not-all Žižek
Less Than Nothing by Ž
December 7, 2012
However, the moment we take account the retroactivity of universal necessity — the fact that each “use” of particular moments for some universal goal, as well as this goal itself, emerge retroactively in order, precisely, to “rationalize” the symptomal excess — we can no longer accept the Hegelian Cunning of Reason in its standard sense. 524
Oct 14, 2012
This brings us back to our original question: in what does the difference between animal and human habits consist? Only humans, spiritual beings, are haunted by spirits―why? Not simply because, in contrast to animals, they have access to universality, but because this universality is for them simultaneously necessary and impossible; that is, it is a problem. In other words, while for human subjects the place of universality is prescribed, it has to remain empty, it can never be filled in with its “proper” content. Continue reading “Less Than Nothing”
Nov 30, 2012
Page 467
Hegel is the ultimate thinker of the process of the emergence of necessary features out of chaotic contingency of contingency’s gradual self-organization of the gradual rise of order out of chaos
How, then, can necessity arise out of contingency? The only way to avoid the obscurantism of “emergent properties” is to bring into play negativity: at its most radical, necessity is not a positive principle of regularity that overcomes contingency, but the negative obverse of contingency: what is “necessary” above all is that every contingent particular entity find its truth in its self-cancellation, disintegration, death. Continue reading “Less than nothing”
February 28 2013 A Reply to My Critics.
Room B01
Clore Management Centre
Birkbeck, University of London
Torrington Square
London WC1E 7HX
If we cannot imagine a society which is not held together by a Master figure but in a different way then we can pack our luggage and just say ok let’s play pragmatic politics. The challenges are great here. I think that in this debate Badiou versus postmodern fluid plural multitude figures of authority I think that both poles are wrong. The structure of a Master as well as this polymorphous multitude structure doesn’t function. There are some hints in Lacan or somewhere you can have a social link which is not founded on the figure of the Master.
large want to be passive, permanent participation, engagement, I much perfer to be passive citizen, I want a state that does its work. I don’t despise ordinary people. Engaged people don’t know what they want
Rehabilitate an ‘elite’ A good politician tells the people what they want, if he’s good, people have this “oh my god, yes now I know what I want.”
Molecular self-organizing multitude against hierarchical order:
Pippin, Robert. “Back to Hegel?” Mediations 26.1-2 (Fall 2012-Spring 2013) 7-28.
Perhaps Zadie Smith’s trenchant summary is the best: States now “de-regulate to privatize gain and re-regulate to nationalize loss.” NYR Blog, June 2, 2012
Let us designate the basic problem that the book addresses as the ontological problem of “subjectivity”; what is it to be a thinking, knowing and also acting and interacting subject in a material world? Žižek begins by claiming that there are four main kinds of answers to such a question possible in the current “ideological-philosophical field”:
(i) scientific naturalism (brain science, Darwinism);
(ii) discursive historicism (Foucault, deconstruction);
(iii) New Age Western “Buddhism”;
(iv) some sort of transcendental finitude (culminating in Heidegger).
Žižek’s thesis is that these options miss the correct one, which he calls the idea of a “pre-transcendental gap or rupture (the Freudian name for which is the drive),” and that this framework is what actually “designates the very core of modern subjectivity.”(6-7)
What all this points towards is the dialectical mediation of the “subjective” and “objective” dimension: “subkulak” no longer designates an “objective” social category but rather the point at which objective social analysis breaks down and the subjective political attitude directly inscribes itself into the “objective” order — in Lacanese, “subkulak” is the point of subjectivization of the “objective” chain: poor peasant—middle peasant—kulak. It is not an “objective” sub-category (or sub-division) of the class of “kulaks” but simply the name for the subjective political attitude of the “kulak.”
This accounts for the paradox that, although it appears as a subdivision of the class of “kulaks,” “subkulaks” is a species that overflows its own genus (that of kulaks), since “subkulaks” are also to be found among middle and even poor farmers. In short,”subkulak” names political division as such, the Enemy whose presence traverses the entire social body of peasants, which is why he can be found everywhere, in all three peasant classes.
This brings us back to the procedure of Stalinist dieresis: “subkulak” names the excessive element that traverses all classes, the outgrowth which has to be eliminated.
There is, in every “objective” classification of social groups, an element which functions like “subkulak” — the point of subjectivization masked as a subspecies of “objective” elements of the social body.
It is this point of subjectivization which, in the strictest sense of the term, sutures the “objective” social structure … What this also means is that the procedure of dieresis is not endless: it reaches its end when a division is no longer a division into two species, but a division into a species and an excremental leftover, a formless stand-in for nothing, a “part of no-part.” At this final point, the singular excrement reunites with its opposite, the universal; that is, the excremental leftover functions as a direct stand-in for the Universal.
In his polemic against Badiou’s reading of Paul, Agamben defines the singularity of the Christian position with regard to the opposition between Jews and Greeks (pagans) not as a direct affirmation of an all-encompassing universality (“there are neither Jews nor Greeks”), but as an additional divide that cuts diagonally across the entire social body and as such suspends the lines of separation between social groups: a (“Christian’) subdivision of each group is directly linked with a (“Christian’) subdivision of all other groups.
