Category: the act

glynos on logic of desire logic of capital

Glynos, Jason. “‘There is no Other of the Other’ Symptoms of a Decline in Symbolic Faith, or, Žižek’s Anti-capitalism” Paragraph vol 24, no. 2, July 2001 (78-110).

  • The subject of capitalism is empty
  • The subject of desire is empty

Lacan’s logic of desire and the logic of capitalism share a deep homology in structuring contemporary subjectivity (87).

  • In both cases the logics are purely formal and independent of the particular concrete contexts wherein they function.
  • Fetishism of the new keeps desire alive
    • Insatiable desire for new products
    • In order to sustain itself it must prevent itself from satisfaction
  • Subject of desire constant never-ending desire after desire
  • Fantasy covers over the necessary dissatisfaction of the subject
    • Dissatisfied are we? Blame immigrants, jews etc.

The depoliticized economy is the disavowed “fundamental fantasy” of postmodern politics

Slavoj Žižek The Ticklish Subject. 1999, 355.

The capitalists erosion of the big Other’s efficiency, therefore, throws the subject of desire into a panic. When symbolic authority qua prohibition gives way to a more permissive society, when object of desire are more readily available and less subject to social prohibition (you are free to invent your own marital and/or sexual arrangements, however perverse these might appear; others will tolerate your actions and opinions), the social subject comes that much closer to realizing its desire. But … this proximity to fulfilment simply arouses anxiety. Why? Because it threatens to extinguish the subject as a subject of desire: a subject of desire sustains itself only on condition that its ultimate object of desire remains inaccessible. Thus, the structural consequence of the growing collapse of symbolic efficiency is not a healthy burgeoning of pleasurable experiences and increased well-being. Instead, it is a desperate attempt to cling to this kind of subjectivity by making the big Other exist.  And in a situation of generalized cynicism, in the absence of symbolic faith, we witness ‘the proliferation of different versions of a big Other that actually exists, in the Real, not merely as a symbolic fiction (90).

This is precisely the role that ethical committees, sex guides, and manuals of political correctness play; or the role that various moral, political and religious fundamentalisms play.  They do not so much succeed in establishing some unitary empty prohibition characteristic of past subjectivities. Instead they are characterized more by a proliferation of rules and regulations that provide a whole host of imaginary ideals (about what to say, about what to eat, etc.).  In the absence of symbolic faith, we attempt to recoup certainty with even greater urgency by means of the decentred sprouting of bureaucratic apparatuses (90).

What unites these otherwise disparate phenomena is our contemporary subjective stance. The disintegration of our faith in the big Other, then, creates anxiety in subjects of desire and it becomes imperative that new obstacles are introduced to regain a sense of balance. In other words, the logic of desire reproduces exactly the logic of capital which requires for its survival new frontiers, new enemies (91).

  • When symbolic Other doesn’t meet expectations, what comes to forefront is (void-) cause of our desire which is misperceived as an obstacle: soft permissive liberal, Jew, immigrant, paedophile
  • Making the Other exist
    • Returning to basic morals in various fundamentalisms
    • Complaining to the Other (complaint culture)
    • Provoking the Other by cutting into the real of the body (body piercing, self-inflicted harm, suicde, s&m)
    • Accusing the Other for allowing others to steal our way of life (discourses targeting immigrants)
    • Bypassing the Other through direct reference to real of science (expert committees)
    • Positing an Other of the Other (conspiracy theories) (91)

Fantasy provides a rationale that premists us to avoid confronting the Other’s inconsistency and incompleteness, thereby generating an Other of the Other, a real Other of the symbolic Other.

A properly authentic, ethical act, is one that manages to effect a traversing of the social fantasy, thereby exposing the lack in the big Other, the ultimate impotence of the dominant politico-economic discourse.

What sustains [capitalism] are the social subject’s disavowed social fantasies and their constitutive ‘threats – those, in other words, who take advantage of our present system, like single mothers, immigrants, … It is precisely there that the battle against capitalism should properly be fought (as opposed to engaging only in rational-deliberative political sarugument which is sustained by these social fantasies).

[W]hat is most traumatic is not that I am subject to the rule of the big Other, to the Master.  Far more traumatic is the possibility that the big Other does not exist.  This is ultimately what we cannot accept as subjects of desire and this is ultimately the reason for our ready recourse to fantasies of the ‘Other of the Other’ who ‘steal’ our enjoyment.  This is why, for Žižek, the aim of ideological critique is to create the conditions in which we can ‘experience how there is nothing “behind” it, and how fantasy masks precisely this “nothing”.  … this ‘crossing of the fantasy’ ushers in a distinctively novel ethical horizon and a corresponding mode of subjectivity (97).

