Archive for the 'Lacan' Category

Revolution, Paradox, and the Christian Tradition: A Chestertonian Debate between John Milbank and Slavoj Zizek.

Published
by
A.D.
on November 11, 2008
in Chesterton, Lacan, Milbank and Zizek
. 17 Comments

So I just presented this at the Popular Culture/American Culture conference up in Niagara Falls. Dan is making me post it here, so if you don’t like you can gnaw his ear. Actually, I’m trying to work it into an article so I’d love to hear comments:

GK Chesterton has been staging something of a comeback in the last few years. While he has always been popular among Catholic thinkers who value his fresh formulations of their tradition, and also, over the past 20 years or so, with thinking Evangelicals, who have been turning to him as proof that one can keep one’s faith without losing ones mind; its only recently that his voice has been heard among the philosophers and the critical theorists, mainly through his influence on two of the most interesting representatives in these fields. One, Slavoj Zizek is a Marxist and strict Lacanian, who has annoyed his audiences by saying that he is a Christian atheist and by claiming that Lenin got it all right. The other, John Milbank, is British, a member of the Anglican church, who has become well known as the most articulate defender of a philosophical and theological movement that goes by the name Radical Orthodoxy, and emphasizes a rediscovery of patrisitic and medieval theologians while at the same time being well read in Jacque Lacan and Karl Marx. Zizek and Milbank have appeared at conferences together as well as edited volumes, and are even co-writing a book. Though they come from radically divergent points of view both Zizek and Milbank see the necessity of philosophy and theology being in close discussion with each other and both have seen Chesterton as a good way to do that. Continue reading ‘Revolution, Paradox, and the Christian Tradition: A Chestertonian Debate between John Milbank and Slavoj Zizek.’

The Paradoxical Nature of the Subject’s Extimate Core

Published
by
DWM
on March 28, 2008
in Lacan, Psychoanalysis and Theology and other
. 4 Comments

Aron gave a great paper yesterday, and I secretly recorded it. If you use itunes, you’ll be able to see a couple pictures that I snapped of him during the presentation.

Have a nice weekend,

-dan

Things that are Impossible in Japan

Published
by
A.D.
on December 5, 2007
in Lacan, Literature and Psychoanalysis
. 1 Comment

One of the most haunting aspects of Silence is the sense you get that Christianity meets its match in this land of “swamp.” That here we have a group of islands whose rockiness has proved inpenetrable to the truth of the cross, and the blazing sword of God’s love. Strangely enough, I just read that Lacan said the same thing about this land, but that he said it concerning psychoanalysis, that Japanese people couldn’t be psychoanalysts because of the way their writing system could be read in two completely divergent ways. That is, the on-yomi and the kun-yomi, two different ways of reading Japanese Kanji (characters imported from China–this of course isn’t even mentioning the two different syllabaries also used in everyday writing, whose doubleness perhaps images the dual readings of the kanji). In other words, you could have the very same kanji that would be pronounced completely differently depending on the mode of reading you were using. Before I knew this, but after I studied a very small amount of Japanese, a language which for English speakers is a cinch to pronounce but a bitch to read, I also droned on to my World Religion classes that the Japanese were fascinating because they could be in two places at once, they could be completely traditional and completely modern/techno/industrial/secular at the same time. In the West, I said, we felt torn between those two options, whereas the Japanese pulled it off so naturally, the way they might design a insurance building according to the ki streaming down the mountainside or start the baseball season off with a Shinto blessing. There is a certain nonchalance about everything in Japan, a confidence that anything can be Japanified, any word absorbed into the language, that they have the secret to digesting everything. Of course, this is the complaint in Silence, that Christianity has just become another variant of Japanese thought, that it was some kind of seed not mentioned in the parable of the sower, the seed that is planted but becomes genetically modified and grows into something else! Continue reading ‘Things that are Impossible in Japan’

Where the Father was, there Shall I be

Published
by
A.D.
on May 26, 2007
in Death, Harry Potter, Imaginary, Lacan and Real
. 2 Comments

I guess I should have just posted my proposal! But don’t ask me for more (that is, until the proposal gets accepted and I actually have to write the paper)

Considering the importance of the Imaginary register in children’s literature, it is no surprise that the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling, the best selling children’s books ever, has some fairly typical imaginary/fantasy elements, such as wizards and witches with improbable powers. Rowling, though, has stated that her books are simply “about death”—the one element which fantasies seem to always miraculously avoid. While the genre of fantasy in its purest sense obviates death, and thus the dimension of theReal, Rowling’s book are structured such that the Imaginary realm is always running into its own limit, the paths of fantasy always being surprised by the stroke of death.
The structure of Harry’s fantasy world, and consequently the structure of the books themselves, is centered on the loss of his parents, but especially that of his father, whose specter makes an appearance in book three, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, as part of a unique time travel sequence. Unlike most time travel sequences which are structured such that an alternative time thread must be created which runs parallel to the “real” time, and which functions as a powerful fantasy of how life could be “if only. . .” the sequence in this book maintains only one history—but with a twist. When Harry and his friends go back in time to ensure that Harry’s godfather, Sirius Black, is able to elude capture, we realize that everything they go back in time to do had already been accomplished by their time traveling selves. This would merely be a typical time-traveling conundrum were it not for the intrusion of the Real in the form of an impasse within the Imaginary. At the end of the initial narration Harry is saved from a gruesome death by the apparition of a stag controlled by what he takes to be the ghost of his deceased father. In the second narration the time traveling Harry, in a moment of shock, realizes that it was not his father who had conjured up the saving image but that it is his present, time-traveling self that must take the responsibility to perform the difficult charm.

