Category: Žižek

foucault copjec

Christopher Lane, “The Experience of the Outside: Foucault and Psychoanalysis” Lacan in America edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté, New York: Other Press, 2000. 309-348.

the subject is constructed by forces lying beyond conscious apprehension and social meaning. 321

The difficulty of establishing where psychoanalysis stands relative to experience and its interpretation not only haunted Foucault’s career but partly determined it. One strand of Foucault’s intellectual project was aimed at complicating historical materialism by building on Nietzsche’s work. Another strand—tied conceptually to the first—focused on challenging the intellectual sovereignty in France of Jean-Paul Sartre. But a third and less successful strand devolved on establishing the importance of psychoanalysis for modern thought without at the same time endorsing Lacan’s “return to Freud.”

In refusing the psychoanalytic argument that sexuality isn’t determined wholly by discourse and social practices, however, Foucault could understand the ontological difficulty of sexuality only the way antiquity represented this phenomenon — that is, as an “effect.. . of errors of regimen [les erreurs de regime]” (UP, p. 16; UPS, p. 23).

Foucault’s insistence even here in approaching sexuality from primarily a culturalist perspective exacerbated his self-acknowledged difficulties. Yet his commitment to engaging some of the psychic repercussions of subjectivation — which dovetailed into his study of the modes of subjection (mode d’assujettisement, G, p. 353) — ironically obliged him to return to psychoanalysis for a better understanding of their diverse effects. I am suggesting that throughout Foucault’s career this pincer-like approach to psychoanalysis overdetermined his perspective on subjectivity. While his first published essay critiqued works by Ludwig Binswanger and Freud, for example, it didn’t dispute the appearance or effect of the unconscious. 328

While subtle differences therefore arise between The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) and Discipline and Punish (1975) concerning the role of the dispositif … the thread linking these books is Foucault’s suggestion that “[t]he individual is the product of power.” The underside to this conception of subjectivity — and, perhaps, the obvious extension of it is the near-metaphysical idea that subjectivity, once freed from outside regulation, would lack “inner conviction” (MF, pp. 89,42). This idea surfaces periodically in Foucault’s 1954 essay on dreams, and it culminates logically with the demand that subjectivity be let alone, whether to silence, abstraction, or pleasure. 331

Bersani valuably represents Foucault’s claims about subjecti vation in the following way: “The mechanisms of power studied by Foucault produce the individuals they are designed to dominate” (S, p. 3).

“The fundamental thesis of Lacanian psychoanalysis,” adds Zizek, “is that what we call ‘reality’ constitutes itself against the background of [symbolic] ‘bliss,’ i.e., of such an exclusion of some traumatic Real. This is precisely what Lacan has in mind when he says that fantasy is the ultimate support of reality: ‘reality’ stabilizes itself when some fantasy frame of a ‘symbolic bliss’ closes off the view into the abyss of the Real.” Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 118

… psychoanalysis departs conclusively from materialist accounts of reality and consciousness, as well as from related critiques of reality’s many shortcomings. By insisting on the ego’s basic ” [in]aptitude for dealing with reality,” Bersani — like Freud and Lacan — shows us why the subject’s alienation is neither explained nor repaired by altering the diverse forms of political oppression that impede and partly shape us, an argument quite different from the frequent and unjustified claim that psychoanalysis is uninterested in our oppression.

Owing to their faith in the underlying influence of these external causes on the subject, Foucauldian and materialist approaches to subjectivity argue that factors such as gender, ethnicity, and even sexuality are egoic effects of varied, contradictory, and unjust social demands.

From this perspective, however, the ego is invested with an ability to modify, subvert, and even repair these demands in order to diminish their effects and sometimes render them meaningless.

The Psychic Life of Power displays at the outset ambivalence about the psychoanalytic argument that only a nonsocial factor — the drive — is capable of determining psychic life. More important for us here, The Psychic Life of Power restates the logic of external causation, which paradoxically restores in principle the forms of social influence that 1 am challenging here. For invaluable discussion of this point, published just before this essay went to press, see S. Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (New York: Verso, 1999), especially pp. 247-312.

Although this faith in the influence of external causes relies erroneously on the ego’s capacity for congruency with the outside, I should stress that in opposing this faith I am
not refuting the influence of external factors. To do so would undercut my emphasis on the asymmetry of psychical and physical reality; it would reproduce another form of voluntarism, generating precisely the characterizations of psychoanalysis that I am objecting to here. The fantasy that the ego determines consciousness slips easily into solipsism and epistemic relativism, a fantasy that we simply make our own reality.

I am objecting instead to the crass suggestion—voiced repeatedly by constructivists and Foucauldians—that subjectivity is merely an “effect” of discourse, a suggestion that renders subjectivity politically transparent, devoid of drives and unconscious causes. 343

This suggestion culminates in a conceptual deadlock, in which social practices and power are caught in a circular relationship that thwarts the possibility of transformation. Let us iterate that Foucault wrote The Archaeology of Knowledge precisely in an atttempt to shatter this deadlock.

One way that psychoanalysis departs conclusively from materialism is by insisting that we can’t test our reality without confronting our perception of the external world. According to Freud, the structure of loss that frames our perception and desire serves as a guide for all subsequent perspectives on reality.

As he argued in “Negation,” building on a related and now famous claim in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality:

The first and immediate aim … of reality-testing is, not to find an object in real perception which corresponds to the one presented, but to re-find such an object, to convince oneself that it is still there.” 66

S. Freud, “Negation,” Standard Edition 19:233-238, 1925, paraphrasing his earlier claim in Three Essays and the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Standard Edition 7:

“The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it” (p. 222).

This statement shows us clearly why Freudian psychoanalysis differs from the conservative idea that therapy consists in adapting the patient’s ego to reality.

For Freud and Lacan, the idea of patient adaptation was preposterous, because egregiously coercive. Indeed, the very question of adaptation returns us to The Order of Things, where Foucault usefully points up a conclusive split between psychoanalysis and psychiatry. Poised between rationalism and unreason in <em>Madness and Civilization</em>, Freudian psychoanalysis surfaces in <em>The Order of Things</em> and even Volume 1 of <em>The History of Sexuality</em> as one of the primary fields that avoids, and even preempts, the coercive logic of psychiatry.

It is psychiatry, Foucault insists, that claims the patient must sacrifice his or her reality for pre-existing forms of social reality.

Lacan of course agreed, arguing in the 1930s — long before Foucault began publishing — that the very idea of “sacrifice” is both manipulative and delusive, insofar as “adaptation” merely substitutes one fantasy about reality for another.

