Žižek – Page 20

from repetition to drive p.496 lost object to loss itself as object

What does the drive mean from a philosophical standpoint? In a vague general sense, there is a homology between the shift from Kant to Hegel and the shift from desire to drive: the Kantian universe is that of desire (structured around the lack, the inaccessible Thing-in-itself), of endlessly approaching the goal, which is why, in order to guarantee the meaningfulness of our ethical activity, Kant has to postulate the immortality of the soul (since we cannot reach the goal in our terrestrial life, we must be allowed to go on ad infinitum).

For Hegel, on the contrary, the Thing-in-itself is not inaccessible, the impossible does happen here and now―not, of course, in the naïve pre-critical sense of gaining access to the transcendent order of things, but in the properly dialectical sense of shifting the perspective and conceiving the gap (that separates us from the Thing) as the Real. With regard to satisfaction, this does not mean that, in contrast to desire which is constitutively non-satisfied, the drive achieves satisfaction by way of reaching the object which eludes desire. True, in contrast to desire, the drive is by definition satisfied, but this is because, in it, satisfaction is achieved in the repeated failure to reach the object, in repeatedly circling around the object. Following Jacques-Alain Miller, a distinction has to be introduced here between a lack and a hole: a lack is spatial, designating a void within a space, while a hole is more radical, it designates the point at which this spatial order itself breaks down (as in the “black hole” in physics).

Therein lies the difference between desire and drive: desire is grounded in its constitutive lack, while the drive circulates around a hole, a gap in the order of being. In other words, the circular movement of the drive obeys the weird logic of the curved space in which the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line, but a curve: the drive “knows” that the quickest way to realize its aim is to circulate around its goal-object. At the immediate level of addressing individuals, capitalism of course interpellates them as consumers, as subjects of desire, soliciting in them ever new perverse and excessive desires (for which it offers products to satisfy them); furthermore, it obviously also manipulates the “desire to desire,” celebrating the very desire to desire ever new objects and modes of pleasure. However, even if it already manipulates desire in a way which takes into account the fact that the most elementary desire is the desire to reproduce itself as desire (and not to find satisfaction), at this level, we do not yet reach the drive.

The drive inheres in capitalism at a more fundamental, systemic, level: the drive is that which propels forward the entire capitalist machinery, it is the impersonal compulsion to engage in the endless circular movement of expanded self-reproduction.

We enter the mode of the drive the moment the circulation of money as capital becomes an end in itself, since the expansion of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. (One should bear in mind here Lacan’s well-known distinction between the aim and the goal of drive: while the goal is the object around which the drive circulates, its true aim is the endless continuation of this circulation as such.)

The capitalist drive thus belongs to no particular individual―it is rather that those individuals who act as the direct “agents” of capital (capitalists themselves, top managers) have to display it.

Miller recently proposed a Benjaminian distinction between “constituted anxiety” and “constituent anxiety,” which is crucial with regard to the shift from desire to drive: while the first designates the standard notion of the terrifying and fascinating abyss of anxiety which haunts us, its infernal circle which threatens to draw us in, the second stands for the “pure” confrontation with the : objet petit a as constituted in its very loss.

Miller is right to emphasize here two features: the difference which separates constituted from constituent anxiety concerns the status of the object with regard to fantasy. In a case of constituted anxiety, the object dwells within the confines of a fantasy, while we get only the constituent anxiety when the subject “traverses the fantasy” and confronts the void, the gap, filled up by the fantasmatic object. Clear and convincing as it is, Miller’s formula misses the true paradox or, rather, ambiguity of the objet a, the ambiguity which concerns the question: does the objet a function as the object of desire or of the drive?

That is to say, when Miller defines the objet a as the object which overlaps with its loss, which emerges at the very moment of its loss (so that all its fantasmatic incarnations, from breast to voice to gaze, are metonymic figurations of the void, of nothing), he remains within the horizon of desire―the true object-cause of desire is the void filled in by its fantasmatic incarnations. While, as Lacan emphasizes, the objet a is also the object of the drive, the relationship is here thoroughly different: although in both cases the link between object and loss is crucial, in the case of the objet a as the object-cause of desire, we have an object which is originally lost, which coincides with its own loss, which emerges as lost, while, in the case of the objet a as the object of the drive, the “object” is directly the loss itself―in the shift from desire to drive, we pass from the lost object to loss itself as an object.

