Tag: whoa

Zupančič sexual difference pt 1 of 2

Alenka Zupančič Sexual Difference and Ontology This paper was originally presented at the 2011 Summer School EGS

And here is a general discussion of ontology and realism: “One Divides Into Two: Negativity, Dialectics, and Clinamen,” held at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin in March 2011.

July 4, 2012 both Zupančič and Copjec particpated in a forum in Spain.  Audio is here.

Traditional ontologies and traditional cosmologies were strongly reliant on sexual difference, taking it as their very founding, or structuring, principle. Ying-yang, water-fire, earth-sun, matter-form, active-passive—this kind of (often explicitly sexualized) opposition was used as the organizing principle of these ontologies and/or cosmologies, as well as of the sciences—astronomy, for example—based on them.

And this is how Lacan could say,“primitive science is a sort of sexual technique.”

At some point in history, one generally associated with the Galilean revolution in science and its aftermath, both science and philosophy broke with this tradition. And if there is a simple and most general way of saying what characterizes modern science and modern philosophy, it could be phrased precisely in terms of the “desexualisation” of reality, of abandoning sexual difference, in more or less explicit form, as the organizing principle of reality, providing the latter’s coherence and intelligibility.

The reasons why feminism and gender studies find these ontologizations of sexual difference highly problematic are obvious. Fortified on the ontological level, sexual difference is strongly anchored in essentialism—it becomes a combinatory game of the essences of masculinity and femininity. Such that, to put it in the contemporary gender-studies parlance, the social production of norms and their subsequent descriptions finds a ready-made ontological division, ready to essentialize “masculinity” and “femininity” immediately. Traditional ontology was thus always also a machine for producing “masculine” and “feminine” essences, or, more precisely, for grounding these essences in being.

When modern science broke with this ontology it also mostly broke with ontology tout court. (Modern) science is not ontology; it neither pretends to make ontological claims nor, from a critical perspective on science, recognizes that it is nevertheless making them. Science does what it does and leaves to others to worry about the (ontological) presuppositions and the (ethical, political, etc.) consequences of what it is doing; it also leaves to others to put what it is doing to use.

Rather, the sexual in psychoanalysis is something very different from the sense-making combinatory game—it is precisely something that disrupts the latter and makes it impossible. What one needs to see and grasp, to begin with, is where the real divide runs here.

Psychoanalysis is both coextensive with this desexualisation, in the sense of breaking with ontology and science as sexual technique or sexual combinatory, and absolutely uncompromising when it comes to the sexual as the irreducible real (not substance). There is no contradiction here.

The lesson and the imperative of psychoanalysis is not, “Let us devote all of our attention to the sexual (meaning) as our ultimate horizon”; it is instead a reduction of the sex and the sexual … to the point of ontological inconsistency, which, as such, is irreducible.

Here is her start on Judith Butler:

One of the conceptual deadlocks in simply emphasizing that gender is an entirely social, or cultural, construction is that it remains within the dichotomy nature/culture.

Judith Butler saw this very well, which is why her project radicalizes this theory by linking it to the theory of performativity. As opposed to expressivity, indicating a preexistence and independence of that which is being expressed, performativity refers to actions that create, so to speak, the essences that they express. Nothing here preexists: Sociosymbolic practices of different discourses and their antagonisms create the very “essences,” or phenomena, that they regulate.

The time and the dynamics of repetition that this creation requires open up the only margin of freedom (to possibly change or influence this process in which sociosymbolic constructions, by way of repetition and reiteration, are becoming nature — “only natural,” it is said.

What is referred to as natural is the sedimentation of the discursive, and in this view the dialectics of nature and culture becomes the internal dialectics of culture. Culture both produces and regulates (what is referred to as) nature.  We are no longer dealing with two terms: sociosymbolic activity, and something on which it is performed; but instead, we are dealing with something like an internal dialectics of the One (the discursive) that not only models things but also creates the things it models, which opens up a certain depth of field. Performativity is thus a kind of onto-logy of the discursive, responsible for both the logos and the being of things.

To a large extent, Lacanian psychoanalysis seems compatible with this account, and it is often presented as such. The primacy of the signifier and of the field of the Other, language as constitutive of reality and of the unconscious (including the dialectics of desire), the creationist aspect of the symbolic and its dialectics (with notions such as symbolic causality, symbolic efficiency, materiality of the signifier) …

All of these (undisputed) claims notwithstanding, Lacan’s position is irreducibly different from the above performative ontology. In what way exactly? And what is the status of the real that Lacan insists upon when speaking of sexuality?

Lacan also starts with a One (not with two, which he would try to compose and articulate together in his theory).

He starts with the One of the signifier. But his point is that, while this One creates its own space and beings that populate it (which roughly corresponds to the space of performativity described above), something else gets added to it. It could be said that this something is parasitic of performative productivity; it is not produced by the signifying gesture but together with and “on top of” it.

It is inseparable from this gesture, but, unlike how we speak of discursive creations/beings, it is not created by it. It is neither a symbolic entity nor one constituted by the symbolic; rather, it is collateral to the symbolic. Moreover, it is not a being: It is discernable only as a (disruptive) effect within the symbolic field, yet it is not an effect of this field, (it is NOT) an effect of the signifier; the emergence of the signifier is not reducible to, or exhausted by the symbolic.

The signifier does not only produce a new, symbolic reality (including its own materiality, causality, and laws); it also “produces,” or opens up, the dimension that Lacan calls the Real. This is what irredeemably stains the symbolic, spoils its supposed purity, and accounts for the fact that the symbolic game of pure differentiality is always a game with loaded dice. This is the very space, or dimension, that sustains the previously mentioned “vital” phenomena (the libido or jouissance, the drive, sexualized body) in their out-of-jointness with the symbolic.

Sexuality (as the Real) is not some being that exists beyond the symbolic; it “exists” solely as the curving of the symbolic space that takes place because of the additional something produced with the signifying gesture.

This, and nothing else, is how sexuality is the Real.

Starting from sexuality’s inherent contradictions — from its paradoxical ontological status, which precisely prevents us from taking it as any kind of simple fact — psychoanalysis came to articulate its very concept of the Real as something new.

The Real is not predicated on sexuality; it is not that “sexuality is the real” in the sense of the latter defining the ontological status of the former. On the contrary, the psychoanalytic discoveries regarding the nature of sexuality (and of its accomplice, the unconscious) have led to the discovery and conceptualization of a singularly curved topological space, which it named the Real.

The antagonism conceptualized by psychoanalysis is not related to any original double, or original multiple, but to the fact that a One introduced by the signifier is always a “One plus” — it is this unassignable plus that is neither another One nor nothing that causes the basic asymmetry and divide of the very field of the One .

The most general, and at the same time precise, Lacanian name for this plus is jouissance, defined by its surplus character. …

The Other is not the Other of the One ; it is the Lacanian name for the “One plus,” which is to say, for the One in which this plus is included and for which it thus has considerable consequences. This, by the way, is also why the Other referred to by Lacan is both the symbolic Other (the treasury of signifiers) and the Other of jouissance, of sexuality.

The first and perhaps most striking consequence of this is that human sexuality is not sexual simply because of its including the sexual organs (or organs of reproduction). Rather, the surplus (caused by signification) of jouissance is what sexualizes the sexual activity itself, endows it with a surplus investment (one could also say that it sexualizes the activity of reproduction).

This point might seem paradoxical, but if one thinks of what distinguishes human sexuality from, let’s say, animal or vegetal sexualities, is it not precisely because of the fact that human sexuality is sexualized in the strong meaning of the word (which could also be put in a slogan like, “sex is sexy”)? It is never “just sex.” Or, perhaps more precisely, the closer it gets to “just sex,” the further it is from any kind of “animality” (animals don’t practice recreational sex).

This constitutive redoubling of sexuality is what makes it not only always already dislocated in respect to its reproductive purpose but also and foremost in respect to itself. The moment we try to provide a clear definition of what sexual activity is, we get into trouble. We get into trouble because human sexuality is ridden with this paradox: The further the sex departs from the “pure” copulating movement (i.e., the wider the range of elements it includes in its activity), the more “sexual” it can become. Sexuality gets sexualized precisely in this constitutive interval that separates it from itself.

butler antigone lacan real

The Act as Feminine: Antigone Between Lacan and Butler
Author: A. Hugill. Goldsmiths College London.

