{"id":9754,"date":"2012-11-14T18:51:57","date_gmt":"2012-11-14T23:51:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=9754"},"modified":"2012-12-19T23:33:55","modified_gmt":"2012-12-20T04:33:55","slug":"9754","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/11\/14\/9754\/","title":{"rendered":"universal bartleby"},"content":{"rendered":"

Daly, Glyn. \u201cPolitics of the political: psychoanalytic theory and the Left(s).\u201d Journal of Political Ideologies<\/em> (October 2009), 14(3), 279\u2013300<\/p>\n

In this sense our autonomy is at once more precarious and more radical. Today we are bombarded with all sorts of choices (consumption, lifestyles, customization of computers, cell-phones, iPods, MySpace, Facebook, etc.) that identify us as \u2018free individuals\u2019. Yet we also possess the capacity to refuse the field of choosing and freedom; to reject the very modality of making changes to our lives and to break with the terms and conditions that are implicit in the latter.<\/p>\n

Along the lines of the famous monologue from Trainspotting<\/em>, we are in a position in which we can choose \u2018not to choose life\u2019.\u00a0 This involves a more radical ethical freedom in which one can assume a certain position of \u2018being impossible<\/strong>\u2019: i.e. a position of refusing the terms of socio-political engagement and identitarian inscription; of refusing the terms of existing possibility.<\/p>\n

In other words, what is needed is the development of forms of political subjectivity that do not embrace the conventions and protocol of existing hegemonic engagement.<\/p>\n

Both \u017di\u017eek\u2019s Bartleybyan politics<\/strong> and Badiou\u2019s politics of subtraction\u2014i.e. the effective withdrawal from official political\/participatory structures in such a way that it undermines simultaneously their symbolic purchase and constitutive logics\u2014point in a different direction. Thus it is not so much a question of siding with the underdog in the game of existing democracy, but rather rejecting the very terms of the latter. In other words, it involves a critique of how democracy, through its mythologization of the idea that all underdogs are potential winners provided they play the game effectively, can become drawn into, and start to function on behalf of, the dominant politico-economic forces.<\/p>\n

Second, and related, the political focus is placed not so much on marginalized groups\/identities in general but rather on those whose position (or perhaps, more accurately, lack of position) embody the symptomal truths of our age<\/strong> \u2014 i.e. those whose situation appears naturalized as irresolvable, inert and beyond any feasible or direct solution.<\/p>\n

These are the displaced and the destitute, the poverty-trapped, the vagrants, homeless and slum-dwellers.<\/span> They are the radically excluded who are constitutively excessive, who cannot be accommodated and who present a kind of dysfunctional resistance that is nevertheless necessary to the functioning of the whole. They are the nameless \u2018unfortunate\u2019 who are passed over, treated with gentrified deliquescence and kept at a non-threatening distance through the \u2018ethical\u2019 concerns of charity and aid. What is needed is a politics that strives to overcome this distancing and to confront directly the primordial repressions that are central to the operation of capitalism as a global economic and socio-cultural system.<\/p>\n

It is against this background that distinct approaches to the Lacanian traversing the fantasy<\/span> emerge.<\/p>\n

In radical democratic thought<\/strong>, the lesson of the traversal is one that tends to imply that we should assume a proper distancing in order to avoid getting caught up in the \u2018cataclysmic desire of fantasy\u2019. The problem therefore is one of adopting the right predisposition: to detach ourselves from<\/strong> objet (a)<\/span> and to thereby affect a condition where we can \u2018really enjoy our partial enjoyment\u2019.<\/p>\n

– Radical politics should consequently restrict itself to revolutionary-reform rather than revolution as such. In general, political engagement should not be excessive but should avoid substantial projects of overhaul in favour of the finite, provisional and pragmatic.<\/p>\n

– Yet it is precisely in these terms that radical democracy appears to remain stuck in the register of desire<\/strong>: real emancipation is postponed eternally; we should be enthusiastic in the chase but never believe that we hold it in our grasp. This is a politics of desire<\/strong>, of infinite deferral. It becomes effectively \u2018a constant search for something else… (with) no specifiable object that is capable of satisfying it\u2019.<\/p>\n

