Capitalism is structurally always in crisis - this is why it is expanding all the time: it can only reproduce itself by way of ‘borrowing from the future’; by way of escaping into the future. The final settling of accounts when all debts would be paid cannot ever arrive. Marx had a name for the social point of impossibility: 'class struggle’. And, perhaps, one should extend this to the very definition ofhumanity: what ultimately distinguishes man from animal is not a positive feature (speech, tool-making, reflexive thinking, or whatever), but the rise of a new point of impossibility designated by Freud and Lacan as das Ding, the impossible-real ultimate reference point of desire.

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claptrap that even if I try to deny God, deep in myself I continue to believe; the unconscious is not in me, it is out there in interactions

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/832150064810303488 http://ift.tt/2nTocaW

Judith Butler pointed out that the Foucauldian ‘body’ as the site of resistance is none other than the Freudian ‘psyche’: paradoxically, ‘body’ is Foucault’s name for the psychic apparatus insofar as it resists the soul’s domination. That is to say, when, in his well-known definition of the soul as the ‘prison of the body’, Foucault turns around the standard Platonic-Christian definition of the body as the ‘prison of the soul’, what he calls ‘body’ is not simply the biological body, but is effectively already caught in some kind of presubjective psychic apparatus. Consequently, don’t we encounter in Kant a secret homologous inversion, only in the opposite direction, of the relationship between body and soul: what Kant calls ‘immortality of the soul’ is effectively the immortality of the other, ethereal, ‘undead’ body? This redoubling of the body into the common mortal body and the ethereal undead body brings us to the crux of the matter: the distinction between the two deaths, the biological death of the common mortal body and the death of the other ‘undead’ body; it is clear that what Sade aims at in his notion of a radical Crime is the murder of this second body.

Disparities, 2016 - SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2oeytPG

“officially”, he strives desperately for certainty, for an unambiguous answer that would provide the remedy against the worm of doubt that is consuming him; actually, the true catastrophe he is trying to evade at any price is this very solution, the emergence of a final, unambiguous answer; which is why he endlessly sticks to his uncertain, indeterminate, oscillating status … There is a kind of reflective reversal at work here: the subject persists in his indecision and puts off the choice not because he is afraid that, by choosing one pole of the alternative, he would lose the other pole (that, in the case of Lina, by opting for innocence, she would have to accept the fact that her husband is a mere small-time crook, devoid of any inner strength, even in the direction of Evil). What he truly fears to lose is doubt as such, the uncertainty, the open state where everything is still possible the second death is prior to the first, and not after, as de Sade dreams it.’

http://ift.tt/2odOqp6 http://ift.tt/2om4pi9

What is so menacing about the femme fatale is not the boundless enjoyment that overwhelms the man and makes him woman’s plaything or slave. It is not Woman as object of fascination that causes us to lose our sense of judgment and moral attitude but, on the contrary, that which remains hidden beneath this fascinating mask and which appears once the masks fall off: the dimension of the pure subject fully assuming the death drive.

http://ift.tt/2nBrWxo

I don’t want to be present in the events that I participate in. I try to become invisible. I perceive myself as someone who shouldn’t exist

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/831791459753922561 http://ift.tt/2nk7ApD

“I’m not responsible for it, that I merely fulfill the Other’s Will"…- this is what Kantian ethics prohibits. …At its most radical, Kantian ethics is NOT “sadist,” but precisely what prohibits assuming the position of a Sadean executioner.

http://ift.tt/2nvF1GU

get rid of the stupid superego of enjoyment: embrace deathdrive in its disruptive traversing of fantasy Beat deathdrive by deathdrive itself

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/831426550071451648 http://ift.tt/2o4k9c8

the Spirit is itself the wound it tries to heal, i.e., the wound is self-inflicted. That is to say, what is “Spirit” at its most elementary? The “wound” of nature: subject is the immense – absolute - power of negativity, of introducing a gap/cut into the given-immediate substantial unity, the power of differentiating, of “abstracting,” of tearing apart and treating as self-standing what in reality is part of an organic unity

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Hegel, the philosopher who made the most radical attempt to think the abyss of madness at the core of subjectivity, is also the philosopher who brought to its “mad” climax the philosophical System as the totality of meaning. This is why, for very good reasons, “Hegel” stands in the eyes of the common sense for the moment at which philosophy gets mad, explodes into a crazy pretense at “absolute knowledge.” However, Hegel’s point is here a much more refined one: not that everything is madness, but that “normality,” the reign of reason, is a self-sublation of madness

