{"id":14071,"date":"2020-05-17T15:08:44","date_gmt":"2020-05-17T19:08:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=14071"},"modified":"2020-05-30T19:27:08","modified_gmt":"2020-05-30T23:27:08","slug":"mcgowan-on-conversion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2020\/05\/17\/mcgowan-on-conversion\/","title":{"rendered":"McGowan"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">On &#8216;symbolic disinvestment&#8217; as a way to resist the obscene excess of capitalism<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed-youtube wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-embed-aspect-4-3 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"The Radicality of Jack Reacher\" width=\"840\" height=\"630\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/DZvrASZ_74g?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Freedom through Conversion<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Rupture with my given identity. Not all conversions are the same. No one is self-identical.  But if no-one converts, this lack of self-identity never becomes evident, this act of conversion attests to this self-division and makes it explicit, and this freedom that self-division gives you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed-youtube wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Born Again: Freedom Through Conversion\" width=\"840\" height=\"473\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/PgvYnpiN914?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Self-division makes us free. Conversion makes self-division or division of subject apparent. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Leap into some new form of satisfaction. Without security that this new form of authority will ground yourself like the old authority it is a Leap Of Faith.  The problem is most conversions, are conversions into new forms of certainty. We convert into something that will give us even a more secure form that the old identity.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Radical Openness. Michael Clayton the movie.  As a example of conversion, it leaves him a blank slate. It doesn&#8217;t give him a new sense of security, sense of wholeness.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Problem with conversion:  Looking for a new form of satisfaction that will fill in their lack. Overcome their self-division.  Richard Dawkins is one of the most renowned atheists in the world.  Even though in that conversion to atheism, there is a way to recoup self-division, in security, he can fill in the lack with his belief in atheism. Atheism will increase one&#8217;s satisfaction, will give the person more marvels to look at in the world. Whole vistas of possibility will open up. Conversion becomes a more satisfying form of satisfaction, one without any LACK at all. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<p>Non-Lacking authority figure.  This Master that has all the answers. The key to successful conversion is to realize the Master knows nothing. There are certain movements able to reveal the lack in the authority figure.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Christianity provides a possible resolution: Promise of salvation, promise of heaven and to be avoid being condemned to eternal lack.  Christian God is fundamentally different. The key moment is death of Christ on the cross.  Hegel says the moment that Christ dies, not just representative of God that dies, God himself is dead. It&#8217;s the Absolute authority is identified with most humiliated and divided as we are.  God&#8217;s power consists in total humility and not in absolute strength. The death of Christ was the greatest radical act in human history.  The greatest authority becomes self-destructive. Christianity even though you can feel like you&#8217;re born into it &#8230; you need to convert to  it.  Islam believes everyone is born a Muslim, only Christianity that suggests that everyone has to be converted into it. This is why freedom is closely intertwined with Christianity.  Judaism doesn&#8217;t require conversion. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Conversion is necessary, its the uprooting of ourselves as individuals, in order to engage in a new form of community a de-naturalization &#8230; Christianity would explicitly reject (Camus born pied noir he came out against the bombing in Algiers because his mother might get hurt) I like the way Christianity contrasts, in gospel of Matthew 10:37, He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Christianity, universal love rips us out of this natural &#8216;familial&#8217; Universal love makes that strange to us.  Conversion is proselytizing, missionary and colonizing, part of imperialism, incredible loss of life,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Conversion is a  it&#8217;s a moment both of freedom and closing off of freedom. Even the worst kind of freedom, at least makes us alienated of what we were. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Psychoanalysis and Christianity try to show that the new authority is not the authority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There is nothing about GOALS &#8230; authority use goals as way to get us to buy into, instead of GOALS, the thing that is hindering me is what nourishes me at the same time.  Heaven is constantly be in the position of driving around in the cab the unreliability of the new master, you have to take total responsibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It ruptures you from what you were, what you were was contingent, ideological, it is nothing, you break from this, violently into something else that is freedom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Moment of rupture, even the most conservative, reactionary conversion, opens up to ANOTHER possibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Recognition of the division of the authority figure, it&#8217;s never fully authoritative. Converting to something that gives you a figure of authority divided from itself. How will you live out that post-authority existence. Understanding the self-division of the authority. You want this authority to rely on &#8230; Sartre, Freud. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed-youtube wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Emancipation After Hegel Interview -- Part I\" width=\"840\" height=\"473\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/uj-5N_7po70?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Antagonism occurs between 2 different entities. Suggests opposition.  Whereas contradiction is more an internal struggle, internal undermining. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We have to come to terms with being at odds with ourselves, the external antagonism is secondary to that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Robert Pippin thinking about Hegel politically, the endpoint of Hegelian dialectic is world of universal recognition. Extrapolated from Master-Slave dialectic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">How to engage in contradiction<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Trump doesn&#8217;t think anything about contradicting himself. That seems to me hypocrisy rather than contradiction.  My political engagement is to reveal the disharmony, it you understand contradiction as impossible to escape, you would not think to create a society in which there was perfect harmony. Cynicism is an attempt to escape contradiction, because it places the cynic outside the fray, to circumvent contradiction. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed-youtube wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Panel #6 - Todd McGowan - Capitalist Subjectivity and Unconscious Freedom\" width=\"840\" height=\"473\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/rxx9QVChzlw?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>One&#8217;s successes, aren&#8217;t psychic economy. Libidinal economy runs on the subject&#8217;s failures.  I&#8217;m only free when I choose a direction that defies my liberal concept of the good. What genuine idea of good is the opposite of the liberal ideal. $1 Million salary comes from capitalist society, my good is never my own good. When I finally obtain, I don&#8217;t find the satisfaction, I find it just around the corner, &#8220;Happiness is always the next thing I&#8217;m going to get.&#8221; Once we strip the good away, our conception of freedom has to look beyond the horizon. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For Kant freedom doesn&#8217;t consist of procuring one&#8217;s own good. One needs to suspend one&#8217;s good in order to follow the moral law.  Without self-limitation, without a radical self-restriction, one can&#8217;t be free. My own self-interest is actually something foreign  to me, the result of an external logic. The LAW restricts all inclinations, the restriction frees the subject from the illusion of self-interest. Kant identifies the moral law with freedom. The defiance of one&#8217;s own good, leads back to the moral good. Kant thinks you can&#8217;t just have this rejection of good with moral law, it has to pay off in the end, and that&#8217;s because it&#8217;s God&#8217;s way. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Freud&#8217;s discovery of the Death Drive in 1920. Subject finds satisfaction in his own failures rather than his own successes.  Satisfaction through failure in the libidinal economy. Unconscious as foundational psychic agency, it acts against the subject&#8217;s good. It satisfies itself through the subversion of the subject&#8217;s self-interest. The unconscious never leaves the subject to govern through their own self-interest. The slip undermines my self-interest, it frees me from the social imperatives &#8230; it takes something from us. It occurs at odds with the subject&#8217;s good. Libidinal economy works against self-interest, sacrifices the subject&#8217;s own good. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The only purpose of the good is sacrificing for the libidinal economy. Freedom is identical with the subject&#8217;s satisfaction, when the unconscious manifests itself, subject emerges through the loss, through the repetition of loss, through failure actualizes the loss that defines it. Sport&#8217;s reference: Tanking.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One must reconcile oneself to one&#8217;s unconscious freedom, reconcile myself to that descriptiveness. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On &#8216;symbolic disinvestment&#8217; as a way to resist the obscene excess of capitalism Freedom through Conversion Rupture with my given identity. Not all conversions are the same. No one is self-identical. But if no-one converts, this lack of self-identity never becomes evident, this act of conversion attests to this self-division and makes it explicit, and &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2020\/05\/17\/mcgowan-on-conversion\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;McGowan&#8221;<\/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":[111,12,99,21,40,15,118,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-desire","category-fantasy","category-interpellation","category-jouissance","category-lack","category-subjectivity","category-symbolic","category-the-real"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14071","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=14071"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14071\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14129,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14071\/revisions\/14129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}