Excerpts from Žižek's Afterword:
"The true adultery is not to copulate outside of marriage, but to copulate in a marriage without love: the simple adultery just violates the law from outside, while marriage without love destroys it from within, turning the letter of the law against its spirit. So, to paraphrase Brecht yet again: what is a simple adultery compared to (the adultery that is a loveless) marriage! It is not by chance that Wagner's underlying formula 'marriage is adultery' recalls Proudhon's 'property is theft'--in the stormy 1848 events, Wagner was not only a Feuerbachian celebrating sexual love, but also a Proudhonian revolutionary demanding the abolition of private property; so no wonder that, later on the same page, Wagner attributes to Jesus a Proudhonian supplement to 'Thou shalt not steal!': 'This also is a good law: Thou shalt not steal, nor covet another man's goods. Who goeth against it, sinneth: but I preserve you from sin, inasmuch as I teach you: Love thy neighbor as thyself; which also meaneth: Lay not up for thyself treasures, whereby thou stealeth from thy neighbor and makest him to starve: for when thou hast thy goods safeguarded by the law of man, thou provokest thy neighbor to sin against the law." (p. 152)
[...] "These lines cannot but evoke the famous passages from The Communist Manifesto that answer the bourgeois reproach that Communists want to abolish freedom, property, and family: it is the capitalist freedom itself that is effectively the freedom to buy and sell on the market and thus the very form of unfreedom for those who have nothing but their labor force to sell; it is the capitalist property itself that means the 'abolition' of property for those who own no means of production; it is the bourgeois marriage itself that is the universalized prostitution. In all these cases the external opposition is internalized, so that one opposite becomes the form of appearance of the other (bourgeois freedom is the form of appearance of the unfreedom of the majority, etc.). However, for Marx, at least in the case of freedom, this means that Communism will not abolish freedom but, by way of abolishing the capitalist servitude, bring about actual freedom, the freedom that will no longer be the form of appearance of its opposite. It is thus not freedom itself that is the form of appearance of its opposite, but only false freedom, the freedom distorted by relations of domination." (p. 153)
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Monday, February 23, 2009
Cheap Shots Against Žižek
Why American Corporate Academics (and Other Capitalist Flunkies) Accuse Žižek of Inconsistency:
"Two leitmotivs of your approach to Lacan are already discernible in what you have said. The first is that you do not conceal Lacan's inconsistencies: you seem always to be on the lookout for unexpected shifts in his position. Your Lacan is a theoretician engaged in continuous polemics against himself, his own previous statements....
True, the fundamental presupposition of my approach to Lacan is the utter incongruity of a 'synchronous' reading of his texts and seminars: the only way to comprehend Lacan is to approach his work as a work in progress, as a succession of attempts to seize the same persistent traumatic kernel. The shifts in Lacan's work become manifest the moment one concentrates on his great negative theses: 'There is no Other of the Other', 'The desire of the analyst is not a pure desire'....Upon encountering such a thesis, one must always ask the simple question: who is this idiot who is claiming that there is an Other of the Other, that the desire of the analyst is a pure desire, and so on? There is, of course, only one answer: Lacan himself a couple of years ago. The only way to approach Lacan, therefore, is to read 'Lacan contre Lacan' (the title of the 1993-4 Jacques-Alain Miller seminar)."
From Žižek's The Metastases of Enjoyment: on Women and Causality (London: Verso, 1994), Appendix A, p. 173
"Two leitmotivs of your approach to Lacan are already discernible in what you have said. The first is that you do not conceal Lacan's inconsistencies: you seem always to be on the lookout for unexpected shifts in his position. Your Lacan is a theoretician engaged in continuous polemics against himself, his own previous statements....
