The Ticklish SubjectThe Absent Centre of Political Ontology by Slavoj Žižek
Intro: A Spectre is Haunting
Heideggerian proponent of the thought of Being who stresses the need to ‘traverse’ the horizon of modern subjectivity culminating in current ravaging nihilism.
Inherent excess, inherent logic philosophers of subjectivity articulate certain excessive moment of ‘madness’ inherent to cogito.
Abyss of freedom. Key dimension of the imagination is disruptive.
Proliferation multiple forms of subjectivity.
Part 1 The Night of The World
Deadlock of Transcendental Imagination
Notion that systems truth emerges from its excess.
Violent gesture breaking out of the finite context.
Kind of ‘universality-in-becoming.’ Not yet ‘stabilized.’
The ‘vanishing mediator.’ Stealing that for sure!
Acquires coordinates of situation into which thrown, finds disorienting, lost.
Authentic encounter with death — singular.
The thrown projection. In an act of anticipatory decision. short circuit, symbolic madness. Movement of repetition.
Freely assuming an imposed destiny. A repetition realizes hidden possibility of the past. Assuming one’s destiny as forced free choice.
Radicalized repetition prevents completion of project. Time as unsurpassable horizon.
Heidegger RECOILS after writing book on Kant. Haha.
Getting caught in deadly impasse and/or ambiguity. Mystery of abyss of freedom. Noumenal beyond appears to subject within finite temporal experience — as a gap?
Divinity approached too closely sublime quality turns into excruciating monstrosity. Night all around it — here shoots a bloody head there another apparition.
Dense and ambiguous. Crucial ‘negative’ feature of imagination. Hegel’s imagination qua the ‘activity of dissolution.’
Jenear Realphilosophie — ‘night of the world.’ — (only available German?).
Disperses continuous reality into a confused multitude of partial objects. Night of the world — transcendental imagination at its most elementary and violent, dissolves every objective link.
Hegel: “Beauty hates Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do.” “Tarrying with the negative is magical power that converts it into being.”
Would be hasty to identify night of the world with the Void of the Mystic which seeks peace, not its violent self-contrast.
The Passage Through Madness
That it is not possible to pass from purely ‘animal soul’ immersed in its natural life-world to ‘normal’ subjectivity dwelling in symbolic universe. The ‘vanishing. mediator’ between the two is the ‘mad’ gesture of radical withdrawal from reality which opens up the space for its symbolic constitution.
Lacan’s notion of the ‘dismemebered’ body. Le corps morcele.
Freudian name for the in-between is the death drive!
Unruliness of animal nature requires a ‘master.’ So says Kant.
Violence of dismemberment versus violence of synthesis. Imbalance between apprehension and comprehension — which generates the mathematical sublime. Bombarded by impossible synthesis? Violence of transcendental imagination itself.
Dissolves phenomenal reality in the direction of the monstrous real.
Incessant, repetitive tracing of difference between materialism and idealism.
Lui: To fill the gap between the noumenal and the imagined phenomenal — fails, so that imagination can reveal the noumenal dimension only in a negative way —
Moi: why negativism proceeds to a feeling that is sublimely exquisite, negative fills gap with dazzling immensity of its own failure.
Sublime in approaching the monstrous is itself indicative of the gap, of the abyss. Sublime takes pleasure in painful failure of imagination, self debasement, humiliation. Contours of an invisible world.
Nature in its impossible totality, mother nature as evil stepmother. Sexualizing antimonies. Hidden goddess, name of the father — feminine monstrosity versus moral law.
Moi: But growing up dreamt of so called moral law as a freudian paternal monstrosity who every night killed the mother off and subjected kids to the unspeakable. That went on for quite a while. The monstrosity is everywhere not gender neutral. Moral law is hammer of dick saying I own you. Possession is nine tenths of moral law?
Moi: Tis an exaggeration. Moral law also includes cleanliness — first stabs at hygiene, but just “the same.” Dont disagree about monstrosity that lies within me, but — don’t see the dick gods as being any much better w.r.t. the Monster Mash.
