Žižek – Page 49

copjec singularity immortality sublimation

23: Someone dies and leaves behind his place, which outlives him and is unfillable by anyone else. This idea constructs a specific notion of the social, wherein it is conceived to consist not only OF particular individuals and their relations to each other, but also AS a relation to these unoccupiable places. The social is composed, then not just of those things that will pass, but also of relations to empty places that will not. This gives society an existence, a durability, despite the rapid and relentless alterations modernity institutes. If, with the collapse of eternity, the modern world is not decimated by historical time, it is because this unoccupiable place, this sense of singularity, somehow knots it together in time. Singularity itself, that which appears most to disperse society, is here posited as essential rather than antagonistic to a certain modern social bond.

Singularity

This notion of singularity which is tied to the act of a subject is defined as modern because it depends on the denigration of any notion of a prior or superior instance that might prescribe or guarantee the act. ”Soul”, ”eternity”, ”absolute”, patriarchal power, all these notions ”have to be destroyed” before an act can be viewed as unique and as capable of stamping itself with its own necessity.
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One calls singular that which “once it has come into being, bears the strange hallmark of something that must be,” and therefore cannot die (Lacan cited in Copjec Antigone)
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24: For it is through the psychoanalytic concept of sublimation that we will be able to clarify exactly how singularity is able to figure and not be effaced by the social bond. … However incomplete the notion of sublimation remains at this point, it is nevertheless clear that it is meant to bridge the gap between singularity and sociality.

Immortality and Sublimation

25: dogma: bare life is sacred [code for Butler’s essential vulnerability, wow I get it now, Copject is arguing that Butler’s emphasis on abject, bare life is well … ]

26: Agamben faults Foucault for failing to demonstrate how political techniques and technologies of the self (by which processes of subjectivization bring the individual to bind himself to his own identity and consciousness and, at the same time, to an external power) converge to produce that form of involuntary servitude” which characterizes the modern subject, we recognize a need to know more about the biological definition of life if we are ever going to be able to explain how modern power is able to sink its roots so thoroughly —so inexhaustibly— into bare life. What is it about this definition of life that allows power to assume such an extensive, even capillary hold over it?

29: [on the pessimism and bleakness of Agamben] For, by focusing, however productively, on historical continuities, Agamben is led to downplay the rupture the nineteenth century "life sciences" represented, and it is precisely the notion of rupture, of a thought or act that would be able to break from its immanent condition, that is needed to restore power to life. The most insidious difficulty confronting us, however, is the fact that we ourselves remain dupes of the dogma that death is imbedded in life; that is, we remain victims of the theme of bodily finitude, or of bare life

The real romantic heritage —which is still with us today— is the theme of finitude. The idea that an apprehension of the human condition occurs primordially in the understanding of its finitude maintains infinity at a distance that’s both evanescent and sacred … the only really contemporary requirement for philosophy since Nietzsche is the secularization of infinity. (Badiou)

This statement strikes one as a long overdue correction of certain contemporary commonplaces. Yet its judgment will remain incomprehensible to cultural theorists [Copjec attacks here the cultural theorists and Butler no doubt] who continue to misrecognize bodily finitude as the sobering fact that confounds our Romantic pretentions. For these theorists —for whom limits are almost always celebrated, insofar as they are supposed to restrict the expansionism of political modernism and its notions of universalism and will— the body is the limit, par excellence, that which puts an end to any claim to transcendence.

What Badiou is here proposing is that our idea of bodily finitude assumes a point of transcendence. Like Agamben, Badiou argues that death becomes immanentized in the body only on condition that we presuppose a beyond. [As opposed to those postmodernists who reject any notion of transcendence as well… plain wierd. (RT)]

how thought escapes being a mere symptom of its historical conditions

What is needed, in this case, is a rethinking of the body. where the body is conceived not as the seat of death but, rather as the seat of sex. Contrary to what Foucault has claimed, the sexualization of the body by psychoanalysis does not participate in the regime of biopolitics; it opposes it. 29

What is needed is not an abandonment of current interest in the body, but a rethinking of it… for in truth another notion of the body has already been proposed, precisely as a challenge to the one offered by the (bare) life sciences… the one suggested by psychoanalysis, where the body is conceived not as the seat of death but, rather, as the seat of sex...

