Structuralism repeated the main gesture of Galilean science: it explained language through something that strictly speaking does not exist, the signifier and the system of differences forming a chain-like structure. The same repetition can be found in Freud, who as well explained thought mechanisms through something that strictly speaking does not exist, the unconscious. This inexistence clearly does not imply that we are dealing with simple illusions. On the contrary, what is at stake are ontologically incomplete realities or realities that are not thoroughly constituted (as Žižek would put it). Hence, Lacan incessantly repeated that the big Other does not exist. Language, this object of the science of language, in the first place does not exist in the Aristotelian sense, as a stable and ready-made organ-tool of communication. Language always comes in combination with autonomy and causality. A Koyréian thesis on language would therefore be: language does not exist, but this inexistence does not prevent it from having real consequences, or in Lacan’s wording, “What has a body and does not exist? Answer – the big Other” (Lacan, 1991: 74). Le langage is what the scientific discourse extracts, constructs, fabricates from the “living language” (lalangue), or rather, language, this epistemic fabrication, is in the best case the isolated and formalised logical and efficient autonomy of the symbolic and in the worst case a fictitious collection of grammatical and semantic rules, which presuppose a “someone” (intentional consciousness) and an idealised communicational model. In other words, for the Aristotelian tradition, which is today most openly perpetuated by the analytic philosophy, language is still an inefficient existence (mental or cerebral organ). By contrast, for consequent structuralists, language is an efficient inexistence (logic materialised in the multiplicity of unconscious formations, sexuality, discursive poiesis etc.).
We can understand why Saussure insisted that linguistics, in order to become a (Galilean) science of language and break with the (Aristotelian) philosophy of language, needed to be grounded on the separation of language from speech and treat language as if no living being would speak it, as a language of pure spirits rather than a language of speaking bodies. Speech is not only the realm of uncountable variations and the proliferation of subjective dialects but also the terrain, on which Aristotelianism imposed the organonic conception of language and removed linguistic autonomy from the picture. Saussure’s insistence on the side of the “ideal language” thus missed the material consequences, which perpetually dynamise the linguistic construction. Saussure nevertheless acknowledged that two main features mark the object of linguistics: it is unstable and it does not exist (it is no positive ontological substance). Linguistic structure is organised inexistence (synchronicity) marked by permanent instability (diachronicity).
Lacanian structuralism began with a wager that the discursive consequences registered by psychoanalysis in the speaking body (the unconscious and sexuality) were no less capable of becoming an object of science in Koyré’s sense (science of the real). This means that the discursive consequences registered by psychoanalysis in the speaking body could be treated by means of the apparatus of formalisation, by the autonomy of language, that they indeed actualise in the first place. Lacan’s unification of the Freudian unconscious with the Saussurean signifier implies that the unconscious could become the object of a Galilean science, and consequently that its ontological status is equivalent to the objects of modern science. Just as the latter treats external reality as reified mathematics and geometry, psychoanalysis thinks all unconscious formations as materialised discourse, and in doing so it brings about another return to Plato. Freud baptised his epistemic invention in an openly anti-Aristotelian manner: he rejected the term psychology (logos of psyché, science of the soul) and instead coined psychoanalysis (analysis of psyché, dissolution of the soul). The Freudian invention is only possible in the soulless universe of modern science and provides yet another case of the experimental verification of Platonism, its clinical verification, given that the Freudian laboratory is the psychoanalytic cabinet, in which experimentation, that is, an experience of “the real insofar as it is impossible to sustain” (Lacan, 1977: 11) takes place.

Samo Tomšič

Negri points out that our contemporary
masters (corporations, media conglomerates, spin doctors, finance
capitalists, post-Fordist outsourcers of all kinds) no longer dream of a kind
of exclusionary, binary totalization and don’t achieve their hegemonic effects
primarily through a normatively repressive logocentrism. What we’ve
been calling post-postmodern capitalism is, as Negri and a host of others
have argued, no longer exactly logocentric: it no longer primarily demands
or seeks a kind of mass conformity, sameness, or totalization. Rather, today’s
cutting-edge capitalism celebrates and rewards singularity, difference,
and openness to new markets and products.

 

The electric ethics of modernity was for humanity like a vast vein of fossil fuel, and now it has been depleted. Does this mean that we have to imagine an electronic ethics of tomorrow? Do we have to think of a new way of being human, one inspired by our fascination with robots, just because long ago we tried to do the same and use electrical energy as a model for being human? Transhumanist thinking will give rise to an abundant variety of electronic ethics in the years to come. These will offer us the ability to go beyond our organic, sensate, electric life in favour of a life modelled on robots, artificial intelligence, and electronic creatures. That life will promise to minimise suffering, sickness, and death. We will be able to cognitively process information at a superior level, and we will gain improved mental capacities for memory, integration, and recognition, all in exchange for our vital intensities. When an image and an idea forge an alliance, we find the promise of a new ethical condition. This happened long ago with electricity and intensity, and it is happening now with electronics and information.
But all that the electronic promise can deliver is a technological version of wisdom and salvation. The electronic promise swings the pendulum back from the intensity of life, forcing itself on to thought towards the information of thought forcing itself on to life. That promise in no way extricates us from the ethical vice that traps our conscience in its clutches. It instead merely strengthens the vice’s grip. So we find ourselves pulled in two different directions at once. To one side, we have the tension between the intense life and the wisdom and salvation offered up by religions; on the other side, there is the struggle between the electric life and the electronic life that is to come. At least the electronic life allows us to realise how obsolete the ideal of electric intensity that we came up in has become. We realise this even if, in many realms of social existence, we continue to obey the modern demand to live hard, fast, and intensely. Other ideals are no doubt already in the works. Some people will believe that they should use the being of information as a model and make their lives into a summary of data that can be preserved and prolonged. The qualities of this life would not be intensified, but they would be more efficient; these would include augmented memory, increased concentration, controlled moods, and the ability to keep death at bay.
Believing in this new promise would mean that we have not learned the lesson of the exhaustion of electric ethics. It would mean wanting to reduce life to thought after having hoped to reduce thought to life. It would propose a materialist analogue of the hope for wisdom and salvation. Believing in that promise once more would drag us into a simulated version of existence, one unencumbered by organic life. To do so would allow us to yet again reduce the feeling of life to something else, or let us deduce something from it, but it will not help us maintain that feeling.
We are not asking for a magical mantra that would show us how to live. We only want one thing, the assurance that we can think up a way for our feeling of living to resist anything that threatens to reduce it or take away from it. We have outgrown our childish expectations that some thought might reveal the meaning of life to us or teach us the rules of existence. All we ask of an ethics is that it assure us that it is possible to live a full life without destroying the intensity of life itself. What is the point of living forever if we lose the feeling of living in the process? Rather than the promise of an intense life or eternal life (be it spiritual or material), what we really want is just a promise that we will be able to feel alive as long as we live.
Just expressing this demand is enough to make us realise that we need look no longer for a solution to our problem; the way we have articulated our demands already makes the solution clear. We are no longer looking to pry our way out of the vice that holds us prisoner. What matters now is finding a way to hang in there and resist.

The Life Intense
A Modern Obsession
Tristan Garcia

…

From generation to generation, a larger and
larger number of us are supernumerary, “useless to
the world” -in any case, to the economic world.
Seeing that for sixty years there have been people
like Norbert Wiener who prophesy that automation
and cybernatization “will produce an unemployment
compared to which the current difficulties
and the economic crisis of the years 1 930-36 will
look like child’s play,” it eventually had to come to
pass. The latest word is that Amazon is planning to
open, in the United States, 2000 completely automated
convenience stores with no cash registers
hence no cashiers and under total monitoring,
with facial recognition of the customers and
real-time analysis of their gestures. On entering
you make your smartphone beep at a terminal and
then you serve yourself. What you take is automatically
debited from your Premium account,
thanks to an app, and what you put back on the
shelf is re-credited. It’s called Amazon Go. In this
shopping dystopia of the future there is no more
cash money, no more standing in line, no more
theft, and almost no more employees. It’s predicted
that this new model, if implemented, will turn
the whole business of distribution, the greatest
provider of jobs in the U . S . , upside down.
Eventually, three quarters of the jobs would disappear
in the sector of convenience stores. More generally,
if one limits oneself to the forecasts of the World
Bank, by about 2030, under the pressure of “innovation,”
40% of the existing jobs in the wealthy
countries will have vanished. “We will never
work,” was a piece of bravado by Rimbaud. It’s
about to become the lucid assessment of a whole
generation of young people.

The Invisible Committee, 2017.
This translation© 2017 by Semiotext(e)

 

All the reasons for making a revolution are there.
Not one is lacking. The shipwreck of politics, the
arrogance of the powerful, the reign of falsehood,
the vulgarity of the wealthy, the cataclysms of
industry, galloping misery, naked exploitation,
ecological apocalypse-we are spared nothing,
not even being informed about it all. ” Climate:
20 1 6 breaks a heat record,” Le Monde announces,
the same as almost every year now. All the reasons
are there together, but it’s not reasons that make
revolutions, it’s bodies . And the bodies are in
front of screens.

The Invisible Committee, 2017.
This translation© 2017 by Semiotext(e).

 

In the first place biopolitical production means that people living today are in the process of being ‘produced’ in such a way that they can adapt successfully to the way that capitalism functions. Think of the manner that mainstream psychological counselling enables one to ‘cope’ with the demands of consumer society; and compare this to Lacan’s opposition (captured in the phrase ‘against adaptation’; see Van Haute 2002) to mainstream psychology, which merely assists the subject to ‘adapt’ to an alienated and alienating society. If this seems far-fetched, ponder the implications of the familiar exhortation, to ‘brand’ or ‘rebrand’ yourself; that is, deliberately turn yourself into a ‘commodity for sale’. Only people who have been thoroughly brainwashed by consumerist capitalism would fail to realise that this surrender to the cynical ‘anthropology of competitiveness’ reduces their human freedom to virtually zero. And yet, people seem to be quite happy to market themselves as commodities, blissfully unaware of the fact that they are participating in their own liquidation as ‘human’ beings capable of freedom of thought and action.

Bert Olivier

Човекът е средоточие на суверенни жестове, които не е способен да похаби, нито пък те него.
Жестовете са безработни.
Ние все още не знаем какво може пришиваното към тях тяло.