JOAN COPJEC SPEAKS

Contrary to the common misperception, reality testing is not described here as a process by which we match our perceptions against an external, independent reality.

In fact, it is the permanent loss of that reality—or real: a reality that was never present as such—that is the precondition for determining the objective status of our perceptions.

Not only is the real unavailable for comparison with our perceptions but, Freud concedes, we can assume that the latter are always somewhat distorted, inexact.   [<em>Read My Desire</em>, p. 233]

Copjec shows us here why psychoanalysis and historicism offer quite different perspectives on reality; she illustrates too that by highlighting the profound repercussions of Freud’s argument about reality, Lacan completely discredited the idea that reality can ever be reparative for the subject.

“In the name of what is social constraint exercised?” he asks in Seminar VII. “[Reality isn’t just there so that we bump our heads up against the false paths along which the functioning of the pleasure principle leads us.”

“In truth,” Lacan continues, “we make reality out of pleasure” (EP y p. 225), a statement inverting the standard materialist claim that we extract whatever pleasure we can from a reality that pre-exists us.

That the ego exists in relation to a structural méconnaissance overturns all existing claims about false consciousness: “By definition,” Lacan says in Seminar II, “there is something so improbable about all existence that one is in effect perpetually questioning oneself about its reality.”

… Foucault’s and Lacan’s rather different perspectives on the subject’s structural relationship to reality and axiomatic dependence on resistance. To my mind the kernel of this difference arises in Freud’s claim, near the end of his study of the Wolfman, that “[a] repression is something very different from a condemning judgement.”

What Freud brings to our attention here is that repression’s importance lies less in what we contain, than in what we can’t evade.

“I’d say that that is the very essence of the Freudian discovery,” remarks Lacan in Seminar I.

To put this another way, repression, for psychoanalysis, doesn’t signify what we can possess of the past; it dramatizes the effort it takes to accomplish forgetting, to remove or dislodge us from a past—and thus a history — that threatens to overwhelm us.

This claim points up a form of difficulty that isn’t altered or resolved by will, whether individual or collective, and the difficulty helps us refute the simplistic objection that psychoanalysis is ahistorical. … our failure to rid ourselves of the past is one of the factors binding us involuntarily to history.

Ž on Mandela

Žižek on legacy of Mandela in NY Times Dec 6 2013

The main change is that the old white ruling class is joined by the new black elite. Secondly, people remember the old African National Congress which promised not only the end of apartheid, but also more social justice, even a kind of socialism. This much more radical ANC past is gradually obliterated from our memory. No wonder that anger is growing among poor, black South Africans.

South Africa in this respect is just one version of the recurrent story of the contemporary left. A leader or party is elected with universal enthusiasm, promising a “new world” — but, then, sooner or later, they stumble upon the key dilemma: does one dare to touch the capitalist mechanisms, or does one decide to “play the game”? If one disturbs these mechanisms, one is very swiftly “punished” by market perturbations, economic chaos, and the rest.

This is why it is all too simple to criticize Mandela for abandoning the socialist perspective after the end of apartheid: did he really have a choice? Was the move towards socialism a real option?

It is easy to ridicule Ayn Rand, but there is a grain of truth in the famous “hymn to money” from her novel Atlas Shrugged: “Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns or dollars. Take your choice – there is no other.” Did Marx not say something similar in his well-known formula of how, in the universe of commodities, “relations between people assume the guise of relations among things”?

In the market economy, relations between people can appear as relations of mutually recognized freedom and equality: domination is no longer directly enacted and visible as such. What is problematic is Rand’s underlying premise: that the only choice is between direct and indirect relations of domination and exploitation, with any alternative dismissed as utopian.

However, one should nonetheless bear in mind the moment of truth in Rand’s otherwise ridiculously-ideological claim: the great lesson of state socialism was effectively that a direct abolishment of private property and market-regulated exchange, lacking concrete forms of social regulation of the process of production, necessarily resuscitates direct relations of servitude and domination. If we merely abolish market (inclusive of market exploitation) without replacing it with a proper form of the Communist organization of production and exchange, domination returns with a vengeance, and with it direct exploitation.

The general rule is that, when a revolt begins against an oppressive half-democratic regime, as was the case in the Middle East in 2011, it is easy to mobilize large crowds with slogans which one cannot but characterize as crowd pleasers – for democracy, against corruption, for instance. But then we gradually approach more difficult choices: when our revolt succeeds in its direct goal, we come to realize that what really bothered us (our un-freedom, humiliation, social corruption, lack of prospect of a decent life) goes on in a new guise. The ruling ideology mobilizes here its entire arsenal to prevent us from reaching this radical conclusion. They start to tell us that democratic freedom brings its own responsibility, that it comes at a price, that we are not yet mature if we expect too much from democracy. In this way, they blame us for our failure: in a free society, so we are told, we are all capitalist investing in our lives, deciding to put more into our education than into having fun if we want to succeed.

At a more directly political level, the United States foreign policy elaborated a detailed strategy of how to exert damage control by way of re-channeling a popular uprising into acceptable parliamentary-capitalist constraints – as was done successfully in South Africa after the fall of apartheid regime, in Philippines after the fall of Marcos, in Indonesia after the fall of Suharto and elsewhere.

At this precise conjuncture, radical emancipatory politics faces its greatest challenge: how to push things further after the first enthusiastic stage is over, how to make the next step without succumbing to the catastrophe of the “totalitarian” temptation – in short, how to move further from Mandela without becoming Mugabe.

If we want to remain faithful to Mandela’s legacy, we should thus forget about celebratory crocodile tears and focus on the unfulfilled promises his leadership gave rise to. We can safely surmise that, on account of his doubtless moral and political greatness, he was at the end of his life also a bitter, old man, well aware how his very political triumph and his elevation into a universal hero was the mask of a bitter defeat. His universal glory is also a sign that he really didn’t disturb the global order of power.

titanic

Žižek re-enacts a scene from Titanic in Perverts Guide to Ideology

Is Cameron’s Titanic really about the catastrophe of the ship hitting the iceberg?

One should be attentive to the precise moment of the catastrophe: it takes place when the two young lovers (Leonardo di Caprio and Kate Winslett), immediately after consummating their amorous link in the sexual act, return to the ship’s deck. This, however, is not all: if this were all, then the catastrophe would have been simply the punishment of Fate for the double transgression (illegitimate sexual act; crossing the class divisions).

