Cryin’ Wolf on that Social Distortion–Hegel’s Negation of Negation by Megan Flocken

My reading finds double negation to be the mechanism by which spirit is actualized. I hope the following will illustrate how the master/slave mentality demands a simple negation; Hegelian immanent transcendence requires a double negation.

Double negation is “the return-to-oneself from alienation” (Zizek, 72). The individual is alienated from self in her divergence with the law through simple negation. For example, I understand running a redlight to be against the law; I run the redlight and acknowledge my act to be against the law…I feel guilty, afraid…I am a criminal. The logic of simple negation is the same as the master/slave: I know the master, I am the slave, I act in independence of the master as I can understand the master to be dependent on me. My freedom is contingent on, in fact rooted in my slavery. Hence, when I act independently I am alienated from my very constitutive substance (as a slave).

The negation of the negation is a freer space. This is a process of dissolution, by which the law is impotized! This is not a master/slave interdependence (a la Badiou’s “occupation”). The master/slave relation is one of simple negation: I acknowledge the law (I am a slave)…I understand the law to be validated in my servitude (I am the foundation of the lord’s subjection over me). Instead, the negation of the negation is the loss of the loss. My act is not a loss, in lack of conformity to the law, but in certainty/faith, in fullness of my embodiment of right. I may break the law, and I do so always with respect to the law. This is self-consciousness (in simple negation). But the revolutionary dissolution of the law is possible with double negation. I run the redlight, I break the law, without acknowledging the power of the law to confine me, i.e., to stop, to feel guilt in my flight. The law is meaningless to me in my absolute right. The law cannot deliver me from the risk of decision…from the abyss of my determining the right.

We find that in place of us positing the presupposition (i.e. observing Reason, which searches for and finds itself), the Spirit is what presupposes the positing (thanks, Zizek, “Sublime Object of Ideology”). In explanation: I create/inform my world while the world creates/informs me. Why and by what logic? I at first understand my action to break the law (simple negation). For example, I am bourgeoisie, yet I do not act as though I am bourgeoisie. I then understand the law to be breaking me (I am the absolute right! I am me without adhering to a universal law of class). In the negation of the negation, the very loss is lost (Zizek, 72). There is no comparative action to the objective universal…The reified substance of law (the master, the slave) empties to the subjectivized virtual substance (Zizek, 76): the spirit is the activity of individuals in their finitude. My practice determines the right. I am not the independent agent/controller of process; instead, WE witness and participate in its unfolding. The negation of the negation is the space in which we, in finite particularity, actualize; in living, we deny the authority of exterior law to encumber us. Not as rebels (i.e. with respect of law, in motive to break the law), the negation of the negation relegates the law to a figment (my action need not consult “the law” because the law has no authority over me). Thus, Spirit exists only insofar as subjects act as if it exists, and as subjects neglect to act as though their circular Reason dictates them to act…as lawbreakers.

Spirit is not a reified, magical phantom, like exchange value and commodity. Spirit is the actualization of culture, ethics, and intention. It is a historical incident that defies quantification. It is insensible but always demonstratable. It is because it IS…and it undergirds all action and is the culmination of all action. The Spirit is the “full acceptance of the abyss” (Zizek, 72), and in this way, it is both giving and receiving form. The abyss is anathema to Reason’s hegemonic dissection of the real…which produces a virtuality of the real. The real is virtualized in Reason through elimination of all actual remainder, unintendedness. Ironically, the real is made tangible, intelligible by its mapping in virtual space–conception. This  desert (of the real) finds that only the mirage…the insensible unity and locus of actualization, is capable of keeping one from death…the ultimate alienation from self. Only our unmappable incidents can defy our illusions. And so in revolt of the unmappable, the Spirit is transfigured to be reich, ideology, and process alike. Rightfully as geist, Spirit is the club and the secret passcode…as practice it conditions our consciousness and self-consciousness, and as thought it opens and transforms our practice. It is the contradiction implicit to being, both universal and particular. It embodies and exhibits the substance as subject. As it signals the future and pays homage to our past, it is our return from alienation to what is and it is our springboard to beyond…which is simply our connection to one another.

The William Desmond Reader

The Irish Catholic Philosopher

For some time now I have maintained that the only hope for theology to breakout of it present day deadlock is through Hegel. This theological deadlock can basically be seen in the dominate forms of theology in the 20th Century– that is, liberal and post-liberal theology . In the 60s the emergence of a “Death of God” theology presented some promise that would finally dislodge theology from both its onto-theological grounding as well as its link to the American Empire seen in the trend of Christian ‘Realism.’ This “Death of God” theology was most basically indebted to Hegel’s ontological structure–a structure premised not on a transcendence fully debarred from materialism, but rather on a process of negativity–of risk itself! Thus transcendence for Hegel had to risk its very being for it-self in order for transcendence to fully realize itself in materialism as such–so that transcendence could fully realize its being in-and-for-itself. In short, it is clear that Hegel’s ontological structure of the negative provides theology some tools by which to realize the truth of its own discourse–a movement of risk, of embracement, and above all, of love.

Yet, Hegel’s very structure is not completely innocent. This is why the very engagement with Hegel is crucial for contemporary theology. Not just from the side of Zizek’s recent work (see his piece on Paul for example forthcoming in our book Paul’s New Moment) but from a more catholic side too. This is why any reading of Hegel for the purposes of articulating a theology– or a political subject premised on the negative (such as Althusser and Breton) that breaks free from the dominate ideological structures operating today–must take seriously the most serious and sustained reading of Hegel in our time. This is why it is absolutely crucial to engage with the work of the Irish Catholic philosopher William Desmond. For it is Desmond’s work that calls us to radically re-think Hegel’s project on many different and interactive levels. This is why Christopher Simpson (author of Religion, Metaphysics, and the Postmodern: William Desmond & John D. Caputo) and I are editing The William Desmond Reader, which will feature an interview by Richard Kearney and a fresh piece by Desmond on his positive metaphysics of the BETWEEN–the metaxological. It is Desmond’s extraordinary contribution to thinking LITERALLY through Hegel and out the other side into a positive unfolding that is irreducible to any foundationalism (the ontology of the I=I or the Fichtean varient I= NOT-I) that gives us philosophical and theological possibilities to continue on beyond the prosaic state of theology today.  It is my belief that Hegel is not the same without really reading Desmond.  More radically, this book posits the question: Could it be that Desmond is that which saves Hegel from himself!  And, if so, does not this very possibility change the coordinates of theology (and Continental Philosophy) today?