Lacan insists throughout his lectures on Antigone that the tragic heroine should be taken as exemplary of the beautiful, in the Kantian sense.

… the relation of the beautiful to death and desire in Lacan – would gain nuance if the concept of the beautiful from which Lacan is working, namely as it appears in Kant’s Critique of Judgement, were further elaborated.

Echoing Kant’s own definition of the beautiful, Lacan frames it in terms of the pure ‘there is’ (il y a); that which is beautiful “communicate[s] a sign of understanding that is situated precisely at equal distance from the power of the imagination and that of the signifier.” Similarly, Kant’s crucial insight in the Critique of Judgement is to radicalize any exclamation that a thing is beautiful, by pointing to the indeterminate character of the object in question.

Beauty, rather than being a property of an object, describes a sensation of pleasure arising from an overwhelming feeling of life (Lebensgefühl) engendered by the free play of the cognitive powers, imagination (Einbildungskraft) and understanding (Verstand), insofar as they are not restricted by any determinate concept.

Beauty is distinguished from the good and the agreeable inasmuch as it is, for Kant, the only free liking. This free liking to which Kant refers is called favour (Gunst) and it is marked by a “letting-be” of the object, a disinterested interest. Interest in the Critique of Judgement refers to a certain use-value, desire or concern with the existence of the object that, in order for a pure aesthetic judgement to arise, should not be taken into consideration.

Lacan’s own definition of the structure of desire is in fact precisely in tune with this definition of beauty as disinterested interest: the object cause of desire (the objet petit a), for Lacan, can never be attained and so too causes desire to function as a means without end. In the same paradoxical manner, one’s desire resists conceptual rationalization and is sustained by the tension of its unfulfillment. Something remains beautiful so long as it resists being fully conceptualized.

The feeling of the sublime describes those “moments when something entrances us so much that we are ready to forget (and to renounce) everything, our own well-being and all that is associated with it; moments when we are convinced that our existence is worth something only in so far as we are capable of sacrificing it.”  In the case of Antigone, we see a subject who identifies entirely with the Thing, the limit, without a protective distance and in so doing meets her demise.

It is against this backdrop that Antigone’s act is radically re-thought by the Lacanian school, as a case of pure means. For Lacan, Antigone is precisely driven by a certain jouissance and not – as is the case with Creon – by any adherence to a concept of an ethical good (representing family or divine law, as some other commentators suggest). As Butler explains, “Antigone will emerge, then, for Lacan as a problem of beauty, fascination, and death as precisely what intervenes between the desire for the good, the desire to conform to the ethical norm, and thereby derails it, enigmatically, from its path.” Antigone’s act could not be judged beautiful in the Kantian sense if it were merely an external embodiment of a moral good. It is precisely the non-conceptual element of her act that fascinates Lacan and propels his interpretation forward in his later consideration of feminine sexuality in Seminar XX.

Zupancic’s description of the sublime as the ‘jouissance of the Other’ in the above-cited passage provides a key to understanding why it is that Antigone’s act is formulated as a ‘feminine act.’ In Seminar XX: Encore,, feminine jouissance is defined precisely as the ‘jouissance of the Other.’ In this lecture, Lacan discusses the particularity of feminine jouissance in contrast to phallic jouissance. The title of the seminar, meaning “again”, signifies the manner in which enjoyment (jouissance) is never satisfied. There is always a gap or remainder left over and desire is sustained through this impossibility of satisfaction in the sexual relationship. In his lesson “On jouissance,” Lacan famously says that “to man insofar as he is endowed with the organ said to be phallic – I said, ‘said to be’ – the corporal sex or sexual organ of woman – I said ‘of woman,’ whereas in fact woman does not exist, woman is not whole – woman’s sexual organ is of no interest except via the body’s jouissance.”

He is here describing what he calls ‘phallic’ jouissance or the jouissance of the organ – which should not be misconstrued as concerning a biological category. There are phallic women and non-phallic men. It rather denotes to what extent a person identifies with the phallic function. Phallic or “sexual” jouissance, for Lacan, is “the obstacle owing to which man does not come (n’arrive pas)… to enjoy woman’s body, precisely because what he enjoys is the jouissance of the organ.”

Feminine jouissance, on the other hand, is “beyond the phallus” by virtue of its non-subsumption in the phallic order. Impossible to know anything about it other than that some women (and men) experience it, Lacan explains it using an example of mystical ecstasy.  In his invocation of God and the mystics, Lacan’s ‘explanation’ of feminine jouissance points to a pure jouissance of being, a being that is at the very limit of language. With recourse to (post)-Lacanian thinkers like Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, it is possible to conceive of this feminine jouissance as relating to the primary relationship with the m(O)ther and the pre- or extra-symbolic inscription of language on the body. In Kristeva, we find a model of this in her concept of the semiotic, the unnamable within the symbolic, what she calls the “transsymbolic, transpaternal function of poetic language.”

Returning to Antigone, we find in Lacan’s Ethics a clear alignment of Antigone’s act – her unwavering love for the pure ‘there is’ of her brother – with this experience of the limits of language. Antigone’s act is fixed to the singularity of her brother’s being, without reference to any particular content:

“The unique value involved is essentially that of language. Outside of language it is inconceivable, and the being of him who has lived cannot be detached from all he bears with him in the nature of good and evil, of destiny, of consequences for others, or of feelings for himself. That purity, that separation of being from the characteristics of the historical drama he has lived through, is precisely the limit or the ex nihilo to which Antigone is attached. It is nothing more than the break that the very presence of language inaugurates in the life of man. That break is manifested at every moment in the fact that language punctuates everything that occurs in the movement of life.”  [Lacan, Ethics, 279]

The purity of Antigone’s act is at the limits of the means-ends logic constituting the symbolic order. The work to which Antigone commits herself, insofar as it can be called a ‘work,’ is marked by a ceaseless ‘unworking.’  She quite literally goes to the limit – to her own death – and as the multiple and never-ending interpretations of Sophocles’ play suggest, Antigone’s insistence is ultimately ambiguous with regard to any positive conceptualization and offers no determinate program in advance. Though her explicit action is to bestow Polyneices with a proper burial, it is uncertain in which name she insists upon doing so (whether divine or family law, or defiance of the state, or something entirely else).

Lacan suggests that Antigone acts in relation to the pure ‘there is,’ the singularity of her brother independent of any particular content, in the ineffaceable character of what is. Lacan regards this unshakeable yet indeterminate stance as the crucial issue of Sophocles’ text, and the reason for its ceaseless fascination:

“What is, is, and it is to this, to this surface, that the unshakeable, unyielding position of Antigone is fixed. She rejects everything else. The stance of the-race-is-run is nowhere better illustrated than here. And whatever else one relates it to, is only a way of causing uncertainty or disguising the absolutely radical character of the position of the problem in the text.” [Lacan, Ethics, 279]

In his book Enjoy Your Symptom!, Zizek draws on this insight with regard to Antigone, in order to put forward a model of a political subjectivity that might be called ‘anarcho-communist.’ He recounts a historical event: Tito’s ‘No!’ to Stalin in 1948, or the split of Yugoslav Communists from the international communist movement. Zizek argues that the importance of this act was to deny Stalin’s hegemony outside of any pre-determined positive ideological project, and to do so from the very situated position of communism itself; to resist Stalin as a communist, to create a rupture in the communist monolith from within, and to subject it to renewed critical consideration. Zizek remarks that a typical liberal reproach to this Lacanian ethic is to depict it as incompatible with a notion of community, as a suicidal ecstasy that suspends the social dimension. Instead, Zizek wants to suggest that a ‘suicidal gesture’ –as Antigone comes to exemplify it – is at the very foundation of every new social link: “with an act, stricto sensu, we can therefore never fully foresee its consequences, i.e., the way it will transform the existing symbolic space: the act is a rupture after which ‘nothing remains the same.’”  Antigone’s No! to Creon is presented as the real feminine act, the real ethical act as such, because it is situated at the limit of being, the very birthplace of the social itself, a place of pure potentiality from which real change can emerge.

