non-Being, and this welcoming of non-Being is potentiality, the fundamental passivity’’ (P 182). To the extent that the potentiality that characterises human beings is primarily the potentiality of not doing something, the subject, here, is conceived as a place where the ceaseless operation of declassification, disidentification, is effected – Bartleby being the model or paradigm of such a subjective stance in so far as the latter allows the subject to become nothing other than the pure potentiality to be or not to be.

The characterisations of the subjective stance in terms of inoperativeness can be seen as an attempt to move beyond the deadlocks of the end of time in so far as such a stance involves ‘‘a suspension of time’’ achieved through the only possible action at the disposal of contemporary subjectivity, an action à la Bartleby, an anticipatory figure: to opt for non-being, or more exactly, for the potentiality not to be.

His act (“I would prefer not to”…), in effect, consists in a mere taking place of the place. He turns himself into a place, an empty place, this being the only place which sovereign power cannot recapture.

However, for this place to be preserved, maintained as a place, nothing should take place therein. His act, instead of constituting an event, in its subversive force, prevents all events from happening. Indeed, Agamben’s Bartleby can be seen as a guardian of the non-event. Ultimately, rather than risking the danger of falling prey to a bad infinity, Agamben seeks to think a final event.

Thus, in contrast to Badiou, who thinks events as time-breaking and/or inaugurating ruptures, Agamben’s main preoccupation is with the event of the end. In light of this, one can also understand why the politico-ethical solution advocated by Agamben essentially consists in saving the past: not something particularly worthy of being remembered, but the past in its whatever character, as it were.

The world can only be saved if its being-thus in the smallest details is preserved. What is saved, then, is not some break-inaugurating moment, a moment of “eternity,” as Badiou would have it, but the banality of the being-thus.

It is precisely for this reason that the world can only be “saved” as irreparable, which is to say, ultimately, as absolutely unsaveable. The salvation and therefore the change of the world consist, in the final analysis, only in assuming its radical contingency.

A true change consists simply in a parallax view, a shift of perception: to see the world as including its potentiality not to be. Yet this change, Agamben insists, minimal as it may appear, is nevertheless extremely difficult to accomplish. In some radical sense, humankind is incapable of achieving it; hence, in order to attain this perspective, the Messiah must come or, at least, Bartleby.

If Deleuze, as Agamben observes, is right in calling Bartleby “a new Christ,” this is not because his aim is to ‘‘abolish the old Law and to inaugurate a new mandate.’’ Rather, “if Bartleby is a new Messiah, he comes not, like Jesus, to redeem what was, but to save what was not” (P 270). If there is something Christ-like in Bartleby, if he can, despite everything, be compared to a saviour, this is because he descends to the deepest level of Leibniz’s ‘‘Palace of Destinies,’’ in order to reveal “the world in which nothing is compossible with anything else, where ‘nothing exists rather than something'” (P 270).

In Badiou’s vocabulary, we could say that Bartleby reveals the inconsistency of being-multiple, an impossible point of the real before Being is localised in any being-there whatsoever, before any world whatsoever can take shape.

Whereas this impossible-real, according to Badiou, can only irrupt to the surface of a world through a rare, unpredictable event, Agamben, on his part, presents it as a result of the subjective destitution. 144

It is precisely because it cannot be situated within a linear temporality of past, present, and future that this time of the now is, as such, the location in which action, the hollowing out of the assigned identities, functions, or symbolic mandates take place. This also explains why the messianic subject, Bartleby, is arrested, blocked, as it were, in the “time of the now,” i.e., at the point of the suspension of time, in order to be able to effect his act, that of the de-activation of identifications assigned to him by the socio-symbolic Other.

The result of the messianic act is not a new creation – it is rather a decreation.

From such a perspective, Bartleby can be seen as someone who turns himself into an utterly irreducible remnant, the sole guardian and guarantor of the empty place destined for ‘‘the experience of taking place in whatever singularity’’ (CC 24). But the price to be paid for this operation of exposure of every singularity to its being-thus, its being whatever, is that the subject himself remains blocked, suspended on the sole act he can effect: I would prefer not to, an act which, in so far as it must be repeated again and again, imprisons the subject in a kind of tense-less space created by this very act.

Hence, it could be said that it is only through a true act of decreation, a subtractive act, to be sure, that the mark of contingency in every creature is revealed. If decreation, as Agamben tells us, “takes place where Bartleby stands” (P 271), we must ask: what exactly is this place where “the actual world is led back to its right not to be; [where] all possible worlds are led back to their right to existence”?

Here, Lacan’s famous formula, “The word is the murder of the Thing,” can help us to illuminate this singular position of the subject: if the signifier “creates” by breaking the biunivocal correlation of the word and the thing, if the word does not represent the thing but can only attain a meaning by being articulated to another word, this means that the signifier already de-realises or un-realises the world.

The act of the signifier is precisely an act of decreation, rendering indistinguishable that which exists from that which does not exist. If the signifier itself empties all reference, what could then be Bartleby’s decreation?

Consider Bartleby’s formula: “I would prefer not to.” As Deleuze correctly observed in his reading of “Bartleby,” Bartleby may well use signifiers, yet he does it in a very peculiar way since his formula is destined primarily to cut the link between words and things, between S1 and S2, leaving S1 all alone, in sufferance, in eternal anticipation of the other signifier that would give it a meaning.

But this formula is itself possible because Bartleby occupies the place of an internal exclusion in relation to language. Put otherwise, only for a subject that is outside discourse, discourse, which for Lacan is precisely the social bond, is nothing but a fraud, a make-believe.

Bartleby’s decreation, in short, can only be effected from the autistic position of the subject who refuses to be caught in any social bond whatsoever, who wants nothing, yet prefers not to, who treats signifiers as fragmented bodies, without any reference whatsoever to a symbolic order.

It is here that we can see what is subversive, really revolutionary, in the act of decreation.

Accomplished by the subject for whom there is no distinction between the real and the symbolic, indeed, by a subject for whom the symbolic is, as such, the real, the act of decreation brings into question the Other, the guarantor of the link between words and their references.