That is to say, the weird movement called “drive” is not driven by the “impossible” quest for the lost object; it is a drive to directly enact the “loss”― the gap, cut, distance ― itself. There is thus a double distinction to be drawn here: not only between the objet a in its fantasmatic and post-fantasmatic status, but also, within this post-fantasmatic domain itself, between the lost object-cause of desire and the object-loss of the drive. 497

objet a death drive negativity

But there is a paradox which complicates this critique of Hegel: is not absolute negativity, this central notion of Hegelian thought, precisely a philosophical figure of what Freud called the “death drive”? Insofar as ― following Lacan ― the core of Kant’s thought can be defined as the “critique of pure desire,” is not the passage from Kant to Hegel then precisely the passage from desire to drive? The very concluding lines of Hegel’s Encyclopedia (on the Idea which enjoys repeatedly transversing its circle) point in this direction, suggesting that the answer to the standard critical question ― “Why does the dialectical process always go on? Why does dialectical mediation always continue its work?” ― is precisely the eppur si muove of the pure drive. 495

This structure of negativity also accounts for the quasi-“automatic” character of the dialectical process, for the common reproach concerning its “mechanical” character: belying all the assurances that dialectics is open to the true life of reality, the Hegelian dialectic is like a processing machine which indifferently swallows up and processes all possible contents, from nature to history, from politics to art, delivering them packaged in the same triadic form. 492

What further complicates the scheme are objects and signifiers which somehow overlap with their own lack: for Lacan, the phallus is itself the signifier of castration (this introduces all the paradoxes of the signifier of the lack of signifier, of how the lack of a signifier is itself “remarked” in a signifier of this lack), not to mention l’objet petit a,;the object-cause of desire which is nothing but the embodiment of lack, its place-holder. The relationship between object and lack is here turned around: far from lack being reducible to the lack of an object, the object itself is a spectral positivization of a lack. And one has to extrapolate this mechanism into the very (pre-)ontological foundation of all being: the primordial gesture of creation is not that of an excessive giving, of assertion, but a negative gesture of withdrawal, of subtracting, which alone opens up the space for the creation of positive entities. This is how “there is something rather than nothing”: in order to arrive at something, one has to subtract from nothing its nothing(ness) itself, that is, one has to posit the primordial pre-ontological Abyss “as such,” as nothing, so that, in contrast to (or against the background of) nothing, something can appear.

What precedes Nothing is less than nothing, the pre-ontological multiplicity whose names range from Democritus’s den to Lacan’s objet a,. The space of this pre-ontological multiplicity is not between Nothing and Something (more than nothing but less than something); den is, on the contrary, more than Something but less than Nothing. The relationship between these three basic ontological terms―Nothing, Something, den―thus takes the form of a paradoxical circle, like Escher’s famous drawing of the interconnected waterfalls forming a circular perpetuum mobile: Something is more than Nothing, den is more than Something (the objet a is in excess with regard to the consistency of Something, the surplus-element which sticks out), and Nothing is more than den (which is “less than nothing”). 495

The underlying problem here is to determine which of the Freudian negations is the primordial one―which one opens up the space for all the others. From the Lacanian perspective, the most obvious candidate may appear to be the notorious “symbolic castration,” the loss which opens up and sustains the space of symbolization―recall, in relation to the Name-of-the-Father as the bearer of symbolic castration, how Lacan, as we have seen, plays on the French homophony between le Nom-du-Père and le Non-du-Père. But it seems more productive to follow a more radical path of thinking beyond the father (père) to what is even worse (pire). Again, the most obvious candidate for this “worse” is the (death) drive, a kind of Freudian correlate of what Schelling called the primordial “contraction,” an obstinate repetitive fixation on a contingent object which subtracts the subject from its direct immersion in reality. 495

Verwerfung Verneinung Verleugnung Verdrängung

Hegelian “negation of negation” is far from being the simple sublation of negativity in a new positive order, while the Freudian death drive is not a push towards total disappearance or self-annihilation, but an “undead” persistence attached to a contingent particularity.