The time travel sequence reiterates a theme that is present throughout the whole series, namely, that Harry must come to terms with his desire that his father could save him, or the fantasy that he might never have lost him. When Harry steps into the place that he had reserved for his father by performing the conjuration himself, we have a moment analogous to what Lacan referred to as the “traversing of the fantasy.” At this moment the fantasy dies, yet inasmuch as Harry is able to act from the place at which his fantasies had controlled him, we witness a sublimation in the Lacanian sense, that is, a re-structuring of the relationship of the Imaginary order to that of the Real, such that the Imaginary does not function to block the Real, but to maintain it, as well as the subject’s minimal distance from it.

Why read Harry Potter?

Published
by
A.D.
on May 25, 2007
in Art, Death, Harry Potter and Lacan
. 3 Comments

I just finished writing up a proposal for this book on Lacan and Children’s Literature in which I argue that one of the powerful things about the Harry Potter books is the way in which the Imaginary order is always cut by the Real, by Death. Harry’s biggest fantasies concern the care that his parents, or Sirius, or Dumbledore might provide him, and as the books progress these supports get taken away from him, one by one. I also argue that the structure is that of a mobius strip, such that the opposition between the Imaginary and the Real is intrinsic to the structure of the fantasies of the characters. Rowling herself said the books are about death, which, in my opinion, the (pure) genre of fantasy has always completely obviated. Rowling, though, sets out like she’s going to give the traditional weight to the imaginary elements (the overblown powers, the ridiculous dualisms) but then always manages to be very surprising in the way these fantasies run into their very own Real limits. The books are theologically right on, as well, for the very simple fact that Harry loves because he is not afraid to die.

In Praise of Shame

Published
by
A.D.
on May 18, 2007
in Auden, Copjec, Lacan, Shame and Zizek
. 6 Comments

Joan Copjec’s article “May ‘68, the Emotional Month” which appears in Lacan: The Silent Partners (Ed. Slavoj Zizek) fleshes out Lacan’s distinction between shame and guilt in which shame is the experience, very close to anxiety, of being overly proximate to objet a, the object cause of desire. Guilt, on the other hand, is called a sham jouissance by Lacan and betrays a flight from anxiety, and thus a flight from Being. There is a play on the French word for shame (honte) and the science of being (ontology) giving us the neologism, hontology. Guilt arises because one has fixed one’s response to the encounter with the object that induces anxiety, in a desperate effort to control the situation. Copjec writes: The fraudulent nature of this jouissance has everything to do with the fact that it gives one a false sense that the core of one’s being is someething knowable, possessable as an identity, a property, a surplus-value attaching to one’s person.” (109) How then shall we steer clear of this transformation from shame into guilt, especially seeing that capitalism is founded on such a universal move of taking loans out on our shame, securing a future at the cost of Being. One helpful image that Copjec gives us is of the veil that covers this place of shame. Shall we avert our eyes from it? Shall we rip it off? Shall we tremble in fear of the priests who stand before it? Is it not clear that these are all responses which engender guilt (which, don’t forget, has its own peculiar pleasure)? Copjec urges us to notice the veil itself, to enter into its arabesques, to thank God for the distance that it affords us, the breathing room. I’ve been looking at the wonderful images on Davis’ blog, all of which are veils upon the almighty. For our words to be good words, we must speak from these terrible places, from these veils that inspire terror and unknowing. There is no way to abolish anxiety (as Auden said, it is the condition of human existence, and in this way our age is most honest) but there is a way to transform our relationship to it.

