August 26, 2014 · 10:09 AM

Mauvaises pensées et autres

Re-reading Valéry in the context of early Lacan. (First reading some early Lacan, then – re-reading Valéry ). In different Ecrit on aggression from the late 40s – early 50s, aggression as the essential formative aspect of subjectivity, observable in all outwardly directed activity (philanthropy, pedagogy, etc). That was before everything was replaced by signifying structures and the objet petit a.

Valéry’s cutting wit goes well with Lacan:

Le talent d’un homme est ce qui nous manque pour mépriser ou détruire ce qu’il fait.

And a few others:

Le peintre ne doit pas faire ce qu’il voit, mais ce qui sera vu.

Notre esprit ne serait rien sans son désordre, - mais borné.

Ce que l’histoire peut nous apprendre de plus sûr, c’est que nous nous trompions sur un point d’histoire.

Les grands hommes se servent de tout ; mais parfois, tant pis pour eux…

And the pearl :

Un chef est un homme qui a besoin des autres.

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May 17, 2014 · 11:29 AM

Goal of Psychoanalysis

Freud often insists that we should not mistake the latent thoughts that the analysis unearths under the manifest content for the unconscious desire itself, in persona-those latent thoughts pertain to the preconscious, often something unpleasant, but not foreign to con- sciousness.It even seemed that the point of analysis was to make conscious those latent thoughts one is unaware of. But desire does not reside in those thoughts themselves, its locus is, rather, between the two, in the very surplus of distortion (Entstellung) of the manifest in relation to the latent-the distortion which cannot be accounted for by latent thoughts; they never present sufficient reason for it by themselves. It resides in the form, not in the content, but the stuff of that form is precisely the surplus of the voice in the signifier.” So the sense of interpretation would then ultimately reside not in providing meaning, in reducing the contingency by displaying the logic which lies behind it, but, rather, through the very act of establishing it, in showing this contingency.

“Interpretation is not limited to providing us with the significations of the way taken by the psyche that we have before us. This implication is no more than a prelude. It is directed not so much at the meaning as towards reducing it to the non-meaning of the signifiers, so that we may rediscover the determinants of the subject’s entire behavior-not in its significatory dependence, but precisely in its irreducible and senseless character qua chain of signifiers.” (Lacan 1979, p. 212)

Mladen Dolar. A Voice and Nothing More (Short Circuits)

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May 14, 2014 · 2:09 PM

A la guerre….

A brilliant end of the chapter L’infini in Le siècle of Alain Badiou! Speaking about the war of the century, a war for “the univocation of the Real, against the equivocations of the imaginary”. An idea of universal thinking against temptations of interpreting…

C’est qu’il y a, de cette guerre, bien d’autres noms moins ésotériques: l’Idée contre la réalité. La liberté contre la nature. L’événement contre l’état des choses. La vérité contre les opinions. L’intensité de la vie contre l’insignifiance de la survie. L’égalité contre l’équité. Le soulèvement contre l’acceptation. L’éternité contre l’Histoire. La science contre la technique. L’art contre la culture. La politique contre la gestion des affaires. L’amour contre la famille.

Oui, toutes ces guerres à gagner, comme le prononce le Tchouvache, “parmi les soubresauts du souffle du non-dit”.

Translation:

This war has many names, less esoteric. Idea against actuality. Freedom against Nature. The Event against the order of things. Truth against opinions. The intensity of living against the insignificance of surviving.  Equality against equity. Rebellion against acceptance. Eternity against History. Science against technology. Art against culture. Politics against management. Love against family.

Yes, all these wars to win! As the Chuvash puts it: “among the somersaults of a breath of unsaid”.

(Chuvash is a reference to the Chuvash/Russian poet Gennadiy Aygi).

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February 18, 2014 · 6:30 PM

Gays, Zionism, Liberals

A reader’s review of Precarious Life by Judith Butler’s on Amazon:

I have admired and enjoyed earlier works by Judith Butler, but this one came at, for her and this book, a most unpropitious moment in my personal historical experience. I had been on a six month journey to Israel attempting to rescue and offer refuge to four Palestinian queers–three men and one woman–who were in fear for their life for very good reason. Their pleas for justice and protection had been thoroughly ignored by the PLA, who basically told them they deserved whatever was coming to them. The only organization willing to give them material support was Keshet, an Israeli LGBT activist group in Tel Aviv.

