What is Power?

On Soft Fascism - Slavoj Zizek

Shout Out to John Dickinson

Ukraine Again, Naturally

Slavoj Zizek, "Should Ukraine Have Nuclear Weapons?"

The situation in Ukraine is becoming increasingly absurd. While American isolationists and the media treat Ukraine’s use of longer-range missiles against Russia as a dangerous escalation, Russia’s fresh wave of attacks on civilian infrastructure is treated as par for the course.

LJUBLJANA – Following Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 US presidential election, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic congresswoman from New York, publicly appealed to those who had voted for both her and Trump. She wanted to know what motivated such an apparently inconsistent choice, and the predominant answer she heard was that she and Trump seemed more sincere, whereas Vice President Kamala Harris came off as too calculating.

It was a fruitful exercise, and we can ask the same of leftists who support both the Palestinians and Russia. After all, the latter has been bombing Ukrainian cities until they resemble Gaza, and just as the right-wing parties in Israel’s government want to create a Greater Israel, the Kremlin hopes to create a Greater Russia. Russia’s eliminationist project should thus remain top of mind whenever we assess developments on the ground.

Immediately after the recent decision by US President Joe Biden’s administration to allow Ukraine to launch US-furnished ATACMS missiles (with a range of up to 190 miles) into Russia, the Kremlin warned that any use of Western arms against the Russian Federation could trigger a nuclear response under its new nuclear doctrine. Nonetheless, the Ukrainians countered by firing six ATACMS missiles at a military facility in the Bryansk region (adjacent to the Ukrainian border) the next day.

Although Russia claims that the damage was negligible – five of the missiles were shot down, and there were no casualties – following the letter of its new nuclear doctrine would mean that it is now at war with the United States and has the right to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine. With some of those around Trump already accusing Joe Biden of taking a dangerous step toward a new world war, is it fair to say that Ukraine went too far? Has it disturbed the fragile balance that kept the conflict limited?

Before jumping to this conclusion, one must remember that the US has permitted Ukraine to target locations primarily in Kursk, the border region from which Russia has been launching many of its attacks against Ukrainian positions. As Josep Borrell, the (outgoing) EU foreign-policy chief put it: “Ukraine should be able to use the arms we provided to them not only to stop the arrow, but also to be able to hit the archers.”

Moreover, recall that Russia had escalated its own campaign against Ukraine mere days earlier, blanketing the entire country with drone and missile attacks against civilian energy infrastructure just before the onset of winter. While six Ukrainian missiles caused panic all around the world, Russia’s systematic destruction of Ukrainian infrastructure has been normalized – much like Israel’s razing of northern Gaza.

The situation is as obscene as it is absurd. Russia, having launched a war of conquest against its peaceful neighbor, now wants to keep its own territory out of the war, and it accuses Ukraine, the victim, of “expanding” the conflict. If Russia is serious about its new nuclear doctrine, let us offer an equally serious counter-doctrine: If an independent country is attacked with non-nuclear forces by a nuclear superpower, its allies have the right – even the duty – to provide it with nuclear weapons so that it has a chance of deterring an attack.

It is often said that Putin wants a return to the Soviet Union and Stalinism; but this is not right. Rather, his regime is sustained by a vision of the pre-1917 imperial era, when czarist Russia’s zone of influence encompassed not only Poland but also Finland. Time will tell if Putin’s neo-Czarism is more than a pipe dream. In the emerging multipolar world, the rise of strong empires, each with its own zone of influence, is quite conceivable.

As Putin told the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June 2022, “sovereignty cannot be segmented or fragmented in the twenty-first century.” Upholding political sovereignty and national identity is essential, he said, but so is strengthening everything that “determines our country’s economic, financial, professional, and technological independence.” Clearly, only a new imperial Russia, not Ukraine or Belarus or Finland, will be able to enjoy the full benefits of sovereignty.

Making matters worse, on the same day that President Vladimir Putin announced the new Russian nuclear doctrine, the BBC reported that, “air pollution in India’s capital Delhi has soared to extremely severe levels, choking residents and engulfing the city in thick smog,” disrupting air transport, forcing schools to close, and halting construction. “And experts warn that the situation could get worse in Delhi in the coming days.”

While Russia indulges in imperial aggression and rattles its nuclear saber, hundreds of millions of people are finding it harder to breathe. Our media trumpet the use of Western weapons against Russia as front-page “breaking news,” and our blinkered leftists regard Ukraine’s “excessive” defense as a dangerous escalation. A threat to our very survival, however, barely merits mention.

Hope: Byung-Chul Han

Alexander Dugin Welcomes in America's 'Bro-Revolution'

In Russia everybody enjoys now bro-revolution concept. We like it.

— Alexander Dugin (@Agdchan) November 15, 2024

Running on Empty...

On Byung-Chul Han's "The Scent of Time"

Homage to St. Grobian, Patron Saint of the MAGA Movement's 'Garbage'

Sebastian Brant - Teil von Titelblatt aus Sebastian Brants "Der Narrenspiegel, das gros Narrenschiff"

from Wikipedia:

Saint Grobian (Medieval Latin, Sanctus Grobianus) is a fictional patron saint of vulgar and coarse people. His name is derived from the Middle High German grob or grop, meaning coarse or vulgar. The Old High German cognate is gerob, gerop. The word "grobian" has thus passed into the English language as an obscure word for any crude, sloppy, or buffoonish person.

---

The satirist Sebastian Brant (1457–1521) conceived Saint Grobian as the patron saint of coarse manners in his famous poem Das Narrenschiff (1494).[1][2] Das Narrenschiff describes the worship paid to this new saint.

Grobian is found later in several works of the period.

Friedrich Dedekind (1524-1598) published Grobianus et Grobiana: sive, de morum simplicitate, libri tres in 1558 at Cologne. Here Grobian is a counselor who teaches men on how to avoid bad manners, gluttony, and drunkenness.