What is more crucial is that, on the deck, Kate passionately says to her lover that, when the ship will reach New York the next morning, she will leave with him, preferring poor life with her true love to the false corrupted life among the rich; at THIS moment the ship hits the iceberg, in order to PREVENT what would undoubtedly have been the TRUE catastrophe, namely the couple’s life in New York – one can safely guess that soon, the misery of everyday life would destroy their love. The catastrophe thus occurs in order to safe their love, in order to sustain the illusion that, if it were not to happen, they would have lived “happily forever after”…

But even this is not all; a further clue is provided by the final moments of di Caprio. He is freezing in the cold water, dying, while Winslet is safely floating on a large piece of wood; aware that she is losing him, she cries: “I’ll never let you go!”, and, while saying this, she pushes him away with her hands – why?

Beneath the story of a love couple, Titanic tells another story, the story of a spoiled high-society girl in an identity-crisis: she is confused, doesn’t know what to do with herself, and, much more than her love partner, di Caprio is a kind of “vanishing mediator” whose function is to restore her sense of identity and purpose in life, her self-image (quite literally, also: he draws her image); once his job is done, he can disappear.

This is why his last words, before he disappears in freezing North Atlantic, are not the words of a departing lover’s, but, rather, the last message of a preacher, telling her how to lead her life, to be honest and faithful to herself, etc. What this means is that Cameron’s superficial Hollywood-Marxism (his all too obvious privileging of the lower classes and caricatural depiction of the cruel egotism and opportunism of the rich) should not deceive us: beneath this sympathy for the poor, there is another narrative, the profoundly reactionary myth, first fully deployed by Kipling’s Captain Courageous, of a young rich person in crisis who gets his (or her) vitality restored by a brief intimate contact with the full-blooded life of the poor. What lurks behind the compassion for the poor is their vampiric exploitation.

mcgowan fool

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis.

Successful normal subjectivity, as Freud defines it, stands in contrast. The normal subject does not exist completely outside the domain of social authority, but this subject is able to enjoy in a way that neurotics, psychotics, and perverts cannot. Rather than keeping the subversion of social authority a private matter (in the manner of the neurotic), the normal subject publicly avows its fantasy. By insisting on its fantasies at the expense of social recognition, such a subject embraces its mode of enjoying. This is the fundamental aim of the psychoanalytic process, and the subject who does this necessarily exposes its fantasy and enjoys in a public way.

By enjoying in a public way, the subject becomes what we might call a fool. The fool is a subject who ceases to court the social authority’s approbation and becomes immune to the seduction of social recognition or rewards. Recognition has a value for the subject only insofar as the subject believes in the substantial status of social authority – that is, insofar as the subject believes that the identities that society confers have a solid foundation. The fool grasps that no such foundation exists and that no identity has any basis whatsoever.  The only possible foundation for the subject lies in the subject itself – in the fantasy that organizes the subject’s enjoyment. Such a subject becomes a fool because it constantly acts in ways that make no sense to the social authority. It acts out of the nonsense of its own enjoyment.

This does not mean that the fool acts at random. Nonsensical enjoyment is not arbitrary enjoyment but enjoyment irreducible to the symbolic world of signification. In fact, the fool, having embraced its own mode of enjoying, acts with considerable regularity. This type of subject clearly acts against its own self-interest and in defiance of any good at all. The paradigmatic instance of the fool is the subject pursuing the lost cause or the subject continuing to act when all hope has already been lost. The pursuit of the lost cause reveals that what motivates the subject is not a potential reward but purely the enjoyment of the pursuit itself. The authentic fool doesn’t peruse the lost cause with resignation but with the knowledge that there is no other cause but the lost one. Rather than paralyzing the subject, this recognition emboldens it, as the example of Hamlet demonstrates.

Hamlet

father’s ghost and determines must kill Claudius in order to revenge his father’s murder, he believes in possibility of justice. For Hamlet at the beginning of S’s play, there is an order in the world that his act might restore …

Hamlet [believes] in distributive justice, which tacitly presupposes a social authority with a solid foundation that could distribute justice. This attitude undergoes a radical transformation, however, when he sees Ophelia’s grave. At this point in the play, Hamlet recognizes the groundlessness of all authority and the hopelessness of his own cause. 137

[…] Once his cause has become a lost cause, Hamlet can act.

As long as Hamlet hopes that his act might accomplish something substantial, the moment will never be right for it. Once he ceases to believe in the possibility of restoring justice and understands the act only in terms of his own fantasmatic enjoyment, he frees himself from the search for the proper moment. Subjects who hope to make an impact on social authority never act because they cannot calculate how the authority will respond to the act. Such subjects, like Hamlet at the beginning of the play, spend their time probing the authority.

Zizek ideology and caste

The Apostate Children Of God Ambedkar knew that there would be outcasts as long as there are castes

Usha Zacharias interview Žižek for Kochi Life

Žižek: I am not a postmodern guy who thinks the question of truth is irrelevant, we are all in ideology, I still live in a very traditional way…. I don’t believe in the postmodern mantra: we are just living in stories, we are telling different stories, the only ideology is the idea that you can clearly distinguish between ideology and truth.

No, everything is not ideology. Also in political life. You can have popular mobilizations at least in the way I understand ideology, in the old fashioned Marxist sense, as something false, something mystifying.

To be outside ideology to me doesn’t mean a kind of abstraction: for example, if poor peasants rebel in India, claiming we want our freedom blah blah, they can evoke some old goddesses, I don’t care.

It can be illusion in the literal sense, but it is not ideology. Ideology is for me measured with how your ideas which motivate you relate to fundamental social antagonism, liberation and so on. You can be very scientific, and you’re still within ideology. You can evoke old gods, but you are not in ideology. I use ideology in a very precise sense, not the simple position like ideology versus objective scientific knowledge.

In 1927, Ambedkar symbolically burnt a copy of the Manusmriti; Gandhi always held in his hand a copy of the Bhagvad Gita—a text that extolled the varna order in its originary four-fold form. Ambedkar mounted a severe critique of the Gita for being a counter-revolutionary defence of the caste order. The Gandhi-Ambedkar difference here is insurmountable: it is the difference between the “organic” solution (solving the problem by way of returning to the purity of the original non-corrupted system) and the truly radical solution (identifying the problem as the “symptom” of the entire system, the symptom which can only be resolved by way of abolishing the entire system).

Ambedkar saw clearly how the structure of four castes, or the varna system, does not unite four elements which belong to the same order: while the first three castes (priests, warrior-kings, merchants-producers) form a consistent All, an organic triad, the Shudras (slaves) and Untouchables (outside the four-fold system) are like Marx’s “Asiatic mode of production” the “part of no part,” the inconsistent element which holds within the system the place of what the system as such excludes — and as such, the Untouchables stand for universality.

