{"id":9851,"date":"2012-11-19T01:38:51","date_gmt":"2012-11-19T06:38:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=9851"},"modified":"2013-06-07T11:09:51","modified_gmt":"2013-06-07T16:09:51","slug":"152-154-obscene-superego-supplement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/11\/19\/152-154-obscene-superego-supplement\/","title":{"rendered":"152-154 obscene superego supplement"},"content":{"rendered":"

The determination of Judaism as the religion of the Law is to be taken literally: it is the Law at its purest, deprived of its obscene superego supplement<\/span>.<\/p>\n

Recall the traditional obscene figure of the father who officially prohibits his son casual sex, while the message between the lines is to solicit him to engage in sexual conquests \u2014 prohibition is here uttered in order to provoke its transgression.<\/p>\n

And, with regard to this point, Paul was wrong in his description of the Law as that which solicits its own violation \u2014 wrong insofar as he attributed this notion of the Law to Jews: the miracle of the Jewish prohibition is that it effectively is just a prohibition, with no obscene message between the lines<\/span>. It is precisely because of this that Jews can look for the ways to get what they want while literally obeying the prohibition. Far from displaying their casuistry and externally manipulative relationship to the Law, this procedure rather bears witness to the direct and literal attachment to the Law.<\/p>\n

And it is in this sense that the position of the analyst is grounded in Judaism. Recall Henry James\u2019s \u201cThe Lesson of the Master,\u201d in which Paul Overt, a young novelist, meets Henry St. George, his great literary master, who advises him to stay single, since a wife is not an inspiration but a hindrance<\/strong>. When Paul asks St. George if there are no women who would \u201creally understand\u2014who can take part in a sacrifice,\u201d the answer he gets is: \u201cHow can they take part? They themselves are the sacrifice. They\u2019re the idol and the altar and the flame.\u201d Paul follows St. George\u2019s advice and renounces the young Marian, whom he passionately loves<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

However, after returning to London from a trip to Europe, Paul learns that, after the sudden death of his wife, St. George himself is about to marry Marian. After Paul accuses St. George of shameful conduct, the older man says that his advice was right: he will not write again, but Paul will achieve greatness.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Far from displaying cynical wisdom, St. George acts as a true analyst, as the one who is not afraid to profit from his ethical choices, in other words, as the one who is able to break the vicious cycle of ethics and sacrifice.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is possible to break this vicious cycle precisely insofar as one escapes the hold of the superego injunction to enjoy<\/span>.<\/p>\n

Traditionally, psycho-analysis was expected to allow the patient to overcome the obstacles which prevented him or her the access to \u201cnormal\u201d sexual enjoyment. Today, however, when we are bombarded from all sides by the different versions of the superego injunction \u201cEnjoy!\u201d\u2014 from direct enjoyment in sexual performance to enjoyment in professional achievement or in spiritual awakening \u2014 one should move to a more radical level: psycho-analysis is today the only discourse in which you are allowed not to enjoy (as opposed to \u201cnot allowed to enjoy\u201d)<\/span>. (And, from this vantage point, it becomes retroactively clear how the traditional prohibition to enjoy was sustained by the implicit opposite injunction.) \ud83d\ude42 See McGowan’s book<\/p>\n

This notion of a Law that is not sustained by a superego supplement involves a radically new notion of society \u2014 a society no longer grounded in shared common roots:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Every word is an uprooting. The constitution of a real society is an uprooting \u2014 the end of an existence in which the \u201cbeing-at-home\u201d is absolute, and everything comes from within. Paganism is putting down roots. . . . The advent of the scriptures is not the subordination of the spirit to a letter, but the substitution of the letter to the soil. The spirit is free within the letter, and it is enslaved within the root. It is on the arid soil of the desert, where nothing is fixed, that the true spirit descended into a text in order to be universally fulfilled.<\/p>\n