Dedekind's work appeared in England in 1605 as The Schoole of Slovenrie: Or, Cato turned wrong side outward, published by one "R.F.". The "Schoole" was imagined as a place where one was instructed to use one's greasy fingers to grab at the nicest portions of any dish and snatch food belonging to fellow diners. Holding back the desire to urinate, fart, and vomit is taught to be bad for one's health; thus, one has to indulge freely in all three activities.

The work also inspired Thomas Dekker's The Guls Horne-Booke (1609).

The German writer Melchior Meyr is the author of a work entitled Gespräche mit einem Grobian (1866).

Sebastian Brant's allegory was translated into English by Alexander Barclay and Henry Watson as Ship of Fools, both in 1509. See also ship of fools.

The Evolution of the University Discourse

The post-facto lies we tell ourselves as to why the Master's arbitrarily imposed changes are "good" for us.

Slavoj Zizek, "Jacques Lacan's Four Discourses"

Although Lacan's notion of "university discourse" circulates widely today, it is seldom used in its precise meaning (designating a specific "discourse," social link). As a rule, it functions as a vague notion of some speech being part of the academic interpretive machinery. In contrast to this use, one should always bear in mind that, for Lacan, university discourse is not directly linked to the university as a social institution-for example, he states that the Soviet Union was the pure reign of university discourse. Consequently, not only does the fact of being turned into an object of the university interpretive machinery prove nothing about one's discursive status-names like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, or Benjamin, all three great antiuniversitarians whose presence in the academy is today all-pervasive-demonstrate that the "excluded" or "damned" authors are the IDEAL feeding stuff for the academic machine. Can the upper level of Lacan's formula of the university discourse - S2 directed toward a - not also be read as standing for the university knowledge endeavoring to integrate, domesticate, and appropriate the excess that resists and rejects it?

Lurking behind the reproach of belonging to university discourse is, of course, the question of the relationship between psychoanalysis and cultural studies. The first fact to note here is that what is missing in cultural studies is precisely psychoanalysis as a social link, structured around the desire of the analyst. Today, one often mentions how the reference to psychoanalysis in cultural studies and the psychoanalytic clinic supplement each other: cultural studies lack the real of clinical experience, while the clinic lacks the broader critico-historical perspective (say, of the historic specificity of the categories of psychoanalysis, Oedipal complex, castration, or paternal authority). The answer to this should be that each of the approaches should work on its limitation from within its horizon-not by relying on the other to fill up its lack. If cultural studies cannot account for the real of the clinical experience, this signals the insufficiency of its theoretical framework itself; if the clinic cannot reflect its historical presuppositions, it is a bad clinic. One should add to this standard Hegelian dialectical paradox (in fighting the foreign or external opposite, one fights one's own essence) its inherent supplement: in impeding oneself, one truly impedes one's external opposite. When cultural studies ignore the real of clinical experience, the ultimate victim is not cultural studies itself but the clinic, which remains caught in pretheoretical empiricism. And, vice versa, when the clinic fails (to take into account its historical presuppositions), the ultimate victim is theory itself, which, cut off from clinical experience, remains an empty ideological exercise. The ultimate horizon is here not the reconciliation of theory and clinic: their very gap is the positive condition of psychoanalysis. Freud already wrote that, in the conditions in which it would finally be possible, psychoanalysis would no longer be needed. Psychoanalytic theory is ultimately the theory of why its clinical practice is doomed to fail.

One of the telltale signs of university discourse is that the opponent is accused of being "dogmatic" and "sectarian." University discourse cannot tolerate an engaged subjective stance. Should not our first gesture be, as Lacanians, to heroically assume this designation of being "sectarian" and engage in a "sectarian" polemic?

University discourse as the hegemonic discourse of modernity has two forms of existence in which its inner tension ("contradiction") is externalized: capitalism, its logic of the integrated excess, of the system reproducing itself through constant self-revolutionizing, and the bureaucratic "totalitarianism" conceptualized in different guises as the rule of technology, of instrumental reason, of biopolitics, as the "administered world." How, precisely, do these two aspects relate to each other? We should not succumb to the temptation of reducing capitalism to a mere form of appearance of the more fundamental ontological attitude of technological domination; we should rather insist, in the Marxian mode, that the capitalist logic of integrating the surplus into the functioning of the system is the fundamental fact. Stalinist "totalitarianism" was the capitalist logic of self-propelling productivity liberated from its capitalist form, which is why it failed: Stalinism was the symptom of capitalism. Stalinism involved the matrix of general intellect, of the planned transparency of social life, of total productive mobilization- and its violent purges and paranoia were a kind of a "return of the repressed," the "irrationality" inherent to the project of a totally organized "administered society." This means the two levels, precisely insofar as they are two sides of the same coin, are ultimately incompatible: there is no metalanguage enabling us to translate the logic of domination back into the capitalist reproduction-through-excess, or vice versa.

The key question here concerns the relationship between the two excesses: the economic excess/surplus integrated into the capitalist machine as the force that drives it into permanent self-revolutionizing and the political excess of power-exercise inherent to modern power (the constitutive excess of representation over the represented: the legitimate state power responsible to its subjects is supplemented by the obscene message of unconditional exercise of Power-laws do not really bind me, I can do to you whatever I want, I can treat you as guilty if I decide to, I can destroy you if I say so).

Perhaps the key to this problem is provided by the historicity inscribed in Lacan's matrix of the four discourses, the historicity of modern European development. The master's discourse stands not for the premodern master, but for the absolute monarchy, this first figure of modernity that effectively undermined the articulate network of feudal relations and interdependences, transforming fidelity to flattery: it is the "Sun-King" Louis XIV with his L'état, c'est moi who is the master par excellence. Hysterical discourse and university discourse then deploy two outcomes of the vacillation of the direct reign of the master: the expert-rule of bureaucracy that culminates in the biopolitics of reducing the population to a collection of homo sacer (what Heidegger called "enframing," Adorno "the administered world," Foucault the society of "discipline and punish"); the explosion of the hysterical capitalist subjectivity that reproduces itself through permanent self-revolutionizing, through the integration of the excess into the "normal" functioning of the social link (the true "permanent revolution" is already capitalism itself).

