Category: Žižek

Žižek in London July 2011

For the video lecture look on the side panel under Žižek London 2011

King’s Speech: the cause of his stuttering is his inability to identify with his symbolic function. The movie is how to make this intelligent guy, stupid enough so that he is able to become King.
Black Swan: while a man, even if he becomes stupid, can still retain his title and have a private life, but a woman needs to make a choice, if you withdraw from a public career you will die.

– Can I please have a coffee without cream.

– Sorry we have run out of cream, we only have milk, can I bring you a coffee without milk? 

A customer enters a store and asks, “You probably don’t have butter or do you?”  The clerk replies, “Sorry we are not the store that doesn’t have butter, we’re the store that doesn’t have toilet paper.  The store that doesn’t have butter is down the street.”

Catastrophic but serious: we know about the impending catastrophe, but don’t take it seriously, this is what psychoanalysis calls the fetishist split.  I know very well, but nevertheless.

We believe much more than we know that we believe.  I am a totally cynical person I don’t care, but in your actions, in what you do, we see your beliefs.   Niels Borg and the horse shoe.

The first one to provide the right direction: GK Chesteron, The Man Who was Thursday.

It is not enough to say, “Communism was a noble idea, it was just a contingent distortion of Stalin that ruined it.”  No, the misinterpretation, is grounded in the idea itself.  I’m not anti-capitalist in a naive sense, but in the sense that when you talk about taoday’s global capitalism, don’t just mention Western countries in the G8 doing bad stuff, mention the Congo, that doesn’t function as a state, its a basket case.  The Republic of Congo is not a deviation but is precisely a part of today’s totality of capitalism.  TOTALITY this is one of the crucial critical notions we should rehabilitate today.

The Hegelian notion of totality, to observie it in its totality, you should include its antagonism, inconsistencies, in other words you cannot say that Congo and China are inconsistencies that don’t count, no these have to be included in the notion.

Necessary Inner Distortions: Things go wrong for necessary reasons.  Public use of reason subtracted from authority etc.  We are witnessing an attempt on public use of reason, in University institutions,  the space of freedom is being convereted into production of expert knowledge, factory for producing experts.

begin

1+1=3  Not just a Hegelian thing.

The opposition between liberal democracy and religious fundamentalism is a false one.

One need put this section in context.  We’re talking about the subject. But the subject where, when, how?  It comes about yes.  From birth? How?  In a magical moment of self-realization?  Of maturity into a total person, socialized into a functioning adult?  None of the above.  The true subject is the subject of an event.   What must concern us most here is the question put forth by Žižek,

What bothers a materialist is: Am I really alive here and now, or am I just vegetating, as a mere human animal bent on survival? In Defence of Lost Causes 512 note 4.

And then there is Fight Club.  Released in 1999, a scene in which Ed Norton’s character beats himself up in front of his boss.  Žižek makes the point that this is an example of traversing the fantasy of being the object, as if saying to the boss, “To you, I’m a vaguely anonymous person, worth nothing to you except as somebody who outputs dispensible intellectual/creative labour units that enhance the corporation’s bottom line.

[obscene superego fantasy Enjoy! that keeps us beholden to Other]

Again why the subject?  Recent events post-financial crisis seem to display the emergence of a new type of political post-individualism, that combines neo-liberalism with an authoritarian ruling structure. The model here is China, a capitalism combined with authoritarian state structure.

Ž the abyss of the Other desire 4

Žižek, S. The Plague of Fantasies. New York: Verso, 1997.
Fiat iustitia, pereat mundus is a Latin phrase. It means: “Let there be justice, though the world perish.”

Hegel’s (and Lacan’s, incidentally) point is that it is possible to move ‘beyond Good and Evil’, beyond the horizon of the Law and constitutive guilt, into drive …

Hegel’s implicit thesis is that

diabolical Evil is another name for the Good itself; for the concept ‘in itself’, the two are indistinguishable, the difference is purely formal, and concerns only the point of view of the perceiving subject.

In short ‘diabolical evil’ is simply Kant’s name for what Freud [calls] the death drive.

I become aware of my freedom only through the experience of how, on behalf of the moral law, I am able to withstand the pressure of the pathological motivations which tie me to innerworldly phenomenal causality.

the pure moral act is impossible, of how one can never be sure that one is acting solely out of consideration for duty, is the far more uncanny fact that the moral act, precisely as impossible, is simultaneously unavoidable, that which is in a way impossible to transgress.

it is only my failure to act ethically which guarantees that I remain an ethical subject, since were I to accomplish a pure ethical act, I would change into a being of diabolical Evil (in a Sadeian Supreme-Being-of-Evilness). 230

true evil involves precisely the blurring of distinctions between Good and Evil — that is, the elevation of Evil into a consistent ethical Principle. A revolutionary terrorist, for example, is of aesthetic interest if he is not merely a bloodthirsty executioner killing and torturing out of pure egotistical baseness, but a sincere idealist ready to sacrifice everything for his Cause, convinced that he is doing a service to humanity, and thus caught in the tragic deadlock of his predicament. … … such an ‘ethical evil’ is the true diabolical Evil, much worse than the evil of simple egotistical baseness: the cleaner you are (the more your motives are selfless-humanitarian), the greater your evil. 234-235

abyss of the Other’s desire 3

Žižek, S. The Plague of Fantasies. New York: Verso, 1997.

The standard subject’s reaction to the act is that of aphanasis, of his/her self-obliteration, not of heroically assuming it: when the awareness of the full consequences of ‘what I have just done’ hits me, I want to disappear.  At this precise point Lacan (and already Freud’s notion fo the death drive) parts with the Romantic ideology of a ‘demonic’ self-destructive Will: the death drive is not a ‘will to die’, radical Evil is not a ‘diabolical’ intention that seeks pleasure in inflicting pain on one’s neighbour …

abyss of the Other’s desire 2

Žižek, S. The Plague of Fantasies. New York: Verso, 1997.

