Category: Žižek

Žižek in Albania

Early 1980s early Yugoslav commie regime undergo a crisis of legitimation.  Milosevic, providing legitimacy for the local Serb republic, devil’s pact with nationalist intelligentsia.  The Poetic Military Complex.  Warriors together with Poets, look out.

Pere Josef, the Catholic France made a pact with Protestant Sweden against Catholic Austrian Empire to prevent unification of Germany.  This led to Hitler around  hundred years later

Pere Josef was a brutal torturer.  But something real crazy, wrote the most beautiful mystical reflections.  How is it possible that the same person who was a monster was in his inner life a breathtakingly refined mysticist.   For some the solution for this is Eastern Spirituality.  But this doesn’t work for Žižek.  The true heroic greatness is to sacrifice his soul, his ethics for his country.  Any fool can give his life.  But it’s the real here that will do evil for his country, rape woman, kill children.  The ethical temptation is presented as a weakness. If you can’t kill, you are weak the true here does it.  Himmler’s solution: Bhagavad Gita, the Indian epic.  Bhagavad appeals to God, how can I do it, women and children will suffer, people will suffer, answer of Christna is: substantial reality doesn’t exist, what we perceive of reality is false appearance. If you arrive at spiritual enlightenment, then you see that that’s the only reality. You can kill as much as you want, kill do it, it doesn’t count, nothing is really killed, it’s all only appearance.  So Himmler always carried Bhagavad Gita in his pocket. Buddhists are the same.   Suzuki, how to kill without feeling guilty.  False illusion of substantial reality, the Buddhist enlightenment, you are no longer part of reality, your mind is a medium of only observation, you only see a dance of shadows and appearance.  Somehow your body gets stuck on the point of the knife my hand is holding.   Rorty says, we don’t have any substantial identity, we are stories we tell ourselves.  “We listen to each other’s stories” the way to bring peace is to listen to each other’s stories, your folkloric dances … An enemy is someone whose stories we were not ready to hear.  Would you say that Hitler was our enemy because we were not ready to hear his story?  Abandon this conclusion of trying to understand each other

🙁 Žižek Inner authenticity is a LIE.   when someone approaches you trying to understand your dances and songs in order to understand you, this tribe just wanted to be good hosts to their guests, and so as good hosts they invented the dance and masks because this is what they thought the other wanted.

You should not do to them what they are doing to you.  Underground the movie is specifically for the Western Gaze. An image of Balkans, outside history, where they each drink fuck all the time. This is what the West wants to see and he stages it for them, the spectacle, what they want to see.

: ( Žižek its Racist Jokes that play a great progressive role.   They were not racist jokes attacking each other but a sharing of obscenities.  I’ll tell you a joke about me, you tell me a joke about yours.  The correct heroic thing to do is not to say “ohhh that’s racist” but to ironically assume it.    A Fairy comes to a Slovene farmer and asks him, I will do anything you want me to do, but I’ll give it to your neighbour twice as much. So the Slovene farmer says, take one of my eyes. So Montenegro, how does a Montenegro masturbate, he digs a whole in ground sticks his penis in and waits for an earthquake etc.  So Žižek argues that its the exchange of these racist jokes etc.  “I fucked your mother” and the message was let’s be truly friends and Žižek replies, only after I do your sister.  So after that they conducted this, they didn’t have to replay it, their friendship developed, in the morning all they would exchange was “mother” and “sister.”  A good feminist would say “after I fuck your father” etc.  [huh?]

He’s not saying let’s start telling dirty jokes about each other.   This ironic populist low humour.  In each culture this works in a specific way. It’s a general feature of culture.  When you look at a culture, how a community is held together, large and small.  You have explicit rules, and then you have ‘meta rules’ higher level rules that tell you how to relate to these rules.   We should never underestimate, the subversion, undermining of community … order but underneath, obsenity total.   Croatia … we had only a med student.  He slept in a room with a wash basin, and a mirror, photos of half-naked girls. Once a weeks  doc came from military hospital.  One guy stood up and said, “he had pains in his penis” What did you say? the doc asked.  Undress. He undressed, his penis is painful.  It’s only when I have an erection.  Okay, the doctor says jerk off.  Do it.  He tries to get erection, it doesn’t work. The doc goes to mirror and gets the photo and takes them back. The doc was looking at us and laughing. This is the most oppressive, there was no underming of power.  You need this OBSCENE underside.

