The Nature and Politics of Envy...

 

Slavoj Žižek, "Abstinence: Egalitarian Justice is Based on Envy" (Google translated from Turkish)

Nietzsche and Freud agreed: Egalitarian justice is based on envy ; It is based on the envy of the Other who has and enjoys what we do not have. After all, the demand for justice is the demand for the restriction of the Other's excessive arbitrariness and for everyone to have equal access to arbitrariness. The necessary consequence of this demand is abstinence (asceticism). Since it is not possible to impose equal conditions on everyone, equal sharing of prohibitions is imposed instead . However, in today's permissive society, this abstinence disguises itself as its opposite: 'Enjoy it!' turns into a generalized Superego imperative. We are all under the influence of this commandment. For this reason, our quality is hindered more than ever.

Consider the yuppie who combines narcissistic 'self-satisfaction' with dieting disciplines such as jogging and healthy eating. Perhaps what Nietzsche called the Last Man was such a person, and this concept could finally become clear in the hedonistic abstinence of today's yuppies. Nietzsche did not simply assert his will against abstinence: he recognized that on the other side of corrupt emotionalism there was a certain abstinence. This is evident in his critique of Wagner's Parsifal , the late-Romantic decadence that oscillates between tearful sentimentalism and vague spiritualism (see Zupančič, The Shortest Shadow ).

So what is envy? Let's go back to the scene Augustin mentioned: The baby is envious of his sibling sucking the mother's breast. The subject does not directly envy the Other's possession of the precious object, but rather the Other's ability to enjoy the object , so stealing from him and possessing the object will not alleviate his envy. Its main purpose is to destroy the Other's ability to enjoy the object. Accordingly, envy belongs to a trilogy: Envy, stinginess and melancholy, which are three ways of not being able to enjoy the object, are also three ways of reflexively enjoying this impossibility.

Unlike the subject who is envious of the other's enjoyment of the object he owns, the stingy subject owns the object but cannot enjoy it or consume it (the old man in the Sting music video leading this thread). The only thing that satisfies him is not turning the object he owns into a sacred/untouchable/forbidden entity that will never be consumed. An example of stinginess is someone who returns home alone, locks the doors, then opens his chest, secretly looks at his precious object and watches it with admiration. The element that prevents the object from being consumed is also the assurance of its status as the object of desire. The melancholic subject (the young woman in the Sting music video) has the object, just like the stingy subject, but has lost the reasons that make the object desirable. The most tragic member of this trio, the melancholic, can freely access everything he wants, but cannot get satisfaction from them [1].

This surplus of envy is the basis of Rousseau's famous, underexploited distinction: on the one hand, there is natural selfishness in the sense of loving oneself ( amour de soi ), on the other hand, there is the perversion of preferring oneself to others ( amour propre ), the latter focusing on destroying obstacles rather than achieving one's own goal. :

All the primitive passions that lead us directly to happiness concern us only with the objects associated with them, their principle is self-love ( amour de soi ), and all are essentially lovable and kind; But when obstacles divert him from his object, he becomes more preoccupied with the obstacle-object he wants to throw away instead of the target-object he wants to reach [the obstacle-object occupies him] and his nature changes and he becomes filled with anger and hatred. Thus, self-love, which is actually a noble and absolute feeling, turns into appropriating love for oneself ( amour propre ), this feeling is relative, it is a comparison of oneself, it demands to be made, its mood consists of negativity and instead of trying to be satisfied with one's own goodness, it is satisfied with the misfortune of others. efforts. ( link )

In other words, an evil person is not a selfish person who only thinks of his own interests. If he were truly selfish, he would be so busy thinking about his own well-being that he would not have time to ruin the fortunes of others. The fundamental flaw of a bad person is precisely that he is more concerned with others than with himself. Rousseau describes a special libidinal mechanism here: the inversion, which shifts the libidinal investment in the object towards the obstacle. This logic is directly applicable to fundamentalist violence: pure hatred was displayed in both the Oklahoma City bombing and the Twin Towers attack, where the real concern was to destroy the obstacle (destroying the Oklahoma City Federal Building or the World Trade Center), not to achieve the lofty aspirations of a truly Christian or Muslim society (see Jean- Pierre Dupuy, Petite metaphysique des tsunamis ).

This is why egalitarianism should never be taken for granted: to the extent that the concept (and practice) of egalitarian justice is motivated by envy, it is based on an inversion of the standard renunciation made to benefit others: 'I will relinquish it, as long as others (too) have it. ) SIN! ' In this sense, evil is not at all opposed to the sacrificial spirit, on the contrary, it is the sacrificial spirit itself; man can neglect his own well-being, as long as, through that sacrifice, he deprives the Other of his arbitrariness...

Notes:

[1] Can a person be envious of himself instead of someone else? For some subjects who cannot stand their own happiness or fortune and who stubbornly undermine themselves, it can be said in vulgar Freudian terms that the Superego is envious of the Ego's success. Lacan's distinction between the 'subject of utterance' (the subject representing himself by saying 'I' in his speech) and the 'subject of utterance' (the 'I' himself who speaks) reaches its extreme in them: The subject settles into the position of his own Other and becomes envious of himself.

From the book "violence"

Turkish: Işık Barış Fidaner

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 

 - 1 Corinthians 13:4 (NIV)

Taken straight from the Bible, Sting discusses the appeal of Biblical stories, and this story in particular, saying: "These stories of murder and obsessive, jealous love appeal to me for some reason". The imagery of this song is particularly vivid, with the structure of the poetry and the repeated verses echoing the chiasmic structure of the Bible. It also brings a particularly human element to the story. David and Bathsheba is one of the most famous "love stories" in the Bible, but the actual language is extraordinarily dry and passionless. Why would the king commit such a terrible crime? "And it came to pass in the morning, that David wrote a letter to Joab, and sent [it] by the hand of Uriah. And he wrote in the letter, saying, Set ye Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle, and retire ye from him, that he may be smitten, and die" (2 Samuel 11:14-15). Sting gives us a glimpse inside the heart of what made this most favored son of God fall. "But every step I thought of you, every footstep only you. And every star a grain of sand, the leavings of a dried-up ocean. Tell me how much longer? How much longer?"