(The difference between Badiou and Agamben is that, for Badiou, this new “Christian’ collective is the site of singular universality, the self-relating universality of naming, of subjective recognition in a name, while Agamben rejects the title of universality.)
The common-sense classificatory approach would say, what’s the big deal? Being Christian or non-Christian is simply another classification that cuts across and overlaps with other classifications, like the fact that there are men and women, which also cuts across all ethnic, religious, and class divides.
There is, however, a crucial difference here: for Paul, “Christian” does not designate yet another predicate (property or quality) of the individual, but a “performative” self-recognition grounded only in its own naming; in other words, it is a purely subjective feature — and, Badiou adds, only as such can it be truly universal.
The opposition between the objective-neutral universal approach and the subjective partisan approach is false: only a radical subjective engagement can ground true universality.
The constellation here is therefore exactly the same as that of the “subkulaks” in the Stalinist discourse: “subkulaks” are also tbe “remainder” of kulaks which cuts across the entire field, a subjective-political category masked as a social-objective quality.
So, when Agamben defines “Christians” not directly as “non-Jews” but as “non-non-Jews,” this double negation does not bring us back to the starting positive determination; it should rather be read as an example of what Kant called “infinite judgment” which, instead of negating a predicate, asserts a non-predicate:
instead of saying that Christians aren’t Jews, one should say that they are non-Jews, in the same sense that horror fiction talks about the “undead.”
The undead are alive while dead, they are the living dead; in the same way, Christians are non-Jews while remaining Jews (at the level of their pre-evental, positive social determination) — they are Jews who, as Paul put it, “died for [in the eyes of] the [Jewish] Law.” 74-75
… the formal homology (as well as substantial difference) between this reflexive logic of the Master-Signifier — the signifier of the lack of the signifier, the signifier which functions as a stand-in (filler) of a lack — and the logic of the objet petit a which is also repeatedly defined by Lacan as the filler of a lack: an object whose status is purely virtual, with no positive consistency of its own, only a positivization of a lack in the symbolic order. Something escapes the symbolic order, and this X is positivized as the objet a, the je ne sais quoi which makes me desire a certain thing or person.
However, this formal parallel between the Master-Signifier and the objet petit a should not deceive us: although, in both cases, we seem to be dealing with an entity which fills in the lack, what differentiates the objet a from the Master-Signifier is that, in the case of the former, the lack is redoubled, that is, the objet a is the result of the overlapping of the two lacks, the lack in the Other (the symbolic order) and the lack in the object — in the visual field, say, the objet a is what we cannot see, our blind spot in relation to the picture.
Each of the two lacks can operate independently of the other: we can have the lack of the signifier, as when we have a rich experience for which “words are missing” or we can have the lack in the visible for which, precisely, there is a signifier, namely the Master-Signifier, the mysterious signifier which seems to recapture the invisible dimension of the object.
Therein resides the illusion of the Master-Signifier: it coalesces with the objet a, so that it appears that the subject’s Other/Master possesses what the subject lacks. This is what Lacan calls alienation: the confrontation of the subject with a figure of the Other possessing what the subject lacks. In separation, which follows alienation, the objet a is separated also from the Other, from the Master-Signifier; that is, the subject discovers that the Other also does not have what he is lacking. The axiom Lacan follows is “no I without a”: wherever an I (unary feature, signifying mark that represents the subject) emerges, it is followed by an a, the stand-in for what was lost in the signification of the real.
Is, then, the objet a the signified of the S1 of the Master-Signifier? It may appear so, since the Master-Signifier signifies precisely that imponderable X which eludes the series of positive properties signified by the chain of “ordinary” signifiers (S2).
But, upon a closer look, we see that the relationship is exactly the inverse: with regard to the division between signifier and signified, the objet a is on the side of the signifier, it fills in the lack in/of the signifier, while the Master-Signifier is the “quilting point” between the signifier and the signified, the point at which the signifier falls into the signified. 598-599
the universal is NOTHING BUT the inadequacy, the non-identity, of the particular to/with itself 539
Muselmannen Here we touch on the topic of Heidegger and psychiatric clinics: what about that withdrawal from engagement which is not death but the psychotic breakdown of a living human being? What about the possibility of “living in death” of vegetating with no care, like the Muselmannen in the Nazi camps? note 40 529
There is a nice anecdote about a Latin American poet who modified the political tenor of his poetry according to whoever was his most recent mistress: when she was a proto-fascist rightist, he celebrated military discipline and patriotic sacrifice; when he got involved with a pro-communist woman, he started to celebrate guerrilla warfare; later, he moved on to a hippy mistress and wrote about drugs and transcendental meditation.
