Grandpa Sessions

지식은 사랑을 전복시킵니다. 우리가 비밀을 꿰 뚫을 때 비례하여 우리는 우리와 닮았 기 때문에 우리 종족을 혐오하게됩니다.

[processedlives]

“Tact, like empathy, is based on a certain form of mutual understanding. But while empathy implies the idea of entering someone else’s mind inasmuch as it is linked to the presumption that ‘I know how you feel’, tact exists to create a form of bonding between individuals that is not based on the idea of intrusion but, conversely, on the respect for existing boundaries, and on a willingness not always to assume that one knows. While empathy requires resonance and proximity, tact is there to restore distance, and to accept the difference between the individuals involved in order to protect and preserve their dignity. Tact is based on an attention towards otherness.”

— Katja Haustein, “How to Be Alone with Others: Plessner, Adorno, and Barthes on Tact” (via mehreenkasana)

[thirdity]

“It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and shortcircuits all its vicissitudes.”

— Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

[grandpasessions]

The problem of passive nihilism does not by any means consist in the fact that “there is nothing everywhere,” that there is nothing all around us: the problem is, rather, that, all around us, there are “somethings,” yet none of these particular “somethings” has the power to engage our will or desire in any serious way.

The Shortest Shadow

Alenka Zupančič

[grandpasessions]

Actually, it is rather obvious that the thing that is ultimately lacking in passive nihilism is the nothing itself.

The problem of passive nihilism does not by any means consist in the fact that “there is nothing everywhere,” that there is nothing all around us: the problem is, rather, that, all around us, there are “somethings,” yet none of these particular “somethings” has the power to engage our will or desire in any serious way.

The Shortest Shadow / Alenka Zupančič

[grandpasessions]

The word as we now use it refers primarily to a congruence between avowal and actual feeling. Is it really possible, does it make sense, to say that the value put upon this congruence became, at a given moment in history, a new element of the moral life? Surely it is as old as speech and gesture?

Sincerity and Authenticity Lionel Trilling

[grandpasessions]

The Liberal Imagination

Lionel Trilling

[grandpasessions]

One can nonetheless defend Hegel here: as a model of what he has in mind, let us take the notion of the clinamen in all its radicality: it is not that there are first atoms, which then deviate from their straight path (or not)—atoms are nothing but their clinamen. There is no substantial “something” prior to the clinamen which gets caught up in it; this “something” which deviates is created, emerges, through the clinamen itself. The clinamen is thus like the photon with no mass: for an ordinary particle (if there is such a thing), we imagine it as an object with a mass, such that when its movement is accelerated its mass grows; a photon, however, has no mass in itself, its entire mass is the result of its acceleration. The paradox is here the paradox of a thing which is always (and nothing but) an excess with regard to itself: in its “normal” state, it is nothing.

This brings us back to Lacan’s notion of the objet a as surplus‐enjoyment: there is no “basic enjoyment” to which one adds the surplus‐enjoyment; enjoyment is always a surplus, in excess. The object‐in‐itself (photon, atom) is here not negated/mediated, it emerges as the (retroactive) result of its mediation.

This result brings us back unexpectedly to Plato’s Parmenides, which uncannily ends up evoking a hypothesis that points forward towards the thesis that there is only Nothing, that all processes take place “from Nothing through Nothing to Nothing”: “If one is not, then nothing is.” Is not Parmenides, even more than Plato’s Sophist, the dialogue on the corrosive all‐pervasive force of nothingness? It begins already in Parmenides 130c‐d, when Parmenides raises a question that perplexes Socrates and forces him to admit his limitation: are there also Ideas of the lowest material things, Ideas of excrement, dust …? Is there an eidos for “things that might seem absurd, like hair and mud and dirt, or anything else totally undignified and worthless?”.

What lurks behind this question is not only the embarrassing fact that the noble notion of Form could also apply to excremental objects, but a much more precise paradox that Plato approaches in his Statesman, in which he makes a crucial claim: divisions (of a genus into species) should be made at the proper joints. For example, it is a mistake to divide the genus of all human beings into Greeks and barbarians: “barbarian” is not a proper form because it does not designate a positively defined group (species), but merely all persons who are not Greeks.

