Category: the act

pluth signifiers signs signfieds chapter 2

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s theory of the subject New York: SUNY Press, 2007.

Traces … were self-sufficient. Signs implied the ruin of this self-sufficiency by subordinating traces to objects. Signifers go even farther: signifiers are not dependent upon merely one object but upon every other signifier. For this reason, it is not entirely appropriate to speak of a signifier “referring” to other signifiers: it does not refer to them as a sign refers to an object. Rather, all other signifiers absorb it, and its particularity is always vanishing because of this absorption.

What is being described in this movement from traces to signs to signifiers is a movement from the self-sufficiency of the trace to the referential structure of the sign to the radical difference constitutive of the signifier. Of course, this radical difference could just as well be called a “hyper referentiality” … A signifier’s reference is not to a specific object or to a specific sign but to all other signifiers, or to the mere fact that signifiers exist (26).

The signifier then is a purely meaningless and purely differential unity, and unlike the trace, it is not self-sufficient but hyper-referential (29).

Although there may never be a strict union of signifier and signified, signifiers, according to Lacan, give the impression that there is meaning somewhere, however elusive it may be.  In fact, this is precisely what signifiers do: they give an impression of meaning (30).

… signifiers are not signs. They originate in a destruction of the one-to-one reference that is constitutive of signs.  Also signifiers are constituted by difference, and their uniqueness consists of their difference from other signifiers … A signifier is moreover, meaningless.  … So whatever meaning is, it is not reducible to or identifiable with a particular signifier.  According to Lacan, signifiers generate a signified effect or meaning effect that cannot itself be situated within the order of signfiiers (30).

This unfixed meaning effect or signified effect is produced by an interaction of signifiers with each other in what Lacan calls … a signifying chain (30).

A signifiying chain is nothing other than a succession of signifiers.

pluth ego ideal

Pluth, Ed. Signifers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.

Blog post originally published on May 15, 2009 at 9:56

The ego ideal is the symbolic or linguistic foundation of identification.  It plays, in the symbolic order, roughly the same role that the mirror image plays in the imaginary order —it is something the ego strives to be but is not. 52

Driving around in a sports car to “piss daddy off.”  What is at stake here is the signifier “father.”  That is, even though they set themselves up in a defiant relation to the ego ideal, the ego ideal is still for them the point of view from which they have a place and are “seen” by the Other, and this is still, whether they are seen by the Other as good or bad, narcissistically satisfying.  Defiant or not, the common factor here is that in these examples they remain seen by the Other, and their actions occur entirely within the Other’s scope.  Indeed, their actions are for the Other, even when they appear to be against the Other (53).

What is important here is the notion that the ego ideal is a signifier in the Other from whose “point of view” the individual is given meaning and a place.  … In Lacan’s revision of the mirror stage, the child is compelled or encourged to identify its mirror image (ideal ego) as itself by a parent (or someone else) saying something like “That’s you Jimmy! Yes it is!”

The child finds that it has a place ein this symbolic Other by means of the Other’s affirmation of a place for the child. The child is told by the Other what he or she is (54).

pluth signifiers generate a signified effect

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s theory of the subject New York: SUNY Press, 2007.

Certainly, unlike a sign, a signifier is not fixed to a particular object, but in its inclusion withn a system of other signifiers there is still an extreme form of reference at work. A signifier’s reference is not to a specific object or to a specific sign but to all other signifiers, or to the mere fact that signifiers exist (26).

According to Lacan’s view, there are nothing but signifiers and signified effects in language (29).

The signifier then is a purely meaningless and purely differential unity, and … not self-sufficient but hyper-referential.  As such, it is also distinguished from the sign, whose reference is more or less fixed.

Although Lacan rejects the Saussurean notion of the sign — a union of signifier and signified — this does not prevent him from granting that some sort of signified effect is an important aspect of language.  Although there may never be a strict union of signifer and signified, signifiers, according to Lacan, give the impression that there is meaning somewhere, however elusive it may be.  In fact, this is precisely what signifiers do: they give an impression of meaning. (30)

A signifier is, moreover, meaningless. Since Lacan rejects the notion that a signifier and signified (meaning) are united in a single unit, meaning is never ultimately pinned to a signifier. So whatever meaning is, it is not reducible to or identifiable with a particular signifier (30).

