not-all Žižek
December 2, 2012
Question: If today you disqualify any emancipatory dimension for a politics of destruction, what then is the place reserved for violence in politics?
BADIOU: Here, again, we touch upon the link between philosophy and
politics. I maintain that today it is a question of creating independent
spaces in such a way that the question of violence takes a defensive turn. Continue reading “Badiou Critical Inquiry Summer 2008”
Alenka Zupančič interviewed by Los Angeles Review of Books, March 9, 2018
CASSANDRA B. SELTMAN: The aim of What IS Sex? is to return to and preserve the idea of sexuality as a subject of philosophical investigation. How do you understand the proliferation of new ontologies in “the times we live in”? Do you see this as a “return” to ontological questions?
ALENKA ZUPANČIČ: I see this as a symptom. There are two levels or aspects of this question. On the one hand, there is a truth, or conceptual necessity, in what you rightfully call the return to ontology. Philosophy should not be ashamed of serious ontological inquiry, and the interrogation here is vital and needed. There is, however, something slightly comical when this need is asserted as an abstract or normative necessity — “one should do this,” and then everybody feels that he or she needs to have their own ontology. “I am John Doe, and here’s my ontology.” There is much arbitrariness here, rather than conceptual necessity and rigor. This is not how philosophy works.
Also, there is this rather bafflingly simplifying claim according to which Kant and the “transcendental turn” to epistemology was just a big mistake, error, diversion — which we have to dismiss and “return” to ontology, to talking about things as they are in themselves. Kant’s transcendental turn was an answer to a real impasse of philosophical ontology. We can agree that his answer is perhaps not the ultimate or philosophically the only viable answer, but this does not mean that the impasse or difficulty that it addresses was not real and that we can pretend it doesn’t exist.
My attempt to “return to” the idea of sexuality as a subject of ontological investigation is rooted in my conviction that psychoanalysis (i.e., Freud and Lacan) and its singular concept of the subject are of great pertinence for the impasse of ontology that Kant was tackling. So my claim is not simply that sexuality is important and should be taken seriously; in a sense, it is spectacularly more ambitious. My claim is that the Freudo-Lacanian theory of sexuality, in its inherent relation to the unconscious, dislocates and transposes the philosophical question of ontology and its impasse in a most interesting way. I’m not interested in sexuality as a case of “local ontology,” but as possibly providing some key conceptual elements for the ontological interrogation as such.
Continue reading “Zupančič Interview”First published in French as La philosophie et l’evenement
Editions Germina, 2010. This English edition Polity Press, 2013
The political field today: the Left/Right opposition and consensus
Alain Badiou, politics has an essential place in your life and work. You view it, moreover, as one of what you call philosophy’s conditions. It is, then, a good place for us to begin tackling your philosophy. First, hasn’t it become difficult today to be involved in politics? I’d also like to hear how you define it. What is politics, the truth of politics?
– We really have to take into account the system of constraints in which people find themselves today. What is their margin of manoeuvre? What freedom do they have? For there to be true politics, the framework within
which things take place has to be both clear and held in common. For example, if society is a society of classes with conflicting interests, then politics will lie within this framework. If the established order rests upon
a collective organization totally at odds with equality, politics will have to deal, locally and globally, with this issue. Politics always has to do with what one knows, and experiences, regarding the nature of contradictions.
I think that in the great political tradition we’ve inherited – a heritage that, moreover, disconcerts us and puts us ill at ease – the fundamental point is that there are enemies. There are not just adversaries, but enemies. There are people whose worldview and what they inflict upon, and expect of, us is something we deem completely unacceptable. Bringing the notion of the enemy into focus like this has always been the perspective of the great tradition of politics, particularly its revolutionary tradition – with ‘revolutionary’ understood in a fairly vague sense, extending from the French Revolution up to the 1980s. Continue reading “Philosophy and the Event Alain Badiou 2010”
Trump, fascism, and the construction of “the people”: An interview with Judith Butler December 18, 2016.
What does Donald Trump represent? The American philosopher Judith Butler, professor at UC, Berkeley, has recently published a short book in French, Rassemblement: Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. She explains that Donald Trump incarnates a new form of fascism. As she puts it, “A lot of people are very happy to see this disturbing, unintelligent guy parading around as if he was the centre of the Earth and winning power thanks to this posture.”
