{"id":9952,"date":"2012-11-23T01:01:16","date_gmt":"2012-11-23T06:01:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=9952"},"modified":"2012-11-23T01:29:36","modified_gmt":"2012-11-23T06:29:36","slug":"z-introduction-to-rudas-book-on-rabble","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/11\/23\/z-introduction-to-rudas-book-on-rabble\/","title":{"rendered":"\u017d introduction to ruda’s book on rabble"},"content":{"rendered":"

… the primordial gesture of creation is not that of an excessive giving, of assertion, but a negative gesture of withdrawal, of<\/span> subtracting<\/span>, which only opens up the space for creation of positive entities.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is how “There is something rather than nothing”:<\/span> in order to arrive at something, one has to <\/span>subtract from nothing its nothing(ness) itself,<\/span> i.e., one has to posit the primordial pre-ontological Abyss “as such,” AS NOTHING, <\/span>so that, in contrast to (or against the background of) nothing,<\/span> something can appear.<\/span><\/p>\n

\ud83d\ude42 Subtract nothing from nothingness, in order to get something. Otherwise nothing will just go on, dumbly, dumb dumb, without a cut, it merely langors, lingers, but never approaching creation of something new out of itself.<\/p>\n

The underlying problem is here which of these negation is the primordial one<\/strong>, i.e., which one opens up the space for all others. From the Lacanian perspective, the most obvious candidate may appear to be the notorious “symbolic castration,”<\/strong> the loss which opens up and sustains the space of symbolization \u2014 recall, insofar as the Name-of-the-Father<\/strong> is the bearer of symbolic castration<\/strong>, how Lacan plays on the French homophony between le Nom-du-Pere (the name of the father)<\/span> and le Non-du-Pere (the no of the father).<\/span><\/p>\n

But it seems more productive to follow a more radical path<\/strong> of thinking beyond father (pere) to what is even worse (pire). Again the most obvious candidate for this “worse” is (death-)drive<\/span>, .<\/span>a kind of Freudian correlate to what Schelling called the<\/strong> primordial “contraction,”<\/span> the obstinate repetitive fixation on a contingent object which subtracts the subject<\/span> from direct immersion into reality.<\/span><\/p>\n

Drive as such is death-drive<\/span> \u2014 not in the sense of longing for univeral negation-dissolution of all particularity, but, on the contrary, in the sense of the “spontaneous” life-flow of generation and corruption getting “stuck” onto some accidental particularity and circulating endlessly around it.<\/p>\n

If Life is a song played on an old LP (which it definitely is not), drive arises when, due to a scratch on the LP surface, the needle gets stuck and the same fragment is repeated.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The deepest speculative insight is that a universality<\/span> can only emerge when a flow of particularity<\/span> get stuck onto a singular moment. And this Freudian notion of drive<\/span> brings us to the radical ambiguity of Hegel’s dialectics: does it follow the logic of drive or not?<\/span><\/p>\n

Hegel’s logic is a logic of purification, of “unstucking”<\/strong>: even when a subject puts all of his libidinal investment into a contingent fragment of being (“I am ready to risk everything for that!”), this contingent fragment \u2014 the Lacanian objet a<\/span> \u2014 is, in its indifferent accidentality, an operator of purification, of “unstucking” from all (other) particular content \u2014 in Lacanese, this object is a metonymy of lack.\u00a0 The subject’s desire is here the transcendental void<\/strong>, and the object is a contingent ontic filler of this void.<\/p>\n

In drive<\/span>, in contrast<\/strong>, objet petit a<\/span> is not only the metonymy of lack, but a kind of transcendental stain, irreducible and irreplacable in its very contingent singularity, not just a contingent ontic filler of a lack.<\/p>\n

While<\/span> drive<\/span> is a mode of being stuck onto a contingent stain-object<\/span>, dialectical negativity is a continuing process of un-stucking from all particular content:<\/span> jouissance<\/span> “leans on” something, hanging onto its particularity \u2014<\/span> this is what is missing in Hegel, but operative in Freud.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

… the primordial gesture of creation is not that of an excessive giving, of assertion, but a negative gesture of withdrawal, of subtracting, which only opens up the space for creation of positive entities. This is how “There is something rather than nothing”: in order to arrive at something, one has to subtract from nothing … Continue reading “\u017d introduction to ruda’s book on rabble”<\/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":[125,100,76,41,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-drive","category-hegel","category-sub-destitute","category-the-real","category-zizek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9952","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=9952"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9952\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9960,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9952\/revisions\/9960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}