Years ago, a Chinese social theorist with links to Deng Hsiao-Ping’s daughter told me an interesting anecdote. When Deng was dying, an acolyte asked him what he thought his greatest act had been, expecting the usual answer: namely that he would mention his economic reforms, which had brought such development to China. To the surprise of the questioner, Deng answered: “No, it was that, when the leadership decided to open up the economy, I resisted the temptation to go all the way and open up also political life to multiparty democracy.” (According to some sources, this tendency to go all the way was pretty strong in some Party circles and the decision to maintain Party control was in no way preordained.) We should resist here the liberal temptation to dream about how, had China also opened up to political democracy, its economic progress would have been even faster: what if political democracy had generated new instabilities and tensions that would have hampered economic progress? What if this (capitalist) progress was feasible only in a society dominated by a strong authoritarian power? Recall the classical Marxist thesis on early modern England: it was in the bourgeoisie’s own interest to leave political power in the hands of the aristocracy and keep for itself economic power. Maybe something homologous is going on in today’s China: it was in the interest of the new capitalists to leave political power to the Communist Party.

—

Some years ago, I heard an anecdote from a friend of Willy Brandt. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Mikhail Gorbachev – at this time already a private citizen – wanted to visit Brandt, and he appeared unannounced at the door of his house in Berlin, but Brandt (or his servant) ignored the ringing of the bell and refused even to open the door. Brandt later explained to his friend his reaction as being an expression of his rage at Gorbachev: by allowing the disintegration of the Soviet bloc, Gorbachev had ruined the foundations of Western social democracy. It was the constant comparison with the East European communist countries that maintained the pressure on the West to tolerate the social democratic welfare state, and once the communist threat disappeared, exploitation in the West became more open and ruthless and the welfare state also began to disintegrate. Simplified as this idea is, there is a moment of truth in it: the final result of the fall of communist regimes is the fall (or, rather, the prolonged disintegration) of social democracy itself.

A Left that Dares to Speak Its Name, Untimely Interventions
Slavoj Žižek

Nothing indeed has been more common for Žižek than to attack Badiou precisely on the grounds that he completely fails to understand the first thing about love, desire, enjoyment and the death drive. Such an attack can take the typically antiphilosophical form of a disparagement, as when Žižek accuses Badiou of falling to the level of sheer non-thought: “When Badiou adamantly opposes the ‘morbid obsession with death,’ when he opposes the Truth-Event to the death drive, and so on, he is at his weakest, succumbing to the temptation of the non-thought.” Or else, especially in Žižek’s more recent works, the accusation can mask itself behind more respectable philosophical labels, such that Badiou turns out to have been blind to the role of pure negativity, or radical finitude, as a prior condition—the tabula rasa of all fantasies that alone clears the ground for a genuine ethical or political act. Thus, except for the sobered-up tone, in Less Than Nothing we are still within the same problematic as the one in The Ticklish Subject: “Negativity (whose Freudian name is the ‘death drive’) is the primordial ontological fact: for a human being, there is no ‘animal life’ prior to it, for a human being is constitutively ‘out-of-joint.’ Every ‘normality’ is a secondary normalization of the primordial dislocation that is the ‘death drive,’ and it is only through the terrorizing experience of the utter vacuity of every positive order of ‘normality’ that a space is opened up for an Event.” Finally, what emerges as the fundamental stake in the ongoing disputes between Badiou and Žižek on the subject of Lacan is the problematic of the different relationships between truth, knowledge, and the real of enjoyment.

Enjoy Your Truth:
Lacan as Vanishing Mediator between Badiou and Žižek

Bruno Bosteels

But, at the beginning, you had the feeling that interpretation, by itself, cures. And, people who know Freud’s writing agree, that we have the feeling at a certain moment, that Freud and his pupils bumped up against symptoms which, in spite of being interpreted, remained. And that means that there is something more in the symptom, more than S1 and S2, more than articulation of signifiers. And Freud was not one to go back on this discovery. He was not followed by his pupils, but he considered precisely this resistance of the symptom. So, Freud developed a hypothesis, I believe it is not excessive to say, that it’s new in the history of human thought, that, yes, a patient may have something, and love fundamentally, be fundamentally attracted to something that harms him. That is, his most precious good may be bad. Freud called it primary masochism and negative therapeutic reaction. It’s a classy expression to say that they don’t want to be cured! Not only because they are of bad faith, not only because they resist the action of the analyst, but because there is something beyond the pleasure principle. And this beyond the pleasure principle Freud elaborated as the death instinct, which was refused by almost all his pupils. And you know the affinity of Lacan for this highly disputed concept. He gave a place to this supposed death instinct, and I found in a speech of Lacan to an audience in the ’30s, that already, he was defending this impossible concept. Impossible concept which is what? I would say death is what Lacan translated as Jouissance. Jouissance is the Lacanian name for what is beyond the pleasure principle.

