the act – Page 2 – objet (a)

Ž lectures on Hegel at the egs 2009

Death Drive 1
this is starting point but at the end we have perfect reconciliation. Hegel was well aware that this excess of negativity could never be culturalized. In contrast to Kant Hegel never believed in perpetual peace. Hegel thinks that this radical negativity, this excess will explode again. This excess is neither Nature nor Culture. Hegelian progress, once you are in culture, retroactively you de-naturalize nature. The price we pay to move into culture, what before was a natural instinct becomes an absolute eternal repetitive drive. That is a REPETITIVE drive.

Aim the true satisfaction of the drive is the circular movement of the drive itself.
Goal is what you official want

Concrete Universality
outlines Schuman and then exposes his source as Charles Rosen

Maybe the true ideological revolution is not a chang in the explicit rules, but the revolution in this background, I’m saying the same thing but the virtual resonance, the virtual background has changed. The implicit, you can’t pin it down, but somehow everything is different.

Billy Bathgate This is a good discussion

Doctorow’s novel and the movie. The novel must have been better after seeing the movie. We have a failed novel, we have a failed repetition (movie) but the repetition, generates retroactively a truly spectral presence of what the novel should have been. It is a virtual object of another kind, the film does not repeat the novel on which it is based, rather they both repeat the virtual X.

Retroactive movement: a movement described it is something which was first conceptualized by Bergson, in spite of my turmoil, I experienced a feeling of admiration for the facility of the passage from abstract to concrete. THe war exploded, what happened, before at the level of abstract knowledge everybody knew about it, expected it, but nonetheless nobody believed it really could happen, a fetishist disavowal, I know very well but nonetheless I don’t believe it could really happen. FIrst it was probable but impossible, but then when it happend it suddenly become REAL and possible. When it really happened, it retroactively became totally possible and acceptable.

The logic we have here is not standard linear logic of possibility. i.e., we have a sitatuation A, with certain possibilities, and one possiblity is realized. NO. we have something that is considered impossible HAPPENS and then retroactively it becomes possible. THIS IS THE LACANIAN ACT.

the ACT it retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility.

Get’s back to Hegel here

The Hegelian temporality, eternity it’s always done this way. You may think Hegel is closure, in development thing becomes what it always already was. … Hegel may appear to be a totally closed structure. NO. We should read the Hegelian notion of totality in this Bergson way.

Pure Past: T.S. Elliot, every new work of art retroactively changes the past. After a certain new work of art, classical works of art are perceived in a different way. The priority of synchrony over diachrony. Yes this is a good 10 minutes

Dostoevsky didn’t only influence Kafka, only through Kafka are we able to note this dimension in Dostoevsky that has become discernible to us.

This retroactive structure in the sense, in every historical point we live in a totality which is necessary, but this totality is retroactively

… Hegel deduces the necessity of contingency. Not only the necessity of contingency but the contingency of necessity. Things become necessary in a way that is ultimately contingent.

Hegel’s narrative is about the very rise of necessity. This is why for Hegel, he insists on Monarchy, Constitutional Monarchy. Hegel was very aware that exactly what people attribute to him, total rational State, where everything is rationally regulated is nonsense, Hegel was aware that in order to have a rational totality you have to have a contingent element on top. The function of the King is to sign his name, the less he knows all the better.

Hegel’s point is that you have state as rational totality, at the top you need an element of radical contingency

Reality is ontologically incomplete

Reality is not fully constituted. Great works of art are like shots on a film, but the film wasn’t developed. If you come later it isn’t an obstacle, there are things you can only understand with a delay. How I perceive this ontological openness, how to interpret quantum physics. Ž quotes the shitty book by Nicholas Fearn. BUt he makes the point of the ontological incompleteness of reality. He uses the video game analogy.

The difficult reality is incomplete but doesn’t collapse into itself, if you look closely enough it is blurred, there is no zero level, the closer you get is blurred.

The basic operation of Hegel, you have a certain epistemological limitation, you solve the problem, by showing how the problem is its own solution.

Adorno, you have 2 irreducible levels: Its wrong to ask oneself, can we get a unified theory, does this mean that we can’t know society. The result of this individual deadlock between individual psychic intersubjective experience and autonomous social structures, this gap. What we misperceive as the limitation of our knowledge of reality, is a basic feature of social reality itself.

Fredric Jameson alternate Modernities

back to Concrete Universal

hegel democracy

Žižek, Slavoj. “Reply: What to Do When Evil Is Dancing on the Ruins of Evil” positions: east asia cultures critique, Volume 19, Number 3, Winter 2011, pp. 653-669 (Article)

So what does it mean to begin from the beginning again? One should bear in mind that 1990 was not only the defeat of communist state socialism but also the defeat of the Western social democracy. Nowhere is the misery of today’s Left more palpable than in its “principled” defense of the social-democratic welfare state: the idea is that, in the absence of a feasible radical Leftist project, all that the Left can do is to bombard the state with demands for the expansion of the welfare state, knowing well that the state will not be able to deliver. This necessary disappointment will then serve as a reminder of the basic impotence of the social- democratic Left and thus push the
people toward a new radical revolutionary Left. It is needless to add that such a politics of cynical “pedagogy” is destined to fail, since it fights a lost battle: in the present politico-ideological constellation, the reaction to the inability of the welfare state to deliver will be rightist populism.

In order to avoid this reaction, the Left will have to propose its own positive project beyond the confines of the social- democratic welfare state.

One should never forget that 1989 was the defeat of both tendencies of the modern statist Left, communist and social- democratic. This is also why it is totally erroneous to put the hopes on strong (fully sovereign) nation-states (which can defend the acquisitions of the welfare state) against transnational bodies such as the European Union which, so the story goes, serve as the instruments of global capital to dismantle whatever remained of the welfare state. From here, it is only a short step to accept the “strategic alliance” with the nationalist Right worried about the dilution of national identity in transnational Europe.

But the trickiest mode of the false fidelity to twentieth-century commu-nism is the rejection of all “really existing socialisms” on behalf of some authentic working- class movement waiting to explode … a traditional Marxist certain that— sooner or later, we just have to be patient and wait— an authentic revolutionary work-ers movement will arise again, victoriously sweeping away the capitalist rule as well as the corrupted official Leftist parties and trade unions. … the surviving Trotskyites who continued to rely on the trust that, out of the entire crisis of the Marxist Left, a new authentic revolution-ary working- class movement would somehow emerge.

So where are we today? Alain Badiou wonderfully characterized the postsocialist situation as “this troubled situation, in which we see Evil dancing on the ruins of Evil”: there is no question of any nostalgia, the com-munist regimes were “evil”— the problem is that what replaced them is also “evil,” albeit in a different way. In what way?

Back in 1991, Badiou gave a more theoretical formulation to the old quip from the times of really existing socialism about the difference between the democratic West and the communist East: in the East, the public word of intellectuals is eagerly awaited and has a great echo, but they are prohibited to speak and write freely, while in the West, they can say and write whatever they want, but their word is ignored by the wide public.

Although Lukacs used the famous Hegelian couple “in- itself/for- itself” to describe the becoming- proletariat of the “empirical” working class as part of social reality, this doesn’t mean that class consciousness arises out of the “objective” social process, that it is “inscribed, almost programmed, in and by historical and social reality”: the very absence of class consciousness is already the outcome of the politico- ideological struggle. In other words, Lukacs doesn’t distinguish the neutral objective social reality from subjec-tive political engagement, not because, for him, political subjectivization is determined by the “objective” social process, but because there is no “objective social reality” that is not already mediated by political subjectivity.