Or, as Ambedkar’s put it in his ingenious wordplay: “There will be outcasts as long as there are castes.” As long as there are castes, there will be an excessive excremental zero-value element which, while formally part of the system, has no proper place within it. Gandhi obfuscates this paradox, as if harmonious structure is possible.

Žižek brockport 2012

On Badiou
Badiou duality: aniimal life, humans, event happens we are interpellated into subjects.  Badiou’s ontological edifice there is no place for psychoanalysis, what psychoanalysis calls the Death Drive
Subjectivity linked to this is not human animal, but not yet the Badiouian EVENT.  Badiou almost becomes a dualist: His mistake is animal life, there is NO SUCH thing as animal life, humans funcitoning in pleasure principle.  NO DEATH DRIVE MEANS WE ARE constantly sabotaging ourselves.  Animal life and the truth event doesn’t cover the whole field.  Look at how Badiou talks about death drive, death drive for him is morbid etc.  THere has to be a 3rd dimension, he tries to read death drive as the shadow of the Event. You have to have anxiety at evental site, but for him in Theory of Subject his best book, he is well aware of necessity of anxiety but it is just a retroactive shadow of the event, but I have my doubts I am more Lacanian here.
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on violence Loyola U. 2009

On Violence
Quotes Alain Badiou: The liberal prohibition of enemies, has a very precise implication, if there is no true struggle in politics, then those who truly disagree with us are not simply our enemies but excluded from scope of humanity so anything goes.  So first step in recognizing humanity of enemy is the unavoidability of the need for enemy in politics.

Žižek at irreverent best

Žižek at Loyola University 2009.

For our struggle it is not against flesh and blood but against world rulers, against spiritual wickedness in the heavens. Our struggle is not against concrete corrupted individuals but against those in  power in general.

Critique of Ideology

Abstract propositions (freedom, democracy) ideology is the very density of symbolic network, schematizes these abstract propositions, renders them liveable, provides concrete background, so they become liveable.

Obscene rituals

Army one big obscenity, improvisation, but what appears to be secret resistance to power, obscenity etc, no, this is how power is experienced.  Harry Frankfurt wrote a book on bulls**t.  Do you have an example of politician who doesn’t b.s. He said John McCain.

When we are in ideology up to our knees. During a  public debate with Bernard Henri Levi

When we both our case in these abstract terms we both couldn’t but agree with each other.  This means that we were in ideology. We obliterated this dense background.  The whole set of unwritten rules.  What a complex phenomenon rules, norms. They don’t just tell you how to act. Norms are never consistent. Whenever you want to be part of a certain collective.  It isn’t just explicit rules, what matters even more are meta, higher level rules that tell you how to deal with the explicit rules.
When you are solicited to do something on condition that you don’t really do it.  You are given a free choice on condition that you make the right choice.  To give you a choice on condition that you choose right.  One guy when it came to signing the oath, he said no, I’m not signing the oath, are you crazy you must sign it, Am I obliged, are you ordering me to sign it.  NO!  This is an oath, its your free choice.  The officer then wrote on a piece of paper an order to freely sign the oath.  Ideology, it’s never what it says, its how you relate to what it says.

Spontaneous acts are not spontaneous outbursts, they are codified, precisely when you learn how to violate the explicit rules. Drinking alcohol or smoking.
You cough at first, you come to enjoy it, be a man.  It’s strictly a second level pleasure more to do with social groups, participating in collective act of transgression, if you want to drink for pure pleasure you usually go for fruit juice.

Violating public rules is not done by private rules, but is enjoined by very private rules that prohibit them.

Here is his critique of Sound of Music
Ayn Rand digression
undermines ruling ideology but through over-identification. Her status is ambiguous, she is liberal capitalist individualism at its purest, but she does it so openly … she is an embarrassment.

The NEIGHBOUR He tells the story about being asked “sexual orientation.”  Americans have their levels of comfort, Europeans have theirs. He then goes on to give the Santner story about a beach on Adriatic coast topless beach.  The point is that each culture for you its not a problem sexual orientation, but much more difficult for women to walk topless. What Santner feared is FEAR OF NEIGHBOUR.  The desiring other of jouissance that invades …. Hard core porn. You either have serious story and can’t see it all, or see it all but story is ridiculous.  Breillat seriously artistic hardcore, you see everything and same time engaging story … Today the predominant porn is Gonzo. They no longer even pretend its a story. But censorship is even more here than ever, its like you have to be reminded all the time, no its just a joke, we’re just filming, the fear is precisely the FEAR of the NEIGHBOUR, if you had to fear that there is real desire, that is the NEIGHBOUR, that dimension has to be repressed.

Keeping Neighbour at a Distance.

customs habits rules of civility.  Political correctness
Indonesian Documentary: 1966 President Sukharo ethnic political cleansing. Boast about their killing. Talk about most efficient and pleasurable way to kill, there is no shame. They appear on a talk show.
While they were torturing and killing, they liked Cagney and Hollywood gangster actors. Which fantasmatic screen made it possible for guys like this to do what they were doing. What kind of society are we living in, where even minimal public shame is disappeared. Even Nazi Germany had shame, they denied everything. Here they have no shame, they admit everything.
Dislocating effects of capitalist globalization: what kinds of obscenities and shamelessness.

Antigone

Žižek, Dolar. Opera’s Second Death. 2001

This domain of the double provides the answer to the question: what is so unsettling about the possibility that a computer might “really think”? It’s not simply that the original (me) will become indistinguishable from the copy, but that my “mechanical” double will usurp my identity and become the “original” (a substantial object), while I will remain a subject.

It is thus absolutely crucial to insist on the asymmetry in the relationship of the subject to his double: they are never interchangeable – my double is not my shadow, its very existence on the contrary reduces ME to a shadow. In short, a double deprives me of my being: me and my double are not two subjects, we are I as a (barred) subject plus myself as a (non-barred) object.

For this reason, when literature deals the theme of the double, it is always from the subjective standpoint of the “original” subject persecuted by the double – the double itself is reduced to an evil entity which cannot ever be properly subjectivized.

This is what the fashionable critique of the “binary logic” gets wrong: it is only in the guise of the double that one encounters the Real – the moment indefinite multitude sets in, the moment we let ourselves go to the rhizomatic poetry of the “simulacra of simulacra endlessly mirroring themselves, with no original and no copy,” the dimension of the Real gets lost.

This Real is discernible only in the doubling, in the unique experience of a subject encountering his double, which can be defined in precise Lacanian terms, as myself PLUS that “something in me more than myself” which I forever lack, the real kernel of my being.

The point is thus not that, if we are only two, I can still maintain the “non-deconstructed” difference between the original and its simulacra/copy – in a way, this is true, but in the OBVERSE way: what is so terrifying in encountering my double is that its existence makes ME a copy and IT the “original.”