Cold distanct dignity, undermine it with obscenity.  But the problem with today’s liberal ideology: a decaffinated Other, they celebrate the Other but its a decaffeneited Other.   Drinking, depair disappears, and Other becomes holistic and spiritual.  The problem of “tolerance”, excessive harrasment, ‘toxic’ neighbour:  pedophile, abusive father etc.   It went from Albanians, Northern Africa, now Romanians.  Italy is now a democracy becoming more and more insubstantial After the last elections, the Centre if falling apart and Buslusconi is the boss.  But what is it about Berlusconi.  Did you notice that B. is systematically undermining the minimal dignity of what it is to be the head of state.  His mistresses, his wife.  An obscene soap opera.  Ronald Reagan was the first that played upon presenting himself as an idiot.  He would mock his own stupidity.  Richard Nixon was the last AUTHENTIC TRAGIC president.  Italy is still a formal democracy but its becoming insubstantial, now you have an obscene head of state who openly mocks his wife’s affairs.  This shouldn’t deceive you, its the like the army in the army, ha ha, masturbate, but the POWER remains there.  POSTMODERN power, permissivity, the right to choice, but underneath its all the more powerful.  Old type patriarch, I don’t care how you feel, behave but you’re going to grandma.  Postmodern permissive non-authoritarian Father, You know how much your grandmother loves you but only visit her if you want to.  Under the permissiveness of free choice, is the message not only must you go … you must enjoy.

Death of liberal Fukuyama utopia died after 9/11.  Western liberal utopia is not the recipe for the rest of world.  The true utopia was the 1990s, the happy era of Clinton … this moment is dangerous.  It is because SHOCK THERAPY, Capitalism needs a new boost, this financial crisis a SHOCK THERAPY for capitalism.  How to use this crisis to break the last of the union trade syndicate.  Let’s use this crisis to break the trade unions.  There was 1 good argument for Capitalism until now, capitalism did need a dictator to survive, Chile etc. but after 10-20 years it did bring democracy.  But now this game is OVER.  CHINA, can we imagine to which person from our time will they be raising statues 100 years in the future.  The long time president of SINGAPORE.  He invented Capitalism with ASIAN values.  that is, Authoritarian Capitalism.     China today is now an ideal capitalist country.   Something is emerging in China, capitalism with Asian values, a capitalism more dynamic and productive than western capitalism but without democracy.  ITS OVER the natural alliance with Capitalism and Democracy.  BERLUSCONI is a European version of it.  Berlusconi plays a clown but he’s got the POWER.  What should be politics, the economy, is de-politicized, the economy is starting to function in an authoritarian way.  What is happening in today’s capitalism, contrary to NEGRI, it NEEDS more than EVER A STRONG STATE. the STATE is getting stronger and stronger, but it won’t be able to do so in a formally DEMOCRATIC way.  When Bush confronted the crisis and addressed the American people. He used almost the same terms as when he reacted to 9/11. Our way of live is in danger.  Bush presented the first bail out money 700 billion dollars.  First vote it was against, then all politicians came together and said to Congress Fuck Off, this is not time for democracy.  They declared an economic state of emergency.  Capitalism is less and less able to function in a democratic state.   Italy since Sept 2008 is in a state of emergency.  This enables government to use army against immigrants, mafia … it will not be classical emergency state, where you wake up and there is curfew, no, its gradual, you’ll still be able to have all your pleasures.  The rise of IMMATERIAL LABOUR. when Marx spoke about it GENERAL INTELLECT, the collective practical knowlecge which is more imporatant than labour time. The source of capitalist wealth is no longer primarily worker exploitation, but COLLECTIVE KNOWLEDGE.  Labour measured by time becomes meaningless.  What Marx didn’t see is the possibility, that capitalism succeeded in REPRIVATISING the general intellect itself.  BILL GATES, how is he rich?  He didn’t exploit his workers, he didn’t get extra profit.  It isn’t from Rent to profit, but from profit to RENT.  It’s not PROFIT, this price is basically totally independent of production costs, he does take into consideration production costs, ITS RENT.  Bill Gates privatised part of the COMMON SPACE and we have to pay him rent.  the moment you deal with immaterial property, knowledge property.  It’s not like making a widget to sell on the market.  With immaterial goods, the state has to intervene.  Bill Gates, with intellectual property, it’s more complex.  Try to privatize some genetic structure. You need an exceptionally strong state to set the parameters. All the problem of copyright. The stronger and stronger state is needed and CANNOT do it in a democratic way.