Sentimentalist Ideology– a feeling that has a point

Sentimentalist Ideology

I have noticed a recent form of ideology rearing its head on commercials lately.  This ideology is perfectly captured in the recent VISA television commercial about the speed skater Dan Jansen.

Just to be clear, I understand Ideology (which is too complex to fully define here) as a congealed collection of ideas that are presented to us on TV, the news media, in novels, newspapers, and so forth– in a manner that motivates us to perform certain actions and enact certain behaviors even to the point where these actions run contrary to our basic beliefs we hold about the world.  So big actors in society (such as Banks, the Military, the Government, the Oil corps., the Media etc.) purposefully project a vision of the world (of existence etc.) that tries to convince you that this vision is one in which you “see yourself” fitting into.

Think of the Mac/PC commercials where the hip young man represents the Apple product and the overweight and out-of-date man stands in for the PC.  Here of course Apple is projecting a vision of the world which you can literally buy yourself into (and that is precisely the point).  Or you can think of the TV show, The Office in which one “entry-point” is that the common viewer associates themselves readily with the “normal” characters of the program, namely Pam and Jim.

Pam and Jim --The Office

In this way, we can see what Karl Marx understood as an “instrument of social reproduction” which is precisely the core meaning of the term ideology.

Of course ideology is much, much more interesting and “hidden” then this basic understanding—and has been developed by Slavoj Zizek (and others) in terms of its perverted meaning etc.  But this is enough for us to see how ideology has recently been projected in terms of sentimentalism.  That is, you are presented with a 30 second commercial in which there is a simple story designed to “pull on your heart strings” that will have you reaching for the tissues.  In this way, one “feels” something and this “feeling” must be seen as another “instrument of social reproduction.”

Here is the commercial with Morgan Freemen narrating.  And keep in mind how the narrator’s amazing voice helps underwrite and support this “projection” of the world.

Hegel’s Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit

This is a gloss of Hegel’s Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit

Examine a curious phrase that Hegel’s uses in his second sentence in his Introduction.  “A certain uneasiness seems justified.”

Uneasiness is another word for anxiety— anxiety that arises from loss.  A loss?  What loss?  A loss of control, of power, of mastery over something.  For Hegel the PS (Phenomenology of Spirit) is written to confront the loss—this “lack” that doesn’t sit right in your belly (like having eaten spoiled food—“This meatlovers pizza aint loving me back”).

Something’s lost for Hegel.  One’s vision is blurred as the clouds crystallize around you making it difficult to see the horizon.

And it is even more complex than beginning in simple “loss.”  For the “logic of loss” is deeply disturbing.  To be at a loss is to have lost one’s bearings—one’s compass if you will.  To be lost is more than simple to be its direct opposite—to be fully aware of where one is, how they got there and where they’re going etc.).  No, to be at a loss is to not even know you are lost!  Is being so lost that you don’t even have a care that you are in fact, unable to plot yourself down in reference to something else.  You are beyond the very limits of what constitutes “being on the map.” To be lost, in Hegel’s sense is to cancel out being lost as a conscious state of mind.  It is unconscious—and thus negates the very meaning of the term itself.   To be lost thus is to transcend the very meaning of the terms themselves.

Do you see where Hegel begins his Introduction?  It is, if you will the acknowledgement that we are so lost that we must try to figure out how lost we really are.  But how is this even possible?  How does one even begin to identify where they are when they have no bearings by which to start?

Ok, but Hegel tries to begin…but not at the beginning (this is utterly impossible) …rather in the middle he begins.  In the middle of what?  In the middle of philosophy’s crisis (a crisis that is equally a cultural, political, economic, scientific, and theological crisis).  Crisis is the Condition of Possibility (CoP) in which philosophy gives birth to truth.

So Hegel begins to give birth to a truth, but this truth cannot simply be born without the experience of tarrying down the hard road of overcoming loss—and this must begin with the overcoming of a contradiction that you (the reader) didn’t even know you had.  This unconscious contradiction that already inheres within one’s naked and naïve consciousness of the world.  Sure you could ignore this “loss” that hovers in you like a ghost that could easily be dismissed, but ignoring it is only a diversionary tactic that will eventually haunt you all the way to your death-bed.  It is there that it patiently awaits you with open arms and a warm glow.  But in life this “glow” appears not warmly but hidden and cool (hiding just beyond the desk and in the closets in the space between).

For the “natural assumption” in philosophy (that must be dealt with prior to the real meat of the matter is what the heck is “cognition” itself?  What is thought (which presupposes that you are thinking it as you as the question about its very nature)?  In this sense, the question has a circularity to it, does it not?  Does it not require you to employ the very thing that you are using in order to explain what that thing is?    It is a circle—because you need to USE cognition (as a means) by which you accomplish your end goal?  The goal thus is already in the means, and conversely the means is already in the goal itself.

For cognition, Hegel tells us is one of two things:

(a) it is an instrument (like a tool of power) in order to get hold of the Absolute

(b) medium through which one discovers it (cognition)

But here the answer is not immediately clear and this causes some anxiety.  Which way to go?

Hegel questions both (a) and (b) because in both cases “we employ a means which immediately brings about” a distortion because the means turns the ends into itself.  This is for Hegel absurd.  Why should we begin with THIS view of cognition when it only leads us down the road to a deadlock (a deadlock that is circular, as we established above).    Likewise, the Absolute cannot be perverted by the very process of knowing it.  Rather the Absolute would have to already know cognition before cognition tries to “get to it.” “For it is not the refraction of the ray, but the ray itself whereby truth reaches us” (47).

In other words, the journey that unfolds all the way to the End already has within each step the End.  But cognition forgets this.  Moreover, the presence of the End (Absolute) within each step is obscured within the spaces between, or what Freud would later call the “unconscious.”  What Hegel is saying is that Modern philosophy (Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, etc.) and science (Bacon) is driven by the compulsion to impose an idea of cognition “as an instrument” or “as a medium” which “assumes that there is a difference between ourselves and this cognition” (47).[1] Modern philosophy does this because it wants to find a sure footing on which one can be confident to rest ideas (and the hierarchical framework of conceptual knowledge).  But Hegel sees that this “foundation” of knowledge is really a sand pile in the rain.  For these two options “presupposes that the Absolute stands on one side and cognition on the other, independent and separated from it, and yet is something real….” Or “it presupposes that cognition” is sundered from the Absolute and so the process of knowledge begins in cognition being alienated from the Absolute.  In other words, cognition necessarily cannot know the Absolute despite the contradictory impulse to want to know it.  In other words the contradiction of modern philosophy is the drive to avoid epistemological errors instead of desiring truth itself.  So the “natural assumption” of modern philosophy rests on an unnatural artificial break that severs human thinking from truth.

