the act – Page 3 – objet (a)

zupančič ethics of real

Zupančič, Alenka. Ethics of the Real. 2000
It is at precisely this point that we must situate the scandal of this dialogue: the terror of Turelure ‘s demands pales before the terror inflicted upon Sygne ( through the intermediary of Badilon ) by the Holy Father.

Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself, has not lost its currency. The commandment in question is evident in the profane discourse of ethics (and politics), where it presents itself under the flag of ‘cultural diversity’ and the associated commandment: ‘Respect the difference of the other.’ This commandment, it is true, does not ask that we love the neighbour/other — it suffices that we “tolerate” him or her. But it seems that at bottom, as Freud would say, it comes down to the same thing. … Thus Badiou has observed:

A first suspicion arises when we consider that the proclaimed apostles of ethics and of the ‘right to difference’ are visibly horrified by any difference that is even a bit pronounced. Because for them, African costumes are barbarous, Islamic fundamentalists are frightening, as is the Chinese totalitarian, and so on. In truth, this famous “other” is not presentable unless he is a good other, that is to say, insofar as he’s the same as us … Just as there is no freedom for the enemies of freedom, so there is no respect for those whose difference consists precisely in not respecting differences.

That is to say: one finds here the same conjuncture as in the case of the commandment to ‘love thy neighbour’: what happens if this neighbour is ‘wicked’, if he or she has a completely different idea of the world, if he or she gets his or her enjoyment in a manner that conflicts with mine?

When Lacan, in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, comments on the commandment ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’, and on Freud’s hesitation regarding this subject, he formulates its impasse with essentially same words as Badiou uses in speaking of the ‘right to ‘difference ‘ :

My egoism is quite content with a certain altruism, altruism of the kind that is situated on the level of the useful. And it even becomes the pretext by means of which I can avoid taking up the problem of the evil I desire, and that my neighbour desires also … What I want is the good of others in the image of my own. That doesn’t cost so much. What I want is the good of others provided that it remain in the image of my own.

we cannot conceive of radical alterity, of the ‘completely other’ (to which Lacan gives the Freudian name das Ding [the Thing]), without bringing up the question of the Same (as opposed to the similar). The similar [le semblable] presupposes and necessitates difference; it requires — in Badiou’s terms – a multiplicity, even an ‘infinite multiplicity’.

Contrary to this, the problem of enjoyment is the problem of the Same, which must be excluded so that this multiplicity can be closed, or ‘united’.

The moment the similar gives way to the Same, evil appears, and with it the hostility associated with the ‘completely other’.

Sygne’s real ethical act does not consist simply in her sacrifice of everything that is dearest to her; this act is, rather, to be found in the final scene of the play: the act in the proper sense of the term, the ethical act, resides in Sygne’s ‘no’ It is only this ‘no’ that propels her sacrifice into the dimension of the real. Let us now turn to this ‘no’ to determine its status, and to specify the relation between the two scenes or ‘events’ in question, Sygne’s sacrifice and her ‘no’.

The thesis which seems the most questionable is the one according to which we realize at the end that Sygne, ‘by some part of herself’, had not really given way or adhered to the politico-religious compromise demanded of her. Contrary to this reading we would insist that:

1. Her act (of sacrifice) is not an instance of ‘giving up on one’s desire ‘ but, rather, one of pure desire; it is characteristic of the logic of desire itself to have as its ultimate horizon the sacrifice of the very thing in the name of which Sygne is ready to sacrifice everything.

2. There is in fact a connection that leads from ‘Sygne’s choice ‘ (her sacrifice) to her final ‘ no ‘. That is to say: without her initial choice, Sygne would never have reached an occasion for Versagung, and — it follows from this —

3 . In the final analysis, it is precisely Badilon who leads her to this ‘negation’; this means that he is not the simple opposite of the analyst but that, in a certain respect, he ‘personifies’ the position of the analyst.

Maxim of ethics of desire: Sadder than to lose one’s life is it to lose one’s reason for living.

Sacrifice everything, including her life to HONOUR (her reason to live).

Life is situated not in the register of being, but in the register of having, HONOUR is something that belongs to the very being of Sygne. 231

It is not this choice: Life or HONOUR

It is this choice: if HONOUR is the only thing left to her, if she has nothing else to give, she will have to give this last thing 231

The logic of Sygne’s sacrifice remains inscribed in the logic of desire, and represents the ultimate horizon of her ‘fundamental fantasy’. But the paradox here is that the moment Sygne attains this ultimate horizon, she is already obliged to go beyond it, to leave it behind.

ethics zupancic review

Jason B. Jones. “The Real Happens” Emory University jbjones AT emory.edu Review of: Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan. New York: Verso, 2000.

The point of Lacan’s identification of the Real with the impossible is not simply that the Real is some Thing that is impossible to happen. On the contrary, the whole point of the Lacanian concept of the Real is that the impossible happens. This is what is so traumatic, disturbing, shattering–or funny–about the Real. The Real happens precisely as the impossible. (“Signs”)

Ethics of the Real merits the serious attention of anyone interested in one of the great ethical crises of our time: Why is nothing but fundamentalism deemed worth dying for any longer?
Continue reading “ethics zupancic review”

5 regrets of the dying

Here are the top five regrets of the dying:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

“This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it.”