COMMUNISM NOW!  Commies before were not strong enough in realizing what a terrifying experience communism was.  The German FIlm Lives of OTHERS.  Liberals don’t get the commie tragedy.  If you know anything of how socialism functions, if you have a corrupted secret police, where the film goes wrong, in a country East Germany, the writer would have been total observation even without somebody wanting to sleep with his wife.  Without religion good people do good things, and bad people do bad things. With religion good people do bad things.  The tragedy, is not bad people doing bad things, its good people starting to do good end up doing BAD things.  We have a whole series of antagonisms today:

– IMMIGRANTS  The walls are going up, West Bank EU, Mexico

– ECOLOGY: you can’t solve with market measure.

– Intellectual property

– Bio genetics; Fukuyama thinks now, biogenetics is strong argument enough all the coordinates are mixed.  There is now a wheel chair run totally by thought.  He can read if you think strongly about forward, backward, left right.  The wheelchair moves according to thought  Our being human is I have my FREE THOUGHT.  The problem is, what goes out, also goes in.  They already isolated the area of brain when you go into panic, then they bombard you and you are already in panic.  They have a machine, press a button all people are in panic.  Things are happening, the affects most ELEMENTARY what it is to be HUMAN.  This is getting underminded the inside/outside. what I think is inside, and reality is outside.

Clinton says this.  The result is hunger, many countries Indonesia, Haiti, the best land was privatized companies, who bought up best lands to export. This export industrial agriculatural plants.   HUNGER IS NEW PHENOMENON. Haiti is selling mud cakes. Cakes made of mud. They have minerals that fill your stomach.  FOOD IS TOO IMPORTANT TO BE LEFT TO THE MARKET says bill clinton. But Z. says what about education, arms industry, and health can’t simply be left to the market.

🙂 Butler argues about the conflation of desire with the real.  What does she mean by this?  That parts of the “literal” penis and the “literal” vagina, which cause pleasure and desire

Chiesa

In what precise sense should Marx’s materialism be regarded as a doctrine that conceives of truth as a material cause?

And, most importantly, can Marx still be, in spite of marxism, the man of truth whose revolution of thought psychoanalysis should escort until a new political paradigm is formed?

The reason why class struggle should remain the privileged model, to insist on class struggle occupying a position of centrality is precisely not to invoke the ‘working class’ as the only agent of emancipation. In a sense, that is already to treat class insurgency as if it were yet another ‘multi-cultural’ demand for recognition.

It’s perfectly possible to imagine a capitalism in which, for instance, the demand for recognition of alternative sexualities has been entirely satisfied. But class struggle in the Marxist sense could not be satisfied by anything short of the ‘obliteration of bourgeoisie as a symbolic social space’ (which is by no means the same thing as the extermination of the members of the bourgeoisie).

In a very real sense, the proletariat is that very obliteration. This point is perhaps best made by a joke recently recounted by Lenin on the Tomb. An IRA man in a balaclava is at the gates of heaven when St Peter comes to him and says, ‘I’m afraid I can’t let you in’. ‘Who wants to get in?’ the IRA man retorts. ‘You’ve got twenty minutes to get the fuck out.’

For Zizek, Laclau makes the mistake of treating the critique of political economy as a ‘positive ontic science’ (just as his dismissal of class struggle makes the mistake of treating the proletariat as if it were a positive ontic entity, ‘the working class’, rather than a ‘substance-less subject’). What this ignores is what Zizek, after Derrida, called the ‘spectral’ dimension of Marx. In Marx’s ‘hauntology’ – where undead labour is the correlate of vitalized commodities – it is understood that fiction structures reality. To call capital a ‘self-engendering monster’ is not at all to speak metaphorically.

