"...these voices will start to reverberate..."

From The Coming Insurrection, by The Invisible Committee, originally published as L'insurrection qui vient by Editions La Fabrique, Paris, 2007 (available at http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/texts/the-coming-insurrection/.)

Excerpts from the semiotext(e) intervention series, distributed by The MIT Press, pp. 128-130:

[....]

"Take up arms. Do everything possible to make their use unnecessary. Against the army, the only victory is political."

[....] "The militarization of civil war is the defeat of insurrection."

[....] "An insurrection triumphs as a political force. It is not impossible to defeat an army politically."

[....]

Dialectics and Noir (2)

Slavoj Žižek, from Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 248-9:

[....] The key to the 'drama of false appearances' is therefore that, in it, less overlaps with more. On the one hand, the standard procedure of censorship is not to show the (prohibited) event (murder, sex act) directly, but in the way it is reflected in the witnesses; on the other hand, this deprivation opens up a space to be filled in by phantasmatic projections--that is to say, it is possible that the gaze which does not see what is actually going on clearly sees more, not less.

Similarly, the notion of noir (or of 'poststructuralist deconstructionism', for that matter), although it results from a limited foreign perspective, perceives in its object a potential which is invisible to those who are directly engaged in it. That is the ultimate dialectical paradox of truth and falsity: sometimes, the aberrant view which misreads a situation from its limited perspective can, by virtue of this very limitation, perceive the 'repressed' potential of the observed constellation. It is true that, if we submit productions usually designated as noir to a close historical analysis, the very concept of film noir loses its consistency, and disintegrates; paradoxically, however, we should none the less insist that Truth is on the level of the spectral (false) appearance of noir, not in detailed historical knowledge. The effectiveness of this concept of noir is that which today enables us immediately to identify as noir the short scene from Lady in the Lake, the simple line of a dialogue in which the detective answers the question 'But why did he kill her? Didn't he love her? with a straight 'That is reason enough to kill'.

Furthermore, sometimes the external misperception exerts a productive influence on the misperceived 'original' itself, forcing it to become aware of its own 'repressed' truth (arguably, the French notion of noir, although it is the result of misperception, exerted a strong influence on American film-making). Is not the supreme example of this productivity of the external misperception the American reception of Derrida? Did it not--although it clearly was a misperception--exert a retroactive productive influence on Derrida himself, forcing him to confront ethico-political issues more directly? Was not the American reception of Derrida in this sense a kind of pharmakon, a supplement to the 'original' Derrida himself--a poisonous stain-fake, distorting the original and at the same time keeping it alive? In short, would Derrida still be so much 'alive' if we were to subtract from his work its American misperception?Slavoj Žižek, from Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 244-5:

Dialectics and Noir (1)

Slavoj Žižek, from Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 244-5:

Although Vernet actually undermines a lot of the standard noir theory (for example, the rather crude notion that the noir universe stands for the paranoiac male reaction to the threat to the 'phallic regime' embodied in the femme fatale), the enigma that remains is the mysterious efficiency and persistence of the notion of noir: the more Vernet is right on the level of facts, the more enigmatic and inexplicable becomes the extraordinary strength and longevity of this 'illusory' notion of noir, the notion that has haunted our imagination for decades. What, then, if film noir is none the less a concept in the strict Hegelian sense: something that cannot simply be explained, accounted for, in terms of historical circumstances, conditions and reactions, but acts as a structuring principle that displays a dynamics of its own--film noir is a real concept, a unique vision of the universe that combines the multitude of elements into what Althusser would have called an articulation. So, once we have ascertained that the notion of noir does not fit the empirical multitude of noir films, instead of rejecting this notion, we should risk the notorious Hegelian rejoinder 'So much the worse for reality!'--more precisely, we should engage in the dialectic between a universal notion and its reality, in which the very gap between the two sets in motion the simultaneous transformation of reality, and of the notion itself. It is because real films never fit their notion that they are constantly changing, and this change imperceptibly transforms the very notion, the standard by means of which they are measured: we pass from the hardboiled detective noir (the Hammett-Chandler formula) to the 'persecuted innocent bystander noir (the Cornell Woolrich formula), and thence to the 'naive sucker caught up in a crime' noir (the James Cain formula), and so on.

