This obscene virtual dimension is inscribed into an ideological text in the guise of the fantasmatic background that sustains the emptiness of the Master-Signifier. The Master-Signifier is the signifier of potentiality, of potential threat, of a threat which, in order to function as such, has to remain potential (just as it is also the signifier of potential meaning whose actuality is the void of meaning: "our Nation," for instance, is the thing itself, the supreme Cause worth dying for, the highest density of meaning--and, as such, it means nothing in particular, it has no determinate meaning, it can be articulated only in the guise of a tautology--"The Nation is the Thing itself"). This emptiness of the threat is clearly discernible in everyday phrases like "Just wait! You'll see what will happen to you!"--the very lack of the specification of what exactly will befall you is what makes the threat so threatening, since it invites the power of my fantasy to fill it in with imagined horrors. As such, the Master-Signifier is the privileged site at which fantasy intervenes, since the function of fantasy is precisely to fill in the void of the signifier-without-signified: that is to say, fantasy is ultimately, at its most elementary, the stuff which fills in the void of the Master-Signifier: again, in the case of a Nation, all the mythic obscure narratives which tell us what the Nation is. In other words, sovereignty always (in its very concept, as Hegel would have put it) involves the logic of the universal and its constitutive exception: the universal and the unconditional rule of Law can be sustained only by a sovereign power which reserves for itself the right to proclaim a state of exception, that is, to suspend the rule of law(s) on behalf of the Law itself--if we deprive the Law of its excess that sustains it, we lose the (rule of) Law itself.
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This is a follow-up to the previous entry (or rather two entries ago) and I'm not sure if it belongs here or there. The last thing I want is introduce chaos into your blog:-) Just to clarify: Strictly speaking, every formal mathematical system that includes arithmetic is Goedel-incomplete. Therefore that type of incompletenes holds for both theories in your example 4. In particular, the "Newtonian", absolute frame of reference approach suffers from it too and is non-All in THAT sense.
ReplyDeleteYes, I've read The Parallax View last year. Alas, our beloved Slavoj writes faster than I'm able to read and much like Achilles I will never be able to catch up with that turtle:-) Anyway, having lived in both, the US and Europe I'm not quite sure if I agree with you (or Milner) that there is one discernible figure of the "Jew" contra which European multiculturalism is being built. The state of Israel seems just too localized to play that role. In the States, on the other hand, I would argue there's the figure of the "liberal" that occupies that position (you know, for much of the south and mid-west it is gay marriage that's responsible for all disasters from 9/11 to Katrina!). If anything I'd say that, for the EU, America is the "Jew"
best regards,
Kris
The point we are trying to clarify is how the exception is constitutive for the masculine logic, but not for the feminine. This has to do with the phallic function, Master-Signifier, fantasy, objet petit a. That we find incompleteness and inconsistency everywhere testifies to the fact that the subject as such is feminine.
ReplyDeleteImaginary-symbolic "reality" is shot through with the Real.
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