Mediapart: Might we say that Donald Trump is a sort of “figure in the carpet” of the analyses you have been producing over the last two decades? Is Trump not a “Butlerian object” par excellence
Judith Butler: I am not sure that Trump is a very good object for my kind of analysis. I do not think that there is, for instance, a fascination with the person of Trump. And if we consider his speech, then we have to consider more specifically the effect of his speech on one part of the US public. Let us remember that he was elected by less than one quarter of the public, and that it is only as the consequence of an outmoded Electoral College that he is now on way to becoming the President. So we should not imagine that there is widespread popular support for Trump. There is widespread disillusionment with participatory politics, and there is some serious contempt for both of the major US parties. But Hillary Clinton won more votes than Trump. So when we ask about support for Trump, we are asking how a minority in the US was able to bring Trump to power. We are asking about a deficit in democracy, not a popular groundswell. In my view, the electoral college should be abolished so that our elections more clearly represent the will of the people. Our political parties also have to be rethought so that there can be greater popular participation in the process. Continue reading “An interview with Judith Butler”
Adrian Johnston is interviewed by Graham Harman about his new book out in May 2014, Adventures in Transcendental Materialism Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers.
Here are some important excerpts
Graham – Your title contains the phrase “transcendental materialism.” There is a tension between these two words that in some sense drives all of your intellectual work. “Transcendental” generally refers to a sort of philosophy, like Kant’s, that asks about our conditions of knowing the world rather than about the world itself. Meanwhile, “materialism” has always been a philosophy that turns in the most hardnosed fashion towards the world itself, viewing humans as a material thing just like everything else. Stated briefly, how does one reconcile the transcendental and materialist standpoints? Continue reading “johnston harman interview pt 1”
“Dissenting Over Diaspora: An Interview with Professor Judith Butler.” Judith Butler Interviewed by Adam Shapiro. Columbia Current 24 Dec. 2013.
C: In your book, you draw on Edward Said and a book of his in which he actually uses Moses as a figure who might be able to inspire peace and cooperation in Israel/ Palestine. Can you elaborate?
JB: First of all, I think there’s a difference between say, cooperation and cohabitation. Because cooperative ventures very often involve accepting inequality and I worry about cooperative Israeli/ Palestinian operations that don’t really call into question the occupation, second class citizenship or the colonial nature of Israel’s rule. And so, cooperation is a way of keeping the status quo in place.
Cohabitation is a word I try to use instead to try to talk about both forms of solidarity that would take aim at the colonial structure of power and forms of living together that might be positive in the context of a new political arrangement in which political equality is substantially realized.
Said, I think, was really interested in whether the diasporic situation of the Palestinian could be a source of understanding or resonance with the diasporic tradition in Jewish life. And he called upon Jews to recall their own history in exile as a way of establishing an understanding of what it meant to suffer radical dispossession.
For Said, the salient point about Moses was not only that he was a wanderer, but also an Egyptian so he has a mixed heritage and connects the Arab and the Jewish in his person. We might say that Moses was Mizrachi. As exilic, Moses stands for a certain kind of ethical sensibility of the exile, the one who seeks not just the return of his own people, but whose thinking about return expands to include all those who have been forcibly dispossessed.
We see this tension reflected, I think, in warring versions of the Haggadah– those that concern themselves with the return and emancipation of the Jews alone, or those that seek to make connections – not strict analogies – between all peoples searching for emancipation. I think for Said, what’s most important is that one group of people who have been radically dispossessed might not only find a way to chronicle and communicate their own dispossession but might also develop an ethical and political concern for the unjust political dispossession of others.
So, Moses is a hopeful figure, not only embodying the link between Jew and Arab, but prefiguring the link that might be made between peoples with very different histories of dispossession. Concretely, what that means for me is, when you start to develop a position about the rights of refugees, and consider that Israel was established, as you know, as a sanctuary for European refugees, one has to take into account the fact that the very founding of Israel produced a new refugee problem, and new demand for sanctuary.
This is one of the major contradictions that drew the critical attention of Hannah Arendt. What would it mean to develop a position on refugees such that whatever sanctuary is found for one group of refugees cannot justifiably expel another population and produce a new refugee class?
It can’t be that “oh, my refugee status needs sanctuary and global recognition even if it means that I push others out and produce a new refugee population”.
That means that we honor the rights of refugees only in the breach. A justifiable position has to be one in which we generalize, without contradiction, from the position of our own history to take into account the insufferable consequences of dispossession for others.
It doesn’t mean those histories are the exact same– they’re not the same, let us be clear. Let’s not get involved in false analogies. But still, I might be able to understand a very different kind of history than my own by virtue of having undergone a history of dispossession and my understanding of dispossession and of the refugee issue might be enlarged through that kind of thinking both through and beyond my own situation.
And I think that’s what Said was trying to do, and he makes this view explicit on several occasions. He was trying to say: “what might bring these people together? They both suffered dispossession”. At that moment he wasn’t simply laying blame: “and you! you’re the ones who dispossessed us!”. He was wondering rather what ethical resources might emerge from dispossession.