Borrowing Badiou’s phrase … through its definition of the sexualized body, psychoanalysis provided the world with a secularized notion of infinity. Or the concept of an immortal individual body, which Kant could not quite bring himself to articulate, is finally thinkable in Freud.

copjec antigone gives herself own law

31: Hegel – Polynices is forever entombed in his own “imperishable individuality,” his own imperishable finitude. In this way bare, bestial life has been dignified, rendered sacred.

32: Lacan’s interpretation turns on his recognition that the body is the site of a different obscenity, a jouissance that opens a new dimension of infinity, immortality. Thus will Lacan be led to describe Antigone’s deed not as a bestowal of “imperishable individuality” on her brother, but as an “immortalization of the family Até.”

But what does this difference signify in regard to Antigone’s relation to the dead, to her familial past, or to the city?
And what does it signify … in regard to the relation between the “individual organism,” which may be looked at, as Freud put it, “as a transitory and perishable appendage to the quasi-immortal germ plasm bequeathed to him by his race,” and the species?
How can our argument —that Lacan reconnects body and act, the very terms Hegel’s analysis sunders— be reconciled with Freud’s contention that sublimation pries the act, whether it be a physical act or the act of thinking, from the body’s grip?

Death and only death is the aim of every drive

32: There is no drive impelling the subject toward any sort of fusion with others … we must then definitively reject the “benevolent illusion” that there is among men a drive toward perfection or progress. Drive pushes away from or against the stabilization of unities or the dumb progress of developments.

… death drives are described by Freud as … working instead toward winning for the subject what we can only regard as potential immortality. How so?

33: Directed not outward toward the constituted world, but away from it, the death drive aims at the past, at a time before the subject found itself where it is now, embedded in time and moving toward death. What if anything does this backward trajectory, this flight from the constituted world and biological death discover? … drive discovers along its path something positive, certain “necessary forms of thought’ … that time does not change … in any way and [to which] the idea of time cannot be applied” Freud does conceive his notion of drive as an intervention in Kant’s philosophy, but the drive does not lend credence to the “Kantian theorem that time and space are … ‘necessary forms of thought'” … rather it significantly revises that theorem. … Freud replaces the transcendental forms with empty, nonobjectifiable objects, the objects of drive.

The aim of the drive is death, “the restoration to an earlier state of things” a stat of inanimation or inertia. Now this state exists only as an illusion … Psychoanalysis rewrites this mythical state as the primordial mother-child dyad, which supposedly contained all things and every happiness and to which the subject strives throughout his life to return.

34: the drive inhibits as part of its very activity, the achievement of its aim, some inherent obstacle —the OBJECT of the drive— simultaneously BRAKES the drive and BREAKS IT UP, curbs it, thus preventing it from reaching its aim, and divides it into partial drives … the now partial drives content themselves with these small nothings, these objects that satisfy them. Lacan gives to them the name objects a: they are, as it were, simulacra of the lost (maternal) object, or as Freud and Lacan both refer to it, of das Ding. Object a is, however, the general term, Lacan designates several specific objects: gaze, voice, breast, phallus. In other words he gives them the names of bodily organs. Why are the objects given these names? How do they displace Kant’s “necessary forms of thought”.

35-36: The various aspects of the mother, what she was like, will be captured by Vorstellungen, the system of representations or signifiers that form the relatively stable and familiar wold we share in common with our “fellow human-beings” or neighbors. But some aspects of the primoridial mother cannot be translated into these representations, since they are, Freud says, “new and non-comparable” to any experience the child has of himself.” A hole thus opens in the system of signifiers since those that would enable us to recall these new and noncomparable or singular aspects of the mother are simply unavailable, they simply do not exist.

… At the core of this matter of the unforgettable but forever lost Thing, we find not just an impossibility of thought, but of a void of Being.

The problems is not simply that I cannot think the primordial mother, but that her loss opens up a hole in being. Or, it is not that the mother escapes representation or thought, but that the jouissance that attached me to her has been lost and this loss depletes the whole of my being.