2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

“This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship. Women also spoke of this regret, but as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.”

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

“Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result.”

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

“Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying.”

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

“This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called ‘comfort’ of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content, when deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again.”

taking responsibility for excessive jouissance

In arguing that the subject’s relationship to itself changes as a consequence of symbolic divestiture, Žižek promotes a conception of ethics that psychoanalytic theorists will recognize as Lacanian insofar as it depends upon an intrasubjective relationship. Lacan’s statement that the only ethics proper to psychoanalysis involves the subject’s relationship to its desire (“do not give way on your desire”) explicitly contrasts both with the ethics of responsibility to the other extolled in Levinas and Derrida and with the “service of goods” that underwrites utilitarian versions of ethics. While remaining committed to an intrasubjective version of ethics, Žižek derives a somewhat different ethical stance from the later Lacanian theory of the sinthome.

Decidedly, this is not the ethics of the “service of goods,” the traumatic encounter with the impossible demand of the Other, some officious busy-ness in the lives of our neighbours, or adherence to the Golden Rule. Instead, the ethical stance requires taking responsibility for one’s own excessive dimension and jouissance. (Rothenberg, Excessive 194)

zizekian critique of butler

Behi, Kambiz. “The “Real” in Resistance: Transgression of Law as Ethical Act” Unbound Vol. 4: 30, 2008.

Foucault’s pluralistic notion of power discourse as a heterogeneous field of multiple resistances only allows for the subversion and rearticulation of power relations within the symbolic field. In other words, the Foucauldian notion of
resistance is always immanent to power and therefore any new Symbolic order created after a successful resistance (revolution) is inherently of the same structural bases of juridico-political order as the previous one. Psychoanalytic theory, … points to a third conception of resistance — beyond structuralist or poststructuralist conceptions—by introducing the possibility for a radical rearticulation of the entire Symbolic order by means of an act proper: through passing into “symbolic death” (Žižek Ticklish Subject. 1999:262). From the perspective of Lacanian theory, Foucault’s notion of resistance is a “false transgression that reasserts the symbolic status quo and even serves as a positive condition of its functioning” (262).

Žižek points out that resistance of the Real is much more than just a performative act that reconfigures “one’s symbolic condition via its repetitive displacements”:

one should maintain the crucial distinction between a mere ‘performative reconfiguration’, a subversive displacement which remains within the hegemonic field and, as it were, conducts an internal guerrilla war of turning the terms of the hegemonic field against itself, and the much more radical act of a thorough reconfiguration of the entire field which redefines the very conditions of socially sustained performativity (Ticklish Subject 1999:264).

Žižek reiterates that performative reconfigurations “ultimately support what they intend to subvert, since the very field of such ‘transgressions’ is already taken into account, even engendered, by the hegemonic form” of symbolic norms and their codified transgressions (1999:264). The matrix of the Symbolic order is deeply invested in a set of ideological institutions, rituals, and practices, which cannot be effectively undermined by linguistic transgressions or performative gestures because they are of the same Symbolic type. Through the Lacanian concept of Real, it is possible to conceptualize resistance to law as an already completed act which originates from the remainder of subjection process—a bit of the Real that is refused in the Symbolic.

A Real act of resistance opens up the possibility for articulating an ethics of the Real that is irreducible to a speech or performative act, which relies on a pre-established set of symbolic rules. Resistance of the Real is an already completed act, originating from that bit of the Real that always refuses the Symbolic.

Žižek 2 impossibilities

Only communism can save liberal democracy
Slavoj Žižek ABC Religion and Ethics 3 Oct 2011

Liberalism and fundamentalism form a single whole: liberalism generates its opposite. The paradox is that liberalism itself is not strong enough to save itself against the fundamentalist onslaught.

[…] 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.

This is why it is totally erroneous to pin our hopes on strong Nation-States, which can defend the acquisitions of the Welfare State, against trans-national bodies like the European Union, which, so the story goes, serve as the instruments of the 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 trans-national Europe.

One should add here that Badiou in no way secretly or openly prefers the police party-State to the State of Law: he states that it is fully legitimate to prefer the State of Law to the police party-State; he draws here another key distinction:

“The trap would be to imagine that this preference, which concerns the objective history of the State, is really a subjective political decision.”

What he means by “subjective political decision” is the authentic collective engagement along the Communist lines: such an engagement is not “opposed” to parliamentary democracy, it simply moves at a radically different level – that is, in it political engagement is not limited to the singular act of voting, but implies a much more radical continuous “fidelity” to a Cause, a patient collective “work of love.”

Today, when the democratic honeymoon is definitely over, this lesson is more actual than ever: what Badiou put in theoretical terms is confirmed by daily experience of the majority of ordinary people: the collapse of Communist regimes in 1989 was no Event in the sense of a historical break, of giving birth to something New in the history of emancipation.

After this supposed break, things just returned to their capitalist normality, so that we have the same passage from the enthusiasm of freedom to the rule of profit and egotism described already by Marx in his analysis of the French Revolution.