Jouissance is Lacan’s name for what’s beyond the pleasure principle. That is to say,
what? Why a new name? Because, it is displeasure, it is pain, it is suffering. So, if
we say there is an unknown pleasure in the suffering of the symptom, an unknown
pleasure that presents itself as pain, this justifies giving it a new
name. Jouissance in this sense, is enjoyment in breach of the pleasure principle,
because it brings no pleasure, but discontrol, discontent, malaise. This could be the
notable thing to introduce in the United States, the contrary of the pursuit of
happiness, because the pursuit of jouissance is contrary to happiness, to the
equilibrium, the harmony, the satisfaction one calls happiness. And, if we accept
this name jouissance, well, we understand also that Freudian drives are not
psychological functions, that psychology can never really accommodate the drive
to instinct. Hunger and thirst are urges you can satisfy; the urge recedes when you
satisfy it. What is incomprehensible in the Freudian drive, in the definition Freud
himself gives of the drive, is that the satisfaction of the drive brings only the
demand for more, for “again”, as Lacan said, “for encore.” Jouissance  is the
Lacanian name for the satisfaction of the drive, as distinct from instinct. And, this
is also a short-cut to understand why Freud said that when you accept, when you
defer to the command of the super-ego, you are always more and more subjected to
its demands. So, what’s difficult about jouissance is that while desire is connected
to speech, and to signifiers, jouissance, on the contrary, is silence. And Freud spoke
mysteriously of the silence of the drives.

http://www.lacan.com/symptom6_articles/miller.html

That’s why I stress this sentence, which may be found in Écrits, when he says, “Not everything is signifying, even if everything is structure.” You have to understand that this sentence from the 60s is already a commentary on his future mathemes. There is a gap here, there is a discrepancy, because from the beginning we define structure from Saussure as an articulation of the signifier. And we are obliged from analytic experience, to operate with a structure which accepts, I would say, a nonsignifying element. And what Lacan calls small “a” is the non-signifiable part of structure, which is easy to say but more difficult to construct. The problem is the relationship of this small “a” to A as Symbolic order. And, is it exterior, purely exterior? Is it interior? The word “extimacy” tries to transcend this opposition. Beginning with the word “intimacy,” which refers to the most private, the center of privacy, this intimacy is at the same time a forbidden zone for the subject. And, in some way, it was known from Augustine’s time, for instance, that at the center of yourself, in the most intimate of your intimacies, as Augustine says in his Confessions, there’s God. There is not you yourself absolutely. In some way God exemplifies this extimacy that is, at the very center, intimacy. That is to say, to drive a wedge into the argument, the most cherished of your intimacies is at the same time the most alien. That’s why Lacan disagreed with Freud on this point. He said “there is no desire to know, there is no drive to know.” And he added: “the only thing I have ever discovered in a patient, and in myself, is the drive not to know.” In that sense we may say that what resists in analytical experience is this jouissance as the very principle of symptom formation. That’s how Lacan defined the symptom: “truth resisting knowledge of jouissance.” And, perhaps, I could give one idea of the drive from this problematic. First, that the small “a,” as surplus jouissance needs to be distinguished from the phallus. Phallus—supposed phallocentrism—is not a final word of Lacan, but one of the first, and on the contrary, one may write that the phallus is something other than small “a.” The phallus as signifier of jouissance is something other than small “a.” A mistake is made here because Lacan defines the phallus as signifier of jouissance. That’s true. But jouissance in Lacan, I would say, is made of two parts: a signifiable part, and a non-signifiable part. And that condition gives a place to the other jouissance, the other-than-phallic jouissance, and that’s why Lacan would give a place to feminine sexuality not by revealing a feminine signifier but by taking into account small “a” as surplus jouissance.

