Tag: excessive

rothenberg dimly lit garage

Imagine that you walk into your dimly lit garage and discover a mess. The place is so jumbled that you cannot even distinguish one thing from another.

Now, let’s say that, suddenly, the walls of the garage disappear, and you discover that this jumbled mass stretches in all directions.

One final gesture: remove yourself from the scene, so that you cannot serve as a reference point or means of orientation. No up nor down, no inside nor outside. No spaces between things, no background against which they stand out, no standpoint from which to assess their relationships.

It is as though everything is glued to everything else in what Copjec calls the “realtight.”

I will follow Alain Badiou in calling this state of affairs “being,” where things have no particular identity or relationship to one another, where there is no subject, and where orientation is impossible. In this state, no thing is determined because no thing has any relation to anything else.

[…] The simple addition of a formal property, the empty set, which has no substance in and of itself, negates the state of sheer being that attends each thing-as-such. It does so by establishing a minimal point of orientation – like making a small cut in a sheet of paper. Once this cut is added, then “things” can bear some minimal relation to each other – they all have a relation to this minimal point of orientation. The “cut” of the empty set creates a vector, and with this stroke, things precipitate into a world of identities, properties, and relationships – as objects.33

rothenberg acephalous subject

Something must be renounced in order for a subject to emerge.

The “acephalous subject” does not function in this intentionalized mode of traditional political discourse: “the subject who acts is no longer a person but, precisely, an object.” That is, in his view, we must give up, once and for all, our sense of the political – the political act, the political domain, and the political collectivity – as based on promise or calculation.

To clarify his point that, in the political Act, the subject assumes the position of the object, Žižek rehearses the relationship of subject to object in Lacanian theory. Psychoanalysis, as we have seen, posits that something must be renounced (or formally negated) in order for a subject to emerge. 175

The objet a comes to stand in for this lost part: “drive is fundamentally the insistence of an undead ‘organ without a body,’ standing, like Lacan’s lamella, for that which the subject had to lose in order to subjectivize itself in the symbolic space of the sexual difference” (OWB 174).

It is in this way that it makes sense to think of objet a as the “correlate” of the subject, even if the object is impossible, i.e., an  absence that nonetheless functions as a strange attractor for the drive. In his most straightforward statement about the acephalous subject, Žižek draws explicitly on the metaphor of the Mobius band to elucidate how the subject and the object should be thought together:

[P]ersons and things are part of the same reality, whereas the object is the impossible equivalent of the subject itself. We arrive at the object when we pursue the side of the subject (of its signifying representation) on the Moebius track to the end and find ourselves on the other side of the same place from where we started. One should thus reject the topic of the personality, a soul-body unity, as the organic Whole dismembered in the process of reification-alienation: the subject emerges out of the person as the product of the violent reduction of the person’s body to a partial object. (OWB 175)

The acephalous subject, or subject of the drives, has a Mobius topology. In Žižek’s thinking, the excessive dimension of the Mobius subject comes into play during the political act as the means by which the subject itself encounters the objective dimension. The objet a, the excessive part of the subject, is “the subject’s stand-in within the order of objectivity” (OWB 175).

When the subject identifies directly with this excess, it becomes genuinely revolutionary because it gains access to the register of the Real, the object. How? According to Žižek, the identification with the object de-personalizes the subject, instituting a gap between its subjectivated individuation (all the little preferences and properties that make up our social identities) and its subject-ness, the “pure” subject that emerges as a function of the drive. This shift in perspective, whereby the subject becomes the object (that it always was) and vice versa, is what Žižek calls the parallax view.

It may be helpful to return to our original formulation of the Mobius subject to understand why Žižek places such importance on this depersonalization.

If we think of the subject after subjectification as a set, A = {x, y, z, Ø}, we could draw the analogy that the elements of the set (x, y, z as the things-turned-objects by the formal negation) are the subject’s “properties” in its symbolic identity: piano-player, husband, chocolate lover.

The excessive dimension of this set derives from the fact that the external brackets marking the set correspond precisely to the internal element of the empty set.

Let us recall that setness (the externality of the brackets) correlates to the place of the subject’s inscription in the Symbolic, prior to any specific content, and the empty set (Ø) correlates to the impossible objet a, which counts as an element of the set but does not have any specific properties. The “pure” subject of Žižek’s remarks is reduced to these formal elements, what we have called the subject* considered by way of the operation of “subtraction” of the ontic properties from the presentation of the subject.