Hegel deconstructs the “natural assumption” on which the practice of philosophy rested from two-hundred years (or more).   And even sees within Modern philosophy a logic of tragedy.   For the logic of tragedy happens when the actor in the plot brings about their own demise because they were unaware of the consequences of their own choices.  In other words, the tragic hero digs their own grave whilst thinking they are laying the road down for their own immortality.  As Hegel put it perfectly himself:  The tragedy of modern philosophy is that they tried to avoid the “fear of error” which “reveals itself rather as a fear of the truth.”

Now this is very odd.  I mean think about this:  Who purposefully avoids the truth in a way that produces all kinds of flashy accruements with pomp and circumstance, with smoke and mirrors to boot?  I mean we all have hang-ups and do weird and strange things (even extraordinary things) in order to avoid doing what we don’t want to do.   And we have an extraordinary capacity to deceive ourselves in thinking we are doing something productive when we’re not accomplishing the task at hand. One is reminded here of really bad Rock bands in Irish pubs that merely turns up the volume in order to mask their severe lack of talent.  In a crude analogy modern philosophy turns up the volume of epistemology in order to cover up the fact that it refuses to do ontology as Hegel says, it “give[s] the impression of working seriously and zealously” (48) when it is really just a tactic of deception.  By contrast Hegel says, “Science must liberate itself from this semblance, and it can do so only by turning against it” (48).

But instead of simply dismissing modern philosophy’s “natural assumptions” willy-nilly Hegel reveals his thinking as truly genealogical in that for him modern philosophy had to reach the deadlock of their own deception in order to press “forward to true knowledge… so that it may purify itself for the life of the Spirit, and achieve finally, through a completed experience of itself, the awareness of what it really is in itself.”  This is a remarkable stance that Hegel has because he not only has contempt for the alienation that modern philosophy (and liberalism) establishes, he also has an uncanny reserve for forgiveness too.  Hegel, if you will “forgives” the hubris nature of modern philosophy because, in fact, the errors committed by philosophy can be seen as a necessary stage that unfolds and even as it can’t help but to reveal a truth deeper than itself.  But here the difference for Hegel is that he sees in error a truth that “mends error” beyond itself.

But what helps Hegel perceive in the presence of the untruth, that which is an absent-truth?  This is one of Hegel’s “tricks” he pulls out of his bag.  His trick is to get to the high-ground so that he can see a more expansive horizon.  Think of the basic military tactic of claiming the high ground so that the enemy is at a great disadvantage like the Union claimed the high-ground of “Big and Little Roundtop” on the left southern flank during the battle of Gettysburg.  Thus, the problem that plagued Modern philosophy was this it thought it had the “high-ground” of the cogito (I think therefore I am), but, in reality this was a like Tolkien’s “ring of power” that literally blinded the philosopher from the “historical perspective.”  The cogito was the philosophical fetish—a symptom that masked its cause (dualism of subject and object) and thus only tragedy could ensue.

Hegel thought can thus be seen as a kind of drug rehab unit that weans you off of the dangers of cogito and trains you to think the “unnatural” logic of the “whole.”  By “whole” Hegel means something akin to a story or a journey whose pilgrim is the character called “Consciousness” and whose terminal point is its own death (which he calls “negation”).  Hegel says, “…the result [of Science] is conceived as it is in truth, namely, as a determinate negation, a new form has thereby immediately arisen, and in the negation [death] the transition is made through which the progress through the complete series of forms comes about of itself” (51).

You see by signing the death-warrant of the cogito one negates it so that “ a new form” alights and the journey of truth continues unfolding.  In effect Hegel’s entire philosophical apparatus is one premised on the Phoenix that dies but arises from its ash-heap.  Yes, so the cliché “we learn from our mistakes” is literally true for Hegel.  Truth is paradoxically revealed in the error of trying to get to it but failing miserably.  This is why there really is no final terminal point in Hegel!  This is because the “progress towards this goal is …unhalting, and short of it no satisfaction is to be found at any of the stations on the way” (51).

“Whatever is confined within the limits of a natural life cannot by its own efforts go beyond its immediate existence; but it is driven beyond it by something else, and this uprooting entails its death.”  But unlike a finite entity that cannot transcend itself (except by birthing its offspring and dying), Consciousness “is explicitly the Notion of itself.  Hence it is something that goes beyond limits, and since these limits are its own, it is something that goes beyond itself.”

So here Hegel simply put together these two:  a singular entity (say a man) and Consciousness.  Now the Man has a different fate than does Consciousness, because the Man is “driven beyond” itself “by something else” (i.e., desire, sex-drive, reproduction etc.), and this drive to become immortal is its own death-keel.  By contrast, Consciousness is able to go beyond itself through its own powers.  It thus “suffers…violence at its own hands” and frustrates its own satisfaction.  Now Consciousness could at this point panic for Hegel and it could “retreat from the truth, and strive to hold on to what it is in danger of losing.  But it can find no peace” (51).  But its own unrest troubles its and arouses its from its slumber (like Hume wakes Kant up).  Consciousness could try to lie down and catch some Zzzzzz but in doing this it “flees from the universal, and seeks only to [sleep with itself]” (52).  It thus risks nothing and will die without returning anew via a resurrected form.

Hegel’s assumption here is that Consciousness “simultaneously distinguishes itself from something, and at the same time relates itself to it, or, as it is said, this something exists for Consciousness; and the determinate aspect of this relating, or of the being of something for a consciousness, is knowing” (52).

This is absolutely key for understanding Hegel.  Here to know something like an object (a tree) one must NOT be the tree, but also NOT be unfamiliar with the tree.  You must be familiar (related) to the tree but not the tree itself.  The tree likewise must be related to consciousness otherwise it is unknowable—for nothing can exist without it being related to consciousness.  In other words, what Hegel is saying here is that for you to know anything at all (like a tree) you must be participating inside of the unfolding of consciousness itself otherwise you could not even think at all.  This further means that the tree and you are part the unfolding of consciousness—which paradoxically unfolds necessarily through you (and the tree) and all other existing objects and subjects.

Later Hegel says that consciousness has a double-nature:  “For consciousness is, on the one hand, consciousness of the object, and on the other, consciousness of itself; consciousness of what for it is the True, and consciousness of its knowledge of the truth” (54).