.. the unique strength of Kant’s ethics lies in this very formal indeterminacy: moral Law does not tell me what my duty is, it merely tells me that I should accomplish my duty. That is to say, it is not possilbe to derive the concrete norms I have to follow in my specific siutation from the moral Law itself —

which means that the subject himself has to assume the responsibility of ‘translating’ the abstract injunction of the moral Law into a series of concrete obligations. 221

The fact that the Subject is a Universal Being means that, precisely, he cannot simply rely on some determinate substantial content (‘universal’ as it may be) which would fix the co-ordinates of his ethical activity in advance, but that the only way for him to arrive at Universality is to accept the objective indeterminacy of his situation — I become ‘universal’ only through the violent effort of disengaging myself from the particularity of my situation: through conceiving this situation as contingent and limiting, through opening up in it the gap of indeterminacy filled in by my act. 222

Subjectivity and universality are thus strictly correlative: the dimension of universality becomes ‘for itself’ only through the ‘individualist’ negation of the particular context which forms the subject’s specific background.

… compels us to reject any reference to ‘duty’ as an excuse: “I know this is difficult, and might be painful, but what can I do? It’s my duty…” … The reference to duty as the excuse for doing our duty should be rejected a hypocritical … The obscene jouissance of this situation is generated by the fact that I conceive of myself as exculpated from what I am doing: isn’t it nice to be able to inflict pain on others in the full awareness that I’m not responsible for it, that I am merely fulfilling the Other’s Will … this is what Kantian ethics prohibits. 221-222

The Kantian law is thus not merely an empty form applied to a random empirical content in order to ascertain if this content meets the critieria of ethical adequacy— rather, the empty form of the Law functions as the promise of an absent content (never) to come. … the form is not only a kind of neutral universal mould of the pluality of different empirical contents; the autonomy of the Form, rather, bears witness to the uncertainty which persists with regard to the content of our acts — we never know if the determinate content which accounts for the specificity of our acts is the right one: that is, if we have really acted in accordance with the Law and have not been guided by some hidden pathological motive. … the subject finds himself in a situation in which, although he knows there is a Law, he never knows (and a priori cannot know) what this Law is — a gap forever separates the Law from its positive incarnations. The subject is thus a priori, by virtue of his very existence, guilty: guilty without knowing what he is guilty of (and for that very reason guilty), infringing the law without knowing its exact regulations.

What we have here is, for the first time in the history of philosophy, the assertion of the Law as unconscious: the experience of Form without content is always the index of a repressed content — the more intensely the subject sticks to the empty form, the more traumatic the repressed content becomes. 226

abyss of the Other’s desire 1

Žižek, S. The Plague of Fantasies. New York: Verso, 1997.

An ethics grounded in reference to the traumatic Real which resists symbolization, the Real which is experienced in the encounter with the abyss of the Other’s desire

Che Vuoi? What do you want [from me]?

… the trauma qua real is not the ultimate external referent of the symbolic process, but precisely that X which forever hinders any neutral representation of external referential reality. … the Real qua traumatic antagonism is, as it were, the objective factor of subjectivization itself; it is the object which accounts for the failure of every neutral-objective representation, the object which ‘pathologizes’ the subject’s gaze or approach, makes it biased, pulls it askew. … the very stain or spot which disturbs and blurs our ‘direct’ perception of reality — which ‘bends’ the direct straight line from our eyes to the perceived object. (Plague of Fantasies 214)

sexual difference is not some mysterious inaccessible X which can never by symbolized but, rather, the very obstacle to this symbolization, the stain which forever keeps the Real apart from the modes of its symbolization. Crucial to the notion fo the Real is this coincidence of the inaccessible X with the obstacle which makes it inaccessible — as in Heidegger, who emphasizes again and again how Being is not simply ‘withdrawn’: Being ‘is ‘nothing but its own withdrawal…’ 216-217

… the unique strength of Kant’s ethics lies in this very formal indeterminacy: moral Law does not tell me what my duty is, it merely tells me that I should accomplish my duty. that is to say, it is not possible to derive the concrete norms I have to follow in my specific situation from the moral Law itself — which means that the subject himself has to assume the responsibility of ‘translating’ the abstract injunction of the moral Law into a series of concrete obligations. In this precise sense, the point of Kant’s ethics is (to paraphrase Hegel) ‘to conceive the moral Absolute not only as Substance, but also as Subject’: the ethical subject bears full responsibility for the concrete universal norms he follows — that is to say, the only guarantor of the universality of positive moral norms is the subject’s own contingent act of performatively assuming these norms. (221)

It is therefore Kant’s very ‘formalism’ which opens up the decisive gap in the self-enclosed ethic and/or religious Substance of a particular life-world: I can no longer simply rely on the determinate content provided by the ethical tradition in which I am embeded; this tradition is always already ‘mediated’ by the subject; it ‘remains alive’ only in so far as I effectively assume it. The way to undermine ethical particularism (the notion that a subject can find his or her ethical Substance only in the particular tradition outof which he grew) is thus not via reference to some more universal positive content (like the unfortunate ‘universal values shared by all humanity’), but only by accepting that the ethical Universal is in itself indeterminate, empty, and that it can be translated into a set of positive explicit norms only by means of my active engagement, for which I take full responsibility … thus there is no determinate ethical universality without the contingency of the subject’s act of positing it as such.    221

Ž on butler laclau badiou emphasis on locality

Žižek, Slovoj. In Defence of Lost Causes. (2008) London: Verso, 2009. page 403.

Badiou reads this failure [of the Chinese Cultural Revolution] — and, more generally, the demise of Communism — as signaling  the end of the epoch in which, in politics, it was possible to generate truth at the universal level, as a global (revolutionary) project: today, in the aftermath of this historical defeat, a political truth can only be generated as (the fidelity to) a local event, a local struggle, an intervention into a specific constellation. However, does he not thereby subscribe to his own version of postmodernism, of the notion that, today, only local acts of “resistance” are possible? What Badiou (Like Laclau and Butler) seems to lack is a meta-theory of history that would provide a clear answer to the alternative that haunts “postmodern” theorizations of the political: is the passage from “large” to “small” (hi)stories, from essentialism to contingency, from global to local politics, and so forth, itself a historical shift, so that, prior to it, universal politics was possible, or is the insight into the local character of political interventions an insight into the very essence of poltics, so that the previous belief in the possiblity of universal political intervention was an ideological illusion?

