To be sure however, we must be careful to mark where this moment of exception may be to any signifying mechanism, for it is never really the difference between a signifier and what it means, which in itself is arbitrary. This difference is not the same as the whole and the exception that constitute it.
With regard to this whole, it is the exception that guarantees its closure and universality. We hence have here two spheres or orders of difference if you prefer. The (external) limit of language is (concrete) reality. The (internal) limit of lalangue is Difference itself. If I may take the liberty of doing so, we may say that lalangue is the inflection of jouissance in language, at the point where the force of a desire sutures or punctuates the signifier. Indeed, this cut in the signifying chain may perhaps be likened to the appearance of an idea.
At the level of the thing itself, we see in Marx the condition for the universalization of the function of the commodity ie. commodity exception is labor itself in whose exercise we have the conjunction of exchange value and use value, being that which produces value itself, traded and materialized in the form of prices.
What then would it mean following Lacan, that the truth is pas-tout, ie. not-all? The answer is that it is not to be found in the difference between a signifier and a reference, but within the signifier itself.
The Real here is identified with the internal limit of lalangue, or 'the unseizable boundary that prevents it from becoming itself.' In other words, like the Hegelian interdiction to Kant, the bar that separates the symbolic from the Real is inside the symbolic field itself.
How, however would we identify the Real, which unlike reality, is 'grasped initially as a hard kernel, or 'as that which always returns to the same place. Kripke would go as far as to assert that the kernel would remain the same in all possible symbolic universes.
What makes the traumatic event, if that is the hard kernel resisting symbolic assimilation, is not presented in its positivity. We are told that its consistency depends on a fantasmaic construction that obfuscates the Void. Like the notion of structural causality presented by Althusser, its effectivity consists in its effects, hence the matter as to whether it occurred, in reality, matters little.
The Real as such is initially identified with a fortuitous encounter. A contingency that derails symbolic automatism, perhaps augmenting its circuit, if not blocking it. Yet as contingency which intrudes, it cannot be pinned down but only constructed, such as 'the purely logical consistency of an X that eludes a structure, but is only discernible via its role in the structure.
The other facet which is emphasized is, contradictory to the usual emphasis of the Real as that which resists symbolization, that which never stops writing itself. In this sense we are presented with a semblant of the Real which is potentially agential, as opposed to enigmatic and opaque, yet that is included however to accommodate this modification, perhaps in the expression of its difference from the signifier.
Writing hence, as an expression of the drive, also is that which 'returns to the same place' as it were, and is as such - objectal and Real. We are prodded as it were - that this act is 'beyond or more precisely below' possible subjectifications - and, as such, does not represent the subject.
Presenting this is Kripke's critique of the theory of descriptions:- 'The Real appears to be the surplus of the quod over the quid, the pure "that" of an object without properties.'
This appears to be dangerous for what we seem to be doing is presenting the Real of trauma as precisely that which resists symbolization, and yet appears to have a host of properties. This, we are warned, were it to be a phantasy projection on the Void (though I am tempted to say of the Void) in the symbolic Other - in an entity whose existence is to be refused. This refusal however, may not alter its ontological consistency or its existential import.
The conception of labour presented here entails an antagonism as it were, analogous perhaps to the primordial patricide - but more viscerally a fight to the death between two subjects for recognition, in which loss entails slavery and bondage.
Habermas, a critic of Hegel, in 1971 argued that we have 'on one hand, a relationship of the subject to the object, to nature - and on the other, symbolic interaction, or the relationship of subjects to each other. The question that Slavoj reads as repressed by such a distinction, and which acts apparently as a critique of the attempted Habermasian reconciliation, that is raised by Hegel is: 'what is the intersubjective (symbolic) economy of work itself, of the instrumental relationship to objectivity? Marxism acknowledges 'social relationships' of domination operating at a level determined by the development of productive forces... thereby acting as a function of the development and the organization of the force of labour itself. In terms of the Hegelian opposition to such a depiction, we are left with what is merely an ambiguous, likening of the Master-Slave dialectic, from Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit' as the point where he comes closest to historical materialism, with the assertion that truth is on the side of the slave labourer.