Žižek capitalist crisis

But was the financial meltdown of 2008 not a kind of ironic comment on the ideological nature of this dream of the spiritualized and socially responsible ecocapitalism? As we all know, on December 11 2008 Bernard Madoff, a great investmentmanager and philanthropist from Wall Street, was arrested and charged with allegedly running a $50 billion “Ponzi scheme” (or pyramid scheme). Madoff’s funds were supposed to be low-risk investments, reporting steady returns, usually gaining a percentage point or two a month. The funds’ stated strategy was to buy large cap stocks and supplement those investments with related stock-option strategies. The combined investments were supposed to generate stable returns and also cap losses – what attracted new and new investors was the regularity of high returns, independent of the market fluctuations – the very feature that should have made his funds suspicious. Sometime in 2005 Madoff’s investment-advisory business morphed into a Ponzi scheme, taking new money from investors to pay off existing clients who wanted to cash out. Madoff told senior employees of his firm that “it’s all just one big lie” and that it was “basically, a giant Ponzi scheme,” with estimated investor losses of about $50 billion.

What makes this story so surprising are two features: first, how the basically simple and well-known strategy still worked in today’s allegedly complex and controlled field of financial speculations; second, Madoff was not a marginal eccentric, but a figure from the very heart of the US financial establishment (Nasdaq), involved in numerous charitable activities.

Is it not that the Madoff case presents us with a pure and extreme case of what caused the financial breakdown? One has to ask here a naïve question: but didn’t Madoff know that, in the long term, his scheme is bound to collapse? What force counteracted this obvious insight? Not Madoff’s personal evil or irrationality, but a pressure, a drive, to go on, to expand the circulation in order to keep the machinery running, which is inscribed into the very system of capitalist relations –

the temptation to “morph” legitimate business into a pyramid scheme is part of the very nature of the capitalist circulation. There is no exact point at which the Rubicon was crossed and the legitimate investment business “morphed” into an illegal pyramid scheme: the very dynamic of capitalism blurs the frontier between “legitimate” investment and “wild” speculation, because capitalist investment is in its very core a risked wager that the scheme will turn out to be profitable, an act of borrowing from the future.

A sudden shift in uncontrollable circumstances can ruin a very “safe” investment – this is what the capitalist “risk” is about. This is the reality of the “postmodern” capitalism: the ruinous speculation raised to a much higher degree than it was even imaginable before.

The self-propelling circulation of the Capital thus remains more than ever the ultimate Real of our lives, a beast that by definition cannot be controlled, since it itself controls our activity, making us blind for even the most obvious insights into the dangers we are courting. It is one big fetishist denial: “I now very well the risks I am courting,
even the inevitability of the final collapse, but nonetheless … I can protract the collapse a little bit more, take a little bit greater risk, and so on indefinitely.”

Again, it is thus not enough to remain faithful to the Communist Idea – one has to locate in historical reality antagonisms which make this Idea a practical urgency. The only true question today is: do we endorse the predominant naturalization of capitalism,or does today’s global capitalism contain strong enough antagonisms which prevent its indefinite reproduction? There are four such antagonisms:

the looming threat of ecological catastrophy,
the inappropriateness of private property for the so-called “intellectual property,”
the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (especially in biogenetics
new forms of apartheid, new Walls and slums.

There is a qualitative difference between the last feature, the gap that separates the Excluded from

Part of no part is universality

What one should add here, moving beyond Kant, is that there are social groups which, on account of their lacking a determinate place in the “private” order of social hierarchy, directly stand for universality; they are what Jacques Ranciere called the “part of no-part” of the social body. All truly emancipatory politics is generated by the shortcircuit between the universality of the “public use of reason” and the universality of the “part of no-part” -this was already the Communist dream of the young Marx: to bring together the universality of philosophy with the universality of the proletariat. From Ancient Greece, we have a name for the intrusion of the Excluded into the socio-political space: democracy.