WHAT AGATHA KNEW
Agatha Christie’s eightieth book, Passenger to Frankfurt – published in 1970 with the subtitle ‘an extravaganza’,
one of the few of her works with no movie or TV adaptation – is a novel that ‘slides from the unlikely to the
inconceivable and finally lands up in incomprehensible muddle. Prizes should be offered to readers who can explain
the ending. Concerns the youth uproar of the ’sixties, drugs, a new Aryan superman and so on, subjects of which
Christie’s grasp was, to say the least, uncertain.’1 However, this ‘incomprehensible muddle’ is not due to Christie’s
senility: its causes are clearly political. Passenger to Frankfurt is Christie’s most personal, intimately felt and at the
same time most political novel; it expresses her personal confusion, her feeling of being totally at a loss with what
was going on in the world in the late 1960s – drugs, sexual revolution, student protests, murders, etc. It is crucial to
note that this overwhelming feeling of confusion is formulated by an author whose speciality was detective novels,
stories about crime, stories about the darkest side of human nature. The deeper reason for her despair is the feeling
that, in the chaotic world of 1970, it was no longer possible to write detective novels that still presupposed a stable
society based on law and order, momentarily disturbed by crime but restored to order by the detective. In the society
of 1970, chaos and crime were rife, so no wonder Passenger to Frankfurt is not a detective novel: there is no
murder, no logic, no deduction. Christie’s sense of the collapse of the elementary cognitive mapping, her
overwhelming fear of chaos, is rendered clearly in her Introduction to the novel:
It is what the Press brings to you every day, served up in your morning paper under the general heading of News. Collect it from the front page.
What is going on in the world today? What is everyone saying, thinking, doing? Hold up a mirror to 1970 in England.
Look at that front page every day for a month, make notes, consider and classify.
Every day there is a killing.
A girl strangled.
Elderly woman attacked and robbed of her meagre savings.
Young men or boys – attacking or attacked.
Buildings and telephone kiosks smashed and gutted.
Drug smuggling.
Robbery and assault.
Children missing and children’s murdered bodies found not far from their homes.
Can this be England? Is England really like this? One feels – no – not yet, but it could be.
Fear is awakening – fear of what may be. Not so much because of actual happenings but because of the possible causes behind them. Some
known, some unknown, but felt. And not only in our own country. There are smaller paragraphs on other pages – giving news from Europe –
from Asia – from the Americas – Worldwide News.
Hi-jacking of planes.
Kidnapping.
Violence.
Riots.
Hate.
Anarchy – all growing stronger.
All seeming to lead to worship of destruction, pleasure in cruelty.
What does it all mean?
So what does all this mean? In the novel, Christie provides an answer; here is the storyline. On a flight home from
Malaya, Sir Stafford Nye, a bored diplomat, is approached in the passenger lounge at Frankfurt airport by a woman
whose life is in danger; to help her, he agrees to lend her his passport and boarding ticket. In this way, he
unwittingly gets caught up in an international intrigue from which the only escape is to outwit the power-crazed
Countess von Waldsausen, who wants to achieve world domination by manipulating and arming the planet’s youth.
This terrible worldwide conspiracy has something to do with Richard Wagner and ‘The Young Siegfried’. We learn
that, towards the end of the Second World War, Hitler went to a mental institution, met with a group of people who
thought they were Hitler, and exchanged places with one of them, thus surviving the war. He then escaped to
Argentina, where he married and had a son who was branded with a swastika on his heel: ‘The Young Siegfried’.
Meanwhile, in the present, drugs, promiscuity and student protests are all secretly caused by Nazi agitators who
want to bring about anarchy so that they can restore Nazi domination on a global scale.
This ‘terrible worldwide conspiracy’ is, of course, ideological fantasy at its purest: a weird condensation of the
fear of extreme Right and extreme Left. The least we can say in Christie’s favour is that she locates the heart of the
conspiracy in the extreme Right (neo-Nazis), not any of the other usual suspects (Communists, Jews, Muslims). The
idea that neo-Nazis were behind the ’68 student protests and the struggle for sexual liberation, with its obvious
madness, nonetheless bears witness to the disintegration of a consistent cognitive mapping of our predicament; the
fact that Christie is compelled to take refuge in such a crazy paranoiac construct indicates the utter confusion and
panic in which she found herself. The picture of our society she paints is simply confused, out of touch with reality
(incidentally, although to a much lesser extent, the same goes for the strangest of John le Carré’s novels, A Small
Town in Germany, which is set in a similar situation). But is her vision really too crazy to be taken seriously? Is our
era, with ‘leaders’ like Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un, not as crazy as her vision? Are we today not all like a
bunch of passengers to Frankfurt? Our situation is messy in a way that is very similar to the one described by
Christie: we have a Rightist government enforcing workers’ rights (in Poland), a Leftist government pursuing the
strictest austerity politics (in Greece). No wonder that, in order to regain a minimal cognitive mapping, Christie
resorts to the Second World War, ‘the last good war’, retranslating our mess into its coordinates.
One should nonetheless note how the very form of Christie’s denouement (one big Nazi plot behind it all)
strangely mirrors the fascist idea of the Jewish conspiracy. Today, the extreme populist Right proposes a similar
explanation of the Muslim immigrant ‘threat’. In the anti-Semitic imagination, the ‘Jew’ is the invisible Master who
secretly pulls the strings – which is precisely why Muslim immigrants are not today’s Jews: they are all too visible,
not invisible, they are clearly not integrated into our society, and nobody claims they secretly pull any strings. If one
sees in their ‘invasion of Europe’ a secret plot, then Jews have to be behind it – as was suggested in an article that
recently appeared in one of the main Slovene Rightist weekly journals, which read: ‘George Soros is one of the most
depraved and dangerous people of our time,’ responsible for ‘the invasion of the negroid and Semitic hordes and
thereby for the twilight of the EU … as a typical talmudo-Zionist, he is a deadly enemy of Western civilization,
nation state and white, European man.’ His goal is to build a ‘rainbow coalition composed of social marginals like
faggots, feminists, Muslims and work-hating cultural Marxists’, which would then perform ‘a deconstruction of the
nation state, and transform the EU into a multicultural dystopia of the United States of Europe’. Furthermore, Soros
is inconsistent in his promotion of multiculturalism:
He promotes it exclusively in Europe and the USA, while in the case of Israel, he, in a way which is for me totally justified, agrees with its
monoculturalism, latent racism and building of a wall. In contrast to EU and USA, he also does not demand that Israel open its borders and
accept ‘refugees’. A hypocrisy proper to Talmudo-Zionism.2
Is this disgusting fantasy, which brings together anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, so different from that contrived
by Christie? Are they both not a desperate attempt to orient oneself in confused times? The extreme oscillations in
public perception of the Korean crisis are significant as such. One week we are told that we are on the brink of
nuclear war, then there is seven days’ respite, then the war threat explodes again. When I visited Seoul in August
2017, my friends there told me there was no serious threat of a war since the North Korean regime knows it could
not survive it, now that the South Korean authorities are preparing the population for a nuclear war. Not long ago
our media was reporting on the increasingly ridiculous exchange of insults between Kim Jong-un and Donald
Trump. The irony was that, in a situation where two apparently immature men are getting angry and hurling insults
at each other, our only hope is for some anonymous and invisible institutional constraint to prevent their rage from
exploding into full war. Usually we tend to complain that in today’s alienated and bureaucratized politics,
institutional pressures and constraints prevent politicians from expressing their real point of view; now we hope that
such constraints will prevent the expression of all-too-crazy personal visions. How did we reach this point?