[…] However, at the heart of Mendieta’s artistic action is a commitment to a certain identity, charged with a kind of naïve essentialism. And it is this fixed notion of community that both Butler and Lacan are working against in their writing on Antigone, though from very different poles.  On the one hand,

Butler wants to posit a multiplicity of meaning that is never fixed beyond the performance of a deed. In this sense, Butler’s notion of ‘performativity’ is not so different from the Lacanian ethical idea; but only to the extent that it puts into question the notion of a ‘doer behind the deed’ – a fixed subjecthood – just as the Lacanian ethical act destabilizes the subject.

[…] Rather than pursuing the destabilized subject to the point of rupture, extreme danger and risk, the point where new possibilities truly emerge, Butler believes in the possibility to gradually dismantle what already exists by parodically using the tools already given, without the act of destruction.

Converging on the body of Antigone, we can see two political stances emerge: death-driven insistence on the singularity of being in contrast to a vitalist view of the limitless plasticity or multiplicity of being. In this sense, Antigone’s legacy concerns, fundamentally, no less than the state of our social order itself. Antigone brings to the fore the question of resistance today. Is it any longer possible to resist capitalist-patriarchal heteronormativity by means of parody? Or is it not, rather, that notions of parody and performance have themselves been subsumed within that very order itself and thus exposed to their own impotency?

Sophocles’ Antigone has been repeatedly resurrected over the last centuries as a result of the fascinating, timeless and unresolved problematics that it presents.  In Lacan’s account, mobilized to support his ethics, the radical non-instrumentality of Antigone’s act is brought to the fore. In this way, it becomes for Lacan the site of similarly constituted ideas: the beautiful and the sublime in Kant’s aesthetics, and feminine jouissance. I have added to this list désoeuvrement and radical passivity. What each of these thoughts holds in common is a paradoxical active-passivity, an ‘unworking’ that pursues the limits of experience. In the pursuit of the limit – the Lacanian Real – the subject is in a position of extreme risk and death-driven instability without recourse to any pre-determined conceptual aim. For Zizek, this is the act par excellence, the act that puts into crisis the stability of any order. Indeed, Antigone’s act “most forcefully exposes the utter injustice and contingency of the Law, the fact that the Law functions precisely to ‘actively’…cover over the fact that it is constructed across a void.”

Interstitial Strategy

Erik Olin Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias New York: Verso, 2010.

Chapter 10: Interstitial Transformation

WHAT IS AN INTERSTITIAL STRATEGY?

The adjective “interstitial” is used in social theory to describe various kinds of processes that occur in the spaces and cracks within some dominant social structure of power. One can speak of the interstices of an organization, the interstices of a society, or even the interstices of global capitalism. The underlying assumption is that the social unit in question can be understood as a system within which there is some kind of dominant power structure or dominant logic which organizes the system, but that the system is not so coherent and integrated that those dominant power relations govern all of the activities that occur within it. Even in so-called “totalitarian” systems in which centralized power penetrates quite deeply into all spheres of social life there are still spaces within which individuals act in relatively autonomous ways, not following the dictates of the logic of the system. This need not imply that such interstitial practices are subversive or that they necessarily corrode the dominant logic of the system, but simply that they are not directly governed or controlled by the dominant power relations and dominant principles of social organization.

Interstitial processes often play a central role in large-scale patterns of social change. For example, capitalism is often described as having developed in the interstices of feudal society. Feudal societies were characterized by a dominant structure of class and power relations consisting of nobles of various ranks who controlled much of the land and the principle means of military violence and peasants with different kinds of rights who engaged in agricultural production and produced a surplus which was appropriated by the feudal dominant class through a variety of largely coercive mechanisms. Market relations developed in the cities, which were less fully integrated into feudal relations, and over time this created the context within which proto-capitalist relations and practices could emerge and eventually flourish. Whether one believes that the pivotal source of ultimate transformation of feudalism came from the dynamics of war-making and state-building, from contradictions in process of feudal surplus extraction, from the corrosive effects of markets, from the eventual challenge of emerging capitalists, or some combination of these processes, the interstitial development of capitalism within feudal societies is an important part of the story.

While interstitial processes and activities clearly play a significant role in social change, it is less obvious that there are compelling interstitial strategies for social transformation. The urban artisans and merchants in feudal society whose interstitial activities fostered new kinds of relations did not have a project of destroying feudal class relations and forging a new kind of society. They were simply engaged in profit-seeking activities, adapting to the opportunities and possibilities of the society in which they lived. The broader ramifications for long-term social change were basically unintended by-products of their interstitial activities, not a strategy as such. An interstitial strategy, in contrast, involves the deliberate development of interstitial activities for the purpose of fundamental transformation of the system as a whole.

There are certainly many interstitial activities in contemporary capitalist societies which are candidates for elements of an interstitial strategy of social emancipation: producer and consumer coops, battered women’s shelters, workers factory councils, intentional communities and communes, community-based social economy services, civic environmental councils, community-controlled land trusts, cross-border equal-exchange trade organizations, and many other things. All of these are consciously constructed forms of social organization that differ from the dominant structures of power and inequality. Some are part of grand visions for the reconstruction of society as a whole; others have more modest objectives of transforming specific domains of social life. Some are linked to systematic theories of social transformation; others are pragmatic responses to the exigencies of social problem-solving. What they have in common is the idea of building alternative institutions and deliberately fostering new forms of social relations that embody emancipatory ideals and that are created primarily through direct action of one sort or another rather than through the state. (page 230)

[…]

Many socialists, especially those enmeshed in the Marxist tradition, are quite skeptical of such projects. The argument goes something like this: While many of these efforts at building alternative institutions may embody desirable values and perhaps even prefigure emancipatory forms of social relations, they pose no serious challenge to existing relations of power and domination. Precisely because these are “interstitial” they can only occupy spaces that are “allowed” by capitalism. They may even strengthen capitalism by siphoning off discontent and creating the illusion that if people are unhappy with the dominant institutions they should just go off and live their lives in alternative settings. Ultimately, therefore, interstitial projects constitute retreats from political struggle for social transformation, not a viable strategy for achieving radical social transformation. At best they may make life a little better for some people in the world as it is; at worst they deflect energies from real political challenge to change the world to something better. There are certainly instances in which this negative diagnosis seems plausible. The hippy communes of the 1960s may have been inspired by utopian longings and a belief that they were part of the “dawning of the Age of Aquarius,” but in practice they functioned more as escapes from the realities of capitalist society than as nodes of radical transformation. Other examples, like organic grocery cooperatives, while not escapes from capitalist society, neverthelessseem constrained to occupy small niches often catering to relatively affluent people who can afford to “indulge” their preferences for a particular kind of “life style”. Organic grocery cooperatives may embody some progressive ideals, but they do not pose a threat to the system.

As a general indictment of interstitial strategies of transformation, these negative judgments are too harsh. They assume both that there is an alternative strategy which does pose a serious “threat to the system” and also that this alternative strategy is undermined by the existence of interstitial efforts at social transformation. The fact is that in present historical conditions no strategy credibly poses a direct threat to the system in the sense that there are good grounds for believing that adopting the strategy today will generate effects in the near future that would really threaten capitalism. (page 231) This is what it means to live in a hegemonic capitalist system: capitalism is sufficiently secure and flexible in its basic structures that there is no strategy possible that immediately threatens it. The strategic problem is to imagine things we can do now which have reasonable chances of opening up possibilities under contingent conditions in the future. Interstitial strategies, of course, may ultimately be dead-ends and be permanently contained within narrow limits, but it is also possible that under certain circumstances they can play a positive role in a long-term trajectory of emancipatory social transformation.

The question, then, is this: what is the underlying model of social transformation in which interstitial activities can be viewed as part of an overall strategy for emancipatory social empowerment? What is the implicit theory of the ways in which such activities can cumulatively transform the society as a whole? Writers in the anarchist tradition devote remarkably little attention to this problem. While anarchist writing criticizes existing structures of capitalist and statist power and defends a vision of a federated cooperative alternative without the coercive domination of the state, there is very little systematic elaboration of how to actually “build the new society within the shell of the old” and how this can lead to a systemic transformation.

