{"id":10187,"date":"2013-01-14T12:53:49","date_gmt":"2013-01-14T17:53:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=10187"},"modified":"2013-01-14T14:24:45","modified_gmt":"2013-01-14T19:24:45","slug":"10187","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2013\/01\/14\/10187\/","title":{"rendered":"subkulak subjectivization"},"content":{"rendered":"

What all\u00a0 this points towards is the dialectical mediation of the “subjective” and “objective” dimension: “subkulak” no longer designates an “objective” social category but rather the point at which objective social analysis breaks down\u00a0and the subjective political attitude directly inscribes itself into the “objective” order \u2014 in Lacanese, “subkulak” is the point of subjectivization of the “objective” chain:\u00a0poor peasant\u2014middle peasant\u2014kulak. <\/span>\u00a0It is not an “objective” sub-category (or\u00a0sub-division) of the class of “kulaks” but simply the name for the subjective\u00a0political attitude of the\u00a0“kulak.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

This\u00a0accounts\u00a0for\u00a0the\u00a0 paradox that, although\u00a0it appears\u00a0as a subdivision\u00a0of the class of “kulaks,” “subkulaks” is a species that overflows its own genus\u00a0 (that\u00a0of\u00a0 kulaks), since “subkulaks” are also to be found among middle and even poor\u00a0farmers.\u00a0In short,”subkulak” names political division as such, the Enemy whose presence traverses the entire social body of\u00a0peasants, which is why he can be found\u00a0everywhere,\u00a0in\u00a0all three peasant classes.<\/p>\n

This brings us back to the procedure of Stalinist dieresis: “subkulak” names the excessive element that traverses all classes, the outgrowth which has to be eliminated.<\/span><\/p>\n

There is, in\u00a0every “objective” classification of social groups, an element which functions like “subkulak”\u00a0\u2014 the point <\/span>of subjectivization <\/span>masked as <\/span>a subspecies of <\/span>“objective”\u00a0elements of the social body.<\/span><\/p>\n

It is this point of\u00a0subjectivization<\/span>\u00a0 which,\u00a0in the strictest sense\u00a0of the term, sutures the “objective” social structure … What this also means is that the procedure of dieresis is not\u00a0endless:\u00a0it reaches its end when a division is no longer a division into two\u00a0species, but a division into a species and an excremental leftover<\/span>, a formless stand-in for nothing,\u00a0a “part of no-part.”<\/span> At this final point, the singular excrement reunites with its opposite, the universal; that is, the excremental leftover functions as a direct stand-in for the Universal.<\/span><\/p>\n

In his polemic against Badiou’s reading of Paul, Agamben defines the singu\u00adlarity of the Christian position with regard to the opposition between Jews and Greeks (pagans) not as a direct affirmation of an all-encompassing universality<\/span> (“there are neither Jews nor Greeks”), but as an additional divide that cuts diagonally across the entire social body and as such <\/em>suspends the lines of separa\u00adtion between social groups<\/strong>: a (“Christian’) subdivision of each group is directly linked with a (“Christian’) subdivision of all other groups.<\/p>\n

(The difference between Badiou and Agamben is that, for Badiou, this new “Christian’ collective is the site of singular universality<\/span>, the self-relating universality of naming, of subjective recognition in a name, while Agamben rejects the title of universality.)<\/p>\n

The common-sense classificatory approach would say, what’s the big deal? Being Christian or non-Christian is simply another classification that cuts across and overlaps with other classifications, like the fact that there are men and women, which also cuts across all ethnic, religious, and class divides.<\/p>\n

There is, however, a crucial difference here: for Paul, “Christian” does not designate yet another predicate (property or quality) of the individual,<\/span> but a “performative” self-recognition grounded only in its own naming; in other words, it is a<\/span> purely subjective feature \u2014 and, Badiou adds, only as such can it be truly universal.<\/span><\/p>\n

The opposition between the objective-neutral universal approach and the subjective\u00ad partisan approach is false: only a radical subjective engagement can ground true universality.<\/span><\/p>\n

The constellation here is therefore exactly the same as that of the “subkulaks” in the Stalinist discourse: “subkulaks” are also tbe “remainder” of kulaks which cuts across the entire field, a subjective-political category masked as a social-objective quality.<\/p>\n

So, when Agamben defines “Christians” not directly as “non-Jews” but as “non-non-Jews,” this double negation does not bring us back to the starting positive determination; it should rather be read as an example of what Kant called “infinite judgment” which, instead of negating a predicate, asserts a non-predicate<\/strong>:<\/p>\n

instead of saying that Christians aren’t Jews<\/em>, one should say that they are non-Jews<\/em>, in the same sense that horror fiction talks about the “undead.”<\/span><\/p>\n

The undead are alive while dead, they are the living dead; in the same way, Christians are non-Jews while remaining Jews (at the level of their pre-evental, positive social determination) \u2014 they are Jews who, as Paul put it, “died for [in the eyes of] the [Jewish] Law.” 74-75<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What all\u00a0 this points towards is the dialectical mediation of the “subjective” and “objective” dimension: “subkulak” no longer designates an “objective” social category but rather the point at which objective social analysis breaks down\u00a0and the subjective political attitude directly inscribes itself into the “objective” order \u2014 in Lacanese, “subkulak” is the point of subjectivization of … Continue reading “subkulak subjectivization”<\/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":[35,103,20],"tags":[116],"class_list":["post-10187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-concrete_universal","category-universal","category-zizek","tag-ltn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10187","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=10187"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10187\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10199,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10187\/revisions\/10199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}