Fantasy, at its most elementary, becomes inaccessible to the subject, the Unconscious is this inaccessible phenomenon

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/859319109066129408 http://ift.tt/2qCwUJ2

The neurotic acknowledges the Law in order to take enjoyment in its transgressions snatching back from the Other part of stolen jouissance

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/858950431195754497 http://ift.tt/2rpAuK0

seduction consists in the play of appearances, hints, and promises, and thereby evokes the elusive domain of the suprasensible sublime Thing

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/858588087714238464 http://ift.tt/2qDKtqU

We are finally getting rid of the metaphysical obsession with authentic Being.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/858230683365507072 http://ift.tt/2qxeIof

All of a sudden, one appears to possess an unspecified X, provokes transference in others; there is always something “magic” about it.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/857864512262864896 http://ift.tt/2sfpig2

to get rid of an over-proximity of belief you no longer have to believe yourself, your belief will already exist objectified in your praying

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/857504895859118080 http://ift.tt/2r4RLHC

Kneel down and you will thereby make someone else believe!

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/857144786310107138 http://ift.tt/2qqAaLP

Kneel down and you will believe that you knelt down because you believed!

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/856777343037255680 http://ift.tt/2r2iO6u

Absolute Knowledge is, of course, unattainable, an unrealizable Ideal!) and forbidden

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/856421293855576064 http://ift.tt/2r7O9Dq

a clear prohibition relieves the guilt which weighs on us when prohibition fails to intervene [in today’s] command to be happy

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/856057600726716417 http://ift.tt/2qniIaV

woman’s impossibility of achieving an identity with herself ..is why woman is a symptom of man [and vice versa]

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/855691415640256512 http://ift.tt/2r5GbdY

There is a Real not because the symbolic cannot grasp its external Real, but because the symbolic cannot fully become itself.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/855327790454906880 http://ift.tt/2r6rM2T

Symbolic castration is the castration which occurs by the very fact of being caught up in the symbolic order, assuming a symbolic mandate

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/854969197968990209 http://ift.tt/2s0uB2P

the ever-lacking object-cause of desire is embodiment of a lack; its fascinating presence is masks the emptiness of the place it occupies.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/854605775142080513 http://ift.tt/2qTCGZu

the best way to destroy an enemy is to leave the field free for him to deploy his potential, so that… the lack of any external obstacle will confront him with the absolutely inherent obstacle of the inconsistency of his own position:

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the patriarchal erotic discourse creates the femme fatale as the inherent threat against which the male identity should assert itself.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/854240630419202048 http://ift.tt/2qh4qEC

the femme fatale qua embodiment of the universe’s corruption is clearly a male fantasy, she materializes its inner antagonisms

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/853882015841693696 http://ift.tt/2qevwfD

When borderline theorists deplore feelings of emptiness as major complaint of patients, recognize in emptiness another name for the subject.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/853515858953605120 http://ift.tt/2qhcYe5

suspend the function of the ego, so that, once its control diminishes, the “dirt” of the analysand’s enjoyment comes to light

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/853152201249873920 http://ift.tt/2raLBHk

woman enjoys insofar as her other (man) does not know

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/852791070387601409 http://ift.tt/2qO21EL

the subject endorses the loss, re-inscribes it as its triumph. Reconciliation is thus simultaneously both less and more than the standard idea of overcoming an antagonism: less, because nothing “really changes”; more, because the subject of the process is deprived of its very (particular) substance.