The predominant liberal notion of democracy also deals with those Excluded, but in a radically different mode: it focuses on their inclusion, on the inclusion of all minority voices. All positions should be heard, all interests taken into account, the human rights of everyone guaranteed, all ways of life, cultures and practices respected, etc. – the obsession of this democracy is the protection of all kinds of minorities: cultural, religious, sexual, etc. The formula of democracy is here: patient negotiation and compromise. What gets lost is the proletarian position, the position of universality embodied in the Excluded.

The new emancipatory politics will no longer be the act of a particular social agent, but an explosive combination of different agents.

What unites us is that, in contrast to the classic image of proletarians who have “nothing to lose but their chains,” we are in danger of losing ALL: the threat is that we will be reduced to abstract empty Cartesian subject deprived of all substantial content,

dispossessed of our symbolic substance,
with our genetic base manipulated,
vegetating in an unlivable environment.

This triple threat to our entire being make us all in a way all proletarians, reduced to “substanceless subjectivity,” as Marx put it in Grundrisse. The figure of the “part of no-part,” confronts us with the truth of our own position, and the ethico-political challenge is to recognize ourselves in this figure – in a way, we are all excluded, from nature as well as from our symbolic substance. Today, we are all potentially a HOMO SACER, and the only way to prevent actually becoming one is to act preventively.

constitutive outside

Ziarek, Ewa Ponowska. “From Euthanasia to the Other of Reason: Performativity and the Deconstruction of Sexual Difference” in Derrida and Feminism. eds. Feder, Ellen K. et al. New York: Routledge. 1997, 115-140.

🙂 This is a great note but it stops short with 8 pages to go. I need to track down the article and find Z’s conclusion!

On the Derridian Ethical

Ungraspable in positive terms, and yet irreducible to epistemological contradiction, the signification of alterity confronts us, once again, with the limit, or the outside to the symbolic order. This limit differs, however, from both the psychoanalytic concept of the Real and Butler’s notion of the “constitutive outside.” Unlike the radical non-coincidence, both temporal and spatial, that the signification of the other generates, Copjec’s and Žižek’s discussion of the Real emphasizes the immediate coincidence of opposites. For Butler, the abject —designating the excluded possibilities of signification threatening the purity of the law— functions as the constitutive outside to the symbolic order. The exclusion of the abject is thus an act of violence that ensures heterosexual hegemony. The task of critical intervention, then, is to question the seeming neutrality of this exclusion, and to recover the foreclosed possibilities of signification, even though this recovery will produce different exclusions in its wake.

For Derrida however, the persistence of alterity as a certain beyond or excess of the social and conceptual totality is not a sign of violent exclusion, but the condition of the very possibility of ethics. The other does not belong to the order of the “production” of the constitutive outside —as radically other, the signification of alterity exceeds both the notion of production and constitution.

(131-132).

constitutive outside

In Butler’s interpretation, what is thus foreclosed from the symbolic is not the prediscursive “empty” kernel but those possibilities of signification that threaten the purity and permanence of the law instituting sexual difference.

With such a concept of the outside, Butler articulates the main task of her inquiry in a very different way from Žižek’s. She does not intend ot affirm the exclusion of the Real as a guarantee of social contingency but questions the stability and ahistorical character of this exclusion: “How might those ostensibly constitutive exclusions be rendered less permanent, more dynamic? How might the excluded return, not as psychosis or the figure of the psychotic within politics, but as that which has been rendered mute, foreclosed from the domain of political signification.” (Butler Bodies 189) (130)

By rethinking the historicity and contingency of the law as the sedimentation of subjective approximations through time, Butler can argue that the mechanisms of exclusion are also, “however inevitable — still and always the historical workings of specific modalities of discourse and power” (Butler Bodies 205) (130).

ziarek on Žižek real

Butler, in the process of deconstructing sexual difference, contests nothing less than the Real itself. … The Lacanian Real, central to Copjec’s and Žižek’s reading of sexual difference, is the realm of being that is radically unsymbolizable, that remains foreclosed from the symbolic order. In this formulation, the Real constitutes a necessary outside of any symbolization — a limit to the totalization of the social or discursive filed. Like Copjec, Žižek suggests that any attempt to define the Real leads to paradoxical formulations … the Real is the starting point, the “impossible kernel” of symbolization and, at the same time, an effect of the symbolic order, an excess, or left-over of symbolization (124)

At stake in the argument about the Real is, on the one hand, a renegotiation of the relations between contingency and compulsion in social and discursive formations, and, on the other, the status of the concept of the outside of history and symbolization.