The positivity of the term “barbarian” thus conceals the fact that it serves as the container for all those who do not fit the form “Greek.” Hegel’s (and Lacan’s) hypothesis is that this holds for all divisions of a genus into species: every genus, in order to be fully divided into species, has to include such a negative pseudo‐species, a “part of no‐part” of the genus, all those who belong to the genus but are not covered by any of its species. This “contradiction” between a genus and its species, embodied in an excessive group whose consistency is purely “negative,” is what sets a dialectical process in motion.

Less Than Nothing Slavoj Zizek

[grandpasessions]

The ideological coordinates of such liberal multiculturalism are determined by two features of our "postmodern" zeitgeist: universalized multiculturalist historicism -

(all values and rights are historically specific, hence any elevation of them into universal notions to be imposed onto others is cultural imperialism at its most violent)

and the universalized "hermeneutics of suspicion" -

(all "high" ethical motives are generated and sustained by "low" motives of resentment, envy, etc.— the call to sacrifice our life for a higher cause is either a mask for manipulation by those who need war to sustain their power and wealth, or a pathological expression of masochism— and this either/or is an inclusive vel, i.e., both terms can be true at the same time).

Another way to formulate Badiou's insight that we live in a world-less universe would be to say that the functioning of ideology today no longer relies on mechanisms for the interpellation [the mechanism through which pre-existing social structures "constitute" (or construct) individual human organisms as subjects with consciousness and agency] of individuals into subjects: what liberalism proposes is a value-neutral mechanism of rights, and so on, a mechanism "whose free play can automatically generate a desired political order, without at any point in interpellating individuals into subjects."

The nameless jouissance cannot be a title of interpellation proper; it is more a kind of blind drive with no symbolic value-form attached to it— all such symbolic features are temporary and flexible, which is why the individual is constantly called upon to "re-create" himself or herself.

Living In the End Times / Slavoj Zizek

[grandpasessions]

The same goes for contemporary art, where we encounter often brutal attempts to “return to the real,” to remind the spectator (or reader) that she is perceiving a fiction, to awaken her from the sweet dream. This gesture has two main forms which, although opposed, amount to the same thing.

In literature or cinema, there are (especially in postmodern texts) self‐reflexive reminders that what we are watching is a mere fiction, such as when the actor on screen addresses us directly as spectators, thus ruining the illusion of the autonomous space of the narrative, or the writer directly intervenes in the story to add an ironic comment; in theatre, there are occasional brutal acts (like slaughtering a chicken onstage) which awaken us to the reality of the stage.

Instead of conferring on these gestures a kind of Brechtian dignity, perceiving them as versions of extraneation, one should rather denounce them for what they are: escapes from the Real, the exact opposite of what they claim to be, desperate attempts to avoid the real of the illusion itself, the Real that emerges in the guise of an illusory spectacle.

Less Than Nothing Slavoj Zizek

[grandpasessions]

The Good emerges as a possibility and duty only through this primordial/ constitutive choice of Evil: we experience the Good when, after choosing Evil, we become aware of the utter inadequacy of our situation. The queerness of the Law thus reaches its apogee in Christianity in which we, humans, are a priori presumed to be fallen, to dwell in sin, so that the entire reign of the law consists of the rules of how to deal with our violations of the law: through confessions and other modes of ritualized repentance. That’s why, as many perspicuous theologians knew, the Fall is felix culpa, the fortunate fault / the blessed fall—or, as St. Augustine put it: “For God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist.” We have to add another step to this reasoning: in order to bring good out of evil, the Good itself—God—has to bring evil out of itself. This is why we should turn around the standard Christian (or Catholic, more precisely) explanation of why there is evil in the world: god gave us freedom, and freedom is the freedom to choose what we freely decide, inclusive of evil … But is it not the other way round? God (more than just exposed us to the temptation of evil, he) pushed us into evil so that we would discover our freedom. There is no freedom without evil since, as Hegel knew very well, to be able to choose between good and evil one already has to be in evil.

Is, consequently, the paradox of the forced choice not inscribed already into the structure of God’s original gift of freedom to humanity? Humans are given freedom—with the expectation that they will misuse it to break free from the Noncommutativity in the Symbolic and in the (Quantum) Real Creator, i.e., to become effectively free. The only way to use the gift of freedom without incurring guilt is not to use it at all—in short, what we find here is the very structure of the forced choice: “you are free to choose—on condition that you make the wrong choice …” No wonder that, according to the standard Gnostic reading of the Fall, the snake which tempts Eve in the Paradise is a benevolent agent of wisdom, trying to impart knowledge to Adam and Eve imprisoned within the walls of Paradise by their evil Creator who wants to keep them in ignorance. God himself, by way of explicitly prohibiting Adam and Eve to eat the apple from the tree of knowledge, effectively wants them to violate his prohibition, to make the step into knowing good and evil and thus becoming aware of the shame of their nakedness. God is here himself inconsistent, divided, saying one thing and, between the lines, giving another covert injunction.