Moi: Monsters everywhere on their own behalf for sure. Monsters ride the carpet of fragile absolutes “pissing” like some ever awakening dormant objective on our hunger for absolute truths.
Jokers wild: We are its excremental discharge.
Fodder Shake Spears: Materialisms extra dimensions — and there it is: Math.
The Violence of the Imagination
Retreat from the abyss. Ground imagination.
Kant: “a blind play of representations, that is to say, less than a dream.”
the monstrous chaotic aggregate of the not-yet-world, pre-ontological chora sublime
Moi: used to call “it” the borderlands, also being out the old way, living on the image. And reality: used to call flatlands, still do some time, also boredom town. Present tense: my helpless horror show.
Moi: Discovery of focus made a difference. Which in some part came from having to illustrate fine details. Place created off of conspiring, this is agnes speaking Chars are very territorial, that had to do with saving spacials from night, trying to work up something, over Zizeks memory habits which for me are Grk in origin. Though, what really is helping too, expands on it, is translating word for word Beckett. Translation forces transitional analysis. Agnes says succulence spreads roots in mud of night soil? And copying it out. Para by para by para.
Moi: I have a place called cutters, and this is one of them.
from Hegel, spectral appearance of partial object
Moi: every char in a way is a partial
Voilence of imagination is twofold.
Moi: LiLu loves folds as a place handler for extensions.
Twofolds violence imagination itself inherent: 1) bombard by images of extreme chaos 2) damage done to imagination by reason. Tension between apprehension and comprehension. Second can never fully catch up with the first. Object is too large. Mathematical sublime doesnt have enough time. Constrained by limitations of temporality.
To retain what runs away, to resist temporal drainage.
Sublime marks moment something emerges out of nothing. Temporality of freedom. Radical rupture in chain of causality.
The Monstrous
Regression into the metaphysical opposition between temporal and eternal lies (in Kant’s metaphysics).
Ethical duty, call of consciousness, motif of guilt. Finitude and throwness, anticipatory-projecting.
When my will follows its Call ,it ultimately wills itself.
Triad: beautiful, sublime, monstrous. Moi: Hmm.
Beauty as apparition of monstrous. Shatters (*forced*) adherence to everyday run of things.
Night of world in which partial objects wander in a state preceding synthesis. Uncanny pre-ontological spectrality.
Moi: The “dead air.” Escaped to.
Psychotic self withdrawal as the ultimate impossibility.
Freudian terms death drive.
Moi: A radical dimension in opposition to violent imposition of order, resists closure of horizon.
Kant with David Lynch
For Lacan, fantasy is on the side of reality. Sustains it. When phantasmic frame disintigrates undergoes loss of reality, starts to perceived as unreal nightmarish universe without foundation.
Schumann’s Carnival. Regression into dreamlike universe, masked ball no one ever knows what or who is hidden beneath mask laughing crazily at us, artistic rendering decomposition of the fantasy frame. Ghastly apparitions strolling along main street.
Living dead.
Rather than learning to suspend, how to identify with the work of imagination in all its inconsistency.
Zero level impossible to endure. Pure void confronted by multiple spectral objects. Exemplification of the undead — object-libido. Negative gesture of contradiction/withdrawal. Replaces reality with membra disjecta. Impossible domain of transcendental freedom.
Glimpsed in Hieronymus Bosch, Surrealists. Here a bloody head there a white apparition.Vanishing mediator.
Gentrifying the monstrous otherness.
David Lynch’s obsession with monstrous dimension of imagination. Voice which no one can perceive but nonetheless dominates.
Dialectical vortex. Symbolically constructed.
What. psychologists call fantasy is the endeavor to close the gap. Form a constituted reality. Lacanian notion of ex-timacy — like that, transgresses border separating interior from exterior. The murmur of the Real.
Chaos theory was born out of the imperfection of the measuring apparatus. Gap is part of the thing itself. Screen through which hidden essence of reality appears.