According to Lacan,  signifiers generate a signified effect or meaning effect that cannot itself be situated within the order of signifiers.

pluth the real

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s theory of the subject New York: SUNY Press, 2007.

Does the real always mean the presymbolic?

2 versions of the real in Lacan’s work:

  1. real1, prior to the acquisition of language, which is “progressively symbolized” in the course of the child’s life
  2. second order real (real2) which is an effect of the symbolic order itself

Real2 is not outside the symbolic, as real1 seems to be. This second-order real is characterized by impasses and impossibilities that occur in the symbolic order itself.

The real can only be inscribed on the basis of an impasse of formalization (Seminar XX)

Instead of being a field of referents that language aims at, this version of the real is a stumbling block in the field of signification itself (17).

pluth on signifiers and subject of lacan the real

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: freedom in Lacan’s theory of the subject, New York: SUNY Press, 2007.  Print.

🙂 Lacan who not only subverts the subject but then he RETHOUGHT the subject but his critics are out there: Borch-Jacobson is saying that although Lacan’s subject is not EXTERNAL to language (that would be too Cartesian), so he says that Lacan’s subject is the same as language.

A persistent theme in Lacan’s discussions of the subject is the view that the subject is an effect of signifiers, and so B-J is right to wonder whether the subject is anything other than language. B-J does not consider, however, that thinking of the subject as an effect does not have to mean that the subject is somehow immanent in, rather than external to, language . I will be arguing that Lacan’s subject is an effect of language, but an effect that remains external to, and not reducible to, language.  This is because the subject is not simply an effect of signifiers but an effect of signifiers themselves interacting with something nonlinguistic: sexuality (12).

The subject is in part “in” the Other but is also not in the Other: in other words, the subject has an important relation to language, but it is also external to language in some way. … the subject is not identitcal to language (14).

[T]he subject is portrayed [by Lacan] as something articulated between two poles. One of the poles is language, while the other pole remains a bit vague (15).

It will turn out that the subject is produced not only by an interaction of signifiers but by an interaction of signfiers with something nonlinguistic. Although the subject is not identical to either of the poles Lacan considers here, each pole designates something that is involved in the production of a subject — and language alone does not suffice (15-16).

[T]he production of the subject by signifiers needs to be complemented with an appreciation of a particular type of obstacle to signification.  … it would be not erroneous to understand this second pole in terms of sexuality … (16).

One way to get at this second pole, nevertheless, is to consider the idea that there is something of the body that does not fit with the “socialized” body, the body that is overwritten with signifiers.

Saying that a body is overwritten with signifiers suggests that ther is something prior to signifiers on which the writing occurs, something that gets besieged by signfiers at some moment of its existence. This could be thought of as a body prior to the body that is linguistically and socially carved up, thus a body that is presymbolic and perhaps to be thought of in terms of what Lacan called the real (16-17).

Whatever term is settled upon, the category under which this organism or body is to be thought is the real, and not the symbolic (17).

pluth Other

Renata Salecl suggests that our historical moment is characterized both by the the collapse of … an Other, of a subject-supposed-to-know, and by a variety of attempts to reestablish some kind of full, “premodern” Other …is it possible to accept somehow that the Other does not know, while avoiding the temptation to “save” the Other from this fate.

Is it at all possible for us to act socially and individually in such a way that we do not either implicitly rely on a notion of an Other who knows, or implicitly expect the reestablishment of such an Other?

Žižek Tilton Gallery NYC nov 2006

Can one really tolerate a neighbour

the symptom pre-exists what it is a symptom of

If a woman is a symptom, she is walking around, do you want me to be your symptom
Pure symptom: a nun, a radical feminine position, I will be a pure symptom
Man need a symptom to be
Film DaVinci Code: The girl is frigid, totally de-sexualized. She witnessed the primordial sin, saw her grandfather in some pagan sin.  So jesus has to copulate to cover up that she doesn’t.
Solution: She accepts her role as leader of group who believe in her.  A passage from eros to agape, from eros to political love.
Abyss of subjectivity: elementary reaction is FEAR, especially today, the inexistence of the big Other is more apparent than ever, not only language, but also ecology, is disappearing.  The moment through genome and bio manipulations, the moment you can manipulate nature this way, it is no l onger nature in the sense of dense impenatrability.
If somone fucks with your inner nature, they violate your freedom, no its much more radical … the ultimate horror, modern science can produce new forms of monstors, not just observe.
Nonetheless behind all this is fear of the neigbour.  The big problem today is to control this dimension of the neighbour.