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Some demand grounds its existence in complaints: ”I am insofar as I make the Other…guilty for my misery”

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/831065599073714176 http://ift.tt/2o7eu2n

Woman ‘‘reads’’ man’s deep dreams, returns them to him as his symptom, his own message, his Other Thing, which he isn’t ready to acknowledge

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/830706808851406848 http://ift.tt/2okzqSY

we live in a permissive universe, you should strive for pleasures and happiness— but, in order to have a life full of happiness and pleasures, you should avoid dangerous excesses, so everything is prohibited if it is not deprived of its substance

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man as such is “derailed”, it eats more than “natural”, it is obsessed with sexuality more than “natural”, i.e. it follows its drives with an excess far beyond “natural” (instinctual) satisfaction, and this excess of drive has to be “gentrified”

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the enemy is..overidentification. The fundamental move is that of assuming distance.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/830344435229683712 http://ift.tt/2of9vMh

So, we have a subject who dedicates his life to pleasure and becomes so deeply involved in the preparatory activities (jogging, massages, tanning, applying cremes and lotions…) that the attraction of the official Goal of his efforts fades away; the narcissistic “care of the Self,” and not the “repressive” network of social prohibitions, is the ultimate enemy of intense sexual experiences. The utopia of a post-psychoanalytic subjectivity engaged in the pursuit of new, idiosyncratic bodily pleasures beyond sexuality has reverted into disinterested boredom; and the direct intervention of pain (sado-masochistic sexual practices) seems the only remaining path to the intense experience of pleasure.

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seeking a trait with which to identify, Kafka’s protagonist does not understand the meaning of the call of the Other.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/829980786719936512 http://ift.tt/2mVstqd

Absolute Knowledge is terrifying, because it threatens mortification of all the richness of the living

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/829707891498160128 http://ift.tt/2nKHaBb

Absolute Knowledge is, of course, unattainable, an unrealizable Ideal!) and forbidden (Absolute Knowledge is terrifying, because it threatens mortification of all the richness of the living through the self-movement of the concept

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the “object small a” is the pure form of a curve, this sinthome discernible in multiple guises that are echoed in each other—the uncanny curved shapes from the credits, the curve in Madeleine’s hair (copied from the same curve in the hair of Carlotta Valdes from her portrait), the winding streets of San Francisco where Scottie is tailing Madeleine, the spiral of the descending staircase in the tower

in the film Vertigo http://ift.tt/2nxXzbO

Although sexual jouissance is inherently masturbatory and idiotic, isolating me—the core of my subjectivity—from my partner, reducing the partner to an instrument (of my jouissance ), it does not hold that, for this reason, I must renounce sexual jouissance to assert my love for the other. On the contrary, it is precisely such a renunciation that is, as a rule, a fake, a stratagem masking some unacknowledged jouissance (there is nothing more elementary than the jouissance provided by renouncing pleasures in sacrificing oneself for the other). For that reason, perhaps the ultimate proof of love for the other is that I am ready to share with the other the very heart of my masturbatory idiotic jouissance

http://ift.tt/2ng506X

Fantasy constructs…the jouissance we are deprived of is concentrated in the Other

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/829619707091283968 http://ift.tt/2mm9rOp

Instead of being bothered by what I am for others I no longer look for a guarantee in another’s desire & assume the contingency of my being.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/829257289085370368 http://ift.tt/2nBfzTd