As Kierkegaard puts it, the prohibition awakens the possibility of freedom— the freedom to violate the prohibition, i.e., to eat from the tree of knowledge of the difference of Good and Evil. God engages here in a perverse strategy: in pronouncing the prohibitive Word, he solicits man to violate this prohibition and thereby become human—as St Augustine put it long ago (in his Enchiridion, xxvii): “God judged it better to bring good out of evil, than to allow no evil to exist.” Or, as Hegel, Kierkegaard’s great opponent, would have it, knowledge is not just the possibility to choose evil or good, “it is the consideration or the cognition that makes people evil, so that consideration and cognition themselves are what is evil, and that therefore such cognition is what ought not to exist because it is the source of evil.” In short, prohibition precedes what it prohibits, or, as Kierkegaard puts it, the explanation anticipates what is subsequent. The knowledge gained by Adam and Eve after eating from the tree is nonetheless not simply empty—here is what happens after they taste the apple:

Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?” The man answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.” And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?” (Genesis 3:7–11)

Before eating from the tree, the two were already naked, they just didn’t know they were naked—they fell literally like the proverbial cat above the precipice which falls down only after it looks down and notices there is no ground under its feet. The shift involved in the Fall is thus purely subjective, it involves a different attitude towards what Adam and Eve are: the two of them merely realize (register, take note of) what they are—as in the famous passage from Moliere in which a guy, when told that he is speaking prose—a new word for him—asserts with pleasure that he knows how to speak prose. What betrayed their Fall to God was not their brash display of nakedness, but their feeling of shame at realizing that they are naked—one can say that their very moral feeling of shame made them guilty. Recall Alphonse Allais’s old joke when he pointed at a woman walking along a street and shouted: “Look at her! Beneath her clothes, she is totally naked!” In exactly the same way, a human being is guilty only under the cover of his/her shame. And is it not the same with the punishment that befalls them (they will die)? In the same way that they were already naked, they were also already mortal, they just didn’t relate to their mortality—as Heidegger would have put it, animals die, but only man relates to his death as his innermost (im)possibility. So when God enounces the punishment, he just spells out what Adam and Eve already realized when they noticed that they are naked, namely their misery as two weak mortal beings.

Quantum History Slavoj Zizek

[grandpasessions]

So in what sense does Lacan mention “the future of the real”? For Lacan, a true interpretation is not just another symbolic semblance but a discourse which is not of a semblance (the title of one of Lacan’s late seminars): it has effects in the real, it transforms the real of the patient’s subjectivity. Interpretation is not just a different symbolization of the unconscious real, it changes the basic coordinates of the real core of its subjectivity—if it is formulated at the right moment of the analytic process. Here time enters again: an interpretation has effects in the real only if it is formulated at the right moment, otherwise it remains a symbolic bla-bla, a semblance which leaves the real unaffected—so no wonder that the patient as a rule easily agrees with it. A direct acceptance of an interpretation is a proof that it has no effects in the real, that it leaves the core of the patient indifferent.

So in what sense does Lacan mention “the future of the real”? For Lacan, a true interpretation is not just another symbolic semblance but a discourse which is not of a semblance (the title of one of Lacan’s late seminars): it has effects in the real, it transforms the real of the patient’s subjectivity. Interpretation is not just a different symbolization of the unconscious real, it changes the basic coordinates of the real core of its subjectivity—if it is formulated at the right moment of the analytic process. Here time enters again: an interpretation has effects in the real only if it is formulated at the right moment, otherwise it remains a symbolic bla-bla, a semblance which leaves the real unaffected—so no wonder that the patient as a rule easily agrees with it. A direct acceptance of an interpretation is a proof that it has no effects in the real, that it leaves the core of the patient indifferent.

