Žižek – Page 7 – objet (a)

Zupančič ethics and tragedy pt2

Zupančič, Alenka. Ethics and tragedy in Lacan. (2003) The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté, New York: Cambridge UP. 173-190.

IT IS EASIER TO ACCEPT INTERDICTION THAN TO RUN THE RISK OF CASTRATION.

To put it simply: the law gives a signifying form to the impossibility involved in the very phenomenon of desire.

The fundamental operation of the law is always to forbid something that is in itself impossible. The fact that the law links this impossible to some particular object should not prevent us from seeing this.

By designating a certain object as forbidden, the law does two things:

1) it isolates the impossible Thing that the desire aims at but never attains, and

2) it provides an image of this Thing. This image (my neighbor’s wife, for instance) has to be distinguished from what, on the level of the symbolic, is nothing else but the signifier of the impossible as such.

The law condenses the impossible involved in desire into one exceptional “place.” Via this logic of exception, it liberates the field of the possible. This is why the intervention of the law can have a liberating effect on the subject.

It makes it possible for Achilles not to spend every minute of his life trying to figure out why he cannot catch up with the tortoise, or trying obstinately to do so. It can make him a productive member of the community.

This is the reason why Lacan, although he refuses to put analysis into the service of producing happy members of the community, also refuses to subscribe to the discourse advocating the liberation of desire from the repression and the spoils of law.

His point is that the law supplements the impossibility involved in the very nature of desire by a symbolic interdiction, and that it is thus erroneous to assume that by eliminating this interdiction, we will also eliminate the impossibility involved in the desire.

What he warned against, for instance, in the turmoil of 1968, was not some chaotic state that could result from the abolition of certain laws and prohibitions.

He didn’t warn against human desire running crazy. On the contrary, he warned against the fact that desire, tired of dealing with its own impossibility, will give up and resign to anything rather than try to find its own law. 178

We have already quoted Lacan’s thesis according to which “it is easier to accept interdiction than to run the risk of castration.” However, as should be clear from what we just developed, this does not mean that interdiction keeps us safe from being exposed to castration (that is, from undergoing a loss of something that we have).

The “fear of castration” is the fear of losing that which constitutes a signifying support for the lack involved in the experience of the desire as such. Interdiction is what provides that support; it is what gives a signifying form to the lack (or to the experience of “castration”) which is already there.

Psychoanalysis, as Lacan conceived it, is not something that will restitute the good old law where it is lacking. Although many clinical problems can indeed be traced to the failure of the law to function for the subject as a stabilizing factor, the job of psychoanalysis is in no way to make sure that the subject will finally subscribe to the ideal of this or that authority.

One should rather say that once things have gone so far (as to produce a neurosis, for instance), they can only go further.

In principle, it is easier to go by the law than to find one’s own way around desire.

But all the malfunctions and dysfunctions that appear in the clinic (as well as in the psychopathology of everyday life) remind us not only that this doesn’t always work, but also that it never works perfectly.

Psychoanalysis is not here to repair the damage, to help the social machine to function more smoothly and to reconstruct whatever was ill-constructed.

It is there to take us further along the path that our “problems” have put us on, it is there as the “guardian” of the other way, the one that consists in finding our own way around our desire.

Emblematic of this “other way” is the story of Oedipus who, although unknowingly, steps out of the shelter of interdiction, is led to give up the thing that captivated him, and enters the realm where “the absolute reign of his desire is played out . . . something that is sufficiently brought out by the fact that he is shown to be unyielding right to the end, demanding everything, giving up nothing, absolutely unreconciled” (S VII, p. 310).

This is what makes it possible for Lacan to insist upon the fact that the renunciation of goods and of power that is supposed to be a punishment, “is not, in fact, one” (S VII, p. 310).

Consequently, tragedy, at least in the perspective of what Lacan calls the tragic dimension of analytical experience, is not necessarily all that “tragic,” but can produce the kind of liberation that takes place in the case of Oedipus.