The ruling ideology is, of course, well aware of this gap, and its reply is “maturity”: one should get rid of utopian hopes which can only end up in totalitarianism and accept the new capitalist reality. The tragedy is that some Leftists subscribe to this judgment.

Alain Badiou described three distinct ways for a revolutionary – or radical emancipatory – movements to fail.

— First, there is, of course, a direct defeat: one is simply crushed by the enemy forces.

— Second, there is defeat in the victory itself: one wins over the enemy (temporarily, at least) by way of taking over the main power-agenda of the enemy (the goal is simply to seize state power, either in the parliamentary-democratic way or in a direct identification of the Party with the State).

— third, perhaps most authentic, but also most terrifying, form of failure: guided by the correct instinct that every attempt to consolidate the revolution into a form of State power represents a betrayal of the revolution, but unable to invent and impose on social reality a truly alternative social order, the revolutionary movement engages in a desperate strategy of protecting its purity by the “ultra-leftist” resort to destructive terror.

Badiou aptly calls this last version the “sacrificial temptation of the void”:

“One of the great Maoist slogans from the red years was ‘Dare to fight, dare to win’. But we know that, if it is not easy to follow this slogan, if subjectivity is afraid not so much to fight but to win, it is because struggle exposes it to a simple failure (the attack didn’t succeed), while victory exposes it to the most fearsome form of failure: the awareness that one won in vain, that victory prepares repetition, restauration. That a revolution is never more than a between-two-States. It is from here that the sacrificial temptation of the void comes. The most fearsome enemy of the politics of emancipation is not the repression by the established order. It is the interiority of nihilism, and the cruelty without limits which can accompany its void.”

What Badiou is effectively saying here is the exact opposite of Mao’s “Dare to win!” – one should be afraid to win (to take power, to establish a new socio-political reality), because the lesson of the twentieth century is that victory either ends in restoration (return to the logic of State power) or gets caught in the infernal cycle of self-destructive purification.

This is why Badiou proposes to replace purification with subtraction: instead of “winning” (taking over power) one maintains a distance towards state power, one creates spaces subtracted from State. But does this not represent a kind of division of labour between the radical and the pragmatic Left?

Subtracting itself from State politics, the radical Left limits itself to assuming principled positions and bombarding the State with impossible demands, while the pragmatic Left makes a pact with the devil in the sense of Peter Mandelson’s admission that, when it comes to the economy, we are all Thatcherites.

Is Communism then simply “impossible” in the sense that it cannot be stabilized into a new order? Even Badiou presents the eternal “Idea of Communism” as something which returns again and again, from Spartacus and Thomas Munzer to Rosa Luxemburg and the Maoist Cultural Revolution – in other words, as something that fails again and again.

The term “impossible” should make us stop and think. Today, impossible and possible are distributed in a strange way, both simultaneously exploding into an excess.

On the one hand, in the domains of personal freedoms and scientific technology, the impossible is more and more possible (or so we are told): “nothing is impossible.” We can enjoy sex in all its perverse variations, entire archives of music, films and TV series are available for download. […]

On the other hand, especially in the domain of socio-economic relations, our era perceives itself as the era of maturity in which, with the collapse of Communist states, humanity has abandoned the old millenarian utopian dreams and accepted the constraints of reality (namely, the capitalist socio-economic reality) with all its impossibilities.

And so, today we cannot engage in large collective acts (which necessarily end in totalitarian terror), cling to the old Welfare State (it makes you non-competitive and leads to economic crisis), isolate yourself from the global market, and so on, and so on.

Distinguish between 2 impossibilities

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

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

This real is impossible in the sense that it is the impossible of the existing social order – which, however, in no way implies that this real/impossible cannot be directly dealt with and radically transformed in a “crazy” act which changes the basic “transcendental” coordinates of a social field, an act which changes the very coordinates of what is possible and thus retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility.

This is why Communism concerns the Real: to act as a Communist means to intervene into the real of the basic antagonism which underlies 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, fraternity? The paradox is that liberalism itself is not strong enough to save them against the fundamentalist onslaught.

Fundamentalism is a reaction – a false, mystifying, reaction, of course – against a real flaw 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 Western and Eastern Europe, there are signs of a long-term re-arrangement of the political space. Until recently, the political space was dominated by two main parties which addressed the entire electoral body: a Right-of-centre party (Christian-Democrat, or liberal-conservative) and a Left-of-centre party (socialist, social-democratic), with smaller parties addressing a narrow electorate (greens, liberals, etc.).

Now, there is progressively emerging one party which stands for global capitalism as such, usually with relative tolerance towards abortion, gay rights, religious and ethnic minorities; opposing this party is a stronger and stronger anti-immigrant populist party which, on its fringes, is accompanied by directly racist neo-Fascist groups.

The exemplary case is here Poland: after the disappearance of the ex-Communists, the main parties are the “anti-ideological” centrist liberal party of the Prime Minister Donald Dusk, and the conservative Christian party of Kaczynski brothers.

Silvio Berlusconi in Italy is a proof that even this ultimate opposition is not insurmountable: the same party, his Forza Italia, can be both the global-capitalist-party and integrate the populist anti-immigrant tendency.