And this is how consciousness overcomes itself.  “Herewith a new pattern of consciousness comes on the scene as well, for which the essence is something different from what it was at the preceding stage.  It is this fact that guides the entire series of the patterns of consciousness in their necessary sequence.”  But how does this happen exactly?  What is the origination of the “new object” that appears and thus presents itself (like a child dressed for Church presents herself for her mother’s approval) to consciousness?  In this presentation consciousness does not know how this happened—and so it happens “behind the back of consciousness” (56).  But when consciousness “grasps its own essence (of both knowing and not knowing of both relating to otherness and not relating at once), it will signify the nature of absolute knowledge itself” (57).

So Hegel in short begins in a void of unknowing and arises out of it by giving us a formula for consciousness grasping its own essence of presence and absence (of relation and non-relation, of the identity of identity and non-identity) in which case consciousness thus becomes aware of itself.  Thus consciousness is finally self-consciousness!

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[1] Italics belong to Hegel

Postmodern Philosophy–A Seminar

Man at the Café by Juan Gris

Rollins College
Religion Senior Seminar: REL 490
Spring 2010
Weds 4 to 6:30pm, ORL 215
Office Hours: 8.30-9.30 & 11-12 M&W

Seminar Title:
Religion Senior Seminar
Postmodernism: System. . . Structure . . . Difference . . . Truth

Dr. Creston Davis
Email: Creston.Davis@gmail.com

Teaching Assistant: Megan Flocken
Thursdays, 5:30-6:30pm, Olin library pillow room (crowd permitting)
Fridays, 1-2pm, French House patio (weather permitting)
meganflocken@gmail.com
407.353.6329

*This seminar begins with the high-water mark of modern “critical” philosophy, which is constituted in the Post-Enlightenment trend called “Romanticism” and especially in the thought of Hegel, seen most vividly in his interpretations and responses to Kant’s and Fichte’s transcendental grounding of the subject/Ego. Above all it is Hegel who gives us a sustained critique of “critical” philosophy that culminates in the thought of Kierkegaard whose version of “repetition” gives birth to a seminal logic found within the post-modern philosophical outlook. The seminar then takes us through the “Heideggerian” turn framed by Western philosophy’s forgetfulness about the very question of Being and then into the heart of postmodern philosophy (Derrida) and out the other side (in the thought of Badiou, Derrida’s student, Malabou and Zizek). So, if you like, we move from modern philosophy, to postmodern philosophy, and into a moment that I call a “post-secular” horizon in which the question of Being and theology has returned to the centerpiece within the tradition of Continental philosophy.

Mark Tansey "Derrida Queries de Man"

Some of the questions this seminar will address include: How can we pass beyond absolute Knowledge? (this is the question Mark C. Taylor poses). How can we approach that which marks the closure of a system of thought that needs nothing but its own system to subsist? If modernism is, as Alain Badiou asserts, a system of our “accepted facts” of a world articulated by “the great constructions of the 19th Century to which we remain captive—the idea of the historical subject, the idea of progress, the idea of revolution, the idea of humanity and the ideal of science,” then what comes after modernity? What, in other words, is the “logic of thinking, critique, and existence” in the wake of the collapse of the great “metanarratives” of history? In short: What becomes of philosophy and theology after the fall of the project we call modernity?

Is there hope for thinking (for the production of thought) after the failure of modern philosophy seen at its zenith when “Kant’s efforts to unearth the conditions of the possibility of knowledge actually births the conditions of the impossibility of knowledge precisely because the a priori categories of understanding forever sunder thought from the thing-in-itself (ding an sich)?” (Tayor) This very epistemological move (a move that requires the subject to “step-back” from the objects) necessarily articulates a split between subject and object, between the “external world” and our mind that thinks the objects in the world). In the heart of epistemology the world is thus alienated from the thinking subject, because the question of the certitude of the ideas of the external objects in the mind actually representing those objects in the external world cannot be established. Hence, the subject and the object are sundered into an irreconcilable relation (i.e., a relation premised on non-relation). The Critique of Pure Reason ends by confirming an unbridgeable gap between subject and object, which again undermines the very possibility of knowledge in the first place. In other words, Hegel’s project begins by trying to address this “gap” set between the world “out there” and our ideas that think “the world” in our mind.

The New Man by El Lissitzky

Enter Hegel! For Hegel the impasse of Kant’s critical philosophy can be transcended only by giving, as Mark C. Taylor argues “speculative expression to Kant’s aesthetic idea, and secondly, by establishing the actuality of this speculative idea uncovered in its concrete embodiment in both nature and history.” So “Hegel reformulates Kant’s definition of poetic Geist, by defining spirit as that which relates itself to itself and is determinate, is other-being and being-for-self, and in this determinateness, or in its self-externality, abides within itself; in other words, it is in and for itself” (Taylor). So Hegel solves Kant’s epistemological problematic but at the cost of turning the world’s Geist into a totalizing system in which difference is neutralized into the background of the Whole; difference and otherness are sacrificed to the god of History—The Absolute! (or at least this is one well known way of situating Hegel’s system–a way that I challenge in my forthcoming book on Hegel (that Clayton Crockett, Slavoj Zizek and I edit) coming out with Columbia University Press later this year).

The thoroughgoing critique of Hegel’s “totalizing-system” was launched by Soren Kierkegaard and in doing so establishes many seminal pillars of what will become known as postmodernism in the 20th century. For Kierkegaard what is forever missing in Hegel’s system is the individual who emerges within the throes of temporality and becoming which always resists the closure that absolute knowledge exerts upon it. Thus, “truth for Kierkegaard is an irreducible process; one that is lived as a struggle against the closure of the absolute knowledge in the fabric of time. This is because he regards “reality” as “an inter-esse between the moments of the hypothetical unity of thought and being that abstract thought presupposes.” So, in the final analysis, truth for Kierkegaard is “inaccessible and unachievable”—a motif that confronts his readers clearly in his seminal text, Repetition. (cf. Taylor’s Introduction for more about Kierkegaard vis-a-vis Hegel).