And what political policy toward the rights of refugees and the need for sanctuary that all people have? And if we were to start with that more generalizable claim, what kind of political organization of life might be possible? I believe it is this perspective that provides a set of diasporic principles for thinking about a new kind of polity in Palestine.
C: The diasporic is clearly a very important theme for you. But galut (exile) in traditional Judaism generally has to end in some form of geula (redemption). So if, for you, galut is the preferable Jewish status, what does redemption look like?
JB: Here I rely a great deal on the scholar Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin who has written on sovereignty and exile. His work has only been published in article form in English, but he has a book in French and he’s an extraordinary scholar of these matters.
I think that there are ways of understanding redemption that do not involve gathering all the scattered lives back into the same homeland. In a certain Kabbalistic tradition, one that clearly informed the early Walter Benjamin, redemption was a feature of scattered life, found in all dimensions of the world.
So there are theological debates we might have about Benjamin and Gershom Scholem that would feature different ways of understanding redemption – the former decidedly less nationalistic than the latter. But it seems clear that both diasporic Jews, and diasporic Jewish communities, are not well-served by the idea that they are living in a “fallen” condition. The tradition of Jews living with non-Jews in the diaspora might well serve as a model for thinking about possibilities of co-habitation in Israel/Palestine, as I tried to suggest in relation to the founding contradiction at the heart of the refugee issue in Israel/Palestine.
C: You write in the book that using the Holocaust to justify Zionism is not ethically sound. But without a sovereign Jewish state, how can the security of Jewish people be assured?
JB: First of all, my guess is that living on the condition of equality and reciprocal acknowledgement with its Arab neighbors would do more for security of the Jewish people in that area than the militarism of the current state does.
So I actually think political equality works in the service of security, works in the service of cohabitation. I think that the source of the anti-Semitism we see today can be found in Greece where they actively, openly elected Golden Dawn people who are Nazi fascists and even in the National Party in Germany where Nazi insignias, which were once really rigorously banned, are now being openly worn again.
So there’s a lot that needs to be done politically to combat anti-Semitism that does not have to do with the Israeli state but does have to do with forms of anti-Semitism that are emerging within fascist currents in Europe. And I think that’s where our critical attention should be at this particular moment.
My own sense is that one has to oppose all forms of state racism, as we see exemplified in Israel, but all forms of anti-Semitism as well. And this means that the opposition to Israel cannot justifiably participate in anti-Semitism. That said, it is important not to discount an anti-colonial struggle as “definitionally” anti-Semitic. We have to develop a large enough framework to oppose all forms of racism.
C: Some of the concerns about BDS rest in claims that the movement is anti-Semitic. While you have done much to argue that this is not in fact the case, certain statements by BDS leaders, such as Omar Barghouti, have provided cause for concern. What would you respond to Barghouti’s statement that he “could not help but compare the Warsaw ghetto wall with Israel’s much more ominous wall caging 3.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in fragmented, sprawling prison,” when in your book you reject comparisons and therefore trivializations of the Holocaust?
JB: I do not think that strict analogies can be made between the Nazi genocide and the Occupation, it is true. I do not think that they serve either the ethical imperative to understand the history of that genocide or the contemporary political imperative to oppose the Occupation.
I myself do not accept the analogy. But perhaps most importantly, the arguments in favor of BDS do not rely on that analogy, even if some people who support BDS also engage in some of those analogies.
The argument for BDS is based on the fact that international laws have been abrogated and continue to be, and existing nation-states do not press the state of Israel to comply with those laws.
So on that ground, the boycott emerges as a non-violent effort to pressure a state to comply with international laws and norms that would secure the equal rights of Palestinians within Israel, the rights of self-determination for Palestinians on the West Bank which were promised and suspended by the Oslo accords, and the rights of dispossessed Palestinians to some form of return. None of these claims depend on that analogy.
C: Can you describe the ideal binational state and how it could function practically?
JB: It is not for me to describe or to prescribe. It seems that for political equality to become substantial, all the rightful inhabitants of that land would have to decide it. And that leaves us with the question of who rightfully inhabits those lands. So that would be the most important point of departure.
I believe, as I have said, that there are political risks with both the one state and the two state solution, and that it is up to those who have been denied rights of self-determination to enter that political process that decides what form of government would work best.
As you know, the two state solution founders very often on the problem of establishing borders. And the one-state proposal founders on the question of who is entitled to full citizenship.
If the one-state solution builds a greater Israel, it fulfills the expansionist aims of the settlers. But if it guarantees equal rights before the law without discriminating on the basis of religion, race, or national origin, then we might see something much more promising.
Similarly, if a two state solution leaves Palestine with only 10% of its former lands, and still living under siege or occupation, then that would not really work at all.