On the basis of the conceptualization of the Real as the necessary outside of the symbolic order, Žižek condemns both the universalization of the symbolic and its obverse side, its “rapid historicization,” which treats the subject merely as the effect or the actualization of its historical conditions. Both of these gestures … ignore that which is foreclosed from historicization. In order to take into account the incompleteness and contingency of the historical process, the critical accounts of history, Žižek argues, have to presuppose an empty place, an non-historical kernel, that which cannot be symbolized and yet is produced by symbolization itself (Žižek Sublime 135) (Ziarek 125).

Butler’s argument with the Real neither disputes the contingency of social formations nor denies the constitutive outside to symbolization. On the contrary, through her reading of Laclau and Mouffe, she links such contingency and incompleteness to the promise of radical democracy: “The incompleteness of every ideological formulation is central to the radical democratic project’s notion of political futurity. The subjection of every ideological formation to REarticulation … constitutes the temporal order of democracy as an incalculable future, leaving open the production of new subject-positions, new political signifiers …” (Butler, Bodies 193)

What she does contest … is the fixity of the Real (or rather, to articulate it more cautiously, the invariable failure of its inscription) and the permanent structure of its exclusion.

Even though the foreclosure of the Real “guarantees” contingency and incompleteness of all social relations, the process of this foreclosure is not marked by the contingency or historicity, and therefore is not open to redescription. We are confronted here, Butler argues, with the unchangeable production of the outside, even though the ‘production’ in question is marked by the instability of cause and effect. As Butler points out, “if we concur that every discursive formation proceeds through constituting an ‘outside’, we are not thereby committed to the invariant production of that outside as the trauma of castration (nor to the generalization of castration as the model for all historical trauma) (Butler Bodies, 205) (125).

Campbell critique sexual d Ziarek Outside

Campbell, Kirsten. “The Plague of the Subject: Subjects, Politics, and the Power of Psychic Life” in Butler Matters: Judith Butler’s Impact on Feminist and Queer Studies. eds. Sönser Breen, Margaret and Warren J. Blumenfeld. Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. 2005, (81-94).

Foreclosure: Freud never uses the term “foreclosure”, he used “repression” and “disavowal” to describe the ego’s refusal of an incompatible idea together with its affect. Instead she uses Lacan’s use of foreclosure as “A foundational psychic exclusion that cannot be represented within the subject’s symbolic economy”. This deployment of Lacan in the name of Freud allows Butler to evade certain theoretical difficulties posed by Lacanian theory to her conception of foreclosure.

Butler’s account implies that the prohibition against the homosexual object is pre-oedipal, because it is prior to the constitution of the subject. This prohibition, however, CANNOT be pre-oedipal. If it is pre-oedipal, then it must be prior to sexual difference. If the prohibition is prior to sexual difference, then the object that is prohibited cannot be a homosexual object, because a homosexual object is defined by sexual difference. The definition of a same-sex object relies upon a notion of sexual difference because such a concept would be meaningless without an already established distinction between the sexes. In order for Butler’s prohibition to operate against desire for same-sex objects, those objects must already be defined by sexual difference and, so, the prohibition described by Butler must be an oedipal prohibition in the register of sexual difference. The failure to address this problem of sexual difference entails that there is a lack of coherence in this theory of the formation of heterosexual identity (89).

In Butler’s interpretation, what is thus foreclosed from the symbolic is not the prediscursive “empty” kernel but those possibilities of signification that threaten the purity and permanence of the law instituting sexual difference. With such a concept of the outside, Butler articulates the main task of her inquiry iin a very diffferent way from Žižek’s. She does not intend to affirm the exclusion of the Real as a guarantee of social contingency but questions the stability and ahistorical character of this exclusion.

