whoa – Page 4 – objet (a)

dislocation and identity

Discourse Theory in European Politics., Howarth, David and Jacob Torfing, 2005 Palgrave.

The dislocation of the discursive structure means that the subject always emerges as a split subject that might attempt to reconstruct a full identity through acts of identification. … When it comes to the theory of the subject, post-structuralism has retained a rather structuralist view that threatens to reduce the subject to an objective location within the discursive structure … The idea that the subject simultaneoulsy occupies the position of being a worker, a woman, an environmentalist, and so on, might help us to combat class reductionism, but provides an inadequate understanding of the processes that lead to the formation of multiple selves. Here, the notion of dislocation provides a fruitful starting point.

The recurrent dislocations of the discursive system mean that the subject cannot be conceived in terms of a collection of structurally given positions. The discursive structure is disrupted and this prevents it from fully determining the identity of the subject. The does not mean we have to reintroduce an ahistorical subjectivity that is given outside the structure. The subject is internal to the structure, but it has neither a complete structural identity nor a complete lack of structural identity. Rather it is a failed structural identity. Because of dislocation, the subject emerges as a split subject, which is traumatized by its lack of fullness. The split subject might either disintegrate or try to recapture the illusion of a full identiy by means of identifying itself with the promise of fullness offered by different political projects. Hence a dislocated Russion party functionary might aim to reconstitute a full identity by identifying with the promise of Russion nationalism, neoliberalism, social democracy, or some religious movement. The split subject might identify with many different things a the same time. In this situation the hegemonic struggles will have to offer ways of articulating the different points of identification into a relatively coherent discourse. Social antagonism will play a crucial role for the attempt to unify dissimilar points of identification. The construction of a constitutive outside facilitates the displacement of responsibility for the split subject’s lack onto an enemy, which is held responsible for all evil. The externalization of the subject’s lack to an enemy is likely to fuel political action that will be driven by an illusionary promise: that the elimination of the other will remove the subject’s original lack 17.

Žižek communist hypothesis pt 4

This brings us to the next elementary definition of communism: in contrast to socialism, communism refers to singular universality, to the direct link between the singular and the universal, bypassing particular determinations.

When Paul says that, from a Christian standpoint, “there are no men or women, no Jews or Greeks;’ he thereby claims that ethnic roots, national identities, etc., are not a category of truth. To put it in precise Kantian terms: when we reflect upon our ethnic roots, we engage in a private use of reason, constrained by contingent dogmatic presuppositions; that is, we act as “immature” individuals, not as free humans who dwell in the dimension of the universality of reason. (104)

In his vision of public space characterized by the unconstrained exercise of Reason, he invokes a dimension of emancipatory universality outside the confines of one’s social identity, of one’s position within the order of (social) being —precisely the dimension so crucially missing in Rorty.

This space of singular universality is what, within Christianity, appears as the “Holy Spirit” -the space of a collective of believers subtracted from the field of organic communities, or of particular lifeworlds (“neither Greeks nor Jews”) . Consequently, is Kant’s “Think freely, but obey!” not a new version of Christ’s “Render therefore untoCaesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s” ? ” Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s” : in other words, respect and obey the “private” particular life —world of your community; “and unto God the things that are God’s”: in other words, participate in the universal space of the community of believers. The Paulinian collective of believers is a proto-model of the Kantian “world-civil – society;’ and the domain of the state itself is thus in its own way “private”: private in the precise Kantian sense of the “private use of Reason” in the State administrative and ideological apparatuses (106).

The ex-slaves of Haiti took the French revolutionary slogans more literally than did the French themselves: they ignored all the implicit qualifications which abounded in Enlightenment ideology (freedom-but only for rational “mature” subjects, not for the wild immature barbarians who first had to undergo a long process of education in order to deserve freedom and equality . . . ) . This led to sublime “communist” moments, like the one that occurred when French soldiers (sent by Napoleon to suppress the rebellion and restore slavery) approached the black army of (self-)liberated slaves. When they heard an initially indistinct murmur coming from the black crowd, the soldiers at first assumed it must be some kind of tribal war chant; but as they came closer, they realized that the Haitians were singing the Marseillaise, and they started to wonder out loud whether they were not fighting on the wrong side. Events such as these enact universality as a political category. In them, as Buck-Morss put it, “universal humanity is visible at the edges”:

rather than giving multiple, distinct cultures equal due, whereby people are recognized as part of humanity indirectly through the mediation of collective cultural identities, human universality emerges in the historical event at the point of rupture. It is in the discontinuities of history that people whose culture has been strained to the breaking point give expression to a humanity that goes beyond cultural limits. And it is in our emphatic identification with this raw, free, and vulnerable state, that we have a chance of understanding what they say. Common humanity exists in spite of culture and its differences. A person’s nonidentity with the collective allows for subterranean solidarities that have a chance of appealing to universal, moral sentiment, the source today of enthusiasm and hope. (112-113)

Buck-Morss provides here a precise argument against the postmodern poetry of diversity: the latter masks the underlying sameness of the brutal violence enacted by culturally diverse cultures and regimes: “Can we rest satisfied with the call for acknowledging ‘multiple modernities: with a politics of ‘diversity: or ‘multiversality,’ when in fact the inhumanities of these multiplicities are often strikingly the same?” But, one may ask, was the ex -slaves’ singing of the Marseillaise ultimately not an index of colonialist subordination-even in their self-liberation, did not the Blacks have to follow the emancipatory model of the colonial metropolis? And is this not similar to the idea that contemporary opponents of US politics should be singing the Stars and Stripes? Surely the true revolutionary act would have been for the colonizers to sing the songs of the colonized?