But if the green line is honored and de-colonization is complete, it might be a chance for all inhabitants to exercise legitimates rights of self-determination. So, as you can see, one cannot really say what should happen from the outside, but only help a bit to track the possibilities. My own task is to try to rethink the possible, but not tell others what to do.
C: And a question we ask all our interviewees: do you have a favorite Woody Allen film?
JB: The Purple Rose of Cairo.
Psychoanalysis in times of Science An Interview With Paul Verhaeghe, 2011
When you are working analytically, you have the so-called preliminary conversations. That means that you postpone the moment when you have someone lying on the sofa, on the couch. You have to have an indication of when to begin, a point where you can say: now is the time that I can put someone on the couch. With a number of people this point was never reached because the problem for which they came was of such a nature that putting them on the couch would have had a contra-therapeutic or contra-analytic effect. Then I ask myself why this is the case. What problem am I dealing with here? Which diagnosis, with all the nuances of the word diagnosis, which diagnostic structure is facing me? The first answer that I could defend, that I could do something with and which I still defend, was an old Freudian category, Aktualpathologie. Here I found a description in part of a number of symptoms present among these people, primarily panic attacks and somatisation, in combination with an inadequate potential to symbolise, to work through something, to put something into words. This entailed that our most important instrument, namely free association, was disabled. You then have to deal with, as it were, meaningless symptoms, panic attacks, and you had people that could not express it — whatever ‘it’ may be.
That is why I continued working face-to-face with this group and very consciously sought other ways to deal with them. To make a long story short, as concerns the method of treatment, with this group you have to, so to say, do the opposite as with the other group. The classic group of psychoneurosis suffer from an excess of meaning, an excess of history, an excess of the imaginary, and this you have to deconstruct. With the new group there is a lack on all these levels. They do not trust the other. If there is transference, it is negative transference. They hardly have the potential for symbolising. They hardly have a history. They have a history, but they cannot verbalise that history. You have to provide them as it were the instruments and in particular develop a relationship with them by which they can work through a number of things. That means that I indeed work psychoanalytically, but in the opposite direction. To return to the social aspect, I ask myself why the radical shift?
Why is it that we see classical hysteria and obsessional neurosis far less than before? Then we arrive at your question about the risk of psychologisation, the risk of decontextualisation. The most obvious answer is found in psychology and to some extent in contemporary attachment theory, which is more or less psychoanalytic, although it is becoming increasingly cognitive. The answer there is the reference to the mother, the processes of reflection that occur between mother and child — mirroring. Although with this you all too quickly end up in a psychologising model, in a decontextualising model and in the mother-blaming model, because it is the fault of the mother. Consequently, we have to widen our scope: if it is indeed the case that mothers no longer function as they used to function, then that must have to do with a different social context. Then you have to try — and this is very difficult for a classically trained analyst/psychologist — to obtain some insight into those social factors.
[—]
The most common term of abuse used these days on the playground at primary school is ‘loser’. Isn’t that terrible? It has to do with children eight, nine years old. If they call each other loser, what does that say about the model of our society? Can I do something with this psychoanalytically? Yes, psychoanalysis always works on the tension between individual and society on the level of enjoyment and desire. If you want to summarise the core of Freud’s theory, this is what it is about. There is the individual, there is society, and society ensures certain rules when it comes to pleasure and desire. The individual resists them, but at the same time also needs them. But the social model in which we are now living is exactly the opposite of the model in Freud’s time. In his day, all emphasis was on desire. Pleasure was for the afterlife, by way of speaking. These days the accent is on pleasure. We should enjoy ourselves immensely; pleasure has become a commodity, on credit if need be, but in any case pleasure is everywhere. Desire has been killed….
McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. Interview with Tutt October 2013
Once we accept that the good is antithetical to our enjoyment, is a barrier to our enjoyment, it becomes possible to think politics beyond the good. The politics of enjoyment can eschew the good altogether, I think. But we can’t fall into the trap of saying that the world will be better if we adopt a different organization of our enjoyment. No, in some sense it will become worse because we would lose the justifications that accompany our failures to enjoy fully. What we would gain, however, is what I would call an authentic relation to our enjoyment. I think we have to insist absolutely on the concept of authenticity in order to conceive of politics, just as resolutely as we have to abandon the good. In this way, I would replace the good with authenticity. That’s what we can’t do without in fact, even if it has been discredited by the association with Heidegger.
What is important about psychoanalysis to me is its theoretical intervention, its discovery of the death drive and the role that fantasy plays in our psyche. This is the great advance. And political struggle can integrate these theoretical insights without any help from actual psychoanalysis.