This brings us to Badiou’s dismissal of the critique of political economy. Since he conceives economy as a particular sphere of positive social being, he excludes it as a possible site of a “truth-event.” But once we accept that economy is always political economy, that is, a site of political struggle, and that its depoliticization, its status as a neutral sphere of “servicing the goods,” is in itself always-already the outcome of a political struggle, then the prospect opens up of the repoliticization of economy and thus of its reassertion as the possible site of truth-event.

Badiou’s exclusive opposition between the “corruptive” force of economy and the purity of the communist idea as two incompatible domains introduces an almost gnostic tone into his work: on the one side the noble citoyenstruggling on behalf of the principled axiom of equality, on the other side the “fallen” bourgeois, a miserable “human animal” striving for profits and pleasures. The necessary outcome of such a gap is terror: it is on account of the very purity of the communist idea motivating the revolutionary process, of the lack of “mediation” between this Idea and social reality, that the Idea can intervene into historical reality without betraying its radical character only in the guise of self- destructive terror.

This is why the “critique of political economy” is crucial if we are to surmount this deadlock: only through a change in the structure of capitalism can the circle of necessary defeats be broken.

It is crucial to clearly distinguish here between two impossibilities: the impossible-real of a social antagonism and the impossibility on which the predominant ideological field focuses. Impossibility is here redoubled, it serves as a mask of itself, that is, the ideological function of the second impossibility is to obfuscate the real of the first impossibility.

Today, the ruling ideology endeavors to make us accept the “impossibility” of a radical change, of abolishing capitalism, of a democracy not constrained to parliamentary game, and so on, in order to render invisible the impossible/real of the antagonism that cuts across capitalist societies.

This real is impossible in the sense that it is the impossible of the existing social order, that is, its constitutive antagonism— which, however, in no way implies that this real/impossible cannot be directly dealt with and radically transformed in a “crazy” act that changes the basic “transcendental” coordinates of a social field.

This is why, as Alenka Zupancic put it, Jacques Lacan’s formula of overcoming an ideological impossibility is not “everything is possible,” but “impossible happens.”

The Lacanian real/impossible is not an a priori limi-tation that should realistically be taken into account, but it is the domain of act, of interventions that can change its coordinates: an act is more than an intervention into the domain of the possible— an act changes the very coordinates of what is possible and thus retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility.

This is why communism also concerns the real: to act as a communist means to intervene into the real of the basic antagonism underlying today’s global capitalism.

In authentic Marxism, totality is not an ideal but a critical notion— to locate a phenomenon in its totality does not mean to see the hidden harmony of the whole, but to include into a system all its “symptoms,” antagonisms, inconsistencies, as its integral parts. In this sense, liberalism and fundamentalism form a “totality”: the opposition of liberalism and fundamentalism is structured so that liberalism itself generates its opposite.

So what about the core values of liberalism: freedom, equality, and so forth? The paradox is that liberalism itself is not strong enough to save them — that is, its own core — against the fundamentalist onslaught. Fundamentalism is a reaction— a false, mystifying, reaction, of course— against a real aw of
liberalism, and this is why it is again and again generated by liberalism. Left to itself, liberalism will slowly undermine itself— the only thing that can save its core is a renewed Left.

In short, the wager of the Western thought is that radical negativity (whose first and immediate expression is egalitarian terror) is not condemned to remain a short ecstatic outburst after which things have to return to normal — on the contrary, radical negativity, this undermining of every traditional hierarchic order, can articulate itself in a new positive order in which it acquires the stability of a new form of life. This is the meaning of the Holy Spirit in Christianity: faith cannot only be expressed in, but exists as the collective of believers. This faith is in itself based on “terror,” indicated by Christ’s words that he brings sword, not peace, and that whoever doesn’t hate his or her father and mother is not his true follower, and so forth. The content of this terror is the rejection of all traditional hierarchic community ties, with the wager that another collective link is possible based on this ter-ror, an egalitarian link of believers connected by agape as political love.

Another example of such an egalitarian link based on terror is democracy itself. One should follow Claude Lefort’s description of democracy here: the democratic axiom is that the place of power is empty, that there is no one who is directly qualified for this post either by tradition, charisma, or his or her expert and leadership properties. This is why, before democracy can enter the stage, terror has to do its work, forever dissociating the place of power from any natural or directly qualified pretender: the gap between this place and those who temporarily occupy it should be maintained at any cost.

And this is also why one can supplement in a democratic way Hegel’s deduction of monarchy. Hegel insists on the monarch as the “irrational” (contingent) head of state precisely in order to keep the summit of state power apart from the experts (for him embodied in state bureaucracy) — while the bureaucracy rules by expertise; that is, while bureaucrats are chosen on account of their abilities and qualifications, the king is a king by his birth, ultimately, by a lot, on account of natural contingency.

The danger Hegel is thereby trying to avoid exploded a century later in Stalinist bureaucracy, which is precisely the rule of (communist) experts: Stalin is NOT a figure of a master but the one who “really knows,” who is an expert in all imaginable fields, from economy to linguistics, from biology to philosophy.

But we can well imagine a democratic procedure maintaining the same gap on account of the irreducible moment of contingency in every electoral
result: far from being its limitation, the fact that the elections do not pretend to select the most qualified person is what protects them from the totali-tarian temptation— which is why, as it was already clear to the Ancient Greeks, the most democratic form of selecting who will rule us is by a lot.

That is to say, as Lefort has demonstrated, the achievement of democracy is to turn what is in traditional authoritarian power the moment of its great-est crisis, the moment of transition from one to another master when, for a moment, “the throne is empty,” which causes panic, into the very resort of its strength: democratic elections are the moment of passing through the zero point when the complex network of social links is dissolved into purely quantitative multiplicity of individuals whose votes are mechanically counted. The moment of terror, of the dissolution of all hierarchic links, is thus reenacted and transformed into the foundation of a new and stable positive political order.

Hegel is thus perhaps— measured by his own standards of what a ratio-nal state should be— wrong in his fear of the direct universal democratic vote (see his nervous rejection of the English Reform Bill in 1831). It is pre-cisely democracy (democratic universal election) that (much more appropri-ately than his own state of estates) accomplishes the “magic” trick of convert-ing the negativity (the self- destructive absolute freedom that coincides with the reign of terror) into a stable new political order. In democracy, the radi-cal negativity of terror, the destruction of everyone who pretends to identify with the place of power, is aufgehobenand turned into the positive form of democratic procedure.

Today, when we know the limitation of the formal democratic procedure, the question is whether we can imagine a step further in this direction of the reversal of egalitarian negativity into a new positive order. One should look for traces of such an order in different domains, including the scientific communities. A report on how the CERN community (European Organi-zation for Nuclear Research) is functioning is indicative here: in an almost utopian way, individual efforts coexist with nonhierarchic collective spirit, and the dedication to the scientific cause (to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang) far outweighs material considerations.