There is a lot to be done with this. Firstly, we can recognize the current political landscape as inherently populist. It is not only, as Zizek said, that populism (whether it be the ‘progressive’ populism of the anti-capitalist or anti-globalization movements or the reactionary populism of the fuel protesters or the Countryside Alliance) is the complement to administrative post-politics. It is that administrative post-politics is already itself populist. Badiou has argued that post-political malaise is not some accidental side-effect of parliamentary democracy but the terminal phase into which it inevitably declines.  Populism projects a restricted sense of possibilities, always offers us a choice from a fixed and pre-existent menu. It is the expression of the always-already, the anti-Event.

butler antigone

“Antigone’s Claim: A Conversation With Judith Butler”
Theory & Event Volume 12, Issue 1, 2009

Consider Antigone. As we know, she buried her brother in spite of Creon’s order, and then, when she is asked to deny that she has done this, she enters a very interesting and particular position. Because she is not a citizen, she is not allowed to speak; she is prohibited from speaking, and yet she is compelled by the sovereign law to speak. So, when she does speak, she defies that law, and her speech exceeds the law that governs acceptable speech. To what extent, then, can Antigone figure for us in the position of the speaker who is outside of the accepted discourse, who nevertheless speaks, sometimes intelligently, sometimes critically, within and against that discourse? Perhaps the norms that govern philosophy work that way, producing a mimetic excess that questions the legitimacy of those norms. More broadly, these questions may have larger appeal and prove relevant to any number of people who are in minority positions or understand themselves as excluded from official public discourse – but somehow are still talking.

As we titled this conversation “Antigone’s Claim”, so we may ask what would Antigone’s claim be for the present and how we understand her claim in the present. It seems to me that in insisting on the public grievability of lives, Antigone becomes for us a war critic who opposes the arbitrary and violent force of sovereignty. In a way, she stands in advance for precarious lives, including new immigrants, the sans-papiers, those who are without health insurance, those who are differentially affected by the global economy, questions of poverty, of illiteracy, religious minorities, and the physically challenged. That she, in some sense, becomes a figure through whom we can think what it means to understand certain lives as more precarious than others, who live out a precariousness so that others can engage in the fantasy of their impermeability and omnipotence.

fink

Lack or Loss of something is required to set the symbolic in motion.

The Phallus is the signifier of lack

A woman’s sexual identity can, in fact, involve many different possible combinations, for unlike masculine and feminine structure, which in Lacan’s view constitute an either/or, there being no middle ground between them, ego identification can include elements from many different persons, both male and female. In other words, the imaginary level of sexual identity can, in and of itself, be extremely self-contradictory.

The very existence of sexual identity (sexuation, to use Lacan’s term) at a level other than that of the ego, at the level of subjectivity, should dispel the mistaken notion so prevalent in the English-speaking world that a woman is not considered to be a subject at all in Lacanian theory.  Feminine structure means feminine subjectivity. Insofar as a woman forms a relationship with a man, she is likely to be reduced to an object —object (a)— in his fantasy; and insofar as she is viewed from the perspective of masculine culture, she is likely to be reduced to nothing more than a collection of male fantasy object dressed up in culturally stereotypical clothes: i(a), that is, an image contains yet disguises object (a).  That may very well imply a loss of subjectivity in the common, everyday sense of the word —”being in control of one’s life,” “being an agent to be reckoned with,” and so on— but it in no way implies a loss of subjectivity in the Lacanian sense of the term.  The very adoption of a position or stance with respect to (an experience of) jouissance involves and implies subjectivity.  Once adopted, a feminine subject will have come into being. The extent to which that particular subject subjectivizes her or his world is another question.

sexuation female existential

Female Existential:
‘there is no entity x that says “no” to the phallic function’.

notxphallic

There is not any that is not phallic jouissance, the emphasis going on the first “is.” All the jouissances that do exist are phallic (in order to exist, according to Lacan, something must be articulable within our signifying system determined by the phallic signifier); but that does not mean there cannot be some jouissances that are not phallic. It is just that they do no exist; instead, they ex-sist. The Other jouissance can only ex-sist, it cannot exist, for to exist it would have to be spoken, articulated, symbolized.