The mistake in this reproach is double. First, contrary to appearances, it is far more acceptable for the colonial power to see its own people singing others’ (the colonized’s) songs than songs which express their own identity — as a sign of tolerance and patronizing respect, colonizers love to learn and sing the songs of the colonized . . . Second, and much more importantly, the message of the Haitian soldiers’ Marseillaise was not “You see, even we, the primitive blacks, are able to assimilate ourselves to your high culture and politics, to imitate it as a model!” but a much more precise one: “in this battle, we are more French than you, the Frenchmen, are —we stand for the innermost consequences of your revolutionary ideology, the very consequences you were not able to assume.” Such a message cannot but be deeply unsettling for the colonizers— and it would certainly not be the message of those who, today, might sing the Stars and Stripes when confronting the US army.

(Although, as a thought experiment, if we imagine a situation in which this could be the message, there would be nothing a priori problematic in doing so.)

🙂 Žižek says the politically correct guilt felt by Western countries over its colonialist past, inhibits their ability to see things clearly

The French colonized Haiti, but the French Revolution also provided the ideological foundation for the rebellion which liberated the slaves and established an independent Haiti; the process of decolonization was set in motion when the colonized nations demanded for themselves the same rights that the West took for itself. In short, one should never forget that the West supplied the very standards by which it (and its critics) measures its own criminal past. We are dealing here with the dialectic of form and content: when colonial countries demand independence and enact a “return to roots;’ the very form of this return (that of an independent nation-state) is Western. In its very defeat (losing the colonies) , the West thus wins, by imposing its social form on the other (115).

… the point is simply that the British colonization of India created the conditions for the double liberation of India: from the constraints of its own tradition as well as from colonization itself (116).

The standard position adopted by the unconditional defenders of the rights of illegal immigrants is to concede that, at the level of state, the counter-arguments may well be “true” (ie., of course a country cannot accept an endless flow of immigrants; of course they compete in ways which threaten local jobs, and may also pose certain security risks), but their defense moves at a different level altogether, a level which has a direct link with demands of reality, the level of principled politics where we can unconditionally insist that “qui est ici est d’ici” (“those who are here are from here’) . But is this principled position not all too simple, allowing for the comfortable position of a beautiful soul?

I insist on my principles, and let the state deal with pragmatic constraints of reality . . . In this way, do we not avoid a crucial aspect of the political battle for the rights of immigrants: how to convince the workers opposing those immigrants that they are fighting the wrong battle; and how to propose a feasible form of alternative politics?

The “impossible” (an openness to immigrants) has to happen in reality-this would be a true political event.

But why should the immigrant not be satisfied with his normalization? Because, instead of asserting his identity, he has to adapt to his oppressor’s standards: he is accepted, but defacto in a secondary role. His oppressor’s discourse defines the terms of his identity. One should remember here the programmatic words of Stokely Carmichael (the founder of Black Power) :

“We have to fight for the right to invent the terms which will allow us to define ourselves and to define our relations to society, and we have to fight that these terms will be accepted. This is the first need of a free people, and this is also the first right refused by every oppressor.”

The problem is how, exactly, to do this. That is to say, how to resist the temptation to define oneself with reference to some mythical and totally external identity (“African roots”) , which, by way of cutting links with “white” culture, also deprives the oppressed of crucial intellectual tools for their struggle (namely, the egalitarian emancipatory tradition) as well as potential allies.

One should thus slightly correct Carmichael’s words: what the oppressors really fear is not some totally mythical self-definition with no links to white culture, but a self-definition which, by way of appropriating key elements of the “white” egalitarian-emancipatory tradition, redefines that very tradition, transforming it not so much in terms of what it says as in what it does not say —that is, obliterating the implicit qualifications which have defacto excluded Blacks from the egalitarian space. In other words, it is not enough to find new terms with which to define oneself outside of the dominant white tradition —one should go a step further and deprive the whites of the monopoly on defining their own tradition.

In this precise sense, the Haitian Revolution was “a defining moment in world history. The point is not to study the Haitian Revolution as an extension of the European revolutionary spirit, that is, to examine the significance of Europe (of the French Revolution) for the Haitian Revolution, but rather to assert the significance of the Haitian Revolution for Europe.

It is not only that one cannot understand Haiti without Europe —one cannot understand either the scope or the limitations of the European emancipation process without Haiti. Haiti was an exception from the very beginning, from its revolutionary struggle against slavery which ended in independence in January 1804: “Only in Haiti was the declaration of human freedom universally consistent. Only in Haiti was this declaration sustained at all costs, in direct opposition to the social order and economic logic of the day:’ For this reason, “there is no single event in the whole of modern history whose implications were more threatening to the dominant global order of things.” (Hallward Damning the Flood) 121

stavrakakis Žižek antigone the act

Stavrakakis, Yannis. “The Lure of Antigone: Aporias of an Ethics of the Political” Boucher, Geoff, and Jason Glynos and Matthew Sharpe, eds. Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Responses to Žižek. Great Britain: Ashgate. 2005. Print.

