{"id":8998,"date":"2012-05-07T19:08:54","date_gmt":"2012-05-08T00:08:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=8998"},"modified":"2012-05-07T19:47:16","modified_gmt":"2012-05-08T00:47:16","slug":"8998","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/05\/07\/8998\/","title":{"rendered":"on \u017d act and Real superego"},"content":{"rendered":"

McSweeney, John. “Finitude and Violence: \u017di\u017eek versus Derrida on Politics<\/a>” KRITIKE 5:2 (December 2011) 41-58<\/p>\n

Any act<\/span> which would bear upon this Real<\/span> could only be \u201ctragic\u201d: \u00a0either one ultimately succeeds in acting only within the Symbolic order, leaving the transcendental Real<\/span> and its deep circumscription of socio-political possibilities unchanged (so that one\u2019s acts<\/span> are always already futile from the outset), or one succeeds in acting upon the Real<\/span>, but at the cost of a radical destruction of the existing social order, realized in a radical annihilation of the self (Lacan\u2019s passage \u00e0 l\u2019acte).<\/p>\n

Indeed, just two years earlier, \u017di\u017eek had realized that Lacan\u2019s model of such an act<\/span>, Antigone<\/span>, is insufficient to the uncompromising violence of such an act<\/span>. Her sacrifice of her place within the Symbolic order is only apparent, because her treasonous burial of her brother remains at the service of, and inscribes her existence within, a deeper law of the gods. In her stead, \u017di\u017eek proposes the figure of Medea<\/span>, whose murder of her children, means that there can be no recuperation of her act<\/span> of vengeance against her husband.<\/p>\n

Faced with this disturbing logic, \u017di\u017eek would soon come to the conclusion that the construction of the Real<\/span> as transcendental Thing is not only flawed but, in fact, may be a key element of capitalist ideology, misdirecting political acts<\/span> toward an impossible capitalism as phantom Thing (and thus toward an impossible act<\/span>), and away from actually existing capitalism\u00a0and its rather more mundane vulnerabilities to change.<\/p>\n

Instead, \u017di\u017eek turned to an immanent conception of the Real as the internal limit of the Symbolic, such that the \u201cnot-All\u201d of the Symbolic order, the encounter with its aporias and limits, is an encounter with the Real that exceeds, conditions, and precedes it. And this encounter with the SymbolicReal limit immanent to things is the encounter with their self-difference: with\u00a0the excess of the thing over its signification, symbolized by the excess of the \u00a0materiality of the letter over its signifying force.<\/p>\n

Act in turn is modeled on St. Paul\u2019s notion of overcoming the Sisyphean cycle of law, transgression and guilt via naive identification with elements of the law, attending to the SymbolicReal letter of the law, in order to expose and undermine the operation of its \u00a0superego supplement, \u201cthe Law\u201d, which would grant it pure Symbolic\u00a0coherence.<\/p>\n

In \u017di\u017eek\u2019s reading, Paul\u2019s act mirrors the later Lacan\u2019s notion of feminine subjectivation, in which woman identifies with elements of the Symbolic order, apart from the social-superego supplement that would constitute them as elements of a perfectly complete signifying system. By thus identifying with the Symbolic as a \u201cnot-All\u201d<\/span> traversed by multiple Symbolic-Real limits, the feminine subject exposes and undermines the operation of these superego injunctions.<\/p>\n

The crucial point for the current discussion is that \u017di\u017eek thus conceives of act as fundamentally within the Symbolic order, but\u00a0without support from it: its significance does not depend upon the Symbolic order<\/span> (and it can be justified only retrospectively in terms of the new situation it brings about). By contrast, masculine subjectivation<\/strong> involves identification with one\u2019s individual \u201clittle bit of the Real\u201d left over from one\u2019s castrating insertion within the Symbolic order, such that a subjective act must both be entangled with and be destructive of that order. Arguably, this complex relation increases the vulnerability of the masculine subject to the subtle inversions of ideological interpellation.\u00a0Thus, unlike Derridean messianicity (as \u017di\u017eek conceives it), the Pauline-feminine act pays attention to the concrete self-difference of things, placing faith in the liberatory force of identification with a given element of the Symbolic order and its specific Symbolic-Real difference.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

McSweeney, John. “Finitude and Violence: \u017di\u017eek versus Derrida on Politics” KRITIKE 5:2 (December 2011) 41-58 Any act which would bear upon this Real could only be \u201ctragic\u201d: \u00a0either one ultimately succeeds in acting only within the Symbolic order, leaving the transcendental Real and its deep circumscription of socio-political possibilities unchanged (so that one\u2019s acts are … Continue reading “on \u017d act and Real superego”<\/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":[73,24,106,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-derrida","category-lacan","category-the-act","category-zizek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8998","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=8998"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8998\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9004,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8998\/revisions\/9004"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}