Is this lesson not best encapsulated in the famous scene from Duck Soup, in which one of the brothers (the house-breaker) tries to convince the other (Groucho, the President of Freedonia) that he is just his mirror-image, i.e. that the door frame into the next room is really a mirror: since they are both dressed in the same way (the same white nightgown with a nightcap), the intruder imitates in a mirror-like way Groucho’s gestures, with the standard Marx brothers’ radicalization of this logic ad absurdum (the two figures change sides through the mirror-frame; when the double forgets to follow closely one of Groucho’s gestures, Groucho is for a brief moment perplexed, but when, after a delay, he repeats the gesture, as if to test the fidelity of the mirror-image, and, this time, the double copies it correctly, so Groucho is again convinced of the truth of his mirror image). The game is only ruined when the THIRD Marx brother arrives, dressed in exactly the same way…

Back to the Greek tragedy: the other series, opposite to this line of self-sacrificing women, is that of the excessively destructive women who engage in a horrifying act of revenge: Hekabe, Medea, Phaedra. Although they are first portrayed with sympathy and compassion, since their predicament is terrible (Hekabe sees her entire family destroyed and herself reduced to a slave; Medea, who sacrificed all – her country – for the love of Jason, a Greek foreigner, is informed by him that, due to dynastic reasons, he will marry another young princess; Phaedra is unable to resist her all-consumming passion for Hippolytus, her stepson), the terrible act of revenge these women concoct and execute (killing their enemies or their own children, etc.) is considered pathologically excessive and thus turns them into repulsive monsters.

That is to say, in both series, we begin with the portrayal of a normal, sympathetic woman, caught in a difficult predicament and bemoaning her sad fate (Iphigenia begins with professing her love of life, etc.); however, the transformation which befalls them is thoroughly different: the women of the first series find themselves “interpellated into subjects,” i.e. abandon their love of life and freely assume their death, thus fully identifying with the paternal Law which demanded this sacrifice, while the women of the second series turn into inhuman avenging monsters undermining the very foundations of the paternal Law. In short, they both transcend the status of normal mortal suffering women, prone to human pleasures and weaknesses, and turn into something no-longer-human; however, in one case, it is the heroic free acceptance of one’s own death in the service of community, while, in the other case, it is the excessive Evil of monstrous revenge.

There are, however, two significant exceptions to this series: Antigone and Electra. Antigone clearly belongs to the first series of the women who accept their sacrifice on behalf of their fidelity to the Law; however, the nature of her act is such that it doesn’t fit the existing public Law and Order scheme, so her no-longer-human insistence does not change her into a hero to be worshipped in public memory.

On the other side, Electra is a destructive avenger, compelling her brother Orestes to kill their mother and her new husband; however, she does this on behalf of her fidelity to her betrayed father’s memory. The destructive fury is thus here in the service of the very paternal Law, while in the case of Antigone, the self-sacrificing sublime gesture is accomplished in resistance to the Law of the City.

We thus get an uncanny confusion which disturbs the clear division: a repulsive avenger for the right Cause; a sublime self-sacrificial agent for the wrong Cause. – The further interesting point is the “psychological” opposition between Antigone’s inner certainty and calm, and Electra’s obvious hysterical theater:

Electra indulges in exaggerated theatrical self-pity, and thereby confirms that this indulgence is her one luxury in life, the deepest source of her libidinal satisfaction. She displays here inner pain with neurotic affectation, offering herself as a public spectacle. After complaining all the time about Orestes’ delay in returning and avenging their father’s death, she is late in recognizing him when he does return, obviously fearing that his arrival will deprive her of the satisfaction of her grievance. Furthermore, after forcing Orestes to perform the avenging act, she breaks down and is unable to assist him.

In the case of Antigone and Medea, the “radical” act of the heroine is opposed to a feminine partner who “compromises her desire” and remains caught in the “ethics of the Good”: Antigone is contrasted to gentle Ismene, a creature of human compassion unable to follow her sister in her obstinate pursuit (as Antigone herself puts it in her answer to Ismene: “life was your choice, when mine was death”);

Medea is contrasted to Jason’s young new bride (or even herself in the role of a mother). In the case of Iphigenia, her calm dignity, her willing acceptance of the forced choice of self-sacrifice on behalf of her father’s desire, is contrasted to the furious outbursts of her sister Electra, hysterically calling for revenge, yet fully enjoying her grief as her symptom, fearing its end.

Why, in this triad of the “radical” heroines (Iphigenia, Antigone, Medea), do we tend to prefer Antigone, elevating her to the sublime status of the ultimate ethical hero(ine)? Is it because she opposes the public Law not in the gesture of a simple criminal transgression, but on behalf of ANOTHER Law?

Therein resides the gist of Judith Butler’s reading of Antigone: “the limit for which she stands, a limit for which no standing, no translatable representation is possible, is /…/ the trace of an alternate legality that haunts the conscious, public sphere as its scandalous future.”(Butler 2000, p. 40)

Antigone formulates her claim on behalf of all those who, like the sans-papiers in today’s France, are without a full and definite socio-ontological status: as Butler emphasizes through a passing reference to Giorgio Agamben (Butler 2000, p. 81), in our era of self-proclaimed globalization, they – the non-identified – stand for the true universality.

Which is why one should pin down neither the position from which (on behalf of which) Antigone is speaking, neither the object of her claim: in spite of her emphasis of the unique position of the brother, this object is not as unambiguous as it may appear (is Oedipus himself also not her (half)brother?); her position is not simply feminine, because she enters the male domain of public affairs – in addressing Creon, the head of state, she speaks like him, appropriating his authority in a perverse/displaced way; and neither does she speak on behalf of kinship, as Hegel claimed, since her very family stands for the ultimate (incestuous) corruption of the proper order of kinship. Her claim thus displaces the fundamental contours of the Law, what the Law excludes and includes.

Butler develops her reading in contrast to two main opponents, not only Hegel but also Lacan. In Hegel, the conflict is conceived as internal to the socio-symbolic order, as the tragic split of the ethical substance: Creon and Antigone stand for its two components, state and family, Day and Night, the human legal order and the divine subterranean order.

Lacan, on the contrary, emphasizes how Antigone, far from standing for kinship, assumes the limit-position of the very instituting gesture of the symbolic order, of the impossible zero-level of symbolization, which is why she stands for death drive: while still alive, she is already dead with regard to the symbolic order, excluded from the socio-symbolic coordinates.