What allows one to disinvest in the capitalist mode of subjectivity is not, in my view, the psychoanalytic session. Instead it is the confrontation with a mode of enjoyment that ceases to provide the satisfaction that it promises. This prompts one to think about alternatives.
It’s impossible to understand how contemporary authority functions without psychoanalysis. Lacan is very clear in his explanation of the superego as an agency not of prohibition but of enjoyment, and nothing is more evident in today’s authorities. We are constantly bombarded with commands that we enjoy ourselves, and we feel guilty not for our sins but for our failures to enjoy as much as our neighbors. Psychoanalysis shows us that this command to enjoy is integral to how authority operates and that obedience can feel transgressive. This is the key to the power of contemporary authority. We obey but never experience ourselves as obedient. … We don’t know how obedient we are, and we require psychoanalysis to show us.
I was completely in support of Occupy Wall Street and even had several students who took part with my full encouragement. That said, there is a theoretical problem, and it is located exactly at the point you bring up. Occupy didn’t identify with the missing binary signifier but involves an identification with the excluded. I have a real problem with the slogan that identifies the movement with the 99%. What happens? Instantly, a new Other is produced that is the 1%, and if we can just eliminate this 1%, then we will achieve the good. That’s the logic at work. In this sense, Occupy, despite its successes (including, I would claim, the re-election of Barack Obama), remained within a very traditional political paradigm.
Identification with the missing binary signifier would insist, in contrast, would involve an identification with the inherent failure of the Other or the system itself. It would have to say something like “No One Belongs” rather than the two alternatives — either we are really the ones who belong or we are those who don’t belong. Not we are all citizens but no one is a citizen.
We shouldn’t give the 1% credit with really enjoying themselves or knowing what they’re doing. Badiou calls these finance capitalists legitimate gangsters. I don’t disagree, but this creates the sense that they are on the inside while the rest of us are on the outside.
Isn’t the lesson of Michael Mann’s masterpiece The Insider with Russell Crowe that the insider is always an outsider and that enjoyment, despite what we believe, is located on the outside?
An interview over Zizek Friday, October 11, 2013 — Adam Kotsko
1. In general, what are the fundamental formulations of Žižek on theology?
Žižek interprets Christianity along Hegelian lines, as an enactment of the death of God. His approach is similar to that of Thomas Altizer, whose declaration of the death of God caused significant controversy in the US in the 1960s. The basic claim is that when God became incarnate in Christ, that was a total and irreversible decision to empty himself into Christ—and so when Christ died on the cross, God truly and irreversibly died, emptying himself into the world.
2. What is the peculiarity of his approach?
Žižek’s approach goes against the mainstream of Christian theology, where the doctrine of the Trinity has allowed theologians to affirm that only one of the divine persons underwent the ordeal of the incarnation — hence isolating the impact of the incarnation on the divine life. From the orthodox perspective, it is correct to say that “God is dead” in view of Christ’s death, but in a more important sense, God “survived” even when Christ was buried in the tomb.
The Hegelian approach Žižek adopts also differs from traditional Christology, which holds that God raised Christ personally and individually from the dead. In the Hegelian interpretation, by contrast, Christ’s divine power is “resurrected” as the new form of community known as the “Holy Spirit.” Here, however, Žižek differs from Hegel insofar as he views the “Holy Spirit” not as an institutional form of life (like the Catholic Church) but as a fundamentally new form of human life together.
3. In what sense are the works of Žižek, especially the latest ones, relevant to the current theological debate?
I see many mainstream theologians as torn between two desires. On the one hand, they recognize that the Greek philosophical categories through which the early Church Fathers interpreted the gospel were not the best fit and in some ways wound up distorting the Christian message. On the other hand, though, they want to remain faithful to the orthodox doctrines that grew out of that conceptuality. Karl Barth is emblematic of this conflict—he claims to be providing a radical new basis for Christian doctrine, and yet he always comes up with essentially the same answers that orthodoxy had always provided.
In that context, I think Žižek’s approach represents a way out of this deadlock, insofar as the Hegelian interpretation of Christianity attends to the inherent logic of the incarnation without troubling itself about philosophical presuppositions such as the unchangeability of God. In a sense, Hegel, Altizer, and Žižek may represent a real attempt to follow up on Paul’s claim to know nothing but Christ crucified.
From the other direction, I believe that Žižek’s project provides support for other radical attempts to rethink the Christian tradition—particularly in the various liberation theologies. This is not to say that such theologians “need” Žižek, but rather that Žižek’s work could point more mainstream theologians toward the creative, radical work that is already going on.
4. In what sense is the argumentation of Žižek on this subject complex and unusual?
One challenge for theologians who want to read Žižek is the importance of Lacan for his project. While Žižek’s reading of Hegel is somewhat idiosyncratic, Hegel is at least familiar to most theologians—Lacan, on the other hand, is a less frequent point of reference and is in many ways more difficult to approach given that he uses a lot of his own jargon and symbols in developing his concepts. I try to provide some orientation in Lacanian thought in my book, so that people can at least know where to begin.
