Zupan\u010di\u010d Realism in Psychoanalysis<\/p>\n
Conference ICI Berlin One of the great merits of Meillassoux\u2019s book is that it has (re)opened, not so much the question of the relationship between philosophy and science, as the question of whether they are speaking about the same world.<\/p>\n I emphasize … another dimension of his [Meillassoux\u2019s] gesture, a dimension enthusiastically embraced by our Zeitgeist, even though it has little philosophical (or scientific) value, and is based on free associations related to some more or less obscure feelings of the present Unbehagen in der Kultur<\/em>. Let us call it its psychological dimension, which can be summed up by the following story:<\/p>\n After Descartes we have lost the great outdoors, the absolute outside, the Real, and have become prisoners of our own subjective or discursive cage. The only outside we are dealing with is the outside posited or constituted by ourselves or different discursive practices. And there is a growing discomfort, claustrophobia in this imprisonment, this constant obsession with ourselves, this impossibility to ever get out of the external inside that we have thus constructed.<\/p>\n There is also a political discomfort that is put into play here, that feeling of frustrating impotence, of the impossibility of really changing anything, of soaking in small and big disappointments of recent and not so recent history. Hence a certain additional redemptive charm of a project that promises again to break out into the great Outside<\/strong>, to reinstitute the Real in its absolute dimension, and to ontologically ground the possibility of radical change<\/strong>.<\/p>\n One should insist, however, that the crucial aspect of Meillassoux lies entirely elsewhere than in this story which has found in him (perhaps not all together without his complicity) the support of a certain fantasy, namely and precisely the fantasy of the \u2018great Outside\u2019 which will save us \u2013 from what, finally?…<\/p>\n it is a fantasy<\/span> in the strict psychoanalytic sense: a screen that covers up the fact that the discursive reality is itself leaking, contradictory, and entangled with the Real as its irreducible other side<\/span><\/strong>. That is to say: the great Outside<\/strong> is the fantasy<\/strong><\/span> that covers up the Real<\/span><\/strong> that is already right here.<\/p>\n In Lacan we find a whole series of such, very strong statements, for example: \u2018Energy is not a substance\u2026, it\u2019s a numerical constant that a physicist has to find in his calculations, so as to be able to work\u2019.<\/p>\n The fact that science speaks about this or that law of nature and about the universe does not mean that it preserves the perspective of the great Outside (as not discursively constituted in any way), rather the opposite is the case. Modern science starts when it produces its object<\/strong>.<\/p>\n This is not to be understood in the Kantian sense of the transcendental constitution of phenomena, but in a slightly different, and stronger sense.<\/p>\n Modern science literally creates a new real(ity)<\/strong>; it is not that the object of science is \u2018mediated\u2019 by its formulas, rather, it is indistinguishable from them; it does not exist outside them, yet it is real<\/span><\/strong>.<\/p>\n It has real consequences or consequences in the<\/strong> real<\/span><\/strong>. More precisely: the new real<\/span><\/strong> that emerges with the Galilean scientific revolution (the complete mathematisation of science) is a real<\/span><\/strong> in which \u2013 and this is decisive \u2013 (the scientific) discourse has consequences<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Such as, for example, landing on the moon<\/span><\/strong>. For, the fact that this discourse has consequences in the real does not hold for nature in the broad and lax sense of the word, it only holds for nature as physics or for physical nature.<\/p>\n At stake is a key dimension of a possible definition of materialism, which one could formulate as follows: materialism<\/strong><\/span> is not guaranteed by any matter<\/strong>. It is not the reference to matter as the ultimate substance from which all emerges (and which, in this conceptual perspective, is often highly spiritualized), that leads to true materialism.<\/p>\n The true materialism<\/span><\/strong>, which \u2013 as Lacan puts is with a stunning directness in another significant passage \u2013 can only be a dialectical materialism, is not grounded in the primacy of matter nor in matter as first principle, but in the notion of conflict, of split<\/span><\/strong>, and of the \u2018parallax of the real\u2019 produced in it.<\/p>\n In other words, the fundamental axiom of materialism<\/span><\/strong> is not \u2018matter is all\u2019 or \u2018matter is primary\u2019, but relates rather to the primacy of a cut<\/span><\/strong>. And, of course, this is not without consequences for the kind of realism that pertains to this materialism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Zupan\u010di\u010d Realism in Psychoanalysis Conference ICI Berlin One Divides Into Two: Dialectics, Negativity & Clinamen Slavoj \u017di\u017eek, Alenka Zupan\u010di\u010d, and Mladen Dolar March\u00a0 2011 One of the great merits of Meillassoux\u2019s book is that it has (re)opened, not so much the question of the relationship between philosophy and science, as the question of whether they … Continue reading “zupancic materialism and real”<\/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":[111,65,125,15,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-desire","category-dia-mat","category-drive","category-subjectivity","category-the-real"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12928","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=12928"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12928\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12990,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12928\/revisions\/12990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nOne Divides Into Two: Dialectics, Negativity & Clinamen<\/a>
\nSlavoj \u017di\u017eek, Alenka Zupan\u010di\u010d, and Mladen Dolar
\nMarch\u00a0 2011<\/p>\n