Talking to the Left: Zizek and Levy

If we take the Gadamerian advisment that lived dialogue is the lesson to be learned from the Platonic dialogues, and not any particular content or Theory, one must admit that it is a pleasure, even an edifying pleasure, to listen to two intelligent persons in discussion.

Here is a recording of a discussion between two “Lefts”: the “half-pessimistic Marxist” Zizek, and the son of May ’68 intellectualism Bernard-Henry Levy, conducted at the New York Public Library on September 16th, 2008. In dialogue the theoretical/political differences between them somehow become translated in something of the way Zizek humorously describes,

Rhett Butler says to the woman, Scartlett O’Harra, ‘Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn’, like “F, three points, off” In Japan I was told, where they are very polite, you know how they translated this line when they subtitled the film? Something like, ‘Frankly my dear, I think there is a slight misunderstanding…between the two of us’… So in this sense, maybe there is a slight misunderstanding [between us]…maybe

Between each speakers’ frequent return visits to rehearsed points, heart-felt slogans and comforting illustrations, there is the experience of a communication, a meeting together. Instead of a string of sitcoms, TV dramas, or even a newshour, this nearly two hours of waxing and waning of “talk” measures something of a happy experience, where happy connotes the good life. The French riots, the consequences of ’68, the role of anti-semiticism in Israel/Palestinian stalemates, the difficulties with personal charity, the future of the Left, the problem of Fundamentalism amid Capitalist freedoms, the Fascism in the phrase Islamo-fascism, the necessary Presidency of Palin vs. the liberal path of more and more political freedoms, are all talked over, with some light. And it’s compelling to hear Zizek in his characteristic gesture say, “I agree with you without question/without reserveration/100%, when you say…”

The mp3 found over here, on this mp3 page, over at Prōlogus.

A Touch More On Žižek

I was reading over at No Useless Leniency and it got me thinking about the “use” of Žižek, the place for his revelations. This was my response to these thoughts, which flowed from yesterday’s post, and the comments that followed; this a product of his thinking sitting within me for some time now, for much more than a decade. Unfortunately this sounds more bloggish than my usual entries, but it is worth posting:

I have to say that the “There is no Other of the Other” as a teaspoon of medicine works quite well, helping one see the nature of any manifestation of The Great Oz, but when you realize that the Other of the suturing Other is a necessary illusionary fold in a social field, the full weight of this critique becomes difficult to balance. As someone strummed and banged, “Meet the new boss…”

What concerns me is that such King-stripping contains its own satisfactions, its own perverse little joy of “ah ha!” or “gotcha!” which is one of the immense pleasures of reading Zizek as he performs his psychoanalytic Judo again again and again like a sociological master. We see the flips, but what about his ground-game, who is going to tap-out from the ideological arm-bar?

Don’t get me wrong, Zizek is a sheer pleasure for the contemplating, but I think I can sense of what makes him perpetually disappointed with his followers (without analyzing him). There is indeed the pleasure of interpretation, which makes his readings of films most satisfying, setting the battlefield upon every aesthetic surface. This is a good thing. But it seems that Zizek feels a vital connection to his conclusions, his opera, that has an immediacy that others simply cannot match.

This makes me feel that the path to “genuine” revolution, even that advocated by Zizek, is of the microscopic kind, the affective body-building of organizing powers which do not benefit so much from the Oz-defying adage “There is no Other of the Other” or even more enjoyably, “(M)Other”. One wonders if the phenomena of Zizek itself is best understood within a communitarian sense of constructive values, rather than in the ultimate satisfactions of the interpretive revelations that he champions. This is not to say that tracing the reservoirs of “enjoyment” cannot be a very good means of measuring social discourse and construction. Every objection to the claims of others seems to contain some element of an unstated objection to their hidden enjoyments. I think it wise to see that the organization of enjoyment is a primary guide to organizations of shared perceptions and actions. But dunotarian proclivities, it seems, could be folded into larger conceptions of constructive agency and action. Is our fundamental realization supposed to be that we are locked in a red room? Is this the limits of our discursive and bodily imagination?

 

Slavoj Žižek: A “Human” Example

If any are unfamiliar (and we must assume that some are not swept up in the Academio-acculturation of a protesting Self) or simply have lost track of him under some characterization, I encourage those who have a love of philosophy to consider the “human” example of Slavoj Zizek, a Lacanian philosopher and sociologist.