The struggle, amidst the myriad of representations it may take, be they historical struggles between modes of production, thematic ones between aesthetic registers, representational differences in congregations, or indeed interpretive differences in the law; requires as it were a form of narrative for their comprehension. Here, sorting through the disparate elements, scraps of evidence, testimony, circumstantial evidence, etc. reveals as it were a plethora of instances where the ends don't meet as it were, or are explicitly at odds with each other. At the level of theory Jaques Alain Miller presents this as the problem between consistency and logical consistency. Investigation here consists in how it may be possible to think their simultaneous conjunction, of what may often be opposing or contradictory determinations. Indeed, this is a beautiful formula for the Real.
Figuratively, this is likened to the Hegelian critique of Kant; though this is elucidated by a rather rushed explanation.
Opposition, in the psychoanalytic tradition Zizek is working with, also carries with it the Lacanian contextual frames of mind. The imaginary or the pre-symbolic level is one which is seen to represent the subjective harmony, even if it is complementarily produced. Impressions made on one's disposition upon witnessing a watercolor painting for example may correspond to this. Another would be that of a fulfilling sexual union, such as when a woman and a man form an 'accomplished' whole.
The Symbolic, as the name may indicate functions via differentiality, much like the way a signifier derives its meaning, in terms of its opposition, even its subtractive dimension that sets it apart from synonyms. Or perhaps more explicitly in antonyms where a term as it were serves as, apart from itself, the lack in its other. Or, to expand it - where an element works to exemplify the other's lack or constitutive absence.
The Real here would be an immeadiate, perhaps even short-circuited conjunction of these opposites - thus rendering them unreadable. "The zero-point of the dialectical process where each passes directly into its other. Despite the Hegelian dialectical process fashioning a key perhaps to unlock the logic at work in such a conjuncture, the Real; at least in its Lacanian formulation, is an inscription formalizable only on the basis of its impasse. Or perhaps in even more naive terms, a heterogeneity too disparate to be thought a constituting principle. Likened, as it were to the failure of its own inscription.
In each of these stages, which may I suppose be likened to the interpretive moments we have a sorting amidst, and synthetization of disparities, be they elements of a plot, or whatever. And this consequent unformed result, in the identification of the signifying mechanism, even perhaps a logic of its expression: which I think at least since Peter Dews' book mentioned earlier in the last video, we identify in their congruence, we map it as it were a symbolic structure, even if its mode of realization does not complete the signifying chain, hence not reaching jouissance.
This fragment as it were, or incomplete map charts what the missed encounter is in its effectivity, an unutilized if not unknown facility, even if our attempts create the intuition of where its outlines may be discernible. As Zizek puts it, instead of saying 'we missed the object, we should understand the object as this missed encounter. To emphasize the point, Jaques Allain Miller is cited, that the subject itself is one of the responses of the Real.
At its most basic visceral level, Lacan offers us some consolation by reminding us that substance, begins if not adheres in the jouissant body. Indeed, Substance is - first of all, the big Other, the order that gives birth to the Subject.' And, I think this duality, both of the inherence of substance, to the body, and its primary identification as the big Other are important markers to meditate on. As much as substance may be constitutive of the big Other as it were, it may also function as its constituent exception, inasmuch as it is substance that makes the Big Other, representing perhaps in another moment its extimate kernel.
In another cautionary remark we are reminded that insisting on a very sharp scission between true reality and psychic reality may not make very much sense to any subject: Zizek describing it as a contradiction in adjecto, to which I might add a recipe for the production of neurosis. Furthermore, any such construction which alienates jouissance from the articulation of the subject's symbolic reality may indeed harm the subject, and I have tried to raise this matter elsewhere under the rubric of bodily alienation. As far as analysis is concerned, even within an orthodox Lacanaian frame, it may well be true that the Real does not exist, and yet it may be possible to discern aspects of the truth from it, perhaps even in the act of transference. And indeed, at its most rudimentary, do we not see this in even the most simplistic models of negation? IE. that it is night, and I write this down on a piece of paper. Tomorrow, it is afternoon, ie. it is no longer night - but the paper is still there.
The oft-quoted 'reading' of the Hegelian dialectic as the thesis-antithesis-synthesis is radically re-written by Zizek now in Lacanian terms, as the Imaginary-Real-Symbolic, with the latter second term, serving as the impassivity of the former, allowing for what is formulateable but more importantly expressible as the Symbolic. A truly novel gesture which at least I have never seen before.
What further reinforces this reading however is the positing of the antithesis, not as somehow already expressed in the thesis itself, (however banal this triadic metaphor may be) but as that which the thesis lacks, or better yet, its constitutive exception required for it to achieve its concentration. In other words, this is not complementary inasmuch as it is its negation in the strong sense of the term. It's own negation as it were.