Lacan's formula of the four discourses thus enables us to deploy the two faces of modernity (total administration and capitalist-individualist dynamics) as two ways to undermine the master's discourse: doubt about the efficiency of the master-figure (what Eric Santner called the "crisis of investiture") can be supplemented by the direct rule of the experts legitimized by their knowledge, or the excess of doubt, of permanent questioning, can be directly integrated into social reproduction. Finally, the analyst's discourse stands for the emergence of revolution-ary-emancipatory subjectivity that resolves the split of university and hysteria. In it, the revolutionary agent - a - addresses the subject from the position of knowledge that occupies the place of truth (i.e., which intervenes at the "symptomal torsion" of the subject's constellation), and the goal is to isolate, get rid of, the master signifier that structured the subject's (ideologico-political) unconscious.

Or does it? Jacques-Alain Miller has recently proposed that today the master's discourse is no longer the "obverse" of the analyst's discourse. [1] Today, on the contrary, our "civilization" itself-its hegemonic symbolic matrix, as it were-fits the formula of the analyst's discourse. The agent of the social link is today a, surplus enjoyment, the superego injunction to enjoy that permeates our discourse; this injunction addresses $ (the divided subject) who is put to work in order to live up to this injunction. The truth of this social link is S2, scientific-expert knowledge in its different guises, and the goal is to generate S1, the self-mastery of the subject, that is, to enable the subject to cope with the stress of the call to enjoyment (through self-help manuals, etc.). Provocative as this notion is, it raises a series of questions. If it is true, in what, then, resides the difference between the discursive functioning of civilization as such and the psychoanalytic social link? Miller resorts here to a suspicious solution: in our civilization, the four terms are kept apart, isolated; each operates on its own, while only in psychoanalysis are they brought together into a coherent link: "in civilization, each of the four terms remains disjoined... it is only in psychoanalysis, in pure psychoanalysis, that these elements are arranged into a discourse."

However, is it not that the fundamental operation of the psychoanalytic treatment is not synthesis, bringing elements into a link, but, precisely, analysis, separating what in a social link appears to belong together? This path, opposed to that of Miller, is indicated by Giorgio Agamben, who, in the last pages of The State of Exception, imagines two Utopian options of how to break out of the vicious cycle of law and violence, of the rule of law sustained by violence. [2] One is the Benjaminian vision of "pure" revolutionary violence with no relationship to the law. The other is the relationship to the law without regard to its (violent) enforcement, such as Jewish scholars do in their endless (re)interpretation of the Law. Agamben starts from the right insight that the task today is not synthesis but separation, distinction: nor bringing law and violence together (so that right will have might and the exercise of might will be fully legitimized), but thoroughly separating them, untying their knot. Although Agamben confers on this formulation an anti-Hegelian twist, a more proper reading of Hegel makes it clear that such a gesture of separation is what the Hegelian "synthesis" is effectively about. In it, the opposites are nor reconciled in a "higher synthesis"; it is rather that their difference is posited "as such."

The example of Paul may help us to clarify this logic of Hegelian reconciliation: the radical gap that he posits between life and death, between life in Christ and life in sin, is in no need of a further synthesis; it is itself the resolution of the "absolute contradiction" of Law and sin, of the vicious cycle of their murual imphcarion. In other words, once the distinction is drawn, once the subject becomes aware of the very existence of this other dimension beyond the vicious cycle of law and its transgression, the battle is formally already won. So, with regard to the old question of the passage from Kant to Hegel, Hegel's move is not to overcome the Kantian division, but, rather, to assert it as such, to drop the need for its overcoming, for the additional reconciliation of the opposites, that is, to gain insight - through a purely formal parallax shift - into how positing the distinction as such already is the looked-for reconciliation. The limitation of Kant is not in his remaining within the confines of finite oppositions, in his inability to reach the Infinite, but, on the contrary, in his very search for a transcendent domain beyond the realm of finite oppositions. Kant is not unable to reach the Infinite - what he is unable to see is how he already has what he is looking for.

However, is this vision not again the case of our late capitalist reality going further than our dreams? Are we not already encountering in our social reality what Agamben envisages as a Utopian vision? Isn't the Hegelian lesson of the global reflexivization-mediatization of our lives that it generates its own brutal immediacy? This has best been captured by Etienne Balibar's notion of excessive, nonfunctional cruelty as a feature of contemporary life, a cruelty whose figures range from "fundamentalist" racist and/or religious slaughter to the "senseless" outbursts of violence performed by adolescents and the homeless in our megalopolises, a violence one is tempted to call Id-Evil, a violence grounded in no utilitarian or ideological reasons. All the talk about foreigners stealing work from us or about the threat they represent to our Western values should not deceive us: under closer examination, it soon becomes clear that this talk provides a rather superficial secondary rationalization. The answer we ultimately obtain from a skinhead is that it makes him feel good to beat foreigners, that their presence disturbs him. What we encounter here is indeed Id-Evil, that is, the Evil structured and motivated by the most elementary imbalance in the relationship between the ego and jouissance, by the tension between pleasure and the foreign body of jouissance in the very heart of it. Id-Evil thus stages the most elementary short circuit in the relationship of the subject to the primordially missing object cause of his desire. What bothers us in the other (Jew, Japanese, African, Turk) is that he appears to entertain a privileged relationship to the object-the other either possesses the object treasure, having snatched it away from us (which is why we don't have it), or he poses a threat to our possession of the object.