True, the fundamental presupposition of my approach to Lacan is the utter incongruity of a 'synchronous' reading of his texts and seminars: the only way to comprehend Lacan is to approach his work as a work in progress, as a succession of attempts to seize the same persistent traumatic kernel. The shifts in Lacan's work become manifest the moment one concentrates on his great negative theses: 'There is no Other of the Other', 'The desire of the analyst is not a pure desire'....Upon encountering such a thesis, one must always ask the simple question: who is this idiot who is claiming that there is an Other of the Other, that the desire of the analyst is a pure desire, and so on? There is, of course, only one answer: Lacan himself a couple of years ago. The only way to approach Lacan, therefore, is to read 'Lacan contre Lacan' (the title of the 1993-4 Jacques-Alain Miller seminar)."
From Žižek's The Metastases of Enjoyment: on Women and Causality (London: Verso, 1994), Appendix A, p. 173
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Is the Lacanian Community 'Stalinist'?
From Žižek's The Metastases of Enjoyment: on Women and Causality (London: Verso, 1994), Appendix A, pp. 171-172:
"One should acknowledge openly what many a critique of the alleged 'totalitarian', 'Stalinist' nature of Lacanian communities makes a big deal of by allusion: yes, the 'spirit', the structuring principle, which expressed itself distortedly in the Stalinist Party, found its proper form in the Lacanian community of analysts," [...]
"The choice here is unavoidable--that is to say, what occurs after passe, when the analysis is over? On the one side is the 'obscurantist' choice: passe as an intimate experience, an ecstatic moment of authenticity that can only be transmitted from person to person in an initiating act of communication. On the other is the 'Stalinist' choice: passe as an act of total externalization through which I irrevocably renounce the ineffable precious kernel in me that makes me a unique being, and leave myself unreservedly to the analytic community. This homology between the Lacanian analyst and the Stalinist Communist can be unfolded further: for example, the Lacanian analyst, like the Stalinist Communist, is in a sense 'infallible'--in contrast to ordinary people, he does not 'live in error', the error (the ideological delusion) is not an inherent constituent of his speech. So when he is empirically 'wrong', the causes are purely external: 'fatigue', 'nervous overcharge', and so on. What he needs is not theoretical enlightenment of his error but simply to 'take a rest' and restore his health...
Does not this 'infallibility' of the Lacanian analyst imply that Lacanian discourse is totally dominated, permeated, by the Master-Signifier?
Quite the contrary: paradoxical as it may sound, it implies that the analytic community is the only community capable of passing by the Master-Signifier. What is the Master-Signifier, strictly speaking? The signifier of transference. Its exemplary case occurs when, while reading a text or listening to a person, we assume that every sentence harbours some hidden profound meaning--and since we assume it in advance, we usually also find it." [...]
"Such a transferential relationship is what the community of Lacanian analysts avoid via their 'infallibility': this community is not founded upon some supposed knowledge, it is simply a community of those who know.
In short, it is the 'subjective destitution', the subject's complete self-externalization, that makes the Master superfluous: a Master is a Master only in so far as I, his subject, am not completely externalized;" [...]
"The constitutive illusion of religious discourse, for example, is that God addresses each individual by name: I know God has me precisely in his mind..."
"One should acknowledge openly what many a critique of the alleged 'totalitarian', 'Stalinist' nature of Lacanian communities makes a big deal of by allusion: yes, the 'spirit', the structuring principle, which expressed itself distortedly in the Stalinist Party, found its proper form in the Lacanian community of analysts," [...]
"The choice here is unavoidable--that is to say, what occurs after passe, when the analysis is over? On the one side is the 'obscurantist' choice: passe as an intimate experience, an ecstatic moment of authenticity that can only be transmitted from person to person in an initiating act of communication. On the other is the 'Stalinist' choice: passe as an act of total externalization through which I irrevocably renounce the ineffable precious kernel in me that makes me a unique being, and leave myself unreservedly to the analytic community. This homology between the Lacanian analyst and the Stalinist Communist can be unfolded further: for example, the Lacanian analyst, like the Stalinist Communist, is in a sense 'infallible'--in contrast to ordinary people, he does not 'live in error', the error (the ideological delusion) is not an inherent constituent of his speech. So when he is empirically 'wrong', the causes are purely external: 'fatigue', 'nervous overcharge', and so on. What he needs is not theoretical enlightenment of his error but simply to 'take a rest' and restore his health...