Zupančič ethics and tragedy pt1

Zupančič, Alenka. Ethics and tragedy in Lacan. (2003) The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté New York: Cambridge UP. 173-190.

Duties that we impose on ourselves and experience as “sacrifices” are, as often as not, a response to the fear of the risks involved in the case if we did not impose these duties. In other words, they are precisely the way we hang on to something that we fear most of all to lose. And it is this fear (or this “possession”) that enslaves us and makes us accept all kinds of sacrifices.

Lacan’s point is that this possession is not some empirical good that we have and don’t want to lose. It is of symbolic nature, which is precisely what makes it so hard to give up.

To renounce this “good” is not so much to renounce something that we have, as it is to renounce something that we don’t have but which is nevertheless holding our universe together.

In other words, “psychoanalysis teaches that in the end it is easier to accept interdiction than to run the risk of castration” (S VII, p. 307).

This formula is, in fact, crucial for the “ethics of psychoanalysis,” which could be defined as that which liberates us by making us accept the risk of castration.

In a certain sense, it puts us in the position where we have nothing to lose. However, while not false, this way of putting things can be misleading, since it suggests some kind of ultimate loss beyond which we no longer can desire or get attached to anything, which is precisely not the point.

The loss in question is rather supposed to liberate the field of the desire – liberate it in the sense that the desire no longer depends upon the interdiction (of the Law) but is led to find and articulate its own law.

The intervention of the law, far from simply “repressing” our desire, helps us deal with the impasse or impossibility involved in the mechanism of the desire as such. To put it simply: the law gives a signifying form to the impossibility involved in the very phenomenon of desire. 178

zizek cynic right of distress

The Real of Violence, Cynicism, and the “Right of Distress”
Slavoj Žižek
THE SINTHOME 14 Summer 2013

Recall Marx’s brilliant analysis of how, in the French revolution of 1848, the conservative-republican Party of Order functioned as the coalition of the two branches of royalism (orleanists and legitimists) in the “anonymous kingdom of the Republic.” [1] The parliamentary deputees of the Party of Order perceived their republicanism as a mockery: in parliamentary debates, they all the time generated royalist slips of tongue and ridiculed the Republic to let it be known that their true aim was to restore the kingdom.

What they were not aware of is that they themselves were duped as to the true social impact of their rule. What they were effectively doing was to establish the conditions of bourgeois republican order that they despised so much (by for instance guaranteeing the safety of private property).

So it is not that they were royalists who were just wearing a republican mask: although they experienced themselves as such, it was their very “inner” royalist conviction which was the deceptive front masking their true social role. In short, far from being the hidden truth of their public republicanism, their sincere royalism was the fantasmatic support of their actual republicanism.

Marx describes here a precise case of perverted libidinal economy: there is a Goal (restoration of the monarchy) which members of the group experience as their true goal, but which, for tactical reasons, has to be publicly disavowed; however, what brings enjoyment are not multiple ways of obscenely making fun of the ideology they have to follow publicly (rage and invectives again republicanism), but the very indefinite postponement of the realization of their official Goal (which allows them to rule united).

Recall how it is when, in the private sphere, I am unhappily married, I mock my wife all the time, declaring my intention to abandon here for my mistress whom I really love, and while I get small pleasures from invectives against my wife, the enjoyment that sustains me is generated by the indefinite postponement of really leaving my wife for my mistress.

This is the formula of today’s cynical politics: its true dupes are the cynics themselves who are not aware that their truth is in what they are mocking, not in their hidden belief. As such, cynicism is a perverted attitude: it transposes onto its other (non-cynical dupes) its own division. This is why, as Freud pointed out, the perverse activity is not an open display of the unconscious, but its greatest obfuscation.

To draw attention to the fundamental violence that sustains a “normal” functioning of the state (Benjamin called it “mythic violence”), and the no les fundamental violence that sustains every attempt to undermine the functioning of the state (Benjamin’s “divine violence”).

This is why the reaction of the state power to those who endanger it is so brutal, and why, in its very brutality, this reaction is precisely “reactive,” protective. So, far from eccentricity, the extension of the notion of violence is based on a key theoretical insight, and it is the limitation of violence to its directly-visible physical aspect which, far from being “normal,” relies on an ideological distortion.