If Deleuze is right in claiming that Bartleby, “even in his catatonic or anorexic state” is not the “sick man” but rather the “Medicine-Man, the new Christ or the brother to us all,” this is because only from the position of the inexistence of the Other – this being, according to Deleuze, the position of the schizophrenic – the symbolic can appear, for other speaking beings, those who believe in the Other and live by its laws, and who use the symbolic as a defence against the real, as mere semblance.

From such a perspective, Bartleby’s act can be viewed less as an act that decreates the created (i.e., the symbolised universe) than as one that decreates the decreation, a decreation to the second power, as it were, because such an act of decreation aims at revealing the generalised semblantification at work in the symbolic order itself.

If the schizophrenic position, a position outside discourse, suits well the revolutionary who strives to unbind the existing social bond in order to postulate a different basis for a community, beyond identifications, beyond functions and places, this is because it embodies the liberating potential, as well as its risks.

For Lacan, as is well known, “not only can man’s being not be understood without madness, but it would not be man’s being if it did not bear madness within itself as the limit of his freedom.”

Indeed, it is only from such a position of extimacy in relation to the social link that “the law of our becoming” can be formulated: “The unsoundable decision of being in which human beings understand or fail to recognize their liberation, in the snare of fate that deceives them about a freedom they have not in the least conquered.”

Lacan. “Presentation on Psychical Causality” Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink 145

commodity fetishism vanishing mediator anti-philosophy

Commodity Fetishism March 2013

Commodity Fetishism June 2010

Commodity Fetishism 2009

Commodity Fetishism 2005

Anti-Philosophy or the Post-Hegelian Break

The scene of philosophical ideas is perceived as secondary scene of representation, a screen, and then you assert some more substantial life process, to which Hegel’s idea is just an illusory reflection,

The first one to do this was Schelling who claimed there is irrational abyss of willing the life of will that is more substantial than ideas and that Hegel is cheating. Hegel’s Becoming, if it is to be actual becoming, presupposes some positive being.
Kierkargard: the individual, absolute decision, leap of faith. the intense actuality of subjective authenticity, that can’t be covered up by abstract Hegelian movement of notions etc. Marx: true science of life, Hegel is mystifying reality, pseudo self-movement. It’s not idea which is developing, its real people, Hegel confuses subject and predicate, its not individuals who are predicates of idea as it is developing it is idea predicate of real individuals. THIS IS ANTI-PHILOSOPHY

Return to Hegel:  Basic Coordinates

– This is a ridiculous image of Hegel : Hegel is a so-called vanishing mediator between traditional metaphysics and the post-Hegelian turn to actual reality, Anti-Philosophy.   Žižek DISS of Charles Taylor click here Hegel is not in-between still idealist but moments of historical description.

Something UNIQUE happened in Hegel: Unthinkable, the entire post-Hegelian anti-Philosophy is one desperate attempt to obliterate what Hegel did.   They do this by constructing a ridiculous image of Hegel.  He is a screen memory, a comfortable image used to cover over something much more traumatic.  The post-Hegelian break misses something in Hegel.

What is a Vanishing Mediator or again in Berlin in 2011

If you are in-between you see something, which afterwards becomes invisible. For a brief moment those apparent reactionaries like Charlie Chaplin saw the ominous dimensions of VOICE, a spectral dimension of voice, voice as foreign body intruder that can haunt us.  But this Chaplin moment became INVISIBLE.

Berlin 2011: Rabinovitch a Jew who wants to leave the Soviet Union

Hamster ideology symptom fetish anti semitism chicken joke

Žižek, Slavoj. “Slavoj Žïžek in Kosova — Ideology Between Symptom and Fetish.” Online Video Clip. YouTube. YouTube, 29 May 2009. Web. 14 Feb. 2013.

Pfaller, Robert. “Where is Your Hamster The Concept of Ideology in Slavoj Žižek’s Cultural Theory.” Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Responses to Slavoj Žižek.  Eds.  Geoff Boucher , and Jason Glynos and Matthew Sharpe, 2005.

Hamster This is the famous hamster story

Interpassivity Not only inter-activity, where others can be active for us, what about inter-passivity, others who could be passive for us.

Fascist Populism Fetish: The lie is at the surface. the cause of this antagonism is the Jew.

In the first case is from appearance to what is hidden behind it. On the other hand, JEWS are responisble, you tell me but don’t you see that when you are attacking jews, you are really attacking financial exploitation, and you are targeting the wrong guy.

Although one thought it would be easy to UNDERMINE the anti-semite, don’t you see you are just projecting on the JEWS for all that is wrong for society. It seems evident for those who are not in it. BUT IT ISN’T THIS EASY.

A naive liberal, but can’t you see universal rights are a problem, then he might say a more social liberal, we should include woman. or cynicsm, “I know but we can’t afford true equality, that’s life.”

Fetishist Ironic disavowal: Kung Fu Panda, oriental mythology, at the same time the film makes fun of its own orientalist mythology. Even though it makes fun of it, it still functions.  Our beliefs still function even if we don’t believe in it.  Niels Bohr again.

open fundamentalist disavowal: anti-semitism

The moment you accept the debate at the level of facts. The true question are Jews really like that: Why does Nazi needs this figure of the Jew to sustain its ideological edifice. Even if a husband is jealous, with a suspicion of his wife, even if his wife is sleeping around, his jealousy is pathological fact.  Why did he need this pathological to sustain his psychic stability.

Here is the moment when Žižek distinguishes between being simply racist against Jews and true anti-semitism Jews is blah blah. This is racist. They are blah blah because they are jewish Being a jew is the mysterious X, that explains all of it. THE LOGIC OF FETISHISM AT ITS PUREST.