In the de-politicized sphere of post-ideological administration, the only way to mobilize people is to awaken fear (from immigrants – that is, from the neighbour). To quote Gaspar Tamas, we are thus again slowly approaching the situation in which “there is no one between Tsar and Lenin” – in which the complex situation will be reduced to a simple basic choice: community or collective, Socialism or Communism.

To put it in the well-known terms from 1968, in order for its key legacy to survive, liberalism needs the brotherly help of the radical Left.

The task is thus to remain faithful to what Badiou calls the eternal Idea of Communism: the egalitarian spirit alive for thousands of years in revolts and utopian dreams, in radical movements from Spartacus to Thomas Muntzer up to some religions (Buddhism versus Hinduism, Daoism or Legalists versus Confucianism, and so on).

The problem is how to avoid the alternative of radical social explosions which end in defeat, unable to stabilize themselves in a new order, or of equality, but displaced to a domain outside social reality (in Buddhism we are all equal in nirvana).

It is here that the originality of the Western thought enters, in its three great historical ruptures: Greek philosophy breaking with the mythic universe; Christianity breaking with the pagan universe; modern democracy breaking with traditional authority.

In all these cases, the egalitarian spirit is transposed into a – limited, but nonetheless actual – new positive order.

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 can not 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, that whoever doesn’t hate his father and mother is not his true follower – 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 terror, 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 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.

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 totalitarian temptation – which is why, as it was clear already 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 greatest 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 re-enacted and transformed into the foundation of a new and stable positive political order. Hegel is thus perhaps wrong in his fear of the direct universal democratic vote (see his nervous rejection of the English Reform Bill in 1831): it is precisely democracy which accomplishes the “magic” trick of converting the negativity (the self-destructive absolute freedom which coincides with the reign of terror) into a stable new political order: in democracy.

Once upon a time, we called this Communism. Why is its re-actualization so difficult to imagine today? Because we live in an era of naturalization: political decisions are as a rule presented as matters of pure economic necessity. For instance, when austerity measures are imposed, we are repeatedly told that this is simply what has to be done.

In May 2010 and again in June 2011, large demonstrations exploded in Greece after the government announced the austerity measures it has to adopt in order to meet the conditions of the European Union for the bailout money to avoid the state’s financial collapse.

One often hears that the true message of the Greek crisis is that not only Euro, but the project of the united Europe itself is dead. But before endorsing this general statement, one should add a Leninist twist to it: Europe is dead, OK, but – which Europe?

The answer is: the post-political Europe of accomodation to world market, the Europe which was repeatedly rejected at referendums, the Brussels technocratic-expert Europe. The Europe which presents itself as standing for the cold European reason against Greek passion and corruption, for mathematics against pathetics.

But, utopian as it may appear, the space is still open for another Europe, a re-politicized Europe, a Europe founded on a shared emancipatory project, a Europe that gave birth to ancient Greek democracy, to French and October revolutions.

This is why one should avoid the temptation to react to the ongoing financial crisis with a retreat to fully sovereign nation-states, easy preys of the freely-floating international capital which can play one state against the other.

More than ever, the reply to every crisis should be even more internationalist and universalist than the universality of global capital. The idea of resisting global capital on behalf of the defense of particular ethnic identities is more suicidal than ever, with the spectre of the North Korean juche idea lurking behind.

Žižek Congo

Žižek Slavoj Oct 1 2011 in theage.com.au

The West’s thirst for doing business allows it to remain oblivious to the violence in its economic and political systems

… At the forefront of our minds, these days, violence signals acts of crime and terror, let alone great wars. One should learn to step back, to disentangle oneself from the fascinating lure of this directly visible “subjective” violence, violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent.

We need to perceive the contours of the background which generates such outbursts. A step back enables us to identify a violence that sustains our very efforts to fight violence and to promote tolerance: the “objective” violence inscribed into the very smooth functioning of our economic and political systems.

The catch is subjective and objective violence cannot be perceived from the same standpoint – subjective violence is experienced as such against the background of a non-violent zero-level. It is seen as a perturbation of the normal peaceful state of things. However, objective violence is precisely the violence inherent to this “normal” state of things. Objective violence is invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjective violence.

Systemic violence is thus something like the notorious “dark matter” of physics, the counterpart to an all-too-visible subjective violence. It may be invisible, but it has to be taken into account if one is to make sense of what otherwise seem to be ”irrational” explosions of subjective violence.

[…] We can discern this complicity between the “rogue states” and the Western guardians of human rights at its most radical in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is again emerging as the African heart of darkness.

The cover story of Time magazine on June 5, 2006, was “The World’s Deadliest War – a detailed documentation on how about four million people died in Congo as the result of political violence over the previous decade. None of the usual humanitarian uproar followed, just a couple of readers’ letters – as if a filtering mechanism blocked this news from achieving its full impact.

To put it cynically, Time picked the wrong victim in the struggle for hegemony in suffering; it should have stuck to the list of usual suspects: Muslim women and their plight, the oppression in Tibet.