After closely reading Hegel and Kierkegaard the class will turn toward the 20th Century. The dominant philosopher in the 20th century is none other than Martin Heidegger. For Heidegger philosophy has come to its terminus—we must now think after metaphysics. But this is not a sad moment for philosophy; indeed it forces us to think the “unthought” within philosophy. Heidegger’s entire project is predicated on the question of what philosophy has not-thought! We know what philosophy has thought but this thinking for Heidegger is conditioned by the subject wedded to the Cartesian cogito that ends by burning down the house of metaphysics. What becomes interesting for Heidegger, what philosophy has forgotten, is the very question of Being as Being. Not being as constituted by the parameters of the human subject thinking “Being” but thinking Being external to the subject thinking it. In other words, for Heidegger philosophy must think difference—“the difference between Being and beings” (between Being (as pure presence) and objects that indwell in Being). For Heidegger’s question (combined with Kierkegaard) opens up a new space within which philosophy attempts to account for “otherness” beyond the Hegelian “totality” or the “Absolute.” This brings us right into the heart of Jacques Derrida’s idea of la differance and deconstruction, and second, engages Alain Badiou’s idea of the Truth-Event (inspired by his two teachers, John Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser, both of whom were introduced to Hegel through A. Kojeve’s lectures). For the former, the idea of deconstruction is understood as a “critical rereading of all Western philosophy in which Derrida tries to dismantle (the) tradition, as if from within, by tracing philosophy’s other,” as Taylor argues. Siding with Kierkegaard and Heidegger, (early to middle) Derrida unleashes an all out attack on Hegel’s totalizing structure by attempting to think difference as difference and other qua other. “This difference, irreducible to identity—this other, irreducible to same, is an alterity that ‘exceeds the alternative of presence (pure Being) and absence (concealment)’.” Finally, we will observe how, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek attempt to save “truth” from both postmodern and modern philosophy (of both Derrida and Lyotard as well as Gadamer and Heidegger) by re-reading Hegel’s idea of “the negation of negation” along side of his “atheistic” retrieval of St. Paul’s idea of “Event” as a way to re-claim philosophy’s original desire, namely the quest for truth in being-in-the-world.

Rene Magritte

Thus, in a sentence (kind of?): This seminar seeks to trace out Kant’s problematic inextricably bound up in Critical Philosophy, how Hegel attempts to resolve this dualism in terms of a “system” of history and science, which Kierkegaard both agrees and disagrees with, as Heidegger recapitulates the entire tradition of philosophy by thinking difference as such, which inspires Derrida, Badiou and Zizek’s “the Parallax View.”

*My short narrative (a story that we will more or less be following and challenging throughout the seminar) is partly indebted to the work of my friend, Mark C Taylor (professor at Columbia University). See especially his Introduction: “System . . . Structure . . . Difference . . . Other” in his edited book Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy, Chicago University Press, 1986).

Oedipus Rex by Max Ernst

Required Books:

G.W.F. Hegel, Early Theological Writings, intro by Richard Kroner, trans. TM Knox, University of Chicago Press, 1975.

G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, forward by JN Findlay, trans. AV Miller, Oxford University Press, 1977.

Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetition, trans. Edna and Howard Hong, Kierkgaard’s Writings Vol. 6, Princeton University Press, 1983.

Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. Davis Wills, University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier, Stanford University Press, 2003.

Additional Texts (selections provided in class):

Slavoj Zizek and John Milbank, ed. by Creston Davis, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic, MIT Press, 2009.

Creston Davis, Slavoj Zizek, and John Milbank, Paul’s New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future of Christian Theology, Baker Academic, 2010 (forthcoming).

Catherine Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction, trans. Carolyn Shread, Columbia University Press, 2009.

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1962

GRADE

There will be three graded aspects of this seminar. First there will be your final research paper. Your twelve-page paper will be on a topic approved by me no later than the ides of March (i.e., 15th). This paper will comprise 50% of your final grade. The second aspect will require you to both present and respond in the seminar. These are official—formal requirements that require you to accomplish quality work. When you present you will be required to write out your presentation in a three-page paper and get it to the respondent one-week prior to your scheduled presentation in the seminar. The respondent will then have until Sunday at midnight to email his/her two-page response to everyone in the class. The presenter, too, will have to email his/her presentation to everyone in the class by Sunday night midnight. In this way, everyone will have to read the original assigned text, the presenter’s paper, and the respondent’s paper. This part of the grade will comprise 30% (15% for your presentation paper & 15% for your response paper). The third and final graded task will be to post weekly responses to the assigned texts on Blackboard by no later than Wednesday at 3pm. This part of the course will comprise 20% of your grade. You will be required to posit ten (10) posts responding to the assigned reading by the end of the term. Failure to post all ten responses will severely compromise your grade, i.e., the highest grade you can receive in the seminar will be a C. Note: the presenter and the respondent do not have to post their responses on Blackboard the week that they are presenting/responding.

SCHEDULE

#1 January 13 – Hegel: Early Theological Writings

#2 January 20 – Hegel: Early Theological Writings

#3 January 27 – Hegel: The Phenomenology of the Spirit, A. Consciousness, & B. Self-Consciousness

#4 February 3 – Hegel: The Phenomenology of the Spirit, Reason

#5 February 10 – Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit, Spirit

#6 February 17 – Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit, Religion & Absolute Knowledge

#7 February 24 – Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface

#8 March 3 – Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling

SPRING BREAK

#9 March 17 – Heidegger: Introduction to Being and Time (provided)

#10 March 24 – Derrida: The Gift of Death (Chapters I & II)

#11 March 31 – Derrida: The Gift of Death (Chapters III & IV)

#12 April 7 – Badiou: Saint Paul: Foundation of Universalism (Prologue and Chapters I-5)

#13 April 14 – Badiou: Saint Paul: Foundation of Universalism (Chapters VI-XI)

#14 April 21 – Malabou; Davis, Milbank, Zizek (selections from the forthcoming book Paul’s New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future of Christian Theology forthcoming with Baker Academic).

Interview with Mark C. Taylor

Professor Mark C. Taylor

This is part of an interview between Mark C. Taylor and Creston Davis upon the release of Taylor’s new and most extraordinary book, Field Notes from Elsewhere: Reflections on Dying and Living published by Columbia University Press. This book recounts Taylor’s “unforgettable, inverted journey from death to life.” Mark C. Taylor is one of the most respected and provocative public intellectuals in North America. He chairs the religion department at Columbia University and has written over twenty books including Erring: A Postmodern A/theology widely considered to be the best text on postmodern theology ever written.

CRESTON DAVIS: This book is wholly unlike any other book you have written. How does the genre of this text relate to both philosophy and theology on the one hand, and your own interior and irreducible singularity on the other?

MARK C TAYLOR: Having taught philosophy and religion at Williams College for many years and now at Columbia University, I had long considered writing a book that would bring together abstract ideas and the concrete experiences and dilemmas of human life in the form of a philosophical memoir. For many people, the writings of Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida, which lie at the heart of my academic work, are so abstract that they often seem irrelevant. Since my student days, however, I have always found that these writers illuminate questions we all ask and decisions we all face. Over the years, my intellectual life has been suspended between Hegel, who is a speculative systematic thinker par excellence, and Kierkegaard, who probes individual subjectivity with unparalleled insight.

