Religion between Knowledge and Jouissance

Please see the full article at

http://www.lacan.com/zizsmokeonthewater.html

[....]

The drive to pure autistic jouissance (through drugs or other trance-inducing means) arose at a precise political moment: when the emancipatory "sequence" of 1968 exhausted its potentials. At this critical point (mid-1970s), the only option left was a kind of direct, brutal, passage à l’acte, push-towards-the-Real, which assumed three main forms: the search for extreme forms of sexual jouissance; Leftist political terrorism (RAF in Germany, Red Brigades in Italy, etc.) whose wager was that, in an epoch in which the masses are totally immersed into the capitalist ideological sleep, the standard critique of ideology is no longer operative, so that only a resort to the raw Real of direct violence - l’action directe - can awaken the masses); and, finally, the turn towards the Real of an inner experience (Oriental mysticism). What all three share is the withdrawal from concrete socio-political engagement into a direct contact with the Real.

The problem with today’s superego injunction to enjoy is that, in contrast to previous modes of ideological interpellation, it opens up no "world" proper - it just refers to an obscure Unnameable. Even the Nazi anti-Semitism opened up a world: by way of describing the present critical situation, naming the enemy ("Jewish conspiracy"), the goal and the means to achieve it, Nazism disclosed reality in a way which allowed its subjects to acquire a global "cognitive mapping," inclusive of the space for their meaningful engagement. This is why Badiou recently started to elaborate this topic of world, the "logic of worlds": what if the impetus came from his deeper insight into capitalism? What if the concept of world was necessitated by the need to think the unique status of the capitalist universe as world-less? Badiou recently claimed that our time is devoid of world - [1] how are we to grasp this strange thesis?

Perhaps, it is here that one should locate the "danger" of capitalism: although it is global, encompassing the whole worlds, it sustains a stricto sensu "worldless" ideological constellation, depriving the large majority of people of any meaningful "cognitive mapping." The universality of capitalism resides in the fact that capitalism is not a name for a "civilization," for a specific cultural-symbolic world, but the name for a truly neutral economico-symbolic machine which operates with Asian values as well as with others, so that Europe's worldwide triumph is its defeat, self-obliteration, the cutting of the umbilical link to Europe. The critics of "Eurocentrism" who endeavor to unearth the secret European bias of capitalism fall short here: the problem with capitalism is not its secret Eurocentric bias, but the fact that it REALLY IS UNIVERSAL, a neutral matrix of social relations.

In what, more precisely, does this "worldlessness" consist? As Lacan points out in his Seminar XX, Encore, jouissance involves a logic strictly homologous to that of the ontological proof of the existence of God. In the classic version of this proof, my awareness of myself as a finite, limited, being immediately gives birth to the notion of an infinite, perfect, being, and since this being is perfect, its very notion contains its existence; in the same way, our experience of jouissance accessible to us as finite, located, partial, "castrated," immediately gives birth to the notion of a full, achieved, unlimited jouissance whose existence is necessarily presupposed by the subject who imputes it to another subject, his/her "subject supposed to enjoy."

Our first reaction here is, of course, that this absolute jouissance is a myth, that it never effectively existed, that its status is purely differential, i.e., that it exists only as a negative point of reference with regard to which every effectively experienced jouissance falls short ("pleasurable as this is, it is not THAT!"). However, the recent advances of brain studies open up another approach: one can (no longer only) imagine the situation in which pain (or pleasure) is not generated through sensory perceptions, but through a directly excitation of the appropriate neuronal centers (by means of drugs or electrical impulses) – what the subject will experience in this case will be "pure" pain, pain "as such," the REAL of pain, or, to put it in precise Kantian terms, the non-schematized pain, pain which is not yet rooted in the experience of reality constituted by transcendental categories.

"Neurotheologians" applied this insight to religion, by way of identifying the brain processes which accompany intense religious experiences: when a subject experiences himself as timeless and infinite, part of the cosmic All, delivered of the constraints of his Self, the region of his brain which processes information about space, time, and the orientation of the body in space "goes dark"; in the blocking of the sensory inputs which occurs during intense meditative concentration, the brain has no choice but to perceive the self as endless and intimately interwoven with everyone and everything. The same goes for visions: they clearly correspond to abnormal bursts of electrical activity in the temporal lobes (the "temporal-lobe epilepsy"). The counterargument here is: while, of course, everything we experience also exists as a neurological activity, this in no way resolves the question of causality. When we eat an apple, we also experience the satisfaction of its good taste as a neuronal activity, but this in no way affects the fact that the apple was really out there and caused our activity. In the same fashion, it is totally undecided whether our brain wiring creates (our experience of) God, or whether God created our brain wiring… Is, however, the question of causality not simple to resolve? If we (the experimenting doctor) directly intervene in the appropriate parts of the brain, causing the brain activity in question, and, if, during this activity of ours, the subject "experiences the divine dimension," does this not provide a conclusive answer? The further question here is: how will the subject who is aware of all this subjectivize his religious experience? Will he continue to experience it as "religious" in the appropriate ecstatic sense of the term? The extreme solution is here that of a US religious sect which claims that God, who observes us all the time and took note of the lack of authentic religious experiences among his believers, organized the discovery of drugs which can generate such experiences… Further experiments show that when individuals are able to directly stimulate their neuronal pleasure-centres, they do not get caught into a blind compulsive drive towards excessive pleasure, but provide themselves pleasure only when they judge that they "deserved" it (on account of their everyday acts) – however, do many of us not do the same with pleasures provided in a "normal" way? What all this indicates is that people who experienced directly generated pleasures do not suffer a breakdown of their symbolic universe, but integrate smoothly these pleasure experiences into it, or even rely on them to enhance their experience of sacred meaning. However, again, the question is what disavowals do such integrations involve: can I really accept that the industrially fabricated pill that I hold in my hand provides a contact with god?