The re-reading of the synthesis which may now be formed is one which is as pathbreaking for the tradition of the radical enlightenment as it is for de-colonial theory. 'The thing holding the two symbolic alternates together is not their mutual fulfilment of a lack, but their common lack,' Indeed, Zizek seems to be implying an extent of metaphysical intersubjectivity when he states that the terms become one 'against the background of their common lack, that each sends or expresses to the other.'
The synthesis that is produced, if that is indeed the symbolic, no longer has to work as an affirmation of difference as such. In his own words 'the synthesis liberates difference from the compulsion of identity", because it means we no longer have to look for the resolution of the contradiction in the identity of the extremes.' What we are actually presented with is contradiction, as the non-identity itself under the aspect of identity.
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Now you may recall the logic of exception presented in the earlier video which seeks to situate the relation between the ensemble and the elements at the level of the elements themselves, is one which can be potentially adopted by any signifier. Perhaps a Utopian vision would be that each takes turns to play the role of the exception that holds the whole together.
I think it is important that we notice that we still do insist on signifiers: as names, words etc. to function as the exception - for the whole referred to by each signifier functions constitutively by this same logic, that is to say differentially, defining itself in terms of what it is not ie. there is always something that must be excluded for a thing to be what it is.
Without a constitutive exception, a thing would have no exterior, nothing that it holds itself together against, and hence would be pas-tout, or possibly incomplete.
A possible example of this exceptionality would be symptoms, traumatisms and blanks, as Zizek terms them, 'empty non-historicized spaces in the subject's 'symbolic universe'. These would be domains upon who signification is conferred retroactively. Given the bodily nature of the experience we are referring to this is a conception of language that is phenomenological and Merleu Ponty is cited as a reference.
I recall a video which I saw on Youtube, an extract from 'The Pervert's Guide To Cinema', in all likelihood where Zizek talks about the choice presented to Neo, then Mr. Andersen played by Keanu Reeves, about whether he should take the blue pill and remain inside the system of the Matrix, or whether he should take the red pill and see the world beyond it, ie. the Matrix is a simulacra that uses humans as biological batteries to fuel its illusion, and of that other worlds gathered in cities underground who choose to resist it.
He, Zizek explains that the choice is never really about remaining in the system or choosing the outside. Bear in mind that Zizek himself lived through the disintegration of Yugoslavia, and took part in the first free election in 1990.
The point that should be observed here is that it is precisely alternatives presented in these terms which should be resisted ie. you are either inside or outside the system, you are either for or against us. His demand for a third pill from Morpheus is in principle not unlike that of the character of Cypher who makes a deal with agent Smith which allows him to stay in the Matrix, in a new life with more comforts etc. at the price of betraying the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar.
The demand for the third pill is one which like Cypher's choice, is as someone who is already 'outside the system' but wants back in, realizes as it were that the first choice itself was a false one. IE. we outside the system find life unbearable and dream of a prelapsarian time. The point indeed is a more psychoanalytical one for it directly concerns how we perceive our own position with respect to the symbolic order.
To better explain the predicament, an example from his later book - 'Less Than Nothing' serves well. The Lacanian IQ test is basically a barometer to test the subject's attitude to the prevailing authority. An idiot is simply outside the system, let us call him an orthodox red pill user, a moron is one who is inside the system believing in orders stupidly - an imbecile is simply between the two.
The trick is how we can leave the system without sacrificing our dreams? Remembering that our life in the system may be a manufactured product of ideology.
When Zizek says for example, that the goal of analyses is to produce the recognition of desire in full speech, that is to integrate it into the universe of signification - we need to properly comprehend that the symbolic is the medium of any possible mediation between the universe of signification and our imaginary.
Regarding the subject proper who is included, or rather realizes himself totally in the other, who - as it were comprehends or rather realizes his symbolic realization is read to be one who functions as a corresponding cognate of the symbolic machine, ie. of 'the structure without a subject' - which to me at least sounds like the Matrix.
A subject as such is conceived as having a sense of independent consciousness when it can hence be realized that they are capable of demonstrating the possibility of mediating their relation to the symbolic order, that is of understanding, appreciating, criticizing, ie. reasoning, without which they would be reduced to an instrument in its functioning.
