{"id":10122,"date":"2012-12-11T20:27:47","date_gmt":"2012-12-12T01:27:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=10122"},"modified":"2013-05-27T09:00:18","modified_gmt":"2013-05-27T14:00:18","slug":"10122","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/12\/11\/10122\/","title":{"rendered":"difference between \u017d and Badiou on subject"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peter Karlsen The Grace of Materialism Theology with Alain Badiou and Slavoj \u017di\u017eek. <\/em> K\u00f8benhavns Universitet 2010<\/p>\n

What does the freedom that the death drive<\/span> enables look like?<\/span><\/p>\n

\u017di\u017eek (FTKN 206; CWZ 94, 135; PV 202, 210, 231) clearly links death drive with freedom. The death drive<\/span> as a \u2018self-sabotaging structure\u2019 is what enables a break with the determinism of both our natural instincts and our \u2018second nature\u2019 in terms of the cultural dialectic of law and desire in service of the pleasure principle. This rupture with the normal run of things made possible by the death drive<\/span> represents, as \u017di\u017eek (PV 231) puts it, \u2018the minimum of freedom\u2019. So, according to \u017di\u017eek, freedom in its most elementary form is a rupture, a break with determinism.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am determined by causes (be it direct brute natural causes or motivations), and the space of freedom is not a magic gap in this first-level causal chain but my ability retroactively to choose\/determine which causes will determine me.\u201d Thus, a free act is not simply what sets off a new causal sequence; rather it is the retroactive act of endorsing which causal sequence will determine me<\/strong>. 207<\/p>\n

\u017di\u017eek explains the retroactive character of this \u2018second level reflexive causality\u2019 through a useful opposition between what he terms the \u2018ordinary historical notion of time\u2019 and the notion of time displayed in a passage in Henri Bergson\u2019s Two Sources of Morality and Religion<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In the \u2018ordinary historical notion of time\u2019, possibilities precede their realization, whereas the Bergsonian notion of time is characterized by the assertion that an act (realization) retrospectively opens up its own possibility.<\/p>\n

Rather than thinking of times as succeeding moments all loaded with multiple possibilities just waiting to be realized, according to the Bergsonian notion of time, an event only even becomes possible after it has happened, and so it is not determined by its past, rather it changes the past retrospectively by now appearing as a (realized) possibility. 207<\/span><\/p>\n

In a brief excurse in his 2008 book In Defense of Lost Causes<\/em>, \u017di\u017eek offers two explanations for Badiou\u2019s (mistaken) opposition to the notion of death drive<\/span>. The first reason for Badiou\u2019s reluctance is, according to \u017di\u017eek, due to the fact that he relates the death drive<\/span> to the \u2018religious\u2019 motif of finitude<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

But, as we have just seen in the above, in \u017di\u017eek\u2019s view the death drive<\/span> has nothing to do with the pathos of finitude and obsession with mortality, on the contrary<\/strong>. So, as \u017di\u017eek (IDLC 395) puts it, \u201cWhat Badiou misses here is the fact that ‘death drive’<\/span> is, paradoxically, the Freudian name for its very opposite, for the way immortality appears within psychoanalysis: for an uncanny excess of life, for an \u2018undead\u2019 urge which persists beyond the (biological) cycle of life and death, of generation and corruption.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The second reason for Badiou\u2019s dismissal of the death drive<\/span> is, according to \u017di\u017eek (IDLC 394), an all too crude opposition in Badiou\u2019s (e.g. IT 62; D 91-92) philosophy between the rupture of the event as the introduction of genuine novelty and repetition as an obstacle for the rise of anything truly new.<\/p>\n

As demonstrated by Adrian Johnston (2007d, 165) in an article on \u017di\u017eek\u2019s reading of Badiou, the heart of the matter in \u017di\u017eek\u2019s critique of Badiou\u2019s hostility to the notion of death drive<\/span> is not this hostility as such, but a more fundamental matter concerning the very core of Badiou\u2019s theory of the subject, namely the question of how Badiou explains what makes a mere human animal, caught up in a life dictated entirely by its self-interests and desire,<\/span> capable of suddenly taking the decision to be true to an event and thus becomes a subject of truth.<\/span> Or, to put it in terms of Badiou\u2019s Pauline formula of \u2018not\u2026but\u2019:<\/p>\n