Today's achievements of brain sciences thus seem to fulfill the prospect envisaged by Freud of sciences supplanting psychoanalysis: once the biological mechanisms of pain, pleasure, trauma, repression, etc., will be known, psychoanalysis will no longer be needed, since, instead of intervening at the level of interpretation, one will be able to directly regulate the biological processes that generate pathological psychic phenomena. Hitherto there were two ways psychoanalysts replied to this challenge:

either they took recourse to the standard philosophico-transcendental gesture of pointing out how a positive science cannot ever encompass and account for the very horizon of meaning within which it is operative ("even if brain sciences will succeed in totally objectivizing a symptom, formulating its bioneuronal equivalent, the patient will still have to adopt a subjective stance towards this objectivity..."). However, this self-complacent answer is all too short: the success of the brain sciences, if really subjectively assumed, would undermine our very status as subjects of meaning. [2]
or they desperately cling to the parallels or structural homologies between posychoanalysis and brain sciences ("see, we were right, there is a neuronal process that corresponds to repression").

Both these approaches – which supplement each other in their two respective excesses, thed first one with its abstract arrogance, the second one with its subservient modesty – fall short of the challenge of brain sciences: the only proper reply to this challenge is to meet the brain sciences neuronal Real with another Real, not only to ground the Freudian semblant within the neuronal Real. In other words, if psychoanalysis is to survive and retain its key status, one has to find a place for it within the brain sciences themselves, from their inherent blanks and impossibilities. – However, within cognitive sciences themselves, things are no less confused when one tries to account for the emergence of consciousness - whither consciousness? The surprising thing is how "everything goes," all possible answers coexist, from dismissing the question as meaningless through evolutionist accounts of it up to declaring it an unsolvable mystery and proposing that consciousness has no (evolutionary) function at all, that it is a by-product, not a central phenomenon, but an epiphenomenon. What strikes the eye is how evolutionist or cognitivist accounts always seems to stumble upon the same deadlock: after we construct an artificial intelligence machine which can solve even very complex problems, the questions pops up "But it can do it precisely as a machine, as a blind operating entity - why does it need (self)awareness to do it?" So the more consciousness is demonstrated to be marginal, unnecessary, non-functional, the more it becomes enigmatic - it is consciousness itself which is here the Real of an indivisible remainder. – Generally, this multitude can be reduced to four main positions:

1. radical/reductive materialism (Patricia and Paul Churchland): there simply are no qualia, there is no "consciousness," they only exist as a kind of "naturalized" cognitive mistake. The anti-intuitional beauty of this position is that it turns around subjectivist phenomenalism (we are only aware of phenomena, there is no absolute certainty that anything beyond them exists) – here, it is pure phenomenality itself which does not exist!
2. anti-materialism (Chalmers): consciousness-awareness cannot be accounted for in the terms of other natural processes, it has to be conceived as a primordial dimension of nature, like gravity or magnetism.
3. the position of "cognitive closure" which asserts the inherent unknowability of consciousness (McGinn, even Pinker): although consciousness emerged out of material reality, it is necessarily unknowable.
4. non-reductive materialism (Dennett): consciousness exists, but is the result of natural processes and has a clear evolutionary function.

These four positions obviously form a Greimasian semiotic square: the main opposition is the one between 2 and 4, idealism and materialism; 1 and 3 each give to materialism or idealism a cognitive twist. That is to say, both 2 and 4 believe in the possibility of the scientific explanation of consciousness: there is an object ("consciousness") and its explanation, either accounting for it in the terms of non-conscious natural processes (materialism) or conceiving it as an irreducible dimension of its own (idealism). For 1, however, the scientific explanation of consciousness leads to the result that the object-to-be-explained itself does not exist, that it is an epistemological mistake like old notions of flogiston; 3 inverts this position: what disappears here is not the object but explanation itself (although materialism is true, it a priori cannot explain consciousness).

These cognitivist impasses bear witness to the fact that today's sciences shatter the basic presuppositions of our everyday life-world notion of reality. There are three main attitudes one can adopt towards this breakthrough.

- The first one is simply to insist on radical naturalism, i.e., to heroically pursue the logic of the scientific "disenchantment of reality" whatever the cost, even if the very fundamental coordinates of our horizon of meaningful experience are shattered. (In brain sciences, Patricia and Paul Churchland most radically opted for this attitude.)

- The second one is the attempt at some kind of New Age "synthesis" between the scientific Truth and the premodern world of Meaning: the claim is that new scientific results themselves (say, quantum physics) compel us to abandon materialism and point towards some new (Gnostic or Eastern) spirituality – here is a standard version of this motif: "The central event of the twentieth century is the overthrow of matter. In technology, economics, and the politics of nation, wealth in the form of physical resources is steadily declining in value and significance. The powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things." [3] This line of reasoning stands for ideology at its worst: what the reinscription of proper scientific problematic (the role of waves and oscillations in quantum physics, etc.) into the ideological field of "mind versus brute things" obfuscates is the true paradoxical result of the notorious "disappearance of matter" in modern physics: how the very "immaterial" processes lost their spiritual character and become a legitimate topic of natural sciences.

- The third option is that of a neo-Kantian state philosophy whose exemplary case today is Habermas. It is a rather sad spectacle to see Habermas trying to control the explosive results of biogenetics, to curtail the philosophical consequences of biogenetics – his entire effort betrays the fear that something would effectively happen, that a new dimension of the "human" would emerge, that the old image of human dignity and autonomy would survive unscathed. The very excessive reactions are symptomatic here, like the ridiculous over-reaction to Sloterdijk's Elmau speech on biogenetics and Heidegger, [4] discerning the echoes of Nazi eugenics in the (quite reasonable) proposal that biogenetics compels us to formulate new rules of ethics. What this attitude towards scientific progress amount to is a kind of "temptation of (resisting) temptation": the temptation to be resisted is precisely the pseudo-ethical attitude of presenting scientific exploration as a temptation which can lead us into "going too far" - entering the forbidden territory (of biogenetic manipulations, etc.) and thus endangering the very core of our humanity.