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inner Spirit, certain of itself, “no longer needs to form/shape nature and to render it spiritual in order to fixate the divine and to make its unity with nature externally visible: insofar as the free thought thinks externality, it can leave it the way it is ( kann er es lassen wie es ist ).” This sudden retroactive reversal from not-yet to already-is (we never directly realize a goal—we pass from striving to realize a goal to a sudden recognition that it is already realized) is what distinguishes Hegel from all kinds of historicist tropes, including the standard Marxist critical reproach that the Hegelian ideal reconciliation is insufficient, since it leaves reality (real pain and suffering) the way it is, and that what is needed is actual reconciliation through radical social transformation. For Hegel, the illusion is not that of the enforced “false reconciliation” which ignores the persisting divisions; the true illusion resides in not seeing that, in what appears to us as the chaos of becoming, the infinite goal is already realized : “Within the finite order, we cannot experience or see that the goal is truly achieved. The accomplishment of the infinite goal resides only in overcoming the illusion [ Täuschung— deception] that this goal is not yet achieved.”15 In short, the ultimate deception lies in the failure to see that one already has what one is looking for—like Christ’s disciples awaiting his “real” reincarnation, blind to the fact that their collective already was the Holy Spirit

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in Hegel’s philosophy, the fundamental stance of the subject towards objective reality is not that of practical engagement, of confrontation with the inertia of objectivity, but that of letting-it-be: purified of its pathological particularity, the universal subject is certain of itself, it knows that its thought already is the form of reality, so it can renounce enforcing its projects upon reality, it can let reality be the way it is. This is why my labor gets all the more close to its truth the less I work to satisfy my need, that is, to produce objects I will consume. This is why industry which produces for the market is spiritually “higher” than production for one’s own needs: in market-production, I manufacture objects with no relation to my needs. The highest form of social production is therefore that of a merchant : “the merchant is the only one who relates to the Good as a perfect universal subject, since the object in no way interests him on behalf of its aesthetic presence or its use value, but only insofar as it contains a desire of an other.”12 And this is also why, in order to arrive at the “truth” of labor, one should gradually abstract from the (external) goal it strives to realize. The parallel with war is appropriate here: in the same way that the “truth” of the military struggle is not the destruction of the enemy, but the sacrifice of the “pathological” content of the warrior’s particular Self, its purification into the universal Self, the “truth” of labor as the struggle with nature is also not victory over nature, compelling it to serve human goals, but the self-purification of the laborer itself. Labor is simultaneously the (trans)formation of external objects and the disciplinary self-formation/education ( Bildung ) of the subject itself. Hegel here celebrates precisely the alienated and alienating character of labor: far from being a direct expression of my creativity, labor forces me to submit to artificial discipline, to renounce my innermost immediate tendencies, to alienate myself from my natural Self

(via lacanians) http://ift.tt/2qGe0UM

Hegel was fully aware that reconciliation does not alleviate real suffering and antagonisms—his formula from the foreword to his Philosophy of Right is that one should “recognize the Rose in the Cross of the present”; or, to put it in Marx’s terms: in reconciliation one does not change external reality to fit some Idea, one recognizes this Idea as the inner “truth” of the miserable reality itself. The Marxist reproach that, instead of transforming reality, Hegel merely proposes a new interpretation of it, thus in a way misses the point—it is knocking on an open door, since, for Hegel, in order to pass from alienation to reconciliation, we do not have to change reality, but rather the way we perceive and relate to it.

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Lacan is actually much closer to Kafka than to the poststructuralists. It has become a cliché to see Kafka as the “writer of absence” who described a world whose structure remained religious, but where the central space reserved for God is empty. … “the Other does not exist” (Lacan),… it does not exist as Guarantor of truth