It is difficult to see, however, how the “inhuman” position of Antigone could point to an alternative formulation of the socio-political structure. … Antigone’s intransigence, her deadly passion, may thus be what creates her tragic appeal, but even by Žižek’s 1998 standards, one has to conclude that this makes her unsuitable as a model for transformative ethico-political action (173).

Unless of course, one reinterprets her in a substantial way. But then a certain paradox emerges: Antigone can only function as a model for radical political action on the condition that she is stripped of her radically inhuman (anti-social and anti-political) desire.

🙂 Stavrakakis isn’t clear on just exactly what it is in Žižek’s argument that he finds disagreeable. He thinks that Žižek has to ‘tame’ Antigone first in order to find her suitable for politics, that is ‘give way’ on her radical desire, which means, in this case, retreat or withdraw from her radical desire. For Stavrakakis: Wouldn’t the truly radical act be to traverse the lure of Antigone altogether? (174)

🙂 Stavrakakis points out that Lacan himself moved from this position on ethics outlined in this Book 7, to a different position in the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, where the idea of pure desire is questioned. “This shift needs to be taken into account when discussing the function of Antigone.

Desire not only loses its value as a pure force of transgression, but is also revealed as the ultimate support of power and the order of goods. As soon as jouissance acquires its central place in Lacan’s theoretical universe, desire is revealed as a defense against enjoyment, as a compromise formation, while drive emerges as the nodal point of his ethical thought (cites Zupančič, 2000:235) In that sense, desire can never be a pure transgressive force (175).

… desire also has precise limits. It [desire] is always conditioned by the structures of fantasy sustaining “hegemonic” regimes —regimes of power, consumption, and even resistance and transgression. It is always stimulated by the imaginary lure of attaining jouissance, but it is also sustained by the constitutive inability to realise such a goal. In that sense, desire”succeeds,” reproduces itself, through its own failure. This reproduction is not politically innocent. For example, consumer culture is partly sustained by the continuous displacement of final satisfaction from advertisement to advertisement, from product to product, from fantasy to fantasy (176)

The important “by-product” of this play is a specific structuration of desire which guarantees, through its cumulative metonymic effect, the reproduction of the market economy within a distinct “promotional culture“.

It is Lacan himself then who points the way to traversing the lure of Antigone by shifting his understanding of desire. This shift needs to be acknowledged as the radical break it truly represents. Any attempt to reconcile the “pure” desire of Antigone with the later conceptualisation and the critique of illusory desire and/or the ethics of desire with the ethics of drive —what Zupančič seems to attempt in the last pages of her Ethics of the Real — needs to be re-examined and further debated

*Undoubtedly desire and drive are related, but their relation seems to me to escape any logic of reconciliation or supplementation, which is how Zupančič ultimately views their relation. Her aim seems to be to “reconcile” desire with drive (Zupančič, 2000:238), something attempted through presenting drive as a “supplement” of desire (Zupančič, 2000:239): at the heart of desire a possible passage opens up towards the drive; one might therefore come to drive if one follows the ‘logic’ of desire to its limit (Zupančič, 2000: 243).

What is not given appropriate attention here is that reaching this limit entails a crossing which radically transforms our relation to desire. In other words, the limit of desire does not connote the automatic passage into a supplementary field of reconciliation; it primarily signifies a rupture, precisely because “desire never goes beyond a certain point” (Miller, 1996: 423).

Whereas Lacan’s early work and his conceptualisation of desire as something “always in violation, always rebellious and diabolical” —a position informing his reading of Antigone— leads to “the confusion between the drive and desire,” as soon as desire is reconceptualised as ultimately submissive to a law, a shift of almost “gigantic” proportions is insituted, and this shift needs to be acknowledged thoroughly (Miller, 1996: 422-423)

Miller, Jacques-Alain (1996). “Commentary on Lacan’s Text.” Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Return to Freud. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink and Maire Jaanus (Eds). Albany: SUNY Press.

As Žižek himself has pointed out in another text, “[t]here is ethics —that is to say, an injunction which cannot be grounded in ontology— in so far as there is a crack in the ontological edifice of the universe: at its most elementary, ethics designates fidelity to this crack” (Žižek, 1997c:214).

In order for a truly ethical fidelity to an event ot become possible another fidelity is presupposed, a fidelity that cannot be reduced to the event itself or to particular symbolisations of the event and has to retain a certain distance from them: a fidelity to event-ness as distinct from particular events, a “fidelity to the Real qua impossible” (Žižek, 1997c:215).

Such a standpoint not only presents the necessary symbolic prepartions for the proper ethical reception of the act/event, but also offers our best defense against the ever-present risk of being lured by a false event, a satanic miracle, against the ever-present risk of terror and absolutisation of an event, to use Badiou’s vocabulary (Badiou, 2001:85).

Of course, one should be aware that fidelity to event-ness, to what ultimately permits the emergence of the new and makes possible the assumption of an act, presupposes a certain betrayal, not of the act itself, but of a certain rendering of the act as an absolute and divine positivity.

In that sense, fidelity to an event can flourish and avoid absolutisation only as an infidel fidelity, only within the framework of another fidelity — fidelity to the openness of the political space and to the awareness of the constitutive impossibility of a final suture of the social — within the framework of a commitment to the continuous political re-inscription of the irreducible lack in the Other (180).

The transformative potential of a Lacanian ethics of the political is a crucial issue that is far from settled.