Bartlebian Act: Saragmago’s Seeing: voters en masse refuse to vote instead casting invalid ballots.  It is the dialectical difference between not-voting (cynical indifference) and not not voting, (they instead un-vote).  As Ž explains the difference is a focus on the big Other, “the majority of those who do not vote do t not as an active gesture of protest, but in the mode of relying on others — “I do not vote, but I count on others to vote in my place …” Non-voting becomes an act whe it affects the big Other.” (In Defence 410)  

One needs to add here, when one no longer relies on a big Other,

z at middlesex hegel totality

to observe a structure in its totality: we have usually an ideal structure, in contingent in empirical reality, contradictions, it goes wrong.  Hegelian totality means, when we speak of something, we talk of all these consistencies as part of the whole.  When Hegel speaks of a totality it means including all its inconsistencies with it.  For Plato every example is imperfect, becuase there is this ideal, same for Hegel, but the surplus is on the side of the example.

Cunning of reason: whenever you want to impose a project on reality, you can be sure that something will go wrong.  Things will go wrong necessarily, and at the end you get a theory of how things necessarily go wrong.

Something traumatic happens in Hegel: in the moment of passage you see something in the old order that you didn’t see.
Zizek: 20 years ago the dissolution of commie regimes, one capitalism established itself it became invisible.  The passage from silent to talkies, the truly great artists Chaplin, Eisenstein, they knew the moment the talkies became hegemonic, extension of realism.  No the voice is not natural, what we get is this deep insight, in its most radical dimension the voice is a foreign intruder that disrupts our identity.

Alenka Zupancic: in Think Again edited by Hallward.

superstructure which is not superstructure but in the very core of material production.  It is not an illusion, we’re good British empiricists.  You think that its only concrete people, but in capitalist society, in order to be a person you need theological mystifications.

How is it that reality is flat reality, but is re-doubled in itself?

trieb death drive post-Hegel radical evil condition of goodness jean dupuy

An Interview with Slavoj Žižek “On Divine Self-Limitation and Revolutionary Love” Journal of Philosophy and Scripture, Volume 1, Issue 2, Spring 2004 ” Joshua Delpech-Ramey

And here is Ž man strictly talking to Trieb in Berlin March 6, 2009 at the ICI which is where the journal Cultural Inquiry originates.

But the paradox for me, as I try to develop in my work, is that death drive is a very paradoxical notion if you read Freud closely.  Death drive is basically, I claim, the Freudian term for immortality.  Death drive has nothing to do, as Lacan points out, convincingly, with this so-called nirvana principle where everything wants to disappear, and so on. If anything (and because of this I like to read Richard Wagner’s operas where you have this), death drive is that which prevents you from dying.  Death drive is that which persists beyond life and death. Again, it’s precisely what, in my beloved Stephen King’s horror/science fiction terminology he calls the “undead”: this terrifying insistence beneath death, which is why Freud links death drive to the compulsion to repeat. You know, it can be dead, but it goes on. This terrifying insistence of an undead object.

Death Drive insists beyond life and death: Immortality

Undead [From Berlin lecture March 2009]

Negative Judgements –> Negate a predicate: He is not dead.  He is alive.

Infinite Judgements –> Assert a non-predicate: He is undead (doesn’t mean alive).  He’s alive as dead, living dead, a 3rd domain, an endless undead, an immortal domain emerges.  This is the domain of drive.

The object of drive is not getting rid of tension but the reproduction of tension as such. What brings you satisfaction is not getting rid of tension but endless repetition of tension. A strange bad infinity.

The post-Hegelian moment: is this weird repetition for which in a way there is no place in Hegel.  It is not the progressive circularity or bad spurious infinity.  Kierkargard and Freud meet at the topic of repetition.  Repetition that generates precisely NO AUFHEBUNG.

On the one hand Mature Marx refers to Hegel. in Grundrisse, is a postive one, Marx claims Hegel process is mystefied, but a formulation of emancipatory revolutionary process.

But later in Capital something changes, it’s more Capital itself that is formulated in terms of subject itself. With “capital” money passes from substance to subject. it becomes self-reproducing.  It is endlessly repetitive as a drive. The whole goal of circulation is the reproduction/expansion of circulation itself.  Marx says “capital works as an automatic subject.”  It is a Hegelian subject but caught in this endlessly reproductive repetition. Thus Marx might have moved beyond Hegel here.

Another line of thought: Elevate Todestrieb into a key to understand German idealist “self-relating negativity”.   Todestrieb has to be elevated to this kind of transcedental principle.

Hegel’s dialectics: The dialectic of necessity and contingency. The way Hegel is usually read according to usual doxa, Hegel admits of contingency but only as a moment of necessity, it externalizes itself in nature but then this contingency is aufhebung into necessity.  Negative and contingency are allowed but as a tactical retreat. The Absolute is playing a game with itself.  Ž says the reversal, it is not only necessity of contingency, global necessity realizes itself through multiple contingencies, but there is also Contingency of Necessity.

There is a contingent process of how necessity emerges out of contingency.  The French, rational-choice theorist Jean-Pierre Dupuy.  Drew attention to “something contingently becomes necessary”. It’s contingent whether a thing happens or not, but once it happens, it happens necessarily. 

A new event retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility. An impossible event takes place, once it happens it is instantly domesticated and retroactively appears as possible and is naturalized.

First I saw the film, Billy Bathgate I was disappointed by the film. After I saw the film, I saw how the film missed the novel, the film was a bad copy.  Then I read the novel, the novel was even worse.  The very repetition creates the 3rd point of reference. 1+1=3.  First you have a shitty novel, then a shitty film, the bad copy of the novel retroactively creates the possibility of how it could have been a good film or novel.

Deleuze’s Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition: Deleuze gives the best explanation to death drive that Žižek has ever read. Paradox of Freud: the renunciation of enjoyment generates enjoyment in the very act of renunciation.  You renounce desire, but then you get libidinally attached to the very rituals of renouncing desire.

Death drive in Deleuze’s reading is not a specific drive, it does this self-sabotaging thing.   The space of desire is curved.  You don’t go directly at it.  Death drive is nothing but the transcendental principle of “lust principe”  What is human sexuality formally?  It is not simple pleasure.  But pleasure got in the postponement and return and repetition … for example if I keep repeating the shaking of your hand I don’t let go, the very repetition eroticizes it in an obscene way. Death drive doesn’t have an autonomous reality, it is not, “I want pleasure but secretly I want to torture,” Death drive is this transcendental distortion which complicates my access to pleasure.