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“Absolute Knowledge” is divisive AK is in no way a position of “total knowledge,” a position from which, at long last, the subject could finally “know everything.” We must take into account the exact place at which the idea of AK emerges, the end of the Phenomenology of Spirit, the point when the consciousness “de-fetishizes” itself and thus gains the ability to access true knowledge, knowledge instead of truth, and therefore “science” in the Hegelian sense. As such, AK is just a “scilicet,” a “you can know” that opens the space for the development of science (logic, etc.). What does the fetish represent at its core? An object that fills the constitutive lack in the Other, the empty space of the “original repression,” the place where the signifier must be missing in order for the signifying network to articulate itself. In this sense, “de-fetishization” is equivalent to the experience of the constitutive lack in the Other, the Other as barred. Perhaps de-fetishization is even more difficult to accomplish because the fetish reverses the traditional relationship between the “sign” and the “thing.” We normally understand the “sign” as something that represents, replaces, the missing object. When the fetish is an object, it is a thing that replaces the missing “sign.” It is easy to detect absence, the structure of co-referential signifiers, where we thought there was the full presence of a thing, but it is much harder to detect the inert presence of an object in the place where we thought there were only “signs,” an interplay of representations referring back to each other, nothing more than traces. This is why we must take care to differentiate Lacan from any so-called “poststructuralist” tradition whose objective is to “deconstruct” the “metaphysics of presence,” to deny the possibility of full presence, to see only the traces of absence, to dissolve fixed identity into a cluster of references and traces … Lacan is actually much closer to Kafka than to the poststructuralists. It has become a cliché to see Kafka as the “writer of absence” who described a world whose structure remained religious, but where the central space reserved for God is empty. But this is not where it ends; it remains to be shown how this Absence itself conceals an inert, nightmarish presence, an obscene superego object, the “Supremely-Evil-Being.” It is from this perspective that we must reinterpret the two features of AK that initially seem to possess a certain kind of “idealistic” resonance: AK as the “abolition of the object,” in which it does away with objectivity as outside the subject and opposed to it, and AK as the abolition of the Other, removing the dependence of the subject on an instance that is external and de-centered. Hegelian “sublation of the Other” is in no way equivalent to a fusion of the subject with its other, in which the subject appropriates the substantial contents. Rather, we should understand it as a specifically Hegelian way of saying “the Other does not exist” (Lacan), that it does not exist as Guarantor of truth, the Other of the Other, and that therefore we must posit a lack in the Other, that the Other is barred.

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Would it not be possible to determine the final moment of the analytical process, the pass, as the experience of the positive character of the loss, of the initial emptiness filled by the dazzling and fascinating phantasy object – experiencing the realization that the object as such is fundamentally the positivization of an emptiness? Isn’t this experience of the primacy of the place over the phantasy object the traversal of the phantasy, the moment in which, to quote Mallarmé, “nothing takes place except the place”? This is why it is so important to completely differentiate the pass from “resignation,” from “giving up”; from this perspective, analysis would be finished when the analysand “acquiesced to his symbolic castration,” resigning himself to the fact that radical Loss is part of the condition of the being-of-language [parlêtre]. This kind of interpretation turns Lacan into some kind of “wise guru” who preaches “total renunciation.” It may initially seem as if there is a lot of evidence for this interpretation. Isn’t the Phantasy fundamentally the Phantasy of the sexual rapport finally become possible, finally fully realizable? And isn’t the end of the analysis, the traversal of the Phantasy, simply experiencing the realization of the impossibility of the sexual rapport, and therefore the irreconcilably blocked, knotted, failed nature of the “human condition”? But nothing of the kind is true. If we posit as the fundamental ethical principle of analysis “not to give up on one’s desire” – from which it follows that the symptom is, as Jacques-Alain Miller pointed out, precisely a specific mode of “giving up one’s desire” – we must determine the pass as the moment in which the subject takes on his own desire in its pure, “non-pathological,” form, beyond its historicalness/hystericalness. The best example of a “post-analytic” subject is not the dubious figure of a “wise guru,” but rather Oedipus at Colonus, a grumpy old man who asks for everything, who does not want to give up anything. If the traversal of the phantasy is tied to the experience of some kind of lack, this lack is the Other’s and not that of the subject himself. In the pass, the subject undergoes the realization that the agalma, the “hidden treasure,” is already missing from the Other, the object separates itself from the I – the signifying trait in the Other. After the subject has been placed in relation to the object a, “the experience of the fundamental phantasy becomes the drive. What, then, does he who has passed through the experience of this opaque relation to the origin, to the drive, become? How can a subject who has traversed the radical phantasy experience the drive? This is the beyond of analysis, and has never been approached. Up to now, it has been approachable only at the level of the analyst, in as much as it would be required of him to have specifically traversed the cycle of the analytic experience in its totality”. (Lacan 1998a: 273) Isn’t the incessant drive of Hegelian “Absolute Knowledge [AK]” [“savoir absolu [SA]”], the infinitely repeated journey down the already traveled path, the ultimate example of how to “live one’s drive” once history/hysteria are gone? It is no surprise, then, to see Lacan, in Chapter XIV of Seminar XI, articulating the circuit of drive in terms that directly evoke the Hegelian distinction between the “finite” end and the “infinite” end. Lacan makes use of a distinction in the English language between aim and goal (cf. 1998a: 179). The circuit of drive can be determined specifically as the back and forth between aim and goal. Drive is, initially, a path toward a particular goal, and then it becomes the experience that its true goal is the same thing as the path itself, that its “goal is nothing more than turning around in circles”

