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<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\nAlenka Zupan\u010di\u010d<\/strong> : The Lacanian concept of the Real <\/strong>allows for a problematization of this opposition which had become paralysing and unproductive philosophically. We must of course be wary of the tendency to see in this Lacanian move a simple affirmation of a naive realism \u2013 the Real <\/strong>understood in this objectivist fashion. The \u2018Rea<\/strong>l\u2019 for Lacan is not reducible to the discursive but neither is it simply an advocation of an ontological realism, understood unproblematically. Especially since Lacan introduces a key difference between the notion of the Real and that of being. They are related via a \u2018third dimension\u2019, that of the \u2018signifier\u2019, but they do not coincide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What Lacan wants to tell us is that the signifier has ontological significance, the signifier tells us about ontology in a way that the notion of the signified is unable to (this latter being the usual realist referent; the object as the signified).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The signifier is interesting not because we could reduce everything to it and to different signifying operations (this reductionist question is completely false), but because there is something in the signifier and its operations that cannot be reduced back to the signifier and its operations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This is the crucial point, and not some mythical or original outside of the signifier, irreducible to it. This is also what the \u2018materialism of the signifier\u2019 amounts to. Not simply to the fact that the signifier can have material consequences, but rather that the materialist position needs to do more than to pronounce matter the original principle. It has to account for a split or contradiction that is the matter. It has to grasp the concept of the matter beyond that imaginary notion of \u2018something thick and hard\u2019. I\u2019m not saying: \u2018For Lacan, the signifieris the real matter\u2019, not at all. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m saying that, for Lacan, the signifier is what enables us to perceive the non-coincidence between being and the Real, and that this is what eventually leads to a new kind of materialism. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n From this point of view, we can say that Lacan develops the modern moment in philosophy, but as \u017di\u017eek says, \u2018he develops it with a twist\u2019. Then there is the new concept of the subject \u2013 another Lacanian \u2018revolution\u2019 in philosophy, retroactively relating the subject of the unconscious to the Cartesian cogito. This is often one of the great misunderstandings of Lacan (and psychoanalysis), that it jettisons the cogito, that it is anti-Cartesian pure and simple. This is a significant misunderstanding of the psychoanalytical concept of the \u2018subject\u2019 which was one of the main concepts for the delineation of a specific Lacanian orientation in the first place. This concept of \u2018subject\u2019 distinguished Lacan from the wider structuralist movement and their notion of a \u2018subjectless structure\u2019. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But somehow this conception of \u2018subject\u2019 is interpreted as anti-cogito, as the \u2018subject\u2019 is the unconscious subject. Therefore, it was important to clarify the connection between cogito and the unconscious and for example, there is an important anthology from the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, where we explore this problematic in detail (Cogito and the Unconscious edited by \u017di\u017eek [1998a] and including essays by all three thinkers as well as others in the Slovenian wider group of theorists). There is also the question of the radical break with premodern metaphysics involved in the Cartesian gesture, which Lacan judges crucial for the emergence of the subject of the unconscious<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This theme is crucial also for his understanding of ethics. In his important early seminar, Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Lacan 1992), he is discussing the history of ethical thought as it related for example to the metaphysical tradition. His specific example is Aristotle and there is obviously a debt here on one level to Aristotle\u2019s Ethics as a text and conceptual scheme. However, there is also a clear and radical parting of the ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In my own work on ethics, in The Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan<\/em> (Zupan\u010di\u010d 2000), I draw out some of these themes. For example, I put forward a critique of what I term \u2018bio-morality\u2019 and which, in its contemporary developments, represents an allegiance (albeit in rather reduced ways) to Aristotle\u2019s eudaimonistic ethics and metaphysics of being. This is not simply a criticism of Aristotle, but rather of what a revival of his conceptual paradigm today amounts to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In relationship to the theme of ethics, I want to stress that what I develop out of Kant\u2019s ethics must not be opposed or seen as completely distinct from politics. As \u017di\u017eek very rightly pointed out, the contemporary fashion of playing (\u2018good\u2019) ethics against (\u2018bad\u2019) politics is more often than not a direct pendant of the ideology of late capitalism and its conception of democracy. Any rigorous political thought is conceived as potentially dangerous and leading to a possible \u2018disaster\u2019 (that is to say to a more fundamental change in how the present order functions), whereas ethics seems to be much safer, and centred mostly on our individual responsibility, rather than any kind of collective engagement. My own work on Kant and ethics already went against this tendency, pointing both at an unsettling dimension of Kantian ethics, as well as at its emphasis on the universal, rather than simply individual.