It is difficult to be really violent, to perform an act that violently disturbs the basic parameters of social life.

Addition: Life as the sum of ends has a right against abstract right. If for example it is only by stealing bread that the wolf can be kept from the door, the action is of course an encroachment on someone’s property, but it would be wrong to treat this action as an ordinary theft. To refuse to allow a man in jeopardy of his life to take such steps for self-preservation would be to stigmatize him as without rights, and since he would be deprived of his life, his freedom would be annulled altogether. /…/

Hegel does not talk here about humanitarian considerations which should temper our legalistic zeal (if an impoverished father steals bread to feed his starving child, we should show mercy and understanding even if he broke the law…), but about a basic legal right, a right which is as a right superior to other particular legal rights.

In other words, we are not dealing simply with the conflict between the demands of life and the constraints of the legal system of rights, but with a right (to life) that overcomes all formal rights, i.e., with a conflict inherent to the sphere of rights, a conflict which is unavoidable and necessary insofar as it serves as an indication of the finitude, inconsistency, and “abstract” character of the system of legal rights as such.

“To refuse to allow a man in jeopardy of his life to take such steps for self-preservation /like stealing the food necessary for his survival/ would be to stigmatize him as without rights“– so, again, the point is not that the punishment for justified stealing would deprive the subject of his life, but that it would exclude him from the domain of rights, i.e., that it would reduce him to bare life outside the domain of law, of the legal order. In other words, this refusal deprives the subject of his very right to have rights.

However, the key question here is: can we universalize this “right of distress,” extending it to an entire social class and its acts against the property of another class?

Although Hegel does not directly address this question, a positive answer imposes itself from Hegel’s description of “rabble” as a group/class whose exclusion from the domain of social recognition is systematic: “§ 244,

Addition: Against nature man can claim no right, but once society is established, poverty immediately takes the form of a wrong done to one class by another.” In such a situation in which a whole class of people is systematically pushed beneath the level of dignified survival, to refuse to allow them to take “steps for self-preservation” (which, in this case, can only mean the open rebellion against the established legal order) is to stigmatize them as without rights.

dolar hegel freud

March 29, 2011 Hegel Freud Talk
April 2012 Hegel Freud Paper

Verneinung: negation
Verdrängung: repression (neurosis)
Verwerfung: foreclosure (psychosis)
Verleugnung: disavowal (perversion)
Verdichtung: condensation
Verschiebung: displacement

Discussion:

There is no interiority of the self: interior richness that went lost by being alienated, by going to other, by suffering in the other, there is no entity to start with, it is only be going into the other

Hegeian logic as a project is profoundly non-Aristotlean.

Žižek’s intervention:

Gerard Lebrun: Kant is too soft towards the crack (its irreducible), but Kant only draws epietemological consequence, Hegel what if this crack that appears to make in-itself inaccessible is a property of the thing itself. Hegel asserts the crack.

Hegel’s fundamental procedure: the coming of reason (the worst teleological Hegel), but really read him the cunning of reason means its opposite. Whenever you propose a project it will go wrong. If there is a Hegelian text on language it is Heinrich Kleist, if you want to move beyond platitudes, you say too much and then trying to get out of the sh** you fall into, read Hegel’s reading of Antigone, and compare it to Judith Butler, in one feature she follows Gerthe, I’m not doing this for anyone only for my brother. No just my brother, screw everyone. Hegel says only after exposing herself to the contingency of doing it, she because aware of what she is doing. It is not only with Hegel with have first level negation and then Freud adds this clinamen and so on, Hegel can’t think the as it were the foundational matrix of negation itself, what I’m tempted to do, by linking this ‘ver’ problem to the topic of repetition, can Hegel think repetition, the foundational operation of Hegel is something which post-Hegelian though focused on compulsion-to-repeat, the death drive and so on. Something begins visible in Hegel the very core of his operation. Hegel’s notion of totality, it is precisely the totality and all its verspragen. Include all its failures and so on. To speak today about Capitalism, is also to speak about Congo. This is not just a dark area outside, to put it in a political forum, to speak about death penalty, ok let’s debate about abolishing penalty but first let’s abolish guys like you. If you don’t want to speak Fascism don’t talk about capitalism. Hegelian totality all the lapses you have to include them.