(Fink, 2004, 161)

sexuation male existential

——Male Existential:
‘There is an entity x that says “no” to the phallic function.’

onexnot

Nevertheless, there is the belief in another jouissance, in a jouissance that could never come up short.

(Fink, Lacan to the Letter. 2004, 160)

Does the primal father exist in the usual sense? No, he ex-sists: the phallic function is not simply negated in some mild sense in his case; it is foreclosed (Lacan indicates that the bar of negation over the quantifer stands for discordance, whereas the bar of negation over the phallic function stands for foreclosure), and forclosure implies the utter and complete exclusion of something form the symbolic register. As it is only that which is not foreclosed from the symbolic order that can be said to exist, existence going hand in hand with language.

The primal father —implying such a foreclosure— must ex-sist, standing outside of symbolic castration.  He can be said to ex-sist, because, like object (a), the primal father can be written: ∃x Φx

Now the mythical father of the primal horde is said NOT to have succumbed to castration, and what is symbolic castration but a limit or limitation? He thus knows no limits. The primal father lumps all women into the same category: accessible.  The set of ALL women exists for him and for him alone.  His mother and sisters are just as much fair game as are his neighbors and second cousins.

The effect of castration (the incest taboo, in this case) is to divide that mythical set into at least two categories: accessible and inaccessible. Castration brings about an exclusion: mom and sis are off-limits (110).

… a man could only really jouir d’une femme from the position of noncastration … to get off on a woman, to really enjoy her, to take full advantage of her, not from something one imagines that one’s pleasure really comes fro her, not from something one imagines her to be, wants her to be, fools oneself into believing she is or has …

Only the primal father can really get off on women themselves. Ordinary masculine mortals must resign themselves to getting off on their partner object (a). Thus only the mythical primal father can have a true sexual relationship WITH a woman. To him there is such a thing as a sexual relationship. Every other man has a “relationship” with object (a) —to wit, fantasy— not with a woman per se.

The fact that every single man is nevertheless defined by both formulas —one stipulating that is is altogether castrated and the other that some instance negates or refuses castration— shows that incestuous wishes live on indefinitely in the unconscious.  Every man, despite castration (that splitting up of the category of women into two distinct groups), continues to have incestuous dreams in which he grants himself the privileges of the imagined pleasure-finding father who knows no bounds (111).

lacan’s symbolic logic of sexuation

Male ………………. Female

∃x : ‘There is at least one x.’
__
∃x : ‘There is not a single x which …’

Φx : ‘x is subject to the phallic function.’
__
Φx : ‘x is not subject to the phallic function’

∀x : ‘ All x‘s’
__
∀x : ‘Not all x‘s.’

x : jouissance
a : The object (a), Desire’s cause remains beyond signification, unsignifiable. Signifies the Other’s desire insofar as it serves as cause of the subject’s desire; but object (a), considered to play a role “outside of theory,” that is, as REAL, does not signify anything: it IS the Other’s desire, it is desirousness as REAL, not signified.

Φ : The phallic function: the function that institutes lack, that is, the alienating function of language.  The phallic function plays a crucial role in the definition of masculine and feminine structure, for the latter are defined differently in terms of that loss, that lack instituted by alienation, by the splitting brought on by our use of —or rather use by— language (TLS Fink 103).  The phallus is the signifier of lack. The phallus is never anything but a signfier, it is the signifier of desire.  Insofar as desire is always correlated with lack, the phallus is THE signifier of lack.

La: Indicates Woman‘ who does not fall into a set, as she is not completely defined by the phallic function.  “Woman does not exist”: there is no signifier for, or essence of, Woman as such. Woman can thus only be written under erasure: Woman.

-image deleted- signifier of the barred Other, feminine jouissance, Other jouissance (TLS 115).