Žižek cartestian subject cogito

Žižek, Slavoj. SIC Cogito and the Unconscious. Durham: Duke University Press 1998

Introduction: Cogito as a Shibboleth

There  are  two  standard  ways  to  approach  the  relationship  between  philosophy  and psychoanalysis.  Philosophers  usually  search  for  so-called philosophical  foundations  of psychoanalysis”:  their  premise  is  that,  no  matter  how  dismissive  psychoanalysis  is  of philosophy, it nonetheless has to rely on a series of conceptual presuppositions (about the nature  of  drives,  of  reality,  etc.)  that  psychoanalysis  itself  does  not  render  thematic  and that  bear  witness  to  the  way  in  which  psychoanalysis  is  only  possible  within  a  certain philosophical  horizon.

On  the  other  hand,  psychoanalysts  at  their  worst,  indulge  in  so-called “psychoanalyzing of philosophers,” trying to discern pathological psychic motivations beneath  fundamental  philosophical attitudes  (philosophical  idealism  as  the  last  vestige  of the  childish  belief  in  the  omnipotency  of  thoughts;  paranoiac  systematizing  as  the foundation  of  the  need  to  form  all-embracing  philosophical  systems,  etc.).  Both  these approaches  are  to  be  rejected.  While  the  psychoanalytic  reduction  of  philosophy  to  an expression of psychic pathology is today, deservedly, no longer taken seriously, it is much more difficult to counter the seemingly self-evident claim that psychoanalysis cannot relate anything  truly  relevant  to  philosophy,  since  psychoanalysis  must  itself  rely  on  a  set  of philosophical presuppositions that it is unable to reflect upon.

What if, however, references to the Freudian subject are not external to philosophy, but can, in fact, tell us something about  the  modern,  Cartesian  subject?

What  if  psychoanalysis  renders  visible  something that  the  modern  philosophy  of  subjectivity  accomplishes  without  knowing  it,  its  own grounding  gesture,  which  philosophy  has  to  disavow  if  it  is  to  assume  its  place  within academic  knowledge?

To  use  Lacan’s  pun,  what  if  psychoanalysis  renders  visible  the ex-timate  kernel  of  modern  subjectivity,  its  innermost  core  that  philosophy  is  not  ready  to assume, which it tries to keep at a distanceor, to put it in a more fashionable way, what if psychoanalysis  renders  visible  the  constitutive  madness  of  modern  philosophy?

We  are thus  playing  a  double  strategic  game:  this  ex-timate  kernel  of  philosophy  is  not  directly accessible  to  the  psychoanalysis  conceived  of as a  branch  of psychology  or psychiatry  — what we encounter at this level are, of course, the “naive” pre-philosophical theses. What one has to do, is to bring to light the philosophical implications of psychoanalysis, that is, to  retranslate,  to  transpose psychoanalytic  propositions  back  into  philosophy, to “elevate them  to  the  dignity  of  philosophical  propositions”:  in  this  way,  one  is able  to discern  the ex-timate  philosophical  kernel  of  psychoanalysis,  since  this  transposition  back  into philosophy explodes the standard philosophical frame. This is what Lacan was doing all the time:  reading  hysteria  or  obsessional  neurosis  as  a philosophical  “attitude  of  thought towards  reality”  (the  obsessional  compulsion  to  think” if  I  stop  thinking,  I  will  cease  to exist” — as the truth of the Cartesian cogito ergo sum), etc., etc. Are we thus not again engaged in “psychoanalyzing philosophy”? No, since this reference to  madness  is  strictly  internal  to  philosophy  —  the  whole  of  modern  philosophy,  from Descartes onward, involves an inherent reference to the threat of madness, and is thus a desperate attempt to draw a clear line that separates the transcendental philosopher from the madman ( Descartes: how do I know I’m not hallucinating reality? Kant: how to delimit metaphysical  speculation  from  Swedenborgian  hallucinatory  rambling?  ).

This  excess  of madness against which modern philosophy fights is the very founding gesture of Cartesian subjectivity.

…At  this point,  anyone  versed  in  postmodern  deconstructionism will  utter  a sigh  of  bored  recognition:  of  course,  the  Cartesian  ego,  the  selftransparent  subject  of Reason,  is  an  illusion;  its  truth  is  the  decentered,  split,  finite  subject  thrown  into  a contingent,  nontransparent  context,  and  this  is  what  psychoanalysis  renders  visible…. Things,  however,  are  more  complicated.

[…]

1

It  is  against  this  background  that  one  should  appreciate  the  paradoxical  achievement  of Lacan,  which  usually  passes  unnoticed  even  by  his  advocates:  on  the  very  behalf  of psychoanalysis, he  returns  to  the  modern  rationalist  notion  of  subject.  Philosophers  and psychoanalysts,  of  course,  promptly  exclaim  “We  are  here  on  our  home  terrain!”  and proceed  to  reduce  the  Freudian  subject  to  a  psychological  subject  of  introspection,  to philosophical self-consciousness, to Nietzschean will to power…. Lacan’s underlying thesis here  is  even  more  radical  than  with  the  unconscious:

not  only  has  the  Freudian  subject nothing  to  do  with  the  self-transparent,  unified  self-consciousness,  it  is  the  Cartesian subject  itself  (and  its  radicalization  in  German  Idealism,  from  Kant’s  transcendental apperception to self-consciousness from Fichte onward) … the  standard  philosophy  of  subjectivity, … misrecognize the gap that separates the Cartesian subject (when it is “brought to its  notion”  with  Kant)  from  the  self-transparent  ego,  or  from  man,  from  the  “human person.”

What  they fail to  see  is that  the Cartesian subject  emerges  precisely  out of  the “death of man” “transcendental subjectivity” is philosophical antihumanism at its purest.

One  can  see,  now,  why,  in  his  seminar  on  The  Four  Fundamental  Concepts  of  Psycho-Analysis, Lacan asserts that the subject of psychoanalysis is none other than the Cartesian cogito:  the  Freudian  unconscious  emerges  through  the  very  reduction  of  the  “person’s” substantial content to the evanescent punctuality of the cogito.

In  this  precise  sense, one  could  say  that  Martin Luther  was  the first  great antihumanist: modern subjectivity is not announced in the Renaissance humanist celebration of man as the  “crown  of  creation”, that  is,  in  the  tradition  of  Erasmus  and  others  (to  which  Luther cannot but appear as a “barbarian”), but rather in Luther’s famous statement that

man is the excrement who fell out of God’s anus.

Modern subjectivity has nothing to do with the notion of man as the highest creature in the “great chain of being,” as the final point of the  evolution  of  the  universe:  modern  subjectivity  emerges  when  the  subject  perceives himself  as  “out  of  joint,”  as  excluded  from  the  “order  of  the  things,”  from  the  positive order of entities. For that reason, the ontic equivalent of the modern subject is inherently excremental:  there  is  no  subjectivity  proper  without  the  notion  that,  at  a  different  level, from  another  perspective,  I  am  a  mere  piece  of  shit.

For  Marx,  the  emergence  of  working-class subjectivity is strictly codependent to the fact that the worker is compelled to sell the very substance of his being (his creative power) as a commodity on the market, that is, to reduce the agalma, the treasure, the precious kernel of his being, to an object that can be bought for a piece of money — there is no subjectivity without the reduction of the  subject  positive-substantial  being  to  a  disposable  “piece  of  shit.”

In  this  case  of  the correlation between the Cartesian subjectivity and its excremental objectal counterpart, we are  not  dealing  merely  with  an  example  of  what  Foucault  called  the  empirico- transcendental couple that characterizes modern anthropology, but, rather, with the split between  the  subject  of  the  enunciation  and  the  subject  of  the  enunciated:

2

If  the Cartesian subject is to emerge at the level of the enunciation, he is to be reduced to the “almost-nothing” of a disposable excrement at the level of the enunciated content.