When Hegel appears to promote this circular movement, this returning to itself, he always says that to what we return, there is no subject who loses itself, externalizes itself, this loss of self is the very genesis of self. The becoming-self is that you tear yourself out of your immediate natural self, this otherness is precisely you yourself as an object, Kafka the only Bolshevik writer, wrote in his diary, there was a dog who was whipped by his master, stole the whip from his master and started to whip himself and thought, “now I am free.”

I am never myself as a thing. Ontological pain. This return is the very constitution … the absolute is temporary. Hegel is not a cheap historicist. He is a more radical historicist, of course there are eternity above, and this eternity above can be changed.

Dolar clinamen void

Dolar March 30, 2011. The third day of Berlin conference. Mladen Dolar is responding to Aaron Schuster who claims you don’t need negativity to think clinamen which is Deleuzian. Think pure deviation without taking into account crack, void, negativity or Hegel.

Clinamen (inner torsion) version of the thing OR the Void (negativity, lack, dialectics) version of the thing.

Deleuze sees clinamen (pure deviation) the defining item in-itself. You don’t need negativity to think clinamen.

Hegel reads Atomism: introduces void introduces split , the basic unity as divided unity, division is only thing that cannot be further divided

Hegel’s position on the clinamen is curious, he doesn’t really bother with it. Hegel sees the void as the crucial speculative lesson, whereas for Deleuze sees the clinamen (torsion, deviation) is what we have to think without taking into account the void.

From this we arrive at this: Either you see the VOID or you see the CLINAMEN

CLINAMEN: has no time for negativity and void HEGEL and dialectics

VOID: This is the Hegelian way which is based on: lack void, negativity

SPINOZA: could be defined in way of clinamen, Substance expresses itself as inner torsion of substance, substance is pure clinamen, a clinamen in-itself.

CAN one think these 2 things together? CLINAMEN and VOID. EXCLUSIVE? Dolar tries to fit the 2 paths together and NOT make it an exclusive choice.

DOLAR: Take the Hegelian path BUT to see how the Hegelian path of negativity cannot be sustained unless we take this CLINAMEN this deviation encapsulated as INNER DEVIATION of NEGATIVITY

Ž Ukraine Rabinovitch

Žižek. Barbarism with a Human Face in London Review of Books, 25 April 2014

The entire European neo-fascist right (in Hungary, France, Italy, Serbia) firmly supports Russia in the ongoing Ukrainian crisis, giving the lie to the official Russian presentation of the Crimean referendum as a choice between Russian democracy and Ukrainian fascism. The events in Ukraine – the massive protests that toppled Yanukovich and his gang – should be understood as a defence against the dark legacy resuscitated by Putin.

The protests were triggered by the Ukrainian government’s decision to prioritise good relations with Russia over the integration of Ukraine into the European Union.

Predictably, many anti-imperialist leftists reacted to the news by patronising the Ukrainians: how deluded they are still to idealise Europe, not to be able to see that joining the EU would just make Ukraine an economic colony of Western Europe, sooner or later to go the same way as Greece.

In fact, Ukrainians are far from blind about the reality of the EU. They are fully aware of its troubles and disparities: their message is simply that their own situation is much worse. Europe may have problems, but they are a rich man’s problems.

Can we think of the Ukrainian protesters’ reference to Europe as a sign that their goal, too, is ‘to reach the standard of an ordinary Western European civilised country’?

But here things quickly get complicated. What, exactly, does the ‘Europe’ the Ukrainian protesters are referring to stand for? It can’t be reduced to a single idea: it spans nationalist and even fascist elements but extends also to the idea of what Etienne Balibar calls égaliberté, freedom-in-equality, the unique contribution of Europe to the global political imaginary, even if it is in practice today mostly betrayed by European institutions and citizens themselves.