“Woman is a symptom of man” seems to be one of the most notoriously “antifeminist” theses of the late Lacan. There is, however, a fundamental ambiguity as to how we are to read it: this ambiguity reflects the shift in the notion of the symptom within the Lacanian theory. 10 If we conceive the symptom as it was articulated by Lacan in the 1950s—namely as a cyphered message—then, of course, woman-symptom appears as the sign, the embodiment of man’s fall, attesting to the fact that man “gave way as to his desire.” For Freud, the symptom is a compromise formation: in the symptom, the subject gets back, in the form of a cyphered, unrecognized message, the truth about his desire, the truth that he was not able to confront, that he betrayed. So, if we read the thesis of “woman as a symptom of man” against this background, we inevitably approach the position that was most forcefully articulated by Otto Weininger, Freud’s contemporary, a notorious Viennese antifeminist and anti-Semite from the turn of the century, who wrote the extremely influential bestseller Sex and Character 11 and then commited suicide at the age of twenty-four. Weininger’s position is that, according to her very ontological status, woman is nothing but a materialization, an embodiment of man’s sin: in herself, she doesn’t exist, which is why the proper way to get rid of her is not to fight her actively or to destroy her—it is enough for man to purify his desire, to rise to pure spirituality, and, automatically, woman loses the ground under her feet, disintegrates. …We have thus the male world of pure spirituality and undistorted communication, communication without constraint (if we may be permitted to use this Habermasian syntagm), the universe of ideal intersubjectivity, and woman is not an external, active cause which lures man into a fall—she is just a consequence, a result, a materialization of man’s fall. So, when man purifies his desire of the pathological remainders, woman disintegrates in precisely the same way a symptom dissolves after successful interpretation. …If, however, we conceive the symptom as it was articulated in Lacan’s last writings as a particular signifying formation which confers on the subject its very ontological consistency, enabling it to structure its basic, constitutive relationship to enjoyment (jouissance), then the entire relationship is reversed: if the symptom is dissolved, the subject itself loses the ground under his feet, disintegrates. In this sense, “woman is a symptom of man” means that man himself exists only through woman qua his symptom: all his ontological consistency hangs on, is suspended from his symptom, is “externalized” in his symptom. men are “active,” they take refuge in relentless activity in order to escape the proper dimension of the act. The retreat of man from woman (the retreat of the hard-boiled detective from the femme fatale in film noir, for example), is thus effectively a retreat from the death drive as a radical ethical stance: the opposite of Weininger’s image of woman as incapable of a proper ethical attitude.

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neutrality of the symbolic order functions as the ultimate guarantee for the so-called “sense of reality”: as soon as this neutrality is smeared, “external reality” itself loses the self-evident character of something present “out there” and begins to vacillate, i.e., is experienced as delimited by an invisible frame: the paranoia of the noir universe is primarily visual, based upon the suspicion that our vision of reality is always already distorted by some invisible frame behind our backs

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the noir universe is characterized by a radical split, a kind of structural imbalance, as to the possibility of narrativization: the integration of the subject’s position into the field of the big Other, the narrativization of his fate, becomes possible only when the subject is in a sense already dead, although still alive, when “the game is already over"

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In ego-psychology the aim of the analytical cure is to get rid of the dirty water (symptoms, pathological tics, etc., i.e., everything that appears as a disturbance) in order to keep the child (ego) as unspoiled as possible, cleansed of all dark spots, whereas the aim of the Lacanian cure is to throw out the child (to suspend the analysand’s ego), so that the analysand is confronted with his “dirty water,” with symptoms and fantasies which organize his/her enjoyment.

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Darth Vader in the Star Wars trilogy wears a mask concealing a distorted, amorphous face, i.e., also plays the role of “anal father”. …“Anal father” points in a more appropriate way toward the obscene nature of the father qua presymbolic “partial object.”

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The cynical dismissal of semblances as “mere semblances” : The true illusion consists in substantializing the Real itself, in taking the Real as a substantial and reducing the symbolic to a mere texture of semblances. — Cynics …dismiss the symbolic texture as a mere semblance and are blind to …to the way we can intervene into the Real through the symbolic.

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Is (what we usually refer to as) religion not precisely…an attempt to obfuscate this void of infinity by way of imagining a personalized supreme Being, …‘which guarantees the meaning of our life’? …What if our ‘return to ourselves’ resides precisely in our fully assuming this fact, in the spiritual stance which expresses …the awe apropos of the infinity of the universe? Such a stance …involves a profound ‘mystical’ experience of the abyss in which we dwell – in it, we effectively ‘lose the ground under our feet’

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Note Gabriel’s ambiguity: god, the divine, is for him ‘our assuming a maximal distance towards ourselves’ and at the same time the ‘return to ourselves from a maximal distance’. So what if we simply do not return to ourselves but fully accept that we are just a ‘vanishing point in infinity’, ‘an insignificant speck of dust on a small planet’?

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When a wife is afraid that her husband is sick, she may well worry that he is not sick (desiring him to be sick). And could we not say exactly the same about the Left liberals horrified by Trump? Ils ont peur qu’il ne soit une catastrophe. What they really fear is that he will not be a catastrophe. One should get rid of the false panic, fearing the Trump victory as the ultimate horror, which made us support Hillary in spite of all her obvious shortcomings. Trump’s victory created a totally new political situation with chances for a more radical Left. Today’s liberal Left and populist Right are both caught in the politics of fear: fear of the immigrants, of feminists, etc., or the fear of fundamentalist populists, etc.

