if we get too near the object, it loses its sublime features

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/900263867800068096 http://ift.tt/2eIy2H7

the positive object is a ..stand-in for the void of the impossible Thing.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/899906521018109954 http://ift.tt/2wp20YE

The subject’s desire is the desire to ascertain her status as the object of the Other

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/899545394606198784 http://ift.tt/2vCz5yQ

If the symptom dissolves, the subject loses the ground under his feet

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/899177953233436674 http://ift.tt/2wdjNUb

belief is embodied in our very social practice.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/898816969742397441 http://ift.tt/2wTRhrh

The symptom is ..a way for the subject to organize his enjoyment. ..That is why he “loves his symptom more than himself.”

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/898453185848680448 http://ift.tt/2izBk42

the external Master is replaced with an internal one. The price for this identification is, of course, the sacrifice of all “pathological” particular content—duty should be accomplished “for the sake of duty.” …Reality reaches its truth only through/in its self-destruction; unlike Christianity, Hegel is well aware that there is no Other World in which we will be repaid for our terrestrial losses: transcendence is absolutely immanent, what is “beyond” finite reality is nothing but the immanent process of its self-overcoming . Hegel’s name for this absolute immanence of transcendence is “absolute negativity,” as he makes clear in an exemplary way in the dialectics of Master and Servant: the Servant’s secure particular/finite identity is unsettled when, in experiencing the fear of death during his confrontation with the Master, he gets a whiff of the infinite power of negativity; through this experience, the Servant is forced to accept the worthlessness of his particular Self… …What, then, does the Servant get in exchange for renouncing all the wealth of his particular Self? Nothing —in overcoming his particular terrestrial Self, the Servant does not reach a higher level of a spiritual Self; all he has to do is to shift his position and recognize in (what appears to him as) the overwhelming power of destruction which threatens to obliterate his particular identity the absolute negativity which forms the very core of his own Self. In short, the subject has to fully identify with the force that threatens to wipe him out: what he feared in fearing death was the negative power of his own Self. There is thus no reversal of negativity into positive greatness—the only “greatness” here is this negativity itself. Or, with regard to suffering: Hegel’s point is not that the suffering brought about by the alienating labor of renunciation is an intermediary moment that must be patiently endured while we wait for our reward at the end of the tunnel—there is no prize or profit to be gained at the end for our patient submission; suffering and renunciation are their own reward, all that has to be done is to change our subjective position, to renounce our desperate clinging to our finite Selves with their “pathological” desires, to purify our Selves towards their universality. …Hegelian “negativity” serves to “proscribe absolute difference” or “non-being”:8 negativity is limited to the obliteration of all finite/immediate determinations. The process of negativity is thus not just a negative process of the self-destruction of the finite: it reaches its telos when finite/immediate determinations are mediated/maintained/elevated, posited in their “truth” as ideal notional determinations. What remains after negativity has done its work is the eternal parousia of the ideal notional structure. What is missing here, from the Nietzschean standpoint, is the affirmative no : the no of the joyous and heroic confrontation with the adversary, the no of struggle which aims at self-assertion, not self-sublation

http://ift.tt/2wvEFXG

Identity itself emerges through struggle, for stable identity is something that must be gained through an ordeal—even “class struggle” is already present here, in the guise of the war which “makes slaves on the one hand, the free on the other.”…It is easy to posit struggle as “father of all” and then elevate this struggle itself into a higher harmony, in the sense that Being becomes the hidden concord of the struggling poles, like a cosmic music in which the opposites harmoniously echo each other. So, to put it bluntly, is this strife part of the Harmony itself, or is it a more radical discord, one which derails the very Harmony of Being? As Davis perceptively notes, Heidegger is ambiguous here, oscillating between the radically open “strife” of Being and its reinscription into the teleological reversal of Danger into Saving in which, as Jean-Luc Nancy put it, “‘discord’ is at best what makes ‘unity appear’”

http://ift.tt/2g9ZMrO

When am I really alive? Precisely when I enact the “undead” drive in me, the “too-much-ness” of life. And I reach this point when I no longer act directly, but when “it” ( es )—whose Christian name is the Holy Spirit—acts through me. At this point, I reach the Absolute. The next, and crucial, step is to see how this “stuckness” is not just a consequence of our human deficiency or finitude, of our inability to grasp pure Being from our partial perspective (if it were, then the solution would lie in a kind of Oriental self-effacement, an immersion in the primordial Void); rather, this “stuckness” bears witness to a strife at the very heart of Being itself.