Being There

Published
by
A.D.
on April 27, 2007
in Film, Lacan and Psychoanalysis
. 3 Comments

I just watched the movie Being There, starring Peter Sellers. It’s a real fantastic movie, one of the most profound statements on death, language, and TV that I’ve seen in a long time. The story revolves around this gardener whose name is Chance Gardner, who has grown up in an estate that he’s never been allowed to leave. His only source of knowledge of the outside world has come through TV, which he watches constantly, while eating, sleeping, and talking to people. The movie opens with the death of his boss, the owner of the estate, and Chance is simply dumped out on the means streets of DC, completely out of place, an autistic baby man.
By the end of the movie the movers and shakers our great capital want him to run for president of the United States of America. How did this happen? I don’t want to go into the details because what I’m really interested in is the relations to language, image, and The Other. In Lacan, the master signifier, while truly ruling the world of discourse, is primordially dumb, both in the sense that it’s most powerful when it’s silent, and that it is in essence ridiculous, absurd, stupid, meaningless. The master signifier is not a word, but it is the Word. And it is not only the Word that determines our lives (perhaps a phrase that we misunderstood when we were three years old) but the Word that created the universe. How absurd that at the end of analysis we see that our desire is compelled by a misunderstanding, by a slip of the tongue, and that tongue was not even ours–we can’t even claim the mistake as our own. Like at the end of The Death of Ivan Ilyich where everyone gathers around the bedside of the pitiful dying Ivan, and when they see the end has come, say “it is over.” But Ivan Ilyich hears in his eternal fall, “Death is over.” His ear fails him as he gains the ranks of the blessed.
But back to the movie, where we must take into account the name of our Gardener, that is, Chance. The master signifier is arbitrary, aleatory, pure chance, pure gamble, as is the Word–why does God speak to Israel, to Abraham, and Moses? Why does he choose the dunce, Peter, and all those greedy and cowardly tax collector types? We cannot know but we must believe, like Adam in Paradise Lost, which makes us end up sounding pious and ignorant, a label that we will never completely shake. . . . We should notice too that his last name is problematic as well—we never know if people call him Gardner because he is one or because that’s his name. Does not the Master Signifier name hold all the confusion that is related to trying to distinguish a name from a proper name, trying to distinguish Adam from Man, Jesus from the archetype laid down by Joshua.
As Chance finds himself in the middle of big money and big politics in Washington all of a sudden we realize people are calling him Chauncey; they have misheard him, there was some confusion, and he doesn’t take any pains to clear it up. Is it Chance or Chauncey? Is he a gardener, or is Gardner simply his name? In avoiding the signifier Chance are they betraying their disavowal of the arbitrary nature of the Word, the kind of fear we feel when we read that, “God hardened the heart of Pharaoah”? How could heaven and hell be so arbitrary? But beyond that, how could Christians accept such an arbitrary God? Pascal said that we must simply wager on the truth of God’s reveleation! Gambling? with God? Its ridiculous. Could even be a fraud.
How does the film represent this? By showing that everything Chance does he learned from TV, the ultimate source of dumb (even with all that talking!) if there ever was one. He shakes hands like prime ministers do, he kisses like fake lovers, he does yoga and aerobics simply because he sees it on the screen—and everyone says that he is the most authentic, the most real, person they have ever met. He is the only one who doesn’t lie in Washington, and yet everything he does comes from that buzzing talking box. Now this isn’t completely true because we must remember that he is one who works in the garden, and who knows the life and death of trees and shrubs. He becomes famous overnight for saying on a talk show that economics must be like gardening, having a time to grow and a time to die. We should also note that he is illiterate.
The women adore him, want to sleep with him, the men idolize him (some of them also want to sleep with him, especially when he tells them he just “likes to watch [TV!]”). He gets adopted by an extremely rich “king maker” and his wife: Ben and Eve. Ben is dying and Chance sees what everyone else does, but doesn’t mince words. He simply looks at Ben and says, “You’re dying, aren’t you?” Which makes Ben trust him with all his being and soul. So the master signifier, the Word, is not only dumb, but it makes friends with death. It sees death as simply another episode on television, a child’s view of death, mixed with an unassuming resurrection (watch Ponette). And we love nothing more than those who are close to death. And those like Yeltsin we can love only after they are dead.

When Eve, who is falling in love with him, attempts to kiss him, he can’t take his eyes off the TV, luckily enough there is a love scene at the moment on the screen and so he can imitate that with Eve and have a moment of “sexual relationship”–but the channel changes and his body goes limp. He says to her “I like to watch”; she is confused, but then falls to the floor, writhing. Is she masturbating? Is she coming? It’s hard to tell. Chance is not really interested, as he’s attempting to imitate the yoga posture on TV at that moment. The next morning she says to him that because he did not take her, did not take advantage of her, she was finally able to take advantage of herself, and she was opened, purged, renewed. Is this a sexual relationship? I would say yes, a Lacanian, non-sexual relationship, relationship. They are truly in love because they give to each other what they do not have. He, as the final Word, has no desire, and thus cannot not desire her, cannot make love to her. But he has given her desire back to herself, and she finally sees her own self-love. Is she just a narcissist? Perhaps, but she has finally seen herself as one. Will they ever make love again? Will he become the president? These questions are absurd, which is why the final scene in the movie shows him walking on water, while Ben’s funeral goes on behind him. Here the narrative breaks down, well, the movie is over for one, but our ability to look into the future of these characters is nullified, for they have no future. Their exposure to the Word has un-sutured their lives, and they have become like mad Peters, walking on water in spite of themselves.