Or,  to  put  it  in  a  slightly  different  way,  the  intervention  of  the  subject  undermines  the standard premodern opposition between the universal order and the hubris of a particular force whose egotistic excess perturbs the balance of the universal order: “subject” is the name  for  the  hubris,  the  excessive  gesture,  whose  very  excess  grounds  the  universal order;  it  is  the  name  for  the  pathological  abject,  clinamen,  deviation  from  the  universal order,  that  sustains  this  very  universal  order.  The  transcendental  subject  is  the “ontological  scandal,”  neither  phenomenal  nor  noumenal,  but  an  excess  that  sticks  out from the “great chain of being,” a hole, a gap in the order of reality, and, simultaneously, the agent whose “spontaneous” activity constitutes the order of (phenomenal) reality. If, for  the  traditional  ontology,  the  problem  was  how  to  deduce  chaotic  phenomenal  reality background image from the eternal order of the true reality (how to account for the gradual “degeneration” of the  eternal  order),  the  problem  of  the  subject  is  that  of  the  imbalanced  excess,  hubris, deviation, that sustains the order itself. The central paradox of the Kantian transcendental constitution  is  that  the  subject  is  not  the  absolute,  the  eternal  grounding  principle  of reality, but a finite, temporal entity — precisely as such, it provides the ultimate horizon of reality.

The very idea of the universe, of the all of reality, as a totality that exists in itself, is  thus  rejected  as  a  paralogism:  what  appears  as  an  epistemological  limitation  of  our capacity  to  grasp  reality  (the  fact  that  we  are  forever  perceiving  reality  from  our  finite, temporal standpoint), is the positive ontological condition of reality itself. Our  philosophical  and  everyday  common  sense  identifies  the  subject  with  a  series  of features:  the  autonomous  source  of  spontaneous,  self-originating  activity  (what  German Idealists called “self-positing”); the capacity of free choice; the presence of some kind of “inner  life”  (fantasizing);  etc.

Lacan  endorses  these  features,  but  with  a  twist:  the autonomous  source  of  activity  —  yes,  but  only  insofar  as  the  subject  displaces  onto  an Other the fundamental passivity of his being (when I am active, I am simultaneously interpassive, i.e., there is an Other who is passive for me, in my place, like the weepers, the hired women who cry for me at funerals in so-called “primitive” societies); the free choice —  yes,  but,  at  its  most  radical,  the  choice  is  a  forced  one  (i.e.,  ultimately,  I  have  a freedom of choice only insofar as I make the right choice); the presence of fantasizing — yes,  but,  far  from  coinciding  with  the  subject  in  a  direct  experience  of  “inner  life,”  the fundamental fantasy is that which cannot ever be “subjectivized,” that which is forever cut off from the subject….

What Lacan focuses on is this specific twist, this additional turn of the screw that confronts us with the most radical dimension of subjectivity. How, then, does this endeavor of ours relate to Heidegger’s well known attempt to “think through” the horizon of subjectivity? From our perspective, the problem with Heidegger is, in  ultima  analisi,  the  following  one:

the  Lacanian  reading  enables  us  to  unearth  in  the Cartesian subjectivity its inherent tension between the moment of excess (the “diabolical Evil” in Kant, the “night of the world” in Hegel) and the subsequent attempts to gentrify-domesticate-normalize  this  excess.

Again  and  again,  post-Cartesian  philosophers  are compelled,  by  the  inherent  logic  of  their  philosophical  project,  to  articulate  a  certain excessive moment of “madness” inherent to cogito, which they then immediately endeavor to “renormalize.” And the problem with Heidegger is that his notion of modern subjectivity does not seem to account for this inherent excess — in short, this notion simply does not “cover” that aspect of cogito on account of which Lacan claims that cogito is the subject of the unconscious.

3

One of the basic presumptions of contemporary doxa is that the Cartesian cogito paved the way for the unheard-of progress of modern science that profoundly affected the everyday life of mankind. Today, however, it seems as if the Cartesian cogito itself has acquired the status of a prescientific myth, superseded by the very progress of knowledge it unleashed. For  that  reason,  the  title  Cogito  and  the  Unconscious  is  bound  to  give  rise  to  two immediate associations: that it is to be understood as designating the antagonism between cogito  (the  transparent  subject  of  self-consciousness)  and  the  unconscious,  its  opaque Other that subverts the certitudes of consciousness; and, consequently, that cogito is to be repudiated  as  the  agency  of  manipulative  domination  responsible  for  all  present  woes, from  patriarchal  oppression  to  ecological  catastrophes.  The  specter  of  the  “Cartesian paradigm”  roams  around,  simultaneously  proclaimed  dead  and  feared  as  the  ultimate threat  to  our  survival.

In  clear  contrast  to  this  predominant  doxa,  Lacan  pleads  for  a psychoanalytic return to cogito.

Today’s  predominant  position  involves  the  assertion  of  multiple  subjectivities  against  the specter  of  (transcendental)  Subject:  the  unified  Subject,  the  topic  of  transcendental philosophy, the constitutive source of all reality, is dead (or so we are told), and the void of its absence is filled in by the liberating proliferation of the multiple forms of subjectivity– feminine, gay, ethnic….

One should thus abandon the impossible search for the Subject that  is  constitutive  of  reality,  and,  instead,  focus  attention  on  the  diverse  forms  of asserting  one’s  subjectivity  in  our  complex  and  dispersed  postmodern  universe….

What, however,  if  we  perform  the  exact  opposite  of  this  standard  operation,  and  endeavor  to think a subject bereft of subjectivity (of the self-experience of a historical agent embedded in a finite horizon of meaning)?

What kind of monster remains when we subtract from the background image subject  the  wealth  of  self experience  that  constitutes  subjectivity?  The  present  volume provides an answer to this question: its underlying premise is that

the Cartesian subject is this monster, that it emerges precisely when we deprive the subject of all the wealth of the “human person.”

Notes […]

2. See Jacques Lacan, Érits: A Selection ( New York: Norton, 1977), 300.

3. For a more detailed account of this excess, see, in the present volume, Slavoj Žižek, The Cartesian Subject versus the Cartesian Theater.

Kant phenomena noumena

These terms mean literally ‘things that appear’ and ‘things that are thought.’ … [In Kant’s thought, the] intelligible world of noumena is known by pure reason, which gives us knowledge of things as they are.

Things in the sensible world (phenomena) are known through our senses and known only as they appear. To know noumena we must abstract from and exclude sensible concepts such as space and time.

Kant called the determination of noumena and phenomena the ‘noblest enterprise of antiquity’, but in the Critique of Pure Reason he denied that noumena as objects of pure reason are objects of knowledge, since reason gives knowledge only of objects of sensible intuition (phenomena) . Noumena ‘in the negative sense’ are objects of which we have no sensible intuition and hence no knowledge at all; these are things-in-themselves. Noumena ‘in the positive sense’ (e.g. the soul and God) are conceived of as objects of intellectual intuition, a mode of knowledge which man does not possess. In neither sense, therefore, can noumena be known. For both Plato and Kant, nevertheless, conceptions of noumena and the intelligible world are foundational for ethical theory. [The Oxford Companion to Philosophy]

Žižek comment on Butler 2001

Hanlon,Christopher. “Psychoanalysis and the Post-Political: An Interview with Slavoj .” New Literary History, 32 (2001): 1-21. PDF  rest of interview in this blog is here

Question: Judith Butler—with whom you have engaged in ongoing if cordial debate—maintains that the Lacanian topology is itself dubious for its nonhistorical, transcultural presuppositions. You yourself have written that “jouissance is nonhistorical” How do you respond to complaints such as Butler’s?

Žižek: Ah! This is what we are struggling with for dozens, maybe hundreds of pages, in this book. My answer is to say that she is nonhistorical. That is to say, she presents a certain narrative, the same as Ernesto [Laclau]. With Ernesto, it’s that we have an older type of essentialist class politics, then slowly, slowly, essentialism starts to disintegrate, and now we have this contingent struggle for hegemony where everything is open to negotiation . . . . With Judith Butler, there is the same implicit narrative: in the old times, there was sex essentialism, biologically-identified; then slowly, slowly, this started disintegrating into a sex/gender distinction, the awareness that gender is not biologically— but rather culturally—constructed; finally, we come to this performativity,contingency, and so on and so on. So the same story, from essentialist zero-point to this open contingency where we have struggles for hegemony which are undecided. My first reproach as a philosopher to this is that here, some metanarrative is missing. To ask a very stupid, naïve question: why were people one hundred and fifty years ago essentialists? Were they simply stupid? You know what I mean? There is a certain, almost teleological narrative here, in which from the “bad” zero-point of essentialism, slowly we come to the “good” realization that everything is a performative effect, that nothing is exempted from the contingent struggle for hegemony. But don’t you need a metanarrative if you want to avoid the conclusion that people were simply stupid one hundred and fifty years ago?