Ž disagrees strongly with Freud here on eros/thanatos and says Freud really backed away from his discovery.  Žižek says this good constructive Eros versus bad destructive death drive (Todestrieb) is total bunk.   Love is a catastrophe, it’s totally destructive. One point of obsession and everything is ruined, literally out of joint.  Love is totally paradoxical focusing all of your life, the whole world is thrown out of balance, love is radically destabilizing.  I’m passionately in love and ready to risk everything for it.   Insistence on a particularity, you are ready to go to the end.

Antigone is pure death drive: I insist on this particular point I am ready to put at stake everything for it.  Death drive is the ethics at its zero level.  It resides in this paradoxical domain where good coincides with radical evil.  A detailed reading of Kant and Schelling later work on religion.  Kant proposes there the notion of radical evil.  He steps back though.  First he proposes to read radical evil as diabolical evil.  If for Kant you can be good out of principle.  Then why cannot you be evil out of principle?  Not just good, but evil as well.  But then the whole distinction between good and evil falls apart.  You are evil without any pathological possibility, you are just evil.

Mozart’s Don Giovanni: Commandatore, tells Giovanni, repent.  Giovanni knows he will die, Commandatore tries to save Giovanni, if yo urepent you will be saved in after life.  From standpoint of rational calculus Giovanni should agree. But Giovanni says no.  He acts out of pure fidelity to Evil.  It’s not pathological, no personal gain.  This is the greatness of Kant, he goes very far in this direction.

Death drive is the radical non-pathological evil, which is transcendental apriori of every possible form of goodness.

Kant withdraws, says we don’t have diabolical evil only radical evil which is simply a tendency of human nature which is not fulfilling your duty.  But Lacan reads Kant with Sade.  The point of Lacan, Sade is a Kantian.  The Sadian imperative of unconditional jouissance, it goes beyond the pleasure principle.  It’s non-pathological.

Sade proposes purely Kantian idea of ‘radical crime’ that doesn’t simply follow natural impulses, but a crime which breaks with the chain of natural causality, a crime literally against nature itself.  Freedom that breaks the phenomenal chain of natural causality. The paradox that Kant and Schelling struggle with is this obscure domain where radical evil is apriori condition of goodness.

Antigone: you must have this radical excess of evil if you want to go to the end. From the sympathetic human point it is Ismene who is human warm, Antigone is an aggressive bitch.  Creon is right, he basically says, if we publicly do the funeral old hatreds will explode again, we’ll fall into civil war.  Antigone’s counter-argument is so what? It is pure insistance. It is just pure insistence, “I want, I want“.

Žižek wants to present another Antigone, where she succeeds and Creon lets her bury her brother, the whole city is ruined, the last scene Antigone “I was created for love not for hatred” where blood and death is now all around her.

Stalinist version: Antigone and Creon are fighting and Chorus intervenes like a committee for public safety and proclaims a popular dictatorship.

Death Drive as radical evil as a condition of goodness.

Shraing Illusions: We make fun of soemthing, denounce illusions as illusions, but nonetheless they work.

Ž mentions Logic of Capital School at beginning of part II.

******

Point two: The big breakthrough of Heidegger is to totally reconceptualize the notion of finitude. Already we have this in the early Heidegger with special reference to Kant. Already you see precisely how the other of finitude, the big stuff—infinity, eternity, and so on—is a category, modality, horizon of finitude. This was, for Heidegger, Kant’s big breakthrough: transcendental as opposed to transcendent is a category of finitude. All this somehow gets lost, in Badiou.

[But] the whole category of “event” works only from the category of finitude. There are events only in finite situations. You can prove it only from his own position. Only for a finite being do you have this infinite work, what he likes to describe, in Christian terms, this trinity of faith, hope, love. Faith that the event did take place, hope in the final state (in Christianity universal redemption, in Marxism I don’t know, communism at the end) and love as work, as what is between the two, fidelity to the event and so on.

But . . . when in his last work, Badiou tries to articulate the structure of totalitarian danger, he calls “forcing the event,” which means simply to ontologize the event, as if the event were not an infinite process whose place you have to discern in reality, as if the event totally permits its irrealities.

But the gap between event and reality, that which is covered up by totalitarianism, is precisely the gap of finitude—so there is something missing at this level in Badiou.

[…] there is a certain dimension of Christianity which … is missed, I think, by Badiou, because of his overall view that there is no place for finitude, as for example in his critique of Heidegger where he misses the point. He even goes into this mode where being-toward-death is just the animal level of being threatened . . . although I don’t identify Heidegger’s being-toward death with death drive, Badiou is also missing that, because he cannot elevate finitude to its transcendental a priori dignity. He remains precisely, at a certain level, a pre-kantian metaphysician.

Hegel and Žižek

Žižek seminar Hegel Now? Workshop Philosophy Department, Middlesex University. Thursday May 5, 2011.

Žižek’s Hegel Lecture put on by Dahlem Humanities Center (DHC), Freie Universität Berlin, on March 31, 2011, in the Henry Ford Building in Dahlem.

Post-Hegel: A move to a positivity of Being and on the other hand, formalist pure repetition, Kierkargard and Freud (death drive) two strange bedfellows.
You can’t be a Hegelian after this break.  Before there were communitarian Hegelians, and radical Hegelians.  the Pittsburgh Hegelians have rejuvenated Hegel for Liberals.  Their point is ‘recognition’.  This is Zizek’s problem with them.

Catherine Malabou in her debate with Judith Butler There is an co-written article in Houlgate’s recent edited collection on Hegel

For Malabou, she says, no intersubjectivity is not the ulitmate horizon of Hegel

Master — Servant

Phenomenology of Spirit: you should be attentive to the beginning of Master-Servant

Self-consciousness, a subject which perceives among the objects in the world, another object that claims “fuck you” I’m also a subject.