As long as we are fixated – as happens in multiculturalism and identity politics – on the symbolic identifiers of our personal identities, we obscure the link between the subject and the drive as the true engine of the subject’s existence. 176

For when we focus on the symbolic dimension of identity, we are conceiving of the subject as a subject of desire, perpetually seeking to overcome its lack by finding its object of desire. Any political action founded on this premise dooms the actors to a futile search for a Utopia which, of necessity, must always be deferred. footnote 18 [176]

In highlighting the difference between the subject of desire and the subject of the drive, Žižek sets the stage for a theory of collective action that does not depend upon the symbolic properties of the individuals involved, including their “common humanity”:

The collective that emerges at the level of such a fighting subjectivity is to be thoroughly opposed to the intersubjective topic of “how to reach the other,” how to maintain the openness and respect toward Otherness. There are, grosso modo, three ways to reach out to the other that fit the triad of ISR: imaginary (“human touch”), symbolic (“politeness,” “good manners”), real (shared obscenity).

Each of the three has its own dangers… It is easy to discern the falsity of such a gesture of empathy [like that of an Israeli soldier towards a Palestinian he is evicting]: the notion [is false] that, in spite of political differences, we are all human beings with the same loves and worries, neutralizes the impact of what the soldier is effectively doing at that moment. (OWB 177)

Other modes, such as shared obscenity, “can function as a fake solidarity masking underlying power relations” (OWB 178). What then does the acephalous subject offer to counter these deficient approaches to solidarity?

In Žižek’s view, the political meaning of one’s acts has nothing to do with one’s “sincerity or hypocrisy” – that is, one’s “subjective self-experience” is irrelevant to the objective truth of one’s actions. Rather, the subject of the drive institutes a gap between itself and its symbolic-subjective dimension. The subject’s identification with objet a re-casts it, not as a set of symbolic properties, but as connected directly to the order of objectivity.

Introducing a distance towards one’s own symbolic identity puts one in a position to act in an “objective-ethical” way (OWB 182).

Presumably, it is this link to the objective that makes solidarity possible. The manifold differences or symbolic properties of individuals move to the background, while each subject, as identified with the object of the drive, finds its way to the objective order, the only terrain on which meaningful change can occur.

Solidarity, then, emerges not from intersubjective relations but rather from the relations of subjects purified of their symbolic identities, subjects who meet on the ground of objectivity, as objects. 177

There is a tentative feel about this argument, as Žižek shifts from considerations of solidarity to ethics to a more general discussion of whether it is possible to distinguish fascism as a form of group solidarity from other political forms that are ranged against it in contemporary theory, and finally to his judgment that the multitude in Hardt and Negri involves the ultimate type of depoliticization.

So, the underlying difficulty of articulating the grounds on which subjects – subjects that are avowedly excessive – can come together as solidary political groups in a way that avoids fascism is never directly addressed. 177

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)

rothenberg acephalous subject

acephalous: without a head, lacking a governing head or chief

Žižek proposes as the properly political subject an “acephalous subject” who assumes the position of the object”   [Organs Bodies 176 cited in Rothenberg 175]

In this move from desire to drive, he fundamentally alters the picture of a political subject as one who calculates an intervention to bring about the future it desires.  175

The “acephalous subject” does not function in this intentionalized mode of traditional political discourse: “the subject who acts is no longer a person but, precisely, an object.” That is, in his view, we must give up, once and for all, our sense of the political — the political act, the political domain, and the political collectivity — as based on promise or calculation. 175

rothenberg subject of drive

In the neurotic fantasy, the lack installed in the subject can be removed by getting rid of the obstacle that prohibits access to the fulfilling objet a. The neurotic fails to understand that there is no such prohibition, that the lack cannot be remediated by transgressing a prohibition: because the lack constitutes the subject, its elimination would dissolve the subject. 174

Even if there were an object that could completely fulfill the subject’s desire and so eliminate the lack at its heart, the subject still would have to “miss” the object in order to remain a subject. This perpetual “missing” is due neither to desire’s inanition [weakness, lassitude, exhaustion] nor to the strength of the prohibition. It is due to the drive.