Here is the chicken joke Maybe Yugoslavia disappeared because Tito was not allowed to know.  1972 the economic situation had to be done, something big.  But they didn’t tell Tito.  The top nomenklatura decided if we make this public then Tito who is old will die unhappy.  Let’s postpone the crisis, throughout the 1970s the economy was artificially sustained, and by the 1990s it all exploded.  Yugoslavia had nothing to do with nationalist passions.   It was the structure of this joke, Tito was a chicken who should not know.  From everyday life: let’s say I have cancer, of course I would be strong enough, I would try not to tell this to my children, to NOT let them know.  Maintain appearance, the chicken should not know.  This chicken should not know logic, you find in Ptomekin villages, when it was know Tito would visit a village, in the end of the 1950s in China, when Mao ..

bosteels event

Bosteels, Bruno.”What is an Event?” Lecture 02 Jul 2012
Bruno Bosteels “Event,” Encyclopedia of Political Theory. ed. Mark Bevir, vol. 2, Routledge (2010), 878-880.
Event
Follow-up discussion here

The event is arguably the core concept in contemporary European philosophy. While there is no shortage of references to the event in the Anglo-American tradition, from Alfred North Whitehead to Donald Davidson, the concept serves above all to define the principal stake of so-called Continental thought, from Martin Heidegger to Jacques Derrida to Catherine Malabou and from Michel Foucault to Gilles Deleuze to Alain Badiou.

Genealogically, the event emerges with particular force toward the late sixties, marking a possible crossover point between structuralist and subject-centered approaches. Among the features that are relatively invariant in the use of its concept, we can mention the event’s contingent, unpredictable, singular, and radically transformative nature. Beyond these basic invariant traits, however, each individual thinker also gives the event a specific inflection. Major polemics thus concern the unicity or plurality of events, their ontological or nonontological inscription, their immanence or transcendence to the world as is, and their susceptibility to a hermeneutical or a dialectical understanding. Finally, the primacy attributed to the event in contemporary philosophy is not immune to criticisms and attacks from a political point of view, insofar as eventfulness, contingency, and difference in the context of late capitalism can be seen as descriptive of the current functioning of the global market, instead of promising its revolutionary transformation.

Genealogically speaking, we might say that the event becomes the central topic of theoretical and philosophical reflection precisely in the wake of the worldwide “events” of 1968. To think this revolutionary sequence, then, entails not only investigating what happened but also asking the underlying question of how to think the happening of that which happens. In French, this is often called the événementialité of the event, awkwardly translated as the “eventality” of the event, with the task of thinking, whether in history, in political theory, or in philosophy, being described as événementialisation, “eventalization.” Of course, we can also enumerate many conceptual precursors for this notion, such as Aristotle’s tuchè or “chance” as opposed to “automatism” or automaton; the role of clinamen, “deviation” or “swerve,” for ancient atomists after Lucretius; Machiavelli’s fortuna, “fortune” or “chance” in relation to virtù as “capacity” or “power” for intervention; Mallarmé’s coup de dés or “dice throw” as the attempt to “abolish” chance; Nietzsche’s “destiny” of breaking in two the history of humanity; or Heidegger’s Ereignis as “enowning.” These concepts have been variously retrieved among contemporary thinkers of the event, but they appear as precursors only in retrospect and as a result of such retrievals, which do not begin to give shape to a common doctrine until the late sixties in what is then frequently called post-metaphysical or anti-foundational thinking.

More specifically, the concept of the event bridges two traditions that otherwise are at loggerheads: a humanist, subject-centered approach and an anti-humanist focus on the action of the structure. An event is neither the expression of free human action nor the causal effect of structural determinisms.

Instead, an event occurs precisely when and where a certain dysfunction or systematic deadlock becomes visible through the intervention of a subject who, by gaining a foothold in this gap in the structure, at the same time profoundly reshuffles the coordinates that otherwise continue to be determining in the last instance.

The event, in other words, transversally cuts across the traditional oppositions of freedom and necessity, action and system, spontaneity and organization, movement and the State.

Among the event’s defining features we should list its contingency, its unpredictability, its singularity, and its transformative capacity. Beyond this basic consensus, however, we find a wide range of divergent and often polemical orientations.

In the Heideggerian tradition, for example, there is good reason to speak of the event only in the singular, as the event of being itself—being which “is” not but “happens” or “occurs.” This then raises the difficult question, which thinkers as diverse as Derrida and Deleuze grapple with in much of their work, of defining the relation between the unique event of being qua being and the occurrence of plural events in the everyday sense of the term.

For Badiou, on the contrary, the event is that which is not being qua being. In this orientation, therefore, ontology, as the science of being, can literally say nothing of the event, which rather calls for an intervening doctrine of the subject as operative in various fields or conditions, such as art, politics, or science.

A related polemic concerns the immanent or transcendent nature of the event with regard to the situation at hand. Here a Deleuzian orientation, which involves a reevaluation of virtuality outside the traditional binary of the real and the possible, will insist on the presence of the unique event of being as if folded into particular accidents. To this image of the event as fold, by contrast, we can oppose to notion of a radical break, which Badiou, for example, finds at work in Nietzsche and Mallarmé. Neither immanent nor transcendent, in fact, the event crosses out this very opposition for Badiou.

The method for thinking the event also changes depending on which of these basic orientations we adopt. Thus, if in everything that happens the virtuality of the one and only event of being is always already present, then our approach will ultimately take the form of a hermeneutic interpretation in which each item or entity (this or that occurrence) can also simultaneously be read as the expression of the immanence of being (the happening of all that occurs).

Conversely, if an event is inscribed in a specific situation by way of this situation’s deadlock and yet depends on a break with (existing representations of) being, then our approach will most likely take the guise of a dialectical articulation (not in the orthodox terms of negation and the negation of negation but as a logic of scission and of the exception).

The proliferation of theories of the random, multiple, contingent, and radically transformative event, however, can also be seen as the product of late capitalism, rather than as a counteracting force. Marx was after all quite enthusiastic about the power of capitalism to break down old feudal, patriarchal, or idyllic bonds and hierarchies.

But, if it is indeed capitalism itself that reveals all presence to be a mere semblance covering over random multiplicity, then the event as the core concern of post- metaphysical thought might turn out to be little more than descriptive of, if not complicitous with, the status quo.

Difference, multiplicity, or the primacy of events and becomings over subjects and objects, far from giving us critical leverage, thus would define our given state of affairs under late capitalism and its attendant cultural logic.

Further Readings

Badiou, A. (2005). Being and Event. Trans. Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum.