“How might those ostensibly constitutive exclusions be rendered less permanent, more dynamic? How might the excluded return, not as psychosis or the figure of the psychotic within politics, but as that which has been rendered mute, foreclosed from the domain of political signification?” (Butler Bodies 189).

By rethinking the historicity and contingency of the law as the sedimentation of subjective approximations through time, Butler can argue that the mechanisms of exclusion are also, … historical workings of specific modalities of discourse and power. … the “constitutive outside” is an inevitable effect of any identity claims, including the claims of queer identities, but the forms of these exclusions are neither invariant nor ahistorical. Undercutting the political neutrality and ahistorical permanence of “the constitutive outside,” Butler’s emphasis on the historicity of exclusion removes the threat of psychosis associated with it and opens the borders of intelligibility to political contestation (Ziarek 130).

Žižek FT interview

Žižek: The Financial Times website interview

“If you asked me at gunpoint what I really like, I would say to read German idealism, Hegel. What I like most, what I love the best, is this objectivity of belief,” he says. Although people may claim not to believe in the political system, their inert cynicism only validates that system. This is all explained, according to Žižek, by Marx’s theory of “commodity fetishism”, the idea that the way we behave in society is determined by objective market forces rather than subjective beliefs. “The importance is in what you do, not in what you think. I love this dialectical reversal.”

butler continued on sexual d

When the claim is made that sexual difference at this most fundamental level is merely formal (Sheperdson) or empty (Žižek), we are in the same quandary as we were in with ostensibly formal concepts such as universality: is it fundamentally formal, or does it become formal, become available to a formalization on the condition that certain kinds of exclusions are performed which enable that very formalization in its putatively transcendental mode? (144)

The formal character of this originary, pre-social sexual difference in its ostensible emptiness is accomplished precisely through the reification by which a certain idealized and necessary dimorphism takes hold. The trace or remainder which formalism needs to erase, but which is the sign of its foundation in that which is anterior to itself, often operates as the clue to its unravelling. the fact that claims such as ‘cultural intelligibility requires sexual difference’ or ‘there is no culture without sexual difference’ circulate within the Lacanian discourse intimates something of the constraining normativity that fuels this transcendental turn, a normativity secured from criticism precisely because it officially announces itself as prior to and untainted by any given social operation of sexual difference (145).

motivational deficit ethical subject

Critchley, Simon. notes from a talk he gave.

Disappointment: the condition of the world in which we live is pretty grim, a state of war, what might justice be in a violently unjust world? It is this question that provokes the need for an ETHICS.

The main task of this book is responding to that need by offering a theory of ethical experience and subjectivity that will lead to an infinitely demanding ethics of commitment and politics of resistance (3)

active nihilsm, passive nihilism: American Buddhism, contemplative withdrawal where one faces the meaningless chaos of the world with eyes wide shut

Motivational Deficit

where citizens experience the governmental norms that rule contemporary society as externally binding buty not internally compelling, there is a motivational deficit at the heart of secular liberal democracy

Each of these forms of nihilsim express a deep truth: identification of a motivational deficit at the heart of liberal democracy, we are basically indifferent and then fall into active or passive nihilism.

What is required, in my view, is a conception of ethics that begins by accepting the motivational deficit in the institutions of liberal democracy, but without embracing either passive or active nihilism … What is lacking at the present time of massive political disappointment is a motivating, empowering conception of ethics that can face and face down the drift of the present, an ethics that is able to respond to and resist the political situation in which we find ourselves. This brings me to my initial question: if we are going to stand a chance of constructing an ethics that empowers subjects to political action, a motivating ethics, we require some sort of answer to what I see as the basic question of morality. It is to this that I would now like to turn (8).

Ethics of commitment and political resistance

A subject is the name for the way in which a self binds itself to some conception of the good and shapes its subjectivity in relation to that good (10).

Ethics is anarchic meta-politics, it is the continual questioning from below of any attempt to impose order from above. On this view, politics is the creation of interstitial distance within the state, the invention of new political subjectivities. Politics, I argue, cannot be confined to the activity of government that maintains order, pacification and security while constantly aiming at consensus. On the contrary, politics is the manifestation of dissensus, the cultivation of an anarchic multiplicity that calls into question the authority and legitimacy of the state. It is in relation to such a multiplicity that we may begin to restore some dignity to the dreadfully devalued discourse of democracy (13).