The neighbour INTRUDES. Unlike Sam Harris who can happily promote torture because the dimension of the neighbour gets LOST. So Sam can just go ahead and treat humans as just a calculus of ok I toruture you here to prevent greater suffering.  the dimension of the neighbour gets lost.

All outbursts get lost, is outburst against the neighbour.  Since we are still neighbours within our own symbolic universes, own ways of enjoyment.  So what we need today is not more communication but more distance, a new code of discretion, to ignore others more.
Our solution to deal with proximity of the neighbour is Tolerance which Zizek HATES.
He criticizes Wendy Brown, but likes her book, Regulating Aversion.
He talks about Martin Luther King who didn’t use ‘tolerance’ as a category, same with feminism, they don’t ask to be ‘tolerated’.  Tolerance is a depoliticized politics.  MLK was inequality, poverty which demands political solutions.
Brown develops the culturalization of political differences, political differences translated into cultural differences, into different ways of life.
Fukuyama and Huntington Clash of Civilizations, are same don’t contribute, class of civilizations is politics at the ‘end of history’.  politics is rational administration, the only true passionate conflicts are conflicts of culture.

Critique of Brown: They remain caught in too primitive critique of ideology: denouncing the false universality
What appears to be a neutral notion, privledges a certain culture, human rights are not real human rights they privledge male straight males.  Zizek doesn’t subscribe to this.

Of course there is a gap, universal human rights and hwo they function.  this gap has POSITIVE aspects, we can REWRITE IT, mary wollstencraft rewrote it, the blacks in Haiti after the French Rev.

2. If you read closely Hegel it’s that this is only 1 side of the story, of denouncing universality as false universality, blah blah

– We also have the opposite mystification which is more interesting: something you percieve is only your particular interest is already universal dimension.

The cunning of reason, you think you are just following your narrow interests, you don’t see the universal dimension of your acts.

As capitalist subject, you are universal in your own individual self experience, you relate to yourself as self as universal.

My profession is being a knight or a serf, this is absurd they didn’t see themselves as a profession

you yourself experience yourself in the core of your being as universal, whenever capitalism spreads, from within it undermines each culture.  Chinese discovered this and now are using capitalism to destroy their culture instead of the primitive way of using guns that didn’t work.

Foreign cultures appear stupid to me, what from

Experience your own identity as ultimately contingent.  there is no authentic liberation, there is no feminism,

the way to break out of neighbour, abbyss otherness, should we tolerate it or not

EMBRACE this radical universality … in the form of a struggle.  Not that I’m in my culture and you in yours, it’s that what I want to share with you is our shared intolerances, the only universality I share with you is universality of struggle.  My own particular identity, I am not fully myself, in the very core of my identity is a universality that surpasses me, that’s what gives us some hope, that we are not only more particular than we think, even when you think you are immersed in your culture you are UNIVERSAL

SOLIPSISM is FALSE.

THE UNIVERSAL ETHICS IS KANTIAN ETHICS

IMMORAL ETHICS: It doesn’t matter what you do, by fully engaged. No that’s not Zizek.

Kantian Ethics is for Zizek.  there is no BIg other, you cant put on big other to tell you your duty, YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR IT.  A Good Kantian cannot say, what can I do I just obeyed my duty, you are NOT ALLOWED to use duty as excuse to do your duty.  No you have to fully stand behind your duty.  You can’t say I was only doing my duty.

Problem of tolerance:

TERROR!
Abandon that what you are afraid to lose, Accept the loss become UNIVERSAL

You are afraid to lose your particular identity, maybe what you are protecting is in itself worthless, ABANDON THAT

So what a minor disturbance in the solar system.

Don’t fear be calm, things will get better: NO it’s not this, there is no BIG OTHER, it doesn’t exist, we are in the abyss there are no guarantees.

ABC good radical ecology; there is no natural balance, there is no way to return.  Nature as balanced homeostasis HA, Nature is one big catastrophe, what is oil, one big catastrophe of unimaginable proportions.

