Oct 14, 2012<\/p>\n
This brings us back to our original question: in what does the difference between animal and human habits consist? Only humans, spiritual beings, are haunted by spirits\u2015why? Not simply because, in contrast to animals, they have access to universality, but because this universality is for them simultaneously necessary and impossible<\/em>; that is, it is a problem. In other words, while for human subjects the place of universality is prescribed, it has to remain empty, it can never be filled in with its \u201cproper\u201d content. The specificity of man thus concerns the relationship between universal essence and its accidents: for animals, accidents remain mere accidents; only the human being posits universality as such, relates to it, and can therefore reflectively elevate accidents into universal essence. This is why<\/em> man is a \u201cgeneric being\u201d (Marx): to paraphrase Heidegger\u2019s definition of Dasein<\/em>, man is a being for which its genus is for itself a problem: \u201cMan can \u2018present the genus\u2019 to the degree that habit is the unforeseen element of the genus.\u201d<\/p>\n This formulation opens up an unexpected link to the notion of hegemony<\/em> as developed by Ernesto Laclau: there is forever a gap between the universality of man\u2019s genus and the particular habits which fill in its void; habits are always \u201cunexpected,\u201d contingent, accidents elevated to universal necessity. The predominance of one or another habit is the result of a struggle for hegemony, a struggle over which accident will occupy the empty place of the universality.<\/p>\n That is to say, with regard to the relationship between universality and particularity, the \u201ccontradiction\u201d in the human condition\u2015a human subject perceives reality from a singular subjective viewpoint and, simultaneously, perceives himself as included in this same reality as a part, as an object in it\u2015means that the subject has to presuppose universality (there is a universal order, some kind of \u201cGreat Chain of Being,\u201d of which he is a part), while, simultaneously, it is forever impossible for him to entirely fill in this universality with its particular content, to harmonize the Universal and the Particular (since his approach to reality is forever marked\u2015colored, twisted, distorted\u2015by his singular perspective). Universality is always simultaneously necessary<\/em> and impossible<\/em>.<\/p>\n Laclau\u2019s concept of hegemony offers an exemplary matrix of the relationship between universality, historical contingency, and the limit of an impossible Real\u2015and one should always keep in mind that we are dealing here with a distinct concept whose specificity is often missed (or reduced to some vague quasi-Gramscian generality) by those who refer to it.<\/p>\n The key feature of the concept of hegemony resides in the contingent connection between intra-social differences (elements within<\/em> the social space) and the limit that separates society itself from non-society (chaos, utter decadence, the dissolution of all social links)\u2015the limit between the social and its exteriority, the non-social, can only articulate itself in the guise of a difference (by mapping itself onto a difference) between elements within social space. In other words, radical antagonism can only be represented in a distorted way, through particular differences internal to the system. External differences are thus always already also internal, and, furthermore, the link between the internal and external difference is ultimately contingent, the result of political struggle for hegemony.<\/p>\n The standard anti-Hegelian counter-argument here is, of course, that this irreducible gap between the universal (frame) and its particular content is what characterizes Kantian finite subjectivity. Is not Hegelian \u201cconcrete universality\u201d the most radical expression of the fantasy of full reconciliation between the universal and the particular? Is not its basic feature the self-generation of the entire particular content out of the self-movement of universality itself? Against this common reproach, we should insist on the closeness of Laclau\u2019s notion of hegemony to the Hegelian notion of \u201cconcrete universality.\u201d In the latter, the specific difference overlaps with the difference constitutive of the genus itself, just as, in Laclau\u2019s notion of hegemony, the antagonistic gap between society and its external limit, non-society, is mapped onto an intra-social structural difference. Laclau himself rejects the Hegelian \u201creconciliation\u201d between universal and particular on behalf of the gap that forever separates the empty or impossible universal from the contingent particular content that hegemonizes it. If, however, we take a closer look at Hegel, we see that\u2015insofar as every particular species does not \u201cfit\u201d its universal genus\u2015when we finally arrive at a particular species that fully fits its notion, that universal notion itself is transformed into another notion. No existing historical State fully fits the notion of the State\u2015the necessity of a dialectical passage from the State (\u201cobjective spirit,\u201d history) into Religion (\u201cabsolute spirit\u201d) involves the fact that the only existing State that effectively fits its notion is a religious community\u2015which, precisely, is no longer a State<\/strong>. Here we encounter the properly dialectical paradox of \u201cconcrete universality\u201d qua historicity: in the relationship between a genus and its subspecies, one of these subspecies will always be the element that negates the very universal feature of the genus. Different nations have different versions of soccer; Americans do not (or did not) have soccer, because \u201cbaseball is<\/em> their soccer.\u201d Hence also Hegel\u2019s famous claim that modern people do not pray in the morning, because reading the newspaper is<\/em> their morning prayer. In the same way, in disintegrating \u201csocialist\u201d states, writers\u2019 and other cultural clubs did act as political parties. In the same way, \u201cwoman\u201d becomes one of the subspecies of man, Heideggerian Daseinsanalyse<\/em> one of the subspecies of phenomenology, \u201csublating\u201d the preceding universality.\u00a0 357<\/p>\n The impossible point of \u201cself-objectivization\u201d would be precisely the point at which universality and its particular content are fully harmonized\u2015in short, where there would be no struggle for hegemony. And this brings us back to madness: its most succinct definition is that of a direct<\/em> harmony between universality and its accidents, of a cancellation of the gap that separates the two\u2015for the madman, the object which is his impossible stand-in within objectal reality loses its virtual character and becomes a fully integral part of that reality. In contrast to madness, habit avoids this trap of direct identification thanks to its virtual character: the subject\u2019s identification with a habit is not a direct identification with some positive feature, but an identification with a disposition, with a virtuality. Habit is the outcome of a struggle for hegemony: it is an accident elevated to an \u201cessence,\u201d to universal necessity<\/em>, made to fill in its empty place. 358<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Oct 14, 2012 This brings us back to our original question: in what does the difference between animal and human habits consist? Only humans, spiritual beings, are haunted by spirits\u2015why? Not simply because, in contrast to animals, they have access to universality, but because this universality is for them simultaneously necessary and impossible; that is, … Continue reading “Less Than Nothing”<\/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":[35,20],"tags":[116],"class_list":["post-9561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-concrete_universal","category-zizek","tag-ltn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9561","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=9561"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9561\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13645,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9561\/revisions\/13645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}