riot hero
[lacan] starts from the assumption that communication is always a failure: moreover, that is has to be a failure, and that’s the reason we keep on talking. if we understood each other, we would all remain silent. luckily enough, we don’t understand each other, so we keep on talking.
i remember getting out two slices of bread. i remember spreading peanut butter on one, jelly on the other. i remember getting a glass, and pouring milk into it. what happened to my sandwich?
Danielle Allen:
There will be times when one needs to cross the street for safety’s sake; the question is how one does it. On a street late at night, when there aren’t other watchful eyes around, it’s better to cross sooner, rather than scurrying away at the last minute… Our methods, even of crossing streets for safety’s sake, signal to others what we think of them. One needs to display to strangers, as much as possible, that one is willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, and one must present oneself, too, such that one earns the benefit of their doubt. To cross early is to leave open the possibility that one has crossed for reasons unrelated to the stranger’s approach; that possibility gives the stranger a chance not to take personally the fact that one has crossed the street. Democratic trust depends on public displays of an egalitarian, well-intentioned spirit.
Charles Baudelaire:
C’est par le malentendu universel que tout le monde s’accorde. Car si, par malheur, on se comprenait, on ne pourrait jamais s’accorder.
It is by universal misunderstanding that we agree with each other. If, by some misfortune, we understood each other, we would never agree.
Louis Hartz:
Locke dominates American political thought, as no thinker anywhere dominates the political thought of a nation. He is a massive national cliché.
Those who believe Marx had a limited conception of the political (e.g. in The Communist Manifesto, he describes the modern state as the executive committee of the bourgeoisie) seem to miss the whole point of Marx’s critique from “On the Jewish Question”: that liberal rights are themselves too limited, and that our commitment to them prevents the universalizing gesture proper to (authentic) politics. As a corollary to the standard leftist critique of the exclusion underlying the liberal-democratic order (which exposes the particular content that conditions and limits the universalization of liberal-democratic principles), Marx argues that the only authentic political gesture would be to challenge the existing order from the standpoint of its exclusion… in the name of the universal!
“Without the claim to universality, there simply is no politics.” In discussing the qualities of the class that would emancipate bourgeois society, Marx (in an early essay, “A Contribution to the Critique of Helgel’s Philosophy of Rights: Introduction“) states that it would be possessed of a specific genius:
that genius which pushes material force to political power, that revolutionary daring which throws at its adversary the defiant phrase: I am nothing and I should be everything.
JCD points out that several sections of this essay are reminiscent of Ranciere’s arguments about the status of the “part without a part” within a society– the part that, although inherent to the existing universal order, has no ‘proper place’ within it. Later, Marx is even more explicit:
A class must be formed which has radical chains, a class in civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class which is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of society which has a universal character because its sufferings are universal, and which does not claim a particular redress because the wrong which is done to it is not a particular wrong but wrong in general.
JCD: “This, the call of those who are nothing and should be everything, a call signalling a wrong, the wrong, that constitutes their social position, is essentially what Ranciere outlines in Disagreement.” A similar argument is also made by Zizek (here, for example). There you go: Marx, contemporary democratic theorist!
Inspiration: In “The Plague of Fantasies,” Zizek endorses Paul de Man’s notion of interpretation as a “violent act of disfiguring the interpreted text; paradoxically, this disfiguration supposedly comes much closer to the ‘truth’ of the interpreted text than its historicist contextualization.”
Let us focus on Lacan’s great readings of classical literary and philosophical texts (Antigone, Plato’s Symposium, Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason). These readings clearly represent a case of violent appropriation, irrespective of philological rules, sometimes anachronistic, often ‘factually incorrect’, displacing the work from its proper hermeneutic context; yet this very violent gesture brings about a breathtaking ‘effect of truth’, a shattering new insight — once one reads Lacan, an entirely new dimension of Plato’s and Kant’s work is revealed. The key point here is how this ‘effect of truth’ is strictly co-dependent with the violent gesture of ‘anachronistic’ appropriation: the only way to uncover the truth of Plato or Kant is to read them as ‘our contemporaries’.
If I had to explain everything I posted here, I wouldn’t even bother. Lately I’ve been looking at some old books and re-reading my favorite passages. Since most of this is unrelated to my actual work (the work I’m supposed to be doing), I feel like sharing some of this stuff with you, so that it won’t seem to me like a complete waste of time.
In chapter 2 of The Puppet and the Dwarf, “The ‘Thrilling Romance of Orthodoxy’”, Zizek argues that “far from being boring, humdrum, and safe, the search for true orthodoxy is the most daring and perilous adventure” (35). He follows Chesterton in asserting the “truly subversive, even revolutionary, character of orthodoxy“: “civilization itself is the most sensational of departures and the most romantic of rebellions”; “morality is the most dark and daring of conspiracies”. (Similarly, Zizek wonders “what if, in our postmodern world or ordained transgression, in which the marital commitment is perceived as ridiculously out of date, those who cling to it are the true subversives? What if today, straight marriage is ‘the most dark and daring of all transgressions?’”)
———————————-
Update: OK. Let’s get serious, and turn to Zizek and Chesterton’s “subversive” reading of Christianity. For both, the gap that separates man from God is transposed (in a typical Lacanian gesture) into God Himself, as His own radical splitting or, rather, self-abandonment (FTKNWTD liii). Christ’s “Father, why hast thou forsaken me?“, uttered at his crucifixion, points not to the gap between man and God, but to the split in God Himself.
“When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. THey will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.”
In this tale of the Passion, “there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt.” According to Chesterton, this makes Christianity “terribly revolutionary. That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already; but that God could have his back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents for ever. Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone has felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king.”
In her account of the “political imaginary” shared by mass societies in both the United States and the Soviet Union during the early twentieth century, from Dreamworld and Catastrophe, Susan Buck-Morss observes an uncanny resemblance between two widely-distributed images from 1933: above, the U.S. movie poster for King Kong, featuring a giant ape atop the newly-completed Empire State Building; below, the final design for the planned Palace of the Soviets, topped by a colossal statue of Lenin.
Buck-Morss explains:
Lenin has in common with King Kong the fact that both are symbols of the masses, displayed as spectacles for the masses. Like all dream images their meaning is ambivalent, vacillating between a desire that is expressed and a fear that holds it in check. This is what gives them their power to thrill. It is through seduction that they exert control.
Anyway, this sure beats the assigned reading for Patchen’s course.
“When in love, I solicit a look, what is profoundly unsatisfying and always missing is that - You never look at me from the place from which I see you. Conversely, what I look at is never what I want to see
Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 103, original emphasis).
|
|
|
|