{"id":9894,"date":"2012-11-20T14:17:21","date_gmt":"2012-11-20T19:17:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=9894"},"modified":"2012-11-20T14:19:39","modified_gmt":"2012-11-20T19:19:39","slug":"versagung","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/11\/20\/versagung\/","title":{"rendered":"182-3 versagung love Third justice"},"content":{"rendered":"

The first act of Sygne, the heroine of Paul-Louis-Charles-Marie Claudel\u2019s The Hostage<\/em>, is that of what, following Freud, Lacan calls Versagung<\/span>: the radical (self-relating) loss\/renunciation of the very fantasmatic core of her being.<\/p>\n

First, I sacrifice all I have for the Cause-Thing that is for me more than my life; what I then get in exchange for this sacrifice is the loss of this Cause-Thing itself<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\nWe should therefore assume the risk of countering Levinas\u2019s position with a more radical one: others are primordially an (ethically) indifferent multitude<\/span>, and love<\/span> is a violent gesture of cutting into this multitude and privileging a One<\/strong> as the neighbor, thus introducing a radical imbalance into the whole.<\/p>\n

In contrast to love<\/span>, justice<\/span> begins when I remember the faceless many left in shadow in this privileging of the One<\/strong>. Justice<\/span> and love<\/span> are thus structurally incompatible<\/strong>: justice<\/span>, not love<\/span>, has to be blind; it must disregard the privileged One whom I \u201creally understand.\u201d<\/p>\n

What this means is that the Third<\/span> is not secondary: it is always-already here, and the primordial ethical obligation is toward this Third<\/span> who is not here in the face-to-face relationship, the one in shadow, like the absent child of a love-couple.<\/p>\n

This not simply the Derridean-Kierkegaardian point that I always betray the Other because toute autre est un autre<\/em>, because I have to make a choice to select who my neighbor is from the mass of the<\/span> Thirds<\/span>, and this is the original sin-choice of love<\/span>.<\/p>\n

The structure is similar to the one described by Emile Benveniste regarding verbs: the primordial couple is not active-passive, to which the middle form is then added, but active and middle (along the axis of engaged-disengaged).<\/p>\n

The primordial couple is Neutral and Evil (the choice which disturbs the neutral balance) or, grammatically, impersonal Other and I<\/span> \u2014 \u201cyou\u201d is a secondary addition.<\/p>\n

To properly grasp the triangle of love<\/span>, hatred and indifference, one must rely on the logic of the universal and its constitutive exception which only introduces existence.<\/p>\n

The truth of the universal proposition \u201cHumans are mortal\u201d does not imply the existence of even one human, while the \u201cless strong\u201d proposition \u201cThere is at least one human who exists (i.e., some humans exist)\u201d implies their existence.<\/p>\n

Lacan draws from this the conclusion that we pass from universal proposition (which defines the content of a notion) to existence only through a proposition stating the existence of \u2014 not the at least one element of the universal genus which exists, but \u2014 at least one which is an exception to the universality in question.<\/p>\n

What this means with regard to love is that the universal proposition “I love you all”<\/span> acquires the level of actual existence only if \u201cthere is at least one whom I hate\u201d\u2014 a thesis abundantly confirmed by the fact that universal love for humanity always led to the brutal hatred of the (actually existing) exception, of the enemies of humanity.<\/strong>\u00a0 182<\/p>\n

… true love<\/span> … can emerge only against the background \u2014not of universal hatred, but\u2014 of universal indifference<\/strong>: I am indifferent toward All, the totality of the universe, and as such, I actually love<\/span> you, the unique individual who stands\/sticks out of this indifferent background.<\/p>\n

Love<\/span> and hatred<\/span> are thus not symmetrical: love<\/span> emerges out of universal indifference<\/strong>, while hatred emerges out of universal love<\/span>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The first act of Sygne, the heroine of Paul-Louis-Charles-Marie Claudel\u2019s The Hostage, is that of what, following Freud, Lacan calls Versagung: the radical (self-relating) loss\/renunciation of the very fantasmatic core of her being. First, I sacrifice all I have for the Cause-Thing that is for me more than my life; what I then get in … Continue reading “182-3 versagung love Third justice”<\/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":[38,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethics","category-zizek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9894","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=9894"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9894\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9903,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9894\/revisions\/9903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}