The latest ethical "crisis" apropos biogenetics effectively created the need for what one is fully justified in calling a "state philosophy": a philosophy that would, on the one hand, condone scientific research and technical process, and, on the other hand, contain its full socio-symbolic impact, i.e., prevent it from posing a threat to the existing theologico-ethical constellation. No wonder those who come closest to meeting these demands are neo-Kantians: Kant himself was focused on the problem of how, while fully taking into account the Newtonian science, one can guarantee that there is a space of ethical responsibility exempted from the reach of science; as he himself put it, he limited the scope of knowledge to create the space for faith and morality. And are today’s state philosophers not facing the same task? Is their effort not focused on how, through different versions of transcendental reflection, to restrict science to its preordained horizon of meaning and thus to denounce as "illegitimate" its consequences for the ethico-religious sphere?

It is interesting to note how, although Sloterdijk was the target of a violent Habermasian attack, his proposed solution, a "humanist" synthesis of the new scientific Truth and the old horizon of Meaning, although much more refined and ironically-sceptical than the Habermasian "state philosophy," is ultimately separated from it by an almost invisible line of separation (more precisely, it seems to persist in the ambiguity between the Habermasian compromise and the New Age obscurantist synthesis). According to Sloterdijk, "humanism" always involves such a reconciliation, a bridge between the New and the Old: when scientific results undermine the old universe of meaning, one should find a way to reintegrate them into the universe of Meaning, or, rather, to metaphorically expand the old universe of Meaning so that it can "cover" also new scientific propositions. If we fail in this mediating task, we remain stuck in the brutal choice: either a reactionary refusal to accept scientific results, or the shattering loss of the very domain of meaning. Today, we confront the same challenge: "Mathematicians will have to become poets, cyberneticists philosophers of religion, /medical/ doctors composers, information-workers shamans." [5] Is this solution, however, not that of obscurantism in the precise sense of the attempt to keep meaning and truth harnessed together?

/.../ the simplest definition of God and of religion lies in the idea that truth and meaning are one and the same thing. The death of God is the end of the idea that posits truth and meaning as the same thing. And I would add that the death of Communism also implies the separation between meaning and truth as far as history is concerned. "The meaning of history" has two meanings: on the one hand "orientation," history goes somewhere; and then history has a meaning, which is the history of human emancipation by way of the proletariat, etc. In fact, the entire age of Communism was a period where the conviction that it was possible to take rightful political decisions existed; we were, at that moment, driven by the meaning of history. /.../ Then the death of Communism becomes the second death of God but in the territory of history. /.../ Today we may call ‘obscurantism’ the intention of keeping them harnessed together – meaning and truth. [6]

What underlies this split between truth and meaning is capitalist globalization - what is capitalist globalization? Capitalism is the first socio-economic order which de-totalizes meaning: it is not global at the level of meaning (there is no global "capitalist world view," no "capitalist civilization" proper – the fundamental lesson of globalization is precisely that capitalism can accommodate itself to all civilizations, from Christian to Hindu and Buddhist); its global dimension can only be formulated at the level of truth-without-meaning, as the "real" of the global market mechanism. Consequently, insofar as capitalism already enacts the rupture between meaning and truth, it can be opposed at two levels: either at the level of meaning (conservative reactions to re-enframe capitalism into some social field of meaning, to contain its self-propelling movement within the confines of a system of shared "values" which cement a "community" in its "organic unity"), or to question the real of capitalism with regard to its truth-outside-meaning (what, basically, Marx did). Of course, the predominant religious strategy today is that of trying to contain the scientific real within the confines of meaning – it is as an answer to the scientific real (materialized in the biogenetic threats) that religion is finding its new raison d’être:

Far from being effaced by science, religion, and even the syndicate of religions, in the process of formation, is progressing every day. Lacan said that ecumenism was for the poor of spirit. There is a marvellous agreement on these questions between the secular and all the religious authorities, in which they tell themselves they should agree somewhere in order to make echoes equally marvellous, even saying that finally the secular is a religion like the others. We see this because it is revealed in effect that the discourse of science has partly connected with the death drive. Religion is planted in the position of unconditional defense of the living, of life in mankind, as guardian of life, making life an absolute. And that extends to the protection of human nature. /…/ This is /…/ what gives a future to religion through meaning, namely by erecting barriers – to cloning, to the exploitation of human cells – and to inscribe science in a tempered progress. We see a marvellous effort, a new youthful vigour of religion in its effort to flood the real with meaning. [7]

So when the Pope opposes the Christian "culture of Life" against the modern "culture of Death," he is not merely exploiting in a hyperbolic way different attitudes towards abortion. His statements are to be taken much more literally and, at the same time, universally: it is not only that the Church harbors "good news," the trust in our future, the Hope that guarantees the Meaning of Life; the couple culture of Life / culture of Death has to be related to the Freudian opposition of Life and Death drives. "Life" stands for the rule of the "pleasure principle," for the homeostatic stability of pleasures protected from the stressful shocks of excessive jouissance, so that the Pope’s wager is that, paradoxically, not only is religious spirituality not opposed to earthly pleasures, but it is ONLY this spirituality that can provide the frame for a full and satisfied pleasurable life. "Death," on the contrary, stands for the domain "beyond the pleasure principle," for all the excesses through which the Real disturbs the homeostasis of life, from the excessive sexual jouissance up to the scientific Real which generates artificial monsters...

This simple, but salient, diagnosis ends up in a surprising paraphrase of Heidegger, defining the analyst as the "shepherd of the real." However, it leaves some key questions open. Is the death drive for which science stands, which it mobilizes in its activity, not simultaneously an EXCESS OF OBSCENE LIFE, of life as real, exempted from and external to meaning? One should not forget that death drive is a Freudian name for immortality, for a pressure, a compulsion, which insists beyond death (and let us also not forget that immortality is also implicitly promised by science).