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the Hegelian “loss of the loss” is in no way a return to full, lossless, identity. Far from it, the “loss of the loss” is precisely the moment when the loss stops being the loss of “something” and becomes the inauguration of an empty space in which the object (“something”) can survive, the moment when the empty space is recognized as pre-dating its contents – the loss opens the space for the arrival of the object. In the “loss of the loss,” the loss remains a loss; it is not “abolished/canceled” in the ordinary sense of the term. The recuperated “positivity” is that of the loss as loss, the experience of the loss as a “positive” – perhaps even “productive” – condition

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It is through the very thing that initially seemed to exclude us from the Other – our question through which we came to see the Other as enigmatic, inaccessible, transcendent – that brings us together with the Other, because this question is the Other’s question, because the substance is the subject (let us not forget that the thing that defines the subject is the very question itself). Would it not therefore be possible to base Hegelian “dis-alienation” on Lacanian separation? Lacan defined separation as the superimposition of two lacks (cf. Lacan 1998a: 214); when the subject encounters the lack in the Other, he responds with a pre-existing lack, his own lack. In the process of alienation, the subject is confronted with a full, substantial Other, in whose depths there supposedly lies a “secret,” an unreachable treasure. “Dis-alienation,” therefore, has nothing to do with appropriating this secret; the subject never finally pierces into the Other’s hidden core – far from it, the subject simply experiences that this “hidden treasure” (agalma, the object-cause of desire) is already missing from the Other herself. “Dis-alienation” can be reduced to the act through which the subject perceives that the Other’s substantial secret is also a secret for the Other, in other words, the experience of a separation between the Other and its “secret,” the object little a.

