Exception/Not-All

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), pp. 363-4:

These two concepts are usually opposed as respectively the masculine and feminine sides of Lacan's formulae of sexuation: the masculine side consists of a universality made possible by an exception to it; the feminine side does not form such a universality, but there is no exception to it. 'Woman is not-all ... but this means precisely that woman is not-all caught into the phallic function' (p. 67). This masculine logic in fact coincides with that of the master-signifier, in which a certain term (always itself undefined) outside of a series of phenomena explains them and allows them to be exchanged for one another: 'The Master-Signifier ... [is] no longer a simple abbreviation that designates a series of markers but the name of the hidden ground of this series of markers that act as so many expressions-effects of this ground' (p. 186). But as Žižek's work has progressed, he has more and more emphasized the feminine logic of the not-all over this masculine logic of the exception, ultimately understanding it as its real cause. The masculine logic of the exception is an 'exception' within a larger logic of the not-all. For example, of the 'symptom', Žižek writes: 'Symptoms were the series of exceptions, disturbances and malfunctionings ... Later, however, with his notion of the universalized symptom, Lacan accomplished a paradoxical shift ... in which there is no exception to the series of symptoms ... and the symbolic law ... is ultimately just one [of them]' (p. 306). This leads Žižek to consider the Hegelian logic of 'concrete universality', in which it is not that 'the exception grounds the [universal] rule ... [but the] series and [its] exceptions directly coincide' (p. 305). It is a logic that is also to be seen in Žižek's notion of 'love', which renders what is not-all, without nevertheless being an exception to it: 'Even when it is "all" (complete, with no exception), the field of knowledge remains in a way not-all, incomplete. Love is not an exception to the All of knowledge, but rather a "nothing" that renders incomplete even the complete series or field of knowledge' (p. 308).

Enunciated/Enunciation

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), pp. 362-3:

Picking up on the Hegelian theme of substance as subject, one of the ways of exposing the artificiality and arbitrariness of the symbolic construction of reality is to locate that place from which it is enunciated. This, of course, has some relation to that traditional demystifying method of posing the question to some abstract conception of justice: Whose justice? Which particular group in society does this conception of justice favour? But it goes beyond this to speak of that necessarily empty place from which all symbolic constructions are spoken: 'It is precisely the password qua empty speech that reduces the subject to the punctuality of the "subject of the enunciation": in it, he is present qua a pure symbolic point freed of all enunciated content...it is only empty speech that, by way of its very emptiness (of its distance from its enunciated content...), creates the space for "full speech"' (p. 142). And it is in this sense that the attempt to think this empty place might be seen as the attempt to think the empty subject (hence the way that Descartes might be understood to mark the beginning of philosophy in its modern, critical sense): 'What if the self is ... the void that is nothing in itself, that has no substantial positive identity, but which nonetheless serves as the unrepresentable point of reference?' (p. 102). And just as philosophy might be defined as the search for this empty position, so it might itself come from this empty position, embody that which has no place within our current situation: 'Cogito is not a substantial entity, but a pure structural function, an empty place ... as such, it can only emerge in the interstices of substantial communal systems' (p. 11).

Drive/Death-Drive

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), pp. 361-2:

Žižek takes this term from Freud and uses it to speak of that 'void' which underlies symbolic reality: drive can be understood as the repeated folding back of a process onto itself in order to expose that void for which it stands in. In this regard, it can even be understood as speaking of what makes desire possible: 'The Real qua drive is...the agens, the "driving force," of desiring... [This] in no way implies that the Real of drive is, as to its ontological status, a kind of full substantiality...a drive is not a primordial, positive force but a purely geometrical, topological phenomenon, the name for the curvature of the space of desire' (pp. 192-3). Coming back to the question of the empty place or void that runs throughout Žižek's work, however, this drive as abstract principle is not to be seen outside of the actual objects that stand in for it: 'This "pure life" beyond death, this longing that reaches beyond the circuit of generation and corruption, is it not the product of symbolization, so that symbolization itself engenders the surplus that escapes it?' (p. 160). In this sense, drive is not strictly speaking opposed to desire--as the feminine is not opposed to the masculine--but rather its extension to infinity, so that it applies even to itself. As Žižek says, it is a 'curvature of the space of desire'. Another name for this drive is in fact the subject ($)--and this takes us to the relationship between enunciated and enunciation in Žižek's work: 'The psychoanalytic name for this gap [between cause and effect], of course, is the death drive, while its philosophical name in German Idealism is "abstract negativity", the point of absolute self-contradiction that constitutes the subject as the void of pure self-relating' (p. 106).

Antagonism

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), p. 358:

Throughout his work, Žižek presents the social as inherently split, antagonistic, with no possibility of any final unity or harmony. It is for this reason that the various ideological terms that construct society's image of itself (ecology, feminism, racism, etc.) are always disputed. But beyond any particular definition of these terms--whether left, right or centrist--it is in this dispute itself that the 'truth' of society is to be found: 'In social life, for example, what the multitude of (ideological) symbolizations-narrativizations fails to render is not society's self-identity but the antagonism, the constitutive splitting of the "body politic"' (p. 195). One of the names for this antagonism is class struggle, the ongoing conflict between the workers and those who control the means of production: 'Is the supreme example of such a "Real" not provided by the Marxist concept of class struggle? The consequent thinking through of this concept compels us to admit that there is no class struggle "in reality": "class struggle" designates the very antagonism that prevents the objective (social) reality from constituting itself as a self-enclosed whole' (p. 242). In other words, we might say that class struggle is merely the name for the underlying split between positively constituted ideological entities and the void from which they are enunciated. It is not some external limit or shortcoming that could one day be made up--as even the classical notion of class struggle would seem to promise--but an internal limit that is structurally necessary to the realization of the social itself: 'to grasp the notion of antagonism, in its most radical dimension, we should invert the relationship between the two terms: it is not the external enemy who is preventing from achieving identity with myself, but every identity is already in itself blocked, marked by an impossibility, and the external enemy is simply the small piece, the rest of reality upon which we "project" or "externalize" this intrinsic, immanent impossibility' (p. 252).

Concrete Universality

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), pp. 359-360:

Žižek takes up this Hegelian notion, developed at length in his Greater Logic, to speak to that final moment of the dialectic, in which something (Being) coincides with its opposite (Nothing). 'Concrete universality' is thus achieved not when there is one universal for which all others stand in, but--hence the connection with the 'feminine' logic of the not-all--when this universal is only the space that allows the equivalence of all the others, when this universal itself is only one of these others: 'What we have here is thus not a simple reduction of the universal to the particular, but a kind of surplus of the universal. No single universal encompasses the entire particular content, since each particular has its own universal, each contains a specific perspective on the entire field' (p. 69). In this sense, there is no neutral, objective construction of social reality, because any supposed master-signifier or quilting point is itself only one of the elements to be sutured. This relates to Žižek's more general argument, following Adorno and Levi-Strauss, that the definition of society is to be found neither in any of its various descriptions nor in their combination, but in the very split they indicate: 'There is no neutral position, but precisely because there is only one science, and this science is split from within' (p. 77). It is in this sense that Žižek can say that each genus has only two species, the genus itself and that void for which it stands in (p. 326). This is to be seen in the question of sexual difference: there are not two sexes that can be put together, but only one sex (masculine) and that for which it stands in (the feminine), and it is for this reason that sexual difference is one of the ways of properly rendering the 'concrete universality' of the social.

Žižek is Correct: Obama's a Conservative President

Article from SOCIALISTWORKER.ORG

http://socialistworker.org/2009/08/25/surrendering-to-the-status-quo

EDITORIALS [1]

Surrendering to the status quo

August 25, 2009

REPUBLICANS AND conservative Democrats are set to wreck health care reform--and Barack Obama is letting them get away with it.