From here, we can also elaborate a critique of the philosophy of finitude which predominates today. The idea is that, against the big metaphysical constructs, one should humbly accept our finitude as our ultimate horizon: there is no absolute Truth, all we can do is accept the contingency of our existence, the unsurpassable character of our being-thrown into a situation, the basic lack of any absolute point of reference, the playfulness of our predicament… However, the first thing that strikes the eye is here the utmost seriousness of this philosophy of finitude, its all-pervasive pathos which runs against the expected playfulness: the ultimate tone of the philosophy of finitude is that of ultra-serious heroic confrontation of one’s destiny – no wonder that the philosopher of finitude par excellence, Heidegger, is also the philosopher who utterly lacks any sense of humor. [8]

There is, unfortunately, also a Lacanian version of the philosophy of finitude: when, in a tragic tone, one is informed that one has to renounce the impossible striving for full jouissance and accept "symbolic castration," the ultimate constraint of our existence: as soon as we enter symbolic order, all jouissance has to pass through the mortification of the symbolic medium, every attainable object is already a displacement of the impossible-real object of desire which is constitutively lost...) Arguably, Kierkeggard relied so much on humor precisely because he insisted on the relationship to the Absolute and rejected the limitation to finitude. - So what is it that this emphasis on finitude as the ultimate horizon of our existence misses? How can we assert it in a materialist way, without any resort to spiritual transcendence? The answer is, precisely, objet petit a as the "undead" ("non-castrated") remainder which persists in its obscene immortality. No wonder the Wagnerian heroes want so desperately to die: they want to get rid of this obscene immortal supplement which stands for libido as an organ, for drive at its most radical, i.e., death drive. In other words, the properly Freudian paradox is that what explodes the constraints of our finitude is death drive itself. And it is here, in Freudian meta-psychology, that one should look for what one is tempted to call materialist theology.

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Christianity or Dialectical Materialism? Yes, please.

A Life in Writing

Please see the full interview at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/jul/15/slavoj-zizek-interview-life-writing
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"We learned nothing new really from WikiLeaks," he tells me later. "Julian is like the boy who tells us the emperor is naked – until the boy says it everybody could pretend the emperor wasn't. Don't confuse this with the usual bourgeois heroism which says there is rottenness but the system is basically sound. It is like a man who finds his wife has been fucking around – until he can see in great detail what she has been doing, he can pretend to himself nothing is wrong. Julian strips away that pretence. All power is hypocritical like this. What power finds intolerable is when the hypocrisy is revealed."

Žižek sips hot chocolate and wipes his beard. "I should not, speaking frankly, be this man who talks about The Dark Knight and Hegel, about the value of WikiLeaks and Lady Gaga. I should be a mediocre philosophy professor in Ljubljana." He was born on 21 March 1949 in the Slovenian capital in what was then Yugoslavia to a father (Jože) who was an economist and mother (Vesna), an accountant. He had an unhappy childhood. "I read alone, a Freudian retreat that prepared me for the world in all its disgusting obscenity." He glances at me with a jaunty expression: "I trust that when you write this you will not be the usual shitty journalist who is true to the facts. I am expecting creative distortion of my biography. Truth is overrated: I have always been happiest alone. Why should that be interesting to read about?"

He underestimates his life. As a teenager Slavoj wanted to be a film director, but set that ambition aside after being seduced by Hegel. Like other budding Slovenian philosophers, he was influenced by Marxist philosopher Božidar Debenjak's Frankfurt School-inflected lectures of Marx's Das Kapital from the perspective of Hegel's Phenomenology of the Mind. "Hegel is everything to me. His collected works remain my most treasured possession," he says. But he was seduced later by French post-structuralists – Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva and, above all, Jacques Lacan, the psychoanalytic theorist. He was fired as an assistant researcher at the University of Ljubljana when his PhD was initially rejected for being non-Marxist. He spent four years doing national service and then another four unemployed before getting a job as a recording clerk at the Slovenian Marxist Centre, where he became involved with scholars committed to Lacanian psychoanalysis.

He spent the early 1980s in Paris, studying psychoanalysis with Jacques-Alain Miller and François Regnault, before returning to Slovenia where he joined dissident groups critical of Tito's regime. "I was a member of the Communist party until 1988 when it became disgusting to remain in a party that defended militarism." After Tito fell, Žižek – by then a celebrated figure in his homeland as columnist for alternative youth magazine Mladina, and as a leading member of the Committee for the Defence of Human Rights – decided to run as a candidate for the presidency of the Republic of Slovenia in the first free elections, in 1990. He stood for the Liberal Democratic party and came fifth. "Politics," he reflects, "has always been shitty. It is something I am involved in often against my will. My first interest is theory. I am a Hegelian looking for facts to fit the theory."

During this period he developed his literary style in dissident magazines and journals, with Marxist, Hegelian and Lacanian thought juxtaposed with critical analyses of cinema and popular culture in a sometimes appealing sometimes exasperating written equivalent of jazz improvisation. His first book to appear in English, 1989's The Sublime Object of Ideology, brought that style to a broader audience. It used examples from high and low culture in order to explain his understanding of Hegel's dialectic, the basic thesis that underpins all his analyses, and one which finds that contradiction is an internal condition of every identity. Contradiction was also the internal condition of Slavoj Žižek, bearing out Oscar Wilde's dictum: "The well bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves." "My thinking moves so quickly how could it not be full of contradictions?" he asks.

More books in English followed in rapid succession, including For They Know Not What They Do (1991, a book framing the re-emergence of militant nationalism and racism in the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe as a Lacanian eruption of enjoyment), Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology (1993), Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002), The Parallax View (2006) and In Defence of Lost Causes (2008).

These books (and several others) earned Žižek much praise. Terry Eagleton called him "the most formidably brilliant exponent of psychoanalysis, indeed of cultural theory in general to have emerged from Europe in some decades". Film-maker Sophie Fiennes, who directed him in The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema, a 2005 Channel 4 TV documentary in which he presents marvellously Lacanian analyses of some of his favourite films, says: "He is very much a thinker for our turbulent, high speed, information-led lives precisely because he insists on the freedom to stop and think hard about who you are as an individual in this fragmented society." The Chronicle of Higher Education dubbed him "the Elvis of cultural theory".

The blurb for his new books says he has made philosophy relevant for a whole generation of politically committed readers. Žižek demurs. "A lot of what I write is blah, blah, bullshit, a diversion from the 700-page book on Hegel I should be writing."