In what one is almost tempted to call a dialectical synthesis, Butler rejects both extremes (Hegel’s location of the conflict WITHIN the socio-symbolic order; Lacan’s notion of Antigone as standing for the going-to-the-limit, for reaching the OUTSIDE of this order): Antigone undermines the existing symbolic order not simply from its radical outside, but from a utopian standpoint of aiming at its radical rearticulation.

Antigone is a “living dead” not in the sense (which Butler attributes to Lacan) of entering the mysterious domain of ate, of going to the limit of the Law; she is a “living dead” in the sense of publicly assuming an uninhabitable position, a position for which there is no place in the public space – not a priori, but only with regard to the way this space is structured now, in the historically contingent and specific conditions.

This, then, is Butler’s central point against Lacan: Lacan’s very radicality (the notion that Antigone locates herself in the suicidal outside of the symbolic order), reasserts this order, the order of the established kinship relations, silently assuming that the ultimate alternative is the one between the symbolic Law of (fixed patriarchal) kinship relations and its suicidal ecstatic transgression.

What about the third option: that of rearticulating these kinship relations themselves, i.e., of reconsidering the symbolic Law as the set of contingent social arrangements open to change? And does the same not hold also for Wagner: is the obliteration of the Law of the Day in Tristan not the obverse of the inability to envision its radical rearticulation?

Is then Lacan – in his celebration of Antigone’s suicidal choice of ecstatic death – the ultimate Wagnerian, the “last Wagnerite,” if not the perfect one, as G.B.Shaw would have put it? It is here that we encounter the crucial dilemma: can that what Lacan calls ate really be historicized, as the shadowy spectral space of those to whom the contingent public discourse denies the right to full public speech, or is it the other way round, so that we can REARTICULATE the symbolic space precisely insofar as we can, in an authentic ACT, take the risk of passing through this liminal zone of ate, which only allows us to acquire the minimum of distance towards the symbolic order?

Another way to formulate this dilemma is with regard to the question of purity: according to Butler, Antigone speaks for all the subversive “pathological” claims which crave to be admitted into the public space, while for Lacan, she is precisely the PURE one in the Kantian sense, bereft of any “pathological” motivations – it is only by entering the domain of ate that we can attend the pure desire. This is why Antigone is, for Lacan, the very antipode of Hegel’s notorious notion of womankind as “the everlasting irony of the community”(Hegel, 1977,p. 288).

Butler was right to emphasize the strange passage from the (unique) individual to the universal which takes place at this point of Hegel’s Phenomenology (Butler 2000, p. 38): after celebrating the sublime beauty of Antigone, her unique “naive” identification with the ethical substance, the way her ethical stance is part of her spontaneous nature itself, not something won through the hard struggle against the egotistic and other evil propensities (as is the case with the Kantian moral subject), Hegel all of a sudden passes into GENERAL considerations about the role of “womankind” in society and history, and, with this passage, the pendulum swings into the opposite extreme: woman stands for the pathological, criminal even, perversion of the public law.

We can see how, far from bearing witness to an inconsistency in Hegel’s argumentation, this reversal obeys an inexorable logic: the very fact that a woman is formally excluded from the public affairs, allows her to embody the family ethics as opposed to the domain of public affairs, i.e., to serve as a reminder of the inherent limitation of the domain of “public affairs.” (Today, when we are fully aware of how the very frontier that separates the public from the private hinges on political rapport of forces, one can easily perceive women as the privileged agents of the repoliticization of “private” domains: not only of discerning and articulating the traces of political relations of domination in what appears to be an “apolitical” domain, but also of denouncing the very “depoliticization” of this domain, its exclusion from the political, as a political gesture par excellence.)

Is this, however, the ultimate scope of the feminine political intervention? It is here that one should consider the break which separates modernity from Antiquity: already in the late Medieval time, with Joan of Arc, a new figure of the feminine political intervention appeared which was not taken into account by Hegel: on behalf of her very universal exclusion from the domain of politics, a woman can, exceptionally, assume the role of the direct embodiment of the political AS SUCH.

Precisely as Woman, Joan stands for the political gesture at its purest, for the Community (universal Nation) as such against the particular interests of the warring factions. Her male attire, her assumption of male authority, is not to be misread as the sign of unstable sexual identity: it is crucial that she does it AS A WOMAN. Only as such, as a woman, can she stand for the Political Cause in its pure universality. In the very gesture of renouncing the determinate attributes of femininity (a virgin, no children, etc.), she stood for Woman as such. This, however, was simultaneously the reason she HAD to be betrayed and ONLY THEN canonized: such a pure position, standing directly for the national interest as such, cannot translate its universal request into a determinate social order. It is crucial not to confound this Joan’s feminine excess (a woman who, by way of renouncing feminine attributes, directly stands for the universal political mission) with the reactionary figure of “Mother-Nation” or a “Mother-Earth” figure, the patient and suffering mother who stands for the substance of her community, and who, far from renouncing feminine attributes, gives body to the worst male ideological fantasy of the noble woman.

The charge against Joan at her trial can be summed up in three points: in order to regain mercy and be readmitted into the Catholic community, she should (1) disavow the authenticity of her voice, (2) renounce her male dress, and (3) fully submit herself to the authority of the Church (as the actual terrestrial institution). These three points, of course, are interconnected: Joan did not submit to the authority of the Church, because she gave priority to the divine voices through which God addressed her directly, bypassing the Church as institution, and this exceptional status of her as the warrior directly obeying God, bypassing the customs of ordinary people, was signalled by her crossdressing.

Do we not encounter hear, yet again, the Lacanian triad of the Real-

kotsko interview about Ž and religion

An interview over Zizek Friday, October 11, 2013 — Adam Kotsko

1. In general, what are the fundamental formulations of Žižek on theology?

Žižek interprets Christianity along Hegelian lines, as an enactment of the death of God. His approach is similar to that of Thomas Altizer, whose declaration of the death of God caused significant controversy in the US in the 1960s. The basic claim is that when God became incarnate in Christ, that was a total and irreversible decision to empty himself into Christ—and so when Christ died on the cross, God truly and irreversibly died, emptying himself into the world.

2. What is the peculiarity of his approach?

Žižek’s approach goes against the mainstream of Christian theology, where the doctrine of the Trinity has allowed theologians to affirm that only one of the divine persons underwent the ordeal of the incarnation — hence isolating the impact of the incarnation on the divine life. From the orthodox perspective, it is correct to say that “God is dead” in view of Christ’s death, but in a more important sense, God “survived” even when Christ was buried in the tomb.

The Hegelian approach Žižek adopts also differs from traditional Christology, which holds that God raised Christ personally and individually from the dead. In the Hegelian interpretation, by contrast, Christ’s divine power is “resurrected” as the new form of community known as the “Holy Spirit.” Here, however, Žižek differs from Hegel insofar as he views the “Holy Spirit” not as an institutional form of life (like the Catholic Church) but as a fundamentally new form of human life together.