Kants Acosmism
The Kantian fundamental fantasy, the Other Scene of freedom. Spontaneous free agent. No active free agent without this phatasmic support.
Ontological gap, crack at its very heart — a traumatic excess. Night of the world. Suspension positive order of reality. The true monstrosity, the abyss of freedom, of the night of the world.
Inherent tension between moment of excess and subsequent attempt to normalize the excess.
We are always already in the world , engaged in existential project against a background that eludes our grasp and forever remains the opaque horizon into which we are thrown as finite beings. Heidegger.
Lacan. Unconsciousness is the crack that makes the subjects primordial stance something other. Something in the subject resists its full inclusion into its life world context. Disregards requirements of the reality principle.
Exist in self, out there in the world, the phenomenological reduction derealizes them.
Experience of the sublime involves suspension of engagement in the world.
Point of madness, radical contraction, self-withdrawal, founding gesture of subjectivity. Death drive = the undead, immortal insistence precedes disclosure of being, finite confronts being towards death.
Hegelian Ticklish Subject
What is Negation of Negation
Fall is already itself its own sublation, the wound is already in itself its own healing. The longed-for reversal. Recognizing in the fall itself the longed-for liberation. Negation of negation is simply a process of passage. Negation of negation is nothing but repetition at its purest.
The Dialectical Anamorphosis
For social substance subject’s righteousness equals a crime. Movement of self deception. Negation is the beautiful souls critical attitude toward social surroundings. Thwartedness of subject’s teleological activity. Hegel insisted that subject was inherently pathological.
3, 4, 5
Games with alternative histories. Tristan and Isolde, deadly passion, will to drown oneself in the night of the jouissance, leave behind daily universe of symbolic obligations. Deadly vortex of such passions. The mad dance of reflexivity of dialectic reversals. Freedom is a rupture with phenomenal reality.
The Speculative Identity of Substance and Subject
Most elementary form of Spirit’s externalization — language. Divine existence and its insurmountable ground. Absolute subject is relative, caught in subdivision. The unfathomable excess of a Thing. To discern it in failed ’emancipatory’ attempts at liberation. Walter Benjamin’s notion of the revolutionary gaze. The traces of failures, the absences inscribed in its positive existence. Tremendous emancipatory potential simultaneously. aroused and crushed. Crushed hopes and desires innermost kernal of desire.
The Hegelian Forced Choice
Opposition between concrete and abstract. Zealotry of radical, sees no way of combining “true attitude” with existing space.
Abstract universality, that which out to be, possesses a terrorist/subversive potential. The Universal stands for an impossible/unconditional demand, whose power of negativity is destined to undermine any concrete “totality.”
Subject as unique and irreducible to a particular concrete totality. Power of negative undermines fixity of any particular constellation.
Picture thinking consciousness, ignorance about what its really saying.
Modern infinite right to subjectivity. Only way to rational totality — leads through horror of revolutionary Terror. The revolutionary project. Structure of a forced choice. Unleashes force of abstract negativity.
The monstrosity of revolutionary Terror is indispensable “vanishing mediator.” To clear slate, from old established order.
Excessive unilateral gesture. I want it because I want it.
Concrete Universality
Necessary and impossible. Self refuting. Inconsistent.
A rule cannot exist if there is no exception to it.
Universal is battleground on which multitude of contents fight. Universal is an emptiness filled with it.
A radical cut. Overdetermination, the real of some central impossibility.
Rather than want nothing…
Notion of stubborn attachment. Scorned by moralistic judging conscience. Experienced as a crime.
Stubborn clinging to abstract moral standards — ultimate form of evil.
Equates pathologically stubborn attachments to infinite right of subjectivity. Functions as a negative magnitude. It gives body to the will. Considers discipline its opposite.
Soul as prisoner of body vs deprived of depth of his soul.
Using discipline, “meaningless” mechanical drill — to neutralize excessive life substance — to live life as if already. dead.
MOI – OH I DID THAT. when it got really really bad — walked around saying no worries you are already dead. Its just a matter of time. And found a kind of splendor in the void of death. Still do it when things get bad, up in bed. Apropos of the ascetic? No, wasnt like that, didnt rely on the surface. Made the surface a place other than me.
