Plato, Badiou and the “Invariant of Direction”

In Chapter 1 Žižek also calls for a return to Plato, but this time transforming the idealist base of Plato’s eternal truths into a materialist dialectic in which it eternal truth and values emerge from contingent reality as an expression of the human desire for Exodus and liberation. Alain Badiou calls this the Communist hypothesis and Ernst Bloch’s term for this was the “invariant of direction”. First Žižek points out that Plato has been attacked from just about every philosophical and political position that has existed in modernity and post-modernity. He divides this opposition into six different groups of anti-Platonism: 1. vitalist; 2.empiricist-analytic; 3.Marxist; 4.existentialist; 5.Heideggerian; and 6.”Democratic”. Žižek puts it like this:

“Plato’s position is thus similar to that of Descartes: “Plato” is the negative point of reference which unites otherwise irreconcilable enemies: Marxists and anti-Communist liberals, existentialists and analytic empiricists, Heideggerians and vitalists… So why a return to Plato? Why do we need a repetition of Plato’s founding gesture? In his Logiques des mondes, Badiou provides a succinct definition of “democratic materialism” and its opposite, “materialist dialectics”: the axiom which condenses the first is “There is nothing but bodies and languages…,” to which materialist dialectics adds “…with the exception of truths.” One should bear in mind the Platonic, properly meta-physical, thrust of this distinction: prima facie, it cannot but appear as a proto-idealist gesture to assert that material reality is not all that there is, that there is also another level of incorporeal truths. Badiou here makes the paradoxical philosophical gesture of defending, as a materialist, the autonomy of the “immaterial” order of Truth. As a materialist, and in order to be thoroughly materialist, Badiou focuses on the idealist topos par excellence: how can a human animal forsake its animality and put its life in the service of a transcendent Truth? How can the “transubstantiation” from the pleasure-oriented life of an individual to the life of a subject dedicated to a Cause occur? In other words, how is a free act possible? How can one break (out of) the network of the causal connections of positive reality and conceive an act that begins by and in itself? Again, Badiou repeats, within the materialist frame, the elementary gesture of idealist anti-reductionism: human Reason cannot be reduced to the result of evolutionary adaptation; art is not just a heightened procedure for producing sensual pleasure but a medium of Truth; and so on.”

So far it seems to me that every part of this book that I dip into is essentially concerned with the nature of transcendence and how it can be rooted in reality rather than located in the unobtainable Real. Or rather, as he asks  later in Chapter 1, is there a ‘third way’ between Nietzsches self contradictions on Truth as both a “Passion for the Real and a passion for semblance”? This is because:

“There is not just the interplay of appearances, there is a Real—this Real, however, is not the inaccessible Thing, but the gap which prevents our access to it, the “rock” of the antagonism which distorts our view of the perceived object through a partial perspective. The “truth” is thus not the “real” state of things, accessed by a “direct” view of the object without any perspectival distortion, but the very Real of the antagonism which causes the perspectival distortion itself. Again, the site of truth is not the way “things really are in themselves,” beyond perspectival distortion, but the very gap or passage which separates one perspective from another, the gap (in this case, social antagonism) which makes the two perspectives radically incommensurable. The “Real as impossible” is the cause of the impossibility of our ever attaining the “neutral” non-perspectival view of the object. There is a truth, and not everything is relative—but this truth is the truth of the perspectival distortion as such, not a truth distorted by the partial view from a one-sided perspective.”

Again, we can see here an attempt to overcome a dualism through contingent dialectic in which the Ding an Sich is not distorted by an external experience of perception but that the distortion that we experience is actually part of the Ding an Sich. In this way distinction between idealism and materialism, the gap between those two things, becomes the very thing which transcends the apparent contradiction between the two. Idealistic eternal truths and a commitment to the maintenance of those eternal truths become re-functioned as part of the dialectic of process and emergence out of immanence. Idealism and materialism in this view become merged into transcendence, but transcendence based in but also seen through the lens of objective reality. Again, contained within the real are glimpses or pre-illuminations (Bloch’s Vorscheineand Whitehead’s “Prehensions”) of something else which can only be understood as part of that which exists and not external to it. I haven’t found it yet, but I imagine that at some point he will quote Lenin’s famous dictum that “intelligent idealism is closer to intelligent materialism than stupid materialism”. What Žižek - using  Badiou –  argues here and elsewhere is that all of the economic analysis in the world will not put in the position to be able to win people over to your side in the struggle for equality and justice. Of course Žižek  brings in the Arab spring to elucidate this point, pointing out that although the root causes of uprisings lie in contingent processes, the desire to be free provided the impetus.

Again Bloch already recognised this the 1930s when he wrote in 1933/34 that the Communist Party had failed to stop Hitler because it had failed to address the German people’s more idealistic and even metaphysical concerns, leaving the ground free for them  to be exploited by fascism. As he said at the time “you can’t criticise the Communist Party for what it did, but you can criticise it for what it didn’t do.” He said that what was necessary was to put the “warm stream” of Marxism back in to the “cold stream” of economistic analysis. (As an aside we might say that as today, Marxist criticism exists almost entirely in the realm of cultural critique and has, with a few notable an honourable exceptions, almost nothing to say about economics, then one could argue that the reverse is necessary; that we need to pour some invigorating cold water into the rather tepid bath of philosophical Marxism.).

All of this is, of course, designed as a hefty sideswipe at post-modernism and “dogmatic relativism”, as Christopher Norris called it, in an attempt to re-establish a grand narrative of history, but this time one, as discussed in my first posting on this, with only a contingent and retrospective teleology. It is on the basis of that which has become that we can make some predictions about we might want to see, but we can in no way predict what might actually come about as a result of our actions in the face of contingent reality. The question I am starting to ask myself is whether this book is one long plea for seeing history simply as processually autopoietic.

Having started with Plato we might end with Aristotle and ask whether his two categories of being and possibility are relevant here. Bloch used as the basis for his processual dynamic the two Aristotelian terms kata to dynaton (that which is possible) and dynamei on (that which might become possible) to describe the way in which the impossibility emerges out of the darkness of the possible in ways which are as yet unpredictable. the only thing which would keep us on the right path in this process is our commitment to the Invariant of Direction or, as Badiou calls it, the Communist Hypothesis.

 

symposium – should be good!

with Karen Leeder, Mark Fisher, Dina Khapaeva, David Constantine and others

http://www.new.ox.ac.uk/giving-up-the-ghost

You are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic

Continuing the theme of immanence and the constant presence of the Not Yet, Žižek says in chapter 7:

“…if the zero level of nature is space, then natural objects should develop out of space, not be conceived as mysterious chunks of matter that from who-knows-where “enter” space. The only thing that can happen to pure space is asymmetry, its becoming de-homogenized, “curved”—so the idea that “matter” is the effect of curved space is implied by Hegel’s theory of space.”

I know that I may be slightly prejudiced about this but Ernst Bloch uses almost the same language when he talked about the way in which people misunderstand matter as being a “Klotz” or a lump of something separate from a non-material Real. And it seems to me in my reading so far that this is increasingly the theme that Žižek is dealing with in this book. For example, in chapter 14 he uses the same strategy when discussing the Real as something integral to and entirely bound up in reality:

“But does this mean that we end up in a kind of idealism of the symbolic—what we experience as “reality” is symbolically constructed, and even the Real which eludes the grasp of the symbolic is a result of the immanent failure of the symbolic? No, because it is through this very failure to be itself that the symbolic touches the Real. In contrast to transcendentalism, Lacan agrees that we have access to the In-itself: Lacan is not a discourse-idealist who claims that we are forever caught in the web of symbolic practices, unable to reach the In-itself. However, we do not touch the Real by way of breaking out of the “prison-house of language” and gaining access to the external transcendent referent—every external referent (“fully existing positive reality”) is already transcendentally constituted. We touch the Real-in-itself in our very failure to touch it, since the Real is, at its most radical, the gap, the “minimal difference,” that separates the One from itself.”

In this way he also brings us back to the significance of failure, a theme which he has covered many times in his previous books:

“a subject wants to say something, it fails, and this failure is the subject—a “subject of the signifier” is literally the result of the failure to become itself. In this sense, also, within the symbolic space, the effect is a reaction against its cause, while the cause is a retroactive effect of its cause: the subject produces signifiers which fail, and the subject qua Real is the effect of this failure.”

Failure is thus not just a failure to achieve something but it is the achievement of something in a way which only fails against the measure of some ideal intentionality. Failure, as much a success, contributes to the development of a contingent reality. In hindsight of course what was considered to have been a failure may also turn out to have been a building block of success. If we think of Brecht’s poem An die Nachgeborenen where he is addressing the people of the future who will be living in a utopian society on the other side of the great eschatological flood, then we hear how Brecht justifies the terrible things that had to be done in order to create goodness. The flood is thus not some terrible catastrophe which befalls us but is the product of the process of development. This can also be seen in religious terms -as Brecht of course is wont to do – as the immanence of transcendence. William James, for example, spoke of transcendence “breaking in on us” from a metaphysical realm, whereas what both Hegel and Žižek – and Bloch – are maintaining is that the transcendent breaks out of us and carries us forward as drive informed by desire and hope.

This is of course why Žižek remains, as well as a Lacanian psychoanalyst and Hegelian philosopher, a Marxist, because the process of the development of material reality in a social sense has to include a conscious intervention into reality, which will itself create that reality. To put it in its profoundly banal sense, it’s like the poster I saw in a service station recently which said “You are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic.”

We are not stuck in history, we are history.

Mind the Gap. Žižek, Hegel and the Metaphysics of Contingency

There is an old philosophers’ joke that the analytical philosopher always accuses the continental one of being insufficiently clear, while the continental philosopher accuses the analytical one of Being insufficiently. In Zizek’s long awaited book, Less Than Nothing. Hegel and the Shadows of Dialectical Materialism it is possible to feel both things are true at the same time, which is perhaps only appropriate for a book on the dialectics of speculation, materialism and transcendence. It takes up those themes in 14 chapters which divide the book into two parts on Hegel and Lacan respectivelt and which range over German idealism, Nietzsche, Marx and Freud, Quantum Physics, Necessity and Contingency and just about anything you can think of in the history of post-Kantian philosophy. The text itself, while complex and challenging, is also highly accessible and with the usual scatological jokes thrown in it is not a particularly difficult read.

 

What Zizek is trying to do here is to try to reorientate our appreciation of Hegel by, as he says, rejecting the old textbook notion of Hegel as the philosopher of the whole and of totality and the absolute and re-presenting him as someone who sees necessity and the absolute as emerging from the contingent workings of the real. He is trying to get away from the idea of Hegel as a purely teleological thinker, presenting him as someone who sees the endpoint of history in the present moment as a product of the contingent events which have led to this moment. Any teleology is a purely retrospective one. However, what he also tries to make clear is that a retrospective teleology has to also be open to the future, to possibility and process not as a predetermined and inevitable course but as one in which the contingent will continue to create necessity even while recognising that the necessity which emerges from that process is not a necessary necessity, but merely a contingent one. To paraphrase Brian Cox’s latest book on quantum physics, everything that has happened did not have to happen, but now it has, it did.

It is this difficulty of speculating about the nature of what we can know at the same time as thinking about what might become without dropping into the transcendent that represents the greatest problem for any philosopher trying to straddle the gap between epistemology and ontology. As Zizek puts it:

‘The first step in resolving this deadlock is to invert the standard “realist” notion of an ontologically fully constituted reality which exists “out there independently of our mind” and is then only imperfectly “reflected” in human cognition—the lesson of Kant’s transcendental idealism should be fully absorbed here: it is the subjective act of transcendental synthesis which transforms the chaotic array of sensual impressions into “objective reality.”’

This means that what emerges from the book is an onto-epistemic attempt to bridge the gap between what we know and the Ding-an sich. That is why we might say that it is a book about the Metaphysics of Contingency: how did what is come to be and how do we know what it is. This is of course the basis of all culture, thought and philosophy but it is very difficult to unravel the real from the Real. This is because Zizek continues to maintain that although the Real is inaccessible to us due to its basic non-existence it is at the same time always already present in reality. In other words, there is no hole where the whole once was because the hole is part of the whole. The obvious theological implications of this mean that the book also deals centrally with questions of belief, faith and uncertainty and as we can expect with Zizek religion is given a fair crack of the whip even if only to be dismissed as a transcendental attempt to understand the workings of the Real.

Indeed, another possible subtitle for this book might have been Mind the Gap, as what Zizek is trying to do here is to trace the enduring relevance of Hegel to modernity and our alienation from it by way of an investigation of perception within the totality of post-Kantian thought. Although this is a book about Hegel it also has much to teach us about Nietzsche, Marx, Freud and all the other masters of suspicion.