3. In what sense are the works of Žižek, especially the latest ones, relevant to the current theological debate?

I see many mainstream theologians as torn between two desires. On the one hand, they recognize that the Greek philosophical categories through which the early Church Fathers interpreted the gospel were not the best fit and in some ways wound up distorting the Christian message. On the other hand, though, they want to remain faithful to the orthodox doctrines that grew out of that conceptuality. Karl Barth is emblematic of this conflict—he claims to be providing a radical new basis for Christian doctrine, and yet he always comes up with essentially the same answers that orthodoxy had always provided.

In that context, I think Žižek’s approach represents a way out of this deadlock, insofar as the Hegelian interpretation of Christianity attends to the inherent logic of the incarnation without troubling itself about philosophical presuppositions such as the unchangeability of God. In a sense, Hegel, Altizer, and Žižek may represent a real attempt to follow up on Paul’s claim to know nothing but Christ crucified.

From the other direction, I believe that Žižek’s project provides support for other radical attempts to rethink the Christian tradition—particularly in the various liberation theologies. This is not to say that such theologians “need” Žižek, but rather that Žižek’s work could point more mainstream theologians toward the creative, radical work that is already going on.

4. In what sense is the argumentation of Žižek on this subject complex and unusual?

One challenge for theologians who want to read Žižek is the importance of Lacan for his project. While Žižek’s reading of Hegel is somewhat idiosyncratic, Hegel is at least familiar to most theologians—Lacan, on the other hand, is a less frequent point of reference and is in many ways more difficult to approach given that he uses a lot of his own jargon and symbols in developing his concepts. I try to provide some orientation in Lacanian thought in my book, so that people can at least know where to begin.

5. How can we understand the claim of Žižek that, to become a true dialectical materialist, one must go through the Christian experience? Is not this about a paradoxical stance from him?

Žižek understands the Christian experience in terms of the death of God. For him, Christianity is the most radical form of atheism insofar as even God himself becomes an unbeliever in Christ’s cry of dereliction on the cross. This differs from other forms of atheism or skepticism, because Žižek believes that most people who deny a particular God still believe in something else that fills the same role. A scientist, for instance, will generally believe in something like the laws of nature, or a Communist might believe in the laws of historical necessity. Only the Christian experience of a God who doesn’t believe in himself provides the guarantee that we won’t be able to sneak in a new idol to take the old God’s place.

The Christian experience is thus the experience of the undeniable and irrevocable emptying out of any transcendent meaning or purpose—of any “master signifier,” in Lacanian terms. From the traditional Christian perspective, this may seem contradictory or strange, but from Žižek’s own perspective, it doesn’t seem right to call it paradoxical.

6. How can we understand the fact that Žižek is interested in the emancipatory potential offered by Christian theology?

Žižek believes that the total emptying out of transcendent meaning is necessary to open up the possibility of real freedom. For him, death and resurrection represent the movement of completely withdrawing from the present order and setting to work building something new.

7. How does Žižek analyze the continental philosophy and the future of Christian theology from the legacy of Paul of Tarsus? What is the significance of Paul, in this perspective?

For Žižek, Paul’s Christian communities are a model of withdrawing from the present order—or as Žižek puts it in The Puppet and the Dwarf, “unplugging” from the force of law. Where many interpreters believe that Paul is an opponent of the Jewish law, Žižek claims that Paul is trying to give Gentiles access to the uniquely Jewish stance toward the law. In this perspective, Paul’s famous discussion of the law inciting its own transgression in Romans 7 is not talking about the Jewish law, but about distinctively pagan attitudes toward the law. Paul is trying to give his Gentile followers a way out of the vicious cycle he describes there.

This is relevant for today, insofar as Žižek views contemporary culture as embodying a kind of law that incites its own transgression—everything has to be “subversive” and “irreverent.” People don’t feel guilty about having sex, but about not having enough sex. In this context, rebellion against social norms becomes meaningless. A completely different stance that breaks the dichotomy of obedience and rebellion is needed, and that’s what Paul provides in Žižek’s view.

8. To what extent are Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Chesterton leading thinkers in the theological stance of the Slovenian philosopher?

This is an area where I believe Žižek has been misunderstood. Many readers view his use of these thinkers, particularly Chesterton, as an endorsement. In reality, though, his ultimate goal is to show that they don’t go far enough. He enjoys Chesterton’s Hegelian style, for example, but he views Chesterton’s Catholicism as a betrayal of the gospel that returns to the pagan approach to law and transgression. Similarly, though Pascal and Kierkegaard provide very real insights, he wants to go beyond them because they don’t take the next step and embrace the death of God.

9. What are the main points of the debate between Žižek and Milbank in “The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic”?

The encounter between Žižek and Milbank is the encounter between the Hegelian death of God approach and traditional orthodoxy. The debate was productive insofar as it allowed Žižek to develop his critique of traditional theology, particularly of the doctrine of the Trinity, and to reflect on the ethics implied in his position, but both authors’ essays were so long and full of so many digressions that it was almost impossible to discern any actual debate.

For me, the biggest benefit of this debate was that it allowed Žižek to draw a clear line in the sand. Milbank’s followers had sometimes viewed Žižek as a natural ally of their Radical Orthodoxy project, but Žižek declares that Milbank’s vision—which is centered on escaping from the problems of modernity by reasserting hierarchical authority and traditional family values—as “light fascism.” He also makes it clear that he views Milbank’s Anglo-Catholicism, like Chesterton’s Catholicism, as a reversion into the pagan stance toward law and transgression.

10. To what extent does the debate between these two thinkers deepen the dialogue between faith and reason?

In my view, the debate was a disappointment. Žižek and Milbank are simply too far apart for a truly productive struggle to emerge. Far more interesting, in my view, is the confrontation staged between Žižek and Terry Eagleton in Ola Sigurdson’s Theology and Marxism in Eagleton and Žižek: A Conspiracy of Hope. A confrontation with a less traditional theologian like Jurgen Moltmann or Catherine Keller would also have been more interesting.

Between Žižek and Milbank, though, there was little more than a missed encounter. Žižek has not yet found a theological interlocutor who can challenge him in a productive way—and I hope that someone does step up to fill that role, because it is so rare for a contemporary philosopher to have any interest at all in contemporary theology. I don’t think I am the right person for the job, but I hope that in my book, I helped to clear the space for such an encounter to occur.

subject failed articulation

ŽIŽEK, SLAVOJ. A reply: with enemies like these, who needs friends? Revue Internationale de Philosophie 2012. 439-457.