The Freudian series of Vers

Verdrängung―repression
Verwerfung―foreclosure
Verleugnung―disavowal
Verneinung―denial

which supplements the Hegelian-dialectical No is thus not just a complication of that No, it points towards a more radical No, the core of negativity which escaped Hegel and which leaves its traces in different post-Hegelian versions of pure repetition. 490

foreclosure I think with Alenka

Book of Job Traversing the fantasy

He insists on the inexplicableness of everything. “Hath the rain a father? … Out of whose womb came the ice?” (38:28). He goes farther, and insists on the positive and palpable unreason of things; “Hast thou sent the rain upon the desert where no man is, and upon the wilderness wherein there is no man?” (38:26) … To startle man, God becomes for an instant a blasphemer; one might almost say that God becomes for an instant an atheist. He unrolls before Job a long panorama of created things, the horse, the eagle, the raven, the wild ass, the peacock, the ostrich, the crocodile. He so describes each of them that it sounds like a monster walking in the sun. The whole is a sort of psalm or rhapsody of the sense of wonder. The maker of all things is astonished at the things he has Himself made. From G.K. Chesterton The Book of Job, London: Cecil Palmer & Hayard, 1916, p. xxii-xxiii.

God is here overwhelmed by the miracle of his own creation―and we should not miss the negative aspect also at work here. In referring to the chaotic wealth of creatures, God is not boastfully asserting the infinite gap which separates Job from him (as in: “Who are you to complain about your little misery? You have no idea what the universe is …”); he is―implicitly, at least―also admitting that Job has nothing to complain about because his case is in no way unique: the whole world is a terrifying unreasonable mess. This “negation of negation” thus deprives Job even of the last solace brought by the hope that, in God’s eyes at least, his suffering has some deeper meaning: what he thought to be his own perplexity reveals itself to be the perplexity of God himself. This brings us again to Lacan’s key motif of the lack in the Other, best rendered by Hegel’s famous remark that the secrets of the Egyptians were secrets also for the Egyptians themselves: the secret of God is also a secret for God himself.

Here is Žižek in 2009 at EGS with an explanation of the Book of Job and Sexuation

So far so good, we may say: by way of transposing what appears as an epistemological limit into the Thing itself, Hegel shows how the problem is its own solution―but in what precise sense? To avoid a fatal misunderstanding: this crucial dialectical move from epistemological obstacle to ontological impossibility in no way implies that all we can do is reconcile ourselves to this impossibility, i.e., accept reality itself as imperfect.

The premise of psychoanalysis is that one can intervene with the symbolic into the Real, because the Real is not external reality-in-itself, but a crack in the symbolic, so one can intervene with an act which re-configures the field and thus transforms its immanent point of impossibility. “Traversing the fantasy” does not mean accepting the misery of our lives―on the contrary, it means that only after we “traverse” the fantasies obfuscating this misery can we effectively change it. 476

Ž and Badiou

This essay is located here However I think this is basically his essay in Hallward’s Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy 2004

Insofar as, for Badiou, the science of love – this fourth, excessive, truth-procedure – is psychoanalysis, one should not be surprised to find that Badiou’s relationship with Lacan is the nodal point of his thought. How, exactly, does Badiou’s philosophy relate to Lacan’s theory? One should begin by unequivocally stating that Badiou is right in rejecting Lacan’s “anti-philosophy.” In fact, when Lacan endlessly varies the motif of how philosophy tries to “fill in the holes,” to present a totalizing view of the universe, to cover up all the gaps, ruptures and inconsistencies (say, in the total self-transparency of self-consciousness), and how, against philosophy, psychoanalysis asserts the constitutive gap/rupture/inconsistency, etc.etc., he simply misses the point of what the most fundamental philosophical gesture is: not to close the gap, but, on the contrary, to OPEN UP a radical gap in the very edifice of the universe, the “ontological difference,” the gap between the empirical and the transcendental, where none of the two levels can be reduced to the other (as we know from Kant, transcendental constitution is a mark of our – human – finitude and has nothing to do with “creating reality”; on the other hand, reality only appears to us within the transcendental horizon, so we cannot generate the emergence of the transcendental horizon from the ontic self-development of reality). 3

This general statement does not allow us to dispense with the work of a more detailed confrontation. It was Bruno Bosteels who provided the hitherto most detailed account of the difference between Badiou’s and the Lacanian approach. What the two approaches share is the focus on the shattering encounter of the Real: on the “symptomal torsion” at which the given symbolic situation breaks down. What, then, happens at this point of the intrusion of utmost negativity?