Žižek desire drive review of Fink 1996

On the web here at lacan.com

This paper was first published in the Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 1 (1996), 160-61, as a review of Bruce Fink’s The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

Insofar as, according to Lacan, at the conclusion of psychoanalytic treatment, the subject assumes the drive beyond fantasy and beyond (the Law of) desire, this problematic also compels us to confront the question of the conclusion of treatment in all its urgency. If we discard the discredited standard formulas (“reintegration into the symbolic space”, etc.), only two options remain open: desire or drive.

– That is to say, either we conceive the conclusion of treatment as the assertion of the subject’s radical openness to the enigma of the Other’s desire no longer veiled by fantasmatic formations,

– or we risk the step beyond desire itself and adopt the position of the saint who is no longer bothered by the Other’s desire as its decentred cause.

In the case of the saint, the subject, in an unheard-of way, “causes itself”, becomes its own cause. Its cause is no longer decentred, i.e., the enigma of the Other’s desire no longer has any hold over it.

How are we to understand this strange reversal on which Fink is quite justified to insist? In principle, things are clear enough: by way of positing itself as its own cause, the subject fully assumes the fact that the object-cause of its desire is not a cause that precedes its effects but is retroactively posited by the network of its effects: an event is never simply in itself traumatic, it only becomes a trauma retroactively, by being ‘secreted’ from the subject’s symbolic space as its inassimilable point of reference.

In this precise sense, the subject “causes itself” by way of retroactively positing that X which acts as the object-cause of its desire. This loop is constitutive of the subject.

That is, an entity that does not ’cause itself’ is precisely not a subject but an object. However, one should avoid conceiving this assumption as a kind of symbolic integration of the decentred Real, whereby the subject ‘symbolizes’, assumes as an act of its free choice, the imposed trauma of the contingent encounter with the Real.

One should always bear in mind that the status of the subject as such is hysterical: the subject ‘is’ only insofar as it confronts the enigma of Che vuoi? -“What do you want?”- insofar as the Other’s desire remains impenetrable, insofar as the subject doesn’t know what kind of object it is for the Other. Suspending this decentring of the cause is thus strictly equivalent to what Lacan called “subjective destitution”, the de-hystericization by means of which the subject loses its status as subject.

The most elementary matrix of fantasy, of its temporal loop, is that of the “impossible” gaze by means of which the subject is present at the act of his/her own conception. What is at stake in it is the enigma of the Other’s desire: by means of the fantasy-formation, the subject provides an answer to the question, ‘What am I for my parents, for their desire?’ and thus endeavours to arrive at the ‘deeper meaning’ of his or her existence, to discern the Fate involved in it.

The reassuring lesson of fantasy is that “I was brought about with a special purpose”. Consequently, when, at the end of psychoanalytic treatment, I “traverse my fundamental fantasy”, the point of it is not that, instead of being bothered by the enigma of the Other’s desire, of what I am for the others, I “subjectivize” my fate in the sense of its symbolization, of recognizing myself in a symbolic network or narrative for which I am fully responsible, but rather that I fully assume the uttermost contingency of my being.The subject becomes ’cause of itself’ in the sense of no longer looking for a guarantee of his or her existence in another’s desire.

Another way to put it is to say that the “subjective destitution” changes the register from desire to drive. Desire is historical and subjectivized, always and by definition unsatisfied, metonymical, shifting from one object to another, since I do not actually desire what I want. What I actually desire is to sustain desire itself, to postpone the dreaded moment of its satisfaction.

Drive, on the other hand, involves a kind of inert satisfaction which always finds its way. Drive is non-subjectivized (“acephalic”); perhaps its paradigmatic expressions are the repulsive private rituals (sniffing one’s own sweat, sticking one’s finger into one’s nose, etc.) that bring us intense satisfaction without our being aware of it-or, insofar as we are aware of it, without our being able to do anything to prevent it.

In Andersen’s fairy tale The Red Shoes, an impoverished young woman puts on a pair of magical shoes and almost dies when her feet won’t stop dancing. She is only saved when an executioner cuts off her feet with his axe. Her still-shod feet dance on, whereas she is given wooden feet and finds peace in religion.

These shoes stand for drive at its purest: an ‘undead’ partial object that functions as a kind of impersonal willing: ‘it wants’, it persists in its repetitive movement (of dancing), it follows its path and exacts its satisfaction at any price, irrespective of the subject’s well-being. This drive is that which is ‘in the subject more than herself’: although the subject cannot ever ‘subjectivize’ it, assume it as ‘her own’ by way of saying ‘It is I who want to do this!’ it nonetheless operates in her very kernel.

As Fink’s book reminds us, Lacan’s wager is that it is possible to sublimate this dull satisfaction. This is what, ultimately, art and religion are about.

Žižek Marx’s mistake

Žižek, Slavoj. “Object a in Social Links.” Clemens, Justin, and Russell Grigg eds. Reflections on Seminar XVII: Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. 107-128. Print.

However, precisely as Marxists … we should discern the mistake of Marx. On the one hand, he perceived how capitalism unleashed the breathtaking dynamics of self-enhancing productivity — see his fascinated descriptions of how, in capitalism, “all that is solid melts into air,” of how capitalism is the greatest revolutionizing force in the entire history of humanity. On the other hand, he also clearly perceived how this capitalist dynamic is propelled by its own inner obstacle or antagonism, so that the ultimate limit of capitalism (of the capitalist self-propelling productivity) is capital itself. the incessant development and revolutionizing of capitalism’s own material conditions, the mad dance of its unconditional spiral of productivity, is ultimately nothing but a desperate flight forward to escape its own debilitating inherent contradiction (125).