***********

It is precisely because masculinity and femininity represent two non-complementary structures, defined by different relationships to the Other, that there can be no such thing as a sexual relationship. What we do in any relationship is either try to turn the other into what we think we desire or turn ourselves into that which we think the other desires, but this can never exactly map onto the other’s desire. In other words, the ‘major problem of male and female subjects is that they do not relate to what their partners relate to in them’ (citing Salecl 2002:93, in Homer 106). In a sense, we always miss what we aim at in the other and our desire remains unsatisfied. It is this very asymmetry of masculinity and femininity in relation to the phallus and the objet a that means that there can be no such thing as a sexual relationship (Homer 106).

copjec ethics of psychoanalysis

The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

44:”Do not give way on your desire.”  … In short the ethics of psychoanalysis filiates itself with Kant’s argument that ethical progress has nothing to do with that form of progress promoted by modern industry, or the “service of good,” but is rather a matter of personal conversion, of the subjective necessity of going beyond oneself.

GAP BETWEEN INDIVIDUAL AND SPECIES: Freud argues that this gap can never be reabsorbed; moreover, it is the very maintenance of this gap that permits the individual subject from being annihilated by the history she inherits.

46: Creon is driven by his superego, which is that psychic agency which fosters in the subject a distaste for mundane, compromised pleasures and maintains us in a state of dissatisfaction.  Creon’s fixation on the lost object causes him to be relatively indfferent to all others available to him. He remains glued to an ideal he will never attain, since it is derived from his nostalgia for something he never possessed.

47: When she covers the exposed body of her brother, Antigone raises herself out of the conditions of naked existence to which Creon remains bound.

Copjec can’t get back to mom

Secularized notion of infinity

Death Drive: this drive is inhibited as to its aim, part of this drive is to prevent itself from attaining its ultimate aim: death

The satisfaction of the drive through the very inhibition of its aim is the very definition of sublimation.

33: the psychoanalytic theory of Freud replaces [Kant’s] transcendental forms with empty, nonobjectifiable objects, the objects of the drive.

39: “But that’s what I like about them, that they come that way” Jasper Johns

There could not be a better description of drive/sublimation: it so wills what occurs that the object it finds is indistinguishable from the one it chooses.

copjec obdurate desire to endure

41: the singular truth of Antigone’s love for her brother must have a universal destiny, must be openly declared. The proclamation of love occurs in a passage that has struck several critics as so strange as to provoke the wish that it would one day be found to be an interpolation

If my husband had died, I could have had another, and a child by another man, if I had lost the first, but with my mother and father in Hades below, I could never have another brother.

This is the sentiment we express when we say of someone, “they broke the mold after they made him.”  Antigone lets us know that her brother is unique, irreplaceable. There will never be another like him.  His value to her depends on nothing he has done nor on any of his qualities. She refuses to justify her love for him by giving reasons for it, she calls on no authority, no diety, none of the laws of the polis to sanction the deed she undertakes on his behalf.

42: That Antigone does not give reasons for her love does not imply that her brother is unfathomable to her but that she is, as even the Chorus perceives, autonomous. She gives herself her own law and does not seek validation from any other authority. In other words, it is not the otherness but the nonexistence of the Other on which Lacan’s interpretation turns.

42: Antigone’s affirmation of love is, I am arguing, similar to Jasper Johns’s affirmative declaration, “But that’s what I like about them, that they come that way.”  Johns declines to offer reasons for his fascination with targets or American flags or a particular set of commercial stencils; he, too, attests, in Lacan’s phrase, to the “ineffaceable character of what is.” We are invited once more to taste the tautologism of love, and perhaps now we can say in what it consists, namely the coincidence, or near coincidence, of the drive with its object. This is what Lacan sometimes called the “illusion of love”: one believes the beloved is everything one could hope for without recognizing the role one’s love for him or her plays in one’s satisfaction.  … For, love is that which renders what the other is loveable.  This is not to say that Antigone overlooks part of what he is, that she fails to see that is a traitor to Thebes or that he has any personal flaws. It means she loves him as he is, the way he comes.

“I love in you something more than you,”

…. Lacan means to say that this “something more” is accessed through love. If one were to receive identical gifts or identical reports of an event one has unfortunately missed both from an acquaintance and from a beloved friend, one would get more, a surplus satisfaction, from the latter.  A gift given by a beloved friend ceases to coincide with itself, it becomes itself plus the fact that it was given by the friend.  The same is true of everything I get from the beloved, all the qualities, everything he or she is.  That is, the “is” of the beloved is split, fractured. The beloved is always slightly different from or more than herself. It is this more, this extra, that makes the beloved more than just an ordinary object of my attention.