CH: Well, perhaps not a metanarrative in the sense of a guiding historical trajectory, but an acceptance of a loosely Foucauldian premise, that one hundred and fifty years ago there were in place certain institutional mechanisms, powerdiscourses, which coerced belief from their subjects, engendered them . . .

Žižek: Ah! But if you accept this Foucauldian metanarrative, then things get a little complicated. Because Foucault is not speaking about truth value; for him, it is simply the change from one episteme to another. Then . . . OK, I ask you another question—let’s engage in this discussion, with you as Butler. So: is there a truth-value distinction between essentialism and the performativity of gender or is it simply the passage from one episteme to another? What would you say?

CH: I won’t speak for Butler, but if I were a Foucauldian, I would say that the latter is the case, though I may prefer the later episteme in light of my own political objectives.

Žižek: Yeah, but Butler would never accept that.

CH: You don’t think so?

Žižek: You think she would? Because I think that the epistemic presupposition of her work is implicitly—even explicitly, at least in her early work—that, to put it bluntly, sex always already was a performative construction. They just didn’t know it then. But you cannot unite this with Foucauldian narrative, because Foucauldian narrative is epistemologically neutral, in which we pass from one paradigm to the other. You know, sex was confessionary then; sex is now post-confessionary, pleasurable bodies, whatever . . . . But OK: Foucault would be one possible metanarrative. Marxism would provide the other one, in the sense that “the development of capitalism itself provoked a shift in subjectivity,” whatever. But again, what I claim is that there is some unresolved tension concerning historicity and truth-value. I ask you a different question. Both in Laclau and in Butler, there is a certain theory: Butler—and I’m speaking of early Butler; later, things get much more complex, much more interesting, a more intense dialogue becomes possible . . .

CH: So we’re talking about Gender Trouble, parts of Bodies That Matter . . .

Žižek: Yeah, I’m talking about Gender Trouble with Butler, and about Hegemony and Socialist Strategy with Laclau. Why? Because let’s not forget that these two books were the only two authentic “big hits” of the time. . . . I’ll tell you why: both Gender Trouble and Hegemony and Socialist Strategy were read as a model for a certain political practice. With Gender Trouble, the idea was that performativity and drag politics could have a political impact; it was, to put it in naïve, Leninist terms, “a guideline for a certain new feminist practice.” It was programmatic. It was the same with Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. It was a justification for the abandonment of so-called essentialist class politics, after which no specific struggle takes priority, we just have to coordinate our practices, cultivate a kind of “rainbow coalition,” although Ernesto rejects the term . . . . Now, what are these theories? Are they universal theories—of gender or of social/political processes—or are they specific theories about political practice, sex practice, within a certain historical/political moment? I claim that the ambiguity is still irreducible. At the same time that it’s clear that these theories are rooted in a certain historical moment, it’s also clear that they touch upon a universal dimension. Now my ironic conclusion is that, with all this anti-Hegelianism, what both Ernesto and Judith do here is the worst kind of pseudo-Hegelian historicism. At a certain point, it’s as if the access to truth or what always already was true is possible only in a certain historical situation. So in other words, philosophically, I claim that beneath these theories of contingency, there is another narrative that is deeply teleological.

CH: But either Butler or Laclau might rebut this reproach by pointing out that even such an embedded teleology is no worse than a matrix of non-historical Lacanian presuppositions.

Žižek: But my God, this is the big misunderstanding with her! Butler systematically conflates what she calls “Real” with some nonhistorical symbolic norm. It’s interesting how, in order to qualify the Lacanian notion of sexual difference as a nonhistorical Real, she silently slips in this nonhistorical gender norm, to then claim that “we homosexuals are excluded from this,” and so on. So her whole criticism inveighs against this notion that Lacan thinks of sexual difference as part of a nonhistorical, heterosexual normativity, and that this is what should be subverted . . . .

Of course, my counterpoint is that “Real,” for Lacan, is the exact opposite.

“Real” is that on account of which every norm is undermined. When [Butler] speaks of historicity, my point is not that there is something nonhistorical which precedes us. My point is that the Lacanian Real, in a way, is historical, in the sense that each historical epoch, if you will, has its own Real. Each horizon of historicity presupposes some foreclosure of some Real.

Now, Judith Butler would say “OK, I agree with this, but doesn’t this mean that we should re-historicize the Real, include it, re-negotiate it?” No, the problem is more radical . . . . Maybe the ultimate misunderstanding between us—from my perspective— is that for her, historicity is the ultimate horizon. As an old fashioned Freudian, I think that historicity is always a certain horizon which has to be sustained on the basis of some fundamental exclusion. Why is there historicity? Historicity doesn’t simply means that “things change,” and so on. That’s just stupid evolutionism; not in the biological sense, but common sense.

Historicity means that there must be some unresolved traumatic exclusion which pushes the process forward. My paradox would be that if you take away the nonhistorical kernel, you lose history itself.

And I claim that Judith Butler herself, in her last book, is silently approaching this position. Because in Gender Trouble, the idea that your psychic identity is based on some primordial loss or exclusion is anathema; it’s the Big Bad Wolf. But have you noticed that, if you read it closely, in The Psychic Life of Power she now accepts this idea of a primordial loss when she speaks of these “disavowed attachments”? The idea is now that we become subjects only through renouncing the fundamental passionate attachment, and that there’s no return, no reassumption of the fundamental attachment. It’s a very Freudian notion. If you lose the distance, the disavowal . . . it’s psychosis, foreclosure. The big problem I have with this shift is that it’s a very refined political shift of accent. What I don’t quite accept in her otherwise remarkable descriptions is how, when she speaks about the “marginalized disavowed,” she always presupposes—to put it in very naïve terms—that these are the good guys. You know: we have Power, which wants to render everything controllable, and then the problem is how to give voice to those who are marginalized, excluded . . .

CH: You see it as a kind of vulgar Bakhtinianism?

Žižek: Yeah, yeah—you know what I’m aiming at. What I’m aiming at is . . . aren’t racist, anti-Semitic pogroms also Bakhtinian carnival? That’s to say that what interests me is not so much the progressive other whom the power is controlling, but the way in which power has to disavow its own operation, has to rely on its own obscenity. The split is in the power itself. So that . . . when Butler argues very convincingly against—at least she points to the problematic aspects of—legal initiatives that would legalize gay marriages, claiming that in this way, you accept state authority, you become part of the “visible,” you lose solidarity with all those whose identity is not publicly acknowledged . . . I would say, “Wait a minute! Is there a subject in America today who defines himself as marginalized, repressed, trampled by state authority?” Yes! They are called survivalists! The extreme right! In the United States, this opposition between public state authority and local, marginalized resistances is more and more an opposition between civil society and radical rightwing groups. I’m not saying we should simply accept the state. I’m just saying that I am suspicious of the political pertinence of this opposition between the “public” system of power which wants to control, proscribe everything, and forms of resistance to subvert it. What I’m more interested in are the obscene supplements that are inherent to power itself.

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.

stavrakakis yes men 6

Stavrakakis, Yannis. Subjectivity and the Organized Other: Between Symbolic Authority and Fantasmatic Enjoyment Organization Studies 2008 29: 1037

Very often, however, experiencing such alienation is not enough to effect a lessening of the bonds attaching us to the socio-symbolic Other. In other words, subjects are willing to do whatever may be necessary in order to repress or disavow the lack in the Other.

This insight is crucial in understanding power relations. Moving beyond the banal level of raw coercion, which (although not unimportant) cannot form the basis of sustainable hegemony, everyone seeking to understand how certain power structures manage to institute themselves as objects of long-term identification and how people get attached to them is sooner or later led to a variety of phenomena associated with what, since de la Boetie, has been called ‘voluntary servitude’. The central question here is simple:

Why are people so willing and often enthusiastic — or at least relieved — to submit themselves to conditions of subordination, to the forces of hierarchical order? Why are they so keen to comply with the commands of authority often irrespective of their content?