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is similar with psychoanalysis which supposedly also focuses on individual destinies and problems. Here, am I allowed to tell my joke about the grain of seed, or the man who thinks he is one? <\/p>\n\n\n\n He gets cured by the psychoanalysts and then he comes running back, crying that he has just been chased by a chicken. Don\u2019t you know you are a human being, they say? Yes, I am cured. I know that I am a human being, and not a grain of seed. But, please, does the chicken know this? This is the crux of the politics (which is also an ethics) in the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis. It is not enough simply to deal with the plight of the \u2018subject\u2019 and fantasy, through psychoanalysis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rather, we must seek to transform the structures of the symbolic which sustain a given order, determine the Impossible-Real that they grapple with.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Alenka Zupan\u010di\u010d:<\/strong> Yes, when we understand the question \u2018why Freud and Lacan?\u2019, or the question \u2018why psychoanalysis?\u2019, we come close to an understanding of the paradigmatic role which a revised notion of \u2018sexuality\u2019 must play in this discussion. Joan Copjec succinctly pointed out how, for example, in the term \u2018sexual difference\u2019 the term \u2018sex\u2019 has been replaced by the more neutered category of \u2018gender\u2019. As Joan \u2013 an allied member of the \u2018Ljubljana School\u2019 \u2013 put it: Gender theory performed one major feat: it removed the sex from sex. For awhile, gender theorists continued to speak of sexual practices, they ceased to question what sex or sexuality is; sex was no longer the subject of an ontological inquiry and reverted instead to being what it was in common parlance: some vague sort of distinction, but basically a secondary characteristic (when applied to the subject), a qualifier added to others, or (when applied to an act) something a bit naughty. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This is very far from what both Freud (from his early, 1905 text Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality [Freud 1977]) and Lacan have been saying. For Freud, the notion of the \u2018sexual\u2019 is significantly broader than contemporary notions of sex. It is not a substance to be properly described and understood (by psychoanalysis), but more like an impasse that generates and structures different discursive edifices trying to respond to it. It is linked to a notion of a fundamental ontological impasse; this impasse is irreducible for Freud.<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n But we also see here all the accusations against psychoanalysis, that \u2018Freud reduces everything to sex\u2019. In one sense, this accusation is true but what it misses is the complexification and radicalization of what we mean by \u2018sexuality\u2019. Freud discovered human sexuality as a problem (in need of explanation), and not as something with which one could eventually explain every (other) problem. He \u2018discovered\u2019 sexuality as intrinsically meaningless, and not as the ultimate horizon of all humanly produced meaning. A clarification of this point is one of my \u2018interventions\u2019 in Why Psychoanalysis? Three Interventions (Zupan\u010di\u010d 2008b). Lately, I dedicated a whole book to these questions \u2013 it came out in 2011 in Slovenia, but I\u2019m still working on its English version.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The materialism of psychoanalysis is not simply materialism of the body; For, in this, we easily succumb to a rather idealistic notion of a somehow always-already spirited (\u2018vibrant\u2019) matter. In recent debates, psychoanalysis \u2013 in the same package with all of the so-called post-structuralist thought \u2013 is often accused of relying on the formula \u2018always-already\u2019 as its magical formula. But this accusation misses the whole point: for psychoanalysis, \u2018always-already\u2019 is a retroactive effect of some radical contingency that changes given symbolic coordinates. <\/p>\n\n\n\n What a materialism worthy of this name has to do today is to propose a conceptualization of contingency (a break that comes from nowhere, \u2018ex-nihilo\u2019 so to say) in its complex relation to the structuring of the world. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Also, thinking is not simply opposed to things (and to matter), it is part of the thing it thinks, without being fully reducible to it. To advocate materialism and the \u2018Real\u2019 is not to advocate anti-thought. Quite the contrary, we might say \u2013 it calls for more and more thinking. And this is a problem that I sometimes detect in the recent flourishing of \u2018new materialisms\u2019 \u2013 a kind of abdication of thinking when it comes to more complex structures and arguments, as if common sense simplicities were inherently more \u2018materialist\u2019 than something Alenka Zupan\u010di\u010d: A key part of the Nietzschean legacy is I think working against the \u2018moralisation\u2019 of the symbolic, which Nietzsche describes so well in The Genealogy of Morals, for example, and which for example is also a key theme in relation to the thematic of the \u2018moralisation of politics\u2019, which I mentioned earlier. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Concerning nihilism and to quote Ray Brassier, from his text Nihil Unbound, there are things to be said for nihilism. It depends, of course, on what we mean by nihilism. If we mean by it a certain materialist position which recognizes contingency of, for example, our being in the world, and which points to a limit of \u2018making sense of (all) things\u2019, then we must say that to a great extent we cannot go beyond nihilism. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet this does not imply for Nietzsche that we sink in the depressive feelings of \u2018worthlessness of all things\u2019. On the contrary, it rather implies what he calls \u2018gay science\u2019. But, we must simultaneously avoid what Nietzsche calls \u2018reactive nihilism\u2019 and this is, of course, bound up with his whole critique of ressentiment (or \u2018acting against\u2019, reactiveness). To say that there is no ultimate cause of things is not to say that nothing itself is the ultimate cause of things, which amounts to putting the Nothing in the office of the Absolute.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Describing the difference between active and passive nihilism, Nietzsche famously says that man would \u2018rather will nothingness than not will\u2019 (On the Genealogy of Morals). And we could say that what defines (contemporary) passive nihilism is precisely that man would rather not will than will anything too strongly (because the latter supposedly inevitably leads to some kind of \u2018nihilist\u2019 catastrophe). And this seems to become synonymous with what \u2018ethics\u2019 now is in contemporary culture and society and the wider \u2018moralisation of politics\u2019, \u2018biomorality\u2019 etc. (to which I strongly oppose an \u2018ethics of the Real\u2019). There is a \u2018deactivation\u2019 of the will, which is also a deactivation of the \u2018political will\u2019, of the political as such as a paradigmatic space and temporality of antagonism, of the \u2018Real\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In my view, the genuinely new Nietzschean notion of nothingor n egativity is not simply that of \u2018active nihilism\u2019 as opposed to \u2018passive nihilism\u2019, but rather a transfiguration of nothing. Nothing\/negativity is not a kind of ultimate absolute, but rather the smallest yet irreducible difference that is inscribed in being qua being. This is what I argue in my book. I use Nietzsche\u2019s own metaphor of \u2018the shortest shadow\u2019. When speaking of going beyond the opposition real world\/apparent world, Nietzsche describes this moment as \u2018Midday; moment of the shortest shadow\u2019 (Twilight of Idols). <\/p>\n\n\n\n Midday is thus not for him the moment when the sun embraces everything, The thing (as one) no longer throws its shadow upon another thing; instead, it throws its shadow upon itself, thus becoming, at the same time, the thing and Alenka Zupan\u010di\u010d:<\/strong> We can say that subject is \u2018the answer of the Real\u2019, as Lacan puts it somewhere, or that it is the effect of the rift\/inconsistency of the structure.<\/strong> And we can indeed contrast this with the structuralist notion that there is a \u2018structure without a subject\u2019, a subjectless structure. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But what is at stake is above all a profound reconfiguration of what both \u2018structure\u2019 and \u2018subject\u2019 mean, refer to. We can begin with the notion of the structure which differs in Lacan from the classical structuralist notion. Very simply put: for Lacan, structure is \u2018not-all\u2019 (or \u2018not whole\u2019), which is what he articulates with the concept of the \u2018barred Other\u2019. This implies a lack, a contradiction as \u2013 so to say \u2013 \u2018structuring principle of the structure\u2019. Structure is always and at the same time more and less than structure. And this is where the new notion of the subject comes in. Subject is not the opposite of the structure, it is not some intentionality which uses structure to express itself, or which tries to get its more or less authentic voice heard through it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Subject is a singular torsion produced by the inconsistency of the structure. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Take the simple example of the slips of the tongue: for Freud and Lacan, they do not bear witness to a hidden(unconscious) force repressed by the structure, which nevertheless betrays its presence by these slips. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Rather, they are singular existences of structure\u2019s own inherent negativity. This is also the argument that I want to make in the context of the contemporary debates concerning realism, which often disqualify thought or thinking as something merely subjective (facing external reality). Put in a couple of formulas: Instead of taking it as something situated vis-\u00e0-vis being, we should conceive of thought as an objectivized (and necessarily dislocated) instance of the non-relation (contradiction, inconsistency) and rift inherent in being<\/strong> (in \u2018objective reality\u2019). Thinking is a necessarily displaced objectification (\u2018objective existence\u2019) of this rift, that is, of the relation of being to its own Although being is indeed independent of thinking, the rift that structures it only objectively exists as thought, and this perspective opens a new way of conceiving realism and\/or materialism. This is precisely how I would also read the Lacanian subject. And this is why if we remove subject from the structure, we do not get closer to objective reality, but rather further away from it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We can also say that the subject for Lacan is \u2018objectively subjective\u2019, there is an asymmetry in the subject, something in the subject which is not just subjective but which is also inaccessible to the subject. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n We can see the connection back to Kant. The Kantian subject I would endorse is that \u2018pure something, X, which thinks\u2019, the transcendental unity of apperception. The point where subjectivity is not fully assumable and the point where the object is not reducible to or is \u2018not yet\u2019 objectivity (this is Lacan\u2019s notion of objet petit a<\/em>). Here, we see also that the Lacanian subject radicalizes the traditional \u2018object\u2019. The concept of the \u2018object a<\/em>\u2019 is perhaps the most significant Lacanian conceptual invention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Alenka Zupan\u010di\u010d: <\/strong>No, the notions of good and evil are not simply irrelevant to ethics, I would say, although they are indiscernible in advance. The responsibility we have is to decide what is good. It is difficult to overstate Kant\u2019s significance in this respect. He did two things which may look incompatible: first, he founded ethics exclusively in human reason: no God or any other pre-established Good can serve as basis of morality. <\/strong>But instead of this leading to a kind of \u2018relativised\u2019, finitude-bound morality, it led to the birth of the modern thought of the absolute, the unconditional<\/strong>, and of the infinite as the possible, even imperative dimension of the finite. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Whatever objections we may raise to the Kantian ethics \u2013for example, and already, from Hegel\u2019s perspective \u2013 it was with Kant that the standing oppositions like absolute\/contingent, lawful\/unconditional, finite\/infinite broke down, and the path was opened for a truly modern reconfiguration of these terms. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In the twentieth century, Kantian ethics has been largely domesticated to serve as an important ideological foundation of the contemporary democratic liberalism and of the gradual replacement of an emancipatory politics with the discourse of human rights or simply ethics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve always been astonished by the fact that a really radical, uncompromising and excess-ridden writing like Kant\u2019s could be referred to in order to pacify the excess (of the political or something else). When the Nazi criminal Eichmann infamously defended himself by saying that in his doing he has been simply following the Kantian categorical imperative, this was of course an obscene perversion of Kant\u2019s thought. <\/p>\n\n\n\n As \u017di\u017eek succinctly formulated: what follows from Kant is not that we can use moral law as an excuse for our actions (\u2018oh, I wouldn\u2019t do it, but the moral law commanded so\u2019), we are absolutely responsible for the very law we are \u2018executing\u2019. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But Eichmann\u2019s perverse defence did point at the unsettling core exposed by Kant: the unconditional law is one with (the excess of) freedom. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Lacan was probably the first to properly recognize this unsettling, excessive moment that Kant discovered at the very core of ethics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When he wrote his famous essay \u2018Kant with Sade<\/em>\u2019 (Lacan 2002b), the point was not that Kant is in truth as excessive as Sade, but rather that Sade is already a \u2018taming\u2019, a pacification \u2013 in terms perversion \u2013 of the impossible\/real circumscribed by Kant. This is the thread I tried to follow in my book: Kant\u2019s discovery of this unsettling, excessive negativity at the very core of Reason<\/strong>. I was not interested so much in ethics as ethics, as in this thing that Kant has formulated through his considerations of ethics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Helena Motoh and Jones Irwin: Does this mean that the \u2018ethics of psychoanalysis\u2019 simply pits the Real against the symbolic or is there something else going on here? Also, how does the concept of \u2018drive\u2019 and especially the concept of \u2018death drive\u2019, which \u017di\u017eek emphasizes,relate to an ethical dimension? Finally, what does the Lacanian concept of \u2018desire\u2019 (as he describes it in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis<\/em>) have to do with this? Is \u2018desire\u2019 simply jettisoned in the later work?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Alenka Zupan\u010di\u010d:<\/strong> In respect to the relation between symbolic and the Real, there are certainly oscillations and shifts at work already in Lacan, as well as in the work of the three of us (together and separately). The idea that the Real<\/strong> is a kind of unbearable, repulsive thickness beyond the symbolic, left out of it and inaccessible to it, may have had some presence in our work at some point. But I think it is fair to say that for many years now we are all struggling precisely with the problem of a different way of relating them as absolutely crucial. There are some differences in the way we go about it, <\/p>\n\n\n\n but the main and shared shift of perspective that orientates our work could be perhaps summed up as follows: the Real <\/strong>is not any kind of substance or being. It pertains to being (and to the symbolic) as its inherent contradiction\/antagonism. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n I started working on this issue first by getting a bit more into Nietzsche (the first, Slovene version of the Nietzsche book was published in 2001). Borrowing from Badiou his notion of the \u2018minimal difference\u2019 and relating it to Nietzsche\u2019s notion of the \u2018shortest shadow\u2019, I tried to develop the notion of the Real as not that of some Thing, but of the fundamental non-coincidence of things with themselves. <\/strong>This non-coincidence <\/strong>is not caused by the symbolic; rather, the symbolic is already a response to it: it is discursivity as necessarily biased by the constraints of the contradiction in being. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Parallel to this work on Nietzsche was also my working on the theme of love, and later on comedy as possible ways of articulating what is at stake in the relation between the symbolic and the real<\/strong>. Lately, and for some time now, I have been working on this through the question of the ontological implications of the psychoanalytic notion of the sexual. I could perhaps put it in one formula: The real<\/strong> is part of being which is not being (or which is not qua being), but which as such dictates the (symbolic) logic of its appearance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The real is part of being which is not being (or which the Real is not any kind of substance or being. It pertains to being (and to the symbolic) as its inherent contradiction\/antagonism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Helena Motoh and Jones Irwin:<\/strong> Can you say a bit more about the two key Lacanian concepts (not without political ramifications of course) of \u2018desire\u2019 and \u2018drive\u2019. You have already explicated these, to some extent, but can you develop some of the tensions between them? Also, how do these concepts develop in your work, as they seem to have a paradigmatic status while undergoing some transformation for example from the \u2018Ethics of the Real<\/em>\u2019 book to the book on \u2018comedy\u2019. Finally, are there philosophical tensions between your work and the other members of the troika on this fraught relationship between \u2018desire\u2019 and \u2018drive\u2019? <\/p>\n\n\n\n Alenka Zupan\u010di\u010d: <\/strong>Certainly, you are right to point to these concepts as paradigmatic, and they are also crucial when it comes to the articulation of the relationship of the symbolic, the imaginary and the Real<\/strong> You are also correct that there are some differences here \u2013 one would expect nothing less in a philosophical movement worth its salt. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In my own work, I take up the themes of desire and drive throughout. In Ethics of the Real<\/em> I focused mostly, although not exclusively, on Lacan from The Ethics of Psychoanalysis <\/em>and The Transference<\/em> (Seminars VII and VIII). The concept of desire is in the foreground in both, but there is also a shift that starts taking place there, a conceptual move from das Ding <\/em>as the impossible\/Real as the focal point of desire, to the introduction of the object a<\/em>. This shift then gets a further and very complex elaboration in Lacan\u2019s subsequent seminars. But to formulate what is at stake very briefly and simply, we could say that what is involved here is a move from the Real<\/strong> as the abyssal beyond of the symbolic,<\/p>\n\n\n\n to a concept (of the object a<\/em>) which undermines the very logic and nature of the difference on which the previous conception of the Real <\/strong>was based. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Object a<\/em> is neither symbolic nor Real<\/strong> (in the previous sense of the term). It refers to the very impossibility to sustain this kind of difference between the symbolic and the Real<\/strong>, and it is this impossibility that is now the Real<\/strong>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This also opens the door for a more systematic introduction of the concept of the drive. The notion of the object a<\/em> is crucial both for desire and drive, they are different ways of relating this impossible non-ontological dimension (a) to what is, to being. In the Seminar X <\/em>(Anxiety) Lacan provides a formula that I think is absolutely crucial and which I also took as the guiding line of my work after Ethics: he says that love is a sublimation, and then defines sublimation in a very surprising way, namely that sublimation is what makes it possible for jouissance to condescend to desire<\/strong>. If one remembers the famous definition of sublimation from Lacan\u2019s seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis <\/em>(\u2018sublimation is what elevates an object to the dignity of the Thing\u2019) then the shift is indeed dramatic and surprising. This new notion of sublimation becomes directly associated with the question of the drive, for sublimation is also defined as a \u2018nonrepressive satisfaction of the drive\u2019. Now, in Lacan, as well as in our reading of him, there is indeed perceptible a turn from the logic of desire to that of the drive as somehow truer. But this is not simply a turn (of interest) from the symbolic to the Real<\/strong>, as it sometimes seems. What is at stake is rather the recognition of the fact that the