Zupančič review of McGowan

“Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets” by Todd McGowan Reviewed by Alenka Zupančič

Continental Thought and Theory. Volume 1 | Issue 3: Feminism 757-761 | ISSN: 2463-333X http://ctt.canterbury.ac.nz

Relying on some fundamental theses of psychoanalytic (Freudian and Lacanian) theory, McGowan proposes the following argument: the signifying structure is consubstantial with a loss/lack which induces and forms the logic of desire: no object can fully satisfy the latter, because they all function as stand-ins for the impossible lost object.

Here’s a McGowan quote from his article on Trump and the movie Citizen Kane

Entry into language – the subjection to the signifier – produces a lacking subject,

Entry into language – the subjection to the signifier – produces a lacking subject, a subject with desires that cannot be realized. These desires provide satisfaction through their non-realization rather than their realization, through the repetition of failure that characterizes desire.

Whenever the subject finds a particular object that promises to fulfill its desire, it quickly moves on to another object. No object proves fully satisfying because no object can be the object – the object that embodies what the subject feels that it has lost. In the guise of a search for a variety of empirical objects, the subject seeks out a non-existent lost object that would provide it the ultimate satisfaction.

The failure of desire is the result of the type of object that desire hinges on. It is not a present object but an absent one. Even though one cannot see an absence, one can nonetheless recognize the satisfaction that derives from what isn’t there. This is what psychoanalysis unlocks but what capitalist subjectivity forces us to disavow because it would shatter the illusion that gives the commodity its allure.

The defining trauma for subjectivity is its inability to separate lack from excess. Our capacity for excessive enjoyment is inextricably linked to our status as lacking subjects.

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Zupančič interview

As a philosopher, what is it that interests you in psychoanalysis, and why?

Psychoanalysis is not simply a therapeutic practice. It is – perhaps above all – a stunning conceptual invention that made this new practice possible. In this sense, psychoanalysis is also something that “happened” to philosophy and that philosophy cannot remain indifferent to, as if nothing happened there. But this implies of course that – as Lacan put it somewhere – “psychoanalysis is not psychology”. For me this means that psychoanalysis is not a regional science of human being, but concerns, and has something to say about, the very constitution of subjectivity, also in its profound philosophical sense. Lacan’s “return to Freud” involved an extremely serious engagement with philosophy, the whole history of philosophy, as a means of showing and conceptualizing what is so new, or different about Freud. Psychoanalysis is not simply a move “beyond” philosophy; in many ways, philosophy itself has always been a move beyond (previous) philosophy…

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Adrian Johnston 2019 Interview

New Books in French Studies Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism. The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy Volume 1 .

We are religious where we believe ourselves to be secular and secular where we believe ourselves religions. View of nature is religious, monotheistic, renamed God, Nature. Nature is omniscient, omnipotent, all-controlling. Atheistic materialists talk about nature is a re-named version of God of traditional montheism. Economy, the way we treat the economy is religious, the economy is God. When you look at religion, it becomes this-world sectarian identity politics. Religion has become an emblem, cultural identitarianism.

Lacan

Lacanian materialism: atheism doesn’t necessarily imply materialism. Materialism is a necessary but not sufficient condition for atheism. History of materialist thought 18th C. French materialists, Dolbach, Diderot, what you see is atheism involves insisting it is nature not God, that is responsible for reality. They move from God to nature, reassign attributes formerly of God, now attribute to nature.

A subsequent step is required, moving from Strong Nature (Old God) and showing that nature is itself not unified totality, harmonious whole, guarantor, de-theologizing nature. It is a fragmented multitude, the don’t all stand together in a grand scheme. Negation of the negation: negate God, then negate the god-like nature.