If all human industry to stop, earth is so adapted to it, it would cause a catastrophe.

Violent Imposition of Universal Will: ecological crisis, other crisis, the way to beat phenomena like Bush, is not through local resistances, don’t buy the pomo poetry, no longer capitalism from top down, but decentralized, multiple agents, multiple sites of resistance.

NO we must reassert BIG COLLECTIVE decisions.  we have a struggle, you have a struggle, lets see if we can join our struggles, our universality is universality of struggles.
We will need to assert big collective decisions.  The capitalist state is getting bigger and stronger.  State mechanisms military spending, economy these are all state interventions.  More than ever the state is crucial.

If I were to choose American or Chinese model of capitalism,

Žižek concrete universality

I’m interested in this Hegelian concept because I believe now that it is the key that will help me unlock how Žižek will explain Lacanian critique of Laclau (Populism) and Butler (Performativity)

Go here to get the extended critique of Laclau, but I think this is also in his book Parallax View

Book on Žižek by Rex Butler

From Žižek’s article on Lacan.com

The Universal is not the encompassing container of the particular content, the peaceful medium-background of the conflict of particularities; the Universal “as such” is the site of an unbearable antagonism, self-contradiction, and (the multitude of) its particular species are ultimately nothing but so many attempts to obfuscate/reconcile/master this antagonism. In other words, the Universal names the site of a Problem-Deadlock, of a burning Question, and the Particulars are the attempted but failed Answers to this Problem.  The concept of State, for instance, names a certain problem: how to contain the class antagonism of a society? All particular forms of State are so many (failed) attempts to propose a solution to this problem.

Parallax View 34-35, Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic 49, Less Than Nothing 782

butler frames of war

Judith Butler, Frames of War. New York: Verso, 2009.

The point, however will be to ask how such norms operate to produce certain subjects as “recognizable” persons and to make others decidedly more difficult to recognize. The problem is not merely how to include more people within existing norms, but to consider how existing norms allocate recognition differentially. What new norms are possible, and how are they wrought? What might be done to produce a more egalitarian set of conditions for recognizability? What might be done, in other words, to shift the very terms of recognizability in order to produce more radically democratic results? 6

Indeed, every normative instance is shadowed by its own failure, and very often that failure assumes a figural form. The figure lays claim to no certain ontological status, and though it can be apprehended as “living,” it is not always recognized as a life.

What one is pressing for, calling for, is not a sudden break with the entirety of a past in the name of a radically new future. The “break” is nothing other than a series of significant shifts that follow from the iterable structure of the norm. 169.

aboriginal women in canada

That hundreds of aboriginal women can disappear without any popular concern or consternation is proof they lack recognition as properly human.  For Canada to take conscious note of the plight of aboriginal woman requires a mutation in the modality of the liberal subject.  To this extent, Antigone is not the thousands of Aboriginal women who remain nameless, faceless, less than human, Antigone has yet to arrive.  Antigone will emerge simultaneous with a new field of the human, that is when a properly political act succeeds in rupturing the facade of the symbolic, when an aboriginal woman emerges so as to appear monstrous, psychotic, a true ‘terrorist’ of theCanadian way of life.

News article here Sept 4 2009

Žižek the act

Žižek, Slavoj. Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle. New York: Verso, 2004.

‘Acts’ in Lacan’s sense … are ‘impossible’ not in the sense of ‘it is impossible that they might happen’, but in the sense of the impossible that did happen. This is why Antigone was of interest to me: her act is not a strategic intervention which maintains the gap towards the impossible Void; rather, it tends to enact the impossible ‘absolutely’.  I am well aware of the ‘lure’ of such an act — but I claim that, in Lacan’s later versions of the act, this moment of ‘madness’ beyond strategic intervention remains.  In this precise sense, the notion of the act not only does not contradict the ‘lack in the “other’ which, according to Stavrakakis, I overlook — it directly presupposes it: it is only through an act that I effectively assume the big Other’s nonexistence, that is, I enact the impossible: namely, what appears as impossible within the co-ordinates of the existing socio-symbolic order (80).