The situation here is in a way similar to that of Christianity: of course, almost all its elements were already there in the Dead Sea Scrolls; most of the key Christian notions are clear cases of what Stephen Jay Gould would have called 'exaptions', retroactive reinscriptions which misperceive and falsify the original impact of a notion, and so forth; but none the less, this is not enough to explain the Event of Christianity. The concept of noir is therefore extremely productive not only for the analysis of films, but even as a tool to help us retroactively cast a new light on previous classic works of art; in this vein, implicitly applying Marx's old idea that the anatomy of man is the key to the anatomy of the monkey, Elisabeth Bronfen uses the co-ordinates of the noir universe to throw a new light on Wagner's Tristan as the ultimate noir opera. A further example of how noir enables us to 'deliver' Wagner's operas retroactively are his long retrospective monologues, that ultimate horror of impatient spectators--do not these long narratives call for a noir flashback to illustrate them?

"...these voices will start to reverberate and reinforce each other in solidarity."

To those who have awakened:

"In peace there's nothing so becomes a man

As modest stillness and humility;

But when the blast of war blows in our ears,

Then imitate the action of the tiger:

Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,

Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage;

Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;

[....]

Now set the teeth, and stretch the nostrils wide,

Hold hard the breath, and bend up every spirit

To his full height."

--William Shakespeare, Henry V, Act III

Properly Dialectical Procedure

Slavoj Žižek, from Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2000), excerpts from pp. 231-241:

Against Historicism

[....] As Derrida argues so cogently in 'White Mythology', it is not sufficient to claim that 'all concepts are metaphors', but that the very difference between a concept and a metaphor is always minimally metaphorical, relying on some metaphor. Even more important is the opposite conclusion: the very reduction of a concept to a bundle of metaphors already has to rely on some implicit philosophical (conceptual) determination of the difference between concept and metaphor--that is to say, on the very opposition it tries to undermine. We are thus forever caught in a vicious cycle: true, it is impossible to adopt a philosophical stance which is free of the constraints of everyday naive lifeworld attitudes and notions; however, although it is impossible, this philosophical stance is simultaneously unavoidable. [....]

We should always bear in mind this delicate Derridean stance on account of which he avoids the twin pitfalls of naive realism as well as of direct philosophical foundationalism: a 'philosophical foundation' to our experience is impossible, yet necessary--although all that we perceive, understand, articulate, is, of course, overdetermined by a horizon of pre-understanding, this horizon itself remains ultimately impenetrable. [....]

In other words, the ultimate lesson of deconstruction seems to be that one cannot postpone the ontological question ad infinitum. That is to say: what is deeply symptomatic in Derrida is his oscillation between, on the one hand, the hyper-self-reflective approach which denounces the question of 'how things really are' in advance, and limits itself to third-level deconstructive comments on the inconsistencies of philosopher B's reading of philosopher A, and, on the other, direct 'ontological' assertions about how differance and archi-trace designate the structure of all living things and are, as such, already operative in animal nature. One should not miss the paradoxical interconnection of these two levels here: the very feature which forever prevents us from grasping our intended object directly (the fact that our grasping is always refracted, 'mediated', by a decentred otherness) is the feature which connects us with the basic proto-ontological structure of the universe....

So deconstruction involves two prohibitions: it prohibits the 'naive' empiricist approach (let us examine the material in question carefully, then generalize hypotheses about it...), as well as global non-historical metaphysical theses about the origin and structure of the universe. [....]

On a different level, this circular mutual implication which is characteristic of deconstructionism proper is also discernible in political philosophy. [....] In human society, the political is the englobing structuring principle, so that every neutralization of some partial content as 'non-political' is a political gesture par excellence. At the same time, however, a certain excess of non-political violence is the necessary supplement to power: power always has to rely on an obscene stain of violence--that is to say, political space is never 'pure', it always involves some kind of reliance on 'pre-political' violence.

The relationship between these two implications is asymmetrical: the first mode of implication (every violence is political, grounded in a political decision) indicates the overall symbolic overdetermination of social reality (we never attain the zero-level of pure violence; violence is always mediated by the eminently symbolic relationship of power), while the second mode of implication indicates the excess of the Real in every symbolic edifice. Similarly, the two deconstructionist prohibitions/implications are not symmetrical either: the fact that we can never leave behind the conceptual background (that in all deconstruction of the Conceptual we rely on some notion of the opposition between concept and metaphor) indicates the irreducible symbolic overdetermination, while the fact that all concepts remain grounded in metaphors indicates the irreducible excess of some Real.

