The martyr takes his or her stand directly in the Real, short-circuiting
the symbolic and testifying to an alternative truth by repudiating the ways
of the world even unto death. Martyrs take what Walter Benjamin would
call a tiger’s leap into the future, gazing upon the present as though they
were already dead and the present were already the past. The martyr harnesses
the death drive to a cause which might mean more abundant life for
others – an abundance of life which springs from the cessation of his or
her own. This is bound to seem ultra-leftist folly to many of those who
work pragmatically for a more equitable social order, and who must therefore
to some degree abide by the rules of its game. But there is a difference
between working for justice and incarnating it, however negatively one
might do the latter…
A just social order could be founded
only on this solitary, unsociable fidelity to truth.

TROUBLE WITH STRANGERS
TERRY EAGLETON

Was heißt denn digital? Digital kommt von digitus, dem lateinischen Wort für Finger. Im Digitalen wird das menschliche Tun auf die Fingerkuppen reduziert. Lange Zeit war ja die menschliche Tätigkeit mit der Hand verbunden. Daher die Begriffe Handlung, Handwerk. Aber wir fingern heute nur noch. Das ist die digitale Leichtigkeit des Seins. Eine Handlung im emphatischen Sinne ist aber immer eine Art Drama. Heideggers Fetischisierung der Hand protestiert bereits gegen das Digitale.

Byung-Chul Han

Kapitalismus und Todestrieb

All of Sophocles’s mighty protagonists, so Lacan points out, have strayed
beyond the protective shell of the symbolic order into some trackless territory
of the spirit, thrust by some implacable demand or preternatural
purity of being outside the stockade of civic decency to a place of extreme
solitude and self-exposure in which they are set apart in the manner of the
sacred. The sacred signifies those ambiguously cursed and blessed objects
which are earmarked for death, and which in being thus marked with the
livid signs of their own mortality can unleash a formidable power for
transformation. These acolytes of the Real are all liminal creatures, pure
incarnations of Thanatos, at once animate and inanimate, men and women
who are dead but won’t lie down. They are characters lingering in the
departure lounge of life, individuals who like the protagonists of high
tragedy sightlessly move among the ranks of the living dead, and in whose
dumb agony death can already be felt stealthily trespassing upon the terrain
of the living. As such, they are exemplars of the truth that, in Lacan’s own
phrase, ‘all that is lives only in the lack of being’ . Desire in the end
is desire for nothing. It is no more than the living relation of men and
women to their own lack of being, the néant which keeps them on the
move. Psychoanalysis is the resurgence in secular, scientific guise of the
tragic sense of life. In Lacan’s hands, it becomes an atheistic style of religion,
clinging like Beckett’s tramps to a redemption which will never arrive.
The keystone of religion – God – is placed under censure, but the whole
elaborate edifice remains remarkably intact. What is the desire of the Real
but what Augustine and Kierkegaard knew as faith?
So there is no sovereign good, it would seem, beyond clinging intractably
to one’s longing for it. To replicate something of Lacan’s own baroque
wordplay, an ethics of the Real can be summarised in the imperative: Lack
on!

TROUBLE WITH STRANGERS
TERRY EAGLETON

 

For Lacan, then, morality lies beyond the good, useful, virtuous and
pleasurable, in the rigorously lawful domain of desire. Those altruists who
earnestly seek to be of service to others, fulfi lling their needs and enhancing
their well-being, do so only because the true form of enjoyment which is
jouissance – a pleasure which is ‘good for nothing’ – has lamentably failed
them. The utilitarian or political reformer is he who is incapable of enjoyment
without an end in view. Those who prate of the good, so ethicists of
the Real suspect, suppose in implicitly autocratic style that they know just
what good others need; whereas the love of the analyst for his or her patient
never falls prey to such presuppositions.

TROUBLE WITH STRANGERS
TERRY EAGLETON

Thus, begining with total linguistic relativism, Chuang Tzu ends with a sort of metalinguistics. Spillover words do not ward and sector, they PLAY. They contain more than they contain — therefore, like the famous cleaver which never needs sharpening because the Taoist butcher can pass it between all tendons and joints, the Spillover word “finds its proper channel.” The sage does not become trapped in semantics, does not mistake map for territory, but rather “opens things up to the light of Heaven” by flowing with the words, by playing with the words. Once attuned to this flow, the sage need make no special effort to “illumine” , for language DOES IT by itself, spontaneously. Language spills over.
Now, recall that Saussure was studying the Latin anagrams, and that he found the key words of the poems spilling over into other words. Syllables of characters’ names for example are echoed in words describing those characters. At first the founder of modern linguistics considered these anagrams as conscious literary devices. Little by little however it became apparent that such a “reading” would not hold. Saussure began to find anagramatic spillovers everywhere he looked — not only in ALL Latin poetry, but even in prose. He reached the point where he couldn’t tell if he was experiencing a linguistic hallucination or a divine revelation. Anagrams everywhere! Language itself a net of jewels in which every gem reflects all others! He wrote a letter to a respected academic Latinist who had composed Latin odes — poems in which Saussure had detected anagrams. Tell me, he begged, are you the heir to a secret tradition handed down from Classical antiquity — or are you doing it unconsciously? Needless to say, Saussure received no answer. He stopped his research abruptly with a sensation of vertigo, trembling on the abyss of pure nihilism, or pure magic, terrified by the implications of a language beyond language, beyond sign/content, langue/parole. He stopped, in short, precisely where Chuang Tzu begins.

AIMLESS WANDERING
CHUANG TZU’ CHAOS LINGUISTICS
BY HAKIM BEY

 

Souverän ist, so der Staatsrechtier Carl Schmitt,
wer über den Ausnahmezustand verfügt. Einige
Jahre später revidierte er diesen berühmten Satz:
»Nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, angesichts meines
Todes, sage ich jetzt: Souverän ist, wer über die
Wellen des Raumes verfügt.«

Carl Schmitt soll zeitlebens Angst vor Radio und Fernsehen gehabt haben – wegen der manipulativen Wirkung. Heute, im digitalen Regime, müsste der Satz der Souveränität erneut revidiert werden: Souverän ist, wer
über die Daten im Netz verfügt.

Byung-Chul Han

Kapitalismus und Todestrieb

Wie steht es heute mit dem Kommunismus? überall wird Sharing und Community beschworen. Die Sharing-Ökonomie soll die Ökonomie des Eigentums und des Besitzes ablösen. »Sharing is Caring«, »Teilen ist Heilen«, so heißt eine Maxime der »Circler« im neuen Roman von Dave Eggers The Circle. Die Pflastersteine, die den Fußweg zur Firmenzentrale von Circle bilden, sind durchsetzt mit Sprüchen wie »Sucht Gemeinschaft« oder »Bringt euch ein«.

Caring is Killing sollte es aber eigentlich heißen. Auch die digitale Mitfahrzentrale »Wunder Car«, die jeden von uns zum Taxi-Fahrer macht, wirbt mit der Idee der Community. Es ist aber ein Irrtum zu glauben, dass die Sharing-Ökonomie, wie Jeremy Rifkin in seinem jüngsten Buch Die Null-Grenzkosten-Gesellschaft behauptet, ein Ende des Kapitalismus, eine globale, gemeinschaftlich orientierte Gesellschaft einläutet, in der Teilen mehr Wert hätte als Besitzen. Im Gegenteil: Die Sharing-Ökonomie führt letzten Endes zu einer Totalkommerzialisierung des Lebens. Der von Jeremy Rifkin gefeierte Wechsel vom Besitz zum »Zugang« befreit uns nicht vom Kapitalismus. Wer kein Geld besitzt, hat eben auch keinen Zugang zum Sharing. Auch im Zeitalter des Zugangs leben wir weiterhin im »Bannoptikum«, in dem diejenigen, die kein Geld haben, ausgeschlossen bleiben. »Airbnb«, der Community-Marktplatz, der jedes Zuhause in ein Hotel verwandelt, ökonomisiert sogar die Gastfreundschaft. Die Ideologie der Community oder der kollaborativen Commons führt zur Totalkapitalisierung der Gemeinschaft. Es ist keine zweckfreie Freundlichkeit mehr möglich. In einer Gesellschaft wechselseitiger Bewertung wird auch die Freundlichkeit kommerzialisiert. Man wird freundlich, um bessere Bewertungen zu erhalten. Auch mitten in der kollaborativen Ökonomie herrscht die harte Logik des Kapitalismus. Bei diesem schönen »Teilen« gibt paradoxerweise niemand etwas freiwillig ab. Der Kapitalismus vollendet sich in dem Moment, in dem er den Kommunismus als Ware verkauft. Der Kommunismus als Ware, das ist das Ende der Revolution.

Byung-Chul Han
Kapitalismus und Todestrieb

Coming as it does from the pen of a hounded Jewish heretic, this view
of morality is as admirable as it is perverse. Spinoza would not have considered
anger or resentment to be appropriate responses to his persecution,
as he did not consider morality to be an emotive matter in the first place.
Human appetites and aversions spring from our conatus or built-in striving
for self-preservation, and as such lie no more within our mastery than the
Freudian unconscious or the capitalist mode of production. We must
adopt a hermeneutic of suspicion in our judgements, steadfastly purge all
reference to the subject, and take a speaker’s own account of her feelings
and motives as (in the Freudian sense) symptomatic, or (in the Freudo-
Marxist sense) a rationalisation. The truth is necessarily eccentric to one’s
experience: it resides in the physical and material causes underlying such
states of consciousness, and can never be captured within them. To be a
subject is to misinterpret.
The revolutionary force of this view is hard to underestimate. Louis
Althusser saw Spinoza as having ‘introduced an unprecedented theoretical
revolution in the history of philosophy, probably the greatest philosophical
revolution of all time’. These profoundly subversive doctrines, launched
by an obscure lens grinder widely honoured as a saint among philosophers,
undermine entire moral orthodoxies and sabotage whole reaches of human
prejudice. Everyday experience – the very homeland of morality for Locke,
Hutcheson and Hume – is confused, irrational, pre-scientific and spontaneously
self-interested; words like ‘vicious’ and ‘virtuous’, rather like aesthetic
judgements for Kant, indicate not objective properties of things but
a speaker’s attitudes to them; moral terminology cannot apply to human
beings, since they are no more free agents than goldfish; and the self is
never so thoroughly a slave to causality than when it imagines itself to be
at liberty. Men and women are causally determined natural objects, and in
learning and embracing this hardest of truths lie the paths to sanctity and
salvation.

TROUBLE WITH STRANGERS
TERRY EAGLETON

As I remember, it was Maman who had the idea of calling on my father to help. The appointment on Rue Jadin was set for such-and-such an hour on such-and-such a day. I had great expectations for that meeting. If all the stupid doctors hadn’t been able to cure me, who but my father—the eminent psychoanalyst, whose genius I had never once doubted—could understand me, save me? The situation was all the more nightmarish because those around me, understanding nothing of my illnesses and afflictions, seemed to suspect me of malingering, of laziness, even—why not?— of faking it. I see myself on the balcony at the appointed hour, looking out for my father to arrive. Time passed, he still wasn’t there. My impatience grew. How could he be so late, given the circumstances? Rue Jadin is so short you can take it all in with one glance. A few yards from our building was a house of assignation, discreet, frequented by people with “class.” From my lookout, I suddenly saw a woman emerge from it with brisk steps. A few seconds later, a man departed in turn. Dumbfounded, I recognized my father.
How could he have tormented me so just to satisfy his own desires first? How dare he fuck a woman on Rue Jadin, steps away from the home of his children and his ex-wife? I went back inside, seething with indignation.

—

Several years after my father’s death, I passed through Guitrancourt, where he is buried, on my way back from a weekend in Honfleur with my then-boyfriend. I no longer had my own car, and used the opportunity— a day away from Paris, a vehicle—to pay him a visit. The cemetery at Guitrancourt is on a hillside at the edge of the village. Thankfully, the gate is always open, and you can enter without having to be let in. I asked my friend to wait for me on the road down below. I wanted to see my father alone, without witnesses, one on one. (We will overlook the young man’s annoyed and sulky reaction.) It was to be a private, intimate engagement. I walked through the rows of flower-bedecked graves (were the flowers artificial?) until I reached my father’s, at the upper part of the enclosure. An ugly slab of cement with the traditional name and dates (birth, death). I was moved. It had been so many years since we’d talked. The weather was fine and cool, the air bracing. I had brought a red rose with me. I placed it carefully on the headstone, looking a long time for the ideal position, then I stopped. I waited for contact to be established. Things were harder with the “idiot” waiting for me further down and distracting me with his ill humor. I tried in vain to concentrate, to be there completely. As a last resort, I laid my hand on the icy stone until it burned. (How often, in the past, we had held each other’s hand.) Reconciliation of bodies, reconciliation of souls. The magic worked. At last, I was with him. Dear Papa, I love you. You are my father, you know. He must have heard me. Back in Paris, in the middle of the night, I wrote a long letter to a friend that ended, I remember, with the words: “We ought not to leave the dead too long alone.”

A  FATHER
puzzle

SIBYLLE LACAN

Originally published as Un père: Puzzle © Editions GALLIMARD, Paris, 1994.

As the final scene of Moon Palace suggests, ‘finding one’s final place’ is only a temporal illusion. The subject is searching for its place in the world, but as a speaking subject, it is forever alienated from its being: always already ‘out of place,’ the subject by definition is a “discontinuity in the real” (Écrits 299, Lacan).

AN ART OF DESIRE
READING PAUL AUSTER

Bernd Herzogenrath