{"id":6100,"date":"2010-12-22T14:28:41","date_gmt":"2010-12-22T18:28:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=6100"},"modified":"2013-06-07T11:09:53","modified_gmt":"2013-06-07T16:09:53","slug":"stavrakakis-lacan-and-the-political-pt-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2010\/12\/22\/stavrakakis-lacan-and-the-political-pt-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Stavrakakis Lacan and the Political pt 3"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is the lack <\/strong>created by dislocation that causes the desire for a new discursive articulation. It is this lack created by a dislocation of the social which forms the kernel of the political as an antagonistic articulation of different discourses that attempt to symbolise its traumatic nature, to suture the lack it creates. In that sense the political stands at the root of politics, dislocation at the root of the articulation of a new socio-political order, an encounter with the real <\/strong>moment of the political at the root of our symbolisation of political reality. 74<\/p>\n

Trapped as we are within the world of social meaning, all our representations of reality are doomed to fail due to their symbolic character. Every attempt to construct what is impossible to be constructed fails due to our entrapment within the world of construction.\u00a0 The only moment in which we come face to face with the irreducible real <\/strong>beyond representation is when our constructions are dislocated. It is only when Nature, our construction of external reality, meets a stumbling block, something which cannot be symbolically integrated, that we come close to the real <\/strong>of nature, nature, constructed Nature, is nothing but “a mode of concealment, a cloak of abstractions which obscures that discomforting wildness that defies our paranoid urge to delineate the boundaries of Being” (Stav quoting Evnden 1992) 86<\/p>\n

Recognising the constitutivity of the real<\/strong> does not entail that we stop symbolising; it means that we start trying to incorporate this recognition within the symbolic itself, in fact it means that since the symbolic entails lack as such, we abstain from covering it over with fantasmatic constructs<\/strong> \u2014 or, if one accepts that we are always trapped within the field of fantasy, that we never stop traversing it. The guiding principle in this kind of approach is to move beyond fantasy towards a self-critical symbolic gesture recognising the contingent and transient character of every symbolic constuct<\/strong>. 89 <\/strong><\/p>\n

Fantasy negates the real<\/strong> by promising to ‘realise’ it, by promising to close the gap between the real and reality, by repressing the discursive nature of reality’s production.\u00a0 Yet any promise of absolute positivity \u2014 the construction of an imaginarised false real \u2014 is founded on a violent\/negative origin; it is sustained by the exclusion of a real<\/strong> \u2014 a non-domesticated real<\/strong> \u2014 which always returns to its place. Sustaining a promise of full positivity leads to a proliferation of negativity. As we have already pointed out, the fantasy of a utopian harmonious social order can only be sustained if all the persisting disorders can be attributed to an alien intruder. 108<\/p>\n

The fantasmatic ideal of harmony is still with us <\/span><\/p>\n

Can we have passion in politics without holocausts?\u00a0 Furthermore, is it possible to have a politics of hope, a politics of change without utopia?\u00a0 … Democratisation is certainly a political project of hope.\u00a0 But democratic discourse is not (or should not be) based on the vision of a utopian harmonious society.\u00a0 It is based on the recognition of the impossibility and the catastrophic consequence of such a dream.<\/p>\n

Radical Democracy<\/span><\/p>\n

What differentiates democracy from other political forms of society is the legitimisation of conflict and the refusal to eliminate it through the establishment of an authoritarian harmonious order.\u00a0 Within this framework the antagonistic diversity between different conceptions of the good is not seen as something negative that should be eliminated, but as something to be “valued and celebrated.\u00a0 … To believe that a final resolution of conflict is eventually possible, even when it is envisaged as asymptotic approaching to the regulative idea of a free unconstrained communication as in Habermas, is to put the pluralist democratic project at risk.” (Stav quoting Mouffe 1996)\u00a0 111<\/p>\n

Democratic politics \u2014 and politics in general \u2014 can never eliminate conflict and dislocation, antagonism and division.\u00a0 the aim is rather to establish unity within an environment of conflict and diversity; to create a thoroughly doubtful society, beset by productive self-doubt, a society that traverses its utopian mirror image by identifying with its supposed enemy (Stav quotes Beck 1997) … accepting the anti-utopian dimension of antagonism and dislocation, the constitutivity of the politcal qua <\/em>encounter with the real<\/strong>. 112<\/p>\n

Lacanian political theory aims at bring to the fore, again and again, the lack in the Other<\/strong>, the same lack that utopian fantasy attempts to mask, [therefore] it would be self-defeating, if not absurd, to engage itself in utopian or quasi-utopian fantasy construction. 116<\/p>\n

Democracy is not based on or guided by a certain positive, foundational, normative principle.\u00a0 On the contrary, democracy is based on the recognition of the fact that no such principle can claim to be truly universal, on the fact that no symbolic social construct can ever claim to master the impossible real<\/strong>. Democracy entails the acceptance of antagonism, in other words, the recognition of the fact that the social will always be structured around a real<\/strong> impossibility <\/strong>which cannot be sutured. 120<\/p>\n

Democracy provides a concrete example of what we would call a post-fantasmatic <\/strong>or less-fantasmatic politics. 120<\/p>\n

Democracy entails the acceptance of antagonism, in other words, the recognition of the fact that the social will always be structured around a real impossibility which cannot be sutured.<\/p>\n

Thus the project of radical democracy, is based not on the futile fantasmatic suture of the lack in the Other <\/strong>but on the recognition of its own irreducibility.\u00a0 … But this is not possible as long as the ethics of harmony are still hegemonic.\u00a0 What we need is a new ethical framework.<\/strong> This cannot be an ethics of harmony aspiring to realise a fantasy construction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is the lack created by dislocation that causes the desire for a new discursive articulation. It is this lack created by a dislocation of the social which forms the kernel of the political as an antagonistic articulation of different discourses that attempt to symbolise its traumatic nature, to suture the lack it creates. In … Continue reading “Stavrakakis Lacan and the Political pt 3”<\/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":[111,21,24,40,69,72,15,118,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-desire","category-jouissance","category-lacan","category-lack","category-laclau","category-objet-a","category-subjectivity","category-symbolic","category-the-real"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6100","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=6100"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6100\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11220,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6100\/revisions\/11220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}