Fidaner on Zizek

Slavoj Žižek,"The Master's 'arbitrary' declarations"

We must abandon the following view:

The Master always imposes old wisdom and established views with his authority, and so change always comes from those 'below', from those who doubt the master's wisdom.

We theorists need a master because we are hysterical.

Theoretical development is undemocratic: new discoveries do not emerge by improving reasoning; new discoveries arise by desperately trying to discover what it means for the master to make 'arbitrary' statements and their reversal of the common theoretical doctrine.

Such 'arbitrary' statements are not, of course, free from risk; it may not hit, it may miss, it may remain in the middle of irrelevant 'random' claims instead of activating new theoretical discoveries.

Let us not forget that what the Master's claim will lead to depends on us hysterical disciples. The Master is not a 'genius' by himself, but becomes a 'genius' by our diligence. [d.n. Sheikh does not fly, he flies disciples]

Therefore, after the master has finished his work, he must be abandoned, left alone; the impotence of an illusory transfer point will finally be revealed.

But is the work of the master (the so-called one) finished altogether? Yoo...

But if he wants to survive, the only place he can go is to become hysterical once again, to return to analyzation; This is what Lacan was doing all the time in his seminars...

Even if Lacan plays the role of analyst in his seminars, it cannot be said that those who listen to him are a collective analyst; Instead of the singular figure of the analyst, here is the 'enlightened' collective who supposedly share the same desire for psychoanalysis.

From More Than Pleasure

Turkish: Işık Barış Fidaner

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 Işık Barış Fidaner, "Nevermind: Let it go and Let it be"

There are two ways to “nevermind!”:

1) Let it go

2) Let it be

In terms of the metaphor of digestion: “Let it go” is to digest something completely and to discharge it from the system; if you bear some resistance to a certain subject, if you are getting bellyaches when you think about it, if it contains elements you cannot digest, then you fail to discharge it from your system and it gets precipitated somewhere (un/conscious) within your constitution. This is when you cannot “let it go” and instead you cave in to “let it be”ism.

The most visible result of “let it be”ism is how issues you experience in personal relations are first thrown in to be accumulated/contained and then explode in the form of fights. But if you can “let it go”, you don’t throw in and accumulate/contain, instead you throw out and ex-cumulate/ex-contain [1].

Unlike accumulation, ex-cumulation does not “take it personally” but this does not mean that ex-cumulation is indifferent or that it doesn’t care. On the contrary!

Ex-cumulators are even more susceptible than accumulators, for they “take it impersonally”, they take what is said irregardless of their Ego construction, they take it as a generic subject of the symbolic order and digest it completely; whatever they are susceptible to in those words, they take all of them at once, they first infer the necessary consequences, and then discharge those words from their constitution by means of the mechanism of “letting it go”.

But if a word that you “take in” gets stuck at some imaginary obstacle such as an Ego construction, it cannot surpass the level of “taking it personally” and results in “let it be”ism.

Işık Barış Fidaner is a computer scientist with a PhD from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. Admin of Yersiz Şeyler, Editor of Žižekian Analysis, Curator of Görce Writings. Twitter: @BarisFidaner

Notes:

[1] See “İçe Atılan Birikir, Dışa Atılan Öbürikir”, “Gerçek ve Salbırak”, “Hatice mi Netice mi? Sal gitsin!”, “Hazım İlkesinin Ötesi: Hazım Hazindir”