Lacan+(BB)



The one continually screaming, "Close the damned book!!!"?

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' In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary ways of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when all of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, // is //, and // is not // , I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an // ought // , or an // ought not //. This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as this // ought //, or // ought not // , expresses some new relation or affirmation, 'tis necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given; for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the readers; and am persuaded, that this small attention would subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceived by reason.' - David Hume

From Wikipedia entry on "is-ought problem", or: [|Hume, David] (1739). [|//A Treatise of Human Nature//]. London: John Noon. p. 335.

Keep this in mind when Zizek gets to his tired bit on what he calls "nature", or what he attributes to a phantom speaker about "nature".

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"What is at stake in analytic discourse is always this -- to what is uttered as a signifier [by th e patient], you [analysts] give another reading than what it means". (Felman quoting Lacan, p. 21)

In "the practice of psychoanalysis, "reading" refers to the analyst's activity of interpreting, and the emphasis is on the displacement operated by the interpreting: the analyst is called upon to interpret the excess in the patient's discourse -- what the patient says beyond what he has been incited to say, //beyond// the current motivation of the situation; and the analytic meaning is then a displacement of the meaning of the patient's discourse, since it consists in giving what has been pronounced //another reading//. The analytic reading is thus essentially the reading of a difference that inhabits language, a kind of mapping in the subject's discourse of its points of disagreement with, or difference from, itself." (Felman, p. 21)

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'The basic weakness of the usual ecological response is thus its obsessive libidinal economy: we must do all in order that the equilibrium of the natural circuit will be maintained, in order that some horrifying turbulence will not derail the established regularity of nature's ways. To rid ourselves of this predominant obsessive economy, we must take a further step and renounce the very idea of a "natural balance" supposedly upset by the intervention of man as "nature sick unto death." Homologous to the Lacanian proposition "Woman does not exist," we should perhaps assert that Nature does not exist -- it does not exist as a periodic, balanced circuit, thrown off its track by man's inadvertence The very notion of man as an "excess" with respect to nature's balanced circuit has finally to be abandoned. The image of nature as a balanced circuit is nothing but a retroactive projection of man. Herein lies the lesson of recent theories of chaos: "nature" is already, in itself, turbulent, imbalanced; its "rule" is not a well-balanced oscillation around some constant point of attraction, but a chaotic dispersion within the limits of what the theory of chaos calls the "strange attractor," a regularity directing chaos itself.

' One of the achievements of the theory of chaos is the demonstration that chaos does not necessarily imply an intricate, impenetrable web of causes: simple causes can produce "chaotic" behavior. The theory of chaos thus subverts the basic "intuition" of classical physics according to which every process, left to itself, tends toward a kind of natural balance (a resting point or a regular movement). The revolutionary aspect of this theory is condensed in the term "strange attractor." It is possible for a system to behave in a "chaotic," irregular way, i.e., never to return to a previous state, and still be capable of formalization by means of an "attractor" that regulates it -- an attractor that is "strange," i.e., that acquires the form not of a point or of a symmetrical figure, but of endlessly intertwined serpentines within the contours of a definite figure, an "anamorphotically" disfigured circle, a "butterfly," etc'

[...]

' The point is not to "detect order behind chaos," but rather to detect the form, the pattern, of chaos itself, of its irregular dispersion. In opposition to "traditional" science, which is centered on the notion of a uniform law (regular connection of causes and effects, etc.), these theories offer first drafts of a future "science of the real," i.e., of a science elaborating rules that generate contingency, tuché, as opposed to symbolic automaton.' (Looking Awry, p. 39)

So, Zizek, since "...**truth is partial,** **accessible only when one takes sides, and is no less universal for this reason**..." (Zizek, First As Tragedy..., p. 6), which side are you on, here?

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'The crucial thing about the distance separating the false scene staged by the murderer and the true course of events is the structural necessity of the false solution toward which we are enticed because of the "convincing" character of the staged scene, which is-at least in the classic logic and deduction story-usually sustained by representatives of "official" knowledge (the police). The status of the false solution is epistemologically internal to the detective's final, true solution. The key to the detective's procedure is that the relation to the first, false solutions is not simply an external one: the detective does not apprehend them as simple obstacles to be cast away in order to obtain the truth, rather it is only through them that he can arrive at the truth, for there is no path leading immediately to the truth.' (Looking Awry, p. 54)

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'It would be wrong to conclude from the "nonexistence of the big Other," i.e., from the fact that the big Other is just a retroactive illusion masking the radical contingency of the real, that we can simply suspend this "illusion" and "see things as they really are." The crucial point is that this "illusion" structures our (social) reality itself: its disintegration leads to a "loss of reality" -- or, as Freud puts it in The Future of an Illusion, after conceiving religion as an illusion: "Must not the assumptions that determine our political regulations be called illusions as well?"' (Looking Awry, p. 71)