Crossing [Traversing] the Fantasy

1.      Devaluing the object of desire we think the Other has stolen (or threatens to steal) from us:

  • Deflate publicly supported imaginary ideals, our precious treasures that appear to be threatened by the intrusion of an evil menace
    • Jew, Freud attempted just such a strategic move by portraying the Jew as someone who does not in fact possess the precious treasure that anti-Semites insist on imputing to him
  • Paedophiles by demonizing them and stressing the innocence of our children, no, do not exacerbate the problem by heightening the privileged status of the victim, “making their torture and rape all that harder to resist.
  • Instead the equivalent strategy would be to emphasise how children are in fact not as innocent as we might imagine them, to highlight their already polymorphously perverse sexuality, etc.

Of course this strategy (regarding both the Jew and the Paedophile) does not mean that their offences should go unpunished. The point, however, is that without intervening with an eye on the fantasy structuring the social symptoms, not only do we miss an opportunity to sap the jouissance invested in them, we often in fact simply reinforce it (note 75, 109).

2.      Confronting the social subject with the obstacle qua cause of desire. This obstacle is often perceived in terms of a threat, as is the case in UFO conspiracy theories.

  • The crucial, hitherto underestimated ideological impact of the coming ecological crisis will be precisely to make the ‘collapse of the big Other’ part of our everyday experience, i.e., to sap this unconscious belief in the ‘big Other’ of power … exposing the power’s ultimate impotence. Our ‘spontaneous’ ideological reaction to it, of course, is to have recourse to the fake premodern forms of reliance on the ‘big Other’ (‘New Age consciousness’; the balanced circuit of Nature, etc.). Perhaps, however, our very physical survival hinges on our ability to consummate the act of assuming fully the ‘nonexistence of the Other,’ [of abandoning our attempts to find another Other behind the big Other] (99).

The passage from premodern subjectivity to modern subjectivity (and the accompanying shifts in socio-political arrangements) was made possible by the emergence of monotheistic religions; while the passage modern to postmodern (and the accompanying shifts in socio-political arrangements) was made possible by the scientific revolution and the birth of capitalism.  In this view, monotheistic Prohibition marks the primordial repression that gives birth to a whole series of fantasies that support socio-political discourse; and the subsequent modern and postmodern eras presuppose a subjectivity that operations within this fantasmatic framework (100).

Žižek’s anti-capitalism, then, amounts to nothing short of a call to another fundamental mutation in human subjectivity corresponding to the passage through fantasy and entailing an ethical stance that is adequate to this task.

The prospect of a fundamental mutation, however, evokes horror. Just as the demand to replace polytheism with monotheism, or secularism with monotheism could not but be perceived as idealist, even terroristic, so too will the anti-capitalist demand to move beyond fantasy. Why? Because it implies a complete revamping of our economic, social, and political institutional arrangements, and the standards of evaluation they presuppose. This, ultimately, is why it is not possible to give concrete content to the new ethics of the drive.  What will emerge on the Other side of fantasy cannot be predicted in advance, much less judged on the basis of contemporary standards of evaluation. Any such attempt to predict outcomes can only rely on current standards and ideals, reducing reformist cautionary projects to a consequentialist calculus that seeks foundational guarantees rooted in our current ethico-political horizon. It would simply reiterate through other means the thesis that there is an ‘Other of the Other’.

This, indeed, gives some rationale to Žižek’s ‘returns’ to the Stalinist terror, the Nazi horror, or the various ethnic wars.  When he subjects these phenomena to analytical treatment, his aim is not directly to propose a new concrete socio-political framework which would prevent such atrocities in the future. He does not argue that we need more human rights, more political will, more sophisticated legal systems, etc. Instead, his aim is to show that what is responsible for such ‘extraordinary’ outbursts is nothing Other than the very ‘ordinary’ and normal contemporary subject, with all his or her foibles (i.e., the subject of desire) and that we must find a way out, a way through fantasy, a way to fully assume that ‘there is no Other of the Other’ and thus no longer to be ‘bothered’ by the lack in the Other. Žižek effectively implies that the modality of such outbursts is simply unavailable under the regime of an ethics of the drive; that the kind of subjectivity which makes them possible is absent. Thus, his aim is a purely negative one: he cannot offer up a concrete vision of what such a regime would look like, only what it would not look like. In this view, our passage through the fundamental fantasy of capitalism will await the spontaneous invention of new models of socio-political arrangement, just as the spontaneous formation of the Paris commune can be seen as a model for Marx’s communism.  This is, perhaps, one way to read Žižek’s call to the ‘socialization of productive forces’. This empty signifier is one that has been foreclosed by current capitalist discourse. His recourse to it, therefore, invests it with a dimension of impossibility, a radical emptiness that new forms of post-capitalist socio-economic arrangements will attempt to fill with concrete meaning (102).