Marx’s fundamental mistake was to conclude, from these insights, that a new, higher social order (communism) is possible, an order that would not only maintain, but even raise to a higher degree and effectively fully release the potential of the self-increasing spiral of productivity which, in capitalism, on account of its inherent obstacle (“contradiction”), is again and again thwarted by socially destructive economic crises.

In short, what Marx overlooked is that, to put it in the standard Derridean terms, this inherent obstacle/antagonism as the “condition of impossibility” of the full deployment of the productive foreces is simultaneously its “condition of possibility”: if we abolish the obstacle, the inherent contradiction of capitalism, we do not get the fully unleashed drive to productivity finally delivered of its impediment, but we lose precisely this productivity that seemed to be generated and simultaneously thwarted by capitalism. If we take away the obstacle, the very potential thwarted by this obstacle dissipates. (Therein would reside a possible Lacanian critique of Marx, focusing on the ambiguous overlapping between surplus value and surplus enjoyment.) (126)

… what if his [Marx’s] mistake was also to assume that the object of desire (unconstrained expanding productivity) would remain even when deprived of the cause that propels it (surplus value)?

… For Lacan, however, desire has to be sustained by an object cause: not some primoridal incestuous lost object on which desire remains forever transfixed and whose unsatisfying substitutes all other objects are, but a purely formal object that causes us to desire objects that we encounter in reality. As in the case with Marx, Deleuze’s failure to take into account this object cause sustains the illusory vision of unconstrained productivity of desire … (127)

dean discourse of analyst pervert on lenin

Dean, Jodi. Žižek’s Politics. New York: Routledge. 2006. Print.

Discourse of the Analyst

The discourse of the analyst has the same structure as the perverse discourse. The difference between the discourse of the analyst and the perverse discourse rests in the ambiguity of objet petit a (occupying here the position of agent).

In the perverse discourse, objet petit a designates the subject’s ($ in the position of addressee) enjoyment. That is, the pervert is the one who knows what the subject desires and makes himself into an instrument of that desire. Accordingly we see how the formula places knowledge (S2) in the position of truth, supporting the object that speaks. (89)
In the discourse of the analyst, this knowledge (S2) is the “supposed knowledge of the analyst.” This means that in the analytic setting, the subject presumes that the analyst knows the secret of its desire. But, this presumption is false. The enigmatic analyst simply adopts this position, reducing himself to a void (objet petit a) in order that the subject will confront the truth of her desire. The analyst is not supported by objective or historical knowledge. rather, the position is supported only by the knowledge supposed by the subject through transference. Analysis is over when the subject comes to recognize the contingency and emptiness of this place. Žižek follows Lacan in understanding this process as “traversing the fantasy,” of giving up the fundamental fantasy that sustains desire. (89)

Thus, whereas the pervert knows the truth of desire, the analyst knows that there is no truth of desire to know.

The process of traversing the fantasy, of confronting objet petit a as a void, involves “subjective destitution” As the addressee of the speaking object, the subject gives up any sense of a deep special uniqueness, of certain qualities that make him who he is, and comes to see himself as an excremental remainder, to recognize himself as an object. Neither the symbolic order nor the imaginary realm of fantasy provides any ultimate guarantees. They cannot establish for the subject a clear, certain, and uncontested identity. they cannot provide him with fundamental, incontrovertible moral guidelines. What is left out, then, is the authority of the Master (S1, now in the position of production). (89)

Žižek views the discourse of the analyst as homologous to revolutionary emancipatory politics. What speaks in revolutionary politics is thus like objet petit a, a part that is no part, a part that cannot be recuperated into a larger symbolic or imaginary unity. Such a part, in other words, is in excess of the whole.

In emphasizing the structural identity between revolutionary politics and the discourse of the analyst, moreover, Žižek is arguing that the revolutionary act proper has no intrinsic meaning. It is a risk, a venture that may succeed or fail. Precisely what makes revolution revolutionary is that it leaves out (produces as remainder) the authority of a Master: there are no guarantees.(90)

For Žižek, what was remarkable about Lenin was his willingness to adopt this position. Žižek emphasizes two specific moments: 1914 and 1917. In 1914 Lenin was shocked and alone as all the European Social Democratic parties (excluding the Russian Bolsheviks and the Serb Social Democrats) turned to patriotism … falling ini with the prevailing nationalist fervor. Yet this very catastrophic shattering of a sense of international workders’ solidarity, … “cleared the ground for the Leninist event, for breaking the evolutionary historicism of the Second International — and Lenin was the only one who realized this, the only one who articulated the Truth of the catastrophe” … Likewise in April 1917, most of Lenin’s colleagues scorned his call for revolution. Even his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, worried that Lenin had gone mad, but Lenin knew that there was no proper time for revolution, that there are no guarantees that it will succeed. More importantly he knew that waiting for such an imagined proper time was precisely the way to prevent revolution from occuring. … Lenin is remarkable in his willingness to take the risk and engage in an act for which there are no guarantees. We should recall that the odds were fully against Lenin — in peasant Russia he did not even have a working class that could take power. (90)

Against communist dogma regarding the laws of historical development and the proper maturity of the working class, Lenin urged pushing through with the revolution. He did not rely on objective laws of history. He also did not wait for permission or democratic support. He acted without grounds, inventing new solutions in a moment when it was completely unclear what would happen. He refused to wait for authorization or do what other thought he “ought” to do, doing instead what he had to do. Lenin, then, takes the position of objet petit a. The truth of his view does not rest in laws of history but in its own formal position in an uncertain situation, a position marked by the Leninist Party (91).