http://ift.tt/2vgKxjn

Such is the unbearable “news” of psychoanalysis: not its emphasis on the role of sexuality as such, but its rendering visible the “meta-physical” dimension of human sexuality. In order to uphold its edifice, it has to violently suppress this meta-physical dimension of sexuality, to reduce it to animality. In other words, this violent de-spiritualization of the key dimension of being-human

http://ift.tt/2vmwpED

This, in simple terms, is the basic difference between psychoanalysis and Christianity: while both agree that the life of the “human animal” is disrupted by the violent intrusion of a properly meta-physical “immortal” dimension, psychoanalysis identifies this dimension as that of (specifically [in]human) sexuality,of the “undead” drive as opposed to the animal instinct, while Christianity sees in sexuality the very force which drags humans towards animality and prevents their access to immortality.

http://ift.tt/2ilsXJ7

Is our identity fully determined by DNA? Or are we are not just biological automats? Do we have some spiritual freedom and so on?…I think if we are just our DNA. If the interaction of our DNA with environment determines us completely, then yes we should worry. But in a way, we just discovered that we never were free. We were automats [machines] also now but we did not know it. Our freedom was an illusion… So are we automats which just can be controlled or is there hope for our freedom? …We are effectively entering some kind of post human universe where everything, our inner most identity can be reduced to a formula. …What I’m afraid of is a possibility of a direct contact-link between our brain, what we are thinking, and a computer network, because there we lose our autonomy.

http://ift.tt/2v4b03H

“The fact that it is possible to hack a computer through a DNA, means that our identity, determined by DNA is nothing more than just another computer formula,” Zizek said.

http://ift.tt/2xeNOAG

when the leader is caught with his pants down this strengthens the solidarity of the group through this public denial of impotence.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/898089539801149440 http://ift.tt/2uQ5Lst

Identification with community is ultimately always based upon some shared guilt, or more precisely, upon a fetishist disavowal of this guilt

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/897729832397807618 http://ift.tt/2wTXe5d

how do we pass from Revolutionary Terror to Kant’s autonomous and free moral subject? By way of what, in more contemporary language, one could call a full identification with the aggressor: the subject should recognize in the external Terror, in this negativity which constantly threatens to annihilate him, the very core of his (universal) subjectivity; in other words, he should fully identify with it. Freedom is thus not freedom from a Master, but the replacement of one Master with another: the external Master is replaced with an internal one. The price for this identification is, of course, the sacrifice of all “pathological” particular content—duty should be accomplished “for the sake of duty.” …when one talks, one always dwells in the universal—which means that, with its entry into language, the subject loses its roots in the concrete life world. To put it in more pathetic terms, the moment I start to talk, I am no longer the sensually concrete I, since I am caught up in an impersonal mechanism which always makes me say something different from what I wanted to say—as the early Lacan liked to say, I am not speaking, I am being spoken by language. This is one way to understand what Lacan called “symbolic castration”: the price the subject pays for its “transubstantiation” from being the agent of a direct animal vitality to being a speaking subject whose identity is kept apart from the direct vitality of passions. A Nietzschean reading easily discerns in this reversal of Terror into autonomous morality a desperate strategy of turning defeat into triumph: instead of heroically fighting for one’s vital interests, one pre-emptively declares total surrender and gives up all content. Lebrun is here well aware how unjustified the standard critique of Hegel is according to which the dialectical reversal of utter negativity into a new higher positivity, of catastrophe into triumph, functions as a kind of deus ex machina , precluding the possibility that the catastrophe might be the final outcome of the process—the well-known common-sense argument: “But what if there is no reversal of negativity into a new positive order?” This argument misses the point, which is that this is, precisely, what happens in the Hegelian reversal: there is no real reversal of defeat into triumph but only a purely formal shift, a change of perspective, which tries to present defeat itself as a triumph. Nietzsche’s point is that this triumph is a fake, a cheap magician’s trick, a consolation prize for losing all that makes life worth living: the real loss of vitality is supplemented by a lifeless specter. In Lebrun’s Nietzschean reading, Hegel thus appears as a kind of atheist Christian philosopher: like Christianity, he locates the “truth” of all terrestrial finite reality in its (self-)annihilation—reality reaches its truth only through/in its self-destruction; unlike Christianity, Hegel is well aware that there is no Other World in which we will be repaid for our terrestrial losses: transcendence is absolutely immanent, what is “beyond” finite reality is nothing but the immanent process of its self-overcoming . Hegel’s name for this absolute immanence of transcendence is “absolute negativity,” as he makes clear in an exemplary way in the dialectics of Master and Servant: the Servant’s secure particular/finite identity is unsettled when, in experiencing the fear of death during his confrontation with the Master, he gets a whiff of the infinite power of negativity; through this experience, the Servant is forced to accept the worthlessness of his particular Self… …What, then, does the Servant get in exchange for renouncing all the wealth of his particular Self? Nothing —in overcoming his particular terrestrial Self, the Servant does not reach a higher level of a spiritual Self; all he has to do is to shift his position and recognize in (what appears to him as) the overwhelming power of destruction which threatens to obliterate his particular identity the absolute negativity which forms the very core of his own Self. In short, the subject has to fully identify with the force that threatens to wipe him out: what he feared in fearing death was the negative power of his own Self. There is thus no reversal of negativity into positive greatness—the only “greatness” here is this negativity itself. Or, with regard to suffering: Hegel’s point is not that the suffering brought about by the alienating labor of renunciation is an intermediary moment that must be patiently endured while we wait for our reward at the end of the tunnel—there is no prize or profit to be gained at the end for our patient submission; suffering and renunciation are their own reward, all that has to be done is to change our subjective position, to renounce our desperate clinging to our finite Selves with their “pathological” desires, to purify our Selves towards their universality. This is also how Hegel explains the overcoming of tyranny in the history of states: “One says that tyranny is overturned by the people because it is undignified, shameful, etc. In reality, it disappears simply because it is superfluous.”7 It becomes superfluous when people no longer need the external force of the tyrant to make them renounce their particular interests, but when they become “universal citizens” by directly identifying the core of their being with this universality—in short, people no longer need the external master when they are educated into doing the job of discipline and subordination themselves. The obverse of Hegel’s “nihilism” (all finite/determinate forms of life reach their “truth” in their self-overcoming) is its apparent opposite: in continuity with the Platonic metaphysical tradition, he is not ready to give negativity full rein, that is, his dialectics is ultimately an effort to “normalize” the excess of negativity. For late Plato already, the problem was how to relativize or contextualize non-being as a subordinate moment of being (non-being is always a particular/determinate lack of being measured by the fullness it fails to actualize; there is no non-being as such, there is always only, e.g., “green” which participates in non-being by not being “red” or any other color, etc.). In the same vein, Hegelian “negativity” serves to “proscribe absolute difference” or “non-being”:8 negativity is limited to the obliteration of all finite/immediate determinations. The process of negativity is thus not just a negative process of the self-destruction of the finite: it reaches its telos when finite/immediate determinations are mediated/maintained/elevated, posited in their “truth” as ideal notional determinations. What remains after negativity has done its work is the eternal parousia of the ideal notional structure. What is missing here, from the Nietzschean standpoint, is the affirmative no : the no of the joyous and heroic confrontation with the adversary, the no of struggle which aims at self-assertion, not self-sublation

http://ift.tt/2fNq4Qo

we invent, as a protective web, trauma itself. Now, we would normally expect that.. 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.