[C]rossing the fundamental fantasy would involve, in some sense, leaving behind the whole fantasy structure installed by the Prohibition of monotheistic religions. What is required here, is not so much an account of what will follow in concrete and predictive detail, but a precise, even if speculative, theoretical account of what the possible modalities of a subject of the drive might be a the social level. In Other words, what kind of community is (even theoretically) possible for subject s of the drive? What insights can Lacanian clinical theory offer us? Since a Lacanian conception of community eschews ideas of shared values or common symbolic identification; and since it suggests that our social bond should also not be based on a common fantasmatic transgression (which makes possible a community of subjects of desire), what others ways of there of thinking a community of subjects? Indeed, is a social subject of the drive possible? (103)

Chiesa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

butler antigone

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

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

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

copjec ethics of psychoanalysis

The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

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

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

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

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

Copjec can’t get back to mom

Secularized notion of infinity

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

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

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

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

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

copjec obdurate desire to endure

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

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

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

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

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

“I love in you something more than you,”

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

copjec singularity immortality sublimation

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

Singularity

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

Immortality and Sublimation

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

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

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

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

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

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

how thought escapes being a mere symptom of its historical conditions

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

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

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

copjec antigone gives herself own law

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

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

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

Death and only death is the aim of every drive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Žižek on butler

Slavoj Žižek, from Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 219-220

In what, then, does our difference consist? Let me approach this key point via another key criticism from Butler: her point that I describe only the paradoxical mechanisms of ideology, the way an ideological edifice reproduces itself (the reversal that characterizes the effect of point de capiton, the ‘inherent transgression’, etc.), without elaborating how one can ‘disturb’ (resignify, displace, turn against themselves) these mechanisms;

[Žižek shows] how power compels us to consent to that which constrains us, and how our very sense of freedom or resistance can be the dissimulated instrument of dominance. But what remains less clear to me is how one moves beyond such a dialectical reversal or impasse to something new. How would the new be produced from an analysis of the social field that remains restricted to inversions, aporias and reversals that work regardless of time and place? (Butler CHU 29)

In The Psychic Life of Power, Butler makes the same point apropos of Lacan himself:

The [Lacanian] imaginary [resistance] thwarts the efficacy of the symbolic law but cannot turn back upon the law, demanding or effecting its reformulation. In this sense, psychic resistance thwarts the law in its effects, but cannot redirect the law or its effects. Resistance is thus located in a domain that is virtually powerless to alter the law that it opposes. Hence, psychic resistance presumes the continuation of the law in its anterior, symbolic form and, in that sense, contributes to its status quo. In such a view, resistance appears doomed to perpetual defeat. In contrast, Foucault formulates resistance as an effect of the very power that it is said to oppose….For Foucault, the symbolic produces the possibility of its own subversion, and these subversions are unanticipated effects of symbolic interpellations. (Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 98-9).

My response to this is triple. First, on the level of exegesis, Foucault is much more ambivalent on this point: his thesis on the immanence of resistance to power can also be read as asserting that every resistance is caught in advance in the game of power that it opposes. Second, my notion of ‘inherent transgression’, far from playing another variation on this theme (resistance reproduces that to which it resists), makes the power edifice even more vulnerable: in so far as power relies on its ‘inherent transgression’, then–sometimes, at least–overidentifying with the explicit power discourse–ignoring this inherent obscene underside and simply taking the power discourse at its (public) word, acting as if it really means what it explicitly says (and promises)–can be the most effective way of disturbing its smooth functioning.

Third, and most important: far from constraining the subject to a resistance doomed to perpetual defeat, Lacan allows for a much more radical subjective intervention than Butler:

what the Lacanian notion of ‘act’ aims at is not a mere displacement/resignification of the symbolic coordinates that confer on the subject his or her identity, but the radical transformation of the very universal structuring ‘principle’ of the existing symbolic order.