We are in the middle of a new wave of “enclosure of commons”: the com-mons of our natural environs, of our symbolic substance, even of our genetic inheritance. … Antonio Negri was right with his anti- Socialist title Good- Bye Mr. Socialism: communism is to be opposed to socialism, which, instead of the egalitarian collective, offers a solitary organic community— Nazism was national socialism, not national communism. There can be socialist anti-Semitism; there cannot be a communist one. (If it appears, as in Stalin’s last years, it is an indicator that one is no longer faithful to the revolutionary event.) Eric Hobsbawm recently published a column with the title “Social-ism Has Failed. Now Capitalism Is Bankrupt. So What Comes Next?” The answer is communism. Socialism wants to solve the first three antagonisms without the fourth one, without the singular universality of the proletariat.

The only way for the global capitalist system to survive its long- term antago-nism and simultaneously to avoid the communist solution will be to reinvent some kind of socialism in the guise of communitarianism, populism, capitalism with Asian values, or whatsoever.

The future will be communist or socialist. How, then, are we to counter the threat of ecological catastrophe in a communist way? It is here that we should return to the four moments of what Badiou calls the “eternal idea” of revolutionary- egalitarian justice. What is demanded is:

– strict egalitarian justice. All people should pay the same price in eventual renumerations, that is, one should impose the same worldwide norms of per capita energy consumption, carbon dioxide emissions, and so on; the developed nations should not be allowed to poison the environment at the present rate, blaming the developing third world countries, from Brazil to China, for ruining our shared environment with their rapid development;

– terror. Ruthless punishment of all who violate the imposed protective measures, inclusive of severe limitations of liberal “freedoms” and technological control of the prospective lawbreakers;

– voluntarism. The only way to confront the threat of ecological catastrophe is by means of large- scale collective decisions that will run counter to the “spontaneous” immanent logic of capitalist development; as Walter Benjamin pointed out in his “Theses on the Concept of History,” today, the task of a revolution is not to help the historical tendency or
necessity to realize itself but to “stop the train” of history that runs toward the precipice of global catastrophe— an insight that gained new weight with the prospect of ecological catastrophe;

– and, last but not least, all this combined with the trust in the people (the wager that the large majority of the people support these severe measures, see them as their own, and are ready to participate in their enforcement). One should not be afraid to assert, as a combination of terror and trust in the people, the reactivation of one of the figures of all egalitarian-revolutionary terror, the “informer” who denounces the culprits to the authorities. (In the case of the Enron scandal, Time magazine was right to celebrate the insiders who tipped off the financial authorities as true public heroes.)

This is how what once was called communism can still be of use today.

analyst discourse

Bryant, Levi R. “Žižek’s New Universe of Discourse: Politics and the Discourse of the Capitalist” International Journal of Žižek Studies (Vol 2, no. 4) 1-48.

Discourse of Critical Theory

a –> S1
S2 $

As Žižek writes in the introduction to The Sublime Object of Ideology,

In contrast to [the] Althusserian ethics of alienation in the symbolic ‘process without a subject’, we may denote the ethics implied by Lacanian psychoanalysis as that of separation. The famous Lacanian motto not to give way on one’s desire [ne pas céder sur son desir]– is aimed at the fact that we must not obliterate the distance separating the Real from its symbolization: it is this surplus of the Real over every symbolization that functions as the object-cause of desire. To come to terms with this surplus (or, more precisely, leftover) means to acknowledge the fundamental deadlock (‘antagonism’), a kernel resisting symbolic integration-dissolution (Žižek 1989: 3). 34

Are analysis and engaged political activity consistent with one another? As Lacan remarks at the end of The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, “[t]he analyst’s desire is not a pure desire. It is a desire to obtain absolute difference, a desire which intervenes when, confronted with the primary signifier, the subject is, for the first time, in a position to subject himself to it” (Lacan 1998: 276).

The analysand begins analysis in the dimension of the imaginary, treating everything and everyone as the Same. Over the course of analysis what emerges is an absolutely singular constellation of signifiers, specific to this subject and this subject alone as determinants of his unconscious (hence Lacan’s reference to
the subject being in a position to subject himself to this primary signifier).

Lacan goes so far as to suggest that the primary signifiers uncovered in analysis are pure non-sense. “…[T]he effect of interpretation is to isolate in the subject a kernel, a kern, to use Freud’s own term, of non-sense…” (Ibid: 250). If this primary signifier has the status of non-sense, then this is precisely because it is not common but particular to the subject and no other.

It is thus difficult to see how it is possible to get a politics out of the discourse of the analyst, for the discourse of the analyst does not aim at collective engagement or the common– which is necessary for politics –but the precise opposite.

Nonetheless, there is a kernal of truth in Žižek’s characterization of his own position in terms of the discourse of the analyst. Unlike the politics of the discourse of the master premised on the fantasy of imaginary organic totality, any revolutionary politics must speak not from the position of totality, but from the standpoint of the Real, of antagonism, of the remainder, or of that which the other social ties function to veil or hide from view.

In other words, revolutionary political engagement differs from the politics of the State and master in that it approaches the social from the perspective of the Real, treating this as the truth of social formations.

As Žižek remarks, All ‘culture’ is in a way a reaction-formation, an attempt to limit, canalize — to cultivate this imbalance, this traumatic kernel, this radical antagonism through which man cuts his umbilical cord with nature, with animal homeostasis.

It is not only that the aim is no longer to abolish this drive antagonism, but the aspiration to abolish it is precisely the source of totalitarian temptation: the greatest mass murders and holocausts have always been perpetrated in the name of man as harmonious being, of a New Man without antagonistic tension (Žižek 1989: 5).

Where the politics of the master treats this imbalance or traumatic kernel of radical antagonism as an accident to be eradicated and overcome, the critical-revolutionary politics treats the tension as the truth that allows a whole set of social symptoms to be discerned and engaged.

For example, Marx does not treat discontent among the proletariat as an anomalous deviation disrupting the social to be summarily dismissed, but rather as the key to the systematic organization of capitalism and the perspective from which capitalist production is to be understood, and as the potential for revolutionary transformation.

The mark of any critical-revolutionary political theory will thus be that objet a, the remainder, the gap, the traumatic kernel, occupies the position of the agent in the social relation.

140 Ž begins his critique of butler the act neighbor as Thing

Slavoj, Žižek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence.” The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard. 2006. 134-190.

The limit of such a reference to the impenetrable background into which we are thrown and on account of which we cannot be taken as fully accountable and responsible for our acts is the negativity of freedom: even when the entire positive content of my psyche is ultimately impenetrable, the margin of my freedom is that I can say No! to any positive element that I encounter.

This negativity of freedom provides the zero-level from which every positive content can be questioned. Lacan’s position is thus that being exposed/overwhelmed, caught in a cobweb of preexisting conditions, is not incompatible with radical autonomy.

Of course, I cannot undo the substantial weight of the context into which I am thrown; of course, I cannot penetrate the opaque background of my being; but what I can do is, in an act of negativity, “cleanse the plate,” draw a line, exempt myself, step out of the symbolic in a “suicidal” gesture of a radical act —what Freud called “death drive” and what German Idealism called “radical negativity.”

What gets lost in this “critique of ethical violence” is precisely the most precious and revolutionary aspect of the Jewish legacy.

Let us not forget that, in the Jewish tradition, the divine Mosaic Law is experienced as something externally, violently imposed, contingent and traumatic—in short, as an impossible/real Thing that “makes the law.”

What is arguably the ultimate scene of religious-ideological interpellation — the pronouncement of the Decalogue on Mount Sinai — is the very opposite of something that emerges “organically” as the outcome of the path of self-knowing and self-realization: the pronouncement of the Decalogue is ethical violence at its purest.