The famous words of Rousseau from the second chapter of The Social Contract are heard echoing here: ‘A slave in fetters loses everything — even the desire to be freed from them. He grows to love his slavery …’   Obviously, the Oedipal structure implicit in the social ordering of our societies, the role of what Lacan calls ‘the Name-of-the-Father’ in structuring reality through the (castrating) imposition of the Law, predisposes social subjects to accept and obey what seems to be emanating from the big Other, from socially sedimented points of reference invested with the gloss of authority and presented as embodying and sustaining the symbolic order, organizing (subjective and objective) reality.  This central Freudian-Lacanian insight can indeed explain a lot. And this can be very well demonstrated through some empirical examples.

Consider, for instance, the story of The Yes Men, two anti-corporate activistpranksters who have set up a fake ‘World Trade Organisation’ website. Believing that the site is the official WTO site, many visitors have sent them speaking invitations addressed to the real WTO. Mike and Andy decided to accept some of the invitations and soon started attending business meetings and conferences throughout the world as WTO representatives. Although intending to shock and ridicule they soon discovered that their ludicrous interventions generated other types of reaction. This is how they describe their experience themselves:

Neither Andy nor Mike studied economics at school. We know very little about the subject, and we won’t attempt to convince you otherwise; if you are of sound mind, you would see through us immediately. Yet, to our surprise, at every meeting we addressed, we found we had absolutely no trouble fooling the experts — those same experts who are ramming the panaceas of ‘free trade’ and ‘globalization’ down the throats of the world’s population. Worse: we couldn’t get them to disbelieve us.

Some of our presentations were based on official theories and policies, but presented with far more candour than usual, making them look like the absurdities that they actually are. At other times we simply ranted nonsensically. Each time, we expected to be jailed, kicked out, silenced, or at the very least interrupted. But no one batted an eye. In fact, they applauded. (The Yes Men 2005)

Simply put, people seem to be ready to accept anything insofar as it is perceived to be transmitted from a source invested with authority: for businessmen and many academics the WTO is obviously such a source. In other words, the content of a message is not as important as the source from which it emanates. Likewise, the subject’s autonomy in filtering and consciously managing its beliefs seems to be undermined by a dependence on symbolic authority per se.

We saw in the activities staged by the Yes Men how easily people are prepared to accept whatever is perceived as coming from an authority. Obviously, what is at stake here is not only acceptance but also compliance and obedience.

Most people, as is shown in their activities, are indeed prepared to accept and obey anything coming from a source of authority irrespective of the actual content of the command. In fact, this structure of authority seems to be a frame presupposed in every social experience.

As Milgram points out, already before the experiment starts, ‘the subject enters the situation with the expectation that someone will be in charge’. Now, and this is the most crucial point, the role of this someone is structurally necessary, without him the identity of the subject itself remains suspended and no functional social interaction can take place: ‘the experimenter, upon first presenting himself, fills a gap experienced by the subject’.  This quasi-Lacanian formulation reveals something essential. First of all, it lends support to the Lacanian understanding of the Name-of-the-Father, the signifier representing authority and order, as instituting the reality of the subject. In his brief Lacanian analysis of the Milgram experiment, David Corfield is right to point out that it ‘reveals something of the super-egoical consequences of the establishment of the paternal metaphor in a clear, albeit brutal fashion’ (Corfield 2002: 200).

The founding moment of subjectivity proper, the moment linguistic/social subjects come to being, has to be associated with symbolic castration, with the prohibition of incest that resolves imaginary alienation and permits our functional insertion into the social world of language.

In other words, the command embodied in the Name-of-the-Father offers the prototype of symbolic power that structures our social reality in patriarchal societies. This is a power both negative and positive, both prohibitive and productive (à la Foucault). The performative prohibition of the paternal function is exactly what makes possible the development of (sexual) desire. Furthermore, it is a power that presupposes our complicity or rather our acceptance; only this acceptance is ‘forced’ since without it no social subject can emerge and psychosis seems to be the only alternative.

And this is a dialectic which is bound to affect our whole life: ‘A power exerted on a subject, subjection is nevertheless a power assumed by the subject, an assumption that constitutes the instrument of that subject’s becoming’ (Butler 1997b: 11).

Without the assumption of castration no desire can emerge. In that sense, if Giorgio Agamben links biopolitics (a characteristically modern phenomenon according to Foucault) with sovereignty per se (Agamben 1998), Lacan seems to be highlighting the inextricable bond between repressive and productive (symbolic) power. Hence, symbolic castration marks a point of no return for the subject.

It is the command of prohibition and our subjection to it that institutes our social world as a structured meaningful order. Without someone in command reality disintegrates.

What Lacan, in his ‘Agency of the Letter’, describes as the ‘elementary structures of culture’ (Lacan 1977: 148), meaning a linguistically determined sense of ordering, are now also revealed as elementary structures of obedience and symbolic power. The intersubjective effects of this logic are immense: ‘It is not only the subject, but the subjects, caught in their intersubjectivity, who line up … and who, more docile than sheep, model their very being on the moment of the signifying chain that runs through them’ (Lacan 2006: 21).

Without such an elementary structure of obedience — instituted and reproduced in what Milgram calls ‘antecedent conditions’: the individual’s familial experience, the general societal setting built on impersonal relations of authority — the experiment would collapse. And these antecedent conditions have to be understood in their proper Lacanian perspective: they refer primarily to the whole symbolic structure within which the subject is born: ‘the subject … if he can appear to be the slave of language is all the more so of a discourse in the universal movement of which his place is already inscribed at birth, if only by virtue of his proper name’ (Lacan 1977: 63–4).

unconscious the Other

Bailly, Lionel. Lacan: A Beginner’s Guide. Oxford: One World, 2009.

For Lacan, the Subject remained that elusive thing that hides behind the ego, that is alienated from it, that is created in an act of language, and that is largely unconscious. It is the Subject that speaks, but when it speaks, it barely knows what it is saying. And I am no longer referring here to the ‘unconscious discourse’ that appears in clips of the tongue, dreams and pathological symptoms, I am referring to what the speaker (Subject) would think of as ‘conscious speech’. This is because for the most part, the Subject is unconscious of itself.

This view may seem like overstatement: one feels provoked to say, ‘But I do know what I’m talking about … I only make a slop of the tongue very rarely, 99% of the time I mean exactly what I’m saying’, etc.

But the experienced analyst knows instantly when she/he hears denegation (‘Of course, he’s likeable enough’ nearly always means I don’t like him); and even the most common everyday use of language is closely governed by the unconscious. Most of the time, there is an interplay of conscious and unconscious in our speech: we may mean exactly what we say, but we hardly ever know why we say it.

Consider the following examples:

‘Has so-and-so got a partner’ appears a simple question, but what motivates it? Is the questioner a woman worried that the so-and-so in question is interested in her man? Or is it a man interested in so-and-so? Or is it a woman who, motivated by jealousy, hopes to learn that so-and-so is unlucky in love where she herself is not? Whichever it is, the speaker is bound to deny it, and say it’s an innocent question motivated by altruistic concern or curiosity? We can never escape the unconscious – even when it is harmless. 70

‘We’ve cooked a roast for you – we got the joint from such-and-such specialist butcher’ could provoke guilt in a prodigal child, or encourage a guest to bring a bottle of better quality wine than usual (why not just ‘a roast’? Why mention the quality of it?), etc. But again, in both cases, the speaker’s intentions are entirely unconscious.

‘I’m still recovering from the weekend’ is a commonly heard phrase, but why does the speaker think the listener needs to know this? Is she/he boasting about her/his exciting social life, bolstering the edifice of an ego which includes the master signifiers ‘socially successful’ or ‘popular’? or is she/he trying to convince her/himself that she/he had a good time, when in fact she/he was very bored? 70

Even ‘Please may I have a kilo of potatoes’ could be multilayered statement: why not simply, ‘a kilo of potatoes’ – why the time spent on a formula of politesse? Is the questioner trying to show her/his good breeding? Or if, on the contrary, all politesse is dispensed with – they why the rudeness?  Might that be a way of establishing higher status over the lowly greengrocer? And is a kilo enough – or is the speaker being mean and not buying enough, or displaying an anxiety about inadequacy and asking for too many? 70
These trivial examples only underline the power of the unconscious in directing the selection and combination of signifiers into chains with or without our conscious ‘will’; Lacan saw this interplay between conscious and unconscious in the Subject as being like the continuum of the surface of a moebius strip.