This double prohibition that defines deconstructionism bears clear and unambiguous witness to its Kantian transcendental philosophical origins (which, to avoid misunderstanding, is not meant as a criticism here): is not the same double prohibition (on the one hand, the notion of the transcendental constitution of reality involves the loss of a direct naive empiricist approach to reality; on the other, it involves the prohibition of metaphysics, that is, of the all-encompassing world-view that provides the noumenal structure of the Whole universe) characteristic of Kant's philosophical revolution? In other words, one should always bear in mind that Kant, far from simply expressing a belief in the constitutive power of the (transcendental) subject, introduces the notion of the transcendental dimension in order to answer the fundamental and irresolvable deadlock of human existence: a human being strives compulsively towards a global notion of truth, of a universal and necessary cognition, yet this cognition is simultaneously forever inaccessible to him. [....]

Concrete Universality

[....] We can see how, in this precise sense, suture is the exact opposite of the illusory self-enclosed totality that successfully erases the decentred traces of its production process: suture means that, precisely, such self-enclosure is a priori impossible, that the excluded externality always leaves its traces--or, to put it in standard Freudian terms, that there is no repression (from the scene of phenomenal self-experience) without the return of the repressed. More precisely, in order to produce the effect of self-enclosure, one must add to the series an excessive element which 'sutures' it precisely in so far as it does not belong to the series, but stands out as an exception, like the proverbial 'filler' in classificatory systems, a category which poses as one among the species of a genus, although it is actually just a negative container, a catch-all for everything that does not fit the species articulated from the inherent principle of the genus (the 'Asiatic mode of production' in Marxism). [....]

The ultimate philosophical example here is that of the subjective versus objective dimension: subjective perception-awareness-activity versus objective socio-economic or physiological mechanisms. A dialectical theory intervenes with a double short circuit: objectivity relies on a subjective surplus-gesture; subjectivity relies on objet petit a, the paradoxical object which is the subject's counterpoint. [....] On the one hand, we should accept the lesson of Kant's transcendental idealism: out of the confused multitude of impressions, objective reality emerges through the intervention of the subject's transcendental act. [....] On the other hand, the Lacanian objet petit a is the exact opposite of the Master-Signifier: not the subjective supplement which sustains the objective order, but the objective supplement which sustains subjectivity in its contrast to the subjectless objective order: objet petit a is that 'bone in the throat', that disturbing stain which forever blurs our picture of reality--it is the object on account of which 'objective reality' is forever inaccessible to the subject.

This already brings us to the next feature, that of universality and its exception. The properly dialectical procedure, practised by Hegel as well as by Freud in his great case studies, can be best described as a direct jump from the singular to the universal, bypassing the mid-level of particularity [....] When Freud deals with a case of claustrophobia, he always embarks on a search for some singular traumatic experience which is at the root of this phobia: the fear of closed spaces in general is grounded in an experience of.... [....]

From the standpoint of empiricist cognitivism, of course, such a short circuit immediately gives rise to a host of critical questions: how can Freud be so sure that he has picked on a truly representative example? Should we not at least compare this case with a representative sample of other, different cases, and so verify the universality of the concept in question? The dialectical counter-argument is that such careful empirical generalization never brings us to a true universality--why not? Because all particular examples of a certain universality do not entertain the same relationship towards their universality: each of them struggles with this universality, displaces it, and so on, in a specific way, and the great art of dialectical analysis consists in being able to pick out the exceptional singular case which allows us to formulate the universality 'as such'. Just as Marx articulated the universal logic of the historical development of humanity on the basis of his analysis of capitalism as the excessive (imbalanced) system of production (for Marx, capitalism is a contingent monstrous formation whose very 'normal' state is permanent dislocation, a kind of 'freak of history', a social system caught in the vicious superego cycle of incessant expansion--yet precisely as such, it is the 'truth' of the entire previous 'normal' history), Freud was able to formulate the universal logic of the Oedipal mode of socialization through identification with the paternal Law precisely because he lived in exceptional times in which Oedipus was already in a state of crisis.