Human nature: core of who and what we are, ultimately determined and rests upon a bedrock a natural foundation, evolution, genetics, DNA, ultimately is determinative of who and what we are. Something fixed, firm, immutable, unalterable core, part of us from birth. Neuro-plasticity, this picture is scientifically speaking, untenable. The configuration of our central nervous system, the brain is pre-programmed to be re-programmed. We are by nature inclined by the dominance of nurture over nature. Within biology itself, we have a natural scientific discipline, biology alone is insufficient for who and what we are. This is coming from within the natural sciences themselves. Within the life sciences and intra-scientific immanent critique.

Rapprochement between Lacanianism meta-psychological framework and resources offered by neuro-sciences. Pre-history 1, human history prior to language and recorded history. Pre-history 2, natural history, long pre-dates human history. Lacan during 1950s, whatever is beyond language, we can know nothing. Ontogenetic level, our life-history, prior to language, is unknowable. Phylogenetic level, natural history prior to history of human species, before appearance of human, we cannot say anything.

Daniel Lord Smail’s deep history. Pushes back against approaches to human history, that only starts talking about history when we have recorded history. Deep history, human history goes much further back than when we mark the beginnings of recorded history. The biblical sense of history, is disguised as secular mode of history. We continue to be religious even though we think we are operating in secular fashion. Well one fine day exnihilo language appeared and history began.

Alain Badiou

Badiou’s recourse to Plato. What we need to do is develop a combo of Plato and materialism. Plato is a proto-commie. Johnston is an Aristotle guy more than Plato. Johnston is unconvinced. Badiou’s topic of Nature in Being and Event. The version of nature he denies there are no fundamental unities, Being is just a series of proliferating multiplicities without end. One-less ontology. Banishing the One. Exorcising the spectres of Nature as unity and totality, Johnston likes this part. But disagrees when Badiou says even though Nature is not One-All, it is a domain of lawful regularity, Nature is set of structure and dynamics, consistent, a predictable, business as usual. A vision of Nature as eternally re-occurring order, lawful regularity. For Johnston, nature is a lot less lawful, and contains internal differentiations within itself, various levels of emergence.

Democratic Materialism: complicit with late capitalism. A set of ideologies that are pervasive, relativism, culturalism, social constructivism, human reality is this diverse array of different linguistic and cultural universes, different fields of meaning, sometimes compatible, sometimes incompatible, diversity, no possibility for anyone to appeal to Truth, Universal, Eternal. Everything is relative, a matter of context etc.

Materialist Dialectics: How to develop a materialism that allows you to account for things associated with Truth, Universality, eternity, infinity. How to account for history immanent genesis, once they arrive in history, cease to be localizable within context. The foundations of arithmetic and geometry, those foundation laid in ancient Greek world, in a specific historical context, even though we can trace the origins to specific time and place, can’t just be reduced to origins, but trans-historical, eternal validity. This happens in various domains in human history, once it comes on the scene, can’t just be treated as fleeting historical thing among others. It becomes Universal.

Neuroscience, Badiou compares it to phrenology. Map 1-1 correspondences between brain and humans features. Epigenetics and neuroplasticity. Kluge model of the brain, contraption held together, improvised, haphazard. Brain is product of haphazard evolutionary history, components and sub-components slapped together as result of contingent evolutionary history. Awkward components that don’t work well together.

Quentin Meillassoux

Existence of earth before humans. Challenging a long standing dominant tendency in continental philosophy back to Kant. You have this line of orientation philosophically, anything knowable, that can count as existing for us humans is dependent on our subjectivity. The scope of our knowledge is mediated by our subjectivity. All knowledge, what counts for us as reality is dependent on us. This is idealism. You can problematise this, what about fossils. They long predate rise of homo sapiens and even sentient beings with conscious awareness. Basically you get answers as awkward and implausible from idealists.