According to Badiou, the opposition is here the one between impasse and passe.

For Lacan, the ultimate authentic experience (the “traversing of fantasy”) is that of fully confronting the fundamental impasse of the symbolic order; this tragic encounter of the impossible Real is the limit-experience of a human being: one can only sustain it, one cannot force a passage through it. The political implications of this stance are easily discernible: while Lacan enables us to gain an insight into the falsity of the existing State, this insight is already “it,” there is no way to pass through it, every attempt to impose a new order is denounced as illusory: “From the point of the real as absent cause, indeed, any ordered consistency must necessarily appear to be imaginary insofar as it conceals this fundamental lack itself.” Is this not the arch-conservative vision according to which, the ultimate truth of being is the nullity of every Truth, the primordial vortex which threatens to draw us into its abyss? All we can do, after this shattering insight, is to return to the semblance, to the texture of illusions which allow us to temporarily avoid the view of the terrifying abyss, humbly aware of the fragility of this texture… While, for Lacan, Truth is this shattering experience of the Void – a sudden insight into the abyss of Being, “not a process so much as a brief traumatic encounter, or illuminating shock, in the midst of common reality” -, for Badiou, Truth is what comes afterward: the long arduous work of fidelity, of enforcing a new law onto the situation. 5 The choice is thus: “whether a vanishing apparition of the real as absent cause (for Lacan) or a forceful transformation of the real into a consistent truth (for Badiou)”:

is Lacan really unable to think a procedure which gives being to the very lack? Is this not the work of sublimation? Does sublimation not precisely “give being to this very lack,” to the lack as/of the impossible Thing, insofar as sublimation is “an object elevated to the dignity of a Thing” (Lacan’s standard definition of sublimation from his Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis)? This is why Lacan links death drive and creative sublimation: death drive does the negative work of destruction, of suspending the existing order of Law, thereby as it were clearing the table, opening up the space for sublimation which can (re)starts the work of creation. Both Lacan and Badiou thus share the notion of a radical cut/rupture, “event,” encounter of the Real, which opens up the space for the work of sublimation, of creating the new order

Descartes

Wood, Kelsey. Žižek A Reader’s Guide. Wiley/Blackwell. 2012.

Descartes’ effort to erase the entirety of reality and to start with a clean slate, … In the Ticklish Subject, Žižek showed the functional role of the Caresian cogito (“I think, therefore I exist”) within the broader project of methodic doubt and developed Lacan’s insight that the subject of psychoanalysis is none other than Descartes’ cogito.

Žižek disclosed the “empty place” of Lacanian subjectivity as a pure structural function that emerges only through a withdrawal from one’s substantial identity. This means that true subjectivity arises only through encountering the Real, and through the subsequent disintegration of the self that had been constituted within a communal universe of meaning.

In other words, as opposed to the “self” produced by the process of ideological subjectivization, the subject as such involves the hysterical questioning of the feminine subject. To summarize, The Ticklish Subject articulated and clarified Lacan’s account of subjectivity in order to assert the emancipatory potential o f the subject against capitalist ideology. 241

rabble singular universality

Žižek also talks here about rabble at Birkbeck March 26, 2011

What makes the notion of the rabble symptomatic is that it describes a necessarily produced “irrational” excess of modern rational state, a group of people for which there is no place within the organized totality of the modern state, although they formally belong to it — as such, they perfectly exemplify the category of singular universality (a singular which directly gives body to a universality, bypassing the mediation through the particular), of what Ranciere called the “part of no-part” of the social body.

Hegel fails to take note how the rabble, in its very status of the destructive excess of social totality is the “reflexive determination” of the totality as such, the immediate embodiment of its universality, the particular element in the guise of which the social totality encounters itself among its elements, and, as such, the key constituent of its identity.

We can easily perceive here the link between the eminently political topic of the status of the rabble and Hegel’s basic ontological topic of the relationship between universality and particularity, i.e., the problem of how to understand the Hegelian “concrete universality.”