What one should propose here is the Hegelian "infinite judgment," asserting the speculative identity of these "useless" and "excessive" outbursts of violent immediacy, which display nothing but a pure and naked ("non-sublimated") hatred of the Otherness, with the global reflexiv-ization of society. Perhaps the ultimate example of this coincidence is the fate of psychoanalytic interpretation. Today, the formations of the unconscious (from dreams to hysterical symptoms) have definitely lost their innocence and are thoroughly reflexivized: the "free associations" of a typical educated analysand consist for the most part of attempts to provide a psychoanalytic explanation of their disturbances, so that one is quite justified in saying that we have not only Jungian, Kleinian, Lacanian, and so on, interpretations of the symptoms, but symptoms themselves that are Jungian, Kleinian, Lacanian, and so on, that is, whose reality involves implicit reference to some psychoanalytic theory. The unfortunate result of this global reflexivization of interpretation (everything becomes interpretation, the unconscious interprets itself) is that the analyst's interpretation itself loses its performative "symbolic efficiency" and leaves the symptom intact in the immediacy of its idiotic jouissance.

What happens in psychoanalytic treatment is strictly homologous to the response of the neo-Nazi skinhead who, when really pressed for the reasons for his violence, suddenly starts to talk like social workers, sociologists, and social psychologists, quoting diminished social mobility, rising insecurity, the disintegration of paternal authority, the lack of maternal love in his early childhood-the unity of practice and its inherent ideological legitimization disintegrates into raw violence and its impotent, inefficient interpretation. This impotence of interpretation is also one of the necessary obverses of the universalized reflexivity hailed by the risk-society-theorists: it is as if our reflexive power can flourish only insofar as it draws its strength and relies on some minimal "prereflex-ive" substantial support that eludes its grasp, so that its universaliza-tion comes at the price of its inefficiency, that is, by the paradoxical re-emergence of the brute real of "irrational" violence, impermeable and insensitive to reflexive interpretation. So the more today's social theory proclaims the end of nature or tradition and the rise of the "risk society," the more the implicit reference to "nature" pervades our daily discourse: even when we do not speak of the "end of history," do we not put forward the same message when we claim that we are entering a "postideological" pragmatic era, which is another way of claiming that we are entering a postpolitical order in which the only legitimate conflicts are ethnic/cultural conflicts? Typically, in today's critical and political discourse, the term worker has disappeared from the vocabulary, substituted or obliterated by immigrants or immigrant workers: Algerians in France, Turks in Germany, Mexicans in the United States. In this way, the class problematic of workers' exploitation is transformed into the multiculturalist problematic of "intolerance of otherness," and the excessive investment of the multiculturalist liberals in protecting immigrants' ethnic rights clearly draws its energy from the "repressed class dimension. Although Francis Fukuyama's thesis on the "end of history" quickly fell into disrepute, we still silently presume that the liberal-democratic capitalist global order is somehow the finally found "natural" social regime, we still implicitly conceive conflicts in the Third World countries as a subspecies of natural catastrophes, as outbursts of quasi-natural violent passions, or as conflicts based on the fanatic identification to one's ethnic roots (and what is "the ethnic" here if not again a code word for "nature"?). And, again, the key point is that this all-pervasive renaturalization is strictly correlative to the global reflexiviza-tion of our daily lives.

What this means, with regard to Agamben's Utopian vision of untying the knot of the Law and violence is that, in our postpohtical societies, this knot is already untied: we encounter, on the one hand, the globalized interpretation whose globalization is paid for by its impotence, its failure to enforce itself, to generate effects in the real, and, on the other hand, explosions of the raw real of a violence that cannot be affected by its symbolic interpretation. Where, then, is the solution here, between the claim that, in today's hegemonic constellation, the elements of the social link are separated and as such to be brought together by psycho-analysis (Miller), and the knot between Law and violence to be untied, their separation to be enacted (Agamben)? What if these two separations are not symmetrical? What if the gap between the symbolic and the raw real epitomized by the figure of the skinhead is a false one, since this real of the outbursts of the "irrational" violence is generated by the globalization of the symbolic?

When, exactly, does the objet a function as the superego injunction to enjoy? When it occupies the place of the master signifier, that is, as Lacan formulated it in the last pages of his Seminar XI, when the short circuit between S1 and a occurs. The key move to be accomplished in order to break the vicious cycle of the superego injunction is thus to enact the separation between S1 and a. Consequently, would it not be more productive to follow a different path, that is, to start with the different modus operandi of l'objet a, which in psychoanalysis no longer functions as the agent of the superego injunction-as it does in the discourse of perversion? This is how Miller's claim of the identity of the analyst's discourse and the discourse of today's civilization should be read: as an indication that this latter discourse (social link) is that of perversion. That is to say, the fact that the upper level of Lacan's formula of the analyst's discourse is the same as his formula of perversion (a-$) opens up a possibility of reading the entire formula of the analyst's discourse also as a formula of the perverse social link: its agent, the masochist pervert (the pervert par excellence), occupies the position of the object instrument of the other's desire, and, in this way, through serving his (feminine) victim, he posits her as the hystericized/divided subject who "doesn't know what she wants." Rather, the pervert knows it for her, that is, he pretends to speak from the position of knowledge (about the other's desire) that enables him to serve the other; and, finally, the product of this social link is the master signifier, that is, the hysterical subject elevated into the role of the master (dominatrix) whom the pervert masochist serves.

In contrast to hysteria, the pervert knows perfectly what he is for the Other: a knowledge supports his position as the object of his Other's (divided subject's) jouissance. The difference between the social link of perversion and that of analysis is grounded in the radical ambiguity of objet a in Lacan, which stands simultaneously for the imaginary fantasmatic lure/screen and for that which this lure is obfuscating, for the void behind the lure. Consequently, when we pass from perversion to the analytic social link, the agent (analyst) reduces himself to the void, which provokes the subject into confronting the truth of his desire. Knowledge in the position of "truth" below the bar under the "agent," of course, refers to the supposed knowledge of the analyst, and, simultaneously, signals that the knowledge gained here will not be the neutral objective knowledge of scientific adequacy, but the knowledge that concerns the subject (analysand) in the truth of his subjective position.

