{"id":7955,"date":"2011-05-19T09:46:56","date_gmt":"2011-05-19T14:46:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=7955"},"modified":"2012-12-21T02:11:46","modified_gmt":"2012-12-21T07:11:46","slug":"trieb-death-drive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2011\/05\/19\/trieb-death-drive\/","title":{"rendered":"trieb death drive post-Hegel radical evil condition of goodness jean dupuy"},"content":{"rendered":"

An Interview with Slavoj \u017di\u017eek \u201cOn Divine Self-Limitation and Revolutionary Love” Journal of Philosophy and Scripture<\/em><\/a>, Volume 1, Issue 2, Spring 2004 \u201d Joshua Delpech-Ramey<\/p>\n

And here is \u017d man strictly talking to Trieb in Berlin March 6, 2009<\/a> at the ICI which is where the journal Cultural Inquiry originates.<\/p>\n

But the paradox for me, as I try to develop in my work, is that death drive<\/span> is a very paradoxical notion if you read Freud closely.\u00a0 Death drive<\/span> is basically, I claim, the Freudian term for immortality.\u00a0 Death drive<\/span> has nothing to do, as Lacan points out, convincingly, with this so-called nirvana principle where everything wants to disappear, and so on. If anything (and because of this I like to read Richard Wagner\u2019s operas where you have this), death drive is that which prevents you from dying.\u00a0 Death drive<\/span> is that which persists beyond life and death. <\/span> Again, it\u2019s precisely what, in my beloved Stephen King\u2019s horror\/science fiction terminology he calls the \u201cundead\u201d<\/span>: this terrifying insistence beneath death, which is why Freud links death drive to the compulsion to repeat. You know, it can be dead, but it goes on. This terrifying insistence of an undead object.<\/span><\/p>\n

Death Drive insists beyond life and death: Immortality<\/strong><\/p>\n

Undead <\/span>[From Berlin lecture March 2009]<\/p>\n

Negative Judgements<\/strong> –> Negate a predicate: He is not dead.\u00a0 He is alive.<\/p>\n

Infinite Judgements<\/strong> –> Assert a non-predicate: He is undead<\/span> (doesn’t mean alive).\u00a0 He’s alive as dead, living dead, a 3rd domain, an endless undead, an immortal domain emerges.\u00a0 This is the domain of drive.<\/span><\/p>\n

The object of driv<\/strong>e is not getting rid of tension but the reproduction of tension<\/strong> as such. What brings you satisfaction is not getting rid of tension but endless repetition of tension. A strange bad infinity. <\/span><\/p>\n

The post-Hegelian moment<\/span>: is this weird repetition for which in a way there is no place in Hegel.\u00a0 It is not the progressive circularity or bad spurious infinity.\u00a0 Kierkargard and Freud meet at the topic of repetition.\u00a0 Repetition that generates precisely NO AUFHEBUNG.<\/span><\/p>\n

On the one hand Mature Marx refers to Hegel. in Grundrisse<\/em>, is a postive one, Marx claims Hegel process is mystefied, but a formulation of emancipatory revolutionary process.<\/p>\n

But later in Capital <\/em>something changes, it’s more Capital itself that is formulated in terms of subject itself. With “capital” money passes from substance to subject.<\/span> it becomes self-reproducing.\u00a0 It is endlessly repetitive as a drive.<\/span> The whole goal of circulation is the reproduction\/expansion of circulation itself.\u00a0 Marx says “capital works as an automatic subject<\/span>.”\u00a0 It is a Hegelian subject but caught in this endlessly reproductive repetition. Thus Marx might have moved beyond Hegel here.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Another line of thought: Elevate Todestrieb into a key to understand German idealist “self-relating negativity”.\u00a0\u00a0 Todestrieb has to be elevated to this kind of transcedental principle.<\/p>\n

Hegel’s dialectics: The dialectic of necessity and contingency. The way Hegel is usually read according to usual doxa, Hegel admits of contingency but only as a moment of necessity, it externalizes itself in nature but then this contingency is aufhebung<\/strong><\/em> into necessity.\u00a0 Negative and contingency are allowed but as a tactical retreat. The Absolute is playing a game with itself.\u00a0 \u017d says the reversal, it is not only necessity of contingency, global necessity realizes itself through multiple contingencies, but there is also Contingency of Necessity.<\/strong><\/p>\n