What is it that enables the individual under the law to withdraw from (\u2018not\u2019) the law, from the path of the flesh, in order to affirm (\u2018but\u2019) the exception of the gracious event and thus becomes a subject, entering the path of the spirit? \u017di\u017eek touches upon this matter in his extensive discussion in The Ticklish Subject<\/em> of the differences between Badiou\u2019s philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis. In the section entitled \u2018The Lacanian Subject\u2019, \u017di\u017eek (TTS 159) outlines what he takes to be the core of the matter:<\/p>\n

\u201cThat is the difference between Lacan and Badiou: Lacan insists on the primacy of the (negative) act over the positive establishment of a \u2018new harmony\u2019 [\u2026] while for Badiou, the different facets of negativity [\u2026] are
\nreduced to so many versions of \u2018betrayal\u2019 of (or infidelity to, or denial of) the positive Truth-event.\u201d It is undoubtedly correct that Badiou, at least prior to Logics of Worlds, seems to describe any negative mode of relationship to an event as a disqualification for being a subject; that is, anyone who denies an event can of course never become a subject, and anyone who betrays his fidelity to an event is no longer a subject.<\/p>\n

But, the question is, whether Badiou, as \u017di\u017eek seems to imply, refuses negativity as such in regard to the subject. Nevertheless, \u017di\u017eek (TTS 159) is completely right, when he in the succeeding paragraph states that: \u201cThis difference between Badiou and Lacan concerns the precise statusof the subject: Badiou\u2019s main point is to avoid identifying the subject with the constitutive void of the structure<\/strong> [\u2026].\u201d (BE 432; C 202-203; IT 86) Badiou has\u00a0himself on more than one occasion declared this as the crucial difference between Lacanian psychoanalysis and his own philosophy.<\/p>\n

\u017di\u017eek (TTS 159-160) elaborates further on this difference between Lacan and Badiou concerning the subject in the following way:<\/p>\n

For Badiou [\u2026] the subject is consubstantial with a contingent act of Decision; while Lacan introduces the distinction between the subject and the gesture of subjectivization:<\/span> what Badiou [\u2026] describe[s] is the process of subjectivization \u2013 the emphatic engagement, the assumption of fidelity to the Event [\u2026] while the subject is the negative gesture of breaking out of the constraints of Being that opens up the space of possible subjectivization.<\/span><\/p>\n

In Lacanese, the subject prior to subjectivization<\/span> is the pure negativity of the <\/span>death drive<\/span> [\u2026]<\/p>\n

In other words, according to \u017di\u017eek, Badiou wrongly equates the subject with the process of subjectivization,<\/span> that is, to put it in Badiou\u2019s terms, with the \u2018operation\u2019 of decision, fidelity and forcing by means of which we pass from being a mere human animal to becoming a subject of truth. What Badiou misses here is … the negative moment or dimension that grounds the decision to affirm the event,<\/strong> the dimension that makes it possible to engage in a fidelity to an event in the first place.<\/span> And this dimension is precisely the self-sabotaging dimension of the<\/strong> death drive<\/span>. (TTS 160)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter Karlsen The Grace of Materialism Theology with Alain Badiou and Slavoj \u017di\u017eek. K\u00f8benhavns Universitet 2010 What does the freedom that the death drive enables look like? \u017di\u017eek (FTKN 206; CWZ 94, 135; PV 202, 210, 231) clearly links death drive with freedom. The death drive as a \u2018self-sabotaging structure\u2019 is what enables a break … Continue reading “difference between \u017d and Badiou on subject”<\/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":[45,65,76,15,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-badiou","category-dia-mat","category-sub-destitute","category-subjectivity","category-zizek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10122","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=10122"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10122\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11115,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10122\/revisions\/11115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}