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Any resemblance with the old anti-Nazi story of how we first passively observed when the Nazis in power took away the Communists, then the Jews, then the moderate Left, then the liberal center, then even honest conservatives… is purely accidental. …First, the radical Left had to be sacrificed as out of touch with our new postmodern times and its new “paradigms.” Then, the moderate Social-Democratic Left was sacrificed as also out of touch with the necessities of the new global capitalism. Now, in the last epoch of this sad tale, the moderate liberal Right itself (Juppé) was sacrificed as out of touch with conservative values which have to be enlisted if we, the civilized world, want to beat Le Pen.

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Zupančič put it succinctly, “the extremely poor do the fighting for the extremely rich, as it was clear in the election of Trump. And the Left does little else than scold and insult them.”

Zizek citing Alenka Zupancic http://ift.tt/2mGDVaV

Jon Stewart, John Oliver…mostly enact the pure arrogance of the liberal intellectual elite: “Parodying Trump is at best a distraction from his real politics; at worst it converts the whole of politics into a gag. The process has nothing to do with the performers or the writers or their choices. Trump built his candidacy on performing as a comic heel—that has been his pop culture persona for decades. It is simply not possible to parody effectively a man who is a conscious self-parody, and who has become president of the United States on the basis of that performance.”

Zizek citing Stephen Marche http://ift.tt/2nhoMjb

Trump reminded some of his voters of the half-forgotten reality of class struggle, although, of course, he did it in a distorted populist way. Trump’s anti-establishment rage was a kind of return of what was repressed in the moderate liberal Left’s politics focusing on cultural and PC issues. This Left got from Trump its own message in its inverted true form. That’s why the only way to reply to Trump would have been to fully appropriate the anti-establishment rage, not to dismiss it as white trash primitivism.

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pain in nature itself, the pain which gets expressed/resolved in human speech – the Freudian Unbehagen in der Kultur thus gets supplemented by an uncanny Unbehagen in der Natur itself: imagine all of nature waiting for the gift of speech so it can express how bad it is to be a vegetable or a fish. Is it not the special torment of nature to be deprived of the means of conveying its pent-up aggravation, unable to articulate even the simplest lament, ‘Ah me! I am the sea’? And does not the emergence on earth of the speaking being effectively release this terrible organic tension and bring it to a higher level of non-resolution? While there are some intriguing passages in Lacan’s seminars where he speculates on the infinite pain of being a plant, raising the possibility of an Unbehagen in Der Natur, for the most part he conceives the relationship between nature and culture to be one of radical discontinuity.

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The Symbolic tortures/derails life, it subordinates life to a foreign compulsion, depriving it forever of its homeostasis – the move from instinct to drive, from need to desire. Within this perspective, the symbolic order is ‘always-already here’ as our unsurpassable horizon, every account of its genesis amounts to a fantasmatic obfuscation of its constitutive gap. In this Lacanian–structuralist version of the ‘hermeneutic circle’, all we can do is to circumscribe the void/impossibility which makes the Symbolic non-all and inconsistent, the void in which external limit coincides with the internal one (the void delimitates the Symbolic from the real; however, this limitation cuts into the Symbolic itself).

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God doesn’t exist, but its inexistence leaves traces in our reality. More precisely, God qua Cause is a retroactive effect of its own traces-effects, in the same way that a political cause only exists in the series of its effects: communism only exists insofar as there are individuals fighting for it (or attacking it), motivated by it in their activity. So the idea that something exists because something else doesn’t/cannot exist could be read at two levels: first, god ex-sists (or inexists) because there is no sexual relationship; then, our ordinary reality exists because god doesn’t exist. There is a God-Woman because there is no sexual relationship, and this God-Woman doesn’t exist but merely inexists.