Between these two poles, there is also a naive trust in the value of European liberal-democratic capitalism.

Europe can see in the Ukrainian protests its own best and worst sides, its emancipatory universalism as well as its dark xenophobia.

Fanatical defenders of religion start out attacking contemporary secular culture; it’s no surprise when they end up forsaking any meaningful religious experience. In a similar way, many liberal warriors are so eager to fight anti-democratic fundamentalism that they end up flinging away freedom and democracy if only they may fight terror.

The ‘terrorists’ may be ready to wreck this world for love of another [world RT], but the warriors on terror are just as ready to wreck their own democratic world out of hatred for the Muslim other.

Some of them love human dignity so much that they are ready to legalise torture to defend it.

The defenders of Europe against the immigrant threat are doing much the same. In their zeal to protect the Judeo-Christian legacy, they are ready to forsake what is most important in that legacy.

The anti-immigrant defenders of Europe, not the notional crowds of immigrants waiting to invade it, are the true threat to Europe.

Mainstream liberals tell us that when basic democratic values are under threat from ethnic or religious fundamentalists, we should unite behind the liberal-democratic agenda, save what can be saved, and put aside dreams of more radical social transformation.

But there is a fatal flaw in this call for solidarity: it ignores the way in which liberalism and fundamentalism are caught in a vicious cycle.

It is the aggressive attempt to export liberal permissiveness that causes fundamentalism to fight back vehemently and assert itself.

When we hear today’s politicians offering us a choice between liberal freedom and fundamentalist oppression, and triumphantly asking the rhetorical question, ‘Do you want women to be excluded from public life and deprived of their rights?

Do you want every critic of religion to be put to death?’, what should make us suspicious is the very self-evidence of the answer: who would want that?

The problem is that liberal universalism has long since lost its innocence. What Max Horkheimer said about capitalism and fascism in the 1930s applies in a different context today: those who don’t want to criticise liberal democracy should also keep quiet about religious fundamentalism.

Rabinovitch, a Jew, wants to emigrate. The bureaucrat at the emigration office asks him why, and Rabinovitch answers: ‘Two reasons. The first is that I’m afraid the Communists will lose power in the Soviet Union, and the new power will put all the blame for the Communists’ crimes on us, the Jews.’

‘But this is pure nonsense,’ the bureaucrat interrupts, ‘nothing can change in the Soviet Union, the power of the Communists will last for ever!’

‘Well,’ Rabinovitch replies, ‘that’s my second reason.’

Imagine the equivalent exchange between a Ukrainian and an EU administrator. The Ukrainian complains: ‘There are two reasons we are panicking here in Ukraine. First, we’re afraid that under Russian pressure the EU will abandon us and let our economy collapse.’

The EU administrator interrupts: ‘But you can trust us, we won’t abandon you. In fact, we’ll make sure we take charge of your country and tell you what to do!’ ‘Well,’ the Ukrainian replies, ‘that’s my second reason.’

If Ukraine ends up with a mixture of ethnic fundamentalism and liberal capitalism, with oligarchs pulling the strings, it will be as European as Russia (or Hungary) is today. (Too little attention is drawn to the role played by the various groups of oligarchs – the ‘pro-Russian’ ones and the ‘pro-Western’ ones – in the events in Ukraine.)

But there is another kind of support which has been even more conspicuously absent: the proposal of any feasible strategy for breaking the deadlock. Europe will be in no position to offer such a strategy until it renews its pledge to the emancipatory core of its history. Only by leaving behind the decaying corpse of the old Europe can we keep the European legacy of égaliberté alive. It is not the Ukrainians who should learn from Europe: Europe has to learn to live up to the dream that motivated the protesters on the Maidan. The lesson that frightened liberals should learn is that only a more radical left can save what is worth saving in the liberal legacy today.

The Maidan protesters were heroes, but the true fight – the fight for what the new Ukraine will be – begins now, and it will be much tougher than the fight against Putin’s intervention.