 

When I was reading Butler’s passages about the potential opportunities for cooperation between queers and Muslims (etc.) I could not help but look back on my experiences in Israel and, before that, my experiences in Iraq, where I had gone with a relief organization to assist gay men who had been victims of torture. I thought the book committed the error of the three friends in The Book of Job, who care more about their abstractions of the theory of retribution and G-d’s justice (universalism) than about the stark and stubborn actualities of real lives. This is a book that needed far more research and hands-on experience to achieve respect or credibility in my eyes. Geopolitical realities dictate that an alliance between queers and political Islam is an even more extreme pipe dream than an alliance between queers and the Christian Right. Arguing otherwise seemed, I believe, one of the aftereffects of this author’s clear anti-Zionist ideology. This is fine, but it led her into inaccurate, inappropriate, and mistimed political day dreams.

 

The Left really needs to “get real” and figure out who real allies and real adversaries are. Anti-Israeli rhetoric (a.k.a “Israel bashing”) of numerous leftist intellectuals is nothing more than sublimation of the good ol’ antisemitism, Alain Badiou’s protests notwithstanding.

 

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January 18, 2014 · 10:08 PM

Way to make the English language really hop.

 

Throughout their life, so calm, so peaceful,
Sweet old tradition was preserved:
For them, in Butterweek the greaseful,
Russian pancakes were always served;
Two times a year they’d make their fast,
Loved rustic swings of wooden cast,
Soothsaying songs, round-dancing’s pound.
At Trinity, when yawning round,
The peasants prayed all they were able,
They’d shed a tender tear or two
On buttercups still fresh with dew;
They needed kvas like air; at table
Their guests, for all they ate and drank,
Were served in order of their rank.
(Evgeniy Onegin, ch2, XXXV, Translated by Charles Johnston)

Они хранили в жизни мирной
Привычки милой старины;
У них на масленице жирной
Водились русские блины;
Два раза в год они говели;
Любили круглые качели,
Подблюдны песни, хоровод;
В день Троицын, когда народ
Зевая слушает молебен,
Умильно на пучок зари
Они роняли слезки три;
Им квас как воздух был потребен,
И за столом у них гостям
Носили блюда по чинам.
(гл 2, XXXV)

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November 29, 2013 · 12:24 PM

Ethics, Life, Kant, Sade

Stumbled across this Juvenal quote in the introduction to Zupančič’s Ethics of the Real: Summum crede nefas animam praeferre pudori et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas. [(you should) Hold it top wickedness to prefer life to honor and for the sake of living lose reason for living]. I disagree. And I also disagree with the opposite. Holding on to this principle breeds fundamentalism, holding on to the opposite engenders unforgivable weakness. 

The famous discussion between Constant and Kant in a hypothetical about a murderer asking you whether your friend is hiding in the house, where, according to Kant you cannot lie and cannot refuse to answer, you must tell the truth even if it means your friend would be killed illustrates how quickly universal ethics disintegrates into terrifying nonsense. What’s at stake in this example (mentioned in Zupančič’s amazing Ethics of the Real) is the very core of Kantian ethics: there cannot be any exceptions from the universal principles. If you must tell the truth – you must always tell the truth, no matter what particular circumstances may be.

As Lacan points out, this is precisely where Kant leaves a hole for Sade to crawl into. I can cover the most nefarious actions with universal principles: I know the truth I just told my friend about his cheating lover has destroyed him. But what could I do?! It’s not my enjoyment of my friend’s suffering that caused me to do it. It is the categorical imperative of always telling the truth!

The true Universal, as Zupančič explains, is not the categorical imperative used as a litmus test for an ethical action (categorical imperative is essentially a tautology, in Žižek’s interpretation: Do your duty because… it is your duty!), it is the subject himself abiding by what he understands to be his duty to perform the action. This does not mean that ethics is subjective. It is still universal, but it is Universality speaking through the Subject. 