Download Revue internationale de philosophie here.

Communism should no longer be conceived as the subjective (re)appropriation of the alienated substantial content — all versions of reconciliation conceived as “subject swallows the substance” should be rejected.

The Hegelian subject has no substantial actuality, it comes second, it only emerges through the process of separation, of overcoming of its presuppositions, and these presuppositions are also just a retroactive effect of the same process of their overcoming.

The result is thus that there is, at both extremes of the process, a failure-negativity inscribed into the very heart of the entity we are dealing with.

If the status of the subject is thoroughly “processual,” it means that it emerges through the very failure to fully actualize itself.

This brings us again to one of the possible formal definitions of subject: a subject tries to articulate (“express”) itself in a signifying chain, this articulation fails, and by means and through this failure, the subject emerges: the subject is the failure of its signifying representation — this is why Lacan writes the subject of the signifier as $, as “barred.”

In a love letter, the very failure of the writer to formulate his declaration in a clear and efficient way, his oscillations, the letter’s fragmentation, etc., can in themselves be the proof (perhaps the necessary and the only reliable proof) that the professed love is authentic — here, the very failure to deliver the message properly is the sign of its authenticity. If the message is delivered in a smooth way, it arouses suspicions that it is part of a well-planned approach, or that the writer loves himself, the beauty of his writing, more than his love-object, i.e., that the object is effectively reduced to a pretext for engaging in the narcissistically-satisfying activity of writing.

And the same goes for substance: substance is not only always-already lost, it only comes to be through its loss, as a secondary return-to-itself — which means that substance is always-already subjectivized.

In “reconciliation” between subject and substance, both poles thus lose their firm identity.

Let us take the case of ecology: radical emancipatory politics should aim neither at the complete mastery over nature nor at the humanity’s humble acceptance of the predominance of Mother-Earth. Rather, nature should be exposed in all its catastrophic contingency and indeterminacy, and human agency assumed in the whole unpredictability of its consequences — viewed from this perspective of the “other Hegel,” the revolutionary act no longer involves as its agent the Lukacsean substance-subject, the agent who knows what it does while doing it.

One is even tempted to talk here about Marx’s “idealist reversal of Hegel”: in contrast to Hegel who was well aware that the owl of Minerva takes of only at the evening dusk, after the fact, i.e., that Thought follows Being (which is why, for Hegel, there can be no scientifi c insight into the future of society), Marx reasserts the primacy of Thought: the owl of Minerva (German contemplative philosophy) should be replaced by the singing of the Gaelic rooster (French revolutionary thought) — in the proletarian revolution, Thought will precede Being.

Does, however, this mean that the ultimate subjective position we can adopt is that of a split which characterizes the fetishist disavowal? Is all we can do take the stance of “although I know well there is no big Other, the big Other is only the sedimentation, the reified form, of intersubjective interactions, I am compelled to act as if the big Other is an external force which controls us all”?

Lack in the Other

It is here that Lacan’s fundamental insight into how the big Other is “barred,” lacking, in-existing even, acquires its weight: the big Other is not the substantial Ground which secretly pulls the strings, it is inconsistent/lacking, its very functioning depends on subjects whose participation in the symbolic process sustains it. Instead of either the submersion of the subject into its substantial Other or the subject’s appropriation of this Other we thus get a mutual implication through lack, through the overlapping of the two lacks, the lack constitutive of the subject and the lack of/in the Other itself. It is perhaps time to read Hegel’s famous formula “One should grasp the Absolute not only as substance, but also as subject” more cautiously and literally: the point is not that the Absolute is not substance, but subject. The point is hidden in the “not only… but also”: the interplay between the two, which also opens up the space of freedom — we are free because there is a lack in the Other, because the substance out of which we grew and on which we rely in inconsistent, barred, failed, marked by an impossibility.

However, what kind of freedom is thereby opened up? One should raise here a clear and brutal question in all its naivety: but if we reject Marx’s critique of Hegel and stick to Hegel’s notion of the owl of Minerva which takes off only in the evening — i.e., if we accept Hegel’s claim that the position of a historical agent who is able to identify its own role in the historical process and act accordingly is inherently impossible, since such a self-referentiality makes it impossible for the agent to take into account to impact of its own intervention, how this act itself will affect the constellation —, what are the consequences of this position for the act, for emancipatory political interventions?

Does it mean that we are condemned to blind acts, to risky steps into the unknown whose final outcome totally eludes us, to interventions whose meaning we can establish only retroactively, so that at the moment of the act, we can only hope that history will show mercy (grace) and crown our intervention with a minimum of success?

But what if, instead of conceiving this impossibility to take into account the consequences of our acts as a limitation of our freedom, we conceive it as the zero-level (negative) condition of our freedom?

We are free only against the background of this non-transparency: if it were to be possible for us to fully predict the consequences of our acts, our freedom would effectively be only the “known necessity” in the pseudo-Hegelian way, i.e., it would consist in freely choosing and wanting what we know to be necessary. In this sense, freedom and necessity would fully coincide: I act freely when I knowingly follow my inner necessity, the instigations that I found in myself as my true substantial nature… but if this is the case, we are back from Hegel to Aristotle, i.e., we are no longer dealing with the Hegelian subject who itself produces (“posits”) its own content, but with an agent bent on actualizing its immanent potentials, its positive “essential forces,” as the young Marx put it in his deeply Aristotelian critique of Hegel. What gets lost here is the entire dialectics of the constitutive retroactivity of sense, of the continuous retroactive (re)totalization of our experience.

But, again, what does this mean for our ability to act, to intervene into ongoing history? There are in French two words for “future” which cannot be adequately rendered in English: futur and avenir. Futur stands for future as the continuation of the present, as the full actualization of the tendencies which are already here, while avenir points more towards a radical break, a discontinuity with the present — avenir is what is to come /a venir/, not just what will be.

Say, in today’s apocalyptic global situation, the ultimate horizon of the “future” is what Dupuy calls the dystopian “fixed point,” the zero-point of the ecological breakdown, of global economic and social chaos, etc. — even if it is indefinitely postponed, this zero-point is the virtual “attractor” towards which our reality, left to itself, tends.

The way to combat the catastrophe is through acts which interrupt this drifting towards the catastrophic “fixed point” and take upon themselves the risk of giving birth to some radical Otherness “to come.” (We can see here how ambiguity the slogan “no future” is: at a deeper level, it does not designate the closure, the impossibility of change, but what we should be striving for — to break the hold of the catastrophic “future” cover up and thereby open up the space for something New “to come.”) 455