{"id":9473,"date":"2012-10-11T13:31:44","date_gmt":"2012-10-11T18:31:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=9473"},"modified":"2012-10-11T13:51:15","modified_gmt":"2012-10-11T18:51:15","slug":"big-other-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/10\/11\/big-other-3\/","title":{"rendered":"big Other"},"content":{"rendered":"

Does this mean that the ultimate subjective position we can adopt is that of a split which characterizes the fetishistic disavowal? Is it the case that all we can do is take the stance of: \u201calthough I know very well that there is no big Other<\/span>, that the big Other<\/span> is only the sedimentation, the reified form, of intersubjective interactions, I am compelled to act as if the big Other<\/span> is an external force which controls us all\u201d?\u00a0 It is here that Lacan\u2019s fundamental insight into how the big Other<\/span> is \u201cbarred,\u201d lacking, in-existent even<\/span>, acquires its weight: the big Other<\/span> is not the substantial Ground, it is inconsistent or lacking, its very functioning depends on subjects whose participation in the symbolic process sustains it.<\/span><\/p>\n

In place of both the submersion of the subject in its substantial Other and the subject\u2019s appropriation of this Other we thus have a mutual implication through lack, through the overlapping of the two lacks, the lack constitutive of the subject and the lack of\/in the Other itself<\/span>.<\/p>\n

It is perhaps time to read Hegel\u2019s famous formula \u201cOne should grasp the Absolute not only as substance, but also as subject\u201d more cautiously and literally: the point is not that the Absolute is not substance, but subject. The point is hidden in the \u201cnot only \u2026 but also,\u201d that is, in the interplay between the two, which also opens up the space of freedom \u2015<\/p>\n

we are free because there is a lack in the Other, because the substance out of which we grew and on which we rely is inconsistent, barred, failed, marked by an impossibility.<\/span><\/p>\n

But what kind of freedom is thereby opened up? Here we should raise a clear and brutal question in all its na\u00efvet\u00e9: if we reject Marx\u2019s critique and embrace Hegel\u2019s notion of the owl of Minerva which takes flight only at dusk\u2015that is, if we accept Hegel\u2019s claim that the position of an historical agent able to identify its own role in the historical process and to act accordingly is inherently impossible, since such self-referentiality makes it impossible for the agent to factor in the impact of its own intervention, of how this act itself will affect the constellation \u2015 what are the consequences of this position for the act, for emancipatory political interventions?<\/p>\n

Does it mean that we are condemned to acting blindly<\/strong>, to taking risky steps into the unknown whose final outcome totally eludes us, to interventions whose meaning we can establish only retroactively, so that, at the moment of the act, all we can do is hope that history will show mercy (grace) and reward our intervention with at least a modicum of success?<\/p>\n

But what if, instead of conceiving this impossibility of factoring in the consequences of our acts as a limitation of our freedom, we conceive it as the zero-level (negative) condition of our freedom?<\/span> 263The personalized notion of God as a wise old man who, sitting somewhere up there in the heavens, rules the world according to his caprice, is nothing but the mystified positive expression of our ignorance\u2015when our knowledge of actual natural causal networks is limited, we as it were fill in the blanks by projecting a supreme Cause onto an unknown highest entity. From the Hegelian view, Spinoza just needs to be taken more literally than he was ready to take himself: what if this lack or incompleteness of the causal network is not only epistemological but also ontological? What if it is not only our knowledge of reality but reality itself which is incomplete?<\/p>\n

In this sense Dostoyevsky was right: it is only the personalized God\u2015insofar as he is the name for a desiring\/lacking Other<\/strong>, for a gap in the Other\u2015who gives freedom: I am not free by being the creator and master of all reality, when nothing resists my power to appropriate all heterogeneous content; I am free if the substance of my being is not a full causal network<\/strong>, but an ontologically incomplete field. This incompleteness is (or, rather, can also be) signaled by an opaque desiring God, a God who is himself marked by imperfections and finitude, so that when we encounter him, we confront the enigma of \u201cWhat does he want?\u201d an enigma which holds also for God himself (who does not know what he wants).<\/p>\n

But, again, what does this mean for our ability to act, to intervene in history? There are in French two words for the \u201cfuture\u201d which cannot be adequately rendered in English: futur <\/em>and avenir<\/span>. Futur<\/em> stands for the future as the continuation of the present, as the full actualization of tendencies which are already present, while avenir<\/span> points more towards a radical break, a discontinuity with the present \u2015 avenir<\/span> is what is to come (\u00e0<\/em> venir<\/span>), not just what will be.<\/p>\n

For example, in the contemporary apocalyptic situation, the ultimate horizon of the \u201cfuture\u201d is what Jean-Pierre Dupuy calls the dystopian \u201cfixed point,\u201d the zero-point of ecological breakdown, global economic and social chaos, etc. \u2015 even if it is indefinitely postponed, this zero-point is the virtual \u201cattractor\u201d towards which our reality, left to itself, tends.<\/p>\n

The way to combat the future catastrophe is through acts which interrupt this drifting towards the dystopian \u201cfixed point,\u201d acts which take upon themselves the risk of giving birth to some radical Otherness \u201cto come.\u201d<\/p>\n

We can see here how ambiguous the slogan \u201cno future\u201d is: at a deeper level, it designates not the impossibility of change, but precisely what we should be striving for\u2015to break the hold the catastrophic \u201cfuture\u201d has over us, and thereby to open up the space for something New \u201cto come.\u201d\u00a0 264<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Does this mean that the ultimate subjective position we can adopt is that of a split which characterizes the fetishistic disavowal? Is it the case that all we can do is take the stance of: \u201calthough I know very well that there is no big Other, that the big Other is only the sedimentation, the … Continue reading “big Other”<\/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":[100,15,20],"tags":[116],"class_list":["post-9473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hegel","category-subjectivity","category-zizek","tag-ltn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9473","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=9473"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9483,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9473\/revisions\/9483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}