Paganism is the local spirit: nationalism in terms of its cruelty and pitilessness. . . . A humanity with roots that possesses God inwardly, with the sap rising from the earth, is a forest or prehuman humanity…. A history in which the idea of a universal God must only be fulfilled requires a beginning. It requires an elite. It is not through pride that Israel feels it has been chosen.<\/p>\n

It has not obtained this through grace. Each time the peoples are judged, Israel is judged. . . . It is because the universality of the Divine exists only in the form in which it is fulfilled in the relations between men, and because it must be fulfillment and expansion, that the category of a privileged civilization exists in the economy of Creation. This civilization is defined in terms not of prerogatives, but of responsibilities.<\/p>\n

Every person, as a person \u2014 that is to say, one conscious of his freedom \u2014 is chosen. If being chosen takes on a national appearance, it is because only in this form can a civilization be constituted, be maintained, be transmitted, and endure. (DF,137\u2013138)<\/p>\n

Jews are constituted by the lack of land, of territory \u2014however, this lack is reinscribed into an absolute longing (\u201cNext year in Jerusalem!\u201d). What about an unconditional uprooting, renunciation of territory? In other words, does the Jewish identity not involve the paradox of the\u00a0 being-uprooted itself functioning as the foundation of ethnic roots and identity?<\/p>\n

Is there not, consequently, the next step to be accomplished, namely, that of forming a collective which no longer relies on an ethnic identity, but is in its very core the collective of a struggling universality?<\/span><\/p>\n

Levinas is right in locating Jewish universalism in their very nonproselyte stance: Jews do not try to convert all others to Judaism, to impose their particular religious form onto all others; they just stubbornly cling to this form.<\/p>\n

The true universalism is thus, paradoxically, this very refusal to impose one\u2019s message on all others \u2014 in such a way, the wealth of the particular content in which the universal consists is asserted, while all others are left to be in their particular ways of life.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, this stance nonetheless involves its own limitation: it reserves for itself a privileged position of a singularity with a direct access to the universal.<\/span><\/p>\n

All people participate in the universality, but Jews are \u201cmore universal than others\u201d: \u201cThe Jewish faith involves tolerance because, from the beginning, it bears the entire weight of all other men\u201d (DF,173).<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Jewish man\u2019s burden. . . . In other words, insofar as Jews are absolutely responsible, responsible for all of us, at a meta or reflexive level, are we not all doubly responsible to the Jews? Or, in an inverted way, if they are responsible for all of us, isn\u2019t the way to get rid of our responsibility to annihilate them (those who condense our responsibility)?<\/p>\n

What is still missing here is the notion (and practice) of antagonistic universality, of the universality as struggle which cuts across the entire social body, of universality as a partial, engaged position.<\/span><\/p>\n

The relationship between Judaism as a formal, \u201cspiritual\u201d structure and Jews as its empirical bearers is difficult to conceptualize. The problem is how to avoid the deadlock of the dilemma: either Jews are privileged as an empirical group (which means their spirituality, inaccessible to others, is also ultimately of no relevance to them), or Jews are a contingent bearer of a universal structure.<\/p>\n

In this second case, the dangerous conclusion is at hand that, precisely in order to isolate and assert this formal structure, the \u201cprinciple\u201d of Jewishness, one has to eliminate, erase, the \u201cempirical\u201d Jews. Furthermore, the problem with those who emphasize how Jews are not simply a nation or an ethnic group like others and side by side with others is that, in this very claim, they define Jews in contrast to other \u201cnormal\u201d groups, as their constitutive exception.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The determination of Judaism as the religion of the Law is to be taken literally: it is the Law at its purest, deprived of its obscene superego supplement. Recall the traditional obscene figure of the father who officially prohibits his son casual sex, while the message between the lines is to solicit him to engage … Continue reading “152-154 obscene superego supplement”<\/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":[35,21,103,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-concrete_universal","category-jouissance","category-universal","category-zizek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9851","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=9851"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9851\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11204,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9851\/revisions\/11204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}