{"id":10044,"date":"2012-12-07T12:30:47","date_gmt":"2012-12-07T17:30:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=10044"},"modified":"2013-08-02T19:12:17","modified_gmt":"2013-08-03T00:12:17","slug":"neighbour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/12\/07\/neighbour\/","title":{"rendered":"neighbour"},"content":{"rendered":"

However, from a strict materialist standpoint, Laplanche’s notion of the “enigmatic signifier” should be critically supplemented: it is not a primordial fact, an “original trauma” which sets the human animal on the path of subjectivization<\/strong>; it is, rather, a secondary phenomenon, a reaction to the primordial fact of the over-proximity of the other, of his or her intrusive presence or bodily\u00ad material too-much-ness<\/span>. 543<\/p>\n

It\u00a0is\u00a0this intrusive presence<\/span> which is then interpreted as an “enigma,” as an obscure “message” from\u00a0the other who “wants something” from me. In this sense, the “Neighbor”<\/span> refers\u00a0NOT<\/strong> primarily to the abyss of the Other’s desire, the enigma of “Che vuoi?” of “What do you really want from me?” but to an intruder\u00a0who is always and by definition too near.<\/span> This is\u00a0why for Hitler the <\/span>Jew<\/span> was a<\/strong> neighbor<\/span>: no matter how\u00a0far away the Jews were,\u00a0they were always too close<\/strong>; no matter how many were killed, the remnants were always too strong.” Chesterton made this point with utmost clarity:\u00a0“The Bible tells us to love\u00a0our neighbors<\/span>, and also\u00a0to love\u00a0our enemies;\u00a0probably because they are generally the same people.” 543<\/p>\n

The properly Freudian materialist solution would be to turn this relationship around and to posit the paradox of an original excess<\/span>, an excess “in itself” rather than in relation to a presupposed norm.The Freudian drive is just such an excess-in-itself: there is no “normal” drive. <\/strong>The formation of the Ego<\/span> with its borderline between Inside (Ego) and Outside (non-Ego) is already a defense-formation, a reaction against the excess of the drive.<\/span> In short, it is not the excess of the drive which violates the “norm” of the Ego, it is the “norm” (proper measure) itself which is a defense against the excess of the drive.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u00a0is\u00a0for this reason\u00a0 that\u00a0 intersubjectivity\u00a0is not a primordial\u00a0or “natural” state of\u00a0 human being.<\/span> 544<\/p>\n

To find traces of a dimension “beyond intersubjectivity” in Hegel, one should look for them in the very place which is the central ref\u00aderence for the partisans of recognition: the famous chapter on servitude and domination from the Phenomenology<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Malabou <\/span>has noted perceptively that, in spite of the precise logical deduction of the plurality of subjects out of the notion of life, there is an irreducible scandal,<\/strong> something traumatic and unexpected, in the encounter with another subject<\/span>, that is, in the fact that the subject (a self-consciousness) encounters outside itself, in front of it,<\/strong> another living being in the world which also claims to be a subject (a self-consciousness).<\/span><\/p>\n

As a subject, I am by definition alone, a singularity opposed to the entire world of things, a punctuality to which all the world appears, and no amount of phenomenological description of how I am always already “together-with” others can cover up the scandal of another such singularity existing in the world. 544<\/p>\n

So when I encounter in front of me another self-consciousness,<\/span> there is something in me (not simply my egotism, but something in the very notion of self-consciousness) which resists the reduction of both myself and the opposed self-consciousness to simple members of the human species:<\/span> what makes the encounter shocking is that in it, <\/span>two universalities meet where there is room only for one.<\/strong> 545<\/p>\n

In the original encounter, the Other is thus not simply another subject with whom I share the intersubjective space of recognition, but a traumatic<\/span> Thing<\/span>.\u00a0 This is why this excess cannot be properly counted: subjects are never 1 + 1 + 1. .., there is always an objectal excess which adds itself to the series. … an alien monster which is less than One but more than zero. <\/span>\u00a0(The psychoanalytic treatment recreates this scene; the analyst is not another subject, there is no face to face, s\/he is an object which adds itself to the patient.) This excessive spectral object is, of course, a stand-in for the subject, the subject itself as object, the subject’s impossible-real objectal counterpart. 545<\/p>\n

Two men, having had a drink or two, go to the theater, where they become thoroughly bored with the play. One of them feels an urgent need to urinate, so he tells his friend to mind his seat while he goes to find a toilet: “I think I saw one down the corridor outside.” \u00a0The man wanders down the cor\u00adridor, but finds no WC; wandering ever further into the recesses of the theater, he walks through a door and sees a plant pot. After copiously urinating into it and returning to his seat, his friend says to him: “What a pity! You missed the best part. Some fellow just walked on stage and pissed in that plant pot!”<\/strong> The subject necessarily misses its own act, it is never there to see its own appearance on the stage, its own intervention is the blind spot of its gaze.<\/strong><\/p>\n

What, then, divides the subject?<\/span> Lacan’s answer is simple and radical: its (symbolic) identity itself\u00a0\u2014 prior to being divided between different psychic spheres,<\/span> the subject is divided between the void of its cogito (the elusively punc\u00adtual pure subject of enunciation) <\/span>and the symbolic features which identify it in or for the big Other (the signifier which represents it for other signifiers)<\/span>. 555<\/p>\n

In Agnieszka Holland’s Europa, Europa<\/em>, the hero (a young German Jew who passes as an Aryan and fights in the Wehrmacht in Russia) asks a fellow soldier who had been an actor prior to the war: “Is it hard to play someone else?” The actor answers: “It’s much easier than playing oneself.”<\/p>\n

We encounter this otherness at its purest when we experience the other as a<\/span> neighbor<\/span>: as the impenetrable abyss beyond any symbolic identity.<\/span><\/p>\n

When a person I have known for a long time does something totally unexpected, disturbingly<\/span> evil<\/span>, so that I have to ask myself,<\/span> “Did I really ever know him?” does he not effectively become “another person with the same name”?<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

However, from a strict materialist standpoint, Laplanche’s notion of the “enigmatic signifier” should be critically supplemented: it is not a primordial fact, an “original trauma” which sets the human animal on the path of subjectivization; it is, rather, a secondary phenomenon, a reaction to the primordial fact of the over-proximity of the other, of his … Continue reading “neighbour”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[125,100,54,16,76,15,20],"tags":[116,109],"class_list":["post-10044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-drive","category-hegel","category-love","category-ontology","category-sub-destitute","category-subjectivity","category-zizek","tag-ltn","tag-whoa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10044","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10044"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10044\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11626,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10044\/revisions\/11626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}