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Aside

” Žižek proceeds to connect this to a certain Lacanian version of the death drive…: insofar as the denaturalization of nature brought about by the sociocultural overwriting of vital being involves the colonization of the living (i.e., organic body) by the dead (i.e., the symbolic order), one could say, following Hegel and Lacan, that human life is lived under the dominance of lifeless set of cadaverizing signifiers (for instance, memes as mental parasites). Infection by virulent strains of virus-like signifiers is contracted by the individual in the process of struggling to gentrify and mask the abyssal darkness of the void of $ subsisting within substance.”

Adrian Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology p. 188

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November 2, 2013 · 3:06 PM
October 6, 2013 · 11:25 PM

La marque du sacré

J’ai l’intime conviction que notre monde va droit à la catastrophe. Le chemin sur lequel s’avance l’humanité est suicidaire Je parle de la catastrophe au singulier, non pour désigner un événement unique, mais un système de discontinuités, de franchissements de seuils critiques, de ruptures, de changements structurels radicaux qui s’alimenteront les uns les autres, pour frapper de plein fouet avec une violence inouïe les générations montantes.

 
Jean-Pierre Dupuy
 

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August 17, 2013 · 4:42 PM

Hegelian Myths

I found a section on debunking “hegelian myths” on, I think hegel.com. The myths include Hegel rejecting the law of excluded middle, his saying that we live at the end of arts, philosophy, times… And next to each myth were a few sentences explaining why it is not true.

I think such “debunking” does more harm than good. First of all only a petit bourgeois mentality would seriously engage in believing the above mentioned (by “believing” I mean taking it literally and stopping there: Hegel does say that we live at the end of philosophy, time, etc). Intellectual curiosity is precisely what would motivate a true seeker of knowledge to immerse himself in hegelian philosophy to try and answer for himself why one of the most influential thinkers in the history of mankind would allow himself the luxury of such superfluous nonsense. That would lead to many a wonderful discovery, and en route, these boring “myths” will be explicated.

It is the very attempt to dispel it that really creates this kind of drivel. Any universal thought taken out of its context and split into individual parts will display the same nature, just like in the famous tale about an elephant examined by several blind people. When sensations like “elephant is a cord”, or “elephant is a pillar” are expressed, we do not try to disprove them individually “heads on”. We just demonstrate the whole elephant and the falsehoods simply wither out and fall off. In order to do that we must also cure blindness. In this case – intellectual blindness.

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August 17, 2013 · 3:38 PM

Culture, Barbarism, Žižek, Vico

In this essay, Žižek quotes Benjamin, and wonders with him:  “what if culture itself is nothing but a halt, a break, a respite, in the pursuit of barbarity?” He gives an example of how culture can be not just synonymous but identical with barbarity in Less Than Nothing, where he mentions an utterance attributed to various Nazi leaders: “When I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my pistol.” Here “the intended meaning was probably that he was ready to defend high German culture… against Jews and other barbarians; the true meaning, however is that he is himself a barbarian who explodes with violence when confronted with true works of culture.” (at the end of The “Magical Force” of Reversal section of Part III, Chapter 8).

In La Scienza nuouva, Vico has already intuited this position: after the “human” stage of history, comes “barbarie ritornata”, which he defines as “barbarie della riflessione” (barbarity of reflection). His evidence comes from the Middle Ages: an example of new barbarity that set in after the most enlightened teachings of Christianity were revealed. How far away are we from this intuition coming true? For one thing seems to be certain: the same symbolic framework that gives rise and supports culture in a society is also the framework of that society’s possible or existing barbarity. Take the USSR. How proud its citizens were of its ballet, arts, literature. Yet, this was the muster of a totalitarian society, suppressing its citizens with violence only matched by that of Nazi Germany (which, incidently, did not concentrate on its own citizens, not that I am defending the monstorsity of Nazism, just stressing that the monstrocity of communism belongs on a different level). So Benjamin was right: any monument to culture is simultaniously a monument to barbarity.

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