The basic rule of dialectics, therefore is: whenever we are offered a simple enumeration of subspecies of a universal species, we should always look for the exception to the series. [....]

Against Judith Butler (4)

Slavoj Žižek, from Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 308-310:

Perhaps the ultimate object of contention in our debate is the status of the (Lacanian) Real--so let me begin by reiterating what I perceive to be the core of the problem. Butler's critique relies on the opposition between the (hypostatized, proto-transcendental, pre-historical and pre-social) 'symbolic order', that is, the 'big Other', and 'society' as the field of contingent socio-symbolic struggles: all her main points against Laclau or me can be reduced to this matrix: to the basic criticism that we hypostatize some historically contingent formation (even if it is the Lack itself) into a proto-transcendental pre-social formal a priori. For example, when I write 'on the lack that inaugurates and defines, negatively, human social reality', I allegedly posit 'a transcultural structure to social reality that presupposes a sociality based in fictive and idealized kinship positions that presume the heterosexual family as constituting the defining social bond for all humans' (JB, pp. 141-2). If we formulate the dilemma in these terms, then, of course,

[blockquote from Butler] the disagreement seems inevitable. Do we want to affirm that there is an ideal big Other, or an ideal small other, which is more fundamental than any of its social formulations? Or do we want to question whether any ideality that pertains to sexual difference is ever not constituted by actively reproduced gender norms that pass their ideality off as essential to a pre-social and ineffable sexual difference? (JB, p. 144)

This critical line of reasoning, however, only works if the (Lacanian) Real is silently reduced to a pre-historical a priori symbolic norm, as is clear from the following formulation: 'The formal character of this originary, pre-social sexual difference in its ostensible emptiness is accomplished precisely through the reification by which a certain idealized and necessary dimorphism takes hold' (JB, p. 145). If, then, sexual difference is elevated into an ideal prescriptive norm--if all concrete variations of sexual life are 'constrained by this non-thematizable normative condition' (JB, p. 147), Butler's conclusion is, of course, inevitable: 'as a transcendental claim, sexual difference should be rigorously opposed by anyone who wants to guard against a theory that would prescribe in advance what kinds of sexual arrangements will and will not be permitted in intelligible culture' (JB, p. 148). Butler is, of course, aware how Lacan's il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel means that, precisely, any 'actual' sexual relationship is always tainted by failure; however, she interprets this failure as the failure of the contingent historical reality of sexual life to actualize the symbolic norm. Consequently, she can claim that, for Lacanians, 'sexual difference has a transcendental status even when sexed bodies emerge that do not fit squarely within ideal gender dimorphism'. In this way, I 'could nevertheless explain intersexuality by claiming that the ideal is still there, but the bodies in question--contingent, historically formed--do not conform to the ideal' (JB, p. 145; emphasis added).

I am tempted to say that, in order to get close to what Lacan aims at with his il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel, one should begin by replacing even when in the above quote with because: 'sexual difference has a transcendental status because sexed bodies emerge that do not fit squarely within ideal gender dimorphism'. That is to say, far from serving as an implicit symbolic norm that reality can never reach, sexual difference as real/impossible means precisely that there is no such norm: sexual difference is that 'rock of impossibility' on which every 'formalization' of sexual difference founders. In the sense in which Butler speaks of 'competing universalities', one can thus speak of competing symbolizations/normativizations of sexual difference: if sexual difference may be said to be 'formal', it is certainly a strange form--a form whose main result is precisely that it undermines every universal form which attempts to capture it. If one insists on referring to the opposition between the universal and the particular, between the transcendental and the contingent/pathological, then one should say that sexual difference is the paradox of the particular that is more universal than universality itself--a contingent difference, an indivisible remainder of the 'pathological' sphere (in the Kantian sense of the term) which always somehow derails, throws off balance, normative ideality itself. Far from being normative, sexual difference is therefore pathological in the most radical sense of the term: a contingent stain that all symbolic fictions of symmetrical kinship positions try in vain to obliterate. Far from constraining the variety of sexual arrangements in advance, the Real of sexual difference is the traumatic cause which sets their contingent proliferation in motion.

[....]

