Tag Archives: Zizek

July 12, 2015 · 11:59 AM

Demonic Gloom

There is a wonderful word in the Russian language that describes an especially outrageous sort of religious practices, targeted specifically at anything secular, usually in a violent manner: ‘mrakobesiye’. The word is a composite of two: gloom (or darkness) and demon. It is as if darkness turns into a demon and acts accordingly.

The acts of such nature drew some attention recently in the US as a few wonderful merchants started refusing service to gays (bake or deliver flowers for weddings) citing their religious beliefs. In Russia, strengthening the law of “Hurting believers’ feelings” by criminalizing such “hurtful” acts was adopted in 2013 on the heels of the Pussy Riot scandal. A somewhat milder, positive (not persecuting hurtful acts, but promoting religious expression)  version of the same exists in the US under the name of Religious Freedom Restoration Act (unclear why freedom of religion guaranteed by the Constitution needed to be “restored”, implying some tradition of “suppression”).

Despite Freud’s assurances to the contrary, religion is still strong, and will probably remain very strong for a foreseeable future. Actions of the aforementioned business owners shed some light on the reason why. These are classical examples of Lacan’s reversal of Dostoyevsky’s famous claim in the Karamazov Brothers: “If there is no God, everything is permitted!” According to Lacan, it is just the opposite: “If there is no God, nothing is permitted”. It is easy to see why: if a person agrees to become part of a symbolic order, such as a church for instance, then s/he can deposit a substantial share of personal ethics with that order. Let some Big Other (God) be responsible. In exchange, this person gets a carte blanche to enjoy. In effect the symbolic order says: “Join us, and you will be able to enjoy hating and even harming people with impunity. Not only that, this enjoyment may even become a virtue. The alternative (being on your own), means submitting to the terrifying super-ego agency that will plague you for your ethical choices without mercy or redemption forever, effectively banning you from doing what you like.”

Perhaps we need more acts of this nature in our society. Perhaps seeing these grotesque displays of “faith” more people would think twice before joining a church of any kind.

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May 2, 2015 · 11:55 AM

Ontological Catastrophe

This wonderful book is not to be missed. As a matter of fact I have been waiting for it for years!

My foray into the world of Slavoj Žižek started when I first watched this video a while ago. This is a video of a 2003 TV program, where Rudnev and Aronson, two Russian philosophers discuss Wittgenstein. Towards the end of it (one minute before it ends, actually), Rudnev regrets that they don’t have time to address modern philosophy and says, that for him, the only contemporary who can be read today with interest is Slavoj Žižek. Aronson laughs, calling Žižek “re-teller”, Rudnev is slightly embarrassed and retorts defensively, that today the only way for philosophy is eclecticism.

At this point I realized, that it was time to start reading Žižek seriously. Until then I only glanced through one or two of his political articles and did not think I would pursue it any further as I was horrified (and still am) by his political views. As a matter of fact I have rarely encountered anything insulting common sense more than Žižek’s political views. Perhaps Chomsky’s political views. However, a man’s politics (and movie criticism) and his philosophy are completely different things and should be separated.

Ever since picking up Less than Nothing (which in and of itself may be considered quite an endeavor since the hard cover volume is pretty heavy), I was completely assimilated into the Žižek camp. Naturally, this required reading Lacan, which among other things made me doubt command of the French language: his or mine, I was not sure, but it was excruciating. Lacan is more of a talker than a writer.

Since I traveled the whole route zigzagging from Less than Nothing to earlier works, to political works, to Absolute Recoil, I had a benefit of watching how Žižek’s philosophical personality (subject) was born in the future and made its way to the past, defining its own presuppositions. Earlier works can now be perceived as “future anterior”, from the point of view of the later ones. And always, two lingering questions remained: 1. So, where are we regarding the late Schelling and Hegel as starting points to our attempt at understanding the Real? and 2. Žižek is certainly not an eclectic or re-teller. But since he is not a system-builder of any kind either (what a heresy it would be to even think that for a second!) what is in the core of his ideas? And why is psychoanalysis so important? Yes, Lacan as a refracting device which affords a new look at Kant and Hegel is great, but why? And why, unlike Johnston, is Žižek not starting to ask “materialist” questions? And even stressing more and more, that every true materialist has to start from idealism? (Lenin rolling in his grave, I hope).

This book answers all of these questions. No spoilers here, it deserves a close reading! I also like the divergence from the quasineurscientific project of Malabou and Johnston. It is great that these intuitions are emerging now, but I do not believe neuroscience is anywhere near a level that could serve as a starting point for building an interface to psychoanalysis.

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February 26, 2015 · 4:38 PM

Mythology, Madness, and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism

As we are approaching the times, where, according to some bright contemporary minds (Adrian Johnston, Catherine Malabou) to name a couple the debt of biology which according to Freud should explain psychoanalysis, is either being paid or close to it, the question of subjectivity: what is it, really, is re-surging with full force. Adrian Johnston bases his transcendental materialism on a presentation of this very problem and its solution in a couple of must-read books (1 2). There, he engages with modern thinkers on this issue (among other things).

 Mythology, Madness, and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism is a joint effort by Markus Gabriel and Slavoj Žižek, where the issues are tackled from a slightly different angle. Unlike Johnston, for whom, in the crudest of terms, the rise of subjectivity occurs in the register of the Lacanian Real, Gabriel would question the very “real” status of this Real to begin with. In that sense, he is much closer to Žižek, who, in The Parallax View states that the radical materialism must start with the Hegelian concept of Notion (“a truly radical materialist approach … to put it in Hegelese, there is the Particular because the Universal is not fully itself; there is the opaque material reality because the Notion is not fully itself…” Parallax View, The Comedy of Incarnation). On a personal note: I find this anti-Leninist turn most gratifying.

A great feature of this book is Žižek’s chapter on Fichte. I am not going to try and do it justice in a blog entry. Suffice it to say, that importance of Fichte’s thought is only matched by the thoroughness of misunderstanding of it. Žižek boldly battles the dragons of Fichte’s perceived solipsism. It is not that he presents a “new” understanding of Fichte’s philosophy. He presents a “real” understanding of it, reminding us once again about the platonic difference between “philosophia” and “doxophilia”. The “doxa” in this case being the basic adoption of a false reduction of Fichte’s system by Mme de Stael to a story of baron Munchausen, who pulled himself across the river by his sleeve.

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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
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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May 10, 2013 · 7:19 AM

Герменевтика

Что я читал в прошлом году? Ну полгода читал Герменевтику Гадамера, потом еще с Киеркегором разбирался, Гуссерля было тоже много, классику читал: Аристотеля (наверное, уже не помню). Гадамер это интересно, что там Шлеермахер считал в плане герменевтики – не понял вообще. В конце-концов Гадамер бросает свои рассуждения на 600 страниц и переходит к совершенно мистической интерпретации: Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ Λόγος. В начале было слово, т.е. каждое слово творит, подобно божьему слову. Но божье слово действительно творит, а человеческое творит идею. This is kinda neat.

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May 10, 2013 · 6:58 AM

Heidegger, Buddhism.

Zizek writes, that the difference between Heidegger and Buddhism is that according to the former, Sein needs a Dasein that thinks about it, while according to the latter Sein needs nothing (goal being a complete absorption of Dasein in the Sein). Well, yes. This is like much of Zizek: really entertaining, but why would I even begin to compare Heidegger and Buddhism? I could, but the latter seems irrelevant in understanding the former. Or vice versa.

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