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'... the function of __the nostalgic object__ is precisely to conceal the antinomy between eye and gaze -- i.e., the traumatic impact of the gaze // qua // object-by means of its power of fascination. In nostalgia, the gaze of the other is in a way domesticated, "gentrified"; instead of the gaze erupting like a traumatic, disharmonious blot, we have the illusion of "seeing ourselves seeing," of seeing the gaze itself.' (Looking Awry, p. 114)

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' We have thus arrived at the most radical dimension of the break that separates the last Lacan from the "standard" version of his theory. The limit in "classical" Lacan is the limit of discourse; discourse is the very field of psychoanalysis and the unconscious is defined as the "discourse of the Other." Toward the end of the 1960s, Lacan gave definite form to his theory of discourse by means of the four discourses (master, university, hysteric, analyst), i.e., the four possible types of social bond or four possible articulations of the network regulating intersubjective relations. The first is the discourse of the master: a certain signifier (S1), represents the subject (/S) for another signifier or, more precisely, for all other signifiers (S2). The problem is, of course, that this operation of signifying representation never comes off without producing some disturbing surplus, some leftover or "excrement," designated by a small // a...' // (p. 130... and continuing on to 131... I'll type that shit later.)

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'The line of demarcation between modernism and postmodernism must, then, lie elsewhere. Ironically, it is Habermas himself who, on account of certain crucial features of his theory, belongs to postmodernism: the break between the first and the second generation of the Frankfurt school, that is, between Adorno, Horkheimer,and Marcuse on the one side and Habermas on the other, corresponds precisely to the break between modernism and postmodernism. In Adorno and Horkheimer's // Dialectic oj Enlighten men // //t//, in Marcuse's //One-Dimensional Man//, in their unmasking of the repressive potential of "instrumental reason," aiming at a radical revoluton in the historical totality of the contemporary world and at the utopian abolition of the difference between "alienated" life spheres, between art and "reality," the modernist project reaches its zenith of self-critical fulfillment. Habermas is, on the other hand, postmodern precisely because he recognizes a positive condition of freedom and emancipation in what appeared to modernism as the very form of alienation: the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere, the functional division of different social domains, etc. This renunciation of the modernist utopia, this acceptance of the fact that freedom is possible only on the basis of a certain fundamental "alienation," attests to the fact that we are in a postmodernist universe.' (Looking Awry, p. 142)

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On essentialism...
Zizek in "First as Tragedy...", p. 22, in footnote #9 that begins on p. 21.

'... do we not find echoes of the same position in today's discursive "anti essentialist" historicism (from Ernesto Laclau to Judith Butler), which views every social ideological entity as the product of a contingent discursive struggle for hegemony? As it was already noted by Fredric Jameson. universalized historicism has a strange ahistorical flavor: once we fully accept and practise the radical contingency of our identities, all authentic historical tension somehow evaporates in the endless performative games of an eternal present. There is a nice self referential irony at work here: there is history only insofar as there persist remainders of "ahistorical" essentialism. This is why radical anti essentialists have to deploy all their hermeneutic deconstructive skills to detect hidden traces of "essentialism" in what appears to be a postmodern "risk society" of contingencies were they to admit that we already live in an "anti essentialist" society, they would have to confront the truly difficult question of the historical character of today's predominant radical historicism itself, i.e ., confront the topic of this historicism as the ideological form of "postmodern" global capitalism.'

'Herein resides the terrorizing dimension of the pressure to choose what resonates even in the most innocent inquiry when one reserves a hotel room ("Soft or hard pilows? Double or twin beds?") is the much more radical probing: "Tell me who you are? What kind of an object do you want to be? What would fil in the gap of your desire?" This is why the "anti-essentialist" Foucauldian apprehension about "fixed identities" -- the incessant urge to practise the "care of the Self,' to continuously re-invent and re-create oneself -- finds a strange echo in the dynamics of "postmodern" capitalism. Of course, good old existentialism had already claimed that man is what he makes of himself, and had linked this radical freedom to existential anxiety. Here the anxiety of experiencing one's freedom, the lack of one's substantial determination, was the authentic moment at which the subject's integration into the fixity of its ideological universe is shattered. But what existentialism was not able to envisage is what Adorno endeavored to encapsulate with the title of his book on Heidegger, // Jargon // //of Authenticity//; namely how, by no longer simply repressing the lack of a fixed identity, the hegemonic ideology directly mobilizes that lack to sustain the endless process of consumerist "self-re-creation."' (Zizek, First as Tragedy..., p. 64-5)