Nietzsche — nihilistic hatred of life. Moi. Been there do that.
“A revolt against the most fundamental presuppositions of life. Yet it is and remains a Will…”
Desire in something — as its lost, a loss positivized. Moi, yes yes yes to positivize losses, or rather, its apparent emptiness, via the undead, stubborn attachments — to excavations, this for instance is stubborn attachment to my drilling down into “the goods,” what I call excavating. Love stubborn attachments which help provoke — discipline. But this as a mechanical “drill” is not for me meaningless. Meaningless mechanics never have worked to create detachment. Only those with meaning provide “depth” necessary to address it at its depths. Depths went on, in pursuit of desire, as a fascination with their own “thing,” regardless .
Moi – seem to becoming up with a distinction between Focus and Discipline. Not great at discipline. But focus is what I gained from drawing — as one really has to really focus in, in order to get the drawing you are going in after, nothing can interfere with its explicit requirements, or the drawing will engage with the distraction immediately, undermines its focal.
Moi – Focus is a relish in writing. Though in writing the focus explores beguilement, misappropriation, side lines etc. Its almost as if the focus of my work is to hear the off comings, to let it thru — And what, without destroying the picture. Bel and bien, it is the picture. Which discipline for a precomposed picture would force tread over, hmm.
Negating the body — embodied negations.
Negative magnitude stand in for void, for abyss of the Impossible Thing. Stubborn attachment come what may — lethal dis-attachment. Tristins excessive attachment to Isolde. Beautiful woman as image of death. Satisfaction by circulating around the void.
Include Me Out
Always “stealing,” never having anything “truly” belongs to him. To acheive position of a pure invisible mediator, a catalyst.
Towards a Materialist Theory of Grace
Discrepancy between Grace and Virtue.
Margin of freedom lies only in capacity to withhold or grant consent from or to a motive —
Reduction of freedom to the nothing of an empty gesture.
Part 2. The Split Universality
The Politics of Truth
Caught in vortex of systematically undermining and subverting… A violent gesture of distancing… magic, violently poetic moments of subjectivization…
The Truth Event
Infinite multitude of what presents itself. Symbolid reduplicato. Symptomal torsion of being. Elevation of obstacle into transcendental limitation.
Excess of subjectivity, Hegel’s night of the world.
How universality of “woman” emerges out of endless multitude.
Makes visible excess and inconsistencies, the lie. Utilitarian liberal democracy. Multitude of truths. Marginal malfunctionings.
And Its Undecidability
Multiples recognized as an event. Searching for lines of truth. Fidelity to the event. Ex nihilo, the seemingly emerges out of nothing thing. Status of pure multiple and the void.
Paradoxically retain both distance and engagement.
Truth and Ideology/St. Paul with Badiou/
Truth even as intrusion of the traumatic. The four génériques science politics are love.
Succumbing to the temptation of non thought. Suspend attached to this life and enter doman between two deaths, domain of the undead.
Moi — the don juan books, to turn off voices in head. hunters way of seeing.
Spirit is life, flesh is death. St Paul. Morbid Masochistic Morality. Suffering as inherently redeeming. Price of admission eternal life.
Moi — gives meaning to being here that goes beyond corp gigs for cash.
Transgression, indulge in illicit jouissance. Or do what one hates. Because its the law.
Between the Two Deaths
Perverse intermingling of life and death generates desire for trangression. Symbolic rebirth. Radical restructuring.
Nevativity opens up space, changes blance between death and resurrection in favor of death, night of the world. Severing links.
Pre ontological domain of monstrous spectral apparitions. Of the immortal. The monstrous undead object libido.
Parlêtres — beings of language. horrifying in betweens state.
Luther’s famous statement that man is the excrement that fell out of gods anus!!! Ontic eequivalent of modern subject is inherently excremental. commodity on the market. reduced to the almost nothing.
The Lacanian Subject
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