This is an absolute ontological standard.  The original situation is not, I’m a subject and you’re a subject.  “This is not the 69 position, lick and recognize each other.”  No there is an absolute antagonism, I am as a subject singular and absolute, now there is another guy there that says I am also like you, there is only room for one and there is two now competing for the only place.  This Other is not the Levinasian other, nor the (Butler) Other, I recognize you, you recognize me.  The Other is an absolutely shattering intrusion.

The Pittsburgh Hegelians deflate Hegel, no metaphysical commitment, just a transcendental forms of a priori rational forms of argumentation.
Suspension of big ontological questions always implies the worst historicism, which opens up the path of violent return of realist metaphysics, neo-Darwinism

Avoiding or suspending the big ontological questions never works, the big radical questions return.

The break is between post-Hegelian thought and the pre-Hegelian metaphysics.  My thesis is that precisely Hegel disappears in this passage.  Hegel is a vanishing mediator between the two: traditional philosophy and post-metaphysical thought.   Hegel something that is neither is one nor the other.  If you are in-between you can see something which afterwards becomes invisible.  Nice example, the beginning of sound, for a brief moment, the apparent reactionaries like Chaplin, knew something about the ghastly dimension of voice, he saw a potentially ominous spectral dimension of voice, that voice is never a self-transparent means of self-expression but a foreign intruder that can haunt us.  But this became invisible.  This unbearable excess in Hegel becomes invisible.

The ultra-totalitarian Hegel: GK Chesterton “The Man Who was Thursday” the work of the philosophical policeman.  Popper, Adorno, Levinas, Glucksman, would they also subscribe, totalitarianism, the philosophical crime is totality.  Totality = Totalitarianism.  The task of philosophical police, is to find a political crime, gulag, totalitarianism, reading Rousseau etc that a philosophical crime will be committed.  They search out for proponents of totality.  But Ž wants to defend totality.

Žižek’s definition of the Hegelian Totality: [I should go back to the audio to fill in this definition a bit more]

Totality is not an ideal of an organic whole. But a critical notion. To locate a phenomenon in it’s totality is not to locate hidden harmony of its whole. antagonism, self-contradictory antagonistic.  The whole which is the true is the whole plus its symptoms, It’s unintended consequences which betrays its untruth. Today’s global capitalism means speak of the Congo. This is why again the anti-Hegelian rhetorics, which … the space of the Hegelian totality is the space of the abstract harmonious whole, and the excess which undermine it.

Whenever you have a project to something, you can expect it to go wrong, every project is undermined by its inconsistency.

extrnal negtion becomes self-negation.

Only the abstract terror of the French Revolution creates the conditions for liberal freedom. The first choice has to be the wrong choice, it is only the wrong choice that opens the space for concrete freedom.

You arrive at the highest only thruogh the radical contradiction of the lowest. This is the basic temporality of the dialectical process.

Book of Job
Each of 3 theologists try to convince JOb that his suffering must have a deeper meaning.

Why did you do all these things to me? God there commits a blasphemy, the true answer is, you think you are something special but I screwed up everything.

What dies on the cross is God of beyond itself. Holy Spirit is totally unique, what dies on the cross is this disgusting idea that God is up there as a guarantee of meaning. As in when something appears to us as evil, you are looking too close it is a stain, but if you stand back, you can look at it as a part of global harmony. The sacrifice of Jesus Christ, there is no big Other, no guarantee of meaning, the Holy Ghost is that we are here alone without a guarantee. The true message of Christianity is not Trust God, but God Trusts Us. Holy Spirit is the first radical egalitarian institution.

Hate your mother and father, as parts of hierarchy of social order, god is dead, the only hope after this break is an egalitarian community.  But there is in Hegel a teleological movement. Not so according to Ž.

June 23, 1789: King says scram. Mirabeau, “Go and tell your king that we shall leave our places here except when forced by bayonets” the invention of the new surprises you. A prophet from chance, you say too much, you try to integrate the excess, and you suceed.

Christ died. It was a shock. They didn’t know what. Somebody says, why don’t we see it as a triumph.

Contingency, is a deeper necessity that articulates itself through contingency. Julius Cesar crossing the Rubicon. At that point it was totally open. Once he crossed the Rubicon, he created his destiny, so that in retrospect it appeared necessary.

Baladour 1995, Le Monde wrote, “if B will be elected, then we can say his election was necessary” something happens and once it happens it retroactively appears necessary.

The time is come to do a materialist reversal of Marx back to Hegel. This opening towards contingency, Hegel is radical thinker of contingency. marx is you as a historical agent can look into history, see where history is going, and then posit yourself as an agent of progress. Hegel no way. there is no big Other. The conservative poet T.S. Eliot. Every really new work of art, it retroactively changes the whole history of art. This is the Hegelian theory of totality. With every new break the whole past is re-written.

Borges wrote about Kafka, every writer has his predesccors, Kafka can be said to create his forerunners. No. We are not simply retroactively projecting things into the past. No what if history is open, events are retroactively constituted.

Can we think this incompleteness of reality without God thinking of it, in a materialist way. We cannot simply become Hegelians. We should admit that there are things Hegel didn’t know. The topic of REPETITION. Deleuze made it clear, what characterizes post-Hegelian space, it is a notion of REPETITION, in contrast to Hegel involves no Aufhebung.

Kierkargard and Freud: A pure repetition. It’s not that Hegel didn’t see it, but there are signs that point to the unthought of Hegel. There are points that you can see where Hegel wasn’t Hegelian enough. This is what Marx was saying. Hegel’s theory of economy, didn’t yet capture the whole speculative madness of economy. The ideal of captial as abstraction that rules concrete life, Hegel wasn’t Hegelian enough, passage from money to capital subject to substance. Marx in Grundrisse, capital is an AUTOMATIC SUBJECT. Captial wouldh ave been an horror for Hegel, because it is actually infinity and bad repetitive infinity.

hegel’s theory of madness where Hegel develops the rise of human spirit out of animal life, which is more radical than Foucault. The passage through radical madness, is a permanent background to being human. What Hegel missed, its not simple as passing directly from nature to culture, our cultural rituals of love is not a defence against a naturalism, but against a deadly force, once we pass from nature to culture RETROACTIVELY a third domain of radical negativity arises.
Kant: Man is an animal who needs a master, not because of any natural unruliness, but metaphysical unruliness.
Hegel would have been against the Catholic church, Hegel would have said, animals only do it for procreation, to take something that serves a biological aim, and autonomize it with regard to that aim,

Lacan is right. the horror of sexuality for Christianity, is not vulgar biological life, but metaphysical competitor. Sexuality is the very domain where at its most elementary, wher ethe passage fro manimal to human emerges.

