Citation
Žižek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. Verso, New York;London;, 1999.
Contents
Author
Zizek, duh
Context
Engaging with the Cartesian Subject
Thesis
This book Endeavors to reassert the Cartesian subject whose rejection forms the silent pact of all struggling parties of today’s Academia. The point is not to return to the cogito in the guise in which this notion has dominated modern thought what to bring to light it’s forgotten obverse, the excessive, unacknowledged kernal of the cogito, Which is far from the pacifying image of the transparent self.
Part I – confront Heidegger’s attempt to transcend the horizon of modern Cartesian subjectivity. He does not account for the excess of subjectivity (diabolical evil in Kant, ‘night of the world’ in Hegel). Imagination is really anti-synthetic
Part II – four descendants of Althusser
Laclau – theory of Hegemony
Balibar – theory of egaliberte
Ranciere- theory of mesentente
Badiou – theory of subjectivity as fidelity to the truth event
How do each tackle the predominant ‘post-political’ liberal-democratic stance
Part III – tendencies of post-modern thought to assert the liberating proliferation of multiple forms of subjectivity, where cultural recognition more important than socioeconomic struggle
How are we to reformulate a leftist, anti-capitalist political project in the era of global capitalism.
Methodology
Key Terms
Criticisms and Questions
Notes
- The politics of Truth, Alain Badiou as a reader of St.Paul
– the subject emerges interpolated from the truth event.
– budgie provides an elaborated analysis of being. At the bottom is the presentation of pure multiple, the not yet symbolically structured multitude of experience, that which is given. This multitude is not a multitude of ones since counting has not yet taken place. Glad you called any particular consistent multitude a situation, a situation is structured and it is its structure that allows us to count as one. However for us to count as one 3 duplication proper to the symbolization of a situation must be at work that is in order for a situation to be counted as one its structure must always already be a med estructura that designated as 1.
– the truth is always the truth of a specific situation, its repressed truth.
“This symptomal torsion of being which is a truth in the always total texture of knowledge”
– whereas post-modernism says there is no event and that nothing really happens, Badiou insists that miracles do happen.
whereas Kant celebrates the sublime effect on passive Observers Badiou says that the truth event is truth in itself for its agents themselves not for external Observers.
-Subjectivity engages the individual in some cause
-Badiou’s opposition of knowledge and Truth seems to turn exactly around Althusser’s opposition of ideologies and science:Non authentic knowledge is limited to the positive order of being, blinds to its structural void, to its Symtomal torsion; while the engaged truth that subjectivizes provides authentic insight into a situation.
Two divisions of the subjects: 1) conscious ego who adhere’s to the law and decentered desire which works against its conscious will 2) Law / desire versus A New Beginning breaking out of the deadlock of Law and its transgression AKA Christian love.
-”ne pas ceder sur son desir” = “do your duty”
– 4 marks the emergence of working-class subjectivity is strictly co-dependent on the fact that the worker is compelled to sell the very substance of his being as a commodity on the market, that is to reduce the treasure the precious core of his being to an object that can be bought for money. there is no subjectivity without the reduction of the subjects positive substantial being to a disposable piece of s***.
The Lacanian Subject: the subject is strictly correlative with the ontological gap between the universal and the particular. the subject is an act, the decision by means of which we passed from the positivity of the given multitude to the truth event. subject is not a name for the gap of freedom and contingency what is the contingency that grounds the very positive ontological order the vanishing mediator whose self-effacing gesture transforms the pre ontological chaotic multitude into the semblance of A+ objective order of reality.
-Truth is condemned to remain a fiction precisely insofar as the innomable real eludes its grasp.
- Political Subjectivization and its Vicissitudes
-”single unemployed mother” is a synthome: a knot at which all the lines of the predominant ideological argumentation meet.
-The middle class is the very form of the disavowal of the fact that Society doesn’t exist, in it Society does exist. this constant displacement and falsification of the line of class division is the class struggle. Laclau class antagonism would thereby be fully symbolized it would no longer be impossible / real but a simple differential structural feature.
-Antagonism is inherent to universality itself, split into the false concrete universality that legitimizes the existing division of the whole into functional parts, and the impossible/ real demand of abstract universality.
-The proletariat stands for Universal Humanity not because it is the lowest exploded class but because it’s very existence is a living contradiction, it exposes the fundamental imbalance and inconsistency of the capitalist social hole. criticism of the possible Iggy logical functioning of the notion of hybridity should in no way advicate the return to substantially identities. The point is precisely to assert hybridity as the site of the universal.
– leftists must equate universalism with a militant divisive position of 1 engaged in a struggle. True universalists are not those who preach Global tolerance but those who engage in a passionate fight for the assertion of the truth that enthuses them.
– the line that separates two opposing sides in class struggle is not objective, it is not the line separating two positive social groups, But ultimately radically subjective. it runs diagonally to the social division in the order of being, between those who recognize themselves in the call of the truth event and those who deny or ignore it.