L I K E   A   T H I E F   I N     B R O A D    D AY L I G H T, Slavoj Žižek

 

The way to break the spell of power is thus not to succumb to the fantasy of a transparent power; one should
rather hollow out the edifice of power from within by separating the edifice from its agent (the bearer of power). As
developed decades ago by Claude Lefort, therein resides the core of ‘democratic invention’, in the empty place of
power, the gap between the place of power and the contingent agents who, for a limited period, can occupy that
place. Paradoxically, the underlying premise of democracy is thus not only that there is no political agent that has a
‘natural’ right to power, but, much more radically, that ‘the people’ itself, the ultimate source of the sovereign power
in democracy, doesn’t exist as a substantial entity. In the Kantian sense, the democratic notion of ‘people’ is a
negative one, a concept whose function is merely to designate a certain limit: it prohibits any determinate agent from
ruling with full sovereignty. (The only moment when ‘the people’ exists is at democratic elections, which is
precisely that of the disintegration of the entire social edifice – in elections, ‘people’ are reduced to a mechanical
collection of individuals.) The claim that the people does exist is the basic axiom of ‘totalitarianism’, and the
mistake of ‘totalitarianism’ is strictly homologous to the Kantian misuse (‘paralogism’) of political reason: ‘the
people exists’ through a determinate political agent which acts as if it embodies (not only re-presents) the people, its
true will (the totalitarian party and its leader) – i.e. in terms of a transcendental critique, as a phenomenal
embodiment of the noumenal people.
Critics of representative democracy endlessly vary the motif of how, for a priori formal reasons and not just on
account of accidental distortions, multi-party elections betray true democracy – but, while accepting this critical
point as the price to be paid for any functioning democracy, one should add that it is because of such minimal
‘alienation’ signalled by the term ‘representative’ that a democracy functions. That is to say, what this ‘alienation’
points towards is the ‘performative’ character of democratic choice: people do not vote for what they want (they
know that in advance) – it is through such choice that they discover what they want. A true leader does not just
follow the wishes of the majority; she or he makes the people aware of what they want.

L I K E   A   T H I E F   I N     B R O A D    D AY L I G H T, Slavoj Žižek

So even
though the capacity to not act is the quintessence of human resistance, and even
though one of the greatest threats to the consistency of any human form of life
comes from those who think that they “can do anything,” a wholly inoperative
life of pure potentiality is reserved, perhaps, only to God.

David Kishik, The power of life : Agamben and the coming politics