In todays crazy world, offers itself to a Hegelian in-between … and for us too, a certain epock is coming to an end.

Mobilizing Hegelian potentials in today’s world, the time has come to return to Hegel against post-Hegelians against Marx. For example his stuff on the rabble, isnt it today precisely, is that the main form of class struggle isn’t just working class-bourgeouisie, but many forms of rabble, illegal immigrants, landless, etc.

Today isn’t that we are living in a time, maybe in the 20th century we tried too quick to change the world, and that we should reflect on it radically. A brutal fasciest counter-revolution Bologna educational reform. Change intellectuals into experts, change higher education to make it useful. Demonstration in suburbs call psychologists, sociologists. ecology should also ask how did it come to that, do we perceive it correctly.

We are aproaching a time where thinking is absolutely needed Ecology, biogenetics, the limit between inside from outside, we can control mind from outside, chairs moving by your thoughts. This changes the very definition of being human. Be careful to resist the pseud-state of emergency talk. Bill Gates talks like that, Why are we still caught in these ideological debates while children are starving in Africa. The message is do, don’t think about it. Consumption, but I almost become tempted when I pass a Starbucks, they do a wonderful job of ideology, 1% goes to Guatamala children. In the old times citizens/consumers. Now buying the coffee the consumer, your citizenship will be also done by others. Don’t be afraid to be intellectuals today The BOlogna reforms show that those in power know that we are dangerous.

Ž in CUNY

Žižek at CUNY given on Monday April 4, 2011.

I don’t believe in authentic events.  Authenticity for me is what happens after.  The disintegration of communist regimes was not an event because nothing new came about. Adorno said “in today’s consumerist society we are so much caught in pseudo-activity”

We are hyper-active.  When we go to a art gallery nobody really is looking at the pictures.  The idea is that the curator does the viewing for them, so that we can just make comments and so on and so on.

Hegel

Totality: not organic whole, but a critical notion.  To locate a phenomenon in its totality is not to see the hidden harmony of the whole, but to include into a system its antagonism, symptoms, inconsistencies as necessary integral parts.  The Hegelian totality is self-contradictory and antagonistic.

The whole which is true, is the whole with its symptoms.  For Marx the totality of capitalism includes crisis.  For Freud the totality of subject is its symptoms.  The whole is never truly whole.  Every notion of whole LEAVES SOMETHING OUT.  The dialectical method means to include this excess, to account for it.  Symptoms are not signs that something is wrong that can be fixed but signs that the whole is rotton.

 

What is out totality today?

Fetishist disavowal

I know very well but … I don’t really believe it

The very material force of ideology that makes us refuse what we know

Zero point: we are being confronted by something so outside our collective experience that we really don’t see it, the biological and physical disturbances in world that sustains it

Global warming: the arctic sea ice is melting faster than predicted.  Before this meant ominous calls to act … lately however we hear voice enjoin us to warm to global warming.  The pessimistic predictions should be put in more context, more optimistic.  How right Naomi Klein was that global capitalism exploits catastrophes to get rid of the old to use the clean slate to impose its order.  Perhaps global warming will provide the same.

Dipesh Chakrabaty: human and natural histories … humans are able to effect the very balance of life on earth … anthropocene the lesson of global warming is that our freedom was only possible against stable natural parameters, we can do what we want be don’t peturb the parameters.  Global warming is the paradoxical outcome of our growing freedom up to destabilizing the parameters of life on earth.

Geo-engineering recognizes tipping points.  Ge represents a lesser risk than not pursuing such strategies.

27 minutes Žižek talks about JAPAN

Natual disasters are useful reminders that ecological troubles cannot be just caused by human hubris, NATURE itself is to blame, we are mercilessly exposed to nature’s cruel whims.  We have no where to withdraw to, no Mother Earth or balanced state to return.

Deceptively self-assuring by saying we are guilty.

Passive role of impotent observer, who can only sit back and watch what his fate will be so to avoid situation, we engage in frantic obsessive activities, recycling paper, buying organic food etc, just so we can think we are doing, just like a soccer fan in front of the television, shouting thinking he will impact the outcome.

Fetishistic disavowal apropos ecology, I know very well, but I won’t change my life.

Opposite form of disavowal: I know very well I can’t really influence the process that will lead to my ruin do anything, but I can’t just stand here and not do anything, so I’ll buy organic apples, we are demonstrating our capacity for noble large collective project.  There is something of this order, no longer just marginal, but assuming a central role in capitalism functions, i.e., the Starbucks thing.  In the old days we were consumerists and we felt bad so you had to do something to counteract it. True our coffee is expensive but some of our profits go to Guatemala, etc.  You can remain a consumerist because solidarity with the poor is included in the price.

This is the horror of ETHICAL CAPITALISM.  It presents itself as anti-ideology.  I remember when I was young it was usually leftists who speak of urgency, now it is Bill Gates, let’s stop the talk, let’s DO something. Don’t think do!  Do so that you will not have to think.  Humanitarianism in all forms, charity, is absolutely integral in capitalism’s reproduction.

Capitalism exploitation of nature, tries to fix it by making ecological and social responsibility profitable.  Postmodern ethical capitalism, Peter Hawkin, new revolution in production, comparable to the first industrial revolution.  To counteract this tendency we have to change our approach.  Our prosperity was illusory, by exploiting natural resources, water, trees soil air all this natural goods, are non-renewable, they also perform services indispensable for our survival.  We should act economic value of nature as a system.  For this definition to become possible, would require regulations, but also a change in form of commodity and market exchange.

With hawkin new ecological content is squeezed into capitalist form.  So that everything becomes a commodity.  The basic capitalist matrix pursuit of profit through expanded reproduction, he save this matrix.  No matter how far we expand the notion of capital.  But capital contains use-value and exchange-value.