Divided Self

Guilt is the affect that produces a certain splitting or division in the subject … This experience of self-division is … the sting of bad conscience … the phenomenon of guilty conscience reveals — negatively — the fundamentally moral articulation of the self. Namely, that ethical subjectivity is not just an aspect or dimension of subjective life, it is rather the fundamental feature of what we think of as a self, the repository of our deepest commitments and values (23).

Humour

super-ego is the cause of suffering

instead, we should find oneself ridiculous, learn to laugh at ourselves, “a super-ego which does not lacerate the ego, but speaks to it words of unsentimental consolation. this is a positive super-ego that liberates and elevates by allowing the ego to find itself ridiculous 83.

‘Super-ego II’ is the child that has become the parent: wiser, wittier and slightly wizened. It is the super-ego that saves the human being from tragic hubris, from the Promethean fantasy of believing oneself omnipotent, autarkic and authentic, and it does this through humour

It is indeed true, as Nietzsche would claim, that withoiut the experience of sublimation, conscinece cruelly vivisects thh subject, it pulls us apart. This is why we require the less heroic but possibly more tragic form of sublimation that I have tried to describe in this chapter (87).

Market Meltdown 101: Richard Wolff on Economic History from Amherst Wire on Vimeo.

Butler disses Žižek’s sexual d Žižek responds

Tada: JB is critical of the way in which Žižek makes sexual d. ahistorical Real, traumatic and thus outside the struggle for hegemony, JB asks how it can both occasion the chain and is also a link in the chain. How’s that. Žižek replies by accepting this paradox. Further according to the Hegelian concrete universality and also JB’s own work Žižek argues that sexual d is a ‘concrete universality’ in that it attempt to be universal gets overdetermined by its very particular contents. Žižek uses the example of religion, I wish he just used sexual d as an example. But he’s saying I guess the universal difference male/female though universal, will be overtaken by its particular content that tries to fill out this universal. Žižek here cites JB and says that each particularity asserts its own mode of universality (JB’s ‘competing universalities’) Does Žižek’s response satisfy JB? I think not. The very frame male/female is still a sticking point for JB. Even though she understands fully Žižek’s point about how that universality gets differentially articulated. (Man I’m getting good at this eh?)

This problem … is related to the ‘quasi-transcendental’ status that Žižek attributes to sexual difference. If he is right, then sexual difference, in it most fundamental aspect, is outside the struggle for hegemony even as he claims with great clarity that its traumatic and non-symbolizable status occasions the concrete struggles over what its meaning should be. I gather that sexual difference is distinguished from other struggles within hegemony precisely because those other struggles — ‘class’ and ‘nation’, for instance — do not simultaneously name a fundamental and traumatic difference and a concrete, contingent historical identity. Both ‘class’ and ‘nation’ appear within the field of the symbolizable horizon on the occasion of this more fundamental lack, but one would not be tempted, as one is with the example of sexual difference, to call that fundamental lack ‘class’ or ‘nation’ (143).

Thus, sexual difference occupies a distinctive position within the chain of signifiers, one that both occasions the chain and is one link in the chain. How are we to think the vacillation between these two meanings, and are they always distinct, given that the transcendental is the ground, and occasions a sustaining condition for what is called the historical?

Žižek replies:

I fully assume this paradox … This overdetermination of universality by part of its content, this short circuit between the universal and particular, is the key feature of Hegelian ‘concrete universality’, and I am in total agreement with Butler who, it seems to me, also aims at this legacy of ‘concrete universality’ in her central notion of ‘competing universalities’: in her insistence on how each particular position, in order to articulate itself, involves the (implicit or explicit) assertion of its own mode of universality, she develops a point which I aslo try repeatedly to make in my own work (314-315).