Casati, R., and Varzi, A. C., eds. (1996). Events. Aldershot-Dartmouth: International Research Library of Philosophy. Davidson, D. (1980). Essays on Actions and Events. New York: Oxford University Press.

Deleuze, G. (1990). The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press.

Derrida, J. (1982). “Signature Event Context,” Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 309-330.

Foucault, M. (2003). “On the Archaeology of the Sciences: Response to the Epistemology Circle.” The Essential Foucault. Ed. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose. New York: The New Press. 392-404.

Heidegger, M. (1999). Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning). Trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lyotard, J.F. (1990). Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event. New York: Columbia University Press.

Malabou, Catherine. (2004). The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic. Trans. Lisabeth During. New York: Routledge.

Rajchman, J. 1991. Philosophical Events. Essays on the Eighties. New York: Columbia University Press.

Whitehead, Alfred North. (1978). Process and Reality. New York: The Free Press.

Ž lectures on Hegel at the egs 2009

Death Drive 1
this is starting point but at the end we have perfect reconciliation.  Hegel was well aware that this excess of negativity could never be culturalized.  In contrast to Kant Hegel never believed in perpetual peace.  Hegel thinks that this radical negativity, this excess will explode again.  This excess is neither Nature nor Culture.  Hegelian progress, once you are in culture, retroactively you de-naturalize nature.  The price we pay to move into culture, what before was a natural instinct becomes an absolute eternal repetitive drive.  That is a REPETITIVE drive.

Aim the true satisfaction of the drive is the circular movement of the drive itself.
Goal is what you official want

Concrete Universality
outlines Schuman and then exposes his source as Charles Rosen

Maybe the true ideological revolution is not a chang in the explicit rules, but the revolution in this background, I’m saying the same thing but the virtual resonance, the virtual background has changed. The implicit, you can’t pin it down, but somehow everything is different.

Billy Bathgate This is a good discussion

Doctorow’s novel and the movie.  The novel must have been better after seeing the movie.  We have a failed novel, we have a failed repetition (movie) but the repetition, generates retroactively a truly spectral presence of what the novel should have been.  It is a virtual object of another kind, the film does not repeat the novel on which it is based, rather they both repeat the virtual X.

Retroactive movement: a movement described it is something which was first conceptualized by Bergson,  in spite of my turmoil, I experienced a feeling of admiration for the facility of the passage from abstract to concrete.  THe war exploded, what happened, before at the level of abstract knowledge everybody knew about it, expected it, but nonetheless nobody believed it really could happen, a fetishist disavowal, I know very well but nonetheless I don’t believe it could really happen.  FIrst it was probable but impossible, but then when it happend it suddenly become REAL and possible.  When it really happened, it retroactively became totally possible and acceptable.

The logic we have here is not standard linear logic of possibility.  i.e., we have a sitatuation A, with certain possibilities, and one possiblity is realized. NO.  we have something that is considered impossible HAPPENS and then retroactively it becomes possible.  THIS IS THE LACANIAN ACT.

the ACT it retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility.

Get’s back to Hegel here

The Hegelian temporality, eternity it’s always done this way.   You may think Hegel is closure, in development thing becomes what it always already was. … Hegel may appear to be a totally closed structure.  NO. We should read the Hegelian notion of totality in this Bergson way.

Pure Past: T.S. Elliot, every new work of art retroactively changes the past.  After a certain new work of art, classical works of art are perceived in a different way. The priority of synchrony over diachrony.  Yes this is a good 10 minutes

Dostoevsky didn’t only influence Kafka, only through Kafka are we able to note this dimension in Dostoevsky that has become discernible to us.

This retroactive structure in the sense, in every historical point we live in a totality which is necessary, but this totality is retroactively

… Hegel deduces the necessity of contingency. Not only the necessity of contingency but the contingency of necessity.  Things become necessary in a way that is ultimately contingent.

Hegel’s narrative is about the very rise of necessity.  This is why for Hegel, he insists on Monarchy, Constitutional Monarchy.  Hegel was very aware that exactly what people attribute to him, total rational State, where everything is rationally regulated is nonsense, Hegel was aware that in order to have a rational totality you have to have a contingent element on top.  The function of the King is to sign his name, the less he knows all the better.

Hegel’s point is that you have state as rational totality, at the top you need an element of radical contingency

Reality is ontologically incomplete

Reality is not fully constituted.  Great works of art are like shots on a film, but the film wasn’t developed.  If you come later it isn’t an obstacle, there are things you can only understand with a delay.  How I perceive this ontological openness, how to interpret quantum physics.  Ž quotes the shitty book by Nicholas Fearn.  BUt he makes the point of the ontological incompleteness of reality.  He uses the video game analogy.

The difficult reality is incomplete but doesn’t collapse into itself, if you look closely enough it is blurred, there is no zero level, the closer you get is blurred.

The basic operation of Hegel, you have a certain epistemological limitation, you solve the problem, by showing how the problem is its own solution.

Adorno, you have 2 irreducible levels: Its wrong to ask oneself, can we get a unified theory, does this mean that we can’t know society. The result of this individual deadlock between  individual psychic intersubjective experience and autonomous social structures, this gap.  What we misperceive as the limitation of our knowledge of reality, is a basic feature of social reality itself.

Fredric Jameson alternate Modernities

back to Concrete Universal

torture bigelow

Žižek, S. The Guardian, Friday 25 January 2013

Here is how, in a letter to the LA Times, Kathryn Bigelow justified Zero Dark Thirty’s depicting of the torture methods used by government agents to catch and kill Osama bin Laden: “Those of us who work in the arts know that depiction is not endorsement. If it was, no artist would be able to paint inhumane practices, no author could write about them, and no filmmaker could delve into the thorny subjects of our time.”

Really? One doesn’t need to be a moralist, or naive about the urgencies of fighting terrorist attacks, to think that torturing a human being is in itself something so profoundly shattering that to depict it neutrally – i.e., to neutralise this shattering dimension – is already a kind of endorsement.

Imagine a documentary that depicted the Holocaust in a cool, disinterested way as a big industrial-logistic operation, focusing on the technical problems involved (transport, disposal of the bodies, preventing panic among the prisoners to be gassed). Such a film would either embody a deeply immoral fascination with its topic, or it would count on the obscene neutrality of its style to engender dismay and horror in spectators. Where is Bigelow here?