In 2009, responding to a call for a reconsideration of communism by his friend, Parisian philosopher Alain Badiou, Žižek took part in a London conference to test the notion that capitalism was on the point (yet again) of falling apart from its own contradictions and so theorising the emancipated future was imperative. He went on to co-edit The Idea of Communism, a book urging lapsed comrades to raise the red flag anew. "Don't be afraid, join us, come back!" Žižek wrote. "You've had your anti-communist fun, and you are pardoned for it – time to get serious once again!"

Are you or have you ever been a communist? "Not as you might imagine. Marx wrote about the commons – he meant land and property. I mean information. When we pay rent to Bill Gates that is a new kind of enclosure. WikiLeaks represents a threat to such control of information."

Do you really believe in such a society? "I am a philosopher not a prophet. I don't answer questions but ask them to critique our society. Benjamin said it is the task of the leftist thinker not to ride the train of history but to apply the brake. It is also important not to say what everybody else is saying. It is boring, for instance, to criticise the US eternally. Why not China instead? It is China, after all, where they have banned fictional works considering alternative worlds, because they are afraid of their citizens' imaginations. It is China that is colonising Africa."

[....]

Our Task Today

From "Robespierre or the 'Divine Violence' of Terror"

please see the full article online at

http://www.lacan.com/zizrobes.htm

[....]

The Jacobin revolutionary terror is sometimes (half)justified as the "founding crime" of the bourgeois universe of law and order, in which citizens are allowed to pursue in piece their interests, one should reject this claim on two accounts. Not only is it factually wrong (many conservatives were quite right to point out that one can achieve the bourgeois law and order also without the terrorist excess, as was the case in Great Britain - although there is Cromwell...); much more important, the revolutionary Terror of 1792-1794 was not a case of what Walter Benjamin and others call state-founding violence, but a case of "divine violence." [5] Interpreters of Benjamin struggle with what could "divine violence" effectively mean - is it yet another Leftist dream of a "pure" event which never really takes place? One should recall here Friedrich Engels's reference to the Paris Commune as an example of the dictatorship of the proletariat:

Of late, the Social-Democratic philistine has once more been filled with wholesome terror at the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. [6]

One should repeat this, mutatis mutandis, apropos divine violence: "Well and good, gentlemen critical theorists, do you want to know what this divine violence looks like? Look at the revolutionary Terror of 1992-1994. That was the Divine Violence." (And the series goes on: the Red Terror of 1919...) That is to say, one should fearlessly identify divine violence with positively existing historical phenomena, thus avoiding all obscurantist mystification. When those outside the structured social field strike "blindly," demanding AND enacting immediate justice/vengeance, this is "divine violence" - recall, a decade or so ago, the panic in Rio de Janeiro when crowds descended from favelasinto the rich part of the city and started looting and burning supermarkets - THIS was "divine violence"... Like the biblical locusts, the divine punishment for men's sinful ways, it strikes out of nowhere, a means without end - or, as Robespierre put it in his speech in which he demanded the execution of Louis XVI: "Peoples do not judge in the same way as courts of law; they do not hand down sentences, they throw thunderbolts; they do not condemn kings, they drop them back into the void; and this justice is worth just as much as that of the courts."

The Benjaminian "divine violence" should be thus conceived as divine in the precise sense of the old Latin motto vox populi, vox dei: NOT in the perverse sense of "we are doing it as mere instruments of the People's Will," but as the heroic assumption of the solitude of sovereign decision. It is a decision (to kill, to risk or lose one's own life) made in the absolute solitude, with no cover in the big Other. If it is extra-moral, it is not "immoral," it does not give the agent the license to just kill with some kind of angelic innocence. The motto of divine violence is fiat iustitia, pereat mundus: it is JUSTICE, the point of non-distinction between justice and vengeance, in which "people" (the anonymous part of no-part) imposes its terror and makes other parts pay the price - the Judgment Day for the long history of oppression, exploitation, suffering - or, as Robespierre himself put it in a poignant way:

What do you want, you who would like truth to be powerless on the lips of representatives of the French people? Truth undoubtedly has its power, it has its anger, its own despotism; it has touching accents and terrible ones, that resound with force in pure hearts as in guilty consciences, and that untruth can no more imitate than Salome can imitate the thunderbolts of heaven; but accuse nature of it, accuse the people, which wants it and loves it.

And this is what Robespierre aims at in his famous accusation to the moderates that what they really want is a "revolution without a revolution": they want a revolution deprived of the excess in which democracy and terror coincide, a revolution respecting social rules, subordinated to pre-existing norms, a revolution in which violence is deprived of the "divine" dimension and thus reduced to a strategic intervention serving precise and limited goals:

Citizens, did you want a revolution without a revolution? What is this spirit of persecution that has come to revise, so to speak, the one that broke our chains? But what sure judgement can one make of the effects that can follow these great commotions? Who can mark, after the event, the exact point at which the waves of popular insurrection should break? At that price, what people could ever have shaken off the yoke of despotism? For while it is true that a great nation cannot rise in a simultaneous movement, and that tyranny can only be hit by the portion of citizens that is closest to it, how would these ever dare to attack it if, after the victory, delegates from remote parts could hold them responsible for the duration or violence of the political torment that had saved the homeland? They ought to be regarded as justified by tacit proxy for the whole of society. The French, friends of liberty, meeting in Paris last August, acted in that role, in the name of all the departments. They should either be approved or repudiated entirely. To make them criminally responsible for a few apparent or real disorders, inseparable from so great a shock, would be to punish them for their devotion.

This authentic revolutionary logic can be discerned already at the level of rhetorical figures, where Robespierre likes to turn around the standard procedure of first evoking an apparently "realist" position and then displaying its illusory nature: he often starts with presenting a position or description of a situation as absurd exaggeration, fiction, and then goes on to remind us that what, in a first approach, cannot but appear as a fiction, is actually truth itself: "But what am I saying? What I have just presented as an absurd hypothesis is actually a very certain reality." It is this radical revolutionary stance which also enables Robespierre to denounce the "humanitarian" concern with victims of the revolutionary "divine violence": "A sensibility that wails almost exclusively over the enemies of liberty seems suspect to me. Stop shaking the tyrant's bloody robe in my face, or I will believe that you wish to put Rome in chains." The critical analysis and the acceptance of the historical legacy of the Jacobins overlap in the true question to be raised: does the (often deplorable) actuality of the revolutionary terror compel us to reject the very idea of Terror, or is there a way to REPEAT it in today's different historical constellation, to redeem its virtual content from its actualization? It CAN and SHOULD be done, and the most concise formula of repeating the event designated by the name "Robespierre" is: to pass from (Robespierre's) humanist terror to anti-humanist (or, rather, inhuman) terror.