status of the Real <\/strong>as the impossible Beyond of the symbolic is actually an effect of desire and its logic. Desire casts the internal contradiction that drives it in terms of the inaccessible Beyond to which it can only approach asymptomatically. With drive, the contradiction remains internal, and the impossible remains accessible as the impossible. This, I think, is absolutely crucial, and this is what<\/p>\n\n\n\n I tried to formulate with the formula the \u2018Real happens\u2019: the point of Lacan\u2019s identification of the Real<\/strong> with the impossible is not simply that the Real<\/strong> is some Thing that is impossible to happen. On the contrary, and in this reading, the whole point of the Lacanian concept of the Real<\/strong> is that the impossible happens. This is what is so surprising, traumatic, disturbing, shattering \u2013 or funny \u2013 about the Real<\/strong>. The Real<\/strong> happens precisely as the impossible. It is not something that happens when we want it, or try to make it happen, or expect it, or are ready for it. It is always something that doesn\u2019t fit the (established or the anticipated) picture, or fits it all too well. The Real<\/strong> as impossible means that there is no \u2018right\u2019 time or place for it, and not that it is impossible for it to happen (\u2018On love as comedy\u2019, Zupan\u010di\u010d 2000).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Real<\/strong> happens precisely as the impossible. It is not something that happens when we want it, or try to make it happen, or expect it, or are ready for it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n So what is important to stress in this whole \u2018turn\u2019 to the logic of the drive is the following: this is not simply a turn to the drive on account of its supposedly being closer, truer to the Real (as established independently), but rather a turn toward a different conception of the Real as such. <\/p>\n\n\n\n With drive, the Real is no longer a relational notion (sustaining questions like \u2018what is our attitude toward the Real?\u2019). It rather suggests something like: our relation to the Real is already in the Real. This is why questions like \u2018How to get outside to the Real?\u2019 seem to be the wrong kind of questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is because there is no outside of the Real from which one would approach the Real<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 2014 Alenka Zupan\u010di\u010d : The Lacanian concept of the Real allows for a problematization of this opposition which had become paralysing and unproductive philosophically. We must of course be wary of the tendency to see in this Lacanian move a simple affirmation of a naive realism \u2013 the Real understood in this objectivist fashion. The … Continue reading “Alenka Zupan\u010di\u010d interview”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[83,45,138,77,111,65,125,38,79,6,21,24,40,72,94,114,123,118,106,41,48,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-agency","category-badiou","category-butlerethics","category-class","category-desire","category-dia-mat","category-drive","category-ethics","category-ethics_real","category-event","category-jouissance","category-lacan","category-lack","category-objet-a","category-sexual-difference","category-sexuation","category-sinthome","category-symbolic","category-the-act","category-the-real","category-unconscious","category-zizek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14013","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=14013"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14013\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14115,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14013\/revisions\/14115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Sexuality<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
On Materialism<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
and Lacan has learnt the philosophical lesson that is essential in this
respect: in order to be \u2018materialist\u2019 it is not enough to refer to the matter
as the first principle from which everything develops. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
which is more complex and perhaps paradox ridden.<\/p>\n\n\n\nOn Nietzsche<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
makes all shadows and all negativity disappear, and constitutes an undivided Unity of the world; it is the moment of the shortest shadow. And, what is the shortest shadow of a thing, if not this thing itself? Yet, for Nietzsche, this does not mean that the two becomes one, but, rather, that one becomes two. Why? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
its shadow, the real and its appearance. When the sun is at its zenith, things are not simply exposed (\u2018naked\u2019, as it were); they are, so to speak, dressed in their own shadows. In other words: it is not simply that our representations do not coincide with things, it is rather that things do not simply coincide with themselves.<\/strong> There is thus an imperative to \u2018think through\u2019 this negativity. We
need to philosophize, as \u017di\u017eek has said, philosophy is now more important than ever. It is not a game of textualism as some postmodernists would like to suggest perhaps.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe Subject<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\u2018non-\u2019, to its own negativity. <\/p>\n\n\n\nEthics<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
is not qua being), but which as such dictates the (symbolic) logic of
its appearance.<\/p>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n