There are (also) political acts, for politics cannot be reduced to the level of strategic-pragmatic interventions.  In a radical political act, the opposition between ‘crazy’ destructive gesture and a strategic political decision momentarily breaks down — which is why it is theoretically and politically wrong to oppose strategic political acts, risky as they may be, to radical ‘suicidal’ gestures  á la Antigone: gestures of pure self-destructive ethical insistence with, apparently, no political goal. The point is not simply that, once we are thoroughly engaged in a political project, we are ready to put everything at stake for it, including our lives; but, more precisely, that only such an ‘impossilble’ gesture of pure expenditure can change the very co-ordinates of what is strategically possible within a historical constellation. This is the key point: an act is neither a strategic intervention in the existing order, nor its ‘crazy’ destructive negation; an act is an ‘excessive’, transstrategic intervention which redefines the rules and contours of the existing order (80-81).

… the utopia of a harmonious society is a kind of fantasy which conceals the structural ‘lack in the Other’ (irreducible social antagonism), and in so far as the aim of psychoanalytic treatment is to traverse the fantasy — that is to say, to make the analysand accept the nonexistence of the big Other — is the radical democratic politics whose premises is that ‘society doesn’t exist’ (Laclau) not eo ipso a post-fantasmatic politics? (108-109) … There is a whole series of problems with this line (Stavrakakis and Laclau) of reasoning.  First, in its rapid rejection of utopia, it leaves out of the picture the main utopia of today, which is the utopia of capitalism itself … (109)

🙂 Note to Stavrakakis and his article on fantasy and the EU:

The democratic subject, which emerges through a violent abstraction from all its particular roots and determinations, is the Lacanian barred subject, $, which is as such foreign to — incompatible with — enjoyment (111).

So when Laclau and Mouffe complain that only the Right has the requisite passion, is able to propose a new mobilizing Imaginary, while the Left merely administers, what they fail to see is the structural necessity of what they perceive as a mere tactical weakness of the Left. … The only passion is the rightist defence of Europe — al the leftist attempts to infuse the notion of united Europe with political passion (like the Habermas-Derrida initiative) fail to gain momentum.  The reason for this failure is precisely the absence of the ‘critique of political economy’: the only way to account for the shifts described by Stavrakakis (the recent crisis of democracy, etc.) is to relate them to what goes on in contemporary capitalism.

The fundamentalist’ attachment to jouissance is the obverse, the fantasmatic supplement, of democracy itself (113).

Žižek

Today we have two global models: American-style capitalism and Asian-style capitalism. I don’t want to live in a world where these are the only choices. So Europe interests me more in a negative way. I don’t have such a great trust in underdeveloped countries. I think that many of them desire to enter some kind of exploitative symbiosis with the super developed countries. I think that if something new emerges, it will be from post-industrial countries that were once the centre of industrial production but are now still living in the shadows. I am thinking of the ones that haven’t yet found a way to fit into the newly emerging global constellation. This is for me the interesting thing about Europe. Obviously, with the way globalization is progressing at the moment, Europe is the loser. But I think that all historical progress goes like this. The loser has to be reinvented in order to redefine the global coordinates.

Democracy today works like a fetish that prevents us from seeing something. In this sense, democracy does not need to be rejected but questioned instead. What does democracy mean How does it function today It’s crucial to somehow confront and question this pseudo post-modern ideology of “emerging properties” and “spontaneous self-organization.” It is more than obvious that this functions as ideology. But this is only one side of it. The other side is the unheard-of strengthening of state apparatuses. The United States has emerged as an extremely strong organized state apparatus which is engaged in a very global project of war and terror. It is necessary for us to break this pseudo postmodern spell of self-organization and instead rehabilitate the logic of large collective actions. Why not even collective discipline I think we are all too infected with this postmodern liberal ideology that posits collective discipline as proto-fascist.

My only optimism comes from my pessimism. What I am saying is that capitalism is generating tensions and catastrophic potentials within its own field. It will not be able to maintain control indefinitely. As a result, we will be forced to act in a utopian way. True utopia is not: “Oh, we’re doing well but why don’t we dream of doing even better” For me, true utopia is born out of being in a totally desperate situation where you simply cannot survive within the existing coordinates and it becomes a matter of survival to invent something new. I think that we will be forced into this. But, of course, that’s no guarantee that the result will be positive.