Recall, again, Lacan's outrageous statements that, even if what a jealous husband claims about his wife (that she sleeps around with other men) is all true, his jealousy is still pathological. Along the same lines, one could say that, even if most of the Nazi claims about the Jews were true (they exploit Germans, they seduce German girls), their anti-Semitism would still be (and was) pathological - because it represses the true reason the Nazis needed anti-Semitism in order to sustain their ideological position. So, in the case of anti-Semitism, knowledge about what the Jews "really are" is a fake, irrelevant, while the only knowledge at the place of truth is the knowledge about why a Nazi needs a figure of the Jew to sustain his ideological edifice. In this precise sense, the analyst's discourse produces the master signifier, the swerve of the patient's knowledge, the surplus element that situates the patient's knowledge at the level of truth: after the master signifier is produced, even if nothing changes at the level of knowledge, the same knowledge as before starts to function in a different mode. The master signifier is the unconscious sinthome, the cipher of enjoyment, to which the subject was unknowingly subjected.

The crucial point not to be missed here is how the late Lacan's identification of the subjective position of the analyst as that of objet petit a presents an act of radical self-criticism. Earlier, in the 1950's, Lacan conceived the analyst not as the small other (a), but, on the contrary, as a kind of stand-in for the big Other (A, the anonymous symbolic order). At this level, the function of the analyst was to frustrate the subject's imaginary misrecognitions and to make them accept their proper symbolic place within the circuit of symbolic exchange, the place that effectively (and unbeknownst to them) determines their symbolic identity. Later, however, the analyst stands precisely for the ultimate inconsistency and failure of the big Other, that is, for the symbolic order's inability to guarantee the subject's symbolic identity.

One should thus always bear in mind the thoroughly ambiguous status of objet a in Lacan. Miller recently proposed a Benjaminian distinction between "constituted anxiety" and "constituent anxiety": while the first designates the standard notion of the terrifying and fascinating abyss of anxiety that haunts us, its infernal circle that threatens to draws us in, the second stands for the "pure" confrontation with objet a as constituted in its very loss. [3] Miller is right to emphasize here two features: the difference that separates constituted from constituent anxiety concerns the status of the object with regard to fantasy. In a case of constituted anxiety, the object dwells within the confines of a fantasy, while we get the constituent fantasy only when the subject "traverses the fantasy" and confronts the void, the gap, filled up by the fantasmatic object. Clear and convincing as it is. Miller's formula misses the true paradox or, rather, ambiguity of objet a: when he defines objet a as the object that overlaps with its loss, that emerges at the very moment of its loss (so that all its fantasmatic incarnations, from breasts to voice and gaze, are metonymic figurations of the void of nothing), he remains within the horizon of de- sire- the true object cause of desire is the void filled in by its fantasmatic incarnations. While, as Lacan emphasizes, objet a is also the object of the drive, the relationship is here thoroughly different. Although in both cases, the link between object and loss is crucial, in the case of objet a as the object cause of desire, we have an object which is originally lost, which coincides with its own loss, which emerges as lost, while, in the case of objet a as the object of the drive, the "object" is directly the loss itself. In the shift from desire to drive, we pass from the lost object to loss itself as an object. That is to say, the weird movement called "drive" is not driven by the "impossible" quest for the lost object, bur by a push to directly enact the "loss" - the gap, cut, distance - itself. There is thus a double distinction to be drawn here: not only between objet a in its fantasmaric and posrfantasmatic status, but also, within this postfantas-matic domain itself, between the lost object cause of desire and the object loss of the drive. Far from concerning an abstract scholastic debate, this distinction has crucial ideologico-political consequences: it enables us to articulate the libidinal dynamics of capitalism.

Following Miller himself, a distinction has to be introduced here between lack and hole. Lack is spatial, designating a void within a space, while the hole is more radical-it designates the point at which this spatial order itself breaks down (as in the "black hole" in physics). Therein resides the difference between desire and drive: desire is grounded in its constitutive lack, while drive circulates around a hole, a gap in the order of being. In other words, the circular movement of drive obeys the weird logic of the curved space in which the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line, but a curve: the drive "knows" that the shortest way to attain its aim is to circulate around its goal-object. At the immediate level of addressing individuals, capitalism of course interpellates them as consumers, as subjects of desires, soliciting in them ever new perverse and excessive desires (for which it offers products to satisfy them); furthermore, it obviously also manipulates the "desire to desire," celebrating the very desire to desire ever new objects and modes of pleasure. However, even if if already manipulates desire in a way that takes into account the fact that the most elementary desire is the desire to reproduce itself as desire (and not to find satisfaction), at this level, we do not yet reach the drive. The drive inheres to capitalism at a more fundamental, systemic level: drive propels the entire capitalist machinery; it is the impersonal compulsion to engage in the endless circular movement of expanded self-reproduction. The capitalist drive thus belongs to no definite individual - it is rather that those individuals who act as direct "agents" of capital (capitalists themselves, top managers) have to practice it. We enter the mode of the drive when (as Marx put it) the circulation of money as capital becomes "an end in itself, for the expansion of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The circulation of capital has therefore no limits." One should bear in mind here Lacan's well-known distinction between the aim and the goal of drive: while the goal is the object around which drive circulates, its (true) aim is the endless continuation of this circulation as such.

Notes:

[1] Miller, Jacques-Alain, "La passe: Conférence de Jacques-Alain Miller." paper presented at the fourth Congrès de l'AMP, Comandatuba - Bahia, Brazil, August 9-12, 2004.