I have written many books over the years on subjects as diverse as philosophy, religion, literature, literary criticism, art, architecture, technology, and economics. In addition, I have published artistic books, done some art and even had an exhibition, Grave Matters, at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Though I did not realize it at the time, there is a coherence to all this work that has only become clear as I look back. My latest book, After God, represents an effort to integrate the many strands of my thought. It is my most Hegelian book.

Field Notes from Elsewhere is, by contrast, my most Kierkegaardian book. It is a meditation on personal experiences, friends, family, teaching and many other topics. I have also included 120 photographs that are either from family albums or that I took for the book. Rather than a continuous narrative, I tell the story in 52 chapters, each of which has an AM and a PM section. The book begins with a meditation on dawn and ends with reflections on dusk. I regard the book as a cross between a diary, a book of hours and a family photograph album. Each chapter is a three-or-four-page meditation on paired topics like: Premonitions/Postcards, Abandonment/ Mortality, Pleasure/Money, Solitude/Loneliness, Failure/Success, Imperfection/ Vulnerability, Love/Fidelity, Hope/Despair.

The point of departure for the book is a severe illness I suffered in December 2005. As a result of a biopsy, I went into septic shock and suddenly fell critically ill. For two days a team of forty doctors, many of whom did not think I would live, worked to save my life. During the first night, I realized things could go either way but thought I was out of the woods by morning. I was not; my condition remained serious and would not stabilize for several weeks. After five days in the intensive care unit and ten in the hospital, I was released. Five months later, I underwent surgery for cancer. These experiences have changed my life in ways I still am trying to understand.

CD: Do you see your text related to Augustine’s _Confessions_ in any way?

MCT: All autobiographical writing is haunted by Augustine. His Confessions (c. 397) was the first autobiography ever written. For Augustine, knowledge of self and knowledge of God were inseparable – he could not know himself by himself but could only come to know himself through God. Obviously, this mode of self-analysis is the precursor of psychoanalysis as well as many other contemporary strategies of self-interpretation. Augustine presented his work as a prayer to God in which he asks God to show him how to understand himself. Augustine’s theological insight is not, of course, new. Why, then, we might ask did Augustine construct the narrative of his personal experience in the way that he did?

The answer to this question can be found in his understanding of the inextricable interrelation between time and the self. In books IX-X of the Confessions, Augustine presents a revolutionary account of memory and of time. He asks, “What, then, is time?” and proceeds to respond, “I believe I know what time is until someone asks me about it, then I do not know what to say.” Augustine suggests that we generally think there are three tenses of time: past, present and future, but in fact, Augustine argues, there is only one tense of time with three modalities. Only the present is real – there is a present of things present, a present of things past and a present of things to come and all three of these are held together by the mind. With this insight, what Augustine discovers is the subjectivity of time. But this is only half the story – and it is a story; the converse of the subjectivity of temporality is the temporality of subjectivity. The self, in other words, is irreducibly temporal – it has a history and that history defines the self. If the self is temporal, the only way to know the self is to narrate the history through which the self becomes itself. This is what Augustine did in the Confessions. But his analysis could not stop with his own story because his narrative is part of a much larger story. He completes his journey to selfhood by writing City of God. In this work personal history is placed in the context of the history of the world, which, in turn, can only be understood through God’s providential purpose.

My first doctoral dissertation was on Kierkegaard and was entitled, Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship: A Study of Time and the Self. I began that book with an account of Augustine’s view of time and the self in the Confessions. My second doctoral dissertation was entitled Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard. In this book, I argue that Hegel and Kierkegaard present alternative phenomenologies of the self. Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings reenact Augustine’s Confessions and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit extends his City of God in the form of a realized eschatology that unfolds from the time of Christ down to Hegel’s own day.

In many ways, all of my writing and teaching explores the issues raised by Kierkegaard and Hegel. After God is my most Hegelian work and Field Notes from Elsewhere is my most Kierkegaardian book. In Field Notes, as in many of my other books, I give indirect indications of points I prefer not to make directly. The book includes about 120 images in Field Notes, which are either from family photo albums or are photographs I took for the book. The last three photographs are images of a container of dirt I collected from Kierkegaard’s grave, a plant of ivy I grew from a slip I took from Hegel’s grave and a bunch of grapes, which suggests Nietzsche’s Dionysus, the Anti-Christ. Kierkegaard-Hegel-Nietzsche. That’s as close to a holy trinity as I will ever get.

I was not self-consciously thinking about Augustine when I wrote Field Notes, but, obviously, his work is never absent. I conceived the book as a combination of a diary, a family photo album and a book of hours. One of the basic questions I had to answer was how to structure the book. I did not want to write a continuous narrative in a manner reminiscent of Augustine. Life is not, I believe, continuous but is episodic – periods of continuity are punctuated by moments of disruption. As I pondered how to structure the book, I considered taking as my point of departure the Danish word for ‘diary,’ Dagbog – day book. I made up the word Natbog – night book – and thought about writing the Daybook from front to back and the Nightbook from back to front. But this strategy presented certain design problems and, more important, I decided it would not be a good idea to group all of the day entries and night entries together. I then had the idea of structuring the book like a year-long diary – there are 52 chapters each of which has an AM and a PM entry. Each entry is a meditation on a single topic – indeed, a single word.

As I have suggested, the narrative is not continuous but is episodic. There is, however, an overall trajectory to the book and the different subjects are organized in a deliberate way. The book begins with Day/Night and ends with Ordinary/Extraordinary. Day opens with a meditation of dawn breaking on the Berkshire Mountains, which I see from the barn where I write, and closes with “An Ordinary Evening in Williamstown,” which is a rewriting of Wallace Stevens’s, another ghost who haunts these pages, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.” Between beginning and end, the reader discovers stories of family, friends and colleagues as well as reflections on questions none of us can avoid. The last lines of are:

Weeds – but why weeds? – grown tall waiting to be mowed.

Sun, moving south, slipping below the distant tree line.

“The instinct for earth,” for Williamstown, where, unexpectedly,

“The real and the unreal are two in one.”

The truth of incarnation.

Wisdom asks nothing more

Nothing more.

Financial Crisis–One Year Hence

This is an article I published a year ago on the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory’s Blog.  A year later and no one has even challenged the idea of capitalism.  This is ideology at its best!  Capitalism really does mean–socialism for the capitalist!

Global Financial Crisis

October 04, 2008

Crisis: a liberation from capitalism?

By Creston Davis

A certain story underlines the truth of the relationship between the rich and the poor.  Set in a small farming town, a group of workers would meet every week for lunch at a local restaurant.  The men talk about anything from local politics to sports and the occasional vulgar gossip.  Lunch was always paid for by a rich man (who was also part of the group) until one day the working class men starting complaining that the tax code disproportionately favored the wealthy and unfairly burdened the workers and farmers of the town.  By the end of the meeting, the rich man got so mad that he refused to pay for everyone’s lunch.  The cliché moral of the story is that the workers committed the fallacy of biting the hand that feeds them.

But this interpretation fails to see the true reality that resides in the power of the workers (the majority of the labor force in society), a reality that Hegel rightly identified in his master/slave dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit, namely that the power only appears to be in the hands of the master (capitalist, bankers etc.) but really resides in the hands of those who create and produce reality as such, namely the slaves (workers).  In this story, it is almost as if this group of workers could not exist until the rich man brings them together and thus brings them to “life” (appearance) out of sheer and gratuitous grace that is a fake—a mask behind which the reality of a enslavement logic lay.

The world according to the master seemingly makes the workers come into existence out of the pity in the rich man’s heart, whose gift of sustenance only repeats and reinforces the debt that the poor owe him.  The truth of the world is thus hidden from view and obscured by a false logic of debt that the workers must carry around with them in order to exist at all.  But is not the correct interpretation of this story that if and when the rich suddenly fail to pay for our lunches we are free to take what is really ours.  Are we not dependent more immediately on the work of our hands than on the rich?  In other words:  in a time of crisis we finally see the truth of the world hidden from us by the rich.  We the workers are the condition of our own possibility.

Bertolt Brecht

In this way, Bertolt Brecht’s famous line that goes something like, “There is no difference between founding a bank and robbing one”[1] needs a further twist:  There is no difference between a bank collapsing and getting robbed by one.  And is this not precisely what is happening in the United States at the moment?  The banks are rapidly collapsing one by one by one and who comes and saves the banks (who can only save a bank?) the taxpayers!  The truth hits home! Never before has such a crisis revealed the dirty trick of capitalism:  you get screwed both ways—which adds insult to injury!  When you open up a bank account and when you save a bank—either way you get the short end of the deal.  But this is the beauty of the paradox: the people finally grasp the truth of capitalism’s brutality!  And this awakening we can grasps reality and make it our own again.

Professor Carl Raschke’s article “Hyperreality” (published on the JCRT-LIVE Blog) nicely identifies the financial meltdown on Wall Street by appealing to theological and philosophical categories, which helps illuminate some basic factors in the opaque aftermath of the collapse.  Raschke shows how the attempt to get to the materialized bottom of what Fred Jameson called “the cultural [financial?] logic of late capitalism” is impossible.  Indeed one of the most frightening aspects of this meltdown (and there are several) is the fact that no one understands the full extend breath and width of the problem.  The article description of what is effectively un-describable reminded me of Isaac Asimov’s science-fiction short story “The Last Question” in which human beings create a GIANT omnipotent and omniscience machine-computer in order for it to perform the mundane tasks of living (for example, redistributing energy, financial capital, maintaining itself and other sundry by-products etc.) only to discover that the GIANT machine is so enormous that it simply transcends any one’s ability to even find, much less trigger, the on/off switch.  In chillingly appropriate terms, Asimov says that “[t]hey had at least a vague notion of the general plan of relays and circuits that had long since grown past the point where any single human could possibly have a firm grasp of the whole”[2]

Ominously this capitalist financial crisis rings true to one of the basic plots of science-fiction: viz. humans create a machine so big (or robots so plentiful) that it/they ends up taking over the universe only to become conscious of the unforeseen negative efforts when it’s simply too late in the game to make a difference.  Come to think of it, perhaps this basic plot that ties together the standard plot in science-fiction and global financial capital can describe the 20th century.  This provisional hypothesis is too general to prove of course—it will die the death of a thousand qualifications.   Nevertheless this hypothesis does comport with Alain Badiou’s idea that 20th century philosophy.  For Badiou understands philosophy in a triad of hermeneutic, analytic, and postmodern orientations which collectively and in their own different ways puts “the category of truth on trial, and with it the classical figure of philosophy.”[3]  And the result Badiou tells us produces two inter-dependent axioms:

1- “the metaphysic of truth has become impossible…. Philosophy can no  longer pretend to be what it had for a long time decided to be, that is, a search for truth.”
 2- “The question of meaning [language] replaces the classical question of truth.”[4]

And now, in the dawning hours of a new century we are shocked by two different Septembers, 9/11 in which the World Trade Centers are targeted and fall to their doom, and in 2008 with the financial crisis—the fallout of which is less “symbolic” and dramatic but sure to be more financially painful to more people regardless of their race, creed, and gender. On the surface, these two Septembers seem only to have a month in common, but perhaps there is something (an extreme “fundamentalist” take on life at the expense of common hard-working folks i.e., capitalist soldiers/terrorist) that ultimately connects them.

What I found most striking about Raschke’s article was not only his ability to name the unnamable, but more importantly was how he closed the article with a sign of hope.  Here are his words that blend with Jacques Derrida’s:  He with us are obliged “to think the virtualization of space and time, the possibility of virtual events whose movement and speed prohibit us more than ever…from opposing presence to representation, ‘real time’ to ‘deferred time,’ effectivity to its simulacrum…in short, the living to the living-dead of its ghosts.  It obliges us to think, from there, another space for democracy.  For democracy-to-come and thus for justice.” (Specters of Marx, Routledge, 1994).

It is in times such as now— in the dustbowl of the crisis’ fallout—that will inevitably change the course of history.  And, we must not be afraid to ask the hard questions, that is, to see the light of truth (however blinding it may be).  At bottom there are two basic questions:

1-    What group (or corpus of individuals) is able to determine the future coordinates given this crisis?

2-    What ethical and political guidelines will this corpus draw on and emphasis as they make certain fundamental decisions about addressing this crisis?  For example, will they lean more towards an elitist laissez-faire economic outlook or will they take into account the majority of individuals who comprise the poor, the working and the middle classes?  In other words: Will these leaders reproduce a system predicated on greed, privilege, and alienating finance (a system that is de facto broken) or one that takes as its starting point the concepts of sharing, equality, and community?

Regarding the first question, the answer is clear:  The executive and legislative branches of the government are the one’s responsible for making policy decisions.  We stand at a basic and unprecedented crossroads.  And judging from the ubiquitous nature of the lobby industry and their corresponding scandals that have rocked congress to its core, I must admit I have a pretty good idea about how to answer my second set of questions.  Power tends to want to preserve its influence and keep to itself.  I suppose then that we are left with a glimmer of hope that congress will side with the masses, with the common, and with working people. But already in saying this—by stating the fact about the elite—it does force us to ask: Are we not the ones who have the freedom to choose—it seems we are too far removed from determining for ourselves our own future, our welfare and happiness. And a crisis like this allows us to see the truth in all is horrific glory. Perhaps the most important question of all is the one that asks: How and why did we get here in the first place?  How is it that the working people of this country allow themselves to get here in the first place?