Meillassoux relies on Hume’s problem of induction. Human purports to show causal analysis, seeks to demonstrate, we are never entitled to say a given pattern we see as cause-effect is an eternal natural law, inviolable cause-effect structure. Hume points out human beings are never able to test for the eternal validity of our hypotheses of laws of causality. Can only say highly probably, but can never say absolutely certain. We can never be sure we have direct insight into minded dependent causality. Meillassoux takes this Hume and transubstantiates ignorance into insight. Hume takes this as epistemological matter, instead treat it as insight into a real absence of causal necessity in nature and reality itself. There are NO eternally valid causal laws, for Meillassoux, this leads to HYPER CHAOS. any moment what we take to be laws of nature could be different.

Newtonian universe to post-Newtonian. For some unknown reason, nature at turn of century, shifted from being a Newtonian to post-Newtonian universe. this is disastrous for scientific thinking. Instead of scientists based on anomalies of scientific paradigm, and changing the via description and theoretical labour a shift to a new post-Newtonian paradigm Meillassoux according to Johnston, would hold that the universe and nature somehow changed in the early 20th Century. Hmm.

Badiou: Joint shared fidelity to legacy of radical leftism. Badiou is lead by his fundamental philosophical framework and sidelines 3 dimensions central to Johnston’s approach: marginalizes biology, and life sciences, Badiou is a communist but not a Marxist, economics and politics involving the state are central references, but economy and the state, but Badiou disregards economy and the state. For Johnston, the most valuable elements are Marx’s philosophical anthropology is all important, and with Slavoj Žižek totally disagree with Badiou, the centrality of the economy to our entire sociopolitical existence must be taken into account. Johnston also considers the state a central focus of struggle.

Thinking Sex with Alenka Zupančič

Continental Thought and Theory. Vol 2, Issue 2, August 2018

Object-Disoriented Ontology; or, the Subject of What Is Sex?
Russell Sbriglia

Can there be a serious materialism without the subject — that is, without a strong concept of the subject?

The subject names an object that is precisely not just an object among others” is “the whole point.”

The subject “is not simply an object among many objects, it is also the form of existence of the contradiction, antagonism, at work in the very existence of objects as objects …

The subject exists among objects, yet it exists there as the point that gives access to a possible objectivation of their inner antagonism, its inscription into their reality.”

And here we arrive at why the subject is both inextricable from and indispensable to Lacanian materialism: the subject is “not simply the one who thinks,” but who, above all, “makes certain contradictions accessible to thought,” the one through which “these contradictions [in being] appear as a ‘matter of thought.’” Subtract the “‘matter of thought’” that is the subject, and “it is difficult to speak of materialism

In short, the subject stands for the radical negativity, the radical out-of-jointness, of reality (in) itself, the hole in reality that renders being unwhole, disoriented — or, even better, like the topological figures Lacan was so fond of invoking (the torus, Möbius strip, cross-cap, Klein bottle, etc.), non-orientable.

Zupančič Stand Up For Comedy

This paper was written for the conference “Beyond the Joke: Psychoanalysis and Comedy”, which took place at Freud Museum, London, in May 2019.

We live in times when comedy—and especially comedy with an edge—is often threatened from the right and from the left. Maybe even more so from the left: as Angela Nagle has pointed out, we’ve been witnessing lately a curious turn in which the new populist right is taking the side of transgression and rebellion, traditionally associated with the left: they talk about breaking the taboos (of speech, but also of conduct), they dare to speak up, say the forbidden things, challenge the established structures (including the media) and denounce the “elites”.

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Zupančič Odd One In

The subject’s universe will really change only at the moment when she attains the knowledge that the Other knows (that it does not exist).

In psychoanalysis (if it is worthy of its name) the main problem also does not lie simply in the subject becoming conscious of her unconscious, of all that (often painfully) determines her actions and experiences.

This is insufficient: the main problem is precisely how to shift and change the very symbolic and imaginary structures in which this unconscious is embodied outside herself, in the manner and rituals of her conduct, speech, relations to others — in certain situations that keep “happening” to her.