A new and riskier heroism will be needed. It has been shown already by those Russians who oppose the nationalist passion of their own country and denounce it as a tool of power.

It’s time for the basic solidarity of Ukrainians and Russians to be asserted, and the very terms of the conflict rejected. The next step is a public display of fraternity, with organisational networks established between Ukrainian political activists and the Russian opposition to Putin’s regime.

This may sound utopian, but it is only such thinking that can confer on the protests a truly emancipatory dimension.

Otherwise, we will be left with a conflict of nationalist passions manipulated by oligarchs. Such geopolitical games are of no interest whatever to authentic emancipatory politics.

zupančič Möbius strip

The Odd One In On Comedy. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. 2008

Perhaps the simplest way of describing the Möbius strip would be to say that it has, at every point, two sides (the surface and its other side), yet there is only one surface. Starting at any point on the strip and continuing the movement along the same side, without ever crossing the edge, we come sooner or later to the reverse side of the point where we started.

Or, as Lacan puts it: an insect walking on this surface can believe at every moment that there is a side which it hasn’t explored, the other side of that on which it walks. It can strongly believe in this other side, in this beyond, even though there is no other side, as we know. Without knowing this, the insect thus explores the only side there is.

The paradox embodied by the topology of the Möbius strip thus consists in there being only one surface (in this sense we are dealing with immanence), yet at every point there is also the other side. It is in this sense that we should understand the concept of inherent contradiction (of the finite) as the generating point of something that is not reducible to simple finitude. [Odd One 54]

Zupančič comedy #2

Zupančič. “The ‘Concrete Universal’ and What Comedy Can Tell Us About It.” Lacan The Silent Partners. Edited by Slavoj Žižek, New York and London: Verso. 2006. 171-197.

The Odd One In On Comedy. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. 2008

In psychoanalysis the main problem does not lie simply in the subject becoming conscious of her unconsciousness, of all that (often painfully) determines her actions and experiences.

This is insufficient: the main problem is precisely this unconsciousness is embodied outside ‘herself’, in the manner of rituals of her conduct, speech, relations to others — in certain situations that keep ‘happening’ to her.

In short, it is not simply that in analysis the subject has to shift her position (or even ‘adapt’ herself);

the major part of the analytic work consists precisely in shifting the ‘external practices’, in moving all those ‘chickens’ in which the subject’s unconsciousness (and her relation to herself) are externalized.

And one of the major obstacles that can occur in analysis is precisely that the subject can become all too eager to change herself and her perception fo the world, convinced that in analysis she will experience a kind of intimate revelation on account of which everything will be different and easier when she re-enters the world.

In other words, the subject is ready to do quite a lot, change radically, if only she can remain unchanged in the Other (in the Symbolic as the external world in which, to put it in Hegel’s terms, the subject’s consciousness of herself is embodied, materialized as something that still does not know itself as consciousness). Continue reading “Zupančič comedy #2”

zupančič why P? 2

Zupančič Zupančič, Alenka. Why Psychoanalysis: 3 interventions. Aarhus University Press 2008.

It is in this sense that we should understand a crucial Lacanian thesis concerning the issue of the cause:

“Il n’y a de cause que de ce qui cloche”

There is but the cause of that which does not work, or which does not add up. 24

(pssst … check out Dolar’s interpretation here)

There are (at least) two important ideas behind this proposition.

1. the non-immediate character of the causal relationship, which has its classic philosophical articulation in the Hume – Kant debate. The connection between cause and effect involves an irreducible gap, or leap, on account of which Hume wanted to dismiss the very notion of the cause, and which led Kant to propose rational subjectivity as the transcendental constitutive background against which the leap involved in the passage from a cause to its effect remained possible without the causal structure simple falling apart. 24

2. the other important idea involved in Lacan’s account of causality: something appears in this hole, in this interval, in this gap, in this structural split of causality, and it is for this something that psychoanalysis reserves the name of the cause in the strict sense of the term (the cause of object a, the objet as the distortional cause of itself). 25