[2] Agamben, Giorgio, The State of Exception, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

[3] Miller, J.-A., "Le nom-du-père, s'en passer, s'en servir," available at www.lacan.com. It is interesting to note how, in his very polemics against the Hegelian Aufhebug, Miller repeats its operation. That is to say, when Miller deploys the concept of anxiety as the effect which signals the proximity of the Real, he opposes it to the central role of the Name-of-the-Father, of the paternal Law, in Lacan's previous thought: the paternal Law functions as the operator of Aufhebung, of the "significantization," symbolic mediation/integration, of the real, while anxiety enters as a remainder of the Real that resists its symbolic Aufhebung. However, when Miller asks the question of what happens with the paternal Law after this introduction of anxiety as the signal of the Real, he strangely reproduces the very terms of Aufhebung. Of course, the Name-of-the-Father continues to play a function, but a subordinate one within a new theoretical context. In short, the Name-of-the-Father is maintained, negated and elevated to a higher level - the very three features of the Hegelian Aufhebung.

From the New Yorker

Joshua Rothman, "Do You Have Hope?"

And, if not, how can you get some?

Life in America is deeply anxious. Where are we headed? How bad could it get? Who are we, anyway? What’s particularly scary is that everyone’s scared. Even the people whose candidate just won are frightened—of immigrants, of the future, but also of the rest of us. In a column from before the election, I described a sign planted in a yard on my street; it read “Democrats Are Communists and Terrorists—ARE YOU?” The election is over, but the sign remains. So does another, not far from me, showing Trump wielding an AR-15. These signs, which loom over storybook suburban streets in affluent small towns, suggest the degree to which our country has become consumed by fear.

In fearful times, people often see themselves as optimists or pessimists. Being a pessimist can be comforting; if you’re a pessimist, then nothing about the future can surprise you, because you already know it’s going to be bad. The problem with pessimism, however, is that it’s limiting. Pessimism makes it harder to imagine, or really believe in, a better future.

Optimists can sometimes picture that future: in a recent blog post, the economist Alex Tabarrok outlined “the Best-Case Scenario for a Trump Presidency.” (For example, “Trump the developer” could expand the housing supply; he might also “appoint Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head a committee on vaccine policy and, after several years of investigation, write a report.”) Tabarrok isn’t predicting that Trump will do these things; he’s saying only that it would be nice if he did them in place of other things he might do. There are shades of optimism: it’s one thing to have optimistic visions, and another to actually believe that they’ll come to pass. The problem with being a believing optimist is that you may become too selective in your reckoning of good and bad. If the situation is dire enough, then believing in your optimism becomes a kind of denial.

What would it mean, at this point, to believe in an optimistic vision for American politics? On what would that optimism be based? We can all point to bright spots while agreeing that the over-all picture is bleak. The Republican Party is proudly unhinged, while the Democrats are primly inert. The Supreme Court is compromised and corrupt; fundamental reforms are unlikely, and it’s possible that Trump will get to replace multiple aging justices. The media are deeply distrusted, and we are soon to plunge further into the realm of “alternative facts.” The January 6th insurrectionists—one of whom lived around the corner from me, in my Long Island town—will probably be pardoned and held up as patriots for our children to admire. The worst political trends are being accelerated by technological developments that are themselves accelerating, and the planet as a whole is rushing toward a climate crisis that will threaten all of humanity.

I’m sure you have your own items to add to the list. On good days, I can conjure a little optimism. On bad days, I feel a sense of foreboding that I can’t dispel. I’m aware of all the ways in which there’s more to life than politics. But I struggle to find a way of relating to our political future that isn’t intolerably dark, or optimistic in a way that’s essentially unearned.

In a slim new book called “The Spirit of Hope,” the philosopher Byung-Chul Han distinguishes between hope and optimism. “Hopeful thinking is not optimistic thinking,” Han writes, with emphasis. Optimism “knows neither doubt nor despair. Its essence is sheer positivity.” An optimist looks around, finds a few signs of possible salvation or progress, and then concludes that “things will take a turn for the good.” But absolute hope is stranger, and in a way more extreme. It “arises in the face of the negativity of absolute despair,” Han writes, and becomes relevant at times “in which action seems no longer possible.” Hope emerges, paradoxically, when there’s seemingly nothing to hope for. The desert “allows it to germinate.”

Han—who was born in South Korea and lives in Germany, and who is best known for his critiques of consumerist online life, as presented in books like “The Burnout Society”—believes that we’re not used to hoping. We tend not to depend on hope, he writes, both because we’re not often in despair and because we live on treadmills of consumption. “Consumers have no hope,” he writes. “All they have are wishes or needs.” We wish for great Christmas gifts, or for bigger houses or upgraded laptops, or for dinners out; we slip into “a constant present of needs and their satisfaction.” But when we hope, we don’t hope for things we can easily name, or concretely acquire, or even specifically anticipate. For optimists, Han argues, “the nature of time is closure. . . . Nothing occurs. Nothing surprises.” When we need to be surprised, we rely on hope. Seeing nothing to be optimistic about, we hope that something new will come along—some not yet existing force that will knock the world onto a better track.

Han quotes Václav Havel, the heroic writer, dissident, and political leader, who was imprisoned for his democratic convictions before becoming President of Czechoslovakia and, later, the Czech Republic. “Hope is not prognostication,” Havel says. “It’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation.” Instead, it is “an orientation of the spirit,” which “transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.” Hope involves a sense of distance—a consciousness of unrealized possibilities to which you somehow feel connected. Prison is a “particularly hopeless” place, Havel notes, and it’s in hopeless places that the abstract, unknowable, and perhaps transcendental nature of hope becomes most visible.