In short, it is not simply that in analysis the subject has to shift her position (or even adapt herself ); the major part of the analytic work consists precisely in shifting the external practices, in moving all those “chickens” in which the subject’s unconscious (and her relation to herself ) are externalized.

And one of the major obstacles that can occur in analysis is precisely that the subject can become all too eager to change herself and her perception of the world, convinced that in analysis she will experience a kind of intimate revelation as a result of which everything will be different and easier when she reenters the world.

In other words, the subject is ready to do quite a lot, change radically, if only she can remain unchanged in the Other (in the Symbolic as the external world in which, to put it in Hegel’s terms, the subject’s consciousness of herself is embodied, materialized as something that still does not know itself as consciousness).

In this case, belief in the Other (in the modern form of believing that the Other does not know) is precisely what helps to maintain the same state of things, regardless of all subjective mutations and permutations.

The subject’s universe will really change only at the moment when she attains the knowledge that the Other knows (that it does not exist). (16-17 Odd One In)

Butler Interview

Judith Butler on the culture wars, JK Rowling and living in “anti-intellectual times” New Statesman September 2020

AF: One example of mainstream public discourse on this issue in the UK is the argument about allowing people to self-identify in terms of their gender. In an open letter she published in June, JK Rowling articulated the concern that this would “throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman”, potentially putting women at risk of violence.

JB: If we look closely at the example that you characterise as “mainstream” we can see that a domain of fantasy is at work, one which reflects more about the feminist who has such a fear than any actually existing situation in trans life. The feminist who holds such a view presumes that the penis does define the person, and that anyone with a penis would identify as a woman for the purposes of entering such changing rooms and posing a threat to the women inside. It assumes that the penis is the threat, or that any person who has a penis who identifies as a woman is engaging in a base, deceitful, and harmful form of disguise. This is a rich fantasy, and one that comes from powerful fears, but it does not describe a social reality. Trans women are often discriminated against in men’s bathrooms, and their modes of self-identification are ways of describing a lived reality, one that cannot be captured or regulated by the fantasies brought to bear upon them. The fact that such fantasies pass as public argument is itself cause for worry.

AF: The consensus among progressives seems to be that feminists who are on JK Rowling’s side of the argument are on the wrong side of history. Is this fair, or is there any merit in their arguments?

JB: Let us be clear that the debate here is not between feminists and trans activists. There are trans-affirmative feminists, and many trans people are also committed feminists. So one clear problem is the framing that acts as if the debate is between feminists and trans people. It is not. One reason to militate against this framing is because trans activism is linked to queer activism and to feminist legacies that remain very alive today. Feminism has always been committed to the proposition that the social meanings of what it is to be a man or a woman are not yet settled. We tell histories about what it meant to be a woman at a certain time and place, and we track the transformation of those categories over time. 

We depend on gender as a historical category, and that means we do not yet know all the ways it may come to signify, and we are open to new understandings of its social meanings. It would be a disaster for feminism to return either to a strictly biological understanding of gender or to reduce social conduct to a body part or to impose fearful fantasies, their own anxieties, on trans women… Their abiding and very real sense of gender ought to be recognised socially and publicly as a relatively simple matter of according another human dignity. The trans-exclusionary radical feminist position attacks the dignity of trans people. 

[… ] feminists are committed to thinking about the diverse and historically shifting meanings of gender, and to the ideals of gender freedom. By gender freedom, I do not mean we all get to choose our gender. Rather, we get to make a political claim to live freely and without fear of discrimination and violence against the genders that we are. Many people who were assigned “female” at birth never felt at home with that assignment, and those people (including me) tell all of us something important about the constraints of traditional gender norms for many who fall outside its terms.  

AF: This year, you published, The Force of Nonviolence. Does the idea of “radical equality”, which you discuss in the book, have any relevance for the feminist movement?