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truth is the same thing as the path to itself. A Pole and a Jew are sitting in the same carriage in a train. Something is bothering the Pole and he keeps fidgeting in his seat. Finally, he can’t hold it in any longer and blurts out: “Tell me how it is that you Jews are able to get so rich by bleeding people down to their last cent?” The Jew answers: “Okay, I’ll tell you, but I won’t do it for free. Give me five zlotys.” After pocketing the coins, he begins: “First, you have to take a dead fish, cut off its head, and pour its guts into a glass of water. Then, when the moon is full, you bury this glass in a graveyard.” “And,” the Pole asks greedily, “if I do that I’ll be rich?” “Not so fast,” the Jew replies; “there is more to it, but if you want to hear the rest you’ll need to give me five more zlotys.” The money is exchanged and the Jew continues his story, soon asks for more money, etc., up until the Pole finally explodes: “You cheat! You think I’m not on to you? There’s no secret, you just want to take all my money!” The Jew calmly replies: “There you go, now you understand how the Jews …” Every aspect of this little story is worth interpreting, starting with the very beginning. The fact that the Pole can’t stop looking over at the Jew means that he is already in the process of transferring onto the Jew; for him the Jew embodies the subject who supposedly knows (the secret of how to extract every last cent from people). The fundamental lesson is that ultimately the Jew did not trick the Pole: he kept his word, he fulfilled his part of the deal by showing him how Jews, etc., etc. The decisive twist takes place in the gap between the moment in which the Pole gets angry and the Jew gives his final answer. When the Pole explodes, he is already speaking the truth, he just doesn’t know it yet. He sees how the Jew took his money from him, but he only considers this to be some kind of Jewish trick. To put this in topological terms, he does not yet see that he’s already passed onto the other surface of the Möbius strip, that the trick itself contains the answer to the initial question, given that the reason he paid the Jew was precisely to teach him the way in which Jews … The mistake lies in the Pole’s perspective; he was waiting for the Jew’s secret to be revealed at the end of the story. He thought that the story the Jew was telling was just a path toward the final secret. His fixation on the hidden Secret, the final point of the narrative chain, blinded him as to the true secret, which was the way in which he was tricked by the Jew’s story about said secret. The Jew’s “secret” lies in the Pole’s desire, and therefore our own desire; it lies in the fact that the Jew knows how to make use of our desires. This is why the conclusion of this little story corresponds perfectly to the final moment of analysis, the exit from the transfer and the traversal of the phantasy, the two stages of which are split between the final two moments of the joke’s denouement. The Pole’s explosion of anger marks the point where he exits the transfer, where he realizes that “there is no secret” and thus the Jew ceases to be the “subject who supposedly knows.” The Jew’s final comment articulates the traversal of the phantasy. Isn’t the “secret” that causes us to follow the Jew’s story so attentively the object a, the chimerical “thing” of phantasy that provokes our desire, all while being retroactively posited by the desire itself? In this sense, the traversal of the phantasy coincides precisely with the experience that the object, the pure semblant, does nothing more than positivize the hole in our desire. In addition, this story is also a perfect illustration of the unique and irreplaceable role of money in the analytical process. If the Pole was not paying the Jew for his story, he would not reach the level of anger necessary for him to exit from the transfer. It is puzzling that, as a general rule, we do not recognize the structure of this Witz in another, much more famous, story. I am talking, of course, about the Witz of the entrance to the Law in Chapter IX of Kafka’s The Trial and its final reversal when the man from the country who is waiting asks the guard: “Everyone seeks the Law,” the man says, “so how is it that in all these years no one apart from me has asked to be let in?” The doorkeeper realizes that the man is nearing his end, and so, in order to be audible to his fading hearing, he bellows at him, “No one else could be granted entry here, because this entrance was intended for you alone. I shall now go and shut it.” (Kafka 2009b: 155) This reversal is quite analogous to the twist at the end of the story of the Pole and the Jew. The subject finally understands that he was included in the game from the beginning, that the door was already designed for him alone – in the same way that in the story of the Pole and the Jew, the point of the Jew’s story is, ultimately, just to catch the Pole’s desire. And, I should add, it is the same as in the story from Arabian Nights I mentioned earlier in which the hero’s accidental entrance to the cave turns out to have been long-awaited by the wise men. We could even rework Kafka’s story about the entrance to the Law in a way that would make it all the more similar to the Witz of the Pole and the Jew. Let us imagine that, after a long wait, the man from the country suddenly exploded in anger and started to scream at the guard: “You dirty liar! Why are you pretending to guard the entrance to unknown secrets, when you yourself know that there is not a single secret behind that Door, because that entrance was designed for me alone, it serves only to capture my desire?” – to which the guard would calmly reply: “There you go! You’ve finally discovered the true secret of the entrance to the Law.” In these two cases, the logic of the final twist is strictly Hegelian, functioning similarly to what Hegel called the “sublation of the bad infinity.” Both cases start out the same way: the subject is confronted with an inaccessible, transcendental, substantial truth, a forbidden secret that is infinitely deferred. In one case there is the inaccessible Heart of the Law that lies beyond the infinite series of entrances, in the other there is the inaccessible final answer to the question of how Jews manage to get people to give them all their money down to their last cent (because it is clear from the narrative that the Jew could keep going forever). In both stories, the denouement, the solution, is the same – instead of finally succeeding in lifting the final curtain and unveiling the ultimate secret, the Heart of the Law/the way in which the Jews extract people’s money, the subject realizes that he was included in the game from the very beginning, that his exclusion from the Secret and his desire to learn the Secret were already included in the very way the Secret operated. This reveals the dimension of a certain type of reflexivity that is missed by the classical philosophical conception of reflexivity. Philosophical reflexivity consists in the mediating movement through which the One comes to include its alterity, the Subject appropriates the substantial content opposed to it by positing itself as the unity of itself and its other. But this idea of the positivation of impossibility necessarily implies a whole different kind of reflexive reversal, whose key moment occurs when the subject recognizes that the impossibility of appropriating the Heart of the Other is a positive condition for the definition of his own status as subject

