{"id":9826,"date":"2012-11-18T21:58:13","date_gmt":"2012-11-19T02:58:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=9826"},"modified":"2012-11-20T21:14:39","modified_gmt":"2012-11-21T02:14:39","slug":"neighbor-plea-for-ethical-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/11\/18\/neighbor-plea-for-ethical-violence\/","title":{"rendered":"136-7 neighbor plea for ethical violence butler \u017d"},"content":{"rendered":"

Slavoj, \u017di\u017eek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence.” The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology<\/em> Slavoj \u017di\u017eek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard. 2006. 134-190.<\/p>\n

To play this game to the end, when the Wolf Man \u201cregressed\u201d to the traumatic scene that determined his further psychic development\u2014witnessing the parental coitus a tergo \u2014 the solution would be to rewrite this scene, so that what the Wolf Man effectively saw was merely his parents lying on the bed, father reading a newspaper and mother a sentimental novel?<\/p>\n

Ridiculous as this procedure may appear, let us not forget that it also has its politically correct version, that of the ethnic, sexual, and so on minorities rewriting their past in a more positive, self-asserting vein (African-Americans claiming that long be-fore European modernity, ancient African empires already had highly developed science and technology, etc.). … What disappears in this total availability of the past to its subsequent retroactive rewriting are not primarily the \u201chard facts,\u201d but the<\/strong> Real<\/span> of a traumatic encounter whose structuring role in the subject\u2019s psychic economy forever resists its symbolic rewriting.<\/p>\n

The ultimate irony is that this \u201ccritique of ethical violence\u201d is some-times even linked to the Nietzschean motif of moral norms as imposed by the weak on the strong, thwarting their life-assertiveness: moral sensitivity, bad conscience, and guilt feeling are internalized resistances to the heroic assertion of Life. For Nietzsche, such \u201cmoral sensitivity\u201d culminates in the contemporary Last Man who fears excessive intensity of life as something that may disturb his search for \u201chappiness\u201d without stress, and who, for this very reason, rejects \u201ccruel\u201d imposed moral norms as a threat to his fragile balance.<\/p>\n

No wonder, then, that the latest version of the critique of ethical violence was proposed by Judith Butler<\/span>, whose last book, although it does not mention Badiou, is de facto a kind of anti-Badiou manifesto<\/strong>: hers is an ethics of finitude<\/span>, of making a virtue out of our very weakness<\/span>, in other words, of elevating into the highest ethical value the respect for our very inability to act with full responsibility<\/strong>. The question one should ask concerns the limits of this operation<\/span>.<\/p>\n

Butler describes how, in every narrative account of myself, I have to submit myself to the foreign temporality of my language tradition and thus have to accept my radical decenterment. The irony of this description is that Butler, the sharp critic of Lacan, renders here (a somewhat simplified version of) what Lacan calls “symbolic castration,”<\/span> the subject\u2019s constitutive alienation in the decentered symbolic order.<\/p>\n

Is, then, the subject totally determined by the signifying structure, or does it dispose of a margin of freedom?<\/strong> In order to account for this resistance to the rule of symbolic norms, Butler turns to Foucault: norms rule only insofar as they are practiced by subjects, and the subject disposes here of a minimum of freedom to arrange itself with these norms, to subvert them, to (re)inscribe them in different modes, and so on.<\/p>\n

Lacan, on the contrary, allows for a much stronger subjective autonomy<\/span>: insofar as the subject occupies the place of the lack in the Other<\/strong> (symbolic order), it can perform separation<\/span> (the operation which is the opposite of alienation), and suspend the reign of the big Other, in other words, separate itself from it<\/span>. 137<\/p>\n

\ud83d\ude42 \u017d doesn’t go anywhere with this last point. He says Lacan, contra Butler, allows for a strong subjective autonomy.\u00a0 Ok.\u00a0 So?\u00a0 This is the one and only time he speaks of separation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Slavoj, \u017di\u017eek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence.” The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology Slavoj \u017di\u017eek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard. 2006. 134-190. To play this game to the end, when the Wolf Man \u201cregressed\u201d to the traumatic scene that determined his further psychic development\u2014witnessing the parental coitus a tergo … Continue reading “136-7 neighbor plea for ethical violence butler \u017d”<\/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":[45,78,138,38,20],"tags":[105],"class_list":["post-9826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-badiou","category-butler","category-butlerethics","category-ethics","category-zizek","tag-thedebate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9826","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=9826"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9826\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9828,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9826\/revisions\/9828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}