The elements exposed above could be related to yet another discussion of causes in psychoanalysis: to the already mentioned two aspects of the question of the cause (the question of the unconscious causes, and the question of the unconscious as cause) we can add a third one, which seems even more fundamental and concerns

3. the very cause of the constitution of the unconscious. This is a debate developed in a very intriguing way by Jean Laplanche in answer to the deadlocks of the Freudian theory of sexual seduction (of children). 25 Continue reading “zupančič why P? 2”

zupančič April 2014 Toronto

philosophical ontological implications of psychoanalytic notions of sexuality and unconscious. Something happened to philosophy when this thing started to get articulated. One needs to think through this consequences of this unprecedented articulation. The concept of unconscious in its intrinsic link with sexuality is not simply concept of some newly discovered entity, of being. No.

It is not exactly an entity, it is not simply being nor non-being. Sexuality is constitutively unconscious. Fundamental negativity, non-being or gap implied in sexuality.

When Freud discovered sexuality what did this imply? He insisted against Jung, there is NO natural or pre-established place for human sexuality, it is constitutively out of its place. It is fragmented, dispersed.

3 Essays on Sexuality: Sexuality is nothing other than this out-of-placeness of its satisfaction. The sexual for Freud was not a substance to be properly described and circumscribed but rather the impossibility of its own circumscription and the limitation.

Sexual is NOT a separate domain of human activity or human life. Sexuality is something that exists in-itself only as something other. Sexuality is the very out-of-itselfness of being. Continue reading “zupančič April 2014 Toronto”

zupančič the act

Zupančič, Alenka. The Ethics of the Real. New York: Verso. 2000. pp. 94-95.

This is why we have to maintain that it is only the act which opens up a universal horizon or posits the universal, not that the latter, being already established, allows us to ‘guess’ what our duty is, and delivers a guarantee against misconceiving it. At the same time, this theoretical stance has the advantage of making it impossible for the subject to assume the perverse attiude we discussed in Chapter 3: the subject can not hide behind her duty – she is responsible for what she refers to as her duty. 94

This brings us back to the indistinguishability of good and evil. What exactly can this mean? Le us start with what it does not mean. It does not refer to the incertitude as to whether an act is (or was) ‘good’ or ‘bad’.

It refers to the fact that the vcry structure of the act is foreign to the register constituted by the couplet good/bad – that it is neither good nor bad. We can situate this discussion in yet another perspective. The indistinguishability of good and evil here simply indicates that any act worthy of the name is by definition ‘evil ‘ or ‘bad ‘ (or will be seen as such), for it always represents a certain ‘overstepping of boundaries’, a change in ‘what is’, a ‘transgression’ of the limits of the given symbolic order (or community). This is clear in Kant’s discussion of the execution of Louis XVI . It is also clear in the case of Antigone. Continue reading “zupančič the act”

infinite of desire jouissance

Zupančič, Alenka. The Ethics of the Real. New York: Verso. 2000.

The problem of the infinite is not how to attain it but, rather, how to get rid of its stain, a stain that ceaselessly pursues us. The Lacanian name for this parasitism is enjoyment [jouissance]. 249

The death drive is not a drive that aims at death. It aims neither at life nor at death. The drive can be ‘mortal’ precisely because it is indifferent to death (as well as to life); because it is not preoccupied with death, because death does not interest it. … it is indifferent to death. 250

How, then, does the infinite parasitize the finite, our existence as ‘finite beings’ ?

there are two modes of this parasitism, each of them resulting in a different figure of the infinite: first, there is the infinite of desire, which might be described as a ‘bad infinity’

there is the infinite of jouissance (linked to the logic of the Real, and of the realization). Ethics itself can be situated in the passage from the one to the other.

This passage, however, can itself take two different paths.

The paradigm of the first is indicated by the figure of Antigone, and brings out the co-ordinates of ‘classical ethics’ .

The paradigm of the second is evident in the figure of Sygne de Coûfontaine, and constitutes what we might call ‘modern ethics’. 250