{"id":8322,"date":"2011-09-29T12:01:14","date_gmt":"2011-09-29T17:01:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=8322"},"modified":"2013-06-07T11:09:51","modified_gmt":"2013-06-07T16:09:51","slug":"revolutionary-desire-vs-democratic-drive-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2011\/09\/29\/revolutionary-desire-vs-democratic-drive-2\/","title":{"rendered":"dean revolutionary desire vs. democratic drive 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Jodi Dean draft version that is not to be cited<\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve argued that the sublimation of the drive<\/span> captures the subject in the repetitive circuits of communicative capitalism.\u00a0 What\u2019s left? A new, shifted, desire<\/span>, one that recognizes the impossibility of reaching or achieving its object and holds on, refusing to cede it. … Zizek links this new desire<\/span> to Lacan\u2019s notion of the \u201cdesire of the analyst.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0 [Ticklish Subject 296 and Ecrits, \u2018From the Freudian Trieb to the Desire of the Analyst\u201d]<\/p>\n

Such a desire<\/span> is collective, sustaining a community even as it has moved past the need for some kind of phantasmic support. Collective, built around a lack, provides a common desire<\/span> capable of breaking through the self-enclosed circuit of drive<\/span>.<\/p>\n

The part-of-no-part<\/strong> doesn\u2019t designate a subset of persons, a \u201cwe\u201d or a \u201cconcrete identity\u201d that can be empirically indicated. It names the gap, division, or antagonism that marks the non-identity of any ordering with its own components. The Lacanian term for the part-of-no-part<\/strong> would then be objet petite a<\/span>, an impossible, formal object produced as the excess of a process or relation, a kind of gap that incites or annoys, the missingness or not-quite-rightness that calls out to us.<\/p>\n

So we have a rupture or a gap and the subjectification<\/strong> of this gap. But subjectification in what sense? There are different politicizations, different mobilizations and subjectifications that call out to and organize different convictions and interests.<\/p>\n

The emphasis on the gap necessary for communist desire indexes the non-coincidence of communism with its setting, echoing Marxist themes of negation and affirming the communist legacy of revolution. Nonetheless, communism is not the only political ideology that mobilizes negation and revolution. In fact, it shares such a revolutionary mobilization of negation with capitalism itself, hence communism as the negation of the negation.<\/p>\n

The difference in the way they subjectivize the gap, then, is crucial. Capitalist subjectification, the desire it structures and incites, is individual, (even as it tends to sublimate desire in drive, or, differently put, even as individuated desires get caught up in and give way to drive\u2019s powerfully repetitive circuits).<\/strong> To invert Althusser, capitalism interpellates subjects as individuals. A communism that does likewise fails to effect a rupture or install a gap. \u00a0Communist desire can only be collective.<\/p>\n

In a setting of capitalism\u2019s distractions and compulsions, one may very well feel like something is wrong, something is missing, something is deeply unfair. Then one might complicate this idea, or contextualize it, or forget about it and check email. Or one might try to make a difference\u2014signing petitions, blogging, voting, doing one\u2019s own part as an individual. And here is the problem, one continues to think and act individualistically. Under capitalist conditions, \u00a0communist desire<\/span> entails \u201cthe renunciation of individual freedom,\u201d the deliberate and conscious subordination of self in and to a collective communist will. This subordination requires discipline, work, and organization. It is a process carried out over time and through collective struggle.
\nIndeed, it\u2019s active collective struggle that changes and reshapes desire from its individual (and for Lukacs bourgeois and reified form) into a common, collective one.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n


\nIn this provisional sketch of a theory of communist desire, I\u2019ve emphasized the lack<\/strong> (the openness of desire) and its subjectification<\/strong>. I\u2019ve argued that communist desire is the collective subjectification of the lack.<\/strong> It is a collective assumption of the division or antagonism constitutive of the political, an assumption that takes collectivity as the form of desire in two senses: our desire and our desire for us; or, communist desire is the collective desire for collective desiring.<\/span><\/p>\n

Oh, demographers and statisticians! What have you unleashed?As capital demolishes all previous social ties, the counting on which it depends provides a new figure of belonging!<\/em> Capital has to measure itself, count its profits, its rate of profit, its share of profit, its capacity to leverage its profit, its confidence or anxiety in its capacity for future profit. Capital counts and analyzes who has what, representing to itself the measures of its success. These very numbers can be, and in the slogan \u201cWe are the 99%\u201d they are, put to use. They aren\u2019t resignified\u2014they are claimed as the subjectification of the gap separating the top one percent from the rest of us. With this claim, the gap becomes a vehicle for the expression of communist desire, that is, for a politics that asserts the people as divisive force in the interest of over-turning present society and making a new one anchored in collectivity and the common.<\/p>\n

In a close engagement with Catherine Malabou\u2019s discussion of severe brain injuries, Zizek discusses the logic of dialectical transitions, \u201cafter negation\/alienation\/loss, the subject \u2018returns to itself,\u2019 but this subject is not the same as the substance that underwent the alienation\u2014it is constituted in the very movement of returning to itself.\u201d[i]<\/a> Zizek concludes, \u201cthe subject is<\/em> as such the survivor of its own death<\/em>, a shell which remains after it is deprived of its substance.\u201d Proletarianization is a name for the process of this deprivation under capital (as I discuss in chapter three). The deprivation of substance\u2014common, social, substance\u2014leaves collectivity as its shell, as the form that remains for communist desire.<\/p>\n

This collective form overlaps with the object-cause of communist desire<\/strong>, the people understood as the part-of-no-part<\/strong>. As I argue above, the part-of-no-part<\/strong> names the gap or antagonism that marks the non-identity of any ordering with its own components. It can thus be designated with Lacan\u2019s objet petit a<\/em>, an impossible formal object produced as the excess of a process, a missingness or off-ness that calls out to us.<\/p>\n

Zizek notes that for Lacan, the object of desire always remains at a distance from the subject; no matter how close the subject gets to the object, the object remains elusive.[ii]<\/p>\n

The distinction between object and object-cause<\/span> is not the same as any old object to which it attaches.<\/p>\n

The object-cause<\/span> of communist desire is the people and, again, the people not as a name for the social whole but as a name for the exploited, producing majority.<\/p>\n

[i] Living in the End Times, 307
\n[ii] See Living in the End Times 303<\/p>\n

Conclusion<\/em><\/p>\n

I [Jodi Dean] have attempted to set out an idea of communist desire in the space marked by the end of a certain left melancholy and by an alternative to the way of the drive. Whereas some have viewed drive\u2019s sublimation as the alternative to a desire configured in terms of law and its transgression, I\u2019ve sketched an alternative notion of desire, one that, via collectivity, breaks from drive\u2019s repetitive circuits. Instead of trapped in failure, getting off on failing to reach the goal, communist desire subjectivizes its own impossibility, its constitutive lack and openness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Jodi Dean draft version that is not to be cited I\u2019ve argued that the sublimation of the drive captures the subject in the repetitive circuits of communicative capitalism.\u00a0 What\u2019s left? A new, shifted, desire, one that recognizes the impossibility of reaching or achieving its object and holds on, refusing to cede it. … Zizek … Continue reading “dean revolutionary desire vs. democratic drive 2”<\/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":[45,111,125,21,24,90,15,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-badiou","category-desire","category-drive","category-jouissance","category-lacan","category-resistance","category-subjectivity","category-zizek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8322","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=8322"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8322\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11207,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8322\/revisions\/11207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}