Does not this 'infallibility' of the Lacanian analyst imply that Lacanian discourse is totally dominated, permeated, by the Master-Signifier?
Quite the contrary: paradoxical as it may sound, it implies that the analytic community is the only community capable of passing by the Master-Signifier. What is the Master-Signifier, strictly speaking? The signifier of transference. Its exemplary case occurs when, while reading a text or listening to a person, we assume that every sentence harbours some hidden profound meaning--and since we assume it in advance, we usually also find it." [...]
"Such a transferential relationship is what the community of Lacanian analysts avoid via their 'infallibility': this community is not founded upon some supposed knowledge, it is simply a community of those who know.
In short, it is the 'subjective destitution', the subject's complete self-externalization, that makes the Master superfluous: a Master is a Master only in so far as I, his subject, am not completely externalized;" [...]
"The constitutive illusion of religious discourse, for example, is that God addresses each individual by name: I know God has me precisely in his mind..."
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Unothodox maybe, but Marxist nonetheless
From Žižek and Daly, Conversations with Žižek (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2004), pp. 147:
"I think that there is a central idea developed by Georg Lukács and the Frankfurt School which, in spite of all my criticism of the Western Marxist tradition, is today more actual than ever. The idea is that the economy is not simply one among the social spheres. The basic insight of the Marxist critique of political economy--of commodity fetishism and so on--is that the economy has a certain proto-transcendental social status. Economy provides a generative matrix for phenomena which in the first approach has nothing to do with economy as such. For example, we can speak about reification, the commodification of culture and of politics and so on. At the level of form, the capitalist economy has a universal scope. So what interests me is the global structuring dimension of what goes on at the level of capitalist economy. It is not just one domain among others."
[...] "The problem for me is , what is working class today? I think that we should certainly abandon any fetish about the centrality of the working class. But at the same time we should abandon the opposite (postmodern) fetish: that the working class is disappearing; that it is meaningless to speak about the working class. Both are wrong."
From Žižek and Daly, Conversations with Žižek (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2004), pp. 149:
"My position is almost classical Marxist in the sense that I would insist that anti-capitalist struggle is not simply one among other political struggles for greater equality, cultural recognition, anti-sexism and so on. I believe in the central structuring role of the anti-capitalist struggle."
"I think that there is a central idea developed by Georg Lukács and the Frankfurt School which, in spite of all my criticism of the Western Marxist tradition, is today more actual than ever. The idea is that the economy is not simply one among the social spheres. The basic insight of the Marxist critique of political economy--of commodity fetishism and so on--is that the economy has a certain proto-transcendental social status. Economy provides a generative matrix for phenomena which in the first approach has nothing to do with economy as such. For example, we can speak about reification, the commodification of culture and of politics and so on. At the level of form, the capitalist economy has a universal scope. So what interests me is the global structuring dimension of what goes on at the level of capitalist economy. It is not just one domain among others."
[...] "The problem for me is , what is working class today? I think that we should certainly abandon any fetish about the centrality of the working class. But at the same time we should abandon the opposite (postmodern) fetish: that the working class is disappearing; that it is meaningless to speak about the working class. Both are wrong."
From Žižek and Daly, Conversations with Žižek (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2004), pp. 149:
"My position is almost classical Marxist in the sense that I would insist that anti-capitalist struggle is not simply one among other political struggles for greater equality, cultural recognition, anti-sexism and so on. I believe in the central structuring role of the anti-capitalist struggle."