The Judeo-Christian tradition is thus to be strictly opposed to the New Age Gnostic problematic of self-realization or self-fulfillment, and the cause of this need for a violent imposition of the Law is that the very terrain covered by the Law is that of an even more fundamental violence, that of encountering a neighbor: far from brutally disturbing a preceding harmonious social interaction, the imposition of the Law endeavors to introduce a minimum of regulation onto a stressful “impossible” relationship.

When the Old Testament enjoins you to love and respect your neighbor, this does not refer to your imaginary semblable/double, but to the neighbor qua traumatic Thing.

In contrast to the New Age attitude which ultimately reduces my Other/Neighbor to my mirror-image or to the means in the path of my self-realization (like the Jungian psychology in which other persons around me are ultimately reduced to the externalizations-projections of the different disavowed aspects of my personality), Judaism opens up a tradition in which an alien traumatic kernel forever persists in my Neighbor — the Neighbor remains an inert, impenetrable, enigmatic presence that hystericizes me. The core of this presence, of course, is the Other’s desire, an enigma not only for us, but also for the Other itself.

For this reason, the Lacanian “Che vuoi?” is not simply an inquiry into “What do you want?” but more an inquiry into “What’s bugging you? What is it in you that makes you so unbearable, not only for us but also for yourself, that you yourself obviously do not master?”

— in Serb, there is a vulgar expression which perfectly renders this meaning: when somebody is getting on one’s nerves, one asks him, “What for a prick is fucking you? [Koji kurac te jebe?]”

universal bartleby

Daly, Glyn. “Politics of the political: psychoanalytic theory and the Left(s).” Journal of Political Ideologies (October 2009), 14(3), 279–300

In this sense our autonomy is at once more precarious and more radical. Today we are bombarded with all sorts of choices (consumption, lifestyles, customization of computers, cell-phones, iPods, MySpace, Facebook, etc.) that identify us as ‘free individuals’. Yet we also possess the capacity to refuse the field of choosing and freedom; to reject the very modality of making changes to our lives and to break with the terms and conditions that are implicit in the latter.

Along the lines of the famous monologue from Trainspotting, we are in a position in which we can choose ‘not to choose life’. This involves a more radical ethical freedom in which one can assume a certain position of ‘being impossible’: i.e. a position of refusing the terms of socio-political engagement and identitarian inscription; of refusing the terms of existing possibility.

In other words, what is needed is the development of forms of political subjectivity that do not embrace the conventions and protocol of existing hegemonic engagement.

Both Žižek’s Bartleybyan politics and Badiou’s politics of subtraction—i.e. the effective withdrawal from official political/participatory structures in such a way that it undermines simultaneously their symbolic purchase and constitutive logics—point in a different direction. Thus it is not so much a question of siding with the underdog in the game of existing democracy, but rather rejecting the very terms of the latter. In other words, it involves a critique of how democracy, through its mythologization of the idea that all underdogs are potential winners provided they play the game effectively, can become drawn into, and start to function on behalf of, the dominant politico-economic forces.

Second, and related, the political focus is placed not so much on marginalized groups/identities in general but rather on those whose position (or perhaps, more accurately, lack of position) embody the symptomal truths of our age — i.e. those whose situation appears naturalized as irresolvable, inert and beyond any feasible or direct solution.

These are the displaced and the destitute, the poverty-trapped, the vagrants, homeless and slum-dwellers. They are the radically excluded who are constitutively excessive, who cannot be accommodated and who present a kind of dysfunctional resistance that is nevertheless necessary to the functioning of the whole. They are the nameless ‘unfortunate’ who are passed over, treated with gentrified deliquescence and kept at a non-threatening distance through the ‘ethical’ concerns of charity and aid. What is needed is a politics that strives to overcome this distancing and to confront directly the primordial repressions that are central to the operation of capitalism as a global economic and socio-cultural system.

It is against this background that distinct approaches to the Lacanian traversing the fantasy emerge.

In radical democratic thought, the lesson of the traversal is one that tends to imply that we should assume a proper distancing in order to avoid getting caught up in the ‘cataclysmic desire of fantasy’. The problem therefore is one of adopting the right predisposition: to detach ourselves from objet (a) and to thereby affect a condition where we can ‘really enjoy our partial enjoyment’.

– Radical politics should consequently restrict itself to revolutionary-reform rather than revolution as such. In general, political engagement should not be excessive but should avoid substantial projects of overhaul in favour of the finite, provisional and pragmatic.

– Yet it is precisely in these terms that radical democracy appears to remain stuck in the register of desire: real emancipation is postponed eternally; we should be enthusiastic in the chase but never believe that we hold it in our grasp. This is a politics of desire, of infinite deferral. It becomes effectively ‘a constant search for something else… (with) no specifiable object that is capable of satisfying it’.

– Radical democratic desire, in this sense, is sustained by not having the ‘object’ of democracy. Democracy is always finally elsewhere. In this context, political subjectivity becomes one of establishing a kind of homoeostatic predisposition or proper distancing: one avoids excess in order to avoid disappointment in never attaining the real Thing.

Yet for Žižek traversing the fantasy does not mean to proceed to a non-fantasmatic or even a post-fantasmatic universe defined simply in terms of a containment and/or domestication of excess (this in itself would be something of a fantasy). There is no transcendence of the fantasmatic (the structuring of desire) as such.

Traversal in this sense is the opposite of exorcism. The point is not simply to expel excess but rather to inflect/assume the latter: to take responsibility for the inherency of excess that is integral to human drive.

Traversal, in this sense, puts one in touch with the object of drive — the hole presupposed by all demand and around which Being revolves.

To put it in the terms of Star Wars, the problem is not to bring balance to the force but to recognize that the force itself is the result of a certain (tilted) excess — a Real intervention/structuring — and that it is only through contingence with the latter that alternative possibilities (a different kind of force, or indeed political) can be shown.

The freedom which is gained here, which can be called post-fantasmatic, is thus not one of overcoming alienation but precisely a freedom through alienation in its most radical sense: i.e. the acceptance of the fact that imbalance/excess is our most basic condition towards which we cannot exercise any pre-given partiality or disposition.

Ž’s Lacanian radicalism can be thought of as something that tries to break out of the endless cycle of desire and to move towards a certain logic of love (involving both desire and drive).

While this may sound hopelessly sentimental, we should recall that in Lacan love is distinguished from desire in coming to terms with the non-ideal and the non-all and with accepting precisely the lack in the Other. Love is its own excess, an uncompromising ‘violence’ that goes beyond mere antagonism (i.e. it does not externalize blockage/failure but accepts this as the very condition of being). Through love one finds, and indeed makes, the universal-divine in all its contingent fragility and failing.

Perhaps a more appropriate way of thinking about this shift is in terms of opening the possibility of a politics of excess; a politics that effectively chooses ‘something else’ — i.e. something other than the current mode of choosing.

It refuses to embrace today’s alibis where social ‘problems’ are displaced onto charities, ethical committees, focus groups and all the institutions of political deferral up to and including existing democracy. In this way it places ‘us’ in the scene and refuses not to take responsibility for the contemporary totality and its symptoms. Such a politics is distinguished from radical democratic hegemony in that it does not give up on the real thing or view concrete projects as merely the ersatz fillers of the empty place.

