Zizek: Idealism and Materialism

Idealism and materialism/religion and atheism

“Perhaps the ultimate difference between idealism and materialism is the difference between these two forms of the Real: religion is the Real as the impossible Thing beyond phenomena, the Thing which “shines through” phenomena in sublime experiences; atheism is the Real as a grimace of reality. This is why the standard religious riposte to atheists (“But you can’t really understand what is to believe!”) has to be turned around: our “natural” state is to believe, and the truly difficult thing to grasp is the atheist’s position. (...) Atheism in not the position of believing only in positive (ontologically fully constituted, sutured, closed) reality; the most succint definition of atheism is precisely “religion without religion” – the assertion of the void of the Real deprived of any positive content, prior to any content; the assertion that any content is a semblance which fills in the void. (...)

Not only do both religion and atheism insist on the Void, on the fact that our reality is not ultimate and closed – the experience of this Void is the original materialist experience, and religion, unable to endure it, fill it in with religious content.”

“And is not this shift also the shift from Kant to Hegel? (...)”

Slavoj Zizek, “For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor”, Forward to the second edition, London, Verso, 2008, p. xxiii-xxix.

Brilliant!

The "I"

Descartes: "I think, therefore I am"

Lacan: "I think where I am not, therefore I am where I think not."

An image from the fantastic film THE ISTER

by David Barison & Daniel Ross, 2004

Connect this reflection of Heidegger to what people like Stiegler, Simondon and other philosophers of technics say...

the face and the body

From the PRE FACE of the book FACE (see other post), quoting William A. Ewing:

"(...) after all, we are seldom able to scrutinize another naked body in the public sphere. We do, however, walk around with our faces exposed to the gaze of others. While the body, therefore, remains largely a private affair, despite our culture's obsession with it, the face is a public one."

(p. 12)

performance studies

"There is no object (or set of objects) called performance(s) the study of which performance studies takes as its purpose. Rather, there is an idea, performance, that serves as the paradigmatic standing point for any inquiry that occurs within the disciplinary realm. In principle, this paradigm can function as a lens through which to examine almost anything."

Philip Auslander
"Theory For Performance Studies: a Students Guide", London, Routledge, 2007, Introduction, pp. 2-3.

Probably with the dismiss of positivism the idea of a fixed object for each discipline had also the tendency to disappear: actually, each particular discipline (as archaeology, for instance) is a very open field, with no fixed borders, but having a certain tradition in the way it looks at the world and at the so called material things in particular. Our aim is ultimately to understand the human being, and that is why archaelogy (and many other traditional academic disciplines) is so interested in performance studies: because they amplify the scope of our viewing, which is critical to get rid of interpretations that are often inspired in a rigid or static reality. For us, archaeologists, it is very important to look for temporality and process in that reality. But that is not enough, because knowledge is not only improved through induction. We also need to discuss the theory of the human, of the human in action, the theory of performance and performancescapes.

That said, a question persists: is performance an adequate theoretical standpoint to look at human beings? Giving emphasis to movement and fluidity, as it is implicit in this approach, don't we take the risk of universalizing a very modern (or post-modern) vision of the human? Aren't we again projecting in the past a kind of mobility that is so typical of (and specific to) our age of globalization and fast moving, vanishing values and peoples?

bureaucratic domination and literature

"(...) there is something in the very genre of  literary writing which resists the forms of bureaucratic domination that ask for total transparency by reducing everything to their own explanatory genres of discourse."

Simon Malpas,

"Jean-François Lyotard", London, Routledge, 2003, p. 97

"I" is just the one who says "I"

A pure performative entity.

The Lacanian subject of the enunciation.

The Cartesian cogito is the subject of the unconscious.

Slavoj Zizek

"The Cartesian subject versus the Cartesian Theater"

in Cogito and the Unconscious

(Slavoj Zizek ed,), Durham, Duke University Press, 1998, chapter 9.

Derrida and Zizek: totality and its remainder

Interesting thought of Tony Myers in "Slavoj Zizek", London, Routledge, 2003, col. "Critical Thinkers" (p. 116):

"IF DERRIDA'S WORK CAN BE CHARACTERIZED AS AN EXTENDED ANALYSIS OF THE NON-IDENTITY OF TIME WITH ITSELF, IT IS EQUALLY POSSIBLE TO CHARACTERIZE ZIZEK'S WHOLE OEUVRE AS A COMMENTARY ON THE LACK OF IDENTITY WITH ITSELF. THEY ARE BOTH DEALING WITH A LACK OF BALANCE, A CONSTITUTIVE "OUT-OF-JOINTNESS" OF THE TOTALITY. FOR EACH OF THEM, THERE IS ALWAYS AN ELEMENT OF THE WHOLE THAT "STICKS OUT" AND MARS THE INTEGRITY OF THAT WHOLE."