http://ift.tt/2v279U7

the working over of animal instincts—the drive is not instinct but its “denaturalization.” There is, however, a deeper logic to this paradox: from within the established human universe of meaning, its own founding gesture is invisible, indiscernible from its opposite, so that it has to appear as its opposite. This, in simple terms, is the basic difference between psychoanalysis and Christianity: while both agree that the life of the “human animal” is disrupted by the violent intrusion of a properly meta-physical “immortal” dimension, psychoanalysis identifies this dimension as that of (specifically [in]human) sexuality, of the “undead” drive as opposed to the animal instinct, while Christianity sees in sexuality the very force which drags humans towards animality and prevents their access to immortality. Such is the unbearable “news” of psychoanalysis: not its emphasis on the role of sexuality as such, but its rendering visible the “meta-physical” dimension of human sexuality. The paradox of Christianity is that, in order to uphold its edifice, it has to violently suppress this meta-physical dimension of sexuality, to reduce it to animality. In other words, this violent de-spiritualization of the key dimension of being-human is the “truth” of the Christian elevation of human spirituality. Unfortunately, Hegel does the same in his theory of marriage—as does Heidegger too. The standard idealist question “Is there (eternal) life after death?” should be countered by the materialist question: “Is there life before death?” This is the question Wolf Biermann asked in one of his songs—what bothers a materialist is: am I really alive here and now, or am I just vegetating, as a mere human animal bent on survival? When am I really alive? Precisely when I enact the “undead” drive in me, the “too-much-ness” of life. And I reach this point when I no longer act directly, but when “it” ( es )—whose Christian name is the Holy Spirit—acts through me. At this point, I reach the Absolute. The next, and crucial, step is to see how this “stuckness” is not just a consequence of our human deficiency or finitude, of our inability to grasp pure Being from our partial perspective (if it were, then the solution would lie in a kind of Oriental self-effacement, an immersion in the primordial Void); rather, this “stuckness” bears witness to a strife at the very heart of Being itself. Deeply pertinent here is Gregory Fried’s reading of Heidegger’s entire opus through the interpretive lense of his reference to Heraclitus’s polemos (struggle—in German, Krieg , Kampf , or, predominantly in Heidegger, Auseinandersetzung ) from the latter’s famous fragment 53: “War is both father of all and king of all: it reveals the gods on the one hand and humans on the other, makes slaves on the one hand, the free on the other.”32 It is not only that the stable identity of each entity is temporary, that they all sooner or later disappear, disintegrate, return to the primordial chaos; their (temporary) identity itself emerges through struggle, for stable identity is something that must be gained through an ordeal—even “class struggle” is already present here, in the guise of the war which “makes slaves on the one hand, the free on the other.” There is, however, a further step to be taken with regard to polemos : it is easy to posit struggle as “father of all” and then elevate this struggle itself into a higher harmony, in the sense that Being becomes the hidden concord of the struggling poles, like a cosmic music in which the opposites harmoniously echo each other. So, to put it bluntly, is this strife part of the Harmony itself, or is it a more radical discord, one which derails the very Harmony of Being? As Davis perceptively notes, Heidegger is ambiguous here, oscillating between the radically open “strife” of Being and its reinscription into the teleological reversal of Danger into Saving in which, as Jean-Luc Nancy put it, “‘discord’ is at best what makes ‘unity appear’”

http://ift.tt/2x2pEcm

the Christian attitude to Christ’s death is not one of melancholic attachment to his deceased person, but one of infinite joy

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/897368545289539584 http://ift.tt/2uGxY52

In its very Otherness, Solaris generates spectral phenomena.., our innermost idiosyncratic whims

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/897005053181136896 http://ift.tt/2w4AphZ

Solaris brings us too close to what in ourselves must remain at a distance if we are to sustain the consistency of our symbolic universe.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/896639980507996161 http://ift.tt/2vRUHL4

The radical break introduced by Christianity consists in the fact that it is the first religion without the sacred

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/896278849293602821 http://ift.tt/2wSG3A8

The rupture introduced by Christianity: now we know.. The impact of this…opens up the space for violence not contained by any mythic limit

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/895915211332472833 http://ift.tt/2wBsOod

Life substance is derailed (the Freudian name of this..is of course the death drive). This is why the human being is not a “rational animal”

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/895556607018496000 http://ift.tt/2vTjJK7

in Christianity God profanes himself

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/895193093342973952 http://ift.tt/2vk8wRf

The Sacred is the last veil that conceals the horror of the Profane.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/894830696031813632 http://ift.tt/2vBLA11

cutting is a radical attempt to (re)gain a stronghold in reality,…against the unbearable anxiety of perceiving oneself as non-existing.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/894470703633891329 http://ift.tt/2vdqULR

the art resides in a demand which, while ‘realist’, disturbs the very core of the hegemonic ideology and implies a much more radical change

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/894108298731020289 http://ift.tt/2ueqW2Q

The masochist ,thinking ‘he knows it for her,’ ‘pretends to speak from the position of knowledge (about the other’s desire)’. He perversely ‘exerts control through’ ‘what he is for the Other’: ‘the object of’ their jouissance, Zizek says.

(via andre-vantino) http://ift.tt/2fjVFZN

the realization of desire does not consist in its being “fulfilled,” “fully satisfied,” it coincides rather with the reproduction of desire

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/893747178514120705 http://ift.tt/2vB2oVc

we mistake for the searching and indecision proper to desire what is, in fact, the realization of desire.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/893383538061529089 http://ift.tt/2vpIflF

Shakespeare’s Richard II is confronted with the void of his subjectivity outside the symbolic title “king,” forced into hysterical outbursts

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/893016111704420353 http://ift.tt/2vmpqzK

Richard II proves beyond any doubt that Shakespeare had read Lacan

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/892653726028230656 http://ift.tt/2vjzaus

The object is “objectively” nothing, though, viewed from a certain perspective, it assumes the shape of “something,” begot by “nothing.”

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/892297640599224320 http://ift.tt/2hlcdRW