When you’re immobilized, hope involves a sense that something, somewhere, is in motion. Han cites one of Franz Kafka’s many parables. Imagine, Kafka writes, that you live in a provincial village infinitely far from the center of the empire in which you reside. The godlike emperor, whom you’ve never met or even seen, has, for some unfathomable reason, leaned down from his deathbed and dictated a special and secret message, intended just for you, to a courier. The courier is strong, and begins elbowing his way through the throngs that surround the emperor. But, even if he pushes through those crowds, he must still make it down the crowded palace steps, and then through the crowded “courts,” and then through the many sections of the “second outer palace,” and then through the mud-clogged streets of the imperial capital, and then all the way across the country to you. In short, he’ll never deliver the message. So, Kafka writes, “you sit at your window when evening falls and dream it to yourself.”

This may make hope sound a little passive or woo-woo, and a little solitary. But Han thinks this isn’t quite right, either. We must distinguish between a weak, passive kind of hope, he writes, and a strong, active version. The strong version of hoping is a little like hunting: a person with hope “leans forwards and listens attentively,” trying to figure out what’s new in the world; she wants to pick up the scent. This kind of hope, rooted in enthusiasm and motivation, “develops forces that make people spring into action.” If you’re lost in the wilderness, and you have no idea which way to go, hope can sharpen your senses and urge you over the next ridge. And “the subject of hope is a We,” Han writes. We tend to want things for ourselves, but we hope for a more general future. Whatever the emperor’s message is, it’s not the winning lottery numbers; it’s something more profound, about who we are and how we fit in. And, in fact, we’re all dreaming of receiving such a message.

As a philosopher, Han has a spiritual bent. He seems open to the notion that hope is inherently transcendent—that it comes from God. But his basic premise doesn’t have to be religious; it suggests only that the world contains untold potential, that what we see in front of us isn’t all that there will ever be. It’s by helping us know this, Havel writes, that hope “gives us the strength to live and continually to try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.”

When Han writes that “the subject of hope is a We,” he means partly that what we hope for is often a better, more connected kind of life, together with our families, our neighbors, or our fellow-citizens. But he also means that other people can be a source of hope, because they may see a path to that life when we can’t. Hope is other people: this can be a difficult idea to accept, especially when the other people seem extremely “other,” and see you that way in return. Still, there are more than a hundred and sixty million registered voters in America, and there’s no law saying that the way they think now will be the way they’ll think tomorrow. The same goes for politicians. Having a politics of hope isn’t just about saying the word. Hope isn’t a vibe; it involves a substantive search for the new, instead of sticking, out of doubt, to the old. This is risky—not just practically, but emotionally, even spiritually. Optimists and pessimists approach the future by diminishing their uncertainty. In contrast, Han writes, when we hope, we place a bet we can’t quite justify—we become “creditors to the future.” Will it pay us back, or rip us off?

There’s only one way to know. Our political culture tells us to see our opponents as uniformly awful—to reduce them to their vote—and yet ordinary human experience shows that most people are complex, decent, and just trying to get along. What should we prioritize: the stark binaries of politics, or the reality of people as we know them? Hope doesn’t deny how grim things are; it doesn’t look away from the news, or wish away the signs in the street, or sugarcoat the terrible plans of those coming to power. But it doesn’t deny the potential in people, either. “The hopeful expect the incalculable, possibilities beyond all likelihood,” Han writes. Which is to say that, if you don’t have hope, exactly—because you can’t quite picture what could fix this mess—that’s partly because life always involves seeing only part of the picture. The precondition for finding hope is having none.

Yarvin Yackery

(00:00) Intro

(00:35) Debate with Richard Hanania: Reflections and insights 

(05:33) A roadmap on building new institutions 

(10:30) Convergence of Media and intelligence 

(12:50) The role of journalism in modern governance 

(15:15) Sponsors: Dealcraft | Notion 

(17:30) Creating high-trust media for the future

(24:54) Engaging the elite: strategies for influence

(40:32) Sponsor: Squad 

(41:46) The importance of sophisticated content 

(51:16) The illusion of engagement in media 

(51:50) Building a cult-like audience 

(53:22) Commercial success of subcultures 

(57:07) Truth adjudication and reliable sources 

(59:31) Regime change and Wikipedia 

(01:06:58) Elon Musk and the future of Twitter 

(01:14:57) The power of human curation 

(01:34:44) The failure of libertarianism 

(01:39:36) Conclusion and final thoughts

Totemic Social Capital for Thee Means Silence for Me...

I wonder where all this fascist intolerance came from...

Becoming Imperceptable

Deleuze & Guattari meet Pink Floyd

The End is Near! @@

Nathan Gardels, "Illiberal Democracy Comes To America"

The election may mark liberalism’s last sigh as a dominant ideology.

The stunning election of Donald Trump and his allies in the U.S. Congress has set America on a starkly divisive course not seen since the Civil War era.

Several things bear pointing out.

Those who implicitly trusted the electoral system lost decisively, while trust has apparently been restored for those who suspected all the institutions of democracy were corrupt. Conspiracy theories about stolen ballots have evaporated overnight. No one this time around is plotting to block the transfer of power.

The “strong gods” of family, faith and nation prevailed against the culturally liberal sentiments of the open society, which we wrote about recently in Noema. That is a trend across the West that will now receive a further boost as the ascendant direction of history.

Festering resentment against elites — who were seen as insulated from the consequences of their woke tolerance, including on immigration — conjoined with the economic headwinds battering working America. Despite the headline statistics trumpeted by the Democrats, or the barely manifested results of President Joe Biden’s industrial policies, the ongoing reality of inflation and the unequal conditions in daily life could not be masked. As recently reported, the top 20% account for 40% of all consumption, which drives the American economy, while the bottom 40% accounts for only 20%. And that is not to speak of the third factor of a creeping isolationist temper that sees entanglement in conflicts abroad as worsening damage at home.

Whether all those across a surprisingly broad spectrum who amassed the popular vote for Trump fully grasped what they were mandating, illiberal democracy is what we will all now get.