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the impossibility of appropriating the Heart of the Other is a positive condition for the definition of his own status as subject. This twist constitutes a radical change in perspective. It is this very failure – the frustration of the subject’s attempt to appropriate the opposed substantial contents in order to penetrate into the Heart of the Other – that includes the subject in the substance, in the Other. This reflexive shift is exactly what we see at the end of Kafka’s “parable” about the Doors of the Law: the man finally understands that the Door that supposedly hid an inaccessible substantial contentwas destined for him alone, that from the very beginning the unreachable Other of the Law was addressed to him, that it had accounted for him from the outset. The other’s lack It would therefore be a mistake to think that the dialectical relationship between Knowledge and Truth is a progressive approach guided by knowledge of the Truth, in which the subject recognizes the “falseness” and insufficiency of some figure of his knowledge, and so progresses to another figure that is closer to the Truth, etc., until finally Knowledge and Truth come together in Absolute Knowledge. In such a perspective, Truth is a substantial entity, an in-Itself, and the dialectical process takes the form of simple asymptotic progress, a gradual approach to the Truth, something along the lines of Victor Hugo’s famous quote: “Science is asymptotic to truth. Ever approaching but never touching it.” The Hegelian conjunction of the truth with the path toward the truth implies, on the contrary, that we are always already in contact with the truth. When knowledge changes, truth itself must change, which is to say that when knowledge does not correspond to the truth, we don’t simply need to accommodate the truth, but in fact transform the two poles – the insufficiency of knowledge, its lack in relation to the truth, indicates that there is always a lack, an incompleteness at the very core of truth itself. We must therefore toss out the traditional conception of the dialectical process as moved forward by particular, limited, and “unilateral” elements that push it toward a final totality. The truth at which we arrive is not “whole,” the question always remains open, it simply becomes a question we ask of the Other

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The hysterical subject is above all the subject who asks himself a question while at the same time presupposing that the Other has the answer, that the Other holds the key. In the dialectical process, this question asked of the Other is resolved through a reflexive turn in which the question begins to function as its own answer

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identify with your symptom. Desire means betraying your symptom. Death drive is accepting your symptom, circulating around your symptom.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/852435002528804864 http://ift.tt/2pQsFIP

the big Other is itself inconsistent, structured around a lack; the subject finds a niche in the Other by identifying with this very void.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/852066342018719745 http://ift.tt/2rguGA1

Each identity is thwarted from within by the other. Each sex is not something whose identity is established through difference to the other.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/851708967738896384 http://ift.tt/2pLQ7aZ

The world remains religious in its structure, the central place belonging to God is empty, conceals a nightmarish presence of a Superego.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/851340273342967808 http://ift.tt/2qfiO2R

Defence of absolute passionate love will be important.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/850979116421713921 http://ift.tt/2pJHqNH

[The Other of our speech] speaks ‘autonomously’, produces an effect of meaning in senseless contingency, beyond our conscious intention.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/850620517333839872 http://ift.tt/2pHfN7R

Kafka’s Castle’s spectacle is staged to fascinate who endeavour to penetrate its mystery: power feigns indifference to attract us in misery.