JB: My point in the recent book is to suggest that we rethink equality in terms of interdependency. We tend to say that one person should be treated the same as another, and we measure whether or not equality has been achieved by comparing individual cases. But what if the individual – and individualism – is part of the problem? It makes a difference to understand ourselves as living in a world in which we are fundamentally dependent on others, on institutions, on the Earth, and to see that this life depends on a sustaining organisation for various forms of life. If no one escapes that interdependency, then we are equal in a different sense. We are equally dependent, that is, equally social and ecological, and that means we cease to understand ourselves only as demarcated individuals. If trans-exclusionary radical feminists understood themselves as sharing a world with trans people, in a common struggle for equality, freedom from violence, and for social recognition, there would be no more trans-exclusionary radical feminists. But feminism would surely survive as a coalitional practice and vision of solidarity. 

AF: You have spoken about the backlash against “gender ideology”, and wrote an essay for the New Statesman about it in 2019. Do you see any connection between this and contemporary debates about trans rights?

JB: It is painful to see that Trump’s position that gender should be defined by biological sex, and that the evangelical and right-wing Catholic effort to purge “gender” from education and public policy accords with the trans-exclusionary radical feminists’ return to biological essentialism. It is a sad day when some feminists promote the anti-gender ideology position of the most reactionary forces in our society.

Next 4 years under Biden

The Election Is Over. Here’s a Vision From the Left for the Next Four Years.
Organizers and thinkers on where we are in the major fights of our moment—from prison abolition to climate justice and the housing crisis—and where we go next. Melissa Gira Grant, Nick Martin, Katie McDonough, J.C. Pan

We have a new president, but little else has changed in terms of the work ahead. A Biden administration may be more vulnerable to pressure from the left, but its positions on climate disaster, police and private right-wing violence, mass precarity and poverty, and other compounding crises of our moment will do little to pull us out of the fire. Our elite institutions are largely incapable of responding to the urgency of the moment or the left movements rising to meet it.

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Zupančič After End of Art

“After the End of Art: Hegel with Francis Bacon.” Alenka Zupančič, 27 March 2019, Intensive Seminars in Critical Theory at Yale

Looking at Bacon’s theory of philosophy based on Sylvester interview of Bacon, published in 1975. The way Bacon thinks art is extremely precise and resonates with Hegel.

The subject is the joke. Hegel has wilful disappearance of subject. Between Hegel and Bacon something did happen, pushing Hegelian dissolution of art into 2 extremes. Its the discovery of photography, took over the objective stream, and left art to take subjective path. For Bacon, recording-reporting, photography occupies this terrain.

Bacon doesn’t like abstract art. Tension duality of recording and something else that is what makes great art. Traditional painters thought they were just doing recording, but they were doing much more, but the necessity of recording was essential, the artistic grandeur on top of what they produced, was essential to the recording.

But photography has taken over the illustration of the thing that painters in the past had to do themselves. Abstract throw out all forms of reporting, and just do colours etc. Bacon wants to contrast free fancy play versus a deeper necessity and tension that photography ruins. Bacon’s answer is to shift the very emphasis of recording but not shift its imperative. The imperative to record has changed, its no longer about what artists think they have to do or are expected to do, its about what they REALLY have to do, Bacon’s work is obsession. Being stuck that you ABSOLUTELY want to record, yet still have to find a way to record.

Abstract painting doesn’t work, because obsession gives much greater art, than just going in a free fancy way. OBSESSION with something you WANT to record, you get STUCK in wanting to record, a singular thing, DRIVE. This is what Bacon is getting at. Obsession, and Stuckness, absolute necessity. “I want to record an image” is what Bacon repeats. What is the status of this image/appearance? It is not simply out there to be properly recorded. I can record how people look or appear to me, but how can I record how they REALLY appear.

This particular image he wants to record it can only be a MADE appearance, an artifice that renders that in reality that cannot be seen in a direct way, but what we recognize as a crucial element of reality and we say yes, that’s it.

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