This is what “woman as a symptom of man” means, not merely that a man uses a woman to articulate his message — on the contrary, woman is the determining factor: man orients himself towards his symptom, he clings to it to give consistencyto his life. And the Hegelian Cunning of Reason works in a similar way: it is not that Reason is a secret force behind the scenes using human agents for its purposes: there are nothing but agents following their particular purposes, and what they do “auto-poetically” organizes itself into a larger pattern. 528
Another case of lying in the guise of truth: a corrupt philosophy professor from my youth in Slovenia openly admitted his conformism, saying with a disarming smile: “I am scum, I know it, so what? “The lie of such an admission resides in the gap between the enunciated content and its subjective position of enunciation: by way of admitting his corruption openly, did he not adopt an honest position which somehow redeemed him from corruption? Not at all: the appropriate response is to paraphrase the old Jewish joke quoted by Freud: “If you are really scum, why are you telling us that you are scum?” Or, a more aggressive version: “You say that you are scum, but this will not fool us — you really are scum!” — in short: “Don’t lie to us by telling the truth — you are scum!” 521 note 25
However, from a strict materialist standpoint, Laplanche’s notion of the “enigmatic signifier” should be critically supplemented: it is not a primordial fact, an “original trauma” which sets the human animal on the path of subjectivization; it is, rather, a secondary phenomenon, a reaction to the primordial fact of the over-proximity of the other, of his or her intrusive presence or bodily material too-much-ness. 543
It is this intrusive presence which is then interpreted as an “enigma,” as an obscure “message” from the other who “wants something” from me. In this sense, the “Neighbor” refers NOT primarily to the abyss of the Other’s desire, the enigma of “Che vuoi?” of “What do you really want from me?” but to an intruder who is always and by definition too near. This is why for Hitler the Jew was a neighbor: no matter how far away the Jews were, they were always too close; no matter how many were killed, the remnants were always too strong.” Chesterton made this point with utmost clarity: “The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.” 543
The properly Freudian materialist solution would be to turn this relationship around and to posit the paradox of an original excess, an excess “in itself” rather than in relation to a presupposed norm.The Freudian drive is just such an excess-in-itself: there is no “normal” drive. The formation of the Ego with its borderline between Inside (Ego) and Outside (non-Ego) is already a defense-formation, a reaction against the excess of the drive. In short, it is not the excess of the drive which violates the “norm” of the Ego, it is the “norm” (proper measure) itself which is a defense against the excess of the drive.
It is for this reason that intersubjectivity is not a primordial or “natural” state of human being. 544
To find traces of a dimension “beyond intersubjectivity” in Hegel, one should look for them in the very place which is the central reference for the partisans of recognition: the famous chapter on servitude and domination from the Phenomenology.
Malabou has noted perceptively that, in spite of the precise logical deduction of the plurality of subjects out of the notion of life, there is an irreducible scandal, something traumatic and unexpected, in the encounter with another subject, that is, in the fact that the subject (a self-consciousness) encounters outside itself, in front of it, another living being in the world which also claims to be a subject (a self-consciousness).
As a subject, I am by definition alone, a singularity opposed to the entire world of things, a punctuality to which all the world appears, and no amount of phenomenological description of how I am always already “together-with” others can cover up the scandal of another such singularity existing in the world. 544
So when I encounter in front of me another self-consciousness, there is something in me (not simply my egotism, but something in the very notion of self-consciousness) which resists the reduction of both myself and the opposed self-consciousness to simple members of the human species: what makes the encounter shocking is that in it, two universalities meet where there is room only for one. 545
In the original encounter, the Other is thus not simply another subject with whom I share the intersubjective space of recognition, but a traumatic Thing. This is why this excess cannot be properly counted: subjects are never 1 + 1 + 1. .., there is always an objectal excess which adds itself to the series. … an alien monster which is less than One but more than zero. (The psychoanalytic treatment recreates this scene; the analyst is not another subject, there is no face to face, s/he is an object which adds itself to the patient.) This excessive spectral object is, of course, a stand-in for the subject, the subject itself as object, the subject’s impossible-real objectal counterpart. 545
Two men, having had a drink or two, go to the theater, where they become thoroughly bored with the play. One of them feels an urgent need to urinate, so he tells his friend to mind his seat while he goes to find a toilet: “I think I saw one down the corridor outside.” The man wanders down the corridor, but finds no WC; wandering ever further into the recesses of the theater, he walks through a door and sees a plant pot. After copiously urinating into it and returning to his seat, his friend says to him: “What a pity! You missed the best part. Some fellow just walked on stage and pissed in that plant pot!” The subject necessarily misses its own act, it is never there to see its own appearance on the stage, its own intervention is the blind spot of its gaze.
What, then, divides the subject? Lacan’s answer is simple and radical: its (symbolic) identity itself — prior to being divided between different psychic spheres, the subject is divided between the void of its cogito (the elusively punctual pure subject of enunciation) and the symbolic features which identify it in or for the big Other (the signifier which represents it for other signifiers). 555
In Agnieszka Holland’s Europa, Europa, the hero (a young German Jew who passes as an Aryan and fights in the Wehrmacht in Russia) asks a fellow soldier who had been an actor prior to the war: “Is it hard to play someone else?” The actor answers: “It’s much easier than playing oneself.”
We encounter this otherness at its purest when we experience the other as a neighbor: as the impenetrable abyss beyond any symbolic identity.
When a person I have known for a long time does something totally unexpected, disturbingly evil, so that I have to ask myself, “Did I really ever know him?” does he not effectively become “another person with the same name”?