Yet, we are provided a formalization of this process of mediation, if I may call it that: it posits a barred, non-achieved pas-tout or 'not-all' Other. Tellingly one which has a non-symbolizeable, extimate kernel at its core.' Ie. a subject capable of having alienations of their own. 'It is only from the barred Other (A) that we can grasp the subject ($). A subject without such a constituting exception, without a hole as Zizek puts it, is a complete series whose only possible relation to the structure is total alienation, which paradoxically to me at least, is likened to all-encompassing subjectivity. The fact that the Other is lacking is read in the proof of the object à - which may perhaps appear in the form of a symbolic demand. Total alienation is avoided by positing himself as corelative to this demand, or better yet the structure of this remainder, inscribed as $ <> a (read as the barred subject is a correlative or perhaps corresponds to the object cause of desire.)
The barring of the other as presented in the inscription represents to us that the Other is not a mere anonymous machine, 'but an other who lacks the object cause of desire), an Other who wants something from the subject.
To place a preliminary observation about such a formulation, we must ask - would not a barred subject acting as a correlate to the object cause of desire substantialize the subject as it were? Perhaps revealing that what is actually barred in this Lacanian formulation is any true idealism? Another aspect which Zizek presses is to place before us the existentiality of the subject of the signifier that exists to the extent that the Other is capable of demanding something of the subject.
My former question is met within the text as Zizek acknowledges that any reference to a barred Other would seem to relegate Hegel at least to the background. In the depiction of the Lacanian stages of symbolization would entail an Other 'holed by the obstacle of a Real-impossible kernel, which or whose inertia blocks dialecticization, an obstacle that sublates it in and through the symbol - in short, the quintessential anti-Hegelian Other.'
The undoing of a thing or what is termed Das Ungeschehenmachen is in some ways a chronicling of the end of the analytical process presented in this text. Where three stages or passes in the symbolic may be represented: 1. symbolic realization -> which may be read as an accomplished historicization of symptoms 2. the experience of symbolic castration or symbolic destitution, presenting a correlate to the original repression and opening the way to the desires of the subject at the level of the Other 3. Traversal of the phantasy that corresponds to a fall in the object which plugs a hole in the Other.
It is interesting to note that Lacan seems to explicitly state what is to be his take on the concept: that unique (and exceedingly simple) thing that the talking cure and philosophy seemingly share; which is here presented as the time of the Thing. 'It is not the same as the Thing because it is always where the thing isn't..., or attributing this to Hegel, 'a concept is what makes the Thing be there, while, all the while, it isn't.' This is what is referred to as an 'identity in difference', characterizing as it were - the relation of a concept to a thing...:perhaps not the greatest account of Lacan in his account of concept production, and by the same token making the Deleuzian project of a transcendental empiricism (and the many variations it may have inspired, from Nick Land to Nathan Brown) and his differential ontology all the more interesting. Though I believe in such a representation what makes the depiction appear weak is the absence of negation: whose very noticing forms such a key feature in the enunciation and traversal of the path of truth in Hegel. Also, I think there is a rather hasty superposition of negation with the 'death instinct', to present the first evident example from Hegel's Phenomenology itself - it may be night, and you choose to write this down on a piece of paper. Nothing changes in a truth when you write it down. Tomorrow it is morning: but the paper remains the same, but perhaps prompts the past tense with regard to the sentence.
Zizek however puts this as an annihilation of the thing, the moment it is symbolized. But also, 'the unity of the thing, is decentered in relation to the reality of the thing.' And this I believe is hasty indeed, for any given determination of a thing: the calling to name of any of its traits, characteristics, semblants, shapes, etc. necessarily abstracts from the thing - and this I believe is important in his own work.
We then see what is presented ambiguously in another superpositioning of the death instinct with the symbolic order itself, yet we are provided a rationale for this insofar as it follows laws beyond the subject's imaginary lived experiences. The density of this conjuncture cannot be overemphasized as it marks chiefly to my mind at least - the split or schism between leading post-structuralist proponents, namely Foucault and Derrida regarding the use of ecriture, and how we might envision the autonomy of a text, though this might have to sacrifice the initial structurality of the insight.
Yet it is precisely the possibility of this autonomy of the symbolic order, and indeed its possible narrativization if you will - such as in the case of jurisprudence which allows for its central scope to exceed that of the imaginary homeostasis of the pleasure principle. It is for this reason that Lacan says that - "the symbolic order is rejected by the libidinal order, which includes the whole of the domain of the imaginary, including the structure of the ego. And the death instinct is only the mask of the symbolic order." A curious turn of phrase towards the end.
It is also possible, only at the symbolic level of course - that any possibility of undoing the past rests. The word for it in German is Ungeschehenmachen, which may properly be translated into an 'undoing', and Zizek notices that the same term was used by Freud as well as Hegel.
What is actually posited here, in a way that does appear to resonate with the term is the likening of it to the negation of the negation. Here the syllogistic mechanism in play is not exactly the reconciliation between the syntheses and the anti-thesis for it does not read these two as antithetical propositions in the first place. What Zizek seems to be doing here is negating the negation as it were by positing that it never produced the schism in the first place. This of course being a gesture that may be posited only retroactively.
We are also quickly reminded from a quote from Hegel's Encyclopedia 'that... sublation consists in positing that the illusion has not yet been accomplished.' This dimension of futurity is vital and I believe it is instructive to identify the role negation has in this. As Zizek presents elsewhere - when a bar or obstacle to an object of desire is removed we do not get the pure experience so to speak. We realize that it was precisely the inhibitions which created that facet as an object of desire in the first place.
To present the predicament Zizek has this to say - "As we advance we never seem to reach our destination, until all of a sudden - we have already been there the whole time. Too early suddenly turns into too late, without allowing us to determine the moment in which this passage occurred." I think it is crucial that we intervene here and clarify a few basic objections 1. If the right moment as it were is marked by the object a, would it be reductionist of me to suppose that object a could be a commodity? Or would such a naturalization substantialize what is in effect a necessary symbolic or algebraic entity? 2. Consider for a moment that object a were a commodity, or perhaps even a historical article such as Jean Jaques Rousseau's 'Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen'; then could not its process of production, the political forces of the period, and of course its composition not yield what well may amount to a 'moment' - if that is not an inadequate phrase for such a temporality; where our encounter may yet take place? Indeed without being too mysterious about this, I would say such a gesture of ideology critique characterizes much of Zizek's own work.
An example, if it may be called one even as it may be paltry to the spirit is the way Hegel would come to view crime and punishment. During his earlier years in Frankfurt, he witnessed the mechanism of judicio-legal punishment to be an external mechanical coercion. This as it were would foreclose any reconciliation between the criminal and the community he may have violated with his actions. We find his position change as it were, in his mature period, from his Philosophy of Right - the judicial punishment already accomplishes true reconciliation and the retroactive suppression of the crime.
A crucial difference is marked also in how the action of a criminal is interpreted in the mature period, and I hope you see how this ties in with the last video. The criminal act is not a particular act, it by necessity contains the moment of its universality (inasmuch as it is the action of a rational and responsible being). The universality of an act arises from the recognition of its principle, and the presumption of its alleged normative universality. Another way of putting it would be to say that in emphasizing only the mere particularity of the content of his actions, he in no way presents his act as a norm which is universalizable. In other words the criminal is recognized as being rational through the means of punishment.
When thinking about how Zizek's philosophy in terms of how it is oriented; we would notice broadly that it is a subject-oriented philosophy, and we would be well guided as we are in this work to recall the Kantian distinction between phenomenon and noumenon can indeed coincide in a subject. In a quote: 'Man is, on the one hand, a phenomenal being, caught in the chain of natural causation, and, on the other, a noumenal being capable of self-determination and free action.' A construction which seemingly prefigures the perhaps more properly medieval question of free-will and determinism. And yet, almost on the heels of this we find that the conviction behind an act is insufficient for its effectivity, which can only come from the recognition of Others.
This indeed is a structural problem, and one which the beautiful soul understands too well. And despite the 'truth' that the subjective position may articulate, its complicity and self-blindness in the role it plays in an apparently tragic scenario belies that of an exploited victim. A seat that it occupies perhaps too comfortably for some.
Perhaps exemplary of this position is the role played by the suffering mother. "The flow of her complaints is nothing more than the inverted form of a demand addressed to her family to accept her sacrifice."
What is necessary for the beautiful soul here is to renounce the subjective economy that leads to this narcissistic jouissance of sacrifice.
Yet, in another mode though perhaps not in an altogether different register - the disappointment of the beautiful soul resides in the particularity of the injustice it identifies. A literary example is cited, Henry James's 'The Turn of the Screw', where a governess who sees evil spirits everywhere is presented as the true evil. Perhaps this is how: the true source of evil is not the sacrificed contents themselves, but their very form. Perhaps exemplifying, in turn what Hegel may refer to as Ungeschehenmachen, or undoing.
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