The Other is manifest not only in language (even though this may be its principal domain), but also in the whole set of hypotheses that exert their influence upon the Subject. The Law, societal rules, taboos, mores and expectations, and even Time are different faces of the Other. The Other is constituted by the entire symbolic realm of human productions; accessing the Other involves the crossing of the bar described in chapter 3; it also involves the act of alienation described in the Mirror Stage, which situates the Subject within the Other. These processes of alienation and symbolisation which tie together Subject and Other are the essential basis of human creativity. 70-71

Bartleby and violence 2006

The CJLC conducted this interview with Žižek over e-mail from December 2005-January 2006.

In every authentic revolutionary explosion, there is an element of “pure” violence, i.e., an authentic political revolution cannot be measured by the standard of servicing the goods (to what extent “life got better for the majority” afterwards) – it is a goal-in-itself, an act which changes the very standards of what “good life” is, and a different (higher, eventually) standard of living is a by-product of a revolutionary process, not its goal.

Usually, revolutionary violence is defended by way of evoking proverb platitudes like “you cannot make an omelet without breaking some eggs” – a “wisdom” which, of course, can easily be rendered problematic through boring “ethical” considerations about how even the noblest goals cannot justify murderous means to achieve them. Against such compromising attitudes, one should directly admit revolutionary violence as a liberating end-in-itself, so that the proverb should rather be turned around: “You cannot break the eggs (and what is revolutionary politics if not an activity in the course of which many eggs are broken), especially if you are doing it in big heat (of a revolutionary passion), without making some omelets!” … This, of course, in no way implies that we should dismiss violence as such. Violence is needed – but which violence? There is violence and violence: there are violent passages a l’acte which merely bear witness to the agent’s impotence; there is a violence the true aim of which is to prevent that something will effectively change – in a Fascist display of violence, something spectacular should happen all the time so that, precisely, nothing would really happen; and there is the violent act of effectively changing the basic coordinates of a constellation. In order for the last kind of violence to take place, this very place should be opened up through a gesture which is thoroughly violent in its impassive refusal itself, through a gesture of pure withdrawal in which, to quote Mallarme, rien n’aura eu lieu que le lieu, nothing takes place but the place itself.

And this brings us to Melville’s Bartleby. His “I would prefer not to” is to be taken literally: it says “I would prefer not to” and not “I don’t prefer (or care) to do it.” We are thereby back at Kant’s distinction between negative and infinite judgment. In his refusal of the Master’s order, Bartleby does not negate the predicate. He rather affirms a non-predicate: what he says is not that he doesn’t want to do it; he says that he prefers (wants) not to do it. This is how we pass from the politics of “resistance” or “protestation” which parasitizes upon what it negates, to a politics which opens up a new space outside the hegemonic position and its negation. We can imagine the varieties of such a gesture in today’s public space: not only the obvious “There are great changes for a new career here! Join us!” – “I would prefer not to”; but also “Discover the depth of your true self, find inner peace!” – “I would prefer not to”; or “Are you aware how our environment is endangered! Do something for ecology!” – “I would prefer not to”; or “What about all the racial and sexual injustices that we witness all around us? Isn’t it time to do more?” – “I would prefer not to.”

This is the gesture of subtraction at its purest, the reduction of all qualitative differences to a purely formal minimal difference. There is no violent quality in it; violence pertains to its very immobile, inert, insistent, impassive being. Bartleby couldn’t even hurt a fly – that’s what makes his presence so unbearable.

CJLC: So we must all then become so unbearable?
SŽ: Precisely.

the real

Zupancic, Alenka. “Psychoanalysis” Columbia Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophies. Ed. Constantin V.Boundas, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. 457-468.  Print

the Real is not the truth of reality, or the reality without distortion, a ‘naked reality’; the Real is not beyond the reality

the Real is nothing else but a fundamental, structural impasse to which reality gives this or that form.  It is not a realm — Lacan defines it as a register.’

If we take away the reality, no Real will be left.  The fact that reality as we experience it is always-already distorted (in the sense in which the great twentieth-century theme of ideology conceptualized this distortion, or else in the sense in which Lacan proclaimed that all reality is fantasmatic) does not mean that reality is a distortion of the Real.

The distortions of reality (that is, different narratives that structure our symbolic universe and define the ‘roles’ that we are expected to assume, starting with ‘child,’ ‘woman,’ ‘man,’ ‘mother,’ ‘father’) are different forms built to deal with the impasse of the real that constantly haunts us from within.

To say that this impasse is structural is to say that it ‘ex-sists’ as an irreducible surplus element of reality: as its inherent contradiction that may disappear from one place, yet only to reappear in the other. 463

freud lacan

Zupancic, Alenka. “Psychoanalysis” Columbia Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophies. Ed. Constantin V.Boundas, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. 457-468.  Print

The central themes of structural linguistics are the arbitrariness of the sign and the emphasis on differentiality (signifiers only ‘make sense,’ or produce meaning, as parts of a differential network of places, binary oppositions and so on; the signifying chain is strictly separated from the signified), as well as on the fact that there are no positive entities in language.  Lacan concluded that there was an important characteristic of every spoken language that was left out from this account, or was only considered on its margins, …  It is not only according to the laws of differentiality that signifiers produce sense, but also according to the two already mentioned mechanisms: sonorous similarities or homonyms and associations that exist in the speaker’s memory.  Here we are dealing with something like positive entities, with words functioning strangely similarly to objects. 459

In more general terms we could say that signifiers are not simply used to refer to reality, they are part of the same reality they refer to; hence ‘there is no such thing as a metalanguage’

Lacan transposed the bar separating the signifier from the signified (S/s) into the bar inherent to the register of the signifier itself.  Signifiers are never pure signifiers. They are riddled, from within, by unexpected surpluses that tend to ruin the logic of their pure differentiality. On the one side … they are separated from the signified in the sense that there is no inherent connection leading from the signifier to its meaning.  Yet, if this were all, the signifying field would be a consistent system and, as the structuralist motto goes, a structure without subject.  Lacan  subscribes to this view to the extent to which it convincingly does away with the notion of ‘psychological subject,’ of intentional subjectivity using the language for its purposes, mastering the field of speech or being its Cause and Source.

Yet he goes a step further. If we focus on the signifying chain, precisely in its independence and autonomy, we are bound to notice that it constantly produces, from itself, quite unexpected effects of meaning, a meaning which is strictly speaking, a surplus meaning that stains signifers from within.  This surplus meaning is also a carrier of certain quotas of affect or enjoyment, ‘jouissance’ …  It is precisely through this surplus meaning as enjoyment that signifiers are intrinsically bound to reality to which they refer.  Incidentally, this is also the kernel of Lacan’s insistence on the truth being not-all: the effect of the signifier cannot be fully reduced back to the signifier as its cause. 460

The subject of the unconscious is not some deeply hidden subject that makes its presence known through, say, dreams or the slips of the tongue; it only exists with, and within, these very slips of the tongue. 460

What, precisely, it the unconscious? There is no such thing as a direct perception of the unconscious thoughts. dreams (and other formations of unconscious) are not the place where one can get an unobstructed view in the unconscious, beyond the censorship and repression that otherwise ‘hide’ them from consciousness.  On the contrary, these formations are nothing but the censorship and distortions at work. … the unconscious is this very distortion, and not some untarnished content lying beyond these distortions, and contained in the coherent narrative of the latent thoughts reconstructed in the process of analysis.

Something is added to the latent thoughts and this surplus, constitutive of a dream, is the unconscious desire.  In this perspective the unconscious desire is but this excess of form over content.  The unconscious desire is not what is articulated in the latent thoughts, for instance — in the case of Freud’s own famous dream of ‘Irma’s injection’ — the wish to be absolved of the responsibility for a patient not getting better.  The same applies to some other cases discussed by Freud, wishes related to professional ambitions or aggressive wishes towards our supposedly beloved ones, or ‘inappropriate’ sexual wishes.  All these wishes are not all that unconscious; they are closer to the register of thoughts that we (more or less consciously) have, but wouldn’t admit to.