The drive is what keeps desire alive by producing the illusion that there is an object to aim at as it “circles” the place where the object should be, like a strange attractor. In this way, the drive ensures no encounter with an object while maintaining the illusion of its existence. In this account, the subject is a subject of the drive, not a subject of desire. 174-175

rothenberg Žižek universality

The truth is partial: Imagine a blue light shining from an invisible source on a room full of differently colored materials: the blue light has no visible presence in the air, but a white curtain will appear blue, a red wall will appear purple, and so forth.  The same invisible force creates different effects.  This is why Žižek can say that every element in the situation (which is itself shaped by some determining but hidden Real) “takes its own side” with respect to it.  162

The retroversion in Badiou’s model concerns the construction of a space and a vocabulary that could make visible what was overlooked in teh original situation — an occulted egalitarian dimension — but this dimension is posited (and glimpsed in the event) rather than achieved. To take an example from Badiou’s own political efforts, the sans-papiers, foreign workers in France, are recognized in the current political situation only as “immigrants,” not as productive workers. The “encyclopedia” of the French (and arguable Western) situation has no term for these people that would bring to light their status as workers, that is, as having the same properties, necessary to France, as any other worker.  The specifically political nature of the Badiouan act is a function of working towards realizing this occulted egalitarian dimension, a dimension which we prescribe.  Badiou emphasizes repeated that one’s efforts to work to reveal equality should continue regardless of any apparent lack of success. 163

Universality based on the excess generated by the formal negation does not depend upon finding a common ontic property, that is a property which is just one more difference within the situation. All such properties can be used to name differences that are mobilized in the game of hegemony, empty spaces, and master-signifiers, as we have seen in the discussion of Laclau’s political thought. Only the minimal self-difference (described as the radical antagonism cutting across every element) escapes this play of signifiers, existing in an extimate relation to the situation, rather than in its encyclopedia. This self-difference or (self-)antagonism subsists (ex-sists, Lacan would say, to emphasize its extimacy) as the hidden dimension. … Žižek goes on to argue … admonishing Laclau … for ultimately recasting antagonism as agonism, that is, as differences among self-same elements in the social field (Iraq Kettle 90 cited in Rothenberg 164)

rothenberg Möbius subject alt0246

Rothenberg on page 201: For Lacan … every individual becomes a subject in an encounter with the Other (an Other that is far from radically other). This encounter functions as the extimate cause of the subject*: every subject is non-self-coincident; every subject incorporates the other at its core; every subject’s inside is an outside.  Every subject is, from the get-go, a Möbius subject.

:): Rothenberg argues that in the encounter with another person, the very fact that we can never know what we mean to the other person, their interpretation of our message as we speak to them.  This is because of the excessive nature of our relations with other humans. When she says this other is at the core of ourselves, R is suggesting that we’re never in control, we are not the centred subject, an egological “I”.  But this isn’t new.

We can recall first that the Möbius subject’s excess or non-self-coincidence derives from its inability to know its own meaning for others. … The subject’s experience of its own excess provides the motive for entering into the social relation, criss-crossed by fantasy though it is. 202

The encounter with the other functions as the extimate cause of the subject*   The Möbius subject incorporates the other at it core. Every Möbius subject begins its social life as an extimate subject — its fundament is already a function of otherness. 202

In the extimate version, the subject must perpetually seek a response from the others because, in fact, the subject will never be sure of the meaning of the response it gets, yet the subject has nowhere else to go to get it.  The other is not radically other — it is close enough to the subject in kind to warrant the desire for relationship while distant enough in its ability to fulfill the subject’s deepest desire to maintain its otherness.  At the same time, the “other” to whom the subject relates does not truly exist in the way the subject believes: this other is a fantasmatic projection of a wish.  So the subject has a relation of nonrelation to the actual others in the social space.

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.

Review of Excessive Subject

In this book Molly Anne Rothenberg makes clear that progressive political theorists need to re-think their understanding of the subject because the current deadlock has resulted in either structuralist dead-ends, or immanentist ‘Foucaultian’ type analyses that don’t account for the nature of agency and resistance, and so can’t with any sort of robustness contribute to an understanding of social change that includes an idea of radical subjectivity. According to Rothenberg, social theory has been deadlocked around these two versions of subjective agency and their respective theories of causality. She suggests that we toss these theories into the wastebin, and look at an newly emerging way of thinking the ‘social field’ reflected in the recent work of Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek and Alenka Zupancic. I think she benefits most from the theory of Badiou, but is definitely influenced by the latter two as well. Critical of Zizek’s notion of the Act, she nonetheless draws much theoretical weight from his notion of subjective destitution, which Rothenberg, much to her credit, takes to new heights in this book. It is a difficult concept, but one can see Rothenberg struggling to articulate a new approach to thinking subjectivity and its articulation to the social field through an ‘excess’ and a ‘relation of non-relation’. Her final chapter rewards the reader’s discipline (the book overall is a challenging yet clear and insightful read) and patience. Taking up an alternative reading of Melville’s Bartleby, R. allows the reader to get a further handle on her theory of the ‘excessive subject’. Additionally the reading of Felix Guattari’s early work shows the extent to which R. does not shy away from seeking to show how a relation to ‘excess’ via a Möbius subjectivity allows us to begin to think a radical newness and an ethicality that is truly radical and original. Buy this book.