If we understand “concrete universality” in the usual sense of the organic subdivision of the universal into its particular moments, so that universality is not an abstract feature in which individuals directly participate, and the participation of the individual in the universal is always mediated through the particular network of determinations, then the corresponding notions of society is a corporate one: society as an organic Whole in which each individual has to find its particular place, i.e., in which I participate in the State by fulfilling my particular duty or obligation.

There are no citizens as such, one has to be a member of a particular estate ( a farmer, a state official, mother in a family, teacher, artisan …) in order to contribute to the harmony of the Whole. This is the Bradleyian proto-Fascist Hegel who opposes atomistic liberalism (in which society is a mechanic unity of abstract individuals) on behalf of the State as a living organism in which each part has it function, and within this space, the rabble has to appear as the irrational excess, as the threat to social order and stability, as outcasts excluded and excluding themselves from the “rational” social totality.

comparison of freudian hegelian notions of negativity

What Freud aimed at with his notion of death-drive — more precisely, the key dimension of this notion for which Freud himself was blind, unaware of what he discovered, is the “non-dialectical” core of the Hegelian negativity, the pure drive to repeat without any movement of sublation/idealization.

The paradox here is that pure repetition (in contrast to repetition as idealizing sublation) is sustained precisely by its impurity, by the persistence of a contingent “pathological” element to which the movement of repetition remains stuck.

In the Kierkegard-Freudian pure repetition, the dialectical movement of sublimation thus encounters itself, its own core, outside itself, in the guise of a “blind” compulsion-to-repeat.

And it is here that one should apply the great Hegelian motto about the internalizing of the external obstacle: in fighting its external opposite, the blind nonsublatable repetition, the dialectical movement is fighting its own abyssal ground, its own core;

in other words, the ultimate gesture of reconciliation is to recognize in this threatening excess of negativity the core of the subject itself. This excess has different names in Hegel: the “night of the world,” the necessity of war, of madness, etc.

And perhaps, the same holds for the basic opposition between the Hegelian and the Freudian negativity: precisely insofar as there is a unbridgeable gap between them (the Hegelian negativity is idealizing, mediatizing/”sublating” all particular content in the abyss of its universality, while the negativity of the Freudian drive is expressed as being-stuck onto a contingent particular content),

the Freudian negativity provides (quite literally) the “material base” for the idealizing negativity — to put it in somewhat simplified terms, every idealizing/universalizing negativity has to be attached to a singular contingent “pathological” content which serves as its “sinthom” in the Lacanian sense (if this sinthom is unravelled/disintegrated, universality disappears).

The exemplary model of this link is, of course, Hegel’s deduction of the necessity of hereditary monarchy: the rational state as universal totality mediatizing all particular content has to be embodied in the contingent “irrational”figure of the monarch.

Ž introduction to ruda’s book on rabble

… the primordial gesture of creation is not that of an excessive giving, of assertion, but a negative gesture of withdrawal, of subtracting, which only opens up the space for creation of positive entities.

This is how “There is something rather than nothing”: in order to arrive at something, one has to subtract from nothing its nothing(ness) itself, i.e., one has to posit the primordial pre-ontological Abyss “as such,” AS NOTHING, so that, in contrast to (or against the background of) nothing, something can appear.

🙂 Subtract nothing from nothingness, in order to get something. Otherwise nothing will just go on, dumbly, dumb dumb, without a cut, it merely langors, lingers, but never approaching creation of something new out of itself.

The underlying problem is here which of these negation is the primordial one, i.e., which one opens up the space for all others. From the Lacanian perspective, the most obvious candidate may appear to be the notorious “symbolic castration,” the loss which opens up and sustains the space of symbolization — recall, insofar as the Name-of-the-Father is the bearer of symbolic castration, how Lacan plays on the French homophony between le Nom-du-Pere (the name of the father) and le Non-du-Pere (the no of the father).

But it seems more productive to follow a more radical path of thinking beyond father (pere) to what is even worse (pire). Again the most obvious candidate for this “worse” is (death-)drive, .a kind of Freudian correlate to what Schelling called the primordial “contraction,” the obstinate repetitive fixation on a contingent object which subtracts the subject from direct immersion into reality.

Drive as such is death-drive — not in the sense of longing for univeral negation-dissolution of all particularity, but, on the contrary, in the sense of the “spontaneous” life-flow of generation and corruption getting “stuck” onto some accidental particularity and circulating endlessly around it.

