Symptoms

Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (2006)

Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (2006)

Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (2006)

For Lacan, the Kantian overcoming of the “dialectic” of Law and desire—as well as the concomitant “obliteration of the space for inherent transgression”—is a point of no return in the history of ethics: there is no way of undoing this revolution, and returning to the good old times of prohibitions whose transgression sustained us. This is why today’s desperate neoconservative attempts to reassert “old values” are ultimately a failed perverse strategy of imposing prohibitions which can no longer be taken seriously. No wonder Kant is the philosopher of freedom: with him, the deadlock of freedom emerges. That is to say: with Kant, the reliance on any preestablished Prohibition against which we can assert our freedom is no longer viable, our freedom is asserted as autonomous, every limitation/constraint is completely self-posited.

Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (2006)

Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (2006)

James Ivory, A Room With A View (1985)

"It's hard here not to recall Ursula Le Guin's famous short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, about the imaginary city of Omelas, a city which also made do without kings, wars, slaves or secret police.

We have a tendency, Le Guin notes, to write off such a community as 'simple', but in fact these citizens of Omelas were 'not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us.' The trouble is just that 'we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid.' [...]

Omelas had some problems too. But the point remains: why do we assume that people who have figured out a way for a large population to govern and support itself without temples, palaces and military fortifications—that is, without overt displays of arrogance, self-abasement and cruelty—are somehow less complex than those who have not?

Why would we hesitate to dignify such a place with he name of 'city'?"

— David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

The new-born infant cries, his early days are spent in crying. He is alternately petted and shaken by way of soothing him; sometimes he is threatened, sometimes beaten, to keep him quiet. We do what he wants or we make him do what we want, we submit to his whims or subject him to our own. There is no middle course; he must rule or obey. Thus his earliest ideas are those of the tyrant or the slave. He commands before he can speak, he obeys before he can act, and sometimes he is punished for faults before he is aware of them, or rather before they are committed. Thus early are the seeds of evil passions sown in his young heart. At a later day these are attributed to nature, and when we have taken pains to make him bad we lament his badness.

In this way the child passes six or seven years in the hands of women, the victim of his own caprices or theirs, and after they have taught him all sorts of things, when they have burdened his memory with words he cannot understand, or things which are of no use to him, when nature has been stifled by the passions they have implanted in him, this sham article is sent to a tutor. The tutor completes the development of the germs of artificiality which he finds already well grown, he teaches him everything except self-knowledge and self-control, the arts of life and happiness. When at length this infant slave and tyrant, crammed with knowledge but empty of sense, feeble alike in mind and body, is flung upon the world, and his helplessness, his pride, and his other vices are displayed, we begin to lament the wretchedness and perversity of mankind. We are wrong; this is the creature of our fantasy; the natural man is cast in another mould.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, Or On Education (1762)

I am told that many midwives profess to improve the shape of the infant's head by rubbing, and they are allowed to do it. Our heads are not good enough as God made them, they must be moulded outside by the nurse and inside by the philosopher. The Caribs are better off than we are. The child has hardly left the mother's womb, it has hardly begun to move and stretch its limbs, when it is deprived of its freedom. It is wrapped in swaddling bands, laid down with its head fixed, its legs stretched out, and its arms by its sides; it is wound round with linen and bandages of all sorts so that it cannot move. It is fortunate if it has room to breathe, and it is laid on its side so that water which should flow from its mouth can escape, for it is not free to turn its head on one side for this purpose. The new-born child requires to stir and stretch his limbs to free them from the stiffness resulting from being curled up so long. His limbs are stretched indeed, but he is not allowed to move them. Even the head is confined by a cap. One would think they were afraid the child should look as if it were alive. Thus the internal impulses which should lead to growth find an insurmountable obstacle in the way of the necessary movements. The child exhausts his strength in vain struggles, or he gains strength very slowly. He was freer and less constrained in the womb; he has gained nothing by birth.

Is not such a cruel bondage certain to affect both health and temper? Their first feeling is one of pain and suffering; they find every necessary movement hampered; more miserable than a galley slave, in vain they struggle, they become angry, they cry. Their first words you say are tears. That is so. From birth you are always checking them, your first gifts are fetters, your first treatment, torture. Their voice alone is free; why should they not raise it in complaint? They cry because you are hurting them; if you were swaddled you would cry louder still.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, Or On Education (1762)

Chomsky against Hobbesian selfish "human nature"

Freud in Berchtesgaden, 1929, with his wife, Martha, and sister-in-law, Minna Bernays. Photo by Max Halberstadt.

