Eryazgı (predestination) - Translated from Turkish

Slavoj Žižek, "Eryazgı (predestination)"

First death: Death required by biology.

Second death: the peaceful death (mourning) of the subject, the sight of his accounts, the absence of symbolic debts haunting his memory.

With the second notion of death, we can put Wagner's claim into place: Wotan, who volunteered for his own downfall, reached the height of the tragedy: "This is all we need to learn from human history: to volunteer for the inevitable and to fulfill it in person." Wagner's accurate formula should be read to the letter, along with the paradox it brings: If something is inevitable in itself, why should we actually volunteer for it and try to make it happen?

This paradox is at the heart of the symbolic order and is the other side of the paradox of banning something impossible (for example incest), we even find it in Wittgenstein's famous quote: "He must shut up about the unspeakable" – if it is impossible in any case to say anything about it, why is there a prohibition on it unnecessarily? The fear that something can still be said about the unspoken is similar to the fear that what is mandatory may not happen if we do not push it anyway.

The ultimate proof that these are not futile logic games is the existential predestination: the ideological citation point on which the explosion of extraordinary activity was based at the beginning of capitalism was the concept of Protestant eryazý. Common sense might say, if everything's settled in advance, why bother? At the beginning of capitalism, the awareness that their fates had already been sealed led the subjects to a heated activity. The same happens in Stalinism: the most intense mobilization of the social productivity effort was based on the fact that the subjects were aware that they fulfilled the inevitable historical obligation...

Brecht made a poignant statement in "learning games", especially the young man in Jasager who was asked to freely settle for his fate (he will be thrown into the valley). His teacher explains to him: It is customary to ask the victim if he is willing to accept his fate, but it is also customary for the victim to say yes... These examples are not exceptional at all: belonging to any society contains a paradoxical moment in which the subject is ordered to freely embrace something that will be imposed on him (we must all love our country, our parents, etc.).

Our problem is that all these paradoxes can only take place in the reach of symbolism: the distinction/crack that prevents the need to embrace the inevitable freely from being reduced to a meaningless totology can only be the crack that forever separates the direct raw reality of an event from its embroidery into the symbolic network – the only meaning of freely embracing an imposed situation is that you integrate this situation with your own symbolic universe. In this precise sense, the fact that man volunteers freely for his own death also indicates that he is ready to face the death of man at the symbolic level, that is, that he has abandoned the mirage of symbolic immortality.

From The Second Death of opera

Turkish: Light Peace Fidaner

the er part of the eryazg is both in the early/pre-meaning (anti-post pre) in "sooner or later" and in the sense of a private-God who impregnacates everyone to his own destiny.

See "Am I a cake? Come out of my stutter!" Slavoj Žižek

 Slavoj Žižek, "Am I a cake? Come out of here!"

The real freedom is not the freedom to choose one or that from a safe distance, it is not the freedom to choose strawberry cake or chocolate cake; The real freedom overlaps with necessity, indeed in a free choice one has revealed one's own existence – because if one chooses and does something, "it cannot do it any other way". When a resistance leader calls you to fight against the invaders while the foreigners have invaded your country, he will not say, "Let's choose freely now,"Can't you see there is no other way to protect your dignity?"

Therefore, a radically free action is only possible if it is predestined: even if we accept and know that we are destined for something, we do not know exactly what we are destined for, that is, we do not know which of our choices are destined; This eerie situation, which requires us to make decisions even though we know that our decision has already been decided, is perhaps the only way to truly freedom, that is the unbearable burden of a truly free choice – we know that we are destined for whatever we are going to do, but we still have to take risks and choose at a subjective level what we are destined for.

Notes 

From Gender and The Failed Absolute

Turkish: Light Peace Fidaner

See "Eryazgı (predestination)" Slavoj Žižek