– Radical democratic desire<\/strong>, in this sense, is sustained by not having the \u2018object\u2019 of democracy. Democracy is always finally elsewhere. In this context, political subjectivity becomes one of establishing a kind of homoeostatic predisposition or proper distancing: one avoids excess in order to avoid disappointment<\/strong> in never attaining the real Thing.<\/p>\n

Yet for \u017di\u017eek traversing the fantasy<\/span> does not mean to proceed to a non-fantasmatic or even a post-fantasmatic universe defined simply in terms of a containment and\/or domestication of excess (this in itself would be something of a fantasy). There is no transcendence of the fantasmatic (the structuring of desire) as such.<\/p>\n

Traversal in this sense is the opposite of exorcism. The point is not simply to expel excess but rather to inflect\/assume the latter: to take responsibility for the inherency of excess that is integral to human drive.<\/span><\/p>\n

Traversal, in this sense, puts one in touch with the object of drive<\/span> \u2014 the hole presupposed by all demand and around which Being revolves.<\/p>\n

To put it in the terms of Star Wars, the problem is not to bring balance to the force but to recognize that the force itself is the result<\/strong> of a certain (tilted) excess \u2014 a Real intervention\/structuring<\/strong> \u2014 and that it is only through contingence with the latter that alternative possibilities (a different kind of force, or indeed political) can be shown.<\/span><\/p>\n

The freedom which is gained here, which can be called post-fantasmatic, is thus not one of overcoming alienation but precisely a freedom through alienation in its most radical sense: i.e. the acceptance of the fact that imbalance\/excess is our most basic condition towards which we cannot exercise any pre-given partiality or disposition.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u017d\u2019s Lacanian radicalism can be thought of as something that tries to break out of the endless cycle of desire and to move towards a certain logic of love (involving both desire and drive).<\/span><\/p>\n

While this may sound hopelessly sentimental, we should recall that in Lacan love is distinguished from desire in coming to terms with the non-ideal and the non-all and with accepting precisely the lack in the Other. Love is its own excess, an uncompromising \u2018violence\u2019 that goes beyond mere antagonism (i.e. it does not externalize blockage\/failure but accepts this as the very condition of being). Through love one finds, and indeed makes, the universal-divine in all its contingent fragility and failing.<\/span><\/p>\n

Perhaps a more appropriate way of thinking about this shift is in terms of opening the possibility of a politics of excess; a politics that effectively chooses \u2018something else\u2019 \u2014 i.e. something other than the current mode of choosing.<\/span><\/p>\n

It refuses to embrace today\u2019s alibis where social \u2018problems\u2019 are displaced onto charities, ethical committees, focus groups and all the institutions of political deferral up to and including existing democracy. In this way it places \u2018us\u2019 in the scene and refuses not to take responsibility for the contemporary totality and its symptoms. Such a politics is distinguished from radical democratic hegemony in that it does not give up on the real thing or view concrete projects as merely the ersatz fillers of the empty place.<\/p>\n

The point is rather to see how this very division between the universal (as empty place) and particular (contingent filler) is inherent to the latter.<\/span><\/p>\n

In other words, the universal-divine<\/strong> is manifested … through substantial engagement; through finding and making the universal in the particular<\/strong> and through \u2018excessive\u2019 commitment, without excuses or dependency on the Other.<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0 It is a politics that affirms that the only way out is the way in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Daly, Glyn. \u201cPolitics of the political: psychoanalytic theory and the Left(s).\u201d Journal of Political Ideologies (October 2009), 14(3), 279\u2013300 In this sense our autonomy is at once more precarious and more radical. Today we are bombarded with all sorts of choices (consumption, lifestyles, customization of computers, cell-phones, iPods, MySpace, Facebook, etc.) that identify us as … Continue reading “universal bartleby”<\/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":[35,65,125,38,142,72,18,90,76,15,106,41,103,20],"tags":[109],"class_list":["post-9754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-concrete_universal","category-dia-mat","category-drive","category-ethics","category-nightworld","category-objet-a","category-political","category-resistance","category-sub-destitute","category-subjectivity","category-the-act","category-the-real","category-universal","category-zizek","tag-whoa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9754","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=9754"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9754\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9757,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9754\/revisions\/9757"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}