But above all what this book is about is an attempt to try to rescue the transcendental without collapsing into metaphysics. Zizek of course accepts that material reality has a hard-core of existence which is present independently of our perception of it but what he also maintains is that our perception of reality is part of that material reality. The dialectic of epistemology and ontology therefore produces an intertwined reality in which the gap between what we can know and what might be exists as a metaphysics of contingency.  As Zizek said in response to a question from Giorgio Agamben at a conference in 2004

 

“You know what Einstein did in his relativity theory? He started with curved space as the effect of matter. So, let us say that curved space occurs because something brutally from the outside, like a trauma, intervenes into it. Then he turned it around and claimed that it’s the other way; the only thing that effectively exists is the curved space. And that this transcendent matter curving the space is just our misperception of it. In a parallel way I would claim that, in a Hegelian way, the truth of transcendence is a radical gap in immanence. In this sense I would conditionally, if you ask me at gunpoint, be for immanence. But again I have to resist Kant paradoxically as a philosopher of immanence, where the distinction between transcendence and immanence is projected back into immanence itself.”

 

Ernst Bloch called this “transcendence without the transcendent” in which the transcendent is always already present within reality but is also not yet perceivable or possible other than as anticipation. The point is that the very process through which necessity arises out of necessity is a contingent process.

ToC for Less than Nothing

LESS THAN NOTHING. HEGEL AND THE SHADOWS OF DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM

Slavoj Zizek was born, is still alive, and writes books.

INTRODUCTION: EPPUR SI MUOVE

I THE DRINK BEFORE

1 Vacillating the Semblances
“What we cannot speak about we must show” – Idea‘s Appearing – From Fictions to Semblances – Dialectical gymnastics? No, thanks! – From the One to den – “Nothing Exists” – Gorgias, not Plato, was the arch-Stalinist!

2 »Where There Is Nothing, Read That I Love You«

A Christian Tragedy? – The Big Other – The Death of God – The Atheist Wager – “Do not compromise your desire” – Lacan Against Buddhism

3 Fichte’s Choice
From Fichte’s Ich To Hegel’s Subject – The Fichtean Wager – Finite Absolute – The Posited Presupposition – The Fichtean Bone In the Throat – The First Modern Theology

II THE THING ITSELF: HEGEL

4 Is it still possible to be a Hegelian today?
Hegel versus Nietzsche – Struggle and Reconciliation – A Story to Tell – Changing the Destiny – The Owl of Minerva – Potentiality versus Virtuality- The Hegelian Circle of Circles
Interlude 1: Marx as a Reader of Hegel, Hegel as a Reader of Marx

5 Parataxis: Figures of dialectical process
In Praise of Understanding – Phenomena, Noumena, and the Limit – The Differend – Negation of Negation – Form and Content – Negation Without a Filling
Interlude 2: Cogito in the History of Madness

6 “Not only as Substance, but also as Subject”
Concrete Universality – Hegel, Spinoza… and Hitchcock – The Hegelian Subject – Absolute Knowing – The Idea’s Constipation? – The Animal That I Am
Interlude 3: King, Rabble, War… and Sex

7 The Limits of Hegel
A List – Necessity as Self-Sublated Contingency – Varieties of Self-Relating Negation – The Formal Aspect – Aufhebung and Repetition – From Repetition to Drive

III THE THING ITSELF: LACAN

8 Lacan as a Reader of Hegel
The Cunning of Reason – The Lacanian Prosopopoeia – Lacan, Marx, Heidegger – The “Magical Force” of Reversal – Reflexion and Supposition – Beyond Intersubjectivity – Drive Against Will – The Unconscious of Self-Consciousness
Interlude 4: Borrowing From the Future, Changing the Past

9 Suture and Object
From Differentiality to the Phallic Signifier – From the Phallic Signifier to objet a – Sibelius’s Silence – The Pure Difference
Interlude 5: Correlationism And its Discontents

10 Objects, Objects Everywhere
Subtraction, Protraction, Obstruction… Destruction – Objet a between Form and Content – Voice and Gaze – The Grandmother’s Voice – Master and its Specter – The Two Sides of Fantasy – Image and Gaze – Presence – “The picture is in my eye, but me, I am in the picture” – Leave the Screen Empty!
Interlude 6: Cognitivism and the Loop of Self-Positing

11 The non-All, or, the Ontology of Sexual Difference
Sexual Difference in the Disenchanted Universe – The Real of Sexual Difference – Formulas of Sexuation: the All with an Exception – Formulas of Sexuation: the non-All – The Antinomies of Sexual Difference – Why Lacan Is Not a Nominalist – Negation of Negation: Lacan versus Hegel? – »There IS a non-Relationship«