Illiberal Democracy Is Not Fascism, Exactly

Illiberal democracy may not be the fascism of historical precedent, but a close enough cousin to fear. The historian and author of “The Anatomy of Fascism,” Robert Paxton, has said about the MAGA movement: “It’s bubbling up from below in very worrisome ways, and that’s very much like the original fascisms. It’s the real thing. It really is.” Similarly driven by dysfunctional government and perceived social decadence, Trump voters, says Paxton, have an “obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood.”

It’s more than a bit unnerving to remember that, even at the height of its popularity on the path to power when it banned other parties, the Nazis received 37% at the ballot box. Hitler was appointed as chancellor in 1933 by German President Paul von Hindenburg because his party was the biggest in a parliamentary system. He never won a direct popular vote in a competitive election. Trump won nearly 51% of the popular vote in this week’s election.

Elections Alone Are Not Democracy

When Nicolas Berggruen and I published our 2019 book “Renovating Democracy: Governing In The Age of Globalization And Digital Capitalism,” The Economist asked us a question that could fit this very moment as well: “You argue that we need to ‘renovate democracy.’ But another way to see things is that democracy is working just fine, it’s just that the outcomes don’t appeal to comfortable cosmopolitans… What makes you convinced that democracy is broken?”

The answer now would be the same as then: “What we are seeing is the result of elections. But democracy is as much about what happens outside the ballot box: impartial rules, practices, institutions — and political culture — that are not only inclusive, but that foster the reasoned discourse, negotiation and compromise necessary to reach a governing consensus in diverse societies.”

We pointed out then that Trump’s first victory was not the cause of our governing crisis, but a symptom of it:

In recent decades this system has decayed. The mainstream political parties were captured by the organized special interests of an insider establishment that failed to address the dislocations of globalization and disruptions of rapid technological change. This led to a deep distrust of governing institutions by all those left behind. Such disaffection gained more traction than ever before because of the participatory power of social media.

When an unresponsive elite forsakes the average citizen in a system legitimated by popular sovereignty—and fortified by social media—demagogues who fashion themselves as tribunes of the people ride the rage to power. …

The danger now is that the fevered populists are throwing the baby out with the bathwater, assaulting the very norms and institutional checks and balances that guarantee the enduring survival of republics. The revolt against a moribund political class has transmuted into a revolt against governance itself. The result is protracted polarization.

The chief challenge, we said at the time, is not for partisans to put their team back in power through elections, but to mend the breach of distrust between the public and all the intermediating institutions of self-government that have decayed.

This can be done, we argued, by integrating social networks and the broader civil society into governance through new deliberative practices, such as citizens’ assemblies and other forms of impactful citizen engagement “that complement representative government and compensate for its waning legitimacy. In our book we call this ‘participation without populism.’”

The X Factor

What has fanned warranted ressentiment against the “cosmopolitan caste” and the so-called “coastal elites” into an inflamed culture war with the divergent “values of the heartland” is not only the ever-evolving clash between liberal modernity and tradition and their associated status-spheres, but the consolidation of rigid worldviews through the siloed virality of social media.

The newest challenge liberal democracy faces is a digital media ecosystem that both empowers a multitude of voices and concentrates control. The digital oligarch mostly closely linked with the Trump revolution, Elon Musk, has not turned X into a public square, but into a partisan propaganda platform for the MAGA movement.

Indeed, the public square where competing propositions can be tested against each other in the full gaze of the body politic as a whole has virtually disappeared.

Peer-to-peer connectivity fosters this deformation because, as the philosopher Byung-Chul Han notes, it “redirects the flow of communication. Information is spread without forming a public sphere. It is produced in private spaces and distributed to private spaces. The web does not create a public.”

Without a common public space where the credibility and trustworthiness of information can be established, there is no solid ground for meaningful discourse. What takes its place is an arms race of ploy and counter-ploy, which we witnessed in spades during the election campaign.

Just as republics have historically created institutional checks and balances when too much power is concentrated in one place, as should now be the case with ownership of the means of connectivity, so too we need to foster checks and balances for an age when information flows are so distributed that the public sphere is disempowered. The deliberative practices already discussed are but one way to do so.

Liberals Must Deliver The Goods

Finally, the Trump movement has triumphed in the U.S. for much the same reason Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s Morena party succeeded in Mexico. Despite the party’s now realized pledge to gut the independent judiciary by mandating direct election of judges, the party’s presidential candidate, Claudia Sheinbaum, won last summer’s balloting in a landslide.

For all the endless talk of threats to the “rule of law” and “democracy” by the previously governing elites, they failed to move the needle when in power by delivering the goods for the majority who were left behind. For most Mexicans, liberal concerns were a meaningless abstraction in the context of their meager prospects, which never seemed to improve.

Whether Trump’s election marks the last sigh for the ideology of liberalism in the U.S. rests on two things. First, whether his illiberal regime can deliver the goods any better than liberal democrats. Second, whether the opposition does not simply focus on how to get their partisans back in power, but grapples seriously with how to deepen democracy by restoring its connective tissue beyond elections through practices and institutions that enable and encourage negotiation, compromise and consensus rather than partisan combat and culture wars.

Majoritarian Rule Is Not Constitutional Government

To base the idea of democracy solely on elections invites illiberalism because it implies that majoritarian rule is all that is necessary. But, as the American founding fathers well understood, the will of the majority does not embrace all interests in a society, which must be protected equally. That is the reason for constitutional rule as the founding principle of a liberal polity.

In constitutional theory, the imposition of limitations and restraints — the “negative” — is what prevents the majority from absolute domination. It is the negative that makes the constitution, and the “positive” that makes government. The one is the power of acting, the other is the power of preventing or arresting action. The two, combined, make constitutional government.

It is this governing arrangement that has made America great. The biggest danger of Making America Great Again is that a movement that believes it is the embodiment of the will of the majority will cast aside any constraints on its power as a contrivance by the elites of the ancien regime to keep the masses down.

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