The point is rather to see how this very division between the universal (as empty place) and particular (contingent filler) is inherent to the latter.

In other words, the universal-divine is manifested … through substantial engagement; through finding and making the universal in the particular and through ‘excessive’ commitment, without excuses or dependency on the Other. It is a politics that affirms that the only way out is the way in.

act

Starting in the 14th seminar of 1966-1967 … Lacan distinguishes between acting out and the act proper.

An act is an action that conjures into existence a signifying structure into which desire then, after the (f)act inscribes itself. The subject as a desiring being comes into existence in the wake of the act, instead of the act reflecting a previously present form of subjectivity. Lacan in the 14th seminar describes an act as a gesture of symbolization in which the subject is equivalent to the signifiers mobilized by this gesture; and he proceeds to add here that a shift of Symbolic surfaces occurs in a genuine act, that a “mutuation” of the subject transpires through such a deed … after passing through a “true act” the subject emerges transformed that this authentic gesture modifies the very configuration of subjectivity. Lacan,SXIV 2/15/67 . Johnston 147 Lacan,SXIV 2/15/67

Ž and Beckett pt 2

Žižek on Beckett part 2

And, as we know from the Freudian theory, the analyst is here not the one who already knows the truth and just wisely leads the patient to discover it himself/herself: the analyst precisely doesn’t know it, his knowledge is the illusion of transference which had to fall at the end of the treatment.

And is it not that, with regard to this dynamic of the psychoanalytic process, Beckett’s play can be said to start where the analytic process ends: the big Other is no longer “supposed to know” anything, there is no transference, and, consequently, “subjective destitution” already took place.

The woman has been virtually mute since childhood apart from occasional winter outbursts part of one of which comprises the text we hear, in which she relates four incidents from her life:

– lying face down in the grass on a field in April;

– standing in a supermarket;

– sitting on a “mound in Croker’s Acre” (a real place in Ireland near Leopardstown racecourse); and

– “that time at court.”

Each of the last three incidents somehow relates to the repressed first “scene” which has been likened to an epiphany – whatever happened to her in that field in April was the trigger for her to start talking.

Her initial reaction to this paralyzing event is to assume she is being punished by God; strangely, however, this punishment involves no suffering – she feels no pain, as in life she felt no pleasure.

A close reading makes it clear that, just before the play’s end, there IS a crucial break, a decision, a shift in the mode of subjectivity.

This shift is signaled by a crucial detail: in the last (fifth) moment of pause, the Auditor DOESN’T intervene with his mute gesture – his “helpless compassion” lost its ground. Here are all five moments of pause:

(1) “all that early April morning light … and she found herself in the–– … what? … who? … no! … she! …” (Pause and movement 1.)
(2) “the buzzing? … yes … all dead still but for the buzzing … when suddenly she realized … words were– … what? … who? … no! … she! …” (Pause and movement 2.)
(3) “something she– … something she had to– … what? … who? … no! … she! …” (Pause and movement 3)
(4) “all right … nothing she could tell … nothing she could think … nothing she– … what? … who? … no! … she! …” (Pause and movement 4)
(5) “keep on … not knowing what … what she was– … what? … who? … no! … she! … SHE! … [Pause.] … what she was trying … what to try … no matter … keep on …” (Curtain starts down)

Note the three crucial changes here:

(1) the standard, always identical, series of words which precedes the pause with the Auditor’s movement of helpless compassion (“… what? … who? … no! … she! …”) is here supplemented by a repeated capitalized ”SHE”;

(2) the pause is without the Auditor’s movement;

(3) it is not followed by the same kind of confused rumbling as in the previous four cases, but by the variation of the paradigmatic Beckettian ethical motto of perseverance (“no matter … keep on”).

Consequently, the key to the entire piece is provided by the way we read this shift: does it signal a simple (or not so simple) gesture by means of which the speaker (Mouth) finally fully assumes her subjectivity, asserts herself as SHE (or, rather, as I), overcoming the blockage indicated by the buzzing in her head?

In other words, insofar as the play’s title comes from the Mouth’s repeated insistence that the events she describes or alludes to did not happen to her (and that therefore she cannot assumer them in first person singular), does the fifth pause indicate the negation of the plays’s title, the transformation of “not I” into “I”?

Or is there a convincing alternative to this traditional-humanist reading which so obviously runs counter the entire spirit of Beckett’s universe?

Yes – on condition that we also radically abandon the predominant cliché about Beckett as the author of the “theatre of the absurd,” preaching the abandonment of every metaphysical Sense (Godot will never arrive), the resignation to the endless circular self-reproduction of meaningless rituals (the nonsense rhymes in Waiting for Godot).

In what, then, does this shift consist? We should approach it via its counterpart, the traumatic X around which the Mouth’s logorrhea circulates. So what happened to “her” on the field in April?

Was the traumatic experience she underwent there a brutal rape?

When asked about, Beckett unambiguously rejected such a reading: “How could you think of such a thing! No, no, not at all – it wasn’t that at all.”

We should not take this statement as a tongue-in-cheek admission, but literally – that fateful April, while “wandering in a field … looking aimlessly for cowslips,” the woman suffered some kind of collapse, possibly even her death – definitely not a real-life event, but an unbearably-intense “inner experience” close to what C.S.Lewis’ described in his Surprised by Joy as the moment of his religious choice.

What makes this description so irresistibly delicious is the author’s matter-of-fact “English” skeptical style, far from the usual pathetic narratives of the mystical rapture – Lewis refers to the experience as the “odd thing”; he mentions its common location – “I was going up Headington Hill on the top of a bus.” – the qualifications like “in a sense,” “what now appears,” “or, if you like,” “you could argue that… but I am more inclined to think…,” “perhaps,” “I rather disliked the feeling”):

“The odd thing was that before God closed in on me, I was in fact offered what now appears a moment of wholly free choice. In a sense. I was going up Headington Hill on the top of a bus. Without words and (I think) almost without images, a fact about myself was somehow presented to me. I became aware that I was holding something at bay, or shutting something out. Or, if you like, that I was wearing some stiff clothing, like corsets, or even a suit of armor, as if I were a lobster. I felt myself being, there and then, given a free choice. I could open the door or keep it shut; I could unbuckle the armor or keep it on. Neither choice was presented as a duty; no threat or promise was attached to either, though I knew that to open the door or to take off the corset meant the incalculable. The choice appeared to be momentous but it was also strangely unemotional. I was moved by no desires or fears. In a sense I was not moved by anything. I chose to open, to unbuckle, to loosen the rein. I say, ‘I chose,’ yet it did not really seem possible to do the opposite. On the other hand, I was aware of no motives. You could argue that I was not a free agent, but I am more inclined to think this came nearer to being a perfectly free act than most that I have ever done. Necessity may not be the opposite of freedom, and perhaps a man is most free when, instead of producing motives, he could only say, ‘I am what I do.’ Then came the repercussion on the imaginative level. I felt as if I were a man of snow at long last beginning to melt. The melting was starting in my back – drip-drip and presently trickle-trickle. I rather disliked the feeling.”

In a way, everything is here: the decision is purely formal, ultimately a decision to decide, without a clear awareness of WHAT the subject decides about; it is non-psychological act, unemotional, with no motives, desires or fears; it is incalculable, not the outcome of strategic argumentation; it is a totally free act, although one couldn’t do it otherwise. It is only AFTERWARDS that this pure act is “subjectivized,” translated into a (rather unpleasant) psychological experience.