Without a shadow of a doubt, she is on the side of the normalisation of torture.

When Maya, the film’s heroine, first witnesses waterboarding, she is a little shocked, but she quickly learns the ropes; later in the film she coldly blackmails a high-level Arab prisoner with, “If you don’t talk to us, we will deliver you to Israel”. Her fanatical pursuit of Bin Laden helps to neutralise ordinary moral qualms.

Much more ominous is her partner, a young, bearded CIA agent who masters perfectly the art of passing glibly from torture to friendliness once the victim is broken (lighting his cigarette and sharing jokes). There is something deeply disturbing in how, later, he changes from a torturer in jeans to a well-dressed Washington bureaucrat.

This is normalisation at its purest and most efficient – there is a little unease, more about the hurt sensitivity than about ethics, but the job has to be done. This awareness of the torturer’s hurt sensitivity as the (main) human cost of torture ensures that the film is not cheap rightwing propaganda: the psychological complexity is depicted so that liberals can enjoy the film without feeling guilty. This is why Zero Dark Thirty is much worse than 24, where at least Jack Bauer breaks down at the series finale.

The debate about whether waterboarding is torture or not should be dropped as an obvious nonsense: why, if not by causing pain and fear of death, does waterboarding make hardened terrorist-suspects talk? The replacement of the word “torture” with “enhanced interrogation technique” is an extension of politically correct logic: brutal violence practised by the state is made publicly acceptable when language is changed.

The most obscene defence of the film is the claim that Bigelow rejects cheap moralism and soberly presents the reality of the anti-terrorist struggle, raising difficult questions and thus compelling us to think (plus, some critics add, she “deconstructs” feminine cliches – Maya displays no sentimentality, she is tough and dedicated to her task like men).

But with torture, one should not “think”. A parallel with rape imposes itself here: what if a film were to show a brutal rape in the same neutral way, claiming that one should avoid cheap moralism and start to think about rape in all its complexity? Our guts tell us that there is something terribly wrong here;

I would like to live in a society where rape is simply considered unacceptable, so that anyone who argues for it appears an eccentric idiot, not in a society where one has to argue against it.

The same goes for torture: a sign of ethical progress is the fact that torture is “dogmatically” rejected as repulsive, without any need for argument.

So what about the “realist” argument: torture has always existed, so is it not better to at least talk publicly about it? This, exactly, is the problem. If torture was always going on, why are those in power now telling us openly about it? There is only one answer: to normalise it, to lower our ethical standards.

Torture saves lives? Maybe, but for sure it loses souls – and its most obscene justification is to claim that a true hero is ready to forsake his or her soul to save the lives of his or her countrymen.

The normalisation of torture in Zero Dark Thirty is a sign of the moral vacuum we are gradually approaching. If there is any doubt about this, try to imagine a major Hollywood film depicting torture in a similar way 20 years ago. It is unthinkable.

copjec shame pt 2

Copjec, Joan. “May ’68, the Emotional Month.” Lacan: The Silent Partners Ed. Slavoj Žižek. New York: Verso, 2009. Print.

Is not affect, rather. in this account, representation’s own essential ‘out-of-phaseness’ with itself? A marginal difference opens up. separating the individual perception from itself – and it is this difference which is called affect. Not something added to representation or the signifier, but a surplus produced by its very function, a surplus of the signifier over itself.

Affect is the discharge, the movement, of thought. 95

Vorstellungrepräsentanz: it designates the signifier’s otherness to itself. In brief, it names the inner displacement of the signifier, its misalignment with itself.  We become estranged from our memories and thoughts because the signifier, hence thought, can be estranged from itself or can move in a new direction. 95

Anxiety: Sister of Shame
It sometimes happens, however, that thinking does grind to a halt, stops moving, becomes inhibited.  When this happens, affect is known by a more specific name; it is called anxiety. Before we can understand affect in general as the movement of thought, it is necessary to understand this specific affect, which is its obstacle, the arrest of thought.

What erupts into awareness in moments of anxiety is not something that wall formerly repressed (since affect never is), but the disjunction that defines displacement, which suddenly impresses itself as a gap or break in perception.  As Lacan will put it: anxiety is the experience of an encounter with objet petit a.

Copjec, Joan. “May ’68, the Emotional Month.” <em>Lacan: The Silent Partners</em> Ed. Slavoj Žižek. New York: Verso, 2009.  Print.

DELEUZE
The first cffect of Others is that around each object that I perceive or each idea that I think there is the organization of a marginal world, a mantle or background, where other objects and other ideas may come forth ….

I regard an object, then I divert my attention, letting it fall into the background.

At the same time. there comes forth from the background a new object of my attention.

If this new object does not injure me, if it does not collide with me with the violence of a projectile (as when one bumps against something unseen), it is because the first object had already at its disposal a complete margin where I had already felt the preexistence of objects yet to come, and of an entire field of virtualities and potentialities which I  already knew were capable of being actualized.

Gilles Deleuze. ‘Michael Tournier and the World without Others’, published as an appendix in The Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia University Press), 1990, p. 305.

Never more inventive than when speaking of objet petit a, the concept he touts as his major innovation, Lacan went so far in Seminar Xl as to invent a modern myth, the myth of the lamella, to showcase it. … As the twentieth century wore on, and the utopian view of science gave way to dystopian visions, while capitalism grew more muscular, it became more difficult to hold on to  the idea  that pleasure had the power to programme reality.