Monday, February 16, 2009
The Fetish of the Working Class
From Žižek and Daly, Conversations with Žižek (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2004), pp. 145-146:
[...] "we also, of course, have a classical Trotskyism which I think represents something of a tragic position because it is always addressed to the fetish of the working class as a revolutionary party. When I speak to some of my orthodox Marxist friends, it is typical how, with their vision of all of the upheavals from Solidarity in Poland to the disintegration of communism and, more recently, the fall of Milosevic, they are always telling the same story: that those who truly brought down these corrupt degenerate communist regimes were workers--workers' strikes, workers' movements and so on. So the story goes that there was always a chance of an authentic workers' revolution, but since there wasn't a proper political party there, the workers' movement was co-opted either by nationalists, neo-capitalists, CIA agents or whatever. Sometimes there is an element of truth in this. With the early mobilizations of Solidarity, for example, the original demands were for greater socialism and not private property. But nonetheless, I think that the standard idea that in all these cases we had a missed opportunity for socialist revolution is a deep delusion. It doesn't function in this way."
[...] "we also, of course, have a classical Trotskyism which I think represents something of a tragic position because it is always addressed to the fetish of the working class as a revolutionary party. When I speak to some of my orthodox Marxist friends, it is typical how, with their vision of all of the upheavals from Solidarity in Poland to the disintegration of communism and, more recently, the fall of Milosevic, they are always telling the same story: that those who truly brought down these corrupt degenerate communist regimes were workers--workers' strikes, workers' movements and so on. So the story goes that there was always a chance of an authentic workers' revolution, but since there wasn't a proper political party there, the workers' movement was co-opted either by nationalists, neo-capitalists, CIA agents or whatever. Sometimes there is an element of truth in this. With the early mobilizations of Solidarity, for example, the original demands were for greater socialism and not private property. But nonetheless, I think that the standard idea that in all these cases we had a missed opportunity for socialist revolution is a deep delusion. It doesn't function in this way."
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Charismatic Speech, Love, Knowledge
From Bruce Fink's Lacan to the Letter (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), p. 68:
"Lacan sees his own oral teaching as an important part of training. To his mind, his seminars contribute to the training of analysts far more than his writings ever could (even though they too strive to achieve certain training effects). Since Plato's time, it has been clear that oral transmission engenders love and that love and knowledge are not unrelated. Lacan's seminars provide a transferential context, engendering love in the students, love that puts them to work. The student at Lacan's seminar is inspired to work, much as the analysand is in analysis. There is more to it than that, of course: Lacan was, from many accounts, a fine and charismatic speaker who made a great impression on his audience. He also seemed to crave and genuinely thrive on the transference love he inspired in his students. He worked for that love, just as they worked for him."
"Lacan sees his own oral teaching as an important part of training. To his mind, his seminars contribute to the training of analysts far more than his writings ever could (even though they too strive to achieve certain training effects). Since Plato's time, it has been clear that oral transmission engenders love and that love and knowledge are not unrelated. Lacan's seminars provide a transferential context, engendering love in the students, love that puts them to work. The student at Lacan's seminar is inspired to work, much as the analysand is in analysis. There is more to it than that, of course: Lacan was, from many accounts, a fine and charismatic speaker who made a great impression on his audience. He also seemed to crave and genuinely thrive on the transference love he inspired in his students. He worked for that love, just as they worked for him."
Enjoyment, the Will of the People, Envy
From P.D. James' The Children of Men (Random House, 1993), pp. 104-105
Luke said gently: "Protection, comfort, pleasure. There has to be something more."
"It's what people care about, what they want. What more should the Council be offering?"
"Compassion, justice, love."
"No state has ever concerned itself with love, and no state ever can."
Julian said: "But it can concern itself with justice."
Rolf was impatient: "Justice, compassion, love. They're all words. What we're talking about is power. The Warden is a dictator masquerading as a democratic leader. He ought to be made to be responsible to the will of the people."
Theo said: "Ah, the will of the people. That's a fine sounding phrase. At present, the will of the people seems to be for protection, comfort, pleasure." He thought: I know what offends you--the fact that Xan enjoys such power, not the way he exercises it.
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