Resist temptation of human meaning.  Jerry falwell and Pat Robertson, 911 was a sign that god had lifted his protection because of homosexual…

We must save Judeo-Christian legacy, the Book of Job.  Your suffering has a deeper meaning.  The meaning of job ‘s protest, is not that I’M innocent it’s just that I don’t think my suffering has  a deeper meaning, then God comes, agrees with Job, then Job asks, ok ok, why did I lose my house my calf, my goats, my wife.  God gives the famous answer: but where were you when I created those monsters, this is read as the infinite gap between god and mortals, but GK Chesteron suggests: You think you have the right to complain, but look at the universe it covered in shit.

Žižek in CUNY March, 2011.

Only through Christianity you can become a true atheist.  Don’t worry there’s a guy overlook and caring for us, this dies on the cross. This is why we then get the Holy Spirit. Hate them in their function of mother and father, in their function of hierarchic social order.

Fighting emanicipatory collective, it’s not trust God, god says I’m impotent, I trust you.  You the egalitarian spirit of believers, is all there is.

Ecological catastrophes can be solved science and also mythologizes it by reference to spirit and spirituality.

What it leaves out is basic socio-political analysis.  We must reject a serious of solutions, it is not enough to treat ecological threats as ones for science must deal with or holistic wisdom.

What we need is to look at the uniqueness of our situation.  The destruction of nature itself, the natural enviorment.

1906 william james glee at the vividness and admiration of earthquake, pure delight.  How far are we here from the way the Japanese experienced their earthquake.

Plastic nomadic way :  large-scale social transformations.  Should people of japan be dispersed throughout the world … how would the movement of populations be organized.  National sovereignty will have to be redefined and new global forms of cooperation will have to be invented.

Immanuel Kant: egalitarian universality of thought – public use of reason – no man or women, no Greeks

Immature invidiudals – private use of reason

Universal singularity – directly participates in the universal, if a couple of friends meet in apt and debate philosophy its public use of reason, if you work for the state and talk philosophy its private use of reason.  The EU a mega-catastrophe, the Bologna reform of higher education, the urge to subordinate higher educ to the needs of society – useful to concrete problems, — expert opinion, the idea is if you have car burning in suburb of paris, you call security specialists and sociologists, but what you need is to reflect, to discern a problem in the very way we perceive such problems.  The way we perceive of a problem is part of the problem

Our struggle should focus on threat to world civil society.  Cloud computing, no more floppy discs, we are internet based, users access through browsers.  In this way we can access information from anywehere, the access is in our pocket.  Users are accessing files and programs kept in far away place in climate controlled rooms, in order to manage a cloud there needs to be a controlling system, the more the small item small phone is personalized, easy to use and transparent, the more the entire set-up needs to be done elsewhere. But content is also controlled. Vertical integration, a single company is more and more controlling all levels of web.  Apple Inc.  Made a deal with Murdoch news to make it that access to news on their stuff must go through Murdoch.

Wiki leaks: citizen right to know, investigative journalism, liberal freedom-fighters.  This is ideology.  Even if corruption is shown to reach the top,

Wikileaks went beyond free flow of info, what WL threatened was the formal mode of functioning of power, the true target were not just dirty details, those in power, but power itself.

Sari challenging power, by challenging the normal avenues of challenging power,not about dirty secrets, not embarrass those in power, they sought a different functioning of power.

Marx’s General Intellect: forms of wealth are more and more are out of proportion to directly labour time spent on their production, the result is not self-dissolution of capital, but transition of profit into rent.

Bill Gates is richest man, his wealth had nothing to do with the production costs. Gate’s weall is not result of his higher exploitation of his workers.  Why then are milliosn still buying MS. Because MS monopolized the field as direct embodiment by privatized the GI.

Deregulatory, but the state is more and more all present.  Personal libertarianism and hedonism co-exist with a complex web of state regulatory mechanisms.  Apropos neo-liberalism, we should always be aware that it is an ideology, the more the economists are successful is Singapore, capitalist investments are done through state-corporate investments.

Is this our fate? This offensive of privatised GI, although we participate in a public space, this public space is privatized.  We are slowly witnessing a series of events that are SUBLIME.

Is there a true ethical progress in history? 20th century brought democracy but also the holocaust.

Kant interpreted the French revolution which pointed towards the possibility of freedom. A whole people asserted their freedom and equality.  Spectators a taking of sides which borders on enthusiasm, can only be caused by a moral diposition within the human race.  Do these words not fit perfectly the Egyptian uprising. The universal freedom of humanity. It was immediately possible for all of us to identify with it, we didn’t need particularist interpretations, here the frame is universal secular call for freedom and justice.  Muslim and Coptic Chritians joined in a prayer, we are 1, was a SUBLIME moment.

The rise of radical Islamism is the opposite side of the coin of failed leftist revolutions in muslim countries.  Afghanistan was caught in larger global countries, there are no backward people whose 1000 year tradition etc.  That is simply not true.  Thomas Frank What’s the Matter with Kansas.

Western Europe violent return of anti-immigrant populism, to combat centrist liberalism LePen is only politician who refers to working class.

The struggle for who will appropriate the struggles of Egyptian revolution.  The demand for social justice.  What happens the day after.  How will emancipatory explosions be translated into new social order.  Democracy but poverty remains. Look at South Africa, Hollywood Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela.  If anything the black majority is even a little bit worse than under apartheid, with its police brutality, it brought a minimum of safety, now crime is out of control, black elite replaces the white elite.

At different levels we are facing a series of problems which are literally problems of the commons.  They all concern the ‘commons’ of nature, intellectual property, biogenetics and new walls and new exclusions.

We should not abandon the notion of proletariat, redefine it under new conditions.  Proletarian is a worker, reduced to pure subjectivity, when all substantical content is taken from him (marx). In a way ecological crisis is making us proletarian, natural environment is taken from us, intellectual property means general intellect is taken from us  we should radicalize the category of proletarian…

Saroy Giri: we have an overload of false moralistic anti-capitalism, corrupt banks, the catch is that in all these cases it is the ‘bad guy’ corruption, the situation in other words is moralized.  The big question is how the system itself generates this.  A defence of Bernard Madoff: anti-semtic, look that greedy guy, he was a model of charitable capitalism, he just went to the end in the direction the system was going. At all levels we should do it, in ecology its the same, I wanted to write a text to defend BP.  Wasn’t it suspicious that they all focused on they BP were inefficient, but they were only doing what every other oil company was doing.