5. How can we understand the claim of Žižek that, to become a true dialectical materialist, one must go through the Christian experience? Is not this about a paradoxical stance from him?
Žižek understands the Christian experience in terms of the death of God. For him, Christianity is the most radical form of atheism insofar as even God himself becomes an unbeliever in Christ’s cry of dereliction on the cross. This differs from other forms of atheism or skepticism, because Žižek believes that most people who deny a particular God still believe in something else that fills the same role. A scientist, for instance, will generally believe in something like the laws of nature, or a Communist might believe in the laws of historical necessity. Only the Christian experience of a God who doesn’t believe in himself provides the guarantee that we won’t be able to sneak in a new idol to take the old God’s place.
The Christian experience is thus the experience of the undeniable and irrevocable emptying out of any transcendent meaning or purpose—of any “master signifier,” in Lacanian terms. From the traditional Christian perspective, this may seem contradictory or strange, but from Žižek’s own perspective, it doesn’t seem right to call it paradoxical.
6. How can we understand the fact that Žižek is interested in the emancipatory potential offered by Christian theology?
Žižek believes that the total emptying out of transcendent meaning is necessary to open up the possibility of real freedom. For him, death and resurrection represent the movement of completely withdrawing from the present order and setting to work building something new.
7. How does Žižek analyze the continental philosophy and the future of Christian theology from the legacy of Paul of Tarsus? What is the significance of Paul, in this perspective?
For Žižek, Paul’s Christian communities are a model of withdrawing from the present order—or as Žižek puts it in The Puppet and the Dwarf, “unplugging” from the force of law. Where many interpreters believe that Paul is an opponent of the Jewish law, Žižek claims that Paul is trying to give Gentiles access to the uniquely Jewish stance toward the law. In this perspective, Paul’s famous discussion of the law inciting its own transgression in Romans 7 is not talking about the Jewish law, but about distinctively pagan attitudes toward the law. Paul is trying to give his Gentile followers a way out of the vicious cycle he describes there.
This is relevant for today, insofar as Žižek views contemporary culture as embodying a kind of law that incites its own transgression—everything has to be “subversive” and “irreverent.” People don’t feel guilty about having sex, but about not having enough sex. In this context, rebellion against social norms becomes meaningless. A completely different stance that breaks the dichotomy of obedience and rebellion is needed, and that’s what Paul provides in Žižek’s view.
8. To what extent are Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Chesterton leading thinkers in the theological stance of the Slovenian philosopher?
This is an area where I believe Žižek has been misunderstood. Many readers view his use of these thinkers, particularly Chesterton, as an endorsement. In reality, though, his ultimate goal is to show that they don’t go far enough. He enjoys Chesterton’s Hegelian style, for example, but he views Chesterton’s Catholicism as a betrayal of the gospel that returns to the pagan approach to law and transgression. Similarly, though Pascal and Kierkegaard provide very real insights, he wants to go beyond them because they don’t take the next step and embrace the death of God.
9. What are the main points of the debate between Žižek and Milbank in “The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic”?
The encounter between Žižek and Milbank is the encounter between the Hegelian death of God approach and traditional orthodoxy. The debate was productive insofar as it allowed Žižek to develop his critique of traditional theology, particularly of the doctrine of the Trinity, and to reflect on the ethics implied in his position, but both authors’ essays were so long and full of so many digressions that it was almost impossible to discern any actual debate.
For me, the biggest benefit of this debate was that it allowed Žižek to draw a clear line in the sand. Milbank’s followers had sometimes viewed Žižek as a natural ally of their Radical Orthodoxy project, but Žižek declares that Milbank’s vision—which is centered on escaping from the problems of modernity by reasserting hierarchical authority and traditional family values—as “light fascism.” He also makes it clear that he views Milbank’s Anglo-Catholicism, like Chesterton’s Catholicism, as a reversion into the pagan stance toward law and transgression.
10. To what extent does the debate between these two thinkers deepen the dialogue between faith and reason?
In my view, the debate was a disappointment. Žižek and Milbank are simply too far apart for a truly productive struggle to emerge. Far more interesting, in my view, is the confrontation staged between Žižek and Terry Eagleton in Ola Sigurdson’s Theology and Marxism in Eagleton and Žižek: A Conspiracy of Hope. A confrontation with a less traditional theologian like Jurgen Moltmann or Catherine Keller would also have been more interesting.