If Life is a song played on an old LP (which it definitely is not), drive arises when, due to a scratch on the LP surface, the needle gets stuck and the same fragment is repeated.

The deepest speculative insight is that a universality can only emerge when a flow of particularity get stuck onto a singular moment. And this Freudian notion of drive brings us to the radical ambiguity of Hegel’s dialectics: does it follow the logic of drive or not?

Hegel’s logic is a logic of purification, of “unstucking”: even when a subject puts all of his libidinal investment into a contingent fragment of being (“I am ready to risk everything for that!”), this contingent fragment — the Lacanian objet a — is, in its indifferent accidentality, an operator of purification, of “unstucking” from all (other) particular content — in Lacanese, this object is a metonymy of lack. The subject’s desire is here the transcendental void, and the object is a contingent ontic filler of this void.

In drive, in contrast, objet petit a is not only the metonymy of lack, but a kind of transcendental stain, irreducible and irreplacable in its very contingent singularity, not just a contingent ontic filler of a lack.

While drive is a mode of being stuck onto a contingent stain-object, dialectical negativity is a continuing process of un-stucking from all particular content: jouissance “leans on” something, hanging onto its particularity — this is what is missing in Hegel, but operative in Freud.

taking deleuze from behind destitution concrete universal

Žižek. Organs without Bodies. Deleuze and Consequences. Routledge. 2004. (50-51)

Taking Deleuze from Behind

And, what is the Hegelian Begriff as opposed to the nominalist “notion,” the result of abstracting shared features from a series of particular objects?

Often, we stumble on a particular case that does not fully “fit” its universal species, that is “atypical”; the next step is to acknowledge that every particular is “atypical;’ that the universal species exists only in exceptions, that there is a structural tension between the Universal and the Particular.

At this point, we become aware that the Universal is no longer just an empty neutral container of its subspecies but an entity in tension with each and every one of its species. The universal Notion thus acquires a dynamics of its own. More precisely, the true Universal is this very antagonistic dynamics between the Universal and the Particular.

It is at this point that we pass from “abstract” to “concrete” Universal — at the point when we acknowledge that every Particular is an “exception,” and, consequently, that the Universal, far from “containing” its particular content, excludes it (or is excluded by it).

This exclusion renders the Universal itself particular (it is not truly universal, since it cannot grasp or contain the particular content), yet this very failure is its strength: the Universal is thus simultaneously posited as the Particular.

The supreme political case of such a gesture is the moment of revolutionary “councils” taking over – the moment of “ahistorical” collective freedom, of “eternity in time;’ of what Benjamin called “dialectic in suspense. ” Or, as Alain Badiou would have put it in his Platonic terms, in such historical moments, the eternal Idea of Freedom appears/transpires.

Even if its realization is always “impure,” one should stick to the eternal Idea, which is not just a “generalization” of particular experiences of freedom but their inherent Measure.

(To which, of course, Hegel would have retorted that the Thermidor occurs because such a direct actualization of freedom has to appear as Terror.)

One should insert this appearance of Freedom into the series of exceptional temporalities, together with the Messianic time first formulated by Paul — the time when “the end is near: the time of the end of time (as Giorgio Agamben puts it) when, in an ontological “state of emergency;’ one should suspend one’s full identification with one’s sociosymbolic identity and act as if this identity is unimportant, a matter of indifference.

(This exceptional temporality is to be strictly distinguished from the ecstatic-carnivalesque suspension of Order in which things are turned upside-down in a generalized orgy.)

187-190 judaism christianity protestant universal singular

Slavoj, Žižek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence.” The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard. 2006. 134-190.

One should avoid the same mistake in dealing with Judaism: setting the “good” Levinasian Judaism of justice, respect for and responsibility to-ward the other, and so on, against the “bad” tradition of Jehovah, his fits of vengeance and genocidal violence against the neighboring people Judaism is the moment of unbearable absolute contradiction, the worst (monotheistic violence) and the best (responsibility toward the other) in absolute tension— the two are identical and simultaneously absolutely incompatible.