IV THE CIGARETTE AFTER

12 The Foursome of Terror, Anxiety, Courage… and Enthusiasm
Being/World/Event – Truth, Inconsistency, and the Symptomal Point – There is no Human Animal – From Terror to Enthusiasm – Badiou and Anti-Philosophy

13 The Foursome of Struggle, Historicity, Will… and Gelassenheit
Why Lacan Is Not a Heideggerian – Hegel versus Heidegger – The Torture-House of Language – An Alternate Heidegger – From Will To Drive – The Non-Historical Core of Historicity – From Gelassenheit to Class Struggle

14 The Ontology of Quantum Physics
The Ontological Problem – Knowledge In the Real – Agential Realism – The Two Vacuums – Y’a de den

CONCLUSION: THE POLITICAL SUSPENSION OF THE ETHICAL

Slavoj Zizek’s Less Than Nothing

Slavoj has sent me more or less the whole text of his forthcoming book on Hegel called Less Than Nothing so that I can write some preparatory essays for it in the Guardian and other publications. What I shall also be doing is keeping a running commentary going on here as I read the text. It runs to about 1200 words, so it might take quite a long time to get through this and the book is coming out in April. What will do the dip into it, quote excerpts and generally comment on what I think of the content. This is very exciting and I hope people will follow what is going on here and comment on it. I have had a quick look through the text, well, some of it, and it is a complex but engaging piece of work as far as I can see and it raises all manner of issues. The first half of the book is a reading of Hegel as retrospective teleology, that is he rejects the usual reading of Hegel which sees him as somebody who has already made his mind up about the absolute and his dialectic is there merely to prove that everything that happens is part of that absolute. Zizek, as you might expect, turns Hegel on his head and points out that essentially, he was presenting the universe as something which emerges from contingency rather than necessity.

I hope you will follow this and that we can all get prepared for the publication of the blockbuster later this year.

Good Lord, I think they’ve got it

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/8655106/Im-starting-to-think-that-the-Left-might-actually-be-right.html apart from the usual Rightwing bogeyman stuff about Scargill and the anti-social-state stuff at the end, Moore has at least realised that what we have been saying, that the state is not some neutral instance set above and beyond politics, but is there to serve the interests of a ruling class – a class which has been exposed now as a bunch of corrupt and venal liars – this is a very good piece!

 

 

 

 

Kynicism

The trouble with  all of these crises is that people have lived for many years, probably since the 1970s, in a state of elightened false consciousness as Peter Sloterdijk calls it, so that it comes as no surprise to people that politicians and police are corrupt, that the media bends and twists the truth to its own advantage and feeds us with titlle tattle and entertainment while the masters get on with ruling the universe. The real comical thing is to see the newly outraged politicians and journalists confronted on programmes like Newsnight last night with the real public who sit silently and cycnically with their arms folded with an attitude of ‘where the fuck have you been for the last 30 years?’ But under the impact of an economic crisis which exposes the frailty and the externalisation of the true costs of capitalist ‘efficiency’ there is a chance that all of these partial recognitions may coalesce into something approaching a socio-economic class analysis which can be used to mobilise for systemic political change. This is going to be a very brief window of opportunity and at the moment no one is risking taking a leap through the window. As economies within and outwith the Eurozone start to taumble like a pack of cards can the Left overcome its own cynical opposition to the question of power?

Good Riddance to Dangerous Rubbish

I find it extraordinary that people find what the News of the World and the rest of the Murdoch empire have been up to in any way surprising. Where has everyone been while they have been manipulating the news, dragging journalism in to the gutter, sowing discord, racism, homophobia and every other form of divisive poison going for decades, not to mention the way in which they have exercised a controlling right-wing political influence over governments and oppositions of all colours? We didn’t need downright illegal activities to know that this should have been the subject of scrutiny and control many many years ago. And don’t get me started on the proto-fascist Daily Mail, Express and Star. Dacre and Desmond are not better than Murdoch and I assume that there will be much more shit to hit the fan about them as well over the coming weeks. If people at last start to think about the sort of muck-raking and scandalous behaviour we have put up with in the name of a free press then the collapse of the NotW will perhaps be the first step in a very positive direction.

Guardian Column on Marx

I have just finished a series of 8 columns on Marx and Marxism for the Guardian CiF section. They got quite a lot of response (positive and negative) and there seems to be a real desire to carry on debating so I hope people will use this site to do so. It has been underused for far too long!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/peter-thompson