Congo today has effectively re-emerged as a Conradian “heart of darkness” – no one dares to confront it head-on. The death of a West Bank Palestinian child, or an Israeli or an American, is worth thousands of times more to the media than the death of a nameless Congolese.

Why this ignorance? On October 30, 2008, Associated Press reported that Laurent Nkunda, the rebel general besieging Congo’s eastern provincial capital Goma, said he wanted direct talks with the government about his objections to a deal in the billions of dollars that gives China access to the country’s vast mineral riches in exchange for a railway and highway. As problematic (neocolonialist) as this deal may be, it poses a vital threat to the interests of local warlords, since its eventual success would create the infrastructural base for the Congo as a functioning united state.

In 2001, a UN investigation on the illegal exploitation of natural resources in Congo found that the conflict in the country was mainly about access, control and trade of five key mineral resources – coltan, diamonds, copper, cobalt and gold.

According to this investigation, the exploitation of Congo’s natural resources by local warlords and foreign armies is “systematic and systemic”, and the Ugandan and Rwandan leaders in particular (closely followed by Zimbabwe and Angola) had turned their soldiers into armies of business. Rwanda’s army made at least $US250 million in 18 months by selling coltan, used in mobile phones and laptops.

The report concluded that the permanent civil war and disintegration of Congo “has created a ‘win-win’ situation for all belligerents. The only loser in this huge business venture is the Congolese people.”

Beneath the facade of ethnic warfare, we thus discern the contours of global capitalism. After the fall of Mobutu Sese Seko, Congo no longer exists as a united operating state – especially its eastern part is a multiplicity of territories ruled by local warlords controlling their patch of land by an army which as a rule includes drugged children, each of the warlords with business links to a foreign company or corporation exploiting the (mostly) mining wealth in the region.

This arrangement fits both partners: the corporation gets the mining right without taxes, the warlord gets money. The irony is that many of these minerals are used in high-tech products like laptops and mobile phones – in short, forget about the savage customs of the local population, just take away from the equation the foreign high-tech companies and the whole edifice of ethnic warfare fuelled by old passions will fall apart.

Not the least irony is here that among the greatest exploiters are Rwandan Tutsis, the victims of the horrifying genocide more than a decade ago. In 2008, the Rwandan government presented many documents which demonstrated the complicity of former French president Francois Mitterrand (along with his administration) in the genocide of the Tutsis. France supported the Hutu plan for the takeover, up to arming their units, in order to regain influence in this part of Africa at the expense of the Anglophone Tutsis. France’s dismissal of the accusations as totally unfounded was itself unfounded.

Bringing Mitterrand to the Hague tribunal, even posthumously, would have been a true act: the furthest the Western legal system went in this way was the arrest of General Augusto Pinochet, already a rogue statesman. The indictment of Mitterrand would have crossed the fateful line and for the first time brought to trial a leading Western politician who pretended to act as protector of freedom, democracy and human rights. The lesson of the trial would thus have been the complicity of the Western liberal powers in what the media present as the explosion of the “authentic” Third World barbarism.

The “ethical” side of capitalism is thus the result of a complex process of ideological abstraction or obliteration. Companies dealing with raw materials extracted in suspicious conditions (using de facto slaves or child labour) effectively practice the art of “ethical cleansing”, the true business counterpart to ethnic cleansing. Through reselling, such practices obscure the origins of raw materials bought in places where the materials were produced under conditions unacceptable in the West.

There definitely is a lot of darkness in the dense Congolese jungle – but its heart lies elsewhere, in the bright executive offices of our banks and high-tech companies.

In order to truly awaken from the capitalist “dogmatic dream” (as Immanuel Kant would have put it) and see this other true heart of darkness, one should reapply to our situation Bertolt Brecht’s old quip from his The Threepenny Opera: “What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank?”

What is the stealing of a couple of thousand dollars, for which one goes to prison, compared with financial speculations which deprive tens of millions of their homes and savings, and are then rewarded by state help of sublime grandeur?

What is a Congolese local warlord compared to the enlightened and ecologically-sensitive Western top manager? Maybe Jose Saramago was right when, in a recent newspaper column, he proposed treating the big bank managers and others responsible for the meltdown as perpetrators of crimes against humanity whose place is in the Hague tribunal.

Maybe one should not treat this proposal just as a poetic exaggeration in the style of Jonathan Swift, but take it seriously.

Bosteels on Žižek

Bosteels, Bruno. The Actuality of Communism. New York: Verso, 2011.

To envision a new positive order beyond the present horizon thus requires that we take a step back to grasp the moment of genesis of order out of disorder. “In the end, teh alternative here is between idealism and materialism: is the ‘big Other’ (the ideal symbolic order) always already here as a kind of insurmountable horizon, or is it possible to deploy ts ‘genesis’ out of the dispersed ‘non-all’ network of contingent material singularities?” Žižek also asks, before answering his own question in the positive: “The answer is a definite ‘yes’ — it is contained in Lacan’s unexpected vindication of the notion of creativity at its most radical, that is, as creatio ex nihilo: by means of reference to the void of the Thing in the midst of the symbolic structure, the subject is able to ‘bend’ the symbolic space she inhabits, and thus to define his/her desire in its idiosyncrasy.”