Thomas Jefferson--Revolutionary

Is not a time like this the exact time to alight with a hope in taking back what is ours irrespective of the elite (and even despite of them)?  Perhaps we need to appeal to the thought of folks like Thomas Jefferson who called for a revolution every generation.  A crisis is another word for the birth of a democracy—something that America has always promised but has yet to deliver on.  The credit is due and the truth of democratic justice can never be exhausted.

Creston Davis is an Assistant Professor of Religion, Rollins College.

[1] Bertolt Brecht’s, The Three Penny Opera

[2] I. Asimov, “The Last Question” in The SFWA Grand Masters, Vol. II edited by Frederik Pohl, (New York:  A Tom Doherty Associates Book [TOR], 2000) pg. 210.

[3] Alain Badiou, “Philosophy and Desire” in Infinite Thought, translated and edited by Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens (London: Continuum Press, 2003) p. 46.

[4] Ibid. pg. 47.

New Hip-Hop Music-Video [pre-release] by Jesse Weaver Shipley

Jesse behind the camera

At the cafe this afternoon I ran into film-maker/academic Jesse Weaver Shipley (Assistant Prof. in Anthropology Haverford College) who recently cut a music video with M1 from political Hip-Hop underground group Dead Prez and African Hip-Hop newcomer Gibril The African!  The video shows the links between African and African diaspora.  Artists and intellectuals are linking popular culture to theoretical critique. For follow ups ring shipley.jesse@gmail.com.  Also check out his full length feature documentary on African Hip-Hop at Jesse’s webpage.  For those interested see Jesse’s recent essay on Hip-Hop in Africa entitled “The  Aesthetic of the Entrepreneur”  published in Anthropological Quarterly (Summer, 2009).

Introduction to Slavoj Zizek’s Talk, “Is There an Ethics of Psycho-Analysis?” by Roger Casey

Zizek at Rollins

Dobrodošli. I welcome you in Slovenian, the native language of one of the world’s preeminent cultural theorists, Professor Slavoj Zizek, whom it is my pleasure to introduce this evening for his talk on the topic: “Is there an ethics of psychoanalysis?” Earlier, Slavoj told me he will answer this question with either a yes or a no, followed by a two-hour period of silence. Given that you are here tonight (or to be true to Zizek: given than some symbolic order of your divided self is in attendance competing to define itself amidst a sea of otherness), I doubt if I need to introduce Dr. Zizek to you at all. He defies description. He defies categorization. He defies. An example which forever endeared him to this academic administrator: Žižek once wrote the text for an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog.

Questioned as to why a revered intellectual would essentially be writing ad copy, Žižek told the Boston Globe: “If I were asked to choose between doing things like this to earn money and becoming fully employed as an American academic, kissing ass to get a tenured post, I would with pleasure choose writing for such journals!” He defies. Watch him tonight as he does a high-wire balancing act on a tension rope strung between Hegelian and Lacanian towers, using a balancing pole weighted by the major figures in Marxist, film, and cultural criticism. If cultural criticism were painting, he would be its Jackson Pollock. Step back and look at the deep, rich brush stroke of each application of theoretical acrylic in his argument. His expansive intellectual canvas is mind-bogglingly interlaced, yet coherent in all its density. You must look at it. It is inescapable. Zizek is one of the few people in the world about whom I (along with many others in academia) can say, this man has changed the way I look at reality itself. Words fail me. They certainly fail the Real, Zizek argues extensively in his works. En jezik ni nikoli dovolj. One language is never enough—never enough to describe our guest. About critic Albert Murray, it was once written: “The twentieth–century is the century of Albert Murray. We are all lucky enough to have lived in it with him.” If that statement were true of Murray in the twentieth century, I would have to say that the twenty-first century is the century of Zizek. Are we really living in it? This is the fundamental question. If theory were The Matrix, Slavoj would be our Keanu Reeves. Ladies and Gentlemen, Welcome to the Desert of the Real. Welcome to Rollins, Slavoj Zizek.

My brief response (and this is my response and has nothing to do with Zizek or Casey)

In the final analysis the answer is in the affirmative–there is an ethics of psychoanalysis.  But this “ethics” is not at all straightforward; indeed the ethics of psychoanalysis goes radically against the status quo view of what ethics has become in our time, namely, “do that action that extends the capitalist market values even further.”  In other words, ethics has becomes the same thing as making profits–if the action makes a profit then it is the right action whereas if the action does not make a profit then it is rendered “morally corrupt” and thus should be avoided.  By contrast, ethics of psychoanalysis is premised on a radical anti-fetish movement of uncovering  the ideology of capitalist ethics.   In the end, this ethics engages the neighbor (even the toxic neighbor) precisely because they confront you with the abyss of total otherness.  So, this ethics of psychoanalysis is like an atheistic form of Christianity in that it is willing to go to the limit even unto death to demystify the ideology of fetishized beliefs.

John Elias took the photograph above.

Lunch with Billy Collins & Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek & Billy Collins

This afternoon Dr. Denise Cummings, Dr. Julian Chambliss and I had lunch with the poet Billy Collins and the philosopher Slavoj Zizek at the Winter Park Institute.  The conversation was fast and furious and ranged from the role and function of the poet and philosopher, to the origin of language and music and from politics in Cuba to the Gulags in Russia.  Overall it was a very enjoyable and stimulating conversation.  Thanks to Dr. Gail Sinclair for arranging this for us.

At one point, Slavoj brought up the idea of “genius.”  And then he asked Billy:  ”What kind of genius are you?”  Are you like Bach who was a genius, no doubt, but nevertheless diligently worked at perfecting his gift from 9-5 everyday?  Or are you like Mozart who simply showed up with no work and, viola….  Or finally are you like Beethoven whose genius alighted from the result of a fundamental internal struggle.

Zizek's "Silhouette"

Billy’s response was, (and I’m paraphrasing)… “I enjoy writing because it flows out of me and gives me deep satisfaction.”  We concluded, Billy’s “genius” must be like Mozart’s then.  Whereas Slavoj’s genius is like the origin of language: it is a direct result of total failures that give birth to insights that simply cannot appear ad hoc, but only emerges out of the appearances of the world precisely by getting it wrong.  Thus, we must conclude with the most vulgar form of homological analysis.

It was a good time!

From Left to Right: Julian, Billy, Me, Denise, and Slavoj