Unlike (Agamben), Žižek does not abandon law and sovereignty. Lenin’s greatness is not simply that of a risk taker but of a founder, one who takes responsibility for introducing a new order. … addressing the fundamental political problems of the day — antatgonism in an era post-property and the exclusions and violence of neoliberal capitalism — is a matter not of escaping or abandoning the law but of traversing the fantasies that support the law, confronting the perversity and enjoyment in our relations to law. … possibility of moving from law to love. (92-93)

pluth politics calls into question the very organizing principle of the political

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007.

Politics is about a presentation that causes an impasse in representation. Such a presentation occurs, Badiou argues, when migrant workers say, “We want our rights.”

… politics for Badiou is not about the assertion of identity and the procuring of representation, and in this respect I see it as a continuation of Lacan’s project and a contrast to Butler’s work. With a theory of politics that includes a notion like the real as an impasse in signification, Badiou is able to highlight the kinds of effects politics has outside of calls for the recognition of identity. (154)

The resemblance between Lacan’s theory of the act and what Badiou calls politics should, then, be clear. Although the term Other is not used by Badiou in this context, the places where it would fit are obvious. The domain of the political — the state — resembles the Lacanian Other as a subject-supposed-to-know. Politics sustains an impasse in this Other, just as a Lacanian act emphasizes the Other’s lack of consistency, coherence, and totality.

Politics does not consist of repeating the circumstances of an event, of, for example, trying to bring about again what happened at Talbot. Instead, politics as a signifying act preserves the impasse in signification caused by the event.

Politics does not let this event stop being an event for the social. In other words, it does not let an event get fully absorbed or placed in the Other. Politics, then, is a signifying practice that remains faithful to the subjective rupture an event brings about. Politics’ reminder to the Other that all cannot be represented is what Badiou calls the subject-effect of politics. Thus the political subject for Badiou is essentially linked to rupture. The consistency of a political subject, oddly is nothing other than a consistency of a rupture. As Badiou (1982) described it in Théorie du sujet, the subject is a destructive consistency. 155

I argued in chapter 7 that in Lacanian theory the subject of an act is not something from which the real is excluded or repressed. While a signifying act does not present us with the real in the raw, it is not a completely tame real that it presents either. It is precisely the real’s status as an impasse in formalization and signification that is presented in an act. I opened this chapter by asking what the signifying practice of an act does if it does not make demands. If it does not seek recognition by the Other, then is it just a meaningless blah blah blah?

Badiou’s discussion of politics shows us how an act is not like this. Politics, as Badiou conceives it, does something to the social without articulating a demand to the social Other.

While such an act, strictly speaking, has no place, no meaning, in the Other, and while Badiou does not refrain from calling such an act “nonsensical,” such acts are not simply meaningless and are reminiscent of the way Lacan described puns. As Lacan described it, a pun contains a pas-de-sens, a step toward meaning that never gives a full incarnation of meaning in one signifier. This step, far from simply negating the Other, engages in something like a reinvention of the Other. Certainly since an act avoids making demands it does not engage with the Other as a subject-supposed-to-know, and it can be said to be in a negative relation to such an Other.

But by preserving some kind of relation to the creation of a new meaning, it manages to go toward the establishment of a different Other in the place of this Other-who-knows: an Other whose inconsistency and incoherence are laid bare.

Once again we can see how an act is not like the production of meaning in a metaphor. In chapter 2, I claimed that a metaphor succeeds in creating the illusion that there is an incarnation of an absent signified in one particular signifier (latent or manifest) in a signifying chain. this signifier then appears as an enigma, containing within it the keys to its own interpretation, an interpretation that only succeeds in giving more signifiers and never a final signified. Is the signifying production of an act doing something like this?

A distinction between creating a new signifier in an act and creating a new signified in metaphor ought to be maintained. A metaphor exploits signifiers that are already recognizable by the Other. It just deploys them in an unusual way. An act (like a pun) creates a signifier whose place in the Other itself is not assured, a signifier without well-established links to other signifiers that might be able to provide it with meaning. The signifier used in an act (and the phrase “We want our rights,” in Badiou’s discussion, can be taken as a signifier) is something less than an enigma, because it does not appear to be pregnant with any sense at all. It appears to be nonsensical, and yet it could make sense. So this is why I am saying that an act seems to bear more resemblance to the punning pas-de-sens than to metaphor. 156

pluth on butler her lack of act

Pluth, Ed. Signifers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.

Blog post originally published on May 14, 2009 at 15:16

Even attempts to avoid alienation by coming up with our own identities (say, in a project of aesthetic self-creation, or … in a Butlerian politics that affirms the openness of identity) are still always going to be geared toward getting recognition from the Other.