The reality (of the market) principle was dearly calling the shots, telling the pleasure principle in what to invest and what pleasures ought to be sacrificed to get the best returns on those investments. One of the best depictions of the takeover of pleasure by reality is still to be found in Walter Benjamin’s notion of aura.  …  that aura appeared for the first time only with capitalism, specifically as that which had been lost.

an original loss, the difference between satisfaction anticipated and satisfaction obtained, is recuperated by being embodied or imagined in objects with a certain sheen which we no longer simply want, but want more of. Prosthetic gods, we do not simply bring our fantasies closer to reality, more within reach, we experience their remodelling by the market into mise en scènes of the postponement of desire. The gleaming, globalized city erected in the alethosphere turns out to be ruled, as in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, by an occult, maimed wizard, Rot[z]wang, the S1 placed in the bottom-left corner of the University Discourse, the master, castrated, fallen to the level of superegoic urgings to ‘Keep on yearning’. 97

At a certain historical moment. that moment when the social configuration Lacan calls the ‘University  Discourse’ was first set in place, reality — including man began to be conceived as fully manipulable. Man came to be viewed as a being without foundation. without roots, or as so intertwined with the Other as to be infinitely mouldable. This is the heart of the conception of the cosmopolitical subject, nomadic, homeless man of the world.

Capitalism drives and profits from this conception of the malleability of man, but we have not yet said enough to know how it does so, how it gets us to surrender ourselves to it, or what it is we surrender.

The first point that needs to be made is this: if the subject becomes conceivable as completely intertwined with the Other, this is because modern science comes to  be conceived as universal, as having triumphed over and supplanted every other realm and every other form of truth. Man is totally taken up, then, WITHOUT EXCEPTION, into the Other of the scientific world.  98

Without exception? This is, of course, the interesting issue, and one Lacan will persistently mine. According to a long tradition  that includes Freud himself, anxiety is distinguished from fear on the grounds that, unlike fear, it has no object. Anxiety is  intransitive, while fear is  transitive.

Lacan goes against this tradition, however, to assert instead that anxiety is ‘not without object’ Why?

What does he gain by this? The standard criterion, ‘with or without object’, offers a simple choice between two contradictory or mutually exclusive terms which exhaust the field of possibilities. Between the two there is a strict boundary. The choice of one or the other (object or not) decides on which side of the boundary the phenomenon is  situated. Freud seems to have intuited that this boundary did not only divide fear and anxiety, but had the potential to divide the scientific and reason from the unscientific and irrational. And Freud did not want this. He never wanted his science, psychoanalysis, to be construed as a study of irrational phenomena; the workings of the psyche, no matter how troubled, did not fall outside the pale of science.

This is surely why Freud kept trying to model anxiety on some form of actual threat, even proposing at one point a ‘realistic anxiety’ after which signal anxiety might be patterned. The sentiment of anxiety is one of hard certainty, and he felt no impulse to question it, to characterize that feeling as a delusion: that is, to dismiss this certainty as unfounded, as having no basis in reason.

copjec shame

Copjec, Joan. “May ’68, the Emotional Month.” Lacan: The Silent Partners Ed. Slavoj Žižek. New York: Verso, 2009. Print.

Here is a bit on Žižek’s take on shame.

The final aim of psychoanalysis, it turns out, is the production of shame.

Why is shame given such a place of honour, if we may put it that way, in the seminar? And what should the position of the analyst be with respect to it? Should she try to reduce ii, get rid of it, lower her eyes before it?  No; Lacan proposes that the analyst make herself the agent of it. Provoke it.

I.ooking out into the audience gathered in large numbers around him, he accounts for their presence in his final, closing remarks thus: if you have come here to listen to what I have to say, it is because I have positioned myself with respect to you as analyst, that is: as objet cause of your desire.  And in this way I have helped you to feel ashamed. End of seminar.

In response to May ’68, a very emotional month, he ends his seminar, his long warning against the rampant and misguided emotionalism of the university students, with an impassioned plea for a display of shame. Curb your impudence, your shamelessness, he exhorts, cautioning: you should be ashamed! What effrontery!

What a provocation is this seminar! But then: what are we to make of it? Because the reference to shame appears so abruptly only in the final session and without elaboration, this is not an easy question to answer. One hears echoes of the transferential words of Alcibiadcs, who has this to say in The Symposium about Socrates: ‘And with this man alone I have an experience which no one would believe was possible for me – the sense of shame.’

… an affect is what shame is.

The perceived hyperrationality of the formulas drawn on black-boards by their structuralist professors seemed arid and far removed from the turmoil that surrounded them, from the newness of extraordinary events, the violence of police beatings. and from their own inchoate feelings of solidarity with the workers. A grumbling sense that something had been left out, that something inevitably escaped these desiccated and timeless structures, was expressed in the renewed demand that Lacan begin redressing the university’s failures by recognizing the importance of affect. They had had it up to their eyeballs with signifiers and all the talk of signifiers, which only left a whole area of their experience unacknowledged: precisely the fact of their being agitated, moved by what was happening here and now.

Affect is included in the formulas of the four discourses. But where?

The specific effect of repression on affect is displacement.  Affect is ALWAYS displaced, or always out of place. The question is: in relation to what?  The first temptation is to answer: in relation to the signifier or representation. This would mean that representation and affect are out of phase with one another. The problem with this answer is that it tends to reinstate the old antinomy between jouissance and the signifier, and to insist finally on the deficit or failure of representation.

robert pippin reviews LTN

Pippin, Robert. “Back to Hegel?” Mediations 26.1-2 (Fall 2012-Spring 2013) 7-28.

Perhaps Zadie Smith’s trenchant summary is the best: States now “de-regulate to privatize gain and re-regulate to nationalize loss.” NYR Blog,  June 2, 2012

Let us designate the basic problem that the book addresses as the ontological problem of “subjectivity”; what is it to be a thinking, knowing and also acting and interacting subject in a material world? Žižek begins by claiming that there are four main kinds of answers to such a question possible in the current “ideological-philosophical field”:

(i) scientific naturalism (brain science, Darwinism);
(ii) discursive historicism (Foucault, deconstruction);
(iii) New Age Western “Buddhism”;
(iv) some sort of transcendental finitude (culminating in Heidegger).