Laclau: dialectics and contingency (3)

Slavoj Žižek, from Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 227-230:

The second aspect of Laclau's critique of my reading of Hegel is that I do not sufficiently take into account the gap between the Hegelian project in its fundamental dialectical principle and what Hegel actually accomplishes: Hegel's theoretical practice often differs from his 'official' self-understanding--in what he does, he often relies on (disavowed) rhetoricity, contingent tropes, and so on. To this, I am tempted to answer that the split Laclau is talking about is already discernible in the very fundamental Hegelian project itself, which is thoroughly ambiguous. Let me simply mention what may appear to be Hegel's utmost 'logocentric' notion, namely, the notion of totality: one should bear in mind that this notion does not designate simply a total mediation accessible to a global subject but, rather, its exact opposite, best exemplified by the dialectic of the Beautiful Soul: 'totality' is encountered at its purest in the negative experience of falsity and breakdown, when the subject assumes the position of a judge exempt from what he is passing a judgement on (the position of a multiculturalist critic of Western cultural imperialism, of the Western pacifist liberal horrified at the ethnic violence in fundamentalist countries)--here the message of 'totality' is simply: 'No, you are involved in the system you pretend to reject; purity is the most perfidious form of cheating.'... So, far from being correlative to the Universal Subject, 'totality' is really experienced and 'actually exists' precisely in the negative shock of failure, of paying the price for forgetting to include oneself in the situation into which one intervenes. Furthermore, I think that here we are not dealing with a simple case of misreading Hegel: the fact that Laclau tends to reduce the properly Hegelian dialectic of necessity and contingency to the simplified standard notion of contingency as the external/empirical mode of appearance of a 'deeper' underlying Necessity indicates some inherent inconsistency in his theoretical edifice, an inconsistency in the relationship between the descriptive and the normative--here is Laclau's answer to my criticism on this point:

[quotation from Laclau] I have been confronted many times with one or other version of the following question: if hegemony involves a decision taken in a radically contingent terrain, what are the grounds for deciding one way or the other? Žižek, for instance, observes: 'Laclau's notion of hegemony describes the universal mechanism of ideological "cement" which binds any social body together, a notion that can analyse all possible sociopolitical orders, from Fascism to liberal democracy; on the other hand, Laclau none the less advocates a determinate political option, "radical democracy".' I do not think this is a valid objection. It is grounded in a strict distinction between the descriptive and the normative which is ultimately derivative from the Kantian separation between pure and practical Reason. But this is, precisely, a distinction which should be eroded: there is no such strict separation between fact and value. A value-oriented practical activity will be confronted with problems, facilities, resistances, and so on, which it will discursively construct as 'facts'--facts, however, which could have emerged in their facticity only from within such activity. (EL, pp. 79-80) [end of quotation from Laclau]

I think two levels are confounded here. I fully endorse Laclau's argument against the strict distinction between the descriptive and the normative--in fact, I myself refer to a similar example of how the Nazis' 'description' of the social situation in which they intervene (degeneration, the Jewish plot, a crisis of values...) already depends on the practical 'solution' they propose. In Hegelese, it is not only, as Marx put it, that '[m]en make their own history; but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past'; it is also that these circumstances or 'presuppositions' are themselves always-already 'posited' by the practical context of our intervention in them. In this sense, I fully endorse Laclau's point that 'the question: "If the decision is contingent, what are the grounds for choosing this option rather than a different one?", is not relevant' (EL, p. 85): there are no ultimate 'objective' grounds for a decision, since these grounds are always-already retroactively constructed from the horizon of a decision. (I myself often use the example of religion here: one does not become a Christian when one is convinced by reason of the truth of Christianity; rather, only when one is a Christian can one really understand in what sense Christianity is true.) My point, however, is precisely that it is Laclau's theory of hegemony itself which relies on an unreflected gap between the descriptive and the normative, in so far as it functions as a neutral conceptual tool for accounting for every ideological formation, including Fascist populism (one of Laclau's favourite examples). Of course, Laclau would have answered here that the universal theory of hegemony is not simply neutral, since it already involves the practical stance of 'radical democracy'; but again, my answer would be that, precisely, I do not see in what specifically inherent way the very universal notion of 'hegemony' is linked to a particular ethico-political choice. And--as I have already argued in my first contribution to this debate--I think the key to this ambiguity is the unresolved question of the historicity of the assertion of historicism/contingency itself in Laclau's (as well as Butler's) theoretical edifice.