To justify his belief in the possibility of a transformative act that would open up a new order not limited to the alternative of either the pure lack of desire or else the pure positivity of drives, Žižek thus raises the question of the originary act that brings order out of disorder and breaks with the constraints of the always already existing state of affairs. 204

Žižek the real, anamorphosis

Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp eds. The Truth of Žižek London: Continuum. 2007

With Lenin, as with Lacan, the point is that the revolution ne s’autorise que d’elle-même; one should assume the revolutionary act not covered by the big Other — the fear of taking power ‘prematurely’, the search for the guarantee, is the fear of the abyss of the act. 240

🙂 Laclau and his followers claim that every fundamental social antagonism “will always be displaced to some degree since, … antagonism can never be approached directly without political mediation.”

All we have is a series of antagonisms which (can) build a chain of equivalences, metaphorically ‘contaminating’ each other, and which antagonism emerges as ‘central’ is the contingent result of a struggle for hegemony. So does this mean that one should reject the very notion of fundamental antagonism’ (as Laclau does)? 242

In order to explicate the concept of ‘fundamental antagonism’ Žižek cites Lévi-Strauss from his Structural Anthropology. The famous example of the ZERO INSTITUTION.

the very splitting into the two ‘relative’ perceptions implies a hidden reference to a constant — not the objective, ‘actual’ disposition of buildings but a traumatic kernel, a fundamental antagonism the inhabitants of the village were unable to symbolize, to account for, to ‘internalize’ to come to terms with — an imbalance in social relations that prevented the community from stabilizing itself into a harmonious whole. The two perceptions of the ground plan are simply two mutually exclusive endeavours to cope with this traumatic antagonism, to heal its wound via the imposition of a balanced symbolic structure.

It is here one can see in what precise sense the real intervenes through anamorphosis. We have first the ‘actual’, ‘objective’, arrangement of the houses, and then its two different symbolizations which both distort in an anamorphic way the actual arrangement. However, the ‘real‘ is here not the actual arrangement, but the traumatic core of the social antagonism which distorts the tribe members’ view of the actual social antagonism. The real is thus the disavowed X on account of which our vision of reality is anamorphically distorted. It is simultaneously the thing to which direct access is not possible and the obstacle which prevents this direct access; the thing which eludes our grasp and the distorting screen which makes us miss the thing. More precisely the real is ultimately the very shift of perspective from the first to the second standpoint: the Lacanian real is not only distorted, but the very principle of distortion of reality. 243

finitude antigone

Žižek. Traversing the Fantasy eds. Boucher, Glynos, Sharpe. 2005

So what is it that this emphasis on finitude as the ultimate horizon of our existence misses? How can we assert it in a materialist way, without any resort to spiritual transcendence? The answer is, precisely, objet petite a as the ”undead” (“noncastrated”) remainder which persists in its obscene immortality. No wonder the Wagnerian heroes want so desperately to die: they want to get rid of this obscene immortal supplement which stands for libido as an organ, for drive at its most radical, i.e., death drive. In other words, the properly Freudian paradox is that what explodes the constraints of our finitude is death drive itself.

Back to the texts in ‘ the present volume: the main thing that I find problematic in Grigg’s contribution is precisely what appears the most natural thing for a psychoanalyst to do-his “clinical” reading of Antigone’s act as a gesture of hysterical provocation. Lacan, surprisingly, avoided this direction completely: there is, in his detailed reading of Antigone, no mention of repression, of the formations of the unconscious, of incestuous desires (although we are dealing here the Oedipus family, the incestuous family !) . . . And I think Lacan was right here: the dimension he is focusing on-that of the ethical act-cannot be rendered (and also not “demystifled”) in clinical terms. Furthermore, I think Grigg is wrong when he claims that Antigone “defies the law of her city in the name of her (Oedipal) law”: it is her brother’s proper burial that she insists on (as the theatre piece informs as in the lines which are often dismissed as problematic, but on whose key importance Lacan insists, it is only apropos her brother that she is ready to go to the end), and it is not clear what this has to do with the Oedipal Law.

Furthermore, we should not forget the obvious fact that we are not dealing here with just any case of the Oedipus complex, but with Oedipus himself-and, as Lacan liked to point out, the Oedipus family, precisely, was not Oedipal, and Oedipus did not suffer from the Oedipus complex.

Grigg’s other counterargument concerns the problematic status of what I call the “act of absolute freedom” which “derives its essential features (its freedom, its gratuitousness, its criminality, its unaccountability and unpredictability) from the fact that it lies outside all possible symbolic dimensions. It strikes me that not only does Antigone not conform to this requirement but also that this requirement makes an act indistinguishable from mere whimsicality. There is no objective criterion and there can clearly be no appeal to any subjective features to distinguish an act of absolute freedom from a gratuitous act.”

As I abundantly developed elsewhere (among other places in my (Ticklish Subject), such a reading of the act is wrong: what makes a certain move an act proper are not its inherent qualities but its structural place within a given symbolic network — to put it in Badiou’ s terms. an act intervenes at the point of the “symptomal torsion” of this network. This is what distinguishes an act from a mere whimsicality, and this is also why, of course, the externality of the act is absolutely internal to the symbolic order-an act is ex-timate, to use Lacan’s pun.

