Less Than Nothing

the renunciation of ethical autonomy

This brings us to the necessity of Fall: what the Kantian link between dependence and autonomy amounts to is that Fall is unavoidable, a necessary step in the moral progress of man. That is to say, in precise Kantian terms: "Fall" is the very renunciation of my radical ethical autonomy; it occurs when I take refuge in a heteronomous Law, in a Law which is experience as imposed on me from the outside, i.e., the finitude in which I search for a support to avoid the dizziness of freedom is the finitude of the external-heteronomous Law itself. Therein resides the difficulty of being a Kantian. Every parent knows that the child’s provocations, wild and "transgressive" as they may appear, ultimately conceal and express a demand, addressed at the figure of authority, to set a firm limit, to draw a line which means "This far and no further!", thus enabling the child to achieve a clear mapping of what is possible and what is not possible. (And does the same not go also for hysteric’s provocations?) This, precisely, is what the analyst refuses to do, and this is what makes him so traumatic – paradoxically, it is the setting of a firm limit which is liberating, and it is the very absence of a firm limit which is experienced as suffocating. THIS is why the Kantian autonomy of the subject is so difficult – its implication is precisely that there is nobody outside, no external agent of "natural authority", who can do the job for me and set me my limit, that I myself have to pose a limit to my natural "unruliness." Although Kant famously wrote that man is an animal which needs a master, this should not deceive us: what Kant aims at is not the philosophical commonplace according to which, in contrast to animals whose behavioural patterns are grounded in their inherited instincts, man lacks such firm coordinates which, therefore, have to be imposed on him from the outside, through a cultural authority; Kant’s true aim is rather to point out how the very need of an external master is a deceptive lure: man needs a master in order to conceal from himself the deadlock of his own difficult freedom and self-responsibility. In this precise sense, a truly enlightened "mature" human being is a subject who no longer needs a master, who can fully assume the heavy burden of defining his own limitations. This basic Kantian (and also Hegelian) lesson was put very clearly by Chesterton: "Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice."

(Slavoj Žižek, “Cogito, Madness and Religion: Derrida, Foucault and then Lacan,” http://www.lacan.com/zizforest.html, Lacan.com 2007; accessed 3/12/2012.  The Chesterton quote is from Orthodoxy, FQ Publishing, 2004.  The passage is also found in Mythology, Madness, and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism; Markus Gabriel and Slavoj Žižek, Continuum 2009, p. 98.)

Coming April 15, 2013, Raymond Lotta and Slavoj Žižek Debate...See the Challenge Here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkdIGjMkOGo

http://timesflowstemmed.com/tag/slavoj-zizek/

TAG ARCHIVES: SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK

Links of the Week

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Many of these links have been tweeted in the past, but here I can tag and categorise them for future reference. I hope you find some of them interesting too. Please feel free to discuss in comments or on Twitter.

Tomas Sedlacek interview: “Consumption works like a drug. Enough is always just beyond the horizon”.

Michael Stein’s review of On the Road to Babadag: Travels in the Other Europe by Andrzej Stasiuk.

Judith Butler talks about how to read Kafka.

“A Shadow Remains explores [Phillip] Toledano’s personal history as he considers the impact that love and loss has had on his life, and the life of his family.”

Žižek’s essay on Kieślowski’s fascinating ‘The Double Life of Véronique’.

Brief but fascinating thoughts about the implications of Ray Brassier’s tough Nihil Unbound.

Interview with JG Ballard (in his Shepperton home)[in English after introduction].

Eleanor Wachtel’s 1995 conversation with Harold Bloom about The Western Canon.

“On visits to Cambridge University late in life, Jorge Luis Borges offered revealing last thoughts about his reading and writing.”

Bunker archaeology.

Subversive and brilliant adbusts. “Advertising makes people … detest their appearance”.

Foucault and social media: I tweet, therefore I become.

On literature and evil, the only recorded TV interview with Georges Bataille.

Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy – full text [PDF] of Neoliberalism and its crisis.