In his Le siècle, Alain Badiou conceives as a sign of the political regression that occurred towards the end of the XXth century the shift from "humanism AND terror" to "humanism OR terror." In 1946, Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote Humanism and Terror, his defense of the Soviet Communism as involving a kind of Pascalean wager that announces the topic of what Bernard Williams later developed as "moral luck": the present terror will be retroactively justified if the society that will emerge from it will be truly human; today, such a conjunction of terror and humanism is properly unthinkable, the predominant liberal view replaces AND with OR: either humanism or terror... More precisely, there are four variations on this motif: humanism AND terror, humanism OR terror, each either in a "positive" or in a "negative" sense. "Humanism and terror" in a positive sense is what Merleau-Ponty elaborated, it sustains Stalinism (the forceful - "terrorist" - engendering of the New Man), and is already clearly discernible in the French Revolution, in the guise of Robespierre's conjunction of virtue and terror. This conjunction can be negated in two ways. It can involve the choice "humanism OR terror," i.e., the liberal-humanist project in all its versions, from the dissident anti-Stalinist humanism up to today's neo-Habermasians (Luc Ferry & Alain Renault in France) and other defenders of human rights AGAINST (totalitarian, fundamentalist) terror. Or it can retain the conjunction "humanism AND terror," but in a negative mode: all those philosophical and ideological orientations, from Heidegger and conservative Christians to partisans of Oriental spirituality and Deep Ecology, who perceive terror as the truth - the ultimate consequence - of the humanist project itself, of its hubris.

There is, however, a fourth variation, usually left aside: the choice "humanism OR terror," but with TERROR, not humanism, as a positive term. This is a radical position difficult to sustain, but, perhaps, our only hope: it does not amount to the obscene madness of openly pursuing a "terrorist and inhuman politics", but something much more difficult to think. In today's "post-deconstructionist" thought (if one risks this ridiculous designation which cannot but sound as its own parody), the term "inhuman" gained a new weight, especially in the work of Agamben and Badiou. The best way to approach it is via Freud's reluctance to endorse the injunction "Love thy neighbor!" - the temptation to be resisted here is the ethical domestication of the neighbor - for example, what Emmanuel Levinas did with his notion of the neighbor as the abyssal point from which the call of ethical responsibility emanates. What Levinas thereby obfuscates is the monstrosity of the neighbor, monstrosity on account of which Lacan applies to the neighbor the term Thing (das Ding), used by Freud to designate the ultimate object of our desires in its unbearable intensity and impenetrability. One should hear in this term all the connotations of horror fiction: the neighbor is the (Evil) Thing which potentially lurks beneath every homely human face. Just think about Stephen King's Shining, in which the father, a modest failed writer, gradually turns into a killing beast who, with an evil grin, goes on to slaughter his entire family. In a properly dialectical paradox, what Levinas, with all his celebration of the Otherness, fails to take into account is not some underlying Sameness of all humans but the radically "inhuman" Otherness itself: the Otherness of a human being reduced to inhumanity, the Otherness exemplified by the terrifying figure of the Muselmann, the "living dead" in the concentration camps. At a different level, the same goes for Stalinist Communism. In the standard Stalinist narrative, even the concentration camps were a place of the fight against Fascism where imprisoned Communists were organizing networks of heroic resistance - in such a universe, of course, there is no place for the limit-experience of the Muselmann, of the living dead deprived of the capacity of human engagement - no wonder that Stalinist Communists were so eager to "normalize" the camps into just another site of the anti-Fascist struggle, dismissing Muselmann as simply those who were to weak to endure the struggle.

It is against this background that one can understand why Lacan speaks of the inhuman core of the neighbor. Back in the 1960s, the era of structuralism, Louis Althusser launched the notorious formula of "theoretical anti-humanism," allowing, demanding even, that it be supplemented by practical humanism. In our practice, we should act as humanists, respecting the others, treating them as free persons with full dignity, creators of their world. However, in theory, we should no less always bear in mind that humanism is an ideology, the way we spontaneously experience our predicament, and that the true knowledge of humans and their history should treat individuals not as autonomous subjects, but as elements in a structure which follows its own laws. In contrast to Althusser, Lacan accomplishes the passage from theoretical to practical anti-humanism, i.e., to an ethics that goes beyond the dimension of what Nietzsche called "human, all too human," and confront the inhuman core of humanity. This does not mean only an ethics which no longer denies, but fearlessly takes into account, the latent monstrosity of being-human, the diabolic dimension which exploded in phenomena usually covered by the concept-name "Auschwitz" - an ethics that would be still possible after Auschwitz, to paraphrase Adorno. This inhuman dimension is for Lacan at the same time the ultimate support of ethics.

In philosophical terms, this "inhuman" dimension can be defined as that of a subject subtracted from all form of human "individuality" or "personality" (which is why, in today's popular culture, one of the exemplary figures of pure subject is a non-human - alien, cyborg - who displays more fidelity to the task, dignity and freedom than its human counterparts, from the Schwarzenegger-figure in Terminator to the Rutger-Hauer-android in Blade Runner). Recall Husserl's dark dream, from his Cartesian Meditations, of how the transcendental cogito would remain unaffected by a plague that would annihilate entire humanity: it is easy, apropos this example, to score cheap points about the self-destructive background of the transcendental subjectivity, and about how Husserl misses the paradox of what Foucault, in his Let mots et les choses, called the "transcendental-empirical doublet," of the link that forever attaches the transcendental ego to the empirical ego, so that the annihilation of the latter by definition leads to the disappearance of the first. However, what if, fully recognizing this dependence as a fact (and nothing more than this - a stupid fact of being), one nonetheless insists on the truth of its negation, the truth of the assertion of the independence of the subject with regard to the empirical individuals qua living being? Is this independence not demonstrated in the ultimate gesture of risking one's life, on being ready to forsake one's being? It is against the background of this topic of sovereign acceptance of death that one should reread the rhetorical turn often referred to as the proof of Robespierre's "totalitarian" manipulation of his audience. [7] This turn took place in the midst of Robespierre's speech in the National Assembly on 11 Germinal Year II (31 March 1794); the previous night, Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and some others were arrested, so many members of the Assembly were understandably afraid that their turn will also come. Robespierre directly addresses the moment as pivotal: "Citizens, the moment has come to speak the truth." He then goes on to evoke the fear floating in the room:

One wants /on veut/ to make you fear abuses of power, of the national power you have exercised /.../ One wants to make us fear that the people will fall victim to the Committees /.../ One fears that the prisoners are being oppressed /.../

The opposition is here between the impersonal "one" (the instigators of fear are not personified) and the collective thus put under pressure, which almost imperceptibly shifts from the plural second-person "you /vous/" to first-person "us" (Robespierre gallantly includes himself into the collective). However, the final formulation introduces an ominous twist: it is no longer that "one wants to make you/us fear," but that "one fears," which means that the enemy stirring up fear is no longer outside "you/us," members of the Assembly, it is here, among us, among "you" addressed by Robespierre, corroding our unity from within. At this precise moment, Robespierre, in a true master's stroke, assumes full subjectivization - waiting a little bit for the ominous effect of his words to take place, he then continued in the first person singular:

I say that anyone who trembles at this moment is guilty; for innocence never fears public scrutiny.

What can be more "totalitarian" than this closed loop of "your very fear of being guilty makes you guilty" - a weird superego-twisted version of the well-known motto "the only thing to fear is fear itself"? One should nonetheless move beyond the quick dismissal of Robespierre's rhetorical strategy as the strategy of "terrorist culpabilization," and to discern its moment of truth: there are no innocent bystanders in the crucial moments of revolutionary decision, because, in such moments, innocence itself - exempting oneself from the decision, going on as if the struggle I am witnessing doesn't really concern me - IS the highest treason. That is to say, the fear of being accused of treason IS my treason, because, even if I "did not do anything against the revolution," this fear itself, the fact that it emerged in me, demonstrates that my subjective position is external to the revolution, that I experience "revolution" as an external force threatening me.

But what goes on in this unique speech is even more revealing: Robespierre directly addresses the touchy question that has to arise in the mind of his public - how can he himself be sure that he will not be the next in line to be accused? He is not the master exempted from the collective, the "I" outside "we" - after all, he was once very close to Danton, a powerful figure now under arrest, so what if, tomorrow, his proximity to Danton will be used against him? In short, how can Robespierre be sure that the process he unleashed will not swallow him? It is here that his position assumes the sublime greatness - he fully assumes the danger that the danger that now threatens Danton will tomorrow threaten him. The reason that he is so serene, that he is not afraid of this fate, is not that Danton was a traitor, while he, Robespierre, is pure, a direct embodiment of the people's Will; it is that he, Robespierre, IS NOT AFRAID TO DIE - his eventual death will be a mere accident which counts for nothing:

What does danger matter to me? My life belongs to the Fatherland; my heart is free from fear; and if I were to die, I would do so without reproach and without ignominy.

Consequently, insofar as the shift from "we" to "I" can effectively be determined as the moment when the democratic mask falls down and when Robespierre openly asserts himself as a Master (up to this point, we follow Lefort's analysis), the term Master has to be given here its full Hegelian weight: the Master is the figure of sovereignty, the one who is not afraid to die, who is ready to risk everything. In other words, the ultimate meaning of Robespierre's first-person singular ("I") is: I am not afraid to die. What authorizes him is just this, not any kind of direct access to the big Other, i.e., he doesn't claim that he has a direct access to the people's Will which speaks through him. This is how Yamamoto Jocho, a Zen priest, described the proper attitude of a warrior: "every day without fail one should consider himself as dead. There is a saying of the elders that goes, 'Step from under the eaves and you're a dead man. Leave the gate and the enemy is waiting.' This is not a matter of being careful. It is to consider oneself as dead beforehand." [8] This is why, according to Hillis Lory, many Japanese soldiers in WWII performed their own funerals before living for the battlefield:

Many of the soldiers in the present war are so determined to die on the battlefield that they conduct their own public funerals before leaving for the front. This holds no element of the ridiculous to the Japanese. Rather, it is admired as the spirit of the true samurai who enters the battle with no thought of return. [9]

This preemptive self-exclusion from the domain of the living, of course, turns the soldier into a properly sublime figure. Instead of dismissing this feature as part of the Fascist militarism, one should assert it as also constitutive of a radical revolutionary position: there is a straight line that runs from this acceptance of one's own disappearance to Mao Zedong's reaction to the atomic bomb threat from 1955:

The United States cannot annihilate the Chinese nation with its small stack of atom bombs. Even if the U.S. atom bombs were so powerful that, when dropped on China, they would make a hole right through the earth, or even blow it up, that would hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole, though it might be a major event for the solar system."("The Chinese People Cannot Be Cowed by the Atom Bomb")

There evidently is an "inhuman madness" in this argument: is the fact that the destruction of the planet Earth "would hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole" not a rather poor solace for the extinguished humanity? The argument only works if, in a Kantian way, one presupposes a pure transcendental subject non-affected by this catastrophe - a subject which, although non-existing in reality, IS operative as a virtual point of reference. Every authentic revolutionary has to assume this attitude of thoroughly abstracting from, despising even, the imbecilic particularity of one's immediate existence, or, as Saint-Just formulated in an unsurpassable way this indifference towards what Benjamin called "bare life": "I despise the dust that forms me and speaks to you." [10] Che Guevara approached the same line of though when, in the midst of the unbearable tension of the Cuban missile crisis, he advocated a fearless approach of risking the new world war which would involve (at least) the total annihilation of the Cuban people - he praised the heroic readiness of the Cuban people to risk its disappearance.