Antigone both Butler and Žižek reading of the act

Butler in her 1997 reading of Antigone takes her to the limits of the known, of subjectivity, of subjective destitition because she cannot be known through the symbolic. As does Žižek too. The difference is that, Žižek emphasizes the nature of the surge of subject, the emergence of a subject in the space of the rupture of the situation, of the status quo. This is the monstrous human, the neighbour as Thing, emerges in the moment of the emergence of the subject. This is why Žižek rejects any notion of Levinasian approach to the Other as a reaching out, of a ‘getting to know you’ or any such thing. That is a recipe for treating the Other not as Thing, but as de-caffinated. We can only approach the Other in the real. It’s tragic as Eagleton states, the destitution of the subject is the only way to the universal.

trieb death drive post-Hegel radical evil condition of goodness jean dupuy

An Interview with Slavoj Žižek “On Divine Self-Limitation and Revolutionary Love” Journal of Philosophy and Scripture, Volume 1, Issue 2, Spring 2004 ” Joshua Delpech-Ramey

And here is Ž man strictly talking to Trieb in Berlin March 6, 2009 at the ICI which is where the journal Cultural Inquiry originates.

But the paradox for me, as I try to develop in my work, is that death drive is a very paradoxical notion if you read Freud closely. Death drive is basically, I claim, the Freudian term for immortality. Death drive has nothing to do, as Lacan points out, convincingly, with this so-called nirvana principle where everything wants to disappear, and so on. If anything (and because of this I like to read Richard Wagner’s operas where you have this), death drive is that which prevents you from dying. Death drive is that which persists beyond life and death. Again, it’s precisely what, in my beloved Stephen King’s horror/science fiction terminology he calls the “undead”: this terrifying insistence beneath death, which is why Freud links death drive to the compulsion to repeat. You know, it can be dead, but it goes on. This terrifying insistence of an undead object.

Death Drive insists beyond life and death: Immortality

Undead [From Berlin lecture March 2009]

Negative Judgements –> Negate a predicate: He is not dead. He is alive.

Infinite Judgements –> Assert a non-predicate: He is undead (doesn’t mean alive). He’s alive as dead, living dead, a 3rd domain, an endless undead, an immortal domain emerges. This is the domain of drive.

The object of drive is not getting rid of tension but the reproduction of tension as such. What brings you satisfaction is not getting rid of tension but endless repetition of tension. A strange bad infinity.

The post-Hegelian moment: is this weird repetition for which in a way there is no place in Hegel. It is not the progressive circularity or bad spurious infinity. Kierkargard and Freud meet at the topic of repetition. Repetition that generates precisely NO AUFHEBUNG.

On the one hand Mature Marx refers to Hegel. in Grundrisse, is a postive one, Marx claims Hegel process is mystefied, but a formulation of emancipatory revolutionary process.

But later in Capital something changes, it’s more Capital itself that is formulated in terms of subject itself. With “capital” money passes from substance to subject. it becomes self-reproducing. It is endlessly repetitive as a drive. The whole goal of circulation is the reproduction/expansion of circulation itself. Marx says “capital works as an automatic subject.” It is a Hegelian subject but caught in this endlessly reproductive repetition. Thus Marx might have moved beyond Hegel here.

Another line of thought: Elevate Todestrieb into a key to understand German idealist “self-relating negativity”. Todestrieb has to be elevated to this kind of transcedental principle.

Hegel’s dialectics: The dialectic of necessity and contingency. The way Hegel is usually read according to usual doxa, Hegel admits of contingency but only as a moment of necessity, it externalizes itself in nature but then this contingency is aufhebung into necessity. Negative and contingency are allowed but as a tactical retreat. The Absolute is playing a game with itself. Ž says the reversal, it is not only necessity of contingency, global necessity realizes itself through multiple contingencies, but there is also Contingency of Necessity.

There is a contingent process of how necessity emerges out of contingency. The French, rational-choice theorist Jean-Pierre Dupuy. Drew attention to “something contingently becomes necessary”. It’s contingent whether a thing happens or not, but once it happens, it happens necessarily.

A new event retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility. An impossible event takes place, once it happens it is instantly domesticated and retroactively appears as possible and is naturalized.

First I saw the film, Billy Bathgate I was disappointed by the film. After I saw the film, I saw how the film missed the novel, the film was a bad copy. Then I read the novel, the novel was even worse. The very repetition creates the 3rd point of reference. 1+1=3. First you have a shitty novel, then a shitty film, the bad copy of the novel retroactively creates the possibility of how it could have been a good film or novel.

Deleuze’s Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition: Deleuze gives the best explanation to death drive that Žižek has ever read. Paradox of Freud: the renunciation of enjoyment generates enjoyment in the very act of renunciation. You renounce desire, but then you get libidinally attached to the very rituals of renouncing desire.