… it is not enough to say that the genus Religion is divided into a multitude of species … the point, rather, is that each of these particular species involves its own universal notion of what religion is ‘as such’, as well as its own view on (how it differs from) other religions. Christianity is not simply different from Judaism and Islam; within its horizon, the very difference that separates it from the other two ‘religions of the Book’ appears in a way which is unacceptable for the other two. In other words when a Christian debates with a Muslim, they do not simply disagree — they disagree about their very disagreement: about what makes the difference between their religions … This is Hegel’s ‘concrete universality‘: since each particularity involves its own universality, its own notion of the Whole and its own part within it, there is no ‘neutral’ universality that would serve as the medium for these particular positions.

Thus Hegelian ‘dialectical development’ is not a deployment of a particular content within universality but the process by which, in the passage from one particularity to another, the very universality that encompasses both also changes: ‘concrete universality’ designates precisely this ‘inner life’ of universality itself, this process of passage in the course of which the very universality that aims at encompassing it is caught in it, submitted to transformations (316).

butler on the historical frame Žižek

Tada: Here JB. is making the point that Žižek’s discussion of 2 levels of EL’s theory of hegemony. One level is at the level of the battle over content, over establishing a universal out of particularized contents, which one will emerge and so on. But then there is also the level of the very frame within which that content appears. And this Z. insists is what is taken for granted. So JB. says:

And yet, if hegemony consists in part in challenging the frame to permit intelligible political formations previously foreclosed, and if its futural promise depends precisely on the revisability of that frame, then it makes no sense to safeguard that frame from the realm of the historical. Moreover, if we construe the historical in terms of the contingent and political formations in question, then we restrict the very meaning of the historical to a form of positivism. That the frame of intelligibility has its own historicity requires not only that we rethink the frame as historical, but that we rethink the meaning of history beyond both positivism and teleology, and towards a notion of a politically salient and shifting set of epistemes (138).

Tada: Z. argues that this very frame is CAPITALISM! Damn you Žižek! Butler rejects the Lacanian category of lack. As she states here about Žižek’s use of the term:

Butler states:

His resistance to what he calls ‘historicism’ consists in refusing any account given by social construction that might render this fundamental lack as an effect of certain social conditions, an effect which is misnamed through metalepsis by those who would understand it as the cause or ground of any and all sociality. So it would also refuse any sort of critical view which maintains that the lack which a certain kind of psychoanalysis understands as ‘fundamental’ to the subject is, in fact, rendered fundamental and constitutive as a way of obscuring its historically contingent origins (140).

As I hope to make clear, I agree with the notion that every subject emerges on the condition of foreclosure, but do not share the conviction that these foreclosures are prior to the social, or explicable through recourse to anachronistic structuralist accounts of kinship. Whereas I believe that the Lacanian view and my own would agree on the point that such foreclosures can be considered ‘internal’ to the social as its founding moment of exclusion or preemption, the disagreement would emerge over whether either castration or the incest taboo can or ought to operate as the name that designates these various operations (140).

Tada: JB. construes this particular Žižekian intervention as one of ‘levels of analysis’, a topography which she says makes no sense, ‘falls apart’.

(140-141) Žižek proposes that we distinguish between levels of analysis, claiming that one level — one that appears to be closer to the surface, if not superficial — finds contingency and substitutability within a certain historical horizon (here, importantly, history carries at least two meanings: contingency and the enabling horizon within which it appears). …

The other level — which, he claims is ‘more fundamental’ — is an ‘exclusion/foreclosure’ that grounds this very horizon (SZ 108). He warns both L and me against conflating two levels,

1. the endless political struggle of/for inclusions/exclusions WITHIN a given field

2. a more fundamental exclusion which sustains this very field (Z 108).

Tada: But this ‘levels of analysis falls apart, JB argues that the distinctions do not hold up:

On the one hand, it is clear that this second level, the more fundamental one is tied to the first by being both its ground and its limit. Thus, the second level is not exactly exterior to the first, which means that they cannot, strictly speaking, be conceived as separable ‘levels’ at all, for the historical horizon surely ‘is’ its ground, whether or not that ground appears within the horizon that it occasions and ‘sustains’ (141).

Elsewhere he cautions against understanding this fundamental level, the level at which the subject’s lack is operative, as external to social reality: ‘the Lacanian Real is strictly internal to the Symbolic’ (Z 120).