Note: Adam Kotsko in the latest installment of the Journal of Zizek Studies, helpfully points out that Zizek reads Agota Kristof’s novel The Notebook, and claims the twin boy characters as new vehicles of a radical ethical subjectivity. One certainly wonders what Rothenberg would make of this, that is, whether she would see this as a more positive elaboration by Zizek of his important notion of the de-constituted subject, hence shadowing her idea of the Möbius subject? Reading Kotsko’s article together with Rothenberg’s book, gives me the impression that there is a subtle groundswell for a different articulation of the subject that gets us beyond many of the deadlocks that have stymied creative and radical theory for so long now.

retroversive act

[For] Žižek … an act becomes a properly political Act when it leads to its own politicization/legitimation after the fact. Explaining that the “Act occurs in an emergency when one has to take the risk and act without any legitimization, ” Žižek adheres to his sense that strategizing for success or making claims about being able to foresee and bring about a desired future — in short, the whole apparatus of political fulfillment — are illusory routes to political practice.  It is a fantasy to imagine that a procedure or political form could guarantee a promised result — or, perhaps more importantly, guarantee that no unforeseen, horrible consequences will occur.  Such people want “an Act without an Act” (Rothenberg citing Welcome to Desert 153).  Žižek is decisive on this point: “there is no guarantee against the possibility of excess — the risk has to be assumed, it is part of the very field of the political” (WDR 153-154 in Rothenberg 166).  Not even democracy can furnish such a guarantee. Since we cannot know in advance what will happen, our only criterion for the Act must come after the fact, in a retroversive movement of politicization. (166)  “we have to take a risk, a step into the open with no big Other to return our message to us,” (169).

Rothenberg replies:

every single act that anyone might undertake whether the act is large or small and whether it is enacted by someone authoritative (for example, de Gaulle) or not (for example, Rosa Parks), carries with it a significative excess — that is, a potential for appropriation, misunderstanding, and causing unforeseen consequences.  We can recall here that Butler makes the error of proposing a distinction among types of actions on the basis of some imagined ability to assume a risk (for example, taking a risk in order to keep signification open). The risk is part and parcel of all signification, not just “the political field itself.”  Does Žižek think that there is some quality that makes an Act inherently political or not? (168)

Žižek’s preferred example of an Act is not Park’s nonviolent refusal to take a seat at the back of the bus, an act which was prepared for in advance by political organizing and a discourse of legitimation, and which resulted in further politicization and ultimately changes in laws and social insitutions. Instead he nominates the heroic action of the “famous Jewish ballerina” who shot the Nazi guards for whom she was forced to dance, effectively committing suicide in the process. The difference between these two incidents is striking: a nonviolent act that achieves politicization in Parks’ case versus a violent one that does not. Nonetheless, Žižek specifically designates the example of the ballerina as “the way of the act” (Rothenberg 172, citing Žižek in Revolution at the Gates 249).

Žižek on form formalism distinction

🙂 Rothenberg on Žižek’s insistence that the truth is a thoroughly partisan process.  Yet Žižek refuses relativism, so how can he argue truth is partisan but not relativistic.  Rothenberg cites a lengthy passage from Žižek [which I’ve broken up below for purposes of emphasis]:

Form is not the neutral frame of particular contents, but the very principle of concretion, that is, the “strange attractor” which distorts, biases, confers a specific colour on every element of the totality … [W]e should not confuse this properly dialectical notion of Form with the liberal-multiculturalist notion of Form as the neutral framework of the multitude of “narratives” — not only literature, but also politics, religion, science, are all different narratives, stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves, and the ultimate goal of ethics is to guarantee the neutral space in which this multitude of narratives can coexist peacefully — in which everyone, from ethnic to sexual minorities, will have the right and opportunity to tell their story … The properly dialectical notion of Form signals precisely the impossibility of this liberal notion of Form:

Form has nothing to do with “formalism”, with the idea of a neutral Form independent of its contingent, particular content; it stands, rather, for the traumatic kernel of the Real, for the antagonism which “colours” the entire field in question. In this precise sense, class struggle is the Form of the Social: every social phenomenon is overdetermined by it, so that it is not possible to remain neutral towards it.

(Rothenberg 161, citing guess who from Revolution at the Gates, 190, original emphasis)