Now the question is this: Will liberals in Congress refuse to let Obama off the hook and fight back? Or will health care--like the trillions of dollars in giveaways to the banks, the escalation of the U.S. war on Afghanistan, and the maintenance of George W. Bush's police-state powers--become another Obama White House capitulation to the wealthy and powerful?

Certainly it was expected that the health insurance and drug companies would use their clout to try to block real health care reform. On the campaign trail last year, Obama explicitly promised to keep them in line. "I'll have the insurance and drug companies at the table," he said. "They just won't be able to buy every chair...And I'll be at the table. I'll have the biggest chair, because I'm president." Obama even promised to televise negotiations on C-SPAN.

Yet it was President Obama who empowered Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus to frame health care legislation in a closed-door session with six senators from both parties--and it was Baucus who gave Republican Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa veto power over any deal.

Now Obama is poised to junk the so-called "public option"--a government-run insurer that was supposed to compete with private companies. Obama once championed the public option as an essential way to force private insurers and the industry generally to control runaway health care costs--now he calls it a "tiny sliver" of health care reform.

Instead of a program run nationwide by the federal government, the "compromise" position is for multiple health insurance co-ops to fill in the gaps left by private companies. The co-ops would be powerless to negotiate better arrangements with drug and medical companies--they'll end up as a pale imitation of the private system.

Meanwhile, Baucus and Grassley--who are among the top recipients of campaign donations from health insurance companies--have piled on items from the corporate wish list.

Crucially, their proposal would require the uninsured to buy coverage. With the "public option" eliminated or neutralized, this will give private companies a virtually captive market of nearly 50 million people. Government subsidies would pay part of the premiums for low-income people--that is, private insurers would be subsidized with government money.

Moreover, under the Baucus plan, the insurance companies would only have to pay 65 percent of the cost of health care expenses for people enrolled in the mandatory plans. By comparison, today's group plans typically pay between 80 and 90 percent of costs.

For health insurance companies, this proposal is "a bonanza," Robert Laszewski, a former health insurance executive, told the Los Angeles Times. He said the insurance companies' reaction to the plan can be summed up in a single word: "Hallelujah!"

Meanwhile, the White House has apparently agreed to continue to bar the federal government from negotiating discounts from drug companies for government programs--the same multibillion-dollar giveaway that liberals denounced when George W. Bush imposed similar rules on the Medicare prescription drug program.

In return, Big Pharma promised to cut prices by $80 billion over 10 years. As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich pointed out, that's nothing for an industry that makes about $300 billion in sales each year.

And, warns Reich, "when an industry gets secret concessions out of the White House in return for a promise to lend the industry's support to a key piece of legislation, we're in big trouble. That's called extortion: An industry is using its capacity to threaten or prevent legislation as a means of altering that legislation for its own benefit. And it's doing so at the highest reaches of our government, in the office of the president."

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert summed up the situation this way: "If the oldest and sickest are on Medicare, and the poorest are on Medicaid, and the young and the healthy are required to purchase private insurance without the option of a competing government-run plan--well, that's reform the insurance companies can believe in."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THUS, A president who came into office hyped as the second coming of Franklin Delano Roosevelt seems to be conceding to the right on every question.

As a result, it can sometimes seem like the right wing has the initiative on the health care issue, thanks to outsized cable news network coverage of organized right-wingers who packed town hall meetings with members of Congress.

In reality, there has been a substantial majority for years in favor of genuine health care reform. If Obama really took on the unpopular insurance companies and pharmaceutical industry, he could have used his political momentum coming into office to rally support not only for a public option in health care, but for a Medicare-for-all single-payer system that would provide the most equitable and effective solution.