Žižek’s thesis is that these options miss the correct one, which he calls the idea of a “pre-transcendental gap or rupture (the Freudian name for which is the drive),” and that this framework is what actually “designates the very core of modern subjectivity.”(6-7)

hegel democracy

Žižek, Slavoj. “Reply: What to Do When Evil Is Dancing on the Ruins of Evil” positions: east asia cultures critique, Volume 19, Number 3, Winter 2011, pp. 653-669 (Article)

So what does it mean to begin from the beginning again? One should bear in mind that 1990 was not only the defeat of communist state socialism but also the defeat of the Western social democracy. Nowhere is the misery of today’s Left more palpable than in its “principled” defense of the social-democratic welfare state: the idea is that, in the absence of a feasible radical Leftist project, all that the Left can do is to bombard the state with demands for the expansion of the welfare state, knowing well that the state will not be able to deliver. This necessary disappointment will then serve as a reminder of the basic impotence of the social- democratic Left and thus push the
people toward a new radical revolutionary Left. It is needless to add that such a politics of cynical “pedagogy” is destined to fail, since it fights a lost battle: in the present politico-ideological constellation, the reaction to the inability of the welfare state to deliver will be rightist populism.

In order to avoid this reaction, the Left will have to propose its own positive project beyond the confines of the social- democratic welfare state.

One should never forget that 1989 was the defeat of both tendencies of the modern statist Left, communist and social- democratic. This is also why it is totally erroneous to put the hopes on strong (fully sovereign) nation-states (which can defend the acquisitions of the welfare state) against transnational bodies such as the European Union which, so the story goes, serve as the instruments of global capital to dismantle whatever remained of the welfare state. From here, it is only a short step to accept the “strategic alliance” with the nationalist Right worried about the dilution of national identity in transnational Europe.

But the trickiest mode of the false fidelity to twentieth-century commu-nism is the rejection of all “really existing socialisms” on behalf of some authentic working- class movement waiting to explode … a traditional Marxist certain that— sooner or later, we just have to be patient and wait— an authentic revolutionary work-ers movement will arise again, victoriously sweeping away the capitalist rule as well as the corrupted official Leftist parties and trade unions. … the surviving Trotskyites who continued to rely on the trust that, out of the entire crisis of the Marxist Left, a new authentic revolution-ary working- class movement would somehow emerge.

So where are we today? Alain Badiou wonderfully characterized the postsocialist situation as “this troubled situation, in which we see Evil dancing on the ruins of Evil”: there is no question of any nostalgia, the com-munist regimes were “evil”— the problem is that what replaced them is also “evil,” albeit in a different way. In what way?

Back in 1991, Badiou gave a more theoretical formulation to the old quip from the times of really existing socialism about the difference between the democratic West and the communist East: in the East, the public word of intellectuals is eagerly awaited and has a great echo, but they are prohibited to speak and write freely, while in the West, they can say and write whatever they want, but their word is ignored by the wide public.

Although Lukacs used the famous Hegelian couple “in- itself/for- itself” to describe the becoming- proletariat of the “empirical” working class as part of social reality, this doesn’t mean that class consciousness arises out of the “objective” social process, that it is “inscribed, almost programmed, in and by historical and social reality”: the very absence of class consciousness is already the outcome of the politico- ideological struggle. In other words, Lukacs doesn’t distinguish the neutral objective social reality from subjec-tive political engagement, not because, for him, political subjectivization is determined by the “objective” social process, but because there is no “objective social reality” that is not already mediated by political subjectivity.

This brings us to Badiou’s dismissal of the critique of political economy. Since he conceives economy as a particular sphere of positive social being, he excludes it as a possible site of a “truth-event.” But once we accept that economy is always political economy, that is, a site of political struggle, and that its depoliticization, its status as a neutral sphere of “servicing the goods,” is in itself always-already the outcome of a political struggle, then the prospect opens up of the repoliticization of economy and thus of its reassertion as the possible site of truth-event.

Badiou’s exclusive opposition between the “corruptive” force of economy and the purity of the communist idea as two incompatible domains introduces an almost gnostic tone into his work: on the one side the noble citoyenstruggling on behalf of the principled axiom of equality, on the other side the “fallen” bourgeois, a miserable “human animal” striving for profits and pleasures. The necessary outcome of such a gap is terror: it is on account of the very purity of the communist idea motivating the revolutionary process, of the lack of “mediation” between this Idea and social reality, that the Idea can intervene into historical reality without betraying its radical character only in the guise of self- destructive terror.

This is why the “critique of political economy” is crucial if we are to surmount this deadlock: only through a change in the structure of capitalism can the circle of necessary defeats be broken.

It is crucial to clearly distinguish here between two impossibilities: the impossible-real of a social antagonism and the impossibility on which the predominant ideological field focuses. Impossibility is here redoubled, it serves as a mask of itself, that is, the ideological function of the second impossibility is to obfuscate the real of the first impossibility.

Today, the ruling ideology endeavors to make us accept the “impossibility” of a radical change, of abolishing capitalism, of a democracy not constrained to parliamentary game, and so on, in order to render invisible the impossible/real of the antagonism that cuts across capitalist societies.

This real is impossible in the sense that it is the impossible of the existing social order, that is, its constitutive antagonism— which, however, in no way implies that this real/impossible cannot be directly dealt with and radically transformed in a “crazy” act that changes the basic “transcendental” coordinates of a social field.

This is why, as Alenka Zupancic put it, Jacques Lacan’s formula of overcoming an ideological impossibility is not “everything is possible,” but “impossible happens.”

The Lacanian real/impossible is not an a priori limi-tation that should realistically be taken into account, but it is the domain of act, of interventions that can change its coordinates: an act is more than an intervention into the domain of the possible— an act changes the very coordinates of what is possible and thus retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility.

This is why communism also concerns the real: to act as a communist means to intervene into the real of the basic antagonism underlying today’s global capitalism.

In authentic Marxism, totality is not an ideal but a critical notion— to locate a phenomenon in its totality does not mean to see the hidden harmony of the whole, but to include into a system all its “symptoms,” antagonisms, inconsistencies, as its integral parts. In this sense, liberalism and fundamentalism form a “totality”: the opposition of liberalism and fundamentalism is structured so that liberalism itself generates its opposite.

So what about the core values of liberalism: freedom, equality, and so forth? The paradox is that liberalism itself is not strong enough to save them — that is, its own core — against the fundamentalist onslaught. Fundamentalism is a reaction— a false, mystifying, reaction, of course— against a real aw of
liberalism, and this is why it is again and again generated by liberalism. Left to itself, liberalism will slowly undermine itself— the only thing that can save its core is a renewed Left.