Between Žižek and Milbank, though, there was little more than a missed encounter. Žižek has not yet found a theological interlocutor who can challenge him in a productive way—and I hope that someone does step up to fill that role, because it is so rare for a contemporary philosopher to have any interest at all in contemporary theology. I don’t think I am the right person for the job, but I hope that in my book, I helped to clear the space for such an encounter to occur.
Badiou’s four truth procedures, four areas where truth emerges.
Badiou lists the four areas as the areas in which this break happens. I am not sure that this list is the best, exhaustive or conclusive. Maybe this list is too neat in some way. I think things are messier in life. In many everyday situations, even trivial ones, there may be a sudden and unexpected break, people show an inventive creativity and do something very unexpected, and actually change the parameters of the situation and their own lives and the lives of others. I would leave this field open.
I think passion is what drives you, drives you towards something. But it’s not that passion as such is enough. It’s not that it just drives you and you let yourself be driven. It actually demands a hell of a lot if you want to pursue this passion! It demands that you put something, everything at stake.
To risk the usual ways of your life, the ‘bequemes Leben’, if you are lucky enough to have a comfortable social position. There is the spontaneous hang to pursue your social survival within a certain slot, the script for your career is waiting for you. And this is where the question of break comes in.
The passion is what makes a break.
But the break, it demands a hell of a lot of ‘Anstrengung’ and you have to put things at risk. Sometimes drastically at risk. You risk everything for the question of passion, to pursue your passion.
What Freud names ‘Todestrieb’ (death drive) in Jenseits des Lustprinzips (Beyond the Pleasure Principle) is not some striving towards death, but too much of life. There’s too much life, more than you can bear.
So this is the excessive moment which derails the usual course of things and in order to pursue this it takes a lot of courage and persistence, perseverance.
I think most people give up at a certain point. There are many ways of giving up, also as an artist. One way of giving up is to somehow be content with your role or to… ‘übereinstimmen’.
So that you consent to being that role. And this is a socially assigned role which can bring glory and awards. If it started with a break, then the big danger is that the break starts functioning as the institution of the break. The break itself gets institutionalised and highly valued.
Dolar: Yes, it has a place then. Freud has this wonderful phrase “people ruined by their own success“. And I think that in art many people are ruined by their own success. Precisely by succeeding in what they wanted to do and then they fit into this.
They have made an institution of themselves and somehow started to believe that they are this.
You have this wonderful phrase in Lacan: who is a madman? It’s not just an ordinary person who thinks that he’s a king. The definition of a madman is a king who thinks that he’s a king. And you have this madness among artists who believe that they are artists. This is psychosis, in a certain sense, if you really think that you are what you are. You really think that you are an artist. This is the end of art, I think.
Dolar: Feeling at home. Is there a good way to feel at home? I don’t know. I think there’s always an ideological trap in this. What you mostly feel at home with is always ideology because it offers a sort of security. I mean security in the sense of providing a certain status within which you can dwell. And also security of meaning, which means that it provides you with some answers as to ‘What does it all mean?’ ‘We live in parliamentary democracy, we’re a free society, in the era of progress and prosperity’, etc.
I mean the words which fulfil a certain horizon of meaning which situates you within a certain social moment and social structure, within a certain type of social relations. And this is always ideology, ideology is what makes this run. And I think that the break that we are talking about – the break with meaning or the break with the continuity of things – it could be described as a break with ideology.
Art and ideology are at the opposite ends. Art always makes a break, a cut into the ideological continuity of what you most feel at home with. And what you feel at home with is entrusted upon you. But this is not to say that art is immune to ideology, it can easily be made into ideology.
WgK: At that point when you feel content.
Dolar: Yes. When you feel content in your role. One could make a certain opposition between art and culture. I think culture is a sort of domestication of art. You establish canonical artworks which you are taught at school. And it’s a question of what comes into the canon and is it a good thing to have a canon or how to include or exclude works. Of course you always have a canon. There’s no escaping this, but at the same time you have to understand that culture is always a domestification of what is dangerous or excessive in art. It domesticates things by giving them a sort of proper place and value. You can say: ‘Well, Shakespeare is the greatest dramatist of all time.’ I mean it’s quite true, but it’s also a very forced statement to domesticate Shakespeare’s work. You glorify it instead of dealing with it.
WgK: It ends their quality of being a break by giving them a place.
Dolar: Yeah. You reinscribe them into a continuity of a tradition, of a cultural identity.
WgK: I have the feeling it’s a regressive desire.
Dolar: For home?
WgK: Yeah. Isn’t it?