From the Lacanian standpoint, there is only one aspect which is potentially problematic in Lewis’ formulation: the traumatic Event (encounter of the Real, exposure to the “minimal difference”) has nothing to do with the mystical suspension of ties which bind us to ordinary reality, with attaining the bliss of radical indifference in which life or death and other worldly distinctions no longer matter, in which subject and object, thought and act, fully coincide.

To put it in mystical terms, the Lacanian act is rather the exact opposite of this “return to innocence”:

the Original Sin itself, the abyssal DISTURBANCE of the primeval Peace, the primordial “pathological” Choice of the unconditional attachment to some singular object (like falling in love with a singular person which, thereafter, matters to us more than everything else).

And does something like THIS not take place on the grass in Not I?

The sinful character of the trauma is indicated by the fact that the speaker feels punished by God). What then happens in the final shift of the play is that the speaker ACCEPTS the trauma in its meaninglessness, ceases to search for its meaning, restores its extra-symbolic dignity, as it were, thereby getting rid of the entire topic of sin and punishment. This is why the Auditor no longer reacts with the gesture of impotent compassion: there is no longer despair in the Mouth’s voice, the standard Beckettian formula of the drive’s persistence in asserted (“no matter… keep on”), God is only now truly love – not the loved or loving one, but Love itself, that which makes things going. Even after all content is lost, at this point of absolute reduction, the Galilean conclusion imposes itself: eppur si muove.

This, however, in no way means that the trauma is finally subjectivized, that the speaker is now no longer “not I” but “SHE,” a full subject finally able to assume her Word.

Something much more uncanny happens here: the Mouth is only now fully destituted as subject – at the moment of the fifth pause, the subject who speaks fully assumes its identity with Mouth as a partial object.

What happens here is structurally similar to one of the most disturbing TV episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, “The Glass Eye” (the opening episode of the third year). Jessica Tandy (again – the very actress who was the original Mouth!) plays here a lone woman who falls for a handsome ventriloquist, Max Collodi (a reference to the author of Pinocchio); when she gathers the courage to approach him alone in his quarters, she declares her love for him and steps forward to embrace him, only to find that she is holding in her hands a wooden dummy’s head; after she withdraws in horror, the “dummy” stands up and pulls off its mask, and we see the face of a sad older dwarf who start to jump desperately on the table, asking the woman to go away…

the ventriloquist is in fact the dummy, while the hideous dummy is the actual ventriloquist. Is this not the perfect rendering of an “organ without bodies”?

It is the detachable “dead” organ, the partial object, which is effectively alive, and whose dead puppet the “real” person is: the “real” person is merely alive, a survival machine, a “human animal,” while the apparently “dead” supplement is the focus of excessive Life.

Sygne de Coufontaine

In pure love, I freely consent to my own damnation or disappearance, I ecstatically assume it, while in tragedy, I (also) accept my Fate, but I accept it as an external force without consenting to it — the tragic hero rejects it absolutely, protesting against it to the end (Oedipus at Colonus — the case of Antigone is here more ambiguous). In other words, in contrast to the notion of amor fati, there is no love in the tragic hero’s acceptance of his damnation by Fate.

Therein resides the tragic hero’s uncompromising fidelity to his desire: not in the acceptance of Fate, but in holding on to his desire against Fate, in a situation where everything is lost.

Is there, then, no properly Christian tragedy? Here, Antigone is to be opposed to Sygne de Coufontaine from Paul Claudel’s Otage: if Oedipus and Antigone are the exemplary cases of Ancient tragedy, Sygne stands for the Christian tragedy. 81

Sygne lives in the modern world where God is dead: there is no objective Fate, our fate is our own choice, we are fully responsible for it. Sygne first follows the path of ecstatic love to the end, sacrificing her good, her ethical substance for God, for his pure Otherness; and she does it not on account of some external pressure, but out of the innermost freedom of her being — hence she cannot blame Fate when she finds herself totally humiliated, deprived of all ethical substance. This, however, is why her tragedy is much more radical than that of either Oedipus or Antigone: when, mortally wounded after taking the bullet meant for her despicable and hated husband, she refuses to confer any deeper sacrificial meaning on her suicidal intervention, there is no tragic beauty in this refusal — her “No” is signaled merely by a repellent grimace, a compulsive facial tic.

There is no tragic beauty because her total sacrifice has deprived her of all inner beauty and ethical grandeur, so that all that remains is a disgusting excremental stain, a living shell deprived of life.

There is no love here either, all her love was consumed in her previous renunciations. In a way, Sygne is here crucified, her “No” akin to Christ’s “Father, why have you forsaken me?” — which is also a gesture of defiance, a kind of “Up yours! ” directed at the God-Father. Balmes is right to point out that this properly Christian “No” in all its forms is the “unthinkable” traumatic core of pure love, a scandal which undermines it from within. …

The problem with Antigone is not the suicidal purity of her death drive but, quite the opposite, that the monstrosity of her act is covered up by its aestheticization: the moment she is excluded from the community of humans, she turns into a sublime apparition evoking our sympathy by complaining about her plight. This is one of the key dimensions of Lacan’s move from Antigone to Sygne de Coufontaine: there is no sublime beauty in Sygne at the play’s end-all that marks her as different from common mortals is the tic that momentarily disfigures her face. This feature which spoils the harmony of her beautiful face, the detail that sticks out and renders it ugly, is the material trace of her resistance to being co-opted into the universe of symbolic debt and guilt. This, then, should be the first step in a consistent reading of Christianity: the dying Christ is on the side of Sygne, not of Antigone; Christ on the Cross is not a sublime apparition but an embarrassing monstrosity.

on Ž act and Real superego

McSweeney, John. “Finitude and Violence: Žižek versus Derrida on Politics” KRITIKE 5:2 (December 2011) 41-58

Any act which would bear upon this Real could only be “tragic”: either one ultimately succeeds in acting only within the Symbolic order, leaving the transcendental Real and its deep circumscription of socio-political possibilities unchanged (so that one’s acts are always already futile from the outset), or one succeeds in acting upon the Real, but at the cost of a radical destruction of the existing social order, realized in a radical annihilation of the self (Lacan’s passage à l’acte).

Indeed, just two years earlier, Žižek had realized that Lacan’s model of such an act, Antigone, is insufficient to the uncompromising violence of such an act. Her sacrifice of her place within the Symbolic order is only apparent, because her treasonous burial of her brother remains at the service of, and inscribes her existence within, a deeper law of the gods. In her stead, Žižek proposes the figure of Medea, whose murder of her children, means that there can be no recuperation of her act of vengeance against her husband.

Faced with this disturbing logic, Žižek would soon come to the conclusion that the construction of the Real as transcendental Thing is not only flawed but, in fact, may be a key element of capitalist ideology, misdirecting political acts toward an impossible capitalism as phantom Thing (and thus toward an impossible act), and away from actually existing capitalism and its rather more mundane vulnerabilities to change.

Instead, Žižek turned to an immanent conception of the Real as the internal limit of the Symbolic, such that the “not-All” of the Symbolic order, the encounter with its aporias and limits, is an encounter with the Real that exceeds, conditions, and precedes it. And this encounter with the SymbolicReal limit immanent to things is the encounter with their self-difference: with the excess of the thing over its signification, symbolized by the excess of the materiality of the letter over its signifying force.

