For the earlier Lacan, both the ethics of symbolic realization and the ethics of confronting the Real Thing call for the heroic stance of pushing things to the limit in order to leave behind our everyday Verfallenheit, our fallen existence (one must \u201csubjectivize one\u2019s own death\u201d by casting off the wealth of imaginary identifications, thereby attaining the limit-position of a pure subject without an ego; one must violently transgress the very limit of the symbolic order, heroically confronting the dangerous Beyond of the Real Thing).<\/p>\n
a Utopia of misfits and oddballs, in which the constraints for uniformization and conformity have been removed, and human beings grow wild like plants in a state of nature \u2026 no longer fettered by the constraints of a now oppressive sociality, [they] blossom into the neurotics, compulsives, obsessives, paranoids and schizophrenics, whom our society considers sick but who, in a world of true freedom, may make up the flora and fauna of \u201chuman nature\u201d itself.\u00a0 (Fredric Jameson The Seeds of Time<\/em> 1994 p.99)<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
the universal encounters itself among its species in the guise of its \u201coppositional determination.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cGood is a mask of Evil,\u201d the way for Evil to be re-normalized or domesticated.<\/p>\n
Agamben defines our contemporary post-political or bio-political era as a society in which multiple dispositifs<\/em> desubjectivize individuals without producing a new subjectivity, without subjectivizing them:<\/p>\n
Agamben quote:
\nFrom here comes the eclipse of politics which supposed real subjects or identities (workers\u2019 movement, bourgeoisie, etc.) and the triumph of economy, that is to say, of the pure activity of governing which pursues only its own reproduction. The Right and the Left which today follow each other in managing power have thus very little to do with the political context from which the terms which designate them originate. Today these terms simply name the two poles (the one which targets without any scruples the desubjectivation and the one which wants to cover it up with the hypocritical mask of the good citizen of democracy) of the same machine of government.<\/p>\n\u201cBio-politics\u201d designates this constellation in which dispositifs<\/em> no longer generate subjects (\u201cinterpellate individuals into subjects\u201d), but merely administer and regulate individuals\u2019 bare life\u2015in bio-politics, we are all potentially reduced to homini sacri<\/em>.<\/p>\n
The outcome of this reduction, however, involves an unexpected twist\u2015Agamben draws attention to the fact that the inoffensive desubjectivized citizen of post-industrial democracies, who in no way opposes the hegemonic dispositifs<\/em> but zealously executes all their injunctions and is thus controlled by them even in the most intimate details of his or her life, is \u201cnonetheless (and perhaps for this very reason) considered as a potential terrorist\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the eyes of the authority (and, perhaps, the authority is right in this), nothing resembles a terrorist more than an ordinary man.\u201d The more the ordinary man is controlled by cameras, by digital scanning, by data collection, the more he appears as an inscrutable, un-governable X<\/span> which subtracts itself from the dispositifs<\/em> the more it obeys them with docility.<\/p>\n
It is not that it poses a threat to the machine of government by actively resisting it: its very passivity suspends the performative efficacy of the dispositifs<\/em>, making their machine \u201crun on empty,\u201d turning it into a self-parody which serves nothing.<\/p>\n
How can this happen? What is the exact status of this X?<\/span><\/p>\n
To eradicate the profound ambiguity of Agamben\u2019s account, we should apply here the Lacanian distinction between the subject ($) and subjectivation:<\/span><\/p>\n
the X that emerges when a dispositif<\/em> totally desubjectivizes an individual is that of the subject itself, the unfathomable void that ontologically precedes subjectivization (the rise of the \u201cinner life\u201d of self-experience).<\/span><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
X = subject<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For the earlier Lacan, both the ethics of symbolic realization and the ethics of confronting the Real Thing call for the heroic stance of pushing things to the limit in order to leave behind our everyday Verfallenheit, our fallen existence (one must \u201csubjectivize one\u2019s own death\u201d by casting off the wealth of imaginary identifications, thereby … Continue reading “LTN conclusion pt 1”<\/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":[20],"tags":[116],"class_list":["post-9242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-zizek","tag-ltn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9242","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=9242"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9242\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9249,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9242\/revisions\/9249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}