http://ift.tt/2mdqoWe

“Celebration” tells us a lot about how today, in the false memory syndrome of remembering being molested by one’s parents, Freud’s Ur–Father is resuscitated. “Celebration” tells us this precisely through its artificial character. The ultimate paradox of the film is that it’s the ultimate nostalgia. This horror of the rapist father, instead of shocking us, it articulates a kind of nostalgic longing for the good old times when we had fathers who really had force, and when it was really possible to experience such traumas. This is the paradox I want to address. One would expect that fantasies are defenses against traumas. We have a traumatic experience, we cannot endure it so we build up a protective fantasy web of fictions. I claim that we invent, as a protective web, trauma itself. Now, we would normally expect that concentration camp life would be the trauma and we build a fantasy to shield ourselves from it. But perhaps the trauma is the fantasy we construct to protect ourselves from something else. But what can be worse than concentration camp life itself? Let me return again to the opposition of the two fathers, imaginary and symbolic. I claim that what these horrifying figures fill in is the gap of symbolic authority. These two fathers, protective and rapist, have nonetheless something in common although they are opposed. They both suspend the agency of symbolic law, or symbolic prohibition, the proper paternal agency of authority whose function is to introduce the childhood into the universe of social reality with its harsh demands. The reality to which the child is exposed without any maternal protective shield. …Vinterberg’s rapist father is also a father outside the constraints of the symbolic law, with access to full enjoyment. …Vinterberg’s father is this very violence outside symbolic law, and again what is missing is simply the father as symbolic authority. So what happens with the functioning of subjects when symbolic authority loses its efficiency? I claim we get subjects who are strangely de–realized, deprived of their psychology as if we are dealing with robotic puppets that are obeying some strange blind mechanism.

http://ift.tt/2nrmWZ6

we are not directly immersed into the Real. …The Real appears as something absolutely foreign/repellent – this fact already implies that we are already subjected to symbolic castration which entails the loss of the immediate identification with life. Once we are in the Symbolic the ultimate trauma is life itself. Lacan’s name for finitude is (symbolic) castration, and his name for immortality is death drive. They are the two sides of the same operation, i.e. it’s not that the substance of life, the immortal Jouissance-Thing, is ‘castrated’ by the arrival of the symbolic order. …The undead Thing is the remainder of castration, it is generated by castration, and vice versa, there is no ‘pure’ castration, castration itself is sustained by the immortal excess which eludes it.

http://ift.tt/2mNGLga

omnipotency overlaps with impotence, or, even more radically,…the ‘thrust of life’ overlaps with death drive: the phallic signifier stands for potency, live thrust, but potency within the domain of the signifier, which means: of the symbolic death, of the subordination of life to a dead symbolic machine: This articulation by Freud of the death instinct is the articulation of a position essential to an animal being who is caught up and articulated in a signifying system which permits him to dominate his immanence as a living being, and to perceive himself as already dead… …Not, as it may appear, simply the experience of some presymbolic primordial Real Thing but already the obverse, the other side, of symbolic castration – and vice versa, we do not experience ‘signifier in the pure state’ when we encounter a pure symbolic formation like a mathematic formula but precisely when we confront the Real at its most raw.

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the God of the real – is like the Lady in courtly love, it is das Ding, a capricious, cruel master who simply has no sense of universal justice. God-the-Father thus quite literally doesn’t know what he is doing, and Christ is the one who does know it, but is reduced to an impotent, compassionate observer, addressing his father with ‘Father, can’t you see I’m burning?’ – burning together with all the victims of the father’s rage.

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Catholicism is a culture of external playful rituals in contrast to the inner sense of guilt and the pressure of authenticity that characterize Protestantism; in Catholicism we are allowed to just follow the ritual and ignore the authenticity of our inner belief

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Catholicism over Protestantism: Catholicism is a culture of external playful rituals… …This playfulness should not deceive us: Catholicism is resorting to such subterfuges to save the divine big Other in his goodness, while the capriciously ‘irrational’ Predestination in Protestantism confronts us with a god who is ultimately not good and all-powerful but stained by the indelible suspicion of being stupid, arbitrary, or even outright evil. The dark implicit lesson of Protestantism is: if you want god, you have to renounce (part of the divine) goodness.

http://ift.tt/2mCZMlJ

class antagonism is the Real which is obfuscated by the multiplicity of social conflicts.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/828182171089268736 http://ift.tt/2n7J5vu

the subject is always ‘decentred’

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/827949635176165376 http://ift.tt/2mINTv2

the Unconscious is not a deep-seated wisdom but a big mess, a bricolage of symptoms and fantasies which deal with or cover up this deadlock.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/827946870060236800 http://ift.tt/2mqnfqq

partial drives emerge as attempts to obfuscate the basic antagonism (to supplement the absence of sexual relationship

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/827869408009805827 http://ift.tt/2lF3EhN

The whole project in The Dialectic of Enlightenment is “let’s paint the ultimate outcome of the administered world as unavoidable, as catastrophe, for this is the only way to effectively counteract it.”

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Perverse self-instrumentalization (positing oneself as the instrument of the big-Other) necessarily becomes violence as an end-in-itself… …He is staging the fiction of the big Other in order to conceal the jouissance he derives from the destructive orgy of his acts.

http://ift.tt/2lVdlM7