{"id":9304,"date":"2012-09-19T21:17:05","date_gmt":"2012-09-20T02:17:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=9304"},"modified":"2012-11-15T23:01:18","modified_gmt":"2012-11-16T04:01:18","slug":"night-of-the-world-ltn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/09\/19\/night-of-the-world-ltn\/","title":{"rendered":"Night of the World LTN"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our hypothesis is that it is only with reference to this abyss (Night of the World) <\/span>that one can answer the question \u201cHow can an Event explode in the midst of Being? How must the domain of Being be structured so that an Event is possible within it?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Hegelian one: one can and should fully assert creation ex nihilo in a materialist (non-obscurantist) way if one asserts the non-All (ontological incompleteness) of reality. From this standpoint, an Event is irreducible to the order of Being<\/span> (or to a situation with regard to which it is Event); it is also In-itself not just a \u201cfragment of being,\u201d not because it is grounded in some \u201chigher\u201d spiritual reality, but because it emerges out of the void in the order of being<\/span>. 823<\/p>\n

The only solution here is to admit that the couple Being\/Event is not exhaustive, that there must be a third level.<\/p>\n

Insofar as an Event is a distortion or twist of Being, is it not possible to think this distortion independently of<\/em> (or as prior to) the Event,<\/p>\n

so that the \u201cEvent\u201d ultimately names a minimal \u201cfetishization\u201d of the immanent distortion of the texture of Being into its virtual object-cause?<\/p>\n

And is not the Freudo-Lacanian name for this distortion the drive<\/em>, the death drive<\/span>?<\/p>\n

Badiou distinguishes man qua mortal \u201chuman animal\u201d from the \u201cinhuman\u201d subject as the agent of a truth-procedure: as an animal endowed with intelligence and able to develop instruments to reach its goals, man pursues happiness and pleasure, worries about death, and so on; but only as a subject faithful to a Truth-Event does man truly rise above animality.<\/p>\n

How, then, does the Freudian unconscious fit into this duality of the human animal and the subject (defined by its relation to the Truth-Event)? 823<\/p>\n

the \u201chuman animal,\u201d a living being bent on survival, a being whose life follows \u201cpathological\u201d interests (in the Kantian sense): the \u201chuman animal\u201d leads a life regulated by the pleasure principle, a life unperturbed by the shocking intrusion of a Real<\/span> which introduces a point of fixation that persists \u201cbeyond the pleasure principle.\u201d What distinguishes humans from animals (the \u201chuman animal\u201d included) is not consciousness\u2015one can easily concede that animals do have some kind of self-awareness\u2015but the unconscious: animals do not have the Unconscious. One should thus say that the Unconscious, or, rather, the domain of the “death drive,”<\/span> this distortion or destabilization of animal instinctual life, is what renders a life capable of transforming itself into a subject of Truth: only a living being with an Unconscious can become the receptacle of a Truth-Event<\/span>.<\/p>\n

The problem with Badiou\u2019s dualism is thus that it ignores Freud\u2019s basic lesson:<\/p>\n

there is no \u201chuman animal,\u201d<\/strong> a human being is from its birth (and even before) torn away from its animal constraints, its instincts are \u201cdenaturalized,\u201d caught up in the circularity of the<\/span> (death) drive<\/span>, functioning \u201cbeyond the pleasure principle,\u201d marked by the stigma of what Eric Santner called \u201cundeadness\u201d or the excess of life.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is why there is no place for the \u201cdeath drive\u201d in Badiou\u2019s theory, for that \u201cdistortion\u201d of human animality which precedes the fidelity to an Event.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our hypothesis is that it is only with reference to this abyss (Night of the World) that one can answer the question \u201cHow can an Event explode in the midst of Being? How must the domain of Being be structured so that an Event is possible within it?\u201d Hegelian one: one can and should fully … Continue reading “Night of the World LTN”<\/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":[125,100,142,15,20],"tags":[116],"class_list":["post-9304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-drive","category-hegel","category-nightworld","category-subjectivity","category-zizek","tag-ltn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9304","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=9304"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9304\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9793,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9304\/revisions\/9793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}