Death drive in Deleuze’s reading is not a specific drive, it does this self-sabotaging thing. The space of desire is curved. You don’t go directly at it. Death drive is nothing but the transcendental principle of “lust principe” What is human sexuality formally? It is not simple pleasure. But pleasure got in the postponement and return and repetition … for example if I keep repeating the shaking of your hand I don’t let go, the very repetition eroticizes it in an obscene way. Death drive doesn’t have an autonomous reality, it is not, “I want pleasure but secretly I want to torture,” Death drive is this transcendental distortion which complicates my access to pleasure.

Ž disagrees strongly with Freud here on eros/thanatos and says Freud really backed away from his discovery. Žižek says this good constructive Eros versus bad destructive death drive (Todestrieb) is total bunk. Love is a catastrophe, it’s totally destructive. One point of obsession and everything is ruined, literally out of joint. Love is totally paradoxical focusing all of your life, the whole world is thrown out of balance, love is radically destabilizing. I’m passionately in love and ready to risk everything for it. Insistence on a particularity, you are ready to go to the end.

Antigone is pure death drive: I insist on this particular point I am ready to put at stake everything for it. Death drive is the ethics at its zero level. It resides in this paradoxical domain where good coincides with radical evil. A detailed reading of Kant and Schelling later work on religion. Kant proposes there the notion of radical evil. He steps back though. First he proposes to read radical evil as diabolical evil. If for Kant you can be good out of principle. Then why cannot you be evil out of principle? Not just good, but evil as well. But then the whole distinction between good and evil falls apart. You are evil without any pathological possibility, you are just evil.

Mozart’s Don Giovanni: Commandatore, tells Giovanni, repent. Giovanni knows he will die, Commandatore tries to save Giovanni, if yo urepent you will be saved in after life. From standpoint of rational calculus Giovanni should agree. But Giovanni says no. He acts out of pure fidelity to Evil. It’s not pathological, no personal gain. This is the greatness of Kant, he goes very far in this direction.

Death drive is the radical non-pathological evil, which is transcendental apriori of every possible form of goodness.

Kant withdraws, says we don’t have diabolical evil only radical evil which is simply a tendency of human nature which is not fulfilling your duty. But Lacan reads Kant with Sade. The point of Lacan, Sade is a Kantian. The Sadian imperative of unconditional jouissance, it goes beyond the pleasure principle. It’s non-pathological.

Sade proposes purely Kantian idea of ‘radical crime’ that doesn’t simply follow natural impulses, but a crime which breaks with the chain of natural causality, a crime literally against nature itself. Freedom that breaks the phenomenal chain of natural causality. The paradox that Kant and Schelling struggle with is this obscure domain where radical evil is apriori condition of goodness.

Antigone: you must have this radical excess of evil if you want to go to the end. From the sympathetic human point it is Ismene who is human warm, Antigone is an aggressive bitch. Creon is right, he basically says, if we publicly do the funeral old hatreds will explode again, we’ll fall into civil war. Antigone’s counter-argument is so what? It is pure insistance. It is just pure insistence, “I want, I want“.

Žižek wants to present another Antigone, where she succeeds and Creon lets her bury her brother, the whole city is ruined, the last scene Antigone “I was created for love not for hatred” where blood and death is now all around her.

Stalinist version: Antigone and Creon are fighting and Chorus intervenes like a committee for public safety and proclaims a popular dictatorship.

Death Drive as radical evil as a condition of goodness.

Shraing Illusions: We make fun of soemthing, denounce illusions as illusions, but nonetheless they work.

Ž mentions Logic of Capital School at beginning of part II.

******

Point two: The big breakthrough of Heidegger is to totally reconceptualize the notion of finitude. Already we have this in the early Heidegger with special reference to Kant. Already you see precisely how the other of finitude, the big stuff—infinity, eternity, and so on—is a category, modality, horizon of finitude. This was, for Heidegger, Kant’s big breakthrough: transcendental as opposed to transcendent is a category of finitude. All this somehow gets lost, in Badiou.

[But] the whole category of “event” works only from the category of finitude. There are events only in finite situations. You can prove it only from his own position. Only for a finite being do you have this infinite work, what he likes to describe, in Christian terms, this trinity of faith, hope, love. Faith that the event did take place, hope in the final state (in Christianity universal redemption, in Marxism I don’t know, communism at the end) and love as work, as what is between the two, fidelity to the event and so on.

But . . . when in his last work, Badiou tries to articulate the structure of totalitarian danger, he calls “forcing the event,” which means simply to ontologize the event, as if the event were not an infinite process whose place you have to discern in reality, as if the event totally permits its irrealities.

But the gap between event and reality, that which is covered up by totalitarianism, is precisely the gap of finitude—so there is something missing at this level in Badiou.

[…] there is a certain dimension of Christianity which … is missed, I think, by Badiou, because of his overall view that there is no place for finitude, as for example in his critique of Heidegger where he misses the point. He even goes into this mode where being-toward-death is just the animal level of being threatened . . . although I don’t identify Heidegger’s being-toward death with death drive, Badiou is also missing that, because he cannot elevate finitude to its transcendental a priori dignity. He remains precisely, at a certain level, a pre-kantian metaphysician.