Christianity resolves the tension by way of introducing a cut: the Bad itself (finitude, cut, the gesture of difference, “differentiation,” as the Communists used to put it —“the need for ideological differentiation”) as the direct source of Good. In a move from In-Itself to For-Itself, Christianity merely assumes the Jewish contradiction. So if I seem to argue for the step from Judaism to Paulinian Christianity, one should be fully aware that Paul is here conceived as “the first great German-Jewish thinker, equal in stature to Rosenzweig, Freud, and Benjamin.”

At what point in the historical development of Christianity did this Paulinian moment reemerge most forcefully?

Do the three main versions of Christianity not form a kind of Hegelian triad? In the succession of Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Protes-tantism, each new term is a subdivision, split off of a previous unity.

This triad of Universal-Particular-Singular can be designated by three representative founding figures ( John, Peter, Paul) as well as by three races (Slavic, Latin, German).

In the Eastern Orthodoxy, we have the substantial unity of the text and the corpus of believers, which is why the believers are allowed to interpret the sacred Text. The Text goes on and lives in them; it is not outside the living history as its exempted standard and model. The substance of religious life is the Christian community it-self.

Catholicism stands for radical alienation: the entity which mediates between the founding sacred Text and the corpus of believers, the Church, the religious Institution, regains its full autonomy. The highest authority resides in the Church, which is why the Church has the right to interpret the Text; the Text is read during the mass in Latin, a language which is not understood by ordinary believers, and it is even considered a sin for an ordinary believer to read the Text directly, bypassing the priest’s guidance.

For Protestantism, finally, the only authority is the Text itself, and the wager is on every believer’s direct contact with the Word of God as it was delivered in the Text; the mediator (the Particular) thus disappears, withdraws into insignificance, enabling the believer to adopt the position of a “universal singular,”the individual in direct contact with the divine Universality, bypassing the mediating role of the particular Institution. This reconciliation, however, becomes possible only after alienation is brought to the extreme: in contrast to the Catholic notion of a caring and loving God with whom one can communicate, negotiate even, Protestantism starts with the notion of God deprived of any “common measure” shared with humans, of God as an impenetrable Beyond who distributes grace in a totally contingent way.

One can discern the traces of this full acceptance of God’s unconditional and capricious authority in the last song Johnny Cash recorded just before his death, “The Man Comes Around,” an exemplary articulation of the anxieties contained in Southern Baptist Christianity:

There’s a man goin’ ’round taking names
And he decides who to free and who to blame
Everybody won’t be treated all the same
There will be a golden ladder reaching down
When the man comes around

The song is about Armageddon, the end of days, when God will appear and perform the Last Judgment, and this event is presented as pure and arbitrary terror: God is presented almost as Evil personified, as a kind of political informer, a man who “comes around” and provokes consternation by “taking names,” by deciding who is saved and who lost. If anything, Cash’s description evokes the well-known scene of people lined up for a brutal interrogation, and the informer pointing out those selected for torture. There is no mercy, no pardon of sins in it, no jubilation in it.

We are all fixed in our roles: the just remain just and the filthy remain filthy. In this divine proclamation, we are not simply judged in a just way. Rather, we are informed from outside, as if learning about an arbitrary decision, whether we were righteous or sinners, whether we are saved or condemned. This decision appears to have nothing to do with our inner qualities. And, again, this dark excess of the ruthless divine sadism — excess over the image of a severe, but nonetheless just, God — is a necessary negative, an underside, of the excess of Christian love over the Jewish Law: love that suspends the Law is necessarily accompanied by arbitrary cruelty that also suspends the Law.

This is also why it is wrong to oppose the Christian god of Love to the Jewish god of cruel justice: excessive cruelty is the necessary obverse of Christian Love.

And, again, the relationship between these two is one of parallax: there is no “substantial” difference between the god of Love and the god of excessive-arbitrary cruelty; it is one and the same god who appears in a different light only due to a parallactic shift of our perspective.

One might designate this intrusion of radical negativity as the “return of the Jewish repressed” within Christianity: the return of the figure of Jehovah, the cruel God of vengeful blind justice. And it is when one is faced with this violent return that one should assert the ultimate speculative identity of Judaism and Christianity: the “infinite judgment” is here “Christianity is Judaism.”