A wonderful documentary that focuses not only on his ideas, but his extraordinary personage.

A recent, September 9th lecture given in Oregon, on the nature of politeness.

Or, this prospective examination of the film Children of Men.

Zizeks early books definitely made an impression on me, opening the door to Lacanian thinking and cultural analysis, the melding of philosophy to the matters of social concern. I remember attending one of his lectures a decade ago and asking a question on Israel whose premise horrified him. What I suggest is that more than the ultimate validity of his synthesis of Hegel, Kant and Lacan, which can be of interest, it is his lived experience of the significance of philosophy that perhaps gives its most compelling argument for its relevance. As much as Zizek is at pains to not be “human” just like all of “us”, subsumed in the ideology of normalcy, it really is the affective example of his experience of alienation and his thought-out articulation in response to it which allows us to embrace his very sincerity of project, if not his conclusions.

If there were any intellectual I would like to sit down to dinner with, it would be this man.

 

 

Spinoza’s Logic of Affects and an Ontology of Torture

 

There is a curious shadow in the logic of Spinoza, a dark, foreboding underlogic that comes with its incredible sheen, its recourse to a path of Joy and Rationality. It is not so much a consequence of its argumentation, a conclusion drawable from within its aims, but a manifestation of its logic.

What I have in mind is Spinoza’s implicit imperative that Joy follows the aim of becoming more like God. That is, Spinoza’s argument for the path to happiness is that the more that we become like God/Substance, the freer we become, the more active, the least reactionary. This method of analysis is based on the idea that only the entirety of Substance is causa sui, its own cause. All other things are caused through other things. And concordantly, the more we become the causes of our own action, through our better understanding of the forces at play through clearer ideas, the more Joyful and powerful we become.

A single example suffices to get at the root of what Spinoza is after. A child is hit by another child, and reacts with anger, or even hate. A man is hit by another man, and in understanding the forces at play (perhaps the history of race, the residual and institutional sadnesses) is able to act, rather than react, in a more powerful and active manner. Each, the child and the adult, experience themselves to be “free”, but one is consubstantially freer than the other: so would argue Spinoza.

The result of this imitatio be-like-God-have-clearer-ideas-become-more-powerful-and-free approach is remarkable in the capacities of change that inhabit nearly every situation. Each and every moment is open to mental, and therefore physical, avenues of change. In particular, as beings locked in history, the diachronic unfolding of inadequate ideas, a finite existence which is overrun with imaginary effects, our possibilities become our ability to affectively, and intelligently engage with others. That is, we become more our own cause (like God), insofar as we no longer conceive of ourselves as independent and isolated units. We become more our own cause insofar as we realize ourselves to be part of an assemblage of affective and ideational bodies that are already existing, and that through our awareness, we can intentionally construct. We become our own cause, to the degree that “our own” becomes larger and larger. The political ramifications of this path are striking in their dexterity, and it is for this reason that Spinoza became the first modern proponent of a liberal democracy of intellectual freedoms.

All this stems from Spinoza’s idea that we become more Joyous and more powerful, the more we become like God.

But as I say, there is a shadow beneath the logic of this argument, a different kind of “becoming like God” that seems to belie the very logic and exemplification Spinoza uses. And I say this as a Spinozist, a firm admirer of the possibilities of his thought.

One of the most praised, and disconcerting aspects of Spinoza’s notion of God is that this God has no affects. That is, because for Spinoza an affect is the passing from one degree of perfection, to another degree, God being perfect in the expression of himself can have no affect. For this reason, “He who loves God cannot endeavor that God should love him in return” (5p19). That makes for a remarkable ontological set up. We and animals, as finite beings, though we feel, suffer, love, ache, laugh, wonder, etc. as the actual expressions of the Totality that is God, God itself experiences none of these things. In a strange way, we experience them (as a product of our finitude), but God cannot, or does not (which is the same thing for Spinoza). Our very affective state, in its quality, is a kind of illusion which does not register upon the totality as such.

What is curious about this set-up is that it bears striking resemblance to one of the more horrific conditions of human social function, that of the Totalitarian Torture State. That is, under some analysis the State, as a necessary condition of its ideological status as an horizon of social determination actually must torture so as to produce the very expression of its condition, an expression which it then represses.