Another "inhuman" dimension of the couple Virtue-Terror promoted by Robespierre is the rejection of habit (in the sense of the agency of realistic compromises). Every legal order (or every order of explicit normativity) has to rely on a complex "reflexive" network of informal rules which tells us how are we to relate to the explicit norms, how are we to apply them: to what extent are we to take them literally, how and when are we allowed, solicited even, to disregard them, etc. - and this is the domain of habit. To know the habits of a society is to know the meta-rules of how to apply its explicit norms: when to use them or not use them; when to violate them; when not to use a choice which is offered; when we are effectively obliged to do something, but have to pretend that we are doing it as a free choice (like in the case of potlatch). Recall the polite offer-meant-to-be-refused: it is a "habit" to refuse such an offer, and anyone who accepts such an offer commits a vulgar blunder. The same goes for many political situations in which a choice is given on condition that we make the right choice: we are solemnly reminded that we can say no - but we are expected to we reject this offer and enthusiastically say yes. With many sexual prohibitions, the situation is the opposite one: the explicit "no" effectively functions as the implicit injunction "do it, but in a discreet way!" Measured against this background, revolutionary-egalitarian figures from Robespierre to John Brown are (potentially, at least) figures without habits: they refuse to take into account the habits that qualify the functioning of a universal rule:

Such is the natural dominion of habit that we regard the most arbitrary conventions, sometimes indeed the most defective institutions, as absolute measures of truth or falsehood, justice or injustice. It does not even occur to us that most are inevitably still connected with the prejudices on which despotism fed us. We have been so long stooped under its yoke that we have some difficulty in raising ourselves to the eternal principles of reason; anything that refers to the sacred source of all law seems to us to take on an illegal character, and the very order of nature seems to us a disorder. The majestic movements of a great people, the sublime fervors of virtue often appear to our timid eyes as something like an erupting volcano or the overthrow of political society; and it is certainly not the least of the troubles bothering us, this contradiction between the weakness of our morals, the depravity of our minds, and the purity of principle and energy of character demanded by the free government to which we have dared aspire.

To break the yoke of habits means: if all men are equal, than all men are to be effectively treated as equal; if blacks are also human, they should be immediately treated as such. Recall the early stages of the struggle against slavery in the US, which, even prior to the Civil War, culminated in the armed conflict between the gradualism of compassionate liberals and the unique figure of John Brown:

African Americans were caricatures of people, they were characterized as buffoons and minstrels, they were the butt-end of jokes in American society. And even the abolitionists, as antislavery as they were, the majority of them did not see African Americans as equals. The majority of them, and this was something that African Americans complained about all the time, were willing to work for the end of slavery in the South but they were not willing to work to end discrimination in the North. /.../ John Brown wasn't like that. For him, practicing egalitarianism was a first step toward ending slavery. And African Americans who came in contact with him knew this immediately. He made it very clear that he saw no difference, and he didn't make this clear by saying it, he made it clear by what he did. [11]

For this reason, John Brown is the KEY political figure in the history of US: in his fervently Christian "radical abolitionism," he came closest to introducing the Jacobin logic into the US political landscape: "John Brown considered himself a complete egalitarian. And it was very important for him to practice egalitarianism on every level. /.../ He made it very clear that he saw no difference, and he didn't make this clear by saying it, he made it clear by what he did." [12] Today even, long after slavery was abolished, Brown is the dividing figure in American collective memory; those whites who support Brown are all the more precious - among them, surprisingly, Henry David Thoreau, the great opponent of violence: against the standard dismissal of Brown as blood-thirsty, foolish and insane, Thoreau [13] painted a portrait of a peerless man whose embracement of a cause was unparalleled; he even goes as far as to liken Brown's execution (he states that he regards Brown as dead before his actual death) to Christ. Thoreau vents at the scores of those who have voiced their displeasure and scorn for John Brown: the same people can't relate to Brown because of their concrete stances and "dead" existences; they are truly not living, only a handful of men have lived.

It is, however, this very consequent egalitarianism which is simultaneously the limitations of the Jacobin politics. Recall Marx's fundamental insight about the "bourgeois" limitation of the logic of equality: the capitalist inequalities ("exploitations") are not the "unprincipled violations of the principle of equality," but are absolutely inherent to the logic of equality, they are the paradoxical result of its consequent realization. What we have in mind here is not only the old boring motif of how market exchange presupposes formally/legally equal subjects who meet and interact on the market; the crucial moment of Marx's critique of "bourgeois" socialists is that capitalist exploitation does not involve any kind of "unequal" exchange between the worker and the capitalist - this exchange is fully equal and "just," ideally (in principle), the worker gets paid the full value of the commodity he is selling (his labour force). Of course, radical bourgeois revolutionaries are aware of this limitation; however, the way they try to amend it is through a direct "terrorist" imposition of more and more de facto equality (equal salaries, equal health service...), which can only be imposed through new forms of formal inequality (different sorts of preferential treatments of the under-privileged). In short, the axiom of "equality" means either not enough (it remains the abstract form of actual inequality) or too much (enforce "terrorist" equality) - it is a formalist notion in a strict dialectical sense, i.e., its limitation is precisely that its form is not concrete enough, but a mere neutral container of some content that eludes this form.

The problem here is not terror as such - our task today is precisely to reinvent emancipatory terror.

[....]

http://wlcentral.org/book/export/html/1976

2011-07-02 RECORDED STREAM of Assange, Žižek & Goodman Conversation July 2, 11am EDT

This Saturday, July 2, Democracy Now's Amy Goodman will moderate a conversation with Julian Assange and Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek. The event is sponsored by the Frontline Club, and broadcast from The Troxy theater in London.

The focus of the event will be the "ethics and philosophy behind WikiLeaks’ work, the talk will provide a rare opportunity to hear two of the world’s most prominent thinkers discuss some of the most pressing issues of our time," according to the Democracy Now web site.

The conversation coincides with the "publication of the paperback edition of Žižek’s Living in the End Times, in which he argues that new ways of using and sharing information, in particular WikiLeaks, are one of a number of harbingers of the end of global capitalism as we know it."

Starts below at 21 minutes.

Watch live streaming video
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at livestream.com