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The symbolic ultimately hides that there is nothing to hide, that there is no terrifying mystery.

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To liberate from consumer society, liberation is not simply I feel my identity threatened & so I oppose. You must sacrifice part of yourself

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Moral Law is fierce, does not admit excuses, is of mischievous neutrality, of mean in­difference.

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The whole question was to know whether gods desired something. Sacrifice consisted in behaving as if gods desired like us

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In melancholia a phantasy of dispossession..is at work …linked to the impossibility of future-significant action.

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The “melancholy disease” appears … when the subject is closed off from meaningful expression.

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Kafka’s protagonist is trapped through the desire for a ‘secret supposed to be hidden in the Other’

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The trick is to present oneself as a mask that conceals the secret.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/847360308607762432 http://ift.tt/2qTLQ64

The modern name for this Other who is “supposed to believe” in our stead is the “people”. …When Golda Meir was asked whether she believed in God, she said: “I believe in the Jewish people, and the Jewish people believe in God.” This statement …does not imply that the majority of the Jews believe in God. [Meir’s] statement …implies …a certain fetishization of the “people”: even if (to go the extreme) no individual Jewish citizen of Israel believes, each of them presupposes that the “people” believes, and this presupposition is enough to make her act as if she believes. (In Defense of Lost Causes, p227)

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“I myself find it hard to exert such pressure on the poor kids, but what can I do-it’s my duty!” The more pertinent example is that of a Stalinist politician who loves mankind, but nonetheless performs horrible purges and executions; his heart is breaking while he is doing it, but he cannot help it, it’s his Duty towards the Progress of Humanity… What we encounter here is the properly perverse attitude of adopting the position of the pure instrument of the big Other’s Will: it’s not my responsibility, it’s not me who is effectively doing it, I am merely an instrument of the higher Historical Necessity… The obscene jouissance of this situation is generated by the fact that I conceive of myself as exculpated for what I am doing: isn’t it nice to be able to inflict pain on others with the full awareness that 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.

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Unlike desire deathdrive is identification with your symptom You desire so as to avoid your symptom. Identify with the very lack of identity

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/846994116240117761 http://ift.tt/2pO4WMM

The destroyer tried to force a submarine to surface, not knowing it had a nuclear-tipped torpedo. Vadim Orlov, a member of the submarine crew, told the conference in Havana that the submarine was authorized to fire it if three officers agreed. The officers began a fierce, shouting debate over whether to sink the ship. Two of them said yes and the other said no. “A guy named Arkhipov saved the world,” was a bitter comment of a historian on this accident

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Crucial to Buddhism is the reflexive change from the object to the thinker himself: first, we isolate the thing that bothers us, the cause of our suffering; then we change not the object but ourselves, the way we relate to (what appears to us as) the cause of our suffering: “What was extinguished was only the false view of self. What had always been illusory was understood as such. Nothing was changed but the perspective of the observer.” This shift involves great pain; it is not merely a liberation, a step into the incestuous bliss of the infamous “oceanic feeling”; it is also the violent experience of losing the ground under one’s feet, of being deprived of the most familiar stage of one’s being. This is why the path towards Buddhist Enlightenment begins by focusing on the most elementary feelings of “injured innocence,” of suffering an injustice without cause (the preferred topic of narcissistic, masochistic thoughts: “How could she do this to me?I don’t deserve to be treated that way”). The next step is to make the shift to the Ego itself, the subject of these painful emotions, rendering clear and palpable its own fleeting and irrelevant status—the aggression directed against the object causing the suffering should be turned against the Self itself. We do not repair the damage; rather, we gain the insight into the illusory nature of that which appears to need repair. …On the one side, reality remains as it is, nothing changes, it is just fully perceived as what it is, a mere insubstantial flow of phenomena that does not really affect the void at the core of our being; on the other side, the goal is to transform reality itself so that there will be no suffering in it, so that all living beings will enter nirvana.