"Our Adult World and its Roots in Infancy" accounts for its title. Mrs. Klein holds that external ex- periences are of paramount importance throughout life. "However, much de- pends, even in the infant, on the ways in which external influences are interpreted and assimilated by the child, and this in turn largely depends on how strongly destructive impulses and persecutory and depressive anxieties are operative." From this angle she deals with such diverse sub- jects as upbringing of children, attitudes towards subordinates or superiors, love and devotion to various causes, the ca- pacity to grow old with serenity, ambit- iousness and leadership.

Jacques Lacan, Seminar XIXa: The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst (1971-72)

Jacques Lacan, Seminar XIXa: The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst (1971-72)

Every parent knows that a child’s provocations, wild and “transgressive” as they may appear, ultimately conceal and express a demand, addressed to the figure of authority, to set a firm limit, to draw a line which means “This far and no further!”, thus enabling the child to achieve a clear mapping of what is possible and what is not possible. (And does the same not go also for the hysteric’s provocations?) This, precisely, is what the analyst refuses to do, and that is what makes him so traumatic—paradoxically, it is the setting of a firm limit which is liberating, and it is the very absence of a firm limit which is experienced as suffocating. This is why the Kantian autonomy of the subject is so difficult—its implication is precisely that there is nobody out there, no external agent of “natural authority,” who can do the job for me and set me my limit, that I myself have to pose a limit to my natural “unruliness.”Although Kant famously wrote that man is an animal which needs a master, this should not deceive us: what Kant aims at is not the philosophical commonplace according to which—in contrast to animals, whose behavioral patterns are grounded in their inherited instincts—man lacks such firm coordinates which, therefore, have to be imposed on him from the outside, through a cultural authority; Kant’s true aim, rather, is to point out how the very need of an external master is a deceptive lure: man needs a master in order to conceal from himself the deadlock of his own difficult freedom and self-responsibility. In this precise sense, a truly enlightened “mature” human being is a subject who no longer needs a master, who can fully assume the heavy burden of defining his own limitations. This basic Kantian (and also Hegelian) lesson was put very clearly by G. K. Chesterton: “Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice.” Along the same lines, a promiscuous teenager may engage in extreme orgies with group sex and drugs, but what he cannot bear is the idea that his mother could be doing something similar—his orgies rely on the supposed purity of his mother, which serves as the point of exception, the external guarantee: I can do whatever I like, since I know my mother keeps her place pure for me. . . .The most difficult thing is not to violate the prohibitions in a wild orgy of enjoyment, but to do this without relying on someone else who is presupposed not to enjoy so that I can enjoy: to assume my own enjoyment directly, without mediation through another’s supposed purity. (The same goes for belief: the difficult thing is not to reject belief in order to shock a believing other, but to be a nonbeliever without the need for another subject supposed to believe on my behalf.)

Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (2006)

We should bear Lacan’s lesson in mind here: accepting guilt is a maneuver which delivers us of anxiety, and its presence indicates that the subject has compromised his desire. So when,in a move described by Kierkegaard,we withdraw from the dizziness of freedom by seeking a firm support in the order of finitude, this withdrawal itself is the true Fall. More precisely: this withdrawal is the very withdrawal into the constraints of the externally imposed prohibitory Law, so that the freedom which then arises is freedom to violate the Law, freedom caught up in the vicious cycle of Law and its transgression, where Law engenders the desire to “free oneself” by violating it, and “sin” is the temptation inherent to the Law—the ambiguity of attraction and repulsion which characterizes anxiety is now exerted not directly by freedom but by sin. The dialectic of Law and its transgression does not reside only in the fact that Law itself solicits its own transgression, that it generates the desire for its own violation; our obedience to the Law itself is not “natural,” spontaneous, but always-already mediated by the (repression of the) desire to transgress it. When we obey the Law, we do it as part of a desperate strategy to fight against our desire to transgress it, so the more rigorously we obey the Law, the more we bear witness to the fact that, deep within ourselves, we feel the pressure of the desire to indulge in sin. The superego feeling of guilt is therefore right: the more we obey the Law, the more we are guilty, because this obedience is in effect a defense against our sinful desire.

Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (2006)

That is the crucial insight of Freudian metapsychology emphasized by Lacan: the function of Prohibition is not to introduce disturbance into the previous repose of paradisiacal innocence, but, on the contrary, to resolve some terrifying deadlock.

It is only now that we can reconstruct the full sequence: primordial repose is first disturbed by the violent act of contraction, of self-withdrawal, which provides the proper density of the subject’s being; the result of this contraction is a deadlock that tears the subject apart, throwing him into the vicious cycle of sabotaging its own impetus—the experience of this deadlock is dread at its most terrifying. In Lacanese, this contraction creates a sinthome, the minimal formula of the subject’s consistency—through it, the subject becomes a creature proper, and anxiety is precisely the reaction to this overproximity of one’s sinthome. This deadlock is then resolved through Prohibition, which brings relief by externalizing the obstacle, by transposing the inherent obstacle, the bone in the subject’s throat, into an external impediment. As such, Prohibition gives rise to desire proper, the desire to overcome the external impediment, which then gives rise to the anxiety of being confronted with the abyss of our freedom. Thus we have a succession of three anxieties: the joyous “anxiety of nothing” that accompanies the repose of primordial innocence; the deadening anxiety/dread of over-proximity to one’s sinthome; the anxiety of freedom proper, of being confronted with the abyss of possibilities, of what I “can do.”

Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (2006)

The problem here is that no synthesis is possible. We cannot have it both ways: we can never achieve a concrete ethical engagement based on a full critico-philosophical reflection. On the one hand, for the ethical engagement to be truly binding and unconditional, it has to rely on an accepted doxa (which, in this case, of course, means: on the doxa impregnated by the tradition of metaphysical ontology). Such an engagement cannot survive endless self-reflective probing, the full questioning of its presuppositions. On the other hand, critico-historical philosophical reflection easily reveals how the very norms on which our engagement has to rely are the ultimate source of the “regression” to the unethical, to the unauthentic mode of existence; that is, how they are never sufficient to ground a proper ethical attitude (in his own way, Kierkegaard was well aware of this when he posited the necessity of the religious suspension of universal ethical norms as the very fulfillment of the Ethical). The reference to the established set of norms is thus simultaneously the condition of possibility and the condition of impossibility of ethical engagement: we must refer to it, but, simultaneously, this normative dimension, in its determinate form, always-already somehow betrays the Otherness from which every ethical call/injunction emanates.

Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (2006)

A poem must be an impossible prayer. Before this prayer can reach beyond itself, invoke without delay whatever or whomever may hear it and come to its encounter, yield to the words and silences, the sounds and pauses that withdraw into its singular ellipsis, it seeks to be shared and establish a complicity with its reader. Its address doubles and precedes itself, as if it had to make a detour, and in this movement it is no longer obvious whether it will, eventually, address what lies beyond itself, in the manner a possible prayer seems to do. But in what sense is this impossible prayer still a prayer? It is still a prayer because, in its address, the poem must dispossess me, its reader, of a proper name. It must place me in the same position from which it originates. This is how the poem comes about: by ceasing to advertise itself or to put forward names that trigger the automatism of recognition.

Alex Garcia Düttmannn and Juan Manuel Garrido, A Poem's Gap

As Freud pointed out, there is a compulsion to repeat those traumatic events that were passively experienced in an effort to gain mastery over them. People line up to see [horror films] in order to reencounter powerful unconscious anxieties while retaining a sense that they have some control of an active nature the second time around. Moreover, the movie provides an aesthetic distance so that the audience knows that the terror on the screen is not actually happening to them, and they can experience relief along with their fright.

Glen and Krin Gabbard, Psychiatry and the Cinema

Today, more and more, the cultural-economic apparatus itself—in order to reproduce itself under market competition conditions—has not only to tolerate but directly to incite stronger and stronger shocking effects and products. Suffice it to recall recent trends in visual arts: gone are the days when we had simple statues or framed paintings. What we get now are exhibitions of frames themselves without paintings; exhibitions featuring dead cows and their excrements; videos showing the inside of the human body (gastroscopy and colonoscopy); inclusion of smell into exhibitions; etc. Here again, as in sexuality, perversion is no longer subversive: shocking excesses are part of the system itself—the system feeds on them in order to reproduce itself.