If we are interested in identity, in determining or asserting what we are (or even what we want to be), then we are interested in being objects of the Other’s desire. This interest relies upon an Other construed as a subject-supposed-to-know. No pursuit of the self, no matter how apparently subversive it may be, can avoid making an implicit appeal to this kind of Other. Both Butler and Lacan pursue the implications of this impasse, yet despite these similarities, there is an important difference in their results. (140)

Žižek points out (CHU: 124), that the dimension of the act is missing from Butler’s work … and that this is the real flaw … While Butler argues that the subject has no core, unchangeable identity, she does argue that the subject has an unchangeable fixation to identity as such. Her characterization of this fixation leads me to claim that despite her attempts to include a notion of agency in her work, her theory possesses a deterministic streak. The inclusion of a consideration of how acts use signifiers in a way THAT IS NOT BOUND UP WITH IDENTIFICATION AND RECOGNITION would remedy this. (141)

Butler’s accounts of agency and the subject do not require any notion of something external to or other than discourse. She can account for subjects and agents as well as transformations within the “matrix of intelligibility” from a perspective that only considers the discursively constructed nature of identity. Nevertheless Butler wants to avoid giving the impression that she adheres to an extreme “linguisticism.” … Butler wants to include some notion of the body in her account of identification while avoiding two things:

– On the one hand, she wants avoid making the body into a purely linguistic construct

– she also wants to avoid making the body into something simply outside of discourse. 144

In the Psychic Life of Power, the paradox of having to be subjected to power in order to be a subject comes under further scrutiny: “If the terms by which we gain social recognition for ourselves are those by which we are regulated and gain social existence then to affirm one’s existence is to capitulate to one’s subordination a sorry bind” (Butler Psychic 79, quoted in Pluth 147).

Butler reiterates here that it is only by being subjected to a signifier that identifies us that we can be subjects capable of resisting that identification, resisting a reduction to that signifier, and acting as agents. Once again, the preservation of some kind of relation to identity is absolutely crucial for Butler. Without a relation to an alienating identification, the kind of subversive activity she wants to affirm would not be possible. In fact, there would be no “subject” at all, and thus no chance for agency, without both an identity and the preservation of a frustrated relationship to this identity. 147

Because of being wed to the real in a different fashion, an act involves the realization that there is no Other of the Other, nothing behind the Other, as it were, acting as a ground.

Consequently an act transforms the subject (of fantasy) and consists of a signifying practice that does not rely on the Other as a guarantee of meaning and recognition. As … the Fort-Da game .. showed, an act is not for the Other.

Is Lacan’s idea of a desiring Other just like Butler’s idea of identity as a conflicted cultural field? They sound alike insofar as both involve a rejection of the fiction of an Other who is a subject-supposed-to-know. But the resemblance does not go much father. Butler’s “matrix of intelligibility,” out of which identity is forged, contains a multiplicity of signifiers whose interrelations can lead to unpredictable possibilities for identity.

But in Lacan’s work, an encounter with the Other’s desire is not an encounter with a multiplicity of signifiers offering various possibilities for identity. Rather, an encounter with the Other’s desire is an encounter with the absence of any signifier offering a support, guarantee, and recognition point for identity. It is such an absence that makes an encounter with the Other’s desire into an encounter with an impasse in symbolization, which is the mode in which the real appears in an act. Thus the encounter with the Other’s desire can be thought of as an encounter with the real. (148)

The difference between Lacan’s notion of a split, desiring Other and Butler’s notion of a multiple, conflicted social order is the difference between not having a signifier and having a cornucopia of signifiers, which is one way to figure the difference between a theory that includes the real in the symbolic, and a theory that overemphasizes the symbolic (although Butler would not use this term to describe her theory). While her discussion of the body as an impasse is an attempt to resolve this issue, it does not lead Butler to focus on how the subject may have a relation to something other than identity, and how the subject may be doing something other than performing identity —at least sometimes (148).

pluth butler the real2

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: New York, 2007.

On Butler’s conception of the body

As she describes it, the body presents language with a problem and is certainly not reducible to language, but the body is also not radically distinct from language, otherwise we would never be able to account for the body as a resistance to signification. Butler is trying to think of the materiality of the body as something experienced within language, and this actually sounds very much like the Lacanian understanding of the real as an impasse in signification (real2).

Only whenever Butler comes across the term real she systematically understands it to be a domain radically distinct from language and does not seem willing to acknowledge that there is another approach to the real in Lacan’s work, one where the real is just an “impasse in formalization.” 145

In Lacan’s work, the real is an “impasse in formalization” that can be handled in two different ways —

1. it can be covered up by creating a signified for it, or

2. it can be preserved in a particular type of signifying practice.

Badiou argued that Lacan’s theory embraced a covering up of, or a distancing of the subject from, the real, and I countered with the claim that Lacan actually embraced the alternative position in his theory of the act.

Butler’s notions of the body and passionate attachments to identity do not lead her to develop a theory of the act, which would be in part about renewing and rewriting our very attachment to identity itself. In other words, Butler does not seem to consider the possibility that certain signifying practices may be entirely outside the domain of identification. According to Butler, we remain committed to subjection, and thus identification, at the psychic or unconscious level. In fact, [for Butler] this is the very condition for us to be subjects at all. 146

pluth the act the other

Pluth, Ed. Signifers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.

Blog post originally published May 13, 2009 at 13:30

The subject associated with Lacan’s theory of the act is a subject that is negative yet nevertheless consists in some way. It consists in a sustained signifying activity or process that is still not like the signifying practice that characterizes the subject-as-meaning. Žižek is right to see the Lacanian subject in negative terms, but the subject in an act is negative with respect to a particular configuration of the Other, to the Other as a subject-supposed-to-know. In this way it makes sense to speak of the subject in terms of a negative or destructive consistency or process (116).