Dupuy uses the example of seduction. Especially today, in our Politically Correct times, a seduction process always involves the risky move of “making a pass”—at this potentially dangerous moment, one exposes oneself, one intrudes into another person’s intimate space. The danger resides in the fact that, if my pass is rejected, it will appear as a Politically Incorrect act of harassment; so there is an obstacle I have to overcome. Here, however, a subtle asymmetry enters: if my pass is accepted, it is not that I have successfully overcome the obstacle—what happens is that, retroactively, I learn that there never was an obstacle to be overcome. Do we not find a homologous paradox of asymmetrical choice in the Gospel according to John, when Christ says he did not come to judge but to save, rejecting the very practice of judgment— don’t judge (others) for you will yourself be judged? The text then goes on:

Whoever believes in him is not judged [ou krinetai], but whoever does not believe is judged [kekritai] already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. (John 3:18–19 ESV)

The temporality is here crucial: there is no present moment of judgment when you are judged—you either are not judged or you have already been judged. What is excluded is the possibility of being judged and found innocent, the same as in Dupuy’s example of seduction: either you fail and the obstacle remains in force (you are rejected as a harassing intruder) or there was no obstacle—there is no room in this formulation for the possibility of successfully overcoming the obstacle. And, incidentally, exactly the same asymmetry is at work in the Hegelian dialectical process: the subject either stumbles upon an insurmountable obstacle or he realizes that there is no obstacle at all, that what appeared to him as an obstacle is the very condition of his success.

However, there is a dark obverse of this case. On September 2, 1998, the Swissair flight 111 from JFK to Geneva crashed into the Atlantic Ocean southwest of Halifax, and all 229 people on board died. The investigation took over four years, and it disclosed that the inflammable material used in the aircraft’s structure allowed a fire to spread beyond the control of the crew, resulting in a loss of control and the crash of the aircraft. After exposing a series of mistakes made by the pilots and the ground control, a report in the National Geographic Air Crash Investigation series ends by raising the question: if the pilots had avoided all mistakes, what then? The sad answer is: the flight was doomed from the beginning, no correct moves would have made a difference. So it is not that “if the pilots had acted differently, the tragedy would have been avoided”—the counterfactual past possibility is retroactively canceled. This is how the past can be changed counterfactually: when we learn that the flight was doomed from the beginning, nothing changes at the level of (past) facts, what changes are just counterfactual possibilities . . . Let’s finish this series of cases with the highest one from theology: the sin and the Fall. Is this case also noncommutative? Recall Hegel’s characterization of rational consideration itself as evil:

Abstractly, being evil means singularizing myself in a way that cuts me off from the universal (which is the rational, the laws, the determinations of spirit). But along with this separation there arises being-for-itself and for the first time the universally spiritual, laws—what ought to be. So it is not the case that rational consideration has an external relationship to evil: it is itself what is evil.

The serpent says that by eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve will become like God; and after the two do it, God comments: “Behold, Adam has become like one of us.”(Genesis 3:22) Hegel’s comment is: “So the serpent did not lie, for God confirms what it said.” Then Hegel goes on to reject the claim that what God says is meant with irony: “Cognition is the principle of spirituality, and this … is also the principle by which the injury of the separation is healed. It is in this principle of cognition that the principle of ‘divinity’ is also posited.” Subjective freedom is not just the possibility to choose evil or good,

it is the consideration or the cognition that makes people evil, so that consideration and cognition themselves are what is evil, and that therefore such cognition is what ought not to exist because it is the source of evil.

Quantum History Slavoj Zizek

[grandpasessions]

The tension internal to this project is discernible in the two aspects of liberalism, market liberalism, and political liberalism.

Jean-Claude Michéa perspicuously leaks this to two meetings of the term "right": the political Right insists on the market economy, the politically correct culturalized Left insists on the defense of human rights— often it's sole remaining raison d'etre.

Although the tension between these two aspects of liberalism is irreducible, they are nonetheless inextricably leaked, like the two sides of the same coin.

Today, the meaning of "liberalism "moves between two opposed poles: economic liberalism (free market individualism, opposition to strong state regulation, etc.) and political liberalism (with an accent on equality, social solidarity, permissiveness, etc.).

In the US, Republicans are more liberal in the first sense and Democrats in the second.

The point, of course, is that while one cannot decide through closer analysis which is the "true" liberalism, would also cannot resolve the deadlock by proposing a kind of "higher" dialectical synthesis, or "avoid the confusion" by making a clear distinction between the two senses of the term.

The tension between the two meanings is inherent to the very content that "liberalism" endeavors to designate, it is constitutive of the notion itself, so that this ambiguity, far from signaling a limitation of our knowledge, signals the innermost "truth of the notion of liberalism.

