{"id":10232,"date":"2013-01-21T17:27:12","date_gmt":"2013-01-21T22:27:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=10232"},"modified":"2013-01-21T18:49:11","modified_gmt":"2013-01-21T23:49:11","slug":"copjec-shame-pt-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2013\/01\/21\/copjec-shame-pt-2\/","title":{"rendered":"copjec shame pt 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

Copjec, Joan. “May ’68, the Emotional Month.” Lacan: The Silent Partners<\/em> Ed. Slavoj \u017di\u017eek. New York: Verso, 2009. Print.<\/p>\n

Is not affect<\/span>, rather. in this account, representation’s own essential ‘out-of-phaseness’ with itself? A marginal difference opens up. separating the individual perception from itself – and it is this difference which is called affect<\/span>. Not something added to representation or the signifier, but a surplus produced by its very function, a surplus of the signifier over itself<\/span>.<\/p>\n

Affect<\/span> is\u00a0the discharge, the movement, of thought.<\/span> 95<\/p>\n

Vorstellungrepr\u00e4sentanz<\/span>: it designates the signifier’s otherness to itself<\/strong>. In brief, it names the inner displacement of the signifier<\/strong>, its misalignment with itself.\u00a0 We become estranged from our memories and thoughts because the signifier, hence thought, can be estranged from itself<\/strong> or can move in a new direction. 95<\/p>\n

Anxiety: Sister of Shame<\/strong>
\nIt sometimes happens, however, that thinking does grind to a halt, stops moving, becomes inhibited.\u00a0 When this happens, affect<\/span> is known by a more specific name; it is called anxiety<\/span>. Before we can understand affect<\/span> in general as the movement of thought<\/strong>, it is necessary to understand this specific affect<\/span>, which is its obstacle, the arrest of thought<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

What erupts into awareness in moments of anxiety<\/span> is not something that wall formerly repressed (since affect never is), but the disjunction that defines displacement, which suddenly impresses itself as a gap or break in perception.\u00a0 As Lacan will put it: anxiety<\/span> is the experience of an encounter with<\/strong> objet petit a<\/span>.<\/p>\n

Copjec, Joan. “May ’68, the Emotional Month.” <em>Lacan: The Silent Partners<\/em> Ed. Slavoj \u017di\u017eek. New York: Verso, 2009.\u00a0 Print.<\/p>\n

DELEUZE
\nThe first cffect of Others is that around each object that I perceive or each idea that I think there is the organization of a marginal world, a mantle or background, where other objects and other ideas may come forth ….<\/p>\n

I regard an object, then I divert my attention, letting it fall into the background.<\/p>\n

At the same time. there comes forth from the background a new object of my attention.<\/p>\n

If this new object does not injure me, if it does not collide with me with the violence of a projectile (as when one bumps against something unseen), it is because the first object had already at its disposal a complete margin where I had already felt the preexistence of objects yet to come, and of an entire field of virtualities and potentialities which I\u00a0 already knew were capable of being actualized.<\/p>\n

Gilles Deleuze. ‘Michael Tournier and the World without Others’, published as an appendix in The Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia University Press), 1990, p. 305.<\/p>\n

Never more inventive than when speaking of objet petit a, the concept he touts as his major innovation, Lacan went so far in Seminar Xl as to invent a modern myth, the myth of the lamella, to showcase it. … As the twentieth century wore on, and the utopian view of science gave way to dystopian visions, while capitalism grew more muscular, it became more difficult to hold on to\u00a0 the idea\u00a0 that pleasure had the power to programme reality.<\/p>\n

The reality (of the market) principle was dearly calling the shots, telling the pleasure principle in what to invest and what pleasures ought to be sacrificed to get the best returns on those investments. One of the best depictions of the takeover of pleasure by reality is still to be found in Walter Benjamin’s notion of aura<\/strong>.\u00a0 …\u00a0 that aura<\/strong> appeared for the first time only with capitalism, specifically as that which had been lost.<\/p>\n

an original loss, the difference between satisfaction anticipated and satisfaction obtained, is recuperated by being embodied or imagined in objects with a certain sheen which we no longer simply want, but want more of. Prosthetic gods, we do not simply bring our fantasies closer to reality, more within reach, we experience their remodelling by the market into mise en sc\u00e8nes<\/em> of the postponement of desire. The gleaming, globalized city erected in the alethosphere turns out to be ruled, as in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis<\/em>, by an occult, maimed wizard, Rot[z]wang, the S1 placed in the bottom-left corner of the University Discourse, the master, castrated, fallen to the level of superegoic urgings to ‘Keep on yearning’. 97<\/p>\n

At a certain historical moment. that moment when the social configuration Lacan calls the ‘University\u00a0 Discourse’ was first set in place, reality \u2014 including man began to be conceived as fully manipulable. Man came to be viewed as a being without foundation. without roots, or as so intertwined with the Other as to be infinitely mouldable. This is the heart of the conception of the cosmopolitical subject, nomadic, homeless man of the world.<\/p>\n

Capitalism drives and profits from this conception of the malleability of man, but we have not yet said enough to know how it does so, how it gets us to surrender ourselves to it, or what it is we surrender.<\/p>\n

The first point that needs to be made is this: if the subject becomes conceivable as completely intertwined with the Other, this is because modern science comes to\u00a0 be conceived as universal, as having triumphed over and supplanted every other realm and every other form of truth. Man is totally taken up, then, WITHOUT EXCEPTION, into the Other of the scientific world.\u00a0 98<\/p>\n

Without exception? This is, of course, the interesting issue, and one Lacan will persistently mine. According to a long tradition\u00a0 that includes Freud himself, anxiety is distinguished from fear on the grounds that, unlike fear, it has no object. Anxiety<\/span> is\u00a0 intransitive, while fear is\u00a0 transitive.<\/p>\n

Lacan goes against this tradition, however, to assert instead that anxiety is ‘not without object’ Why?<\/p>\n

What does he gain by this? The standard criterion, ‘with or without object’, offers a simple choice between two contradictory or mutually exclusive terms which exhaust the field of possibilities. Between the two there is a strict boundary. The choice of one or the other (object or not) decides on which side of the boundary the phenomenon is\u00a0 situated. Freud seems to have intuited that this boundary did not only divide fear and anxiety<\/span>, but had the potential to divide the scientific and reason from the unscientific and irrational. And Freud did not want this. He never wanted his science, psychoanalysis, to be construed as a study of irrational phenomena; the workings of the psyche, no matter how troubled, did not fall outside the pale of science.<\/p>\n

This is surely why Freud kept trying to model anxiety<\/span> on some form of actual threat, even proposing at one point a ‘realistic anxiety’<\/span> after which signal anxiety<\/span> might be patterned. The sentiment of anxiety<\/span> is one of hard certainty, and he felt no impulse to question it, to characterize that feeling as a delusion: that is, to dismiss this certainty as unfounded, as having no basis in reason.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Copjec, Joan. “May ’68, the Emotional Month.” Lacan: The Silent Partners Ed. Slavoj \u017di\u017eek. New York: Verso, 2009. Print. Is not affect, rather. in this account, representation’s own essential ‘out-of-phaseness’ with itself? A marginal difference opens up. separating the individual perception from itself – and it is this difference which is called affect. Not something … Continue reading “copjec shame pt 2”<\/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":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-zizek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10232","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=10232"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10232\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10234,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10232\/revisions\/10234"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}