An act does not make any demand on the Other, and is thus not about getting recognition from the Other.
Acts then, are ways of using signifiers in which identification is not at stake at all.

The problem with Žižek’s interpretation is that he does not allow for the subject of an act to consist of anything more than a “no!” — ultimately a “no” to signifiers as such. This makes the subject in Lacanian theory out to be more negative than it is (117).

The subject of an act is a product of a particular type of signifying process … a process that is not simply saying “no” to something, but a more nuanced “no … but.” (117)

The Other in Lacan’s later theory is not just the field of any signifying practice whatsoever but is a name for a particular organization within which some signifying practices are recognized as legitimate and others are not. This can be thought of as the Other who is a “subject-supposed-to-know.” An act’s use of signifiers, which is punlike insofar as the signifiers used are not immediately recognicable and able to be situated in the linguistic code, is not oriented toward obtaining recognition by the Other.

An act creates new signifiers and new significations, ones that do not involve getting recognized by the Other. But since acts, like puns, are not entirely nonsensical either, and since they are using signifiers and creating sense, something of the Other is used in them, without that Other being posited as a subject-supposed-to-know. This is the point that is overlooked in Badiou’s reading of Lacan. The very insistent or “ex-ceding” real that Badiou wishes to see taken into account in, and included in, a theory of the subject is present in Lacan’s theory of the act —precisely in the form of the creation of new signifiers, which is not simply a symbolic activity but includes the real in the symbolic (in the kind of exceeding Badiou is after, I believe) insofar as it brings about a signifying “tension.” (128)

pluth on the act

Pluth, Ed. Signifers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.

Originally published on: May 12, 2009 @ 13:53

the act does not depend on gaining recognition from the Other

involves doing something with signifiers

not far from Austin’s performative speech act but Lacan is not interested on acts that change the situation of the world or the set of facts within it . Lacan focuses on acts that change the structure of the subject If Austinian speech acts change the state of affairs in the world —making meetings closed, bachelors married, and so on— then Lacanian speech acts change the subject (101).

The act means crossing a certain threshold

Pluth goes on, “Notice that Austinian speech acts, in contrast, are not at all transgressive but are in fact highly ritualized and codified. The conditions for the success of an Austinian speech act largely depend upon the existence of social guarantees and rituals. Marriages, for example, are only successfully accomplished when performed under very specfic circumstances, and by the proper authorities. According to Lacan’s conception, however, an act transforms a subject, and even though it occurs with signifiers, it does not happen by following a preestablished ritual or code. Also, of course, there is no authority that can ensure the legitimacy of such an act. 101

It is not the case that someone is simply changed by an act: he or she is reinaugurated as a subject. Where there was a certain structure or law operative for a subject prior to an act —imagine this to be an unconscious law, the kind of meaning and determination constructed by the fantasy— an act brings about a transformation in this structure and thereby inaugurates a new subject. In this way, an act situates one outside such a law, and for this reason it is appropriate to consider acts to be transgressive. 102

pluth subject as meaning junction disjunction

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007. Print.

I described the subject as meaning. What I am saying here adds an important supplement to this notion of a subject represent in and for the Other.

First, there is meaning: I am something for the Other, an object that satisfies the Other’s demands, or a significant, desirable object of the Other (like Xenophon). Then, either because of bodily experiences that cannot be signified or an encounter with the Other’s desire, or both, this position as a meaning is called into question. In the wake of these encounters, there are two major possibilities.

1. My position as a satisfying object or meaning for the Other can be reaffirmed. Fantasy is Lacan’s account of how this happens. In fantasy I try to reassert my position as the object of the Other’s desire, and my own desire is to remain such an object.

2. Another way is possible, and Lacan’s theory of the act discusses this. An act involves a different reaction to both the Other’s desire and the meaning constructed for us in the Other (78).

On my reading, Lacan does not come up with a unique and rigorous theory of the subject until his fourteenth and fifteenth seminars (79).

This subject can still be thought of as an “organized system of symbols,” but it is not something that gives this order meaning. Rather, the subject is identified with a meaning. This corresponds to what I spoke of in chapter 3 as the “subject-as-meaning,” a subject represented in the Other, and part of the Other’s discourse. But I have been claiming that Lacan was not satisfied with this version of the subject either. Again, the subject is always something like a consistency of signifiers in Lacan’s opinion, but this is actually only one aspect of the subject.

Lacan’s ultimate vision of the subject is achieved when the subject is portrayed as something between an organized system of symbols and what motivates that organization in the first place — events such as sexuality, jouissance, and the Other’s desire, all of which can be correlated with the real (79-80).

The definition of the subject that I want ot focus on now comes from Lacan’s fourteenth seminar.

A SUBJECT IS SITUATED AT THE JUNCTION AND DISJUNCTION OF THE BODY AND JOUISSANCE

It is not so much of a stretch then, to suggest that when Lacan says “body” here, we could also just as well say language. So not only does this definition reaffirm that a subject is neither language nor jouissance, it also tells us more about the structure of the subject. … in his ninth seminar Lacan was content with saying that the subject is between the two poles of language and the real. In this definition, the subject’s position is given more elaboration. The subject is situated at a junction and disjunction of the two with each other (80).