Instead, Obama has tended to the needs of big capital--and not only on health care policy. The administration began by expanding George W. Bush's unprecedented multi-trillion-dollar giveaway to the banks. Its $787 billion economic stimulus plan hasn't made much of a dent in rising unemployment--if those involuntarily working short hours or dropped out of the workforce are counted, the jobless rate is around 16.3 percent, rather than the official 9.4 percent. And homeowners have been stiffed by the Obama administration, which has no cure for the foreclosure pandemic.

Now, as Obama prepares to surrender his central campaign promise--health care reform--to Republicans and Corporate America, some liberals have had it.

"I don't know if administration officials realize just how much damage they've done themselves with their kid-gloves treatment of the financial industry, just how badly the spectacle of government supported institutions paying giant bonuses is playing," wrote New York Timescolumnist Paul Krugman, adding, "It's hard to avoid the sense that Mr. Obama has wasted months trying to appease people who can't be appeased, and who take every concession as a sign that he can be rolled."

Krugman is correct. But the fact is that Obama is a conventional Democratic Party politician--which means he instinctively puts the interests of big business first. If there's no pressure from below, the corporations will have their way.

Fortunately, some activists are taking the initiative to put forward a progressive alternative. Advocates of a single-payer system upstaged several of Baucus' committee hearings on Capitol Hill to try to force open the corporate-controlled debate.

Physicians for a National Health Program are, along with allies in the single-payer health care movement, organizing meetings around the U.S. to try to shift the terms of the discussion. And five Portland physicians, calling themselves the Mad as Hell Doctors, will travel across the U.S. to Washington, D.C., to push for a single-payer solution.

These actions, though modest, have been important in both countering the myth of a grassroots right-wing rebellion against "government-run health care" and in putting forward a vision of genuine reform--the single-payer solution--that will be needed in the future. Without the activism, the liberal lawmakers who are now speaking out about the shortcomings of the Baucus plan and the White House's strategy might have stayed silent.

Similar action is needed on other issues--from demanding a halt to cuts in social spending or fighting for a new, more effective stimulus plan to create jobs.

Obama has shown where his priorities lie--on health care and many other issues. The task for the left is to organize to fight for our agenda.

"Christian Materialism" and the Problem of Evil

From WITH OR WITHOUT PASSION •
.........What's Wrong with Fundamentalism? - Part I
.........Slavoj Zizek

See full article at http://www.lacan.com/zizpassion.htm

[....]

When theologians try to reconcile the existence of God with the fact of shoah, their answers build a strange succession of Hegelian triads. First, those who want to leave divine sovereignty unimpaired and thus have to attribute to God full responsibility for shoah, first offer (1) the "legalistic" sin-and-punishment theory (shoah has to be a punishment for the past sins of humanity-or Jews themselves); then, they pass (2) to the "moralistic" character-education theory (shoah is to be understood along the lines of the story of Job, as the most radical test of our faith in God - if we survive this ordeal, our character will stand firm...); and, finally, they take refuge in a kind of "infinite judgement" which should save the day after all common measure between shoah and its meaning breaks down, and (3) the divine mystery theory (facts like shoahbear witness to the unfathomable abyss of divine will). In accordance with the Hegelian motto of a redoubled mystery (the mystery God is for us has to be also a mystery for God Himself), the truth of this "infinite judgement" can only be to deny God's full sovereignty and omnipotence.

The next triad is thus composed of those who, unable to combine shoah with God's omnipotence (how could He have allowed it to happen?), opt for some form of divine limitation: (1) first, God is directly posited as finite (not all-encompassing, overwhelmed by the dense inertia of his own creation); (2) then, this limitation is reflected back into God himself as his free act - God is self-limited (He voluntarily constrained his power in order to leave the space open for human freedom); (3) finally, the self-limitation is externalized, the two moments are posited as autonomous - God is embattled (the dualistic solution: there is a counter-force or principle of demoniac Evil active in the world). However, it is only here that we encounter the core of the problem of the origin of Evil.