Act in turn is modeled on St. Paul’s notion of overcoming the Sisyphean cycle of law, transgression and guilt via naive identification with elements of the law, attending to the SymbolicReal letter of the law, in order to expose and undermine the operation of its superego supplement, “the Law”, which would grant it pure Symbolic coherence.

In Žižek’s reading, Paul’s act mirrors the later Lacan’s notion of feminine subjectivation, in which woman identifies with elements of the Symbolic order, apart from the social-superego supplement that would constitute them as elements of a perfectly complete signifying system. By thus identifying with the Symbolic as a “not-All” traversed by multiple Symbolic-Real limits, the feminine subject exposes and undermines the operation of these superego injunctions.

The crucial point for the current discussion is that Žižek thus conceives of act as fundamentally within the Symbolic order, but without support from it: its significance does not depend upon the Symbolic order (and it can be justified only retrospectively in terms of the new situation it brings about). By contrast, masculine subjectivation involves identification with one’s individual “little bit of the Real” left over from one’s castrating insertion within the Symbolic order, such that a subjective act must both be entangled with and be destructive of that order. Arguably, this complex relation increases the vulnerability of the masculine subject to the subtle inversions of ideological interpellation. Thus, unlike Derridean messianicity (as Žižek conceives it), the Pauline-feminine act pays attention to the concrete self-difference of things, placing faith in the liberatory force of identification with a given element of the Symbolic order and its specific Symbolic-Real difference.

butler antigone lacan real

The Act as Feminine: Antigone Between Lacan and Butler
Author: A. Hugill. Goldsmiths College London.

Lacan insists throughout his lectures on Antigone that the tragic heroine should be taken as exemplary of the beautiful, in the Kantian sense.

… the relation of the beautiful to death and desire in Lacan – would gain nuance if the concept of the beautiful from which Lacan is working, namely as it appears in Kant’s Critique of Judgement, were further elaborated.

Echoing Kant’s own definition of the beautiful, Lacan frames it in terms of the pure ‘there is’ (il y a); that which is beautiful “communicate[s] a sign of understanding that is situated precisely at equal distance from the power of the imagination and that of the signifier.” Similarly, Kant’s crucial insight in the Critique of Judgement is to radicalize any exclamation that a thing is beautiful, by pointing to the indeterminate character of the object in question.

Beauty, rather than being a property of an object, describes a sensation of pleasure arising from an overwhelming feeling of life (Lebensgefühl) engendered by the free play of the cognitive powers, imagination (Einbildungskraft) and understanding (Verstand), insofar as they are not restricted by any determinate concept.

Beauty is distinguished from the good and the agreeable inasmuch as it is, for Kant, the only free liking. This free liking to which Kant refers is called favour (Gunst) and it is marked by a “letting-be” of the object, a disinterested interest. Interest in the Critique of Judgement refers to a certain use-value, desire or concern with the existence of the object that, in order for a pure aesthetic judgement to arise, should not be taken into consideration.

Lacan’s own definition of the structure of desire is in fact precisely in tune with this definition of beauty as disinterested interest: the object cause of desire (the objet petit a), for Lacan, can never be attained and so too causes desire to function as a means without end. In the same paradoxical manner, one’s desire resists conceptual rationalization and is sustained by the tension of its unfulfillment. Something remains beautiful so long as it resists being fully conceptualized.

The feeling of the sublime describes those “moments when something entrances us so much that we are ready to forget (and to renounce) everything, our own well-being and all that is associated with it; moments when we are convinced that our existence is worth something only in so far as we are capable of sacrificing it.” In the case of Antigone, we see a subject who identifies entirely with the Thing, the limit, without a protective distance and in so doing meets her demise.

It is against this backdrop that Antigone’s act is radically re-thought by the Lacanian school, as a case of pure means. For Lacan, Antigone is precisely driven by a certain jouissance and not – as is the case with Creon – by any adherence to a concept of an ethical good (representing family or divine law, as some other commentators suggest). As Butler explains, “Antigone will emerge, then, for Lacan as a problem of beauty, fascination, and death as precisely what intervenes between the desire for the good, the desire to conform to the ethical norm, and thereby derails it, enigmatically, from its path.” Antigone’s act could not be judged beautiful in the Kantian sense if it were merely an external embodiment of a moral good. It is precisely the non-conceptual element of her act that fascinates Lacan and propels his interpretation forward in his later consideration of feminine sexuality in Seminar XX.

Zupancic’s description of the sublime as the ‘jouissance of the Other’ in the above-cited passage provides a key to understanding why it is that Antigone’s act is formulated as a ‘feminine act.’ In Seminar XX: Encore,, feminine jouissance is defined precisely as the ‘jouissance of the Other.’ In this lecture, Lacan discusses the particularity of feminine jouissance in contrast to phallic jouissance. The title of the seminar, meaning “again”, signifies the manner in which enjoyment (jouissance) is never satisfied. There is always a gap or remainder left over and desire is sustained through this impossibility of satisfaction in the sexual relationship. In his lesson “On jouissance,” Lacan famously says that “to man insofar as he is endowed with the organ said to be phallic – I said, ‘said to be’ – the corporal sex or sexual organ of woman – I said ‘of woman,’ whereas in fact woman does not exist, woman is not whole – woman’s sexual organ is of no interest except via the body’s jouissance.”

He is here describing what he calls ‘phallic’ jouissance or the jouissance of the organ – which should not be misconstrued as concerning a biological category. There are phallic women and non-phallic men. It rather denotes to what extent a person identifies with the phallic function. Phallic or “sexual” jouissance, for Lacan, is “the obstacle owing to which man does not come (n’arrive pas)… to enjoy woman’s body, precisely because what he enjoys is the jouissance of the organ.”

Feminine jouissance, on the other hand, is “beyond the phallus” by virtue of its non-subsumption in the phallic order. Impossible to know anything about it other than that some women (and men) experience it, Lacan explains it using an example of mystical ecstasy. In his invocation of God and the mystics, Lacan’s ‘explanation’ of feminine jouissance points to a pure jouissance of being, a being that is at the very limit of language. With recourse to (post)-Lacanian thinkers like Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, it is possible to conceive of this feminine jouissance as relating to the primary relationship with the m(O)ther and the pre- or extra-symbolic inscription of language on the body. In Kristeva, we find a model of this in her concept of the semiotic, the unnamable within the symbolic, what she calls the “transsymbolic, transpaternal function of poetic language.”

Returning to Antigone, we find in Lacan’s Ethics a clear alignment of Antigone’s act – her unwavering love for the pure ‘there is’ of her brother – with this experience of the limits of language. Antigone’s act is fixed to the singularity of her brother’s being, without reference to any particular content:

“The unique value involved is essentially that of language. Outside of language it is inconceivable, and the being of him who has lived cannot be detached from all he bears with him in the nature of good and evil, of destiny, of consequences for others, or of feelings for himself. That purity, that separation of being from the characteristics of the historical drama he has lived through, is precisely the limit or the ex nihilo to which Antigone is attached. It is nothing more than the break that the very presence of language inaugurates in the life of man. That break is manifested at every moment in the fact that language punctuates everything that occurs in the movement of life.” [Lacan, Ethics, 279]

The purity of Antigone’s act is at the limits of the means-ends logic constituting the symbolic order. The work to which Antigone commits herself, insofar as it can be called a ‘work,’ is marked by a ceaseless ‘unworking.’ She quite literally goes to the limit – to her own death – and as the multiple and never-ending interpretations of Sophocles’ play suggest, Antigone’s insistence is ultimately ambiguous with regard to any positive conceptualization and offers no determinate program in advance. Though her explicit action is to bestow Polyneices with a proper burial, it is uncertain in which name she insists upon doing so (whether divine or family law, or defiance of the state, or something entirely else).

