Category: Žižek

They’re both worse

Trump or Clinton, Brexit or Remain, Maduro or Guaido? They are both worse!

Most of the choices imposed on us by big media are false choices – their function is to obfuscate the true option. And there is a sad lesson to be drawn from this: if one side in a conflict is bad, the opposite side is not necessarily good.

The first step in defeating Trump is therefore a radical critique of the entrenched elites. Why can Trump and other populists exploit ordinary people’s fears and grievances? Because they felt betrayed by those in power.   

What does this amount to, concretely? Among other things, it means that, obscene as this may sound, the left should not be afraid to also learn from Trump.

How does Trump operate? Many perspicuous analysts pointed out how, while (mostly, at least) he does not violate explicit laws or rules, he exploits to the extreme the fact that all these laws and rules rely on a rich texture of unwritten rules and customs which tells us how to apply explicit laws and rules – and he brutally disregards these unwritten rules.

The latest (and, until now, the most extreme) example of this procedure is Trump’s proclamation of national emergency. His critics were shocked at how he applied this measure, clearly intended only for great catastrophes like a threat of war or natural disaster, in order to build a border to protect the US territory from an invented threat.

However, not only Democrats were critical of this measure – some rightists were also alarmed by the fact that Trump’s proclamation sets a dangerous precedent: what if a future leftist-Democratic president will proclaim a national emergency due to, say, global warming?

My point is that a leftist president should do precisely something like this, especially given global warming effectively IS not only a national emergency. Proclaimed or not, we ARE in an emergency state.

Both sides fail to address the true task: how to construct a new Europe that would redeem what is worth fighting for in the European emancipatory legacy. Instead they betray this legacy, one by pushing Europe back towards nation-state politics, the other by transforming Europe into a domain of technocratic experts. These are the two sides of the same catastrophe. 

Making a living as an artist is challenging

Why Artists are Struggling to Make a Living From Their Art (and the Activists Fighting Back) By Chris Sharratt 07 FEB 2019

Recent studies highlight deep precarity in the art world, alongside a renewed push for fairer payment and resistance to ‘self-exploitation’

  • Artists whose work gets featured in international exhibitions are still struggling to make a living from their art. Tai Shani an artist is just one example of situation facing artists today.
  • A survey was conducted by Arts Council England in which more than 2000 visual artists responded. Artist’s average income: $27,500 Cdn of which only $10,280 Cdn came from their art practice. Two-thirds earn less than $8,500 Cdn from their practice and only 5% earn more than $42,700 Cdn.

‘We need to see a radical overhaul of the current funding system which is exclusive, elitist and relies heavily on the exploitation and unpaid labour of artists across the sector.’

retroactive

December 7, 2012

However, the moment we take account the retroactivity of universal necessity — the fact that each “use” of particular moments for some universal goal, as well as this goal itself, emerge retroactively in order, precisely, to “rationalize” the symptomal excess — we can no longer accept the Hegelian Cunning of Reason in its standard sense. 524

Metastases of Enjoyment

September 20, 2011

Metastases of Enjoyment. New York: Verso, 1994.

[T]he problem that confronted Lacan was: how do we pass from animal coupling led by instinctual knowledge and regulated by natural rhythms to human sexuality possessed by a desire which is eternalized and, for that very reason, insatiable, inherently perturbed, doomed to fail, and so on? …

So the answer to Lacan’s problem is: we enter human sexuality through the intervention of the symbolic order qua heterogeneous parasite that disrupts the natural rhythm of coupling. 155

Less Than Nothing

Oct 14, 2012

This brings us back to our original question: in what does the difference between animal and human habits consist? Only humans, spiritual beings, are haunted by spirits―why? Not simply because, in contrast to animals, they have access to universality, but because this universality is for them simultaneously necessary and impossible; that is, it is a problem. In other words, while for human subjects the place of universality is prescribed, it has to remain empty, it can never be filled in with its “proper” content. Continue reading “Less Than Nothing”

Ž on Kant undead

Nov 17, 2012

A quote from Zizek (Tarrying with the Negative, pp.113-4):

Invoking the “living dead” is no accident here: in our ordinary language, we resort to indefinite judgments precisely when we endeavor to comprehend those borderline phenomena which undermine established differences, such as those between living and being dead. In the texts of popular culture, the uncanny creatures which are neither alive nor dead, the “living dead” (vampires, etc.), are referred to as “the undead”; although they are not dead, they are clearly not alive like us, ordinary mortals. The judgment “he is undead” is therefore an indefinite-limiting judgment in the precise sense of a purely negative gesture of excluding vampires from the domain of the dead, without for that reason locating them in the domain of the living (as in the case of the simple negation “he is not dead”). The fact that vampires and other “living dead” are usually referred to as “things” has to be rendered with its full Kantian meaning: a vampire is a Thing which looks and acts like us, yet it is not one of us. Continue reading “Ž on Kant undead”

Less than nothing

Nov 30, 2012

Page 467

Hegel is the ultimate thinker of the process of the emergence of necessary features out of chaotic contingency of contingency’s gradual self-organization of the gradual rise of order out of chaos

How, then, can necessity arise out of contingency? The only way to avoid the obscurantism of “emergent properties” is to bring into play negativity: at its most radical, necessity is not a positive principle of regularity that overcomes contingency, but the negative obverse of contingency: what is “necessary” above all is that every contingent particular entity find its truth in its self-cancellation, disintegration, death. Continue reading “Less than nothing”

Johnston A.

Johnston, A. (2013). Drive Between Brain And Subject: An Immanent Critique Of Lacanian Neuropsychoanalysis.  The Southern Journal of Philosophy. Vol. 51, Spindel Supplement

I am convinced that the life sciences, in order to do real justice to the richly and unpredictably weird sorts of subjects humans are, must supplement the framing worldview of their spontaneous organicism with the notion that (phrased in Lacanian fashion) there is something in the organic more than the organic itself.

In other words, a nonorganicity is immanent to the most complex forms of the organic. This is by virtue of the reality that, above certain thresholds, complexity of various sorts (be it biological, computational, institutional, social, or whatever) tends, within its given domain(s),to generate inner antagonisms, bugs, glitches, loopholes, short circuits, and tensions (a fact to which any experienced computer programmer, tax lawyer, or government bureaucrat readily would testify).

General Will by Rousseau

General Will:
that the laws decided upon by subjects will operate equally for all: ‘since each man gives himself to all, he gives himself to no one; and since there is no associate over whom he does not gain the same rights as others gain over him, each man recovers the equivalent of everything he loses, and in the bargain he acquires more power to preserve what he has’.

cited in Towards an Anthropology of Infinitude: Badiou and the Political Subject by Nina Power in The Praxis of Alain Badiou. Eds. Paul Ashton, A. J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens 2006

Anamnesis

September 4, 2017

Anamnesis means remembrance or reminiscence, the collection and re-collection of what has been lost, forgotten, or effaced. It is therefore a matter of the very old, of what has made us who we are. But anamnesis is also a work that transforms its subject, always producing something new. To recollect the old, to produce the new: that is the task of Anamnesis.