The standard metaphysical-religious notion of Evil is that of doubling, gaining a distance, abandoning the reference to the big Other, our Origin and Goal, turning away from the original divine One, getting caught into the self-referential egotistic loop, thus introducing a gap into the global balance and harmony of the One-All. The easy, all too slick, postmodern solution to this is to retort that the way out of this self-incurred impasse consists in abandoning the very presupposition of the primordial One from which one turned away, i.e., to accept that our primordial situation is that of finding oneself in a complex situation, one within a multitude of foreign elements-only the theologico-metaphysical presupposition of the original One compels us to perceive the alien as the outcome of (our) alienation. From this perspective, the Evil is not the redoubling of the primordial One, turning away from it, but the very imposition of an all-encompassing One onto the primordial dispersal. However, what if the true task of thought is to think the self-division of the One, to think the One itself as split within itself, as involving an inherent gap?

The very gap between gnosticism and monotheism can thus be accounted for in the terms of the origin of evil: while gnosticism locates the primordial duality of Good and Evil into God himself (the material universe into which we are fallen is the creation of an evil and/or stupid divinity, and what gives us hope is the good divinity which keeps alive the promise of another reality, our true home), monotheism saves unity (one-ness) of a good God by locating the origin of evil into our freedom (evil is either finitude as such, the inertia of material reality, or the spiritual act of willfully turning away from God). It is easy to bring the two together by claiming that the Gnostic duality of God is merely a "reflexive determination" of our own changed attitude towards God: what we perceive as two Gods is effectively the split in our nature, in our relating to God. However, the true task is to locate the source of the split between good and evil into God himself while remaining within the field of monotheism - the task which tried to accomplish German mystics (Jakob Boehme) and later philosophers who took over their problematic (Schelling, Hegel). In other words, the task is to transpose the human "external reflection" which enacts the split between good and evil back into the One God himself.

Back to the topic of shoah, this brings us to the third position above and beyond the first two (the sovereign God, the finite God), that of a suffering God: not a triumphalist God who always wins at the end, although "his ways are mysterious," since he secretly pulls all the strings; not a God who exerts cold justice, since he is by definition always right; but a God who - like the suffering Christ on the Cross - is agonized, assumes the burden of suffering, in solidarity with the human misery. It was already Schelling who wrote: "God is a life, not merely a being. But all life has a fate and is subject to suffering and becoming. /.../ Without the concept of a humanly suffering God /.../ all of history remains incomprehensible." Why? Because God's suffering implies that He is involved in history, affected by it, not just a transcendent Master pulling the strings from above: God's suffering means that human history is not just a theater of shadows, but the place of the real struggle, the struggle in which the Absolute itself is involved and its fate is decided. This is the philosophical background of Dietrich Bonhoffer's deep insight that, after shoah, "only a suffering God can help us now" - a proper supplement to Heidegger's "Only a God can still save us!" from his last interview. One should therefore take the statement that "the unspeakable suffering of the six millions is also the voice of the suffering of God" quite literally: the very excess of this suffering over any "normal" human measure makes it divine. Recently, this paradox was succinctly formulated by Juergen Habermas: "Secular languages which only eliminate the substance once intended leave irritations. When sin was converted to culpability, and the breaking of divine commands to an offense against human laws, something was lost." Which is why the secular-humanist reactions to phenomena like shoah or gulag (AND others) is experienced as insufficient: in order to be at the level of such phenomena, something much stronger is needed, something akin to the old religious topic of a cosmic perversion or catastrophe in which the world itself is "out of joint." Therein resides the paradox of the theological significance of shoah: although it is usually conceived as the ultimate challenge to theology (if there is a God and if he is good, how could he have allowed such a horror to take place?), it is at the same time only theology which can provide the frame enabling us to somehow approach the scope of this catastrophe - the fiasco of God is still the fiasco of GOD.

[....]