Lacan suggests that Antigone acts in relation to the pure ‘there is,’ the singularity of her brother independent of any particular content, in the ineffaceable character of what is. Lacan regards this unshakeable yet indeterminate stance as the crucial issue of Sophocles’ text, and the reason for its ceaseless fascination:

“What is, is, and it is to this, to this surface, that the unshakeable, unyielding position of Antigone is fixed. She rejects everything else. The stance of the-race-is-run is nowhere better illustrated than here. And whatever else one relates it to, is only a way of causing uncertainty or disguising the absolutely radical character of the position of the problem in the text.” [Lacan, Ethics, 279]

In his book Enjoy Your Symptom!, Zizek draws on this insight with regard to Antigone, in order to put forward a model of a political subjectivity that might be called ‘anarcho-communist.’ He recounts a historical event: Tito’s ‘No!’ to Stalin in 1948, or the split of Yugoslav Communists from the international communist movement. Zizek argues that the importance of this act was to deny Stalin’s hegemony outside of any pre-determined positive ideological project, and to do so from the very situated position of communism itself; to resist Stalin as a communist, to create a rupture in the communist monolith from within, and to subject it to renewed critical consideration. Zizek remarks that a typical liberal reproach to this Lacanian ethic is to depict it as incompatible with a notion of community, as a suicidal ecstasy that suspends the social dimension. Instead, Zizek wants to suggest that a ‘suicidal gesture’ –as Antigone comes to exemplify it – is at the very foundation of every new social link: “with an act, stricto sensu, we can therefore never fully foresee its consequences, i.e., the way it will transform the existing symbolic space: the act is a rupture after which ‘nothing remains the same.’” Antigone’s No! to Creon is presented as the real feminine act, the real ethical act as such, because it is situated at the limit of being, the very birthplace of the social itself, a place of pure potentiality from which real change can emerge.

[…] However, at the heart of Mendieta’s artistic action is a commitment to a certain identity, charged with a kind of naïve essentialism. And it is this fixed notion of community that both Butler and Lacan are working against in their writing on Antigone, though from very different poles. On the one hand,

Butler wants to posit a multiplicity of meaning that is never fixed beyond the performance of a deed. In this sense, Butler’s notion of ‘performativity’ is not so different from the Lacanian ethical idea; but only to the extent that it puts into question the notion of a ‘doer behind the deed’ – a fixed subjecthood – just as the Lacanian ethical act destabilizes the subject.

[…] Rather than pursuing the destabilized subject to the point of rupture, extreme danger and risk, the point where new possibilities truly emerge, Butler believes in the possibility to gradually dismantle what already exists by parodically using the tools already given, without the act of destruction.

Converging on the body of Antigone, we can see two political stances emerge: death-driven insistence on the singularity of being in contrast to a vitalist view of the limitless plasticity or multiplicity of being. In this sense, Antigone’s legacy concerns, fundamentally, no less than the state of our social order itself. Antigone brings to the fore the question of resistance today. Is it any longer possible to resist capitalist-patriarchal heteronormativity by means of parody? Or is it not, rather, that notions of parody and performance have themselves been subsumed within that very order itself and thus exposed to their own impotency?

Sophocles’ Antigone has been repeatedly resurrected over the last centuries as a result of the fascinating, timeless and unresolved problematics that it presents. In Lacan’s account, mobilized to support his ethics, the radical non-instrumentality of Antigone’s act is brought to the fore. In this way, it becomes for Lacan the site of similarly constituted ideas: the beautiful and the sublime in Kant’s aesthetics, and feminine jouissance. I have added to this list désoeuvrement and radical passivity. What each of these thoughts holds in common is a paradoxical active-passivity, an ‘unworking’ that pursues the limits of experience. In the pursuit of the limit – the Lacanian Real – the subject is in a position of extreme risk and death-driven instability without recourse to any pre-determined conceptual aim. For Zizek, this is the act par excellence, the act that puts into crisis the stability of any order. Indeed, Antigone’s act “most forcefully exposes the utter injustice and contingency of the Law, the fact that the Law functions precisely to ‘actively’…cover over the fact that it is constructed across a void.”

parallax kant sade

So, far from announcing a triumphant solution, Lacan’s “Kant avec Sade,” his assertion of Sade as the truth of Kant, rather names an embarrassing problem that Lacan failed to resolve — and did not even fully confront — in his Ethics seminar: how are we to distinguish the appearance of pure desire—the violent gesture of transgressing the social domain of “servicing goods” and entering the terrifying domain of ate, that is, the ethical stance of the subject who “does not compromise his desire”—from the fully consummated “passion for the Real,” the subject’s disappearance-immersion in the primordial jouissance? 95

What, then, is the Fall from this Kantian perspective? Consider the first moments of a feminist awakening: it all begins not with a direct attack on patriarchy, but with experiencing one’s situation as unjust and humiliating, one’s passivity as a failure to act—is this very overwhelming awareness of failure not in itself a positive sign? Does it not, in a negative way, bear witness to the fact that women clearly perceive the need to assert themselves, that they perceive the lack of it as a failure? In the same way,“Fall” is the first step toward liberation—it represents the moment of knowledge, of cognizance of one’s situation. Thus “fall into sin” is a purely formal change: nothing changes in reality, it is just the subject’s stance toward reality that undergoes a radical change.

This means that the Fall in the religious sense (the knowledge of sin) is already a reaction to the Fall proper, the retreat from the “dizziness of freedom.”This is why it is crucial to realize that Kierkegaard leaps over the first contraction of finitude, the first emergence of a sinthome which makes the subject a creature proper, and goes directly from the primordial repose to the Prohibition.We should focus on the difference between the two withdrawals from the Void of infinity: the first one is the primordial contraction that creates the sinthome — it precedes Prohibition, while it is only the second one, the retreat from the “dizziness of freedom,” which is the Fall proper: with it,we enter the domain of the superego, of the vicious cycle of the Law and its transgression.

parallax ethics real

Žižek, S. Parallax View MIT Press, 2006. Pages 81-84.

That is to say: how should we interpret the great feminine “No!” of Isabel Archer at the end of The Portrait of a Lady? Why doesn’t Isabel leave Osmond, although she definitely doesn’t love him and is fully aware of his manipulations? The reason is not the moral pressure exerted on her by the notion of what is expected of a woman in her position — Isabel has sufficiently proven that, when she wants to, she is quite willing to override conventions: “Isabel stays because of her commitment to the bond of her word, and she stays because she is unwilling to abandon what she still sees as a decision made out of her sense of independence.”

In short, as Lacan put it apropos of Sygne de Coufontaine in The Hostage, Isabel is also “the hostage of the word.” So it is wrong to interpret this act as a sacrifice bearing witness to the proverbial “feminine masochism”: although Isabel was obviously manipulated into marrying Osmond, her act was her own, and to leave Osmond would simply equal depriving herself of her autonomy.

Continue reading “parallax ethics real”