I’m not a guy we need a “Leninist Party”.  The old style commies in power, when people ask me, you want the old style commies, you are taking to the wrong guy, look at China they are ruthless capitalists, they are on your side.  Even when they celebrated Stalin and Mao, they never proclaimed Stalin did miracles, but they do so in North Korea.

No sympathy for Stalin, but my reproach to standard Anti-communism, if anything it is too soft.  Did you see the movie Life of the Others.  It’s supposed to be anti-communist.  Communist minister wants to sleep with the wife of a writer.  But my east german friends this is ridiculous, where behind evil act there must be some private vice.

The tragedy of East Germany was that writer would been under total surveillance forget about a guy wanting to screw his wife.

People whose basic disposition is good are made to do bad things.

I am saying communism disappears but the problems of COMMONS remains.  And we will have somehow to solve it.

I have no problems with markets, but markets need time, but when you have a catastrophe,large social acts are needed, neither market nor the state but when a nuclear reactor explains transnational large mobilization will have to emerge.

The problems of communism are here, the alternative is either some kind of re-invention of this large scale social movement, or its also quite possible something between Berlusconi and China.  I have nothing against the Chinese, you give to the devil what belongs to the devil, capitalism needed dictatorship for 10 years, Chile, South Korea, but now Singapoer, China, a dynamic capitalism, productive, but no tendency for democracy.  This marriage between capitalism and democracy is slowing disintegrating.  Nothing against democracy, in England, the last elections won by Tony Blair, 1 week there was a t.v. show the most hated person in the U.K. and Blair won. There is a level of social discontent that can’t be captured by multi-party democractic mechanisms,  what about brazil and Bolivia, an inter-action and organized movements, indigenous, workers, social movements.  You get this additional push beyond this purely representational function. If we really care about democracy, in the long term only a new more radical left can save it.  Left to itself, …

Did you notice in what a strange way, the word “impossible” functions, at the level of tech possibilities and private pleasures anything possible, can be an astronaut, go to space, everyting is possible, but the moment you touch the economy, you way raise a little more money for health care NO NO that’s impossible.

Neo-liberalism doesn’t exist in reality.  We have a space.to change things.

lack in the other

Tutt, Daniel. The Object of Proximity: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis in Žižek and Santner via Lacan. American University Also available here danielp.tutt(at)gmail.com

For Lacan, symbolic identity inhabits an empty place, or the “point de capiton,” which occurs when the subject functions as a signifier embodying a function beyond its own concreteness. The subject is emptied of its particular signification in point de capiton, in order to represent fullness in general. Point de capiton operates in national, religious, political, or ethnic signifiers such as “the nation” or “communism” or even religious identity groupings such as “Christian” or “Muslim,” yet they function as pure negativity, and represent what has to be excluded or negated.

As Yannis Stavrakakis points out in the Lacanian Left, the Name of the Father functions as an insertion into point de capiton, as an operation tied to power relations in late capitalism. Lacan’s Seminar on the Four Discourses introduces the “university discourse” as arising in the wake of the chaotic revolutionary protests of May 1968 in France, and across Europe. The university discourse is a mode of discourse that incorporates scientific discourse to legitimize relations of power. The subject in university discourse becomes equivalent with the social totality, and is situated in the particular historical and late capitalist symbolic space, where the movement occurs, mainly apart from the Master’s discourse, and into university discourse.

An excellent example that reveals the procedure of Name of the Father filing in the point de capiton into empty symbolic identity are the popular “culture jamming” Yes Men. The Yes Men are a group of activists who inhabit false symbolic authority by assuming the identity of powerful businessmen, activists, and politicians. They deliver totally ludicrous presentations that are in actuality totally empty of legitimate content. What they have discovered through these presentations to power holders is that their audiences end up listening attentively to their presentations, and more importantly, they end up taking their statements for total fact without question and most often end up agreeing with their absurd findings.

What this indicates more than anything is that symbolic identity construction functions as an empty gesture of symbolic power supported by a fantasmatic supplement, and both unite to form reality. What the Yes Men and the case of Schreber both indicate is that the commands of identity, deployed from the level of fantasy will always be filled up as an empty vessel. The “crisis of investiture” for both Schreber and the Yes Men occur when “the kernel of invasiveness of too much reality” functions on the side of symbolic identity as an empty space that can be filled in with an inherent negativity. This crisis of identity problematizes attempts to adequately symbolize oneself in everyday reality. 🙂 His use of Yes Men here is confusing.

Lack and Desire in the real

In the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, the mediating force of the Other is desire. Desire is posited as universal,  “all desire is desire of the Other,” since all desire is structured around a missing jouissance, around a lack; it is important to understand the way that lack of the Other structures symbolic identities.

Lack … is always introduced through an act of exclusion, an exclusion in part responsible for the fundamental disequilibrium between integrating the Other into the symbolic realm, yet we find that there is something that does fill in the symbolic: fantasy

The imposition of fantasy arises precisely when the desire for filling in, or covering over lack arises. On a structural level, fantasy stimulates and promises to cover over the lack in the Other created by the loss of jouissance.

Since fantasy is also an effect of symbolic castration, it is also a defense mechanism against the fear of symbolic castration. Symbolic castration is defined by Lacan as, “a symbolic lack of an imaginary object,” and symbolic castration is the subject’s first perception of the Other, as not complete, but lacking.

Lacan argues that the subject can only maintain psychic normality by accepting this inherent lack of the other; hence symbolic castration plays a normalizing effect on the subject.

Fantasy then becomes crucial to understanding the role of the “I-Other” relationship and to determining how the Other serves as a support that fills in the void for the lack in the Other, in the realm of the symbolic. The illusory nature of fantasyserves as the central support for the desire to identify, which is inherently impossible in the real, as discussed above.

The Other of fantasy takes on the role of an object, or das Ding to sustains desire itself, and since the Other appears as a remainder, the Other is in an almost mythological status to the subject. The Other promises to provide what the subject lacks and thus unify both as subjects.

The other takes on the role of the object that can potentially unify both the split psyche (of the subject) and of unifying the split social field itself.