The Indivisible Remainder (2)

Schelling Prefigues Marxian Motifs

Slavoj Žižek, from The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters

(London: Verso, 1996, 2007), the following excerpt is from the 2007 edition, p. 4:

Today, it is clearly established that Schelling prefigures a series of key Marxian motifs, up to Marx's 'revolutionary' reproach to Hegel's dialectics according to which the speculative-dialectical resolution of the contradiction leaves the actual social antagonism intact (Hegel's 'speculative positivism'). The roots of the Marxian problematic of 'commodity fetishism' in Schelling provide another link to this series. That is to say: why, precisely, did Marx choose the term fetishism in order to designate the 'theological whimsy' of the universe of commodities? What one should bear in mind here is that 'fetishism' is a religious term for (previous) 'false' idolatry as opposed to (present) true belief: for the Jews, the fetish is the Golden Calf; for a partisan of pure spirituality, fetishism designates 'primitive' superstition, the fear of ghosts and other spectral apparitions, and so forth. And the point of Marx is that the commodity universe provides the necessary fetishistic supplement to 'official' spirituality: it may well be that the 'official' ideology of our society is Christian spirituality, but its actual foundation is none the less the idolatry of the Golden Calf: money.

The Indivisible Remainder (1)

The Aim of the Critique of Ideology

Slavoj Žižek, from The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters

(London: Verso, 1996, 2007), the following excerpts are from the 2007 edition, pp. 1-3:

p. 1: [....] "what we discover in the deepest kernel of our personality is a fundamental, constitutive, primordial lie, the proton pseudos, the phantasmatic construction by means of which we endeavor to conceal the inconsistency of the symbolic order in which we dwell."

p. 2: [....] "the 'natural state' of the human animal is to live in a lie."

p. 3: [....] "the symptom of Power: the grotesque excess by means of which, in a unique short circuit, attitudes which are officially opposed and mutually exclusive reveal their uncanny complicity, where the solemn agent of Power suddenly starts to wink at us across the table in a gesture of obscene solidarity, letting us know that the thing (i.e. his orders) is not to be taken too seriously, and thereby consolidating his power. The aim of the 'critique of ideology', the analysis of an ideological edifice, is to extract this symptomal kernel which the official, public ideological text simultaneously disavows and needs for its undisturbed functioning. One is tempted to say that each of the three main politico-ideological positions ('Right', 'Centre', 'Left') relies on such an unacknowledged yet unavoidable supplement: the 'Right' finds it difficult to conceal its fascination with the myth of a 'primordial' act of violence supposed to ground the legal order; the 'Centre' counts on innate human egotism (between the lines, liberalism as a rule addresses the individual's egotistic indifference to other people's plight); the 'Left', as has long been discerned by perspicacious conservative critics from Nietzsche onwards, manipulates with ressentiment and the promise of revenge ('Now it's our turn to...').

The conclusion to be drawn from this, however, is not that there is no escape, that every subversion of the existing power structure is false, illusory, caught in advance in the network of what it endeavors to undermine, but the exact opposite: every power structure is necessarily split, inconsistent; there is a crack in the very foundation of its edifice--and this crack can be used as a lever for the effective subversion of the power structure....In short, the foundations of Power can be shaken because the very stability of its might edifice hinges on an inconsistent, fragile balance. The other conclusion to be drawn is deeply solidary with the preceding one, although it may give rise to the false impression of contradicting it: perhaps the moment has come to leave behind the old Leftist obsession with ways and means to 'subvert' or 'undermine' the Order, and to focus on the opposite question--on what, following Ernesto Laclau, we can call the 'ordering of the Order': not how can we undermine the existing order, but how does an Order emerge out of disorder in the first place? Which inconsistencies and splittings allow the edifice of Order to maintain itself?

The Subject Supposed to Know

Slavoj Žižek, from Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 250-251:

However, the 'big Other' is not simply the decentred symbolic 'substance'; the further crucial feature is that this 'substance' is, in turn, again subjectivized, experienced as the 'subject supposed to know', the Other of the (forever split, hysterical) subject, the guarantor of the consistency of the field of knowledge. As such, the 'subject supposed to know' is often embodied in a concrete individual, not only God himself (the paradoxical function of God as qua big Other from Descartes through Hobbes and Newton, and so on, up to Einstein is precisely to guarantee the materialist mechanism of Nature--God is the ultimate guarantee that 'nature does not play at dice', but obeys its own laws, but even some quasi-empirical figure; let us recall this well-known passage from Heidegger:

[blockquote from Heidegger] "Recently I got a second invitation to teach at the University of Berlin. On that occasion I left Freiburg and withdrew to the cabin. I listened to what the mountains and the forest and the farmlands were saying, and I went to see an old friend of mine, a 75-year-old farmer. He had read about the call to Berlin in the newspaper. What would he say? Slowly he fixed the sure gaze of his clear eyes on mine, and keeping his mouth tightly shut, he thoughtfully put his faithful hand on my shoulder. Ever so slightly he shook his head. That meant: absolutely no."

Here we have it all: the uncorrupted/experienced old farmer as the subject supposed to know who, with his barely perceptible gesture, a prolongation of the whisper of 'the mountains and the forest', provides the definitive answer....On a different level, did not a reference to the judgement of an authentic member of the working class play the same role in some versions of Marxism-Leninism? And is it not true that even today, multiculturalist 'politically correct' discourse attributes the same authentic stance of the one 'supposed to know' to some privileged (African-American, gay...) figure of the Other?

"...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