{"id":493,"date":"2008-09-10T17:56:51","date_gmt":"2008-09-10T21:56:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=493"},"modified":"2012-10-05T02:51:46","modified_gmt":"2012-10-05T07:51:46","slug":"negativity-in-the-ontological-sense","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2008\/09\/10\/negativity-in-the-ontological-sense\/","title":{"rendered":"Negativity in the ontological sense"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stavrakakis, Yannis. “Re-Activating the Democratic Revolution: The Politics of Transformation Beyond Reoccupation and Conformism.” Parallax, 2003, vol. 9, no. 2, 56-71.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Negativity in the ontological sense as that which, by dislocating our sedimented positivities, ‘shows the limits of the constitution of objectivity’ … negativity refers to the horizon of impossibility and unrepresentability that punctuates the life of linguistic creatures, this does not mean, however, that it should be understood as a mere destructive force.\u00a0 By inscribing a lack in our dislocated positivities it fuels the desire for new social and political constructions.\u00a0 Negativity … indicates the dimension of ‘becoming, a productivity that engenders and ruins every distinct form as a creative destructive restlessness’.\u00a0 It is neither an object nor its negation: it is the condition of possibility\/impossibility of the constitution of objects. 56<\/p>\n

post-fantasmatic radical democratic ethos<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n

[T]he following question posed by Badiou strikes me as extremely important:<\/p>\n

There is always one question in the ethic of truths: how will I, as some-one, continue to exceed my own being?\u00a0 How will I link the things I know, in a consistent fashion, via the effects of being seized by the not-known?<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil<\/em>, p. 50.<\/p>\n

From the point of a radical democratic ethics it is not enough to encourage fidelity to an event (in practice, any event), but to cultivate an openness towards event-ness<\/em>.\u00a0 Such an openness, premised on a Lacanian negative ontology and alert to the ever-present play of negativity and disaster, will be more adequately equipped to allow and encourage the pursuit of a better future within a political framework founded on the awareness of the dangers of absolutization.\u00a0 In that sense, fidelity to an event can flourish and avoid absolutization only within the framework of another fidelity, fidelity to the openness of the political space and to the awareness of the constitutive impossibility of a final suture of the social; within the framework of a commitment to the continuous political re-inscription of the irreducible lack in the Other.\u00a0 This fidelity is not a one-off, a rare occurrence, it is not tied to a great politics of nostalgia, but implies a permanent democratic revolution<\/em> in our political ethos, a skeptical passion that will have to be re-inscribed in every political act: it cannot be reduced to a fidelity to particular acts, not even those associated with the democratic revolution, but extends its scope to an acknowledgment of the post-fantasmatic political potential opened by them in the direction of a continuous radicalization of democracy.\u00a0 Badiou is right that today ‘democracy’ is one of the central organizers of consensus.\u00a0 And this is clearly the consensus of post-democracy.\u00a0 It is obviously necessary to question and interrogate this anti-political normalization of democracy.\u00a0 The only consistent way of doing that, the only way of making democracy relevant again, without reoccupying the dangerous ground of utopian absolutizations, is by re-activating the radical potential of the democratic revolution, by acknowledging event-ness and negativity<\/strong> <\/em>as the conditions of possibility\/impossibility of all transformative political action: “It is a matter of showing how the space of the possible is larger than the one we are assigned — that something else is possible, but not that everyting is possible.” * (68-69)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stavrakakis, Yannis. “Re-Activating the Democratic Revolution: The Politics of Transformation Beyond Reoccupation and Conformism.” Parallax, 2003, vol. 9, no. 2, 56-71. Negativity in the ontological sense as that which, by dislocating our sedimented positivities, ‘shows the limits of the constitution of objectivity’ … negativity refers to the horizon of impossibility and unrepresentability that punctuates the … Continue reading “Negativity in the ontological sense”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38,40,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethics","category-lack","category-ontology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493","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=493"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9446,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493\/revisions\/9446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}