from http://www.lacan.com/symptom6_articles/miller.html

In the twenty-third seminar, Lacan stipulates that a sinthome is a
symptom upon which the very being of its subjective bearer depends.
Were the subject to be “cured” of his/her sinthome, he/she would
cease to exist, would dissipate along with this point de capiton of his/
her subjectivity itself. Hence, the therapeutic gain brought about by
analysis, according to the Lacan of the twenty-fifth seminar, hinges not
on eliminating the sinthome, but on making it transition from being an “in
itself” to a “for itself” (to resort to a bit of Hegelese not foreign to Lacan).
In so doing, the subject goes from being unconsciously in the grip of his/ her sinthome to having a margin of conscious distance from it, after the
achievement of which he/she may even come to identify with it (or at
least be comfortable enough living with it). This might be as much self-transparent freedom and contentment as analysis can afford.
Similarly, apropos invincible religion’s triumphant God hypothesis
as the sinthome of socio-symbolic subjectivity, perhaps there is no “cure”
for religiosity. Maybe the irreducible meanings enshrined in both religion
and philosophy are indeed incurable. However, if this sort of sens is
handled as a sinthome, then although an immediate, first-order atheism
might not be possible for speaking subjects, a mediated, second-order
one is a potential option. Both desire à la Lacan and belief too are
inherently self-reflexive. Hence, one can come not to desire one’s desire
for the divine, not to believe in one’s (first-order) belief. A second-order
atheism therefore would be attainable despite the impossibility of a first-order
one. This would be a position somewhat akin to the Kantian doctrine
of transcendental illusion.
The same might also hold for Lacan’s “insurgence” against
philosophy. Putting together some of his above-cited remarks, Lacanian
anti-philosophy could be described as a second-order rebellion against
unavoidable first-order philosophizing. One cannot help but lapse into
philosophical indulgences. But, one also can struggle against these
lapses. As an anti-philosopher, Lacan might be redescribed as an
uncomfortable and reluctant philosopher. Analogously, as an atheist,
Lacan perhaps is an unsettled, discontent Catholic

Lacan’s Endgame:
Philosophy, Science, and Religion in the Final Seminars
Adrian Johnston

Similarly, as Lacan showed, if Marx was the first structuralist,
that was because globalised capitalism offered the best example of the
structure of structuralists: a set of relations between exchange values
determined by their differences and mutual relations, a symbolic universe
without an exterior, a language without a metalanguage, an Other without an Other and a closed and unidimensional system comprised only of
one qualitative dimension and its quantitative variations and proportions,
devoid of otherness and negativity…
However, in addition to what is cognitively reflected, there is what
is symptomatically discovered: the covered-discovered by the reflection,
the extimate processes that underlie external or internal states, the
production of the product and the enunciation of the enunciated, but also
the negativity of positivity, the misery of wealth and the abstract character
of the most concrete. The discovery is made in the same reflection, in
the open and hollow structure, in the imperceptible matter that must be
calculated through the microscope of ‘abstraction’. It is here, in the
abstract, mathematical, empty and unfounded material structure, where
we discover that the most apparent is the least apparent, that the evident
is contradictory, that the whole is not-all, that the Other is barred and that
the king is naked, that he is a proletarian, a subject without attributes,
except to be alive…  What is important here is that the structure
and its economic materiality appear in Marx as what they are: precarious,
transitory, crossed by history, by conflicts and contradictions, by tensions
and struggles, by movement and by life, by disrupting desires and
corrosive drives and also, on a genetic level, as products of negation,
destruction and alienation, expropriation and privatisation, exploitation
and pauperisation, fetishisation and reification. We can reject some of
these conceptualisations, but we cannot deny that they designate in a
more or less accurate and adequate manner what is revealingly embodied
by the proletarian and understood as the historical truth of capitalism, as
a symptom of how bourgeois society strips and reveals to Marx everything
that he discovers.

Lacanizing Marxism: the Effects of Lacan

in Readings of Marx and Marxist Thinkers
David Pavón Cuéllar

Zarathustra (Un)Vaccinated by Zlatomir Zlatanov

My translation of Zlatomir Zlatanov’s piece “Zarathustra (Un)Vaccinated”: he is a theory oracle you should all know about. (Another trans. of mine is forthcoming soon in Barricade: A Journal of Antifascism & Translation).
Снимка на Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture.
Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture

This is LOCKDOWN THEORY #24: “Zarathustra (Un)Vaccinated” by Zlatomir Zlatanov: “The indirect guilt of neoliberal biopolitics is no longer actual. In the pandemic we are the abandoned of the absent cause, in the absence of cognitive mapping as substitute of class war – both are unactual. Catastrophisms are literalisms. The symbiotic Gaia apparently still does not know what she can do as a Spinozist body in the antidote of the organless body of death. If philosophers and pathogens are locked inside the correlate, then is not the ambiguous fixism of the Great Outdoors yet another viral concubinage? We would rather ask ourselves: is there anything like the witness of the absolute visit, an intransitivity as the pathogen of correlationism?”
https://identitiesjournal.edu.mk/…/IJP…/announcement/view/34

Stanimir Panayotov

One of the Black Notebooks’ little surprises is Heidegger’s praise for the painter Caspar David Friedrich, whom he calls “a peak towering into the godforsaken spaces of the divinity of the onetime God,” a figure on a par with Hölderlin (GA 95: 364/285 tm). Heidegger must have known what is today Friedrich’s most famous painting, The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. A man adopts a bold stance on a craggy peak, and we look out with him over a breathtaking landscape where the lower elevations are shrouded in mist. Heidegger must have felt that exhilaration when thinking of himself as one of the rare dwellers on mountaintops. But did he reflect on the mist? The wanderer in the painting has a magnificent view, but he does not see all: the clouds obscure the valleys below. Maybe he does not care—maybe that is part of his triumphant mood. So be it. But at least he should realize that he does not know what lies under the mist. The heights are heights of both knowledge and ignorance. In his Olympian pose, Heidegger not only fails to see through the mist, but fails to see the mist itself. He not only has no sympathy for real, suffering individuals, but also thinks that he knows them when he does not. The dismissive statements in the notebooks—such as the repeated claim that he is living in the age of the total lack of questioning and thought—are themselves thoughtless, because the fact is that he does not know whether others are questioning. Zarathustra must go down in the beginning of Nietzsche’s book, and the philosopher-rulers must return to the cave in the Republic. Heidegger, who blames Platonism for so much, failed to learn the lesson of Plato’s allegory. The philosophers return to the cave not only in order to save the polis, but also in order to understand the political realm in its particularity after spending time in the light of the intelligible forms. When they first return, they are unable to see in the relative darkness (Republic 516e, 518a). Knowledge of essences, then, does not suffice to grasp politics; we must both ascend and descend, and take the time to adjust our understanding to both realms. Heidegger’s interpretations of the allegory of the cave exemplify blindness instead of recognizing it: he wrongly asserts that “with his view of essence [the philosopher] can now see what happens in the cave for what it is” (GA 34: 89/65). He takes the returning philosopher simply as an enlightened liberator who may be the victim of the deluded masses’ stupidity and resentment, rather than understanding that the philosopher himself needs to relearn to see in the dimness (GA 34: 80–94; GA 36/37: 180–85).

Time and Trauma
Thinking Through
Heidegger in the Thirties
Richard Polt

ВЪЗКРЕСЕНСКА РЕПЕТИЦИЯ

Лазар събуден
Преждевременно
Сред сомнамбули

CUTTING TOGETHER – APART

Срещата пропусната
С квантовия ефект
На нелокалност

КАРАНТИНА

Проваляните
Удоволствия в наслаждението
От провала

КАРАНТИНА-2

В геноцида
На Аушвиц не можеш да умреш
За другите

INDISCERNIBLES

Изваждане
Като прибавяне към Булеанови
Пълчища

ФАЛОСЪТ Е АНГЕЛ

Ангелите
Нямат секс защото са cogito
На секса

THE VOID

Мениджмънт
На пустота в неопределения регистър
На бога мъртъв

ЖЕНАТА НЕ СЪЩЕСТВУВА

Освен
В маскарадно екраниране на мъжката
Фантазия

Trompe-l’œil

Под фалическия
Знак жената винаги
Е майка

НЕБОСВОД

В безкраен отказ
Циркулират звезди на неабсолютната
Визита

ВЕЛИКИЯТ МАСТУРБАТОР

Всичко
С нокти няма как
Да мастурбира

ПЛАНИНСКА МАТЕМАТИКА

Скалите
Криеха от нас лабилните си
Изчисления

НАДПИС В СОЗОПОЛ

За правата
На камъните се застъпват голите
Туристи

ДИФРАКЦИЯ

Пейзаж във виртуален
Отсек на неаксиоматизирани
Решения

ДЗЕН-КВАНТОВ СВЯТ

Енергийна
Орбита на жабешкия скок
Извън локация

Вижте повече на IDENTITIESJOURNAL.EDU.MK

(с безкрайна благодарност към Станимир Панайотов – от автора)