183-4 anti-levinasian conclusion beyond the face of the other

This brings us to the radical anti-Levinasian conclusion: the true ethical step is the one beyond the face of the other, the one of suspending the hold of the face, the one of choosing against the face, for the Third. This coldness is justice at its most elementary.

Every preempting of the Other in the guise of his or her face relegates the Third to the faceless background.

And the elementary gesture of justice is not to show respect for the face in front of me, to be open to its depth, but to abstract from it and refocus onto the faceless Thirds in the background.

It is only such a shift of focus onto the Third that effectively uproots justice, liberating it from the contingent umbilical link that renders it “embedded” in a particular situation.

In other words, it is only such a shift onto the Third that grounds justice in the dimension of universality proper.

When Levinas endeavors to ground ethics in the Other’s face, is he not still clinging to the ultimate root of the ethical commitment, afraid to accept the abyss of the rootless Law as the only foundation of ethics?

Thus, truly blind justice cannot be grounded in the relationship to the Other’s face, in other words, in the relationship to the neighbor. Justice is emphatically not justice for —with regard to— the neighbor.

since the limitation of our capacity to relate to Others’ faces is the mark of our very finitude. In other words, the limitation of our ethical relation of responsibility toward the Other’s face which necessitates the rise of the Third (the domain of regulations) is a positive condition of ethics, not simply its secondary supplement.

“When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity — that was a quality God’s image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how their hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.”

However, what this means is that, in order to practice justice, one has to suspend one’s power of imagination; if hate is a failure of imagination, then pity is the failure of the power of abstraction.

the face is the ultimate ethical lure, and the passage from Judaism to Christianity is not the passage from blindly applying the harsh law to displaying love and pity for the suffering face.

It is crucial that it was Judaism, the religion of the harsh letter of the Law, that first formulated the injunction to love thy neighbor: the neighbor is not displayed through a face; it is, as we have seen, in his or her fundamental dimension a faceless monster.

It is here that one has to remain faithful to the Jewish legacy: in order to arrive at the “neighbor” we have to love, we must pass through the “dead” letter of the Law, which cleanses the neighbor of all imaginary lure, of the “inner wealth of a person” displayed through his or her face, reducing him or her to a pure subject.

Levinas is right to point out the ultimate paradox of how “the Jewish consciousness, formed precisely through contact with this harsh morality, with its obligations and sanctions, has learned to have an absolute horror of blood, while the doctrine of non-violence has not stemmed the natural course towards violence displayed by a whole world over the last two thousand years. . . . Only a God who maintains the principle of Law can in practice tone down its severity and use oral law to go beyond the inescapable harshness of Scriptures” (DF,138).

But what about the opposite paradox? What if only a God who is ready to subordinate his own Law to love can in practice push us to realize blind justice in all its harshness? Recall the infamous lines from Che Guevara’s testamentary “Message to the Tricontinental” (1967): “Hatred is an element of struggle; relentless hatred of the enemy that impels us over and beyond the natural limitations of man and transforms us into effective, violent, selective, and cold killing machines. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy.”

And it is crucial to read these lines together with Guevara’s notion of revolutionary violence as a “work of love”: “Let me say, with the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love. It is impossible to think of an authentic revolutionary with-out this quality.”

One should confer to the words “beyond the natural limitations of man” their entire Kantian weight: in their love/hatred, revolutionaries are pushed beyond the limitations of empirical “human nature,” so that their violence is literally angelic.

Therein resides the core of revolutionary justice, this much misused term: harshness of the measures taken, sustained by love. Does this not recall Christ’s scandalous words from Luke (“if anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and his mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes even his own life —he cannot be my disciple” [Luke 14 : 26]), which point in exactly the same direction as another famous quote from Che? “You may have to be tough, but do not lose your tenderness. You may have to cut the flowers, but it will not stop the Spring.” 54

This Christian stance is the opposite of the Oriental attitude of nonviolence, which —as we know from the long history of Buddhist rulers and warriors— can legitimize the worst violence. It is not that the revolutionary violence “really” aims at establishing a nonviolent harmony; on the contrary, the authentic revolutionary liberation is much more directly identified with violence — it is violence as such (the violent gesture of discarding, of establishing a difference, of drawing a line of separation) which liberates.

Freedom is not a blissfully neutral state of harmony and balance, but the violent act which disturbs this balance.