Eric Santner in his Study of the first Schizophrenic, Daniel Schreber, describes how the mechanism of political torture functions in this way:

Torture is the way an institution simultaneously confesses and represses its deepest secret: that its consistency, its enjoyment of recognition as a really existing social fact, ultimately depends on the magic of performative utterances, on the force of their own immanent process of enunciation. The abjection produced in the torture victim, his betrayal of everything that matters and is dear to him, his confession of his own putrescence, is, as it were, the “substance” that stands in for the lack of substantial foundations to which the institution might appeal for final and ultimate legitimation. The torture victim’s abject body is the ‘privileged’ site of a politicotheological epiphany, for it is there that the reality of institutions and the social facts they sponsor – contracts, titles, money, property, marriages, and the like – bottoms out, touches on a dimension of vicious circularity that cannot be avowed if these social facts are to continue to enjoy credibility, if the social field structured by them is to remain consistent for the subject.

My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity

In a Spinozist context there are quite a number of things that stand out.

For one, the notion of a “politicotheological epiphany”. There is in Spinoza a remarkable sense of the epiphanic. In readers who have struggled through his precise stackings of propositions, there comes a time when suddenly it all locks into place, and a sudden sheen comes into being. I have experienced this myself. It moves from boring and unlikely logic, to brilliant and revealing clarity. And the marriage of the political and the theological of course speaks to Spinoza’s own Politico-theological treatise, which seeks to show the divine and natural expression of both these realms.

Secondly, the enunciative power of the victim is dependent upon the very unaffective status of the torturer (whether it be the person him or herself, or the State). In much the same way, our very affective states, our loud-ringing cries (and laughter), for Spinoza are leveraged off from a non-affective thing, which actually produces them in us. This goes to the very core notion of what an inadequate idea is in Spinoza. An inadequate idea is one which one holds thinking it is about the world, when in fact it is an idea only about oneself (the state of one’s body). In a certain sense, one is confused not only about what an idea (representation) is about, but also “who” is thinking it. For instance, when I think to myself “Sam is a bastard” this idea is really best understood as an expression of my body being in a certain state, and thus in that my body is an extensional expression of Substance, it is an expression made by God, and not me. This illusionary locus of enunciation which marks out the nature of what makes inadequate ideas inadequate, is what shapes the logic of torture under Santner’s description. The victim seems to be crying out a confession of his own experience, but in fact is only expressing a condition of the whole. The victim is confessing-expressing what the State or its torturer cannot, as a matter of its own ontological logic. It is feeling what cannot be felt, as a vector of its own power. The cries and putrescence become immanent to the State.

In Spinoza I think this link can be found right at the level of Affects themselves, joys, loves, hates, sadnesses, jealousies, etc. (again, a thing that God cannot have). Spinoza tells us in the General Definition of Affect, that whatever the affect “this [a confused idea], which constitutes the form of the affect, must indicate or express, a constitution of the Body (or some part of it), which the Body (or some part of it) has because its power of acting, or force of existing, is increased or diminished, aided or restrained.”

Notice the particular form his denomination, the confused idea “must indicate or express”.

In the Latin Spinoza uses a word of largely social obligation to convey this representational necessity, debet (indicare vel exprimit debet). To translate more literally, it “owes”, it “pays the debt,” to “indicate or express”, “to show or come out of” a condition of the body. And the Latin verb exprimit, to express, can even be a word of near torture, in that it can read that ideas owe it to “squeeze out, press out, extort, wrest from” an organization of the body. The double duty of representation shown here “to indicate or express” has affinities with Santner’s process of enunciation which “confesses and represses”. If one were to draw these terms strictly to each other. Our inadequate ideas which we take as being ideas about the world, and belonging to us, are rather confessions of a God-Substance that cannot feel, and the fact of this confessional character is repressed in the very conscious experience of ourselves as distinct and personal entities. Spinoza’s immanent expression of God in affective beings, becomes the nightmare confessional and repressed torture of political subject. Just as Santner strips away the mechanism of enunciation in the example of political torture, Spinoza strips away the representational mechanism of expression in the form of affects felt and ideas held.

To be fair, what seems at first distinct between these two views is that the State is (unconsciously) invested in a particular kind of horrific enunciation, while God as Substance is not. This becomes clear in Michel de Certeau’s essay “Institution of Rot” whose reasonings Eric Santner is working from:

de Certeau wrote:

…[the] goal of torture, in effect, is to produce acceptance of a State discourse, through the confession of putrescence. What the torturer in the end wants to extort from the victim he tortures is to reduce him to being no more than that, rottenness, which is what the torturer himself is and knows that he is, but without avowing it. The victim must voice the filth, everywhere denied, that everywhere supports the representation of the regime’s ‘omnipotence,’ in other words, the ‘glorious image’ of themselves the regime provides for the adherents through its recognition of them. The victim must therefore assume the position of subject upon him the theatre of identifying power is performed.

“Institution of Rot,” in Psychosis in Sexual Identity: Toward a Post-Analytic View of the Schreber Case

Perhaps one could say, following Spinoza’s ontological-affective logic that the degree to which a totalitarian subject agrees with and expresses joyful statements, it is doing so enunciatively on the behalf of a non-affective State, adding to its glory (thereby, holding adequate ideas), and to the degree that he is not, and is made to suffer, he is enunciatively manifesting the ideological substrate of the State’s “glorious image”. The investment of the State in the most abject subject is a very particular kind of investment which is otherwise a product of a general logic of the State.

What is disturbing about this comparison of course is that it is a result that is antithetical the aims of Spinoza’s political imagination. Attempting to be “like God”, the cause of oneself, is supposed to lead to more and more freedom, more and more Joy. But there is an afterimage of such logic, a way in which “attempting to be like God” results in the more horrific totalitarian processes. For if Spinoza’s vision of an affective and modal expression of a non-affective Totality called God is brought to the formal logic of a Totalitarian State, we see striking correspondence. And that this correspondence is not one of accident, but goes to the most central aspect of Spinozist epistemology (that which makes up an inadequate idea) makes it even more ominous. Further, the logic of epiphanic “glorious image” sheen that the very enunicative and repressional processes of the State produce, “squeezing out from the organization of the body” seems to characterize well what is most remarkable about Spinoza’s achievement of stacked and inter-indexed propositions, the sudden clarity of theo-political power, as expressed by Nature and Mind. In short, what is best in Spinoza seems to sanction in part what is worst in politics, through a logic of onto-epistemic imitation. And what is worst in the political seems to explain what is best in Spinoza.

What is one to make of this? Is Spinoza’s really only a vast totalitarian dream projected onto the Universe? Is it that Spinoza, in his reasoned argument for a liberal democratic state not living up to the full de imiatione Dei consequence of his logic? To the first possibility I would answer, I don’t think so. To the second, perhaps. It seems to me that what Santner and de Certeau’s analysis of the logical apparatus of the Totalitarian State reveals about Spinoza’s logic is that there IS a certain epiphanic mechanism employed in his means, a certain redemptive torture of affect which makes of the Totality a “glorious image”. But the value of his thought certainly cannot be reduced to such. What is more important I think is what Spinoza, once this mechanism is exposed, tells us about the liberal state and the path of acting more and more like God. Within such a political process, both doors are open, and perhaps necessary, that of the immanent, body-building, affective sharing that is effectively creative, combining powers as new bodies that de-centralize identity, across Selves, in a communication of reasons; but also, that there is a certain kind of necessary cruelty to social organization, as at times one is forced to collapse one’s own repressed state into a tortured mechanism of enunciation, which generates the very sheen which gives direction to society, the very epiphany which affectively condenses bodies together and facilitates their assembled state. And perhaps these two passages to social wholes, and communications, are phasal to each other. There is no Golden Rule (as golden as Spinoza was able to write it), which does not contain the possibility of political theophany through enunciative confession-repression. Perhaps this is due to the contingent nature of history, and that beneath – or more distant to – reason, IS this very epiphanic capacity of bodies to assemble affects so as to “make the god appear” through suffering, and that at times such a capacity acts as a resource, a resource needing to be checked, but never eliminable. Or perhaps this is written into the very logic of logic, the very capacity to organize ourselves around reasons, ideas and criteria, the dark, but luminous shadow of rationality itself