Dolar: Yes. Ultimately yes. I think that being at home means being in the ideology and being in the meaning and having some sort of meaning secured. And I think that creating a home as a way of being with yourself – or being with another person – is precisely to try to deal with the unhomely element of it. To keep the unhomely element of it alive. What Freud called das Unheimliche, litterally the unhomely, but with the utter ambiguity where it can be given the comic twist. I think that love is keeping the non-homely element alive. It’s not to finally ‘go home’ with someone, but actually to keep this thing in the air. Keep this thing in the air. And comedy is precisely – to keep the ball in the air. Keep the ball in the air, I mean constantly.
A good interview by Ray Filar in July 2013.
Judith Butler on the Israel/Palestine conflict and her recent book Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism
RF: So is Parting Ways a call for transformation?
Establish a firm constitutional basis for equality for all citizens, regardless of what their religion might be, or their ethnicity or race.
End the occupation, which is illegal and an extension of a colonial project. I consider both the West Bank and Gaza to be colonised, even though Gaza is not occupied in the same way that the West Bank is. The Israeli government and military control all goods that pass in or out of that area, and they have restricted employment and building material that would allow Palestinians to rebuild homes and structures that were destroyed by bombardment.
The third call is probably the most controversial, but I do think that a lot of thought has to be given to how the right of return might be conceptualised, and how that right might be honoured, whether it’s via resettlement or compensation. Some plans involve a return to areas where people have lived, not necessarily to the exact homes they lived in.
But people who have been made stateless by military occupation are entitled to repatriation, and then the question is to which state, or to what polity or area? Those who have had their goods taken away are entitled to compensation of some kind. These are basic international laws.
RF: In your final chapter you cite a Mahmoud Darwish poem that says “a possible life is one that wills the impossible.” You describe this as a paradox – could you explain it?
JB: Well, there are people who believe in realpolitik and who say: “There’s never going to be one state, there’s never going to be equality, there’s never going to be peace…don’t fool yourself. If you want to be political, get concrete and see what adjustments you can make in the current regime”.
Then I just think, ok, what would it mean if we lived in a world in which no one held out for the possibility of substantial political equality, or for a full cessation of colonial practices – if no one held out for those things because they were impossible? People do scoff when you say right of return. I was at a meeting with Palestinians and Israelis where people said: “That will never happen.” So I said, “well it will not be taken off the table.”
In fact in politics, sometimes the thing that will never happen actually starts to happen. And there have to be people who hold out for that, and who accept that they are idealists and that they are operating on principle as opposed to realpolitik. If there were no such ideals then our entire political sensibility would be corrupted by this process.
And maybe one of the jobs of theory or philosophy is to elevate principles that seem impossible, or that have the status of the impossible, to stand by them and will them, even when it looks highly unlikely that they’ll ever be realised. But that’s ok, it’s a service.
What would happen if we lived in a world where there were no people who did that? It would be an impoverished world.
Unbehagen and the subject: An interview with Slavoj Žižek Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 15.4. 2010. 418–428
If beneath what you are asking me now is the big question, where does Freud really stand with regard to politics, I think the answer is pretty clear if you really look. I think Freud’s position was, to put it very simply, that psychoanalysis allows us, when you analyse a society, to formulate, to articulate Unbehagen in der Kultur literally, the uneasiness in culture, but more famously translated as Civilization and Its Discontents.
It does this basic symptomal job of showing how the failures, the pathological malfunctions, are symptomatic of the whole. I think that, for a true Freudian, it is totally wrong to distinguish the proper domain where you can use psychoanalysis. For the true Freudian it is not that Freud did his true job in his clinical analysis but then got a little bit crazy when he was writing Totem and Taboo and Unbehagen in der Kultur [Civilization and Its Discontents]. No, because the whole point of Unbehagen in der Kultur is that these pathological phenomena are conditioned by the truth.
They are the symptom, the result of what is wrong in the entire social body as such. In this sense, the two sides are necessarily connected. What is totally alien to Freud is this purely clinical idea that there is the normal functioning of society, then somebody doesn’t work, then the psychoanalyst would have been like the psychological mechanic, the repairman who will set me straight.
I think that Freud, to put it in fashionable terms, isolates a certain excess. He calls it death drive, a certain excess of destructability that is, as it were, undermining, destabilizing the social order, an excess that is ambiguous in the sense that it can be a source of constructive energy or it can be purely destructive.
The idea is that Freud isolates this space of excess, which then, of course, opens up the space for possible change. I think Freud’s basic answer would have been: psychoanalysis just does this elementary job of showing how there is a gap, a failure, a nonfunctioning excess in society. But then, about what to do, he leaves it open. We cannot jump from here directly to positive programs.
This then opens up all possible versions. You can have a conservative Freudian answer: the whole point is to control this threat. You can have a Reichian, naïve, Leftist answer: what is a threat is only a threat from the ruling perspective and we should identify ourselves with it. And you can have a liberal, middle-of-the-way game.