In short, the wager of the Western thought is that radical negativity (whose first and immediate expression is egalitarian terror) is not condemned to  remain a short ecstatic outburst after which things have to return to normal — on the contrary, radical negativity, this undermining of every traditional hierarchic order, can articulate itself in a new positive order in which it acquires the stability of a new form of life. This is the meaning of the Holy Spirit in Christianity: faith cannot only be expressed in, but exists as the collective of believers. This faith is in itself based on “terror,” indicated by Christ’s words that he brings sword, not peace, and that whoever doesn’t hate his or her father and mother is not his true follower, and so forth. The content of this terror is the rejection of all traditional hierarchic community ties, with the wager that another collective link is possible based on this ter-ror, an egalitarian link of believers connected by agape as political love.

Another example of such an egalitarian link based on terror is democracy itself. One should follow Claude Lefort’s description of democracy here: the democratic axiom is that the place of power is empty, that there is no one who is directly qualified for this post either by tradition, charisma, or his or her expert and leadership properties. This is why, before democracy can enter the stage, terror has to do its work, forever dissociating the place of  power from any natural or directly qualified pretender: the gap between this place and those who temporarily occupy it should be maintained at any cost.

And this is also why one can supplement in a democratic way Hegel’s deduction of monarchy. Hegel insists on the monarch as the “irrational” (contingent) head of state precisely in order to keep the summit of state power apart from the experts (for him embodied in state bureaucracy) — while the bureaucracy rules by expertise; that is, while bureaucrats are chosen on account of their abilities and qualifications, the king is a king by his birth, ultimately, by a lot, on account of natural contingency.

The danger Hegel is thereby trying to avoid exploded a century later in Stalinist bureaucracy, which is precisely the rule of (communist) experts: Stalin is NOT a figure of a master but the one who “really knows,” who is an expert in all imaginable fields, from economy to linguistics, from biology to philosophy.

But we can well imagine a democratic procedure maintaining the same gap on account of the irreducible moment of contingency in every electoral
result: far from being its limitation, the fact that the elections do not pretend to select the most qualified person is what protects them from the totali-tarian temptation— which is why, as it was already clear to the Ancient Greeks, the most democratic form of selecting who will rule us is by a lot.

That is to say, as Lefort has demonstrated, the achievement of democracy is to turn what is in traditional authoritarian power the moment of its great-est crisis, the moment of transition from one to another master when, for a moment, “the throne is empty,” which causes panic, into the very resort of its strength: democratic elections are the moment of passing through the zero point when the complex network of social links is dissolved into purely quantitative multiplicity of individuals whose votes are mechanically counted. The moment of terror, of the dissolution of all hierarchic links, is thus reenacted and transformed into the foundation of a new and stable positive political order.

Hegel is thus perhaps— measured by his own standards of what a ratio-nal state should be— wrong in his fear of the direct universal democratic vote (see his nervous rejection of the English Reform Bill in 1831). It is pre-cisely democracy (democratic universal election) that (much more appropri-ately than his own state of estates) accomplishes the “magic” trick of convert-ing the negativity (the self- destructive absolute freedom that coincides with the reign of terror) into a stable new political order. In democracy, the radi-cal negativity of terror, the destruction of everyone who pretends to identify with the place of power, is aufgehobenand turned into the positive form of democratic procedure.

Today, when we know the limitation of the formal democratic procedure, the question is whether we can imagine a step further in this direction of  the reversal of egalitarian negativity into a new positive order. One should look for traces of such an order in different domains, including the scientific communities. A report on how the CERN community (European Organi-zation for Nuclear Research) is functioning is indicative here: in an almost utopian way, individual efforts coexist with nonhierarchic collective spirit, and the dedication to the scientific cause (to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang) far outweighs material considerations.

We are in the middle of a new wave of “enclosure of commons”: the com-mons of our natural environs, of our symbolic substance, even of our genetic inheritance. … Antonio Negri was right with his anti- Socialist title Good- Bye Mr. Socialism: communism is to be opposed to socialism, which, instead of the egalitarian collective, offers a solitary organic community— Nazism was national socialism, not national communism. There can be socialist anti-Semitism; there cannot be a communist one. (If it appears, as in Stalin’s last years, it is an indicator that one is no longer faithful to the revolutionary event.) Eric Hobsbawm recently published a column with the title “Social-ism Has Failed. Now Capitalism Is Bankrupt. So What Comes Next?” The answer is communism. 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 antago-nism 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 whatsoever.

The future will be communist or socialist. How, then, are we to counter the threat of ecological catastrophe in a communist way? It is here that we should return to the four moments of what Badiou calls the “eternal idea” of revolutionary- egalitarian justice. What is demanded is:

– strict egalitarian justice. All people should pay the same price in eventual renumerations, that is, one should impose the same worldwide norms of per capita energy consumption, carbon dioxide emissions, and so on; the developed nations should not be allowed to poison the environment at the present rate, blaming the developing third world countries, from Brazil to China, for ruining our shared environment with their rapid development;

– terror. Ruthless punishment of all who violate the imposed protective measures, inclusive of severe limitations of liberal “freedoms” and technological control of the prospective lawbreakers;

– voluntarism. The only way to confront the threat of ecological catastrophe is by means of large- scale collective decisions that will run counter to the “spontaneous” immanent logic of capitalist development; as Walter Benjamin pointed out in his “Theses on the Concept of History,” today, the task of a revolution is not to help the historical tendency or
necessity to realize itself but to “stop the train” of history that runs toward the precipice of global catastrophe— an insight that gained new weight with the prospect of ecological catastrophe;

– and, last but not least, all this combined with the trust in the people (the wager that the large majority of the people support these severe measures, see them as their own, and are ready to participate in their enforcement). One should not be afraid to assert, as a combination of terror and trust in the people, the reactivation of one of the figures of all egalitarian-revolutionary terror, the “informer” who denounces the culprits to the authorities. (In the case of the Enron scandal, Time magazine was right to celebrate the insiders who tipped off the financial authorities as true public heroes.)

This is how what once was called communism can still be of use today.