There is a contingent process of how necessity emerges out of contingency<\/strong>.\u00a0 The French, rational-choice theorist Jean-Pierre Dupuy<\/a><\/span>.\u00a0 Drew attention to “something contingently becomes necessary”. It’s contingent whether a thing happens or not, but once it happens, it happens necessarily.\u00a0 <\/strong><\/p>\n

A new event retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility.<\/strong> An impossible event takes place, once it happens it is instantly domesticated and retroactively appears as possible and is naturalized.<\/p>\n

First I saw the film, Billy Bathgate<\/em> I was disappointed by the film. After I saw the film, I saw how the film missed the novel, the film was a bad copy.\u00a0 Then I read the novel, the novel was even worse.\u00a0 The very repetition creates the 3rd point of reference. 1+1=3.\u00a0 First you have a shitty novel, then a shitty film, the bad copy of the novel retroactively creates the possibility of how it could have been a good film or novel.<\/p>\n

Deleuze’s Logic of Sense<\/em> and Difference and Repetition<\/em>: Deleuze gives the best explanation to death drive<\/span> that \u017di\u017eek has ever read. Paradox of Freud: the renunciation of enjoyment generates enjoyment in the very act of renunciation.\u00a0 You renounce desire, but then you get libidinally attached to the very rituals of renouncing desire. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Death drive<\/span> in Deleuze’s reading is not a specific drive, it does this self-sabotaging thing.\u00a0\u00a0 The space of desire is curved.\u00a0 You don’t go directly at it.\u00a0 Death drive<\/span> is nothing but the transcendental principle of “lust principe”\u00a0 What is human sexuality formally?\u00a0 It is not simple pleasure.\u00a0 But pleasure got in the postponement and return and repetition … for example if I keep repeating the shaking of your hand I don’t let go, the very repetition eroticizes it in an obscene way. Death drive<\/span> doesn’t have an autonomous reality, it is not, “I want pleasure but secretly I want to torture,” Death drive<\/span> is this transcendental distortion which complicates my access to pleasure.<\/p>\n

\u017d disagrees strongly with Freud here on eros\/thanatos and says Freud really backed away from his discovery.\u00a0 \u017di\u017eek says this good constructive Eros versus bad destructive death drive (Todestrieb) is total bunk.\u00a0\u00a0 Love is a catastrophe, it’s totally destructive. One point of obsession and everything is ruined, literally out of joint.\u00a0 Love is totally paradoxical focusing all of your life, the whole world is thrown out of balance, love is radically destabilizing.\u00a0 I’m passionately in love and ready to risk everything for it.\u00a0\u00a0 Insistence on a particularity, you are ready to go to the end.<\/p>\n

Antigone is pure death drive<\/span>: I insist on this particular point I am ready to put at stake everything for it.\u00a0 Death drive<\/span> is the ethics at its zero level<\/strong>.\u00a0 It resides in this paradoxical domain where good coincides with radical evil.\u00a0 A detailed reading of Kant and Schelling later work on religion.\u00a0 Kant proposes there the notion of radical evil.\u00a0 He steps back though.\u00a0 First he proposes to read radical evil as diabolical evil.\u00a0 If for Kant you can be good out of principle.\u00a0 Then why cannot you be evil out of principle?\u00a0 Not just good, but evil as well.\u00a0 But then the whole distinction between good and evil falls apart.\u00a0 You are evil without any pathological possibility, you are just evil.<\/p>\n

Mozart’s Don Giovanni: Commandatore, tells Giovanni, repent.\u00a0 Giovanni knows he will die, Commandatore tries to save Giovanni, if yo urepent you will be saved in after life.\u00a0 From standpoint of rational calculus Giovanni should agree. But Giovanni says no.\u00a0 He acts out of pure fidelity to Evil.\u00a0 It’s not pathological, no personal gain.\u00a0 This is the greatness of Kant, he goes very far in this direction.<\/p>\n

Death drive<\/span> is the radical non-pathological evil, which is transcendental apriori of every possible form of goodness.<\/span><\/p>\n

Kant withdraws, says we don’t have diabolical evil only radical evil which is simply a tendency of human nature which is not fulfilling your duty.\u00a0 But Lacan reads Kant with Sade<\/em>.\u00a0 The point of Lacan, Sade is a Kantian.\u00a0 The Sadian imperative of unconditional jouissance, it goes beyond the pleasure principle.\u00a0 It’s non-pathological.<\/p>\n