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I am, of course, fundamentally anti-capitalist. But let’s not have any illusions here. No. What shocks me is that most of the critics of today’s capitalism feel even embarrassed, that’s my experience, when you confront them with a simple question, “Okay, we heard your story … protest horrible, big banks depriving us of billions, hundreds, thousands of billions of common people’s money… . Okay, but what do you really want? What should replace the system?” And then you get one big confusion. You get either a general moralistic answer, like “People shouldn’t serve money. Money should serve people.”

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not only you cannot use your pathological longings as an excuse why you can’t do your duty, for example you cannot say “This is my duty but I will not do it because it may hurt my friend”, you also cannot use duty itself as an excuse do your duty. You cannot say to your friend: “Listen, I must drop you now because it is my ethical duty. I know it hurts you but this is my duty.” Because in this way you already objectify yourself, it is not you. Kant means that duty itself is not an excuse to do your duty. You are fully responsible to formulate what your duty is. This is how I read the categorical imperative — it has the structure of what Kant calls aesthetic judgment. Lyotard developed this very nicely: An aesthetic judgment is not simply an application of pre–existing norms to the situation, in the aesthetic judgment you posit the norms yourself and it is your responsibility. Apropos of a particular situation, you have to reinvent the universality which covers the situation, and as such you are fully responsible for it. When you say: “That is my duty”, you cannot say: “What can I do, it’s my duty.” You fully have to stand behind what your duty is. Now, going back to the materiality of the act. Of course, this definition of the authentic act has an aspect of being almost non–historical, I agree with that. But believe me I am an old–fashioned Marxist, so what I claim is that this notion of act is of special actuality today in our so–called post–modern era, where the predominant ethic, across the entire spectrum of ethical positions, from narcissistic hedonism to neo–fundamentalism or whatever, is an ethic precisely against the ethical act. All these problems of ethical committees, of ethical rules, are always about how to prevent an excess which is precisely the excess of the act. In this sense I claim that it is only today, in today’s so–called permissive society, that society is regulated as no society in history ever was, that such notion of an act was ever elaborated.

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the choice is never simply the one between doing my duty or following my striving for “pathological” pleasures and satisfactions; this elementary choice is always redoubled by the one between elevating my striving for pleasures itself into my supreme Duty, and doing my Duty not for the sake of Duty but because it gives me satisfaction to do it. In the first case pleasures are my duty: the “pathological” striving for pleasures is located into the formal space of Duty; in the second case duty is my pleasure: doing my duty is located in the formal space of “pathological” satisfactions

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when I recognize myself as the addressee of the call of the ideological big Other (Nation, Democracy, Party, God, and so forth),…I automatically misrecognize that it is this very act of recognition which makes me what I have recognized myself as-I don’t recognize myself in it because I’m its addressee, I become its addressee the moment I recognize myself in it. This is the reason why a letter always reaches its addressee; because one becomes its addressee when one is reached.

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identify with the very…lack of identity.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/846630475762360324 http://ift.tt/2qzHJvU

You are social as u identify with values? No, society is inscribed not through identification. The way we are split connects us with others.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/846270862567313408 http://ift.tt/2puhhW5

we look for the missing part in the other. The other fills our own gap.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/845909550364573696 http://ift.tt/2qvqLPx

The subject is interior to the Other as it is identified with an obstruction in the Other, with the impossibility of achieving its identity.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/845561140159660032 http://ift.tt/2ppCeBp

the Other does not exist as the Guarantor of Truth

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/845198871676444673 http://ift.tt/2poKwth