Living in the End Time

S. Zizek

[grandpasessions]

This brings us to the proper base (almost in the military sense of the term) of ideology.

When we read an abstract 'ideological' proclamation we are well aware that 'real people' do not experience it abstractly: in order to pass from abstract proposition to people's 'real lives,' it is necessary to add the unfathomable density of a lifeworld context.

Ideology is not constituted by abstract propositions in themselves, rather, ideology is itself this very texture if the lifeworld which 'schematizes' the propositions, rendering them 'livable.'

If there is an ideological experience at its purest, at its zero-level, then it occurs the moment we adopt an attitude of ironic distance, laughing at the follies in which we are ready to believe—it is at this moment of liberating laughter, when we look down on the absurdity of our faith, that we become pure subjects of ideology, that ideology exerts its strongest hold over us.

Living in the End Times // S. Zizek

[grandpasessions]

One reason this book was written is to say as clearly as possible that there are no new lies---and thus none of us are unique in the temptations that we suffer. When it suits his purpose, Satan tells us each that we are-smarter, stupider, better, worse, cleaner, dirtier, more holy, or more horrid than any generation which had preceded us---all lies. Study both history and the Bible and you'll see that Satan has used the same old stories to bind every generation upon the earth. If that be true, then certainly the stories of the Bible can pro- vide some ammunition for "resisting him."

Satan's Whispers Robert Hughes

[grandpasessions]

To realize the truth of what Wittgenstein says is to dissolve the sense of revelation inherent in the solipsistic vision. But Wittgenstein's analysis also shows that the solipsist who feels the sense of his own centrality as revelation is necessarily caught up in a self-contradictory attempt to move beyond this centrality – by trying to communicate his solipsistic insight as if it were relevant to other consciousnesses and by claiming a paradoxical ownership of a world whose status equivocates oddly between the objective and the subjective.

Thus the solipsist is driven to want what he can never have, validation in the consensual world, and this undercuts his seeming self-sufficiency.

Such validation is doubly impossible, for on principle others cannot acknowledge the revelation; and even if they could, their very acknowledging would contradict the essence of the revelation itself. As we have seen, however, the solipsist is nevertheless driven to communicate and to convince.

Schreber, for example, writes of wanting to demolish "mere materialism" and "hazy pantheism" to make way in our minds for the true Order of the World – an ambition that, we must presume, means making public the truth of his own (private) solipsistic vision. With its peculiar combination of doubt and certitude, of diffidence and proselytizing zeal, Schreber's Memoirs manifests the paradoxical yearning that is central to the delusional world of madness.

Indeed, the very act of writing the Memoirs – which, as Schreber tells us in his introduction, is intended to communicate with and to convince his readers – testifies to the fundamental contradiction and the potential sources of vulnerability that can lie at the heart of an autistic world.

The Paradoxes of Delusion Louis A. Sass

[grandpasessions]

Only through imagining this kind of lived-world can one begin to understand how schizophrenics could be capable of performing certain real-world actions that, to the normal person, would be unimaginably horrible. In extreme cases, such patients may seriously mutilate themselves-even, for example, cutting off their own genitals or putting out their eyes.

Though their sensory organs still function and they are cognitively aware of their actions, they do not appear to experience any pain or to register the significance and irreversibility of what they have done. When one talks to these patients, it almost seems that, for them, everything involved in the action-the body part, the cutting, even the pain itself-is a purely theoretical phenomenon, as if the action had been but a thought experiment, a removal of idea-of-penis or idea-of-eye rather than the actual organ of flesh, blood, and screaming nerve.

Many schizophrenic patients often do feel separated from the lived-body: "Body and soul don't belong together; there's no unity," stated one of Manfred Bleuler's patients. And it may be this separation, rather than the polymorphous infantile sexuality postulated by psychoanalysts, that accounts for the uncertain sexual identity in so many of them. One might even understand the tendency for acts of self-mutilation to focus on the genitals in this way-as representing the patient's attempt to bring his idea-of-body into closer correspondence with the purely cerebral nature of his lived world.

The Paradoxes of Delusion Louis A. Sass

[grandpasessions]

As Wittgenstein often pointed out in his later writings, it is nonsensical to doubt immediate subjective experience and impossible to argue (at least in any standard manner) about notions like solipsism, since normal forms of evidence are quite irrelevant to such assertions.

The Paradoxes of Delusion Louis A. Sass