Sade proposes purely Kantian idea of ‘radical crime’ that doesn’t simply follow natural impulses, but a crime which breaks with the chain of natural causality, a crime literally against nature itself.\u00a0 Freedom that breaks the phenomenal chain of natural causality. The paradox that Kant and Schelling struggle with is this obscure domain where radical evil is apriori condition of goodness.<\/span><\/p>\n

Antigone: you must have this radical excess of evil if you want to go to the end.<\/span> From the sympathetic human point it is Ismene who is human warm, Antigone is an aggressive bitch.\u00a0 Creon is right, he basically says, if we publicly do the funeral old hatreds will explode again, we’ll fall into civil war.\u00a0 Antigone’s counter-argument is so what? It is pure insistance. It is just pure insistence, “I want, I want<\/strong>“.<\/p>\n

\u017di\u017eek wants to present another Antigone, where she succeeds and Creon lets her bury her brother, the whole city is ruined, the last scene Antigone “I was created for love not for hatred” where blood and death is now all around her.<\/p>\n

Stalinist version: Antigone and Creon are fighting and Chorus intervenes like a committee for public safety and proclaims a popular dictatorship.<\/p>\n

Death Drive as radical evil as a condition of goodness.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Shraing Illusions: We make fun of soemthing, denounce illusions as illusions, but nonetheless they work.<\/p>\n

\u017d mentions Logic of Capital School<\/em> at beginning of part II<\/a>.<\/p>\n

******<\/p>\n

Point two: The big breakthrough of Heidegger is to totally reconceptualize the notion of finitude<\/span>. Already we have this in the early Heidegger with special reference to Kant. Already you see precisely how the other of finitude<\/span>, the big stuff\u2014infinity, eternity, and so on\u2014is a category, modality, horizon of finitude<\/span>. This was, for Heidegger, Kant\u2019s big breakthrough: transcendental as opposed to transcendent is a category of finitude<\/span>. All this somehow gets lost, in Badiou.<\/p>\n

[But] the whole category of \u201cevent\u201d works only from the category of finitude<\/span>. There are events only in finite situations<\/span>. You can prove it only from his own position. Only for a finite being do you have this infinite work, what he likes to describe, in Christian terms, this trinity of faith, hope, love. Faith that the event did take place, hope in the final state (in Christianity universal redemption, in Marxism I don\u2019t know, communism at the end) and love as work, as what is between the two, fidelity to the event and so on.<\/p>\n

But . . . when in his last work, Badiou tries to articulate the structure of totalitarian danger, he calls \u201cforcing the event,\u201d which means simply to ontologize the event, as if the event were not an infinite process whose place you have to discern in reality, as if the event totally permits its irrealities.<\/p>\n

But the gap between event and reality<\/strong>, that which is covered up by totalitarianism, is precisely the gap of finitude<\/span>\u2014so there is something missing at this level in Badiou.<\/p>\n

[…] there is a certain dimension of Christianity which … is missed, I think, by Badiou, because of his overall view that there is no place for finitude<\/span><\/span>, as for example in his critique of Heidegger where he misses the point. He even goes into this mode where being-toward-death is just the animal level of being threatened . . . although I don\u2019t identify Heidegger\u2019s being-toward death with death drive, Badiou is also missing that, because he cannot elevate finitude<\/span> to its transcendental a priori dignity. He remains precisely, at a certain level, a pre-kantian metaphysician.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An Interview with Slavoj \u017di\u017eek \u201cOn Divine Self-Limitation and Revolutionary Love” Journal of Philosophy and Scripture, Volume 1, Issue 2, Spring 2004 \u201d Joshua Delpech-Ramey And here is \u017d man strictly talking to Trieb in Berlin March 6, 2009 at the ICI which is where the journal Cultural Inquiry originates. But the paradox for me, … Continue reading “trieb death drive post-Hegel radical evil condition of goodness jean dupuy”<\/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":[125,100,24,7,142,76,106,41,20],"tags":[143,109],"class_list":["post-7955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-drive","category-hegel","category-lacan","category-logics","category-nightworld","category-sub-destitute","category-the-act","category-the-real","category-zizek","tag-excessive","tag-whoa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7955","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=7955"}],"version-history":[{"count":26,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7955\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7957,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7955\/revisions\/7957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}