Or–to put it in more psychoanalytic terms — the Lacanian act, in its dimension of ‘traversing the fundamental fantasy’ aims radically to disturb the very ‘passionate attachment’ that forms, for Butler, the ultimately ineluctable background of the process of resignification.

So, far from being more ‘radical’ in the sense of thorough historicization, Butler is in fact very close to the Lacan of the early 1950’s, who found his ultimate expression in the rapport de Rome on ‘The Function and the Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’ (1953)–to the Lacan of the permanent process of retroactive historicization or resymbolization of social reality; to the Lacan who emphasized again and again how there is no directly accessible ‘raw’ reality, how what we perceive as ‘reality’ is overdetermined by the symbolic texture within which it appears.

zizek the act

An act does not simply occur within the given horizon of what appears to be ‘possible’ — it redefines the very contours of what is possible (an act accomplishes what, within the given symbolic universe, appears to be ‘impossible’, yet it changes its conditions so that it creates retroactively the conditions of its own possibility). So when we are reproached by an opponent for doing something unacceptable, an act occurs when we no longer defend ourselves by accepting the underlying premiss that we hitherto shared with the opponent; in contrast, we fully accept the reproach, changing the very terrain that made it unacceptable — an act occurs when our answer to the reproach is ‘Yes, that is precisely what I am doing!’ (121).

… far from constraining the subject to a resistance doomed to perpetual defeat, Lacan allows for a much more radical subjective intervention than Butler: what the Lacanian notion of ‘act’ aims at is not a mere displacement/resignification of the symbolic coordinates that confer on the subject his or her identity, but the radical transformation of the very universal structuring ‘principle’ of the existing symbolic order.  Or — to put it in more psychoanalytic terms — the Lacanian act, in its dimension of ‘traversing the fundamental fantasy’ aims radically to disturb the very ‘passionate attachment’ that forms, for Butler, the ultimately inelcutable background of the process of resignification (220).

it is the very focus on the notion of Real as impossible that reveals the ultimate contingency, fragilty (and thus changeability) of every symbolic constellation that pretends to serve as the a priori horizon of the process of symbolization.

So lacan’s point in unearthing the ‘ahistorical’ limit of historicization/redignification is thus not that we have to accept this limit in a resigned way, but that every historical figuration of this limit is itself contingent and, as such, susceptible to a radical overhaul.

… with all the talk about Lacan’s clinging to an ahistorical bar, and so on, it is Butler herself who, on a more radical level, is not historicist enough: it is Butler who limits the subjet’s intervention to multiple resignifications/displacements of the basic ‘passionate attachment’, which therefore persists at the very limit/condition of subjectivity. Consequently, I am tempted to supplement Butler’s series in her rhetorical question quoted above: ‘How would the new be produced from an analysis of the social field that remains restricted to inversions, aporias, reversals, and performative displacements or resignifications …? (221)

Antigone

Butler, Judith. Antigone’s Claim. 2000 (Wellek lectures given in 1998). New York: Columbia University Press.

My view is that the distinction between symbolic and social law cannot finally hold, that not only is the symbolic itself the sedimentation of social practices but that radical alterations in kinship demand a rearticulation of the structuralist presuppositions of psychoanalysis and, hence, of contemporary gender and sexual theory (Butler, Antigone 2000: 19).

Those who disagree with me then claim, with some exasperation, “but it is the law!” but what is the status of such an utterance?

“It is the law!” becomes the utterance that performatively attributes the very force to the law that the law itself is said to exercise. “It is the law” is thus a sign of allegiance to the law, a sign of the desire for the law to be the indisputable law, a theological impulse within the theory of psychoanalysis that seeks to put out of play any criticism of the symbolic father, the law of psychoanalysis itself.

Thus the status given to the law is precisely the status given to the phallus, the symbolic place of the father, the indisputable and incontestable. The theory exposes its own tautological defense. The law beyond laws will finally put an end to the anxiety produced by a critical relation to final authority that clearly does not know when to stop: a limit to the social, the subversive, the possibility of agency and change, a limit that we cling to, symptomatically, as the final defeat of our own power. Its defenders claim that to be without such a law is pure voluntarism or radical anarchy! Or is it? And to accept such a law as a final arbiter of kinship life? Is that not to resolve by theological means the concrete dilemmas of human sexual arrangements that have no ultimate normative form? (Butler, Antigone: 21)