Slavoj Žižek, David Lynch Is Dead, But his Ethics is more Alive than Ever

What may be called natural science proper presupposes metaphysics of nature; for laws, i.e. principles of the necessity of that which belongs to the existence of a thing, are occupied with a conception which does not admit of construction, because its existence cannot be presented in any à priori intuition; natural science proper, therefore, presupposes metaphysics. Now this must indeed always contain exclusively principles of a non-empirical origin (for, for this reason it bears the name of metaphysics); but it may be either without reference to any definite object of experience, and therefore undetermined as regards the nature of this or that thing of the sense-world, and treat of the laws rendering possible the conception of nature in general, in which case it is the transcendental portion of the metaphysics of nature; or it may occupy itself with the particular nature of this or that kind of thing, of which an empirical conception is given, in such wise, that except what lies in this conception, no other empirical principle will be required for its cognition. For instance: it lays the empirical conception of a matter, or of a thinking entity, at its foundation, and searches the range of the cognition of which the reason is à priori capable respecting these objects; and thus, though such a science must always be termed a metaphysic of nature (namely, of corporeal or thinking nature), it is then not a universal but a particular metaphysical natural science (physics and psychology), in which the above transcendental principles are applied to the two species of sense-objects. But I maintain that in every special natural doctrine only so much science proper is to be met with as mathematics; for, in accordance with the foregoing, science proper, especially [science] of nature, requires a pure portion, lying at the foundation of the empirical, and based upon an à priori knowledge of natural things.

Immanuel Kant in the Preface to Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786)

For a long time we have looked for the unity characteristic of the concept of a science in the direction of its object. The object would dictate the method used for the study of its properties. But this was, at bottom, to limit science to the investigation of a fact, to the exploration of a domain. When it became clear that every science more or less gives itself its fact and appropriates for itself, in this way, what one calls its “domain,” the concept of a science became progressively more focused on its method than on its object. Or more exactly, the expression “object of science” acquired a new sense. The object of science is no longer only the specific domain of problems and obstacles to resolve, it is also the intention and target of the subject of science, it is the specific project that constitutes a theoretical conscience as such.

Georges Canguilhem, What is Psychology? (1956) [tr. David M. Peña-Guzmán]

The psychologist seems to be more embarrassed by the question "what is psychology?" than the philosopher by the question "what is philosophy?" The reason is that philosophy is constituted by the question of its sense and essence much more than it is defined by any answer to it. The fact that this question is reborn incessantly without ever admitting a satisfying response is, for those who would like to call themselves "philosophers", a reason for humility and not a cause for humiliation. But, for psychology, the question of its essence, or more modestly of its concept, also brings into question the very existence of the psychologist since, lacking the ability to explain what he is, he has difficulty explaining what he does. He can justify his importance as a specialist only by pointing to an always -debatable "efficiency". And some would not care one bit if this "efficiency" engendered, in the philosopher, an inferiority complex.

Opening lines of Georges Canguilhem's What is Psychology? (1956) [tr. David M. Peña-Guzmán]

Badiou: Of the subject, there is always something that escapes being put into form, its logico­mathematical capture, in fine its transmission through formal knowledge. In what sense? In the sense that the subject, for the last Lacan, is inextricably tied up with the real. The real, in its Lacanian conceptual content, is what absolutely resists symbolization, whether carried out by means of mathematics, logic, or topology. This motif recurs over and over: the real of the subject is unsymbolizable. As a result, Lacan goes as far as possible in formalization in order to experience a fundamental im­passe. At some point, the integral formalization should break down because it no longer has a hold on the very thing it is trying to grasp. This is the moment when we touch on the real point of the subject.

Roudinesco and Badiou, Jacques Lacan, Past and Present: A Dialogue (2012)

Badiou on the ways in which Lacan inherited from logic, topology, poetry and literature.

From Roudinesco and Badiou, Jacques Lacan, Past and Present: A Dialogue (2012)