This is a very interesting introduction (in many aspects, very basic, but in the good sense of the word) to Zizek's thought, until 2003 of course.

universal and particular

"(...) the explanation of a universal concept becomes "interesting" when the particular cases evoked to exemplify it are in tension with their own universality (...)

Slavoj Zizek,
"The Parallax View", Cambridge, Mass./London, The MIT Press, 2006, p. 11

drawing

Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since
prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic.


Keith Haring


Source:
Inspirational art quotes and fine artists
http://www.artquotes.net

the face

The face is at once the irreparable being-exposed of humans and the very opening in which they hide and stay hidden. The face is the only location of community, the only possible city.


Giorgio Agamben




Source:
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/agamben-resources.html

intelligible

"What makes something intelligible is the paradigmatic exhibition of its own knowability"

Giorgio Agamben

the power of Marx's promise

Quoting Jacques Derrida, in "Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International", London, Routledge, 1994, p. 75:

"Not only must one not renounce the emancipatory desire, it is necessary to insist on it more than ever, it seems, and insist on it, moreover, as the very indestructibility of the "it is necessary". This is the precondition of a re-politicization, perhaps of another concept of the political."

Derrida versus Heidegger on dissociation versus gathering

"Derrida thinks the catastrophe of memory, the impossibility of complete recollection, as a work of mourning. When we mourn we desire both to keep/gather and let go, and it is this sense of loss and letting go that keeps the work of mourning alive. But there is no such sense of loss in Heidegger. If Derrida is a thinker of loss and memory, then Heidegger is ultimately a thinker of gathering (Versammlung) and adjustment (Dike)."


in The Philosophy of Derrida,
by Mark Dooley and Liam Kavanagh
(a precious introduction to Derrida's thouhgt!)

Stocksfield, Acumen Publishing, 2007, p. 94

ordinary life

"So far as common-sensical, ordinary experience is concerned, absolute novelty is excluded from ordinary life. The limiting case of common sense and the commonplace is not sheer novelty but instead the absurd for it rests on an ungrounded primordial credulity. And no doubt this is one of the reasons why ordinary life, when viewed from the center, oppresses us with its banality, its lack of novelty and absurdity. "

FRED KERSTEN

"Galileo and the "Invention" of Opera. A Study in the Phenomenology of Consciousness", Dordrecht/Boston/London, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997, pp. 47-48.

Alain Badiou on Žižek

Alain Badiou on Žižek


"Žižek offers us something like a general psychoanalysis, a psychoanalysis that exceeds the question of clinics and becomes an absolutely general psychoanalysis. This is the first time that anyone has proposed to psychoanalyze our whole world."



Source:
http://www.philosophyandscripture.org/Issue3-1/Badiou/Badiou.html

An Interview with Alain Badiou
“Universal Truths & the Question of Religion”
Adam S. Miller, Journal of Philosophy and Scripture

Edited by Graduate Students in Philosophy
at Villanova University
Editorial Advisor – James Wetzel
ISSN: 1555-5100

Quoting Rothko: about experiences

Tate Modern, London, 18th December 2008 voj

Quoting Jacques Derrida - about the mourning

Source: http://www.humanities.uci.edu/remembering_jd/#top

"Is the most distressing, or even the most deadly infidelity, that of a possible mourning which would interiorize within us the image, idol, or ideal of the other who is dead and lives only in us?

Or is it that of the impossible mourning which...refuses to take the other within oneself, as in the tomb of some nascissism?"

Jacques Derrida

Memoires for Paul De Man

The mysterious

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the
mysterious. It is the source of all art and science. He
to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer
pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as
dead.. his eyes are closed.

Albert Einstein

(source: artquotes.net)

An interesting paper by Slavoj Zizek (2004)

The structure of domination today: a Lacanian view
in
Studies in East European Thought, 56, pp. 383-403, 2004

published by Kluwer Academic Publishers, Netherlands.

Quoting the abstract: