Theorem: The attempt to represent Substance with perfect objectivity necessarily fails.

Proof: The mind tries to use its memory as a map to represent the territory of the field of perception. The problem is that the conscious being is one element in this field. If the mind tries to represent itself representing itself, it runs into an infinite regress like two mirrors facing each other. Even if the mind were a perfect cartographer, it must necessarily represent the point where it represents itself by a metalinguistic symbol that stands for something like "self-description goes here". If it does not, it gets stuck in an infinite loop until it runs out of memory and returns an error. QED. — absoluteaspiration

I like this part. 'Objectivity' is a little tricky, though. To be objective is to be unbiased, to see not with personal eyes but rather with the eyes of the implicit ideal community. To see as one ought to see, to see through the eyes of the end of inquiry.

That aside, it's great to frame the problem in terms of the impossibility of the representation of representation itself.

"If only we had an X state, we'd basically have peace," is a fantasy of peace without having to love the monstrous Neighbor whose very existence gets under your skin. Since antagonism is the result of deep problems immanent to the very constitution of the subject, these statements are structurally fallacious. — absoluteaspiration

I think this is good too. We project/splinter our own contradictions in order to hide from the crack in our cores. The crack is contingent, we want to believe. Some stable arrangement is at least possible. But the monstrous neighbor is actually inside us, the part we try not to see. We hate the monstrous neighbor for disturbing our dream of having a uncracked face.

We openly acknowledge the irreducibly monstrous dimension of the Neighbor and love him anyway because we must.

In other words, the only answer is dedicating oneself to the Cause of emancipation. With this final gesture, pride's spine is finally shattered, but no God remains to guarantee humility's reward. — absoluteaspiration

I can't follow you here, though it's well presented. I can't love the neighbor. I can't hold that occasional love fixed. Nor can I believe in the shattering of pride, but only in the transformation of its object.

And who are we emancipating for what? Freedom dreams of a binding cause, dreams an escape from itself. The ecstasy is in the violence of continual transformation. 'I'm set free to find a new illusion.' I glut myself at the museum of masks. My face is a hole is a mouth for personality. It vomits back its half-digested fare as a new work of art, mostly unsuccessful, mostly 'guilty' of a machine-like predictability. 'I' am mostly a loser in the war against cliche and the quest for surprise and novelty. Zizek himself works at being a strong poet (Harold Bloom).

Slovene philosopher Slavoj Zizek argues against mystical attempts to alter states of consciousness. Instead, he says we should "censor our dreams" and engage in emancipatory struggle as the only road to salvation. — absoluteaspiration

This 'road to salvation' is one more version of the dream, one more myth. And isn't this an old myth indeed? Stop dreaming and fix the world, you fakers! But we wake to dream. Hand me the remote control. Quotidian reality is insufficiently dense. Zizek is a lovable madman.

Another problem here is the vagueness of the struggle. Even the GOP thinks it fights for freedom. 'Everyone' claims to work for Freedom or Justice or Fairness. Hence the utter triviality of chirping about them. When, however, we get to details, then get to boring, old-fashioned politics, which ties to find compromises at the intersection of incompatible abstract pseudo-absolutes.

Just to be clear, I liked your post and my response is meant to be friendly. Forgive any aggressive tone, please, as just being in the movement of the ideas.

How did you reach that notion of ideal community? Who says that a community within those parameters is ideal? Zizek says that the "end of inquiry" is itself an impossible fantasy.

Regarding emancipation, dedication to the Cause leads to salvation in the purely negative sense that you'd hate yourself if you didn't do it. But you're right, why you'd hate yourself needs to be motivated by a lot of material from Badiou. Unfortunately, I haven't read a single one of his books.

How did you reach that notion of ideal community? — absoluteaspiration

To answer playfully, from you & Zizek.

We do the only thing we can do, censor our fantasies and brutally formalize where we stand. — absoluteaspiration

Who is this 'we'? Surely you speak not only to share a mere opinion but to make a case to all reasonable and decent people.

In other words, the only answer is dedicating oneself to the Cause of emancipation. — absoluteaspiration

The only answer for...reasonable people who are swayed by you & Zizek. And if 'we' work toward emancipation, we are incarnating or installing the ideal community so that it is actual.

It's not my original idea, this ideal community, though I do experiment with paraphrases. What is it to be rational? What is it to be unbiased/objective? Humanism is latent in post-religious philosophy and science. 'Reason' is the 'holy ghost' is intimately connected to an ideal community (of saints scientists/philosophers). Isn't it also latent in the Cause of emancipating others? Surely we aren't emancipating only one kind of human being but all human beings. The idea that race, gender, nationality is a merely surface is an expression of humanism. The 'tribe' is expanded to all rational beings. Those who resist this expansion of the tribe are racists, sexists, fascists, etc. And those who appeal to supernatural authorities are 'irrational' or 'reactionary.' It is we humans who determine our own fate, via a universal human reason distributed through all of us. That's why you and I have to give an account, give reasons, for our beliefs. Not I, but reason in me is worth listening to.

Who says that a community within those parameters is ideal? — absoluteaspiration

This is what all the fighting about. It's the clash of groups with different notions of the ideal community.

Zizek says that the "end of inquiry" is itself an impossible fantasy. — absoluteaspiration

I agree with Zizek. I was speaking fast and loose. But what I'm aiming at is describing the goal of 'being on the right side of history.' This is all tied up with the myth of progress, scientific and moral.

Regarding emancipation, dedication to the Cause leads to salvation in the purely negative sense that you'd hate yourself if you didn't do it. — absoluteaspiration

A person could also hate themselves in retrospect for 'wasting' their whole life trying. I'm not taking sides in some simple way. I'm just speaking at a certain distance from the idea. As I mentioned, some of the people who think Trump is Nero Christ believe that they are the good guys. They are dedicated to the Cause of draining the swamp. They are also soldiers of emancipation & truth, in their own eyes.

I really don't want to speak as a prophet. I still don't know who I am, except as the person addicted to not knowing who they are. But that's just it. Dissolving into the Cause looks a little like death to me. ' best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.' And let's consider Zizek himself. He is capitalism's finest product, an old, fat man who can dazzle the youth with his strange brew of dirty jokes and seventh-order talk. But I love the guy. He's a great symbol for us. I think that he knows more than he lets on. And actually he tells the truth in jokes. He's a monster. The world is just raw material for him. Revolution is just a motif for him as a composer of ideas and attitudes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-gK-CzCHug

I relate to very much to Zizek in this video. Life is a monster's dream.

When you desire something, that is because you misperceive the object of your desire as the object small a. Often, it appears to be a shard of the glory you lost when you underwent your traumatic experience, whatever that was. Nevertheless, all this talk of lost glory is usually located strictly within the coordinates of the constitutive fantasy of your subjectivity, not in the facts of external reality. — absoluteaspiration

I've always been fascinated by Lacan & yet ambivalent. But I like the idea of the impossible object. I connect it to a distance effect. From afar, the real object looks like the impossible object. If only we could get that thing, often her, all is well. But maybe we get her. But then we discover that she isn't her. I also think of cats chasing the red dots projected by a laser pointer. Or the green-ness of the grass on the other side of the fence, caused by or painted with an impossible green by that fence.

For Lacan, 'it is not enough that the analyst should support the function of Tiresias. He must also, as Apollinaire tells us, have breasts'[13] – must represent or incorporate the (missing) object of desire. — Wiki

This is another theme I like. The analyst is like the sage or the guru. He depends on a distance effect. The analysand is the young seeker who must find something behind the obvious. I think of the fathers and sons. The son becomes a father precisely when he abandons the idea of the father. So the 'elite' in this case is a patricidal fraternity. This fraternity (of critical reason) does not and indeed cannot exclude anyone directly. But entry costs the death of the father-son complex. The son gives up on the existence of the secret, and the false father gives up on his claim to possess it. And all of this spiel is only bearable or sensible within the fraternity (or sorority if anyone prefers, since the human is not essentially sexed. Reason's only genital is the tongued mouth.)

To me the secret symbolizes an immediate access to truth, perfectly present to a perfectly distinct ego. The isolated ego gazes directly at the impossible object. But to me it seems that the isolated ego is a superstition encouraged by our possession of distinct bodies. The ego is 'made of' a public language. It is voice speaking an essentially alien language, at a distance from itself, unable to say exactly what 'it' means.

These signs defy clear classification into subjective and objective, blurring the boundaries of Substance from within. — absoluteaspiration

I think you are getting at the same thing in that quote above. The ego as consciousness is a voice, a string of signs. The fantasy or ideal is that some kind of meaning of perfectly interior, and this perfect interiority is also the fantasy of the pure ego. For a perfect philosophy to be possible (a time-conquering theory of existence), we need meaning that is completely detachable from signs and their frailties, the necessary possibility of their recontextualization and semantic drift. Doubting with Zizek the end of inquiry, I think instead we'll never know who we are.

Thank you for the clarifications. I hope you're not tired of this debate because I finally found time for it.

I can't love the neighbor. I can't hold that occasional love fixed. Nor can I believe in the shattering of pride, but only in the transformation of its object. — Eee

The love that's required is not a sentimental outpouring, only joining the same Cause as comrades. Don't be too proud to love your Neighbor. That's the only way to prevent the Sinthome from killing us all.

And who are we emancipating for what? — Eee

Once you can leave Zizek's version of Plato's Cave, the only Causes that makes sense are universal rebellions against oppression. For example, Zizek endorses ultimately creating a society where everyone will be free to develop their latent potential to the fullest.

As to method, Zizek proposes advancing in steps that are so reasonable that they are hard for the powers that be to argue against, but so "ideologically" shocking that accepting them creates a slippery slope. Personally, I think that's a bit naive. There is no step so small that the powers that be won't be able to rile up their base against it. If you ask for the right to breathe, conservatives will be up in arms, demanding that the government ban air. I think we should begin by asking for their necks and have them negotiate us down to what we wanted from the start.

Stop dreaming and fix the world, you fakers! — Eee

No one is endorsing this, Zizek least of all. His motto is "Don't act. Just think!" The world can't be "fixed" by creating totalized utopias. But if you want nothing fixed, then you want me to compromise with what I desire, and I won't live like a monk to please your ideological tastes!

Even the GOP thinks it fights for freedom. — Eee

Not being an American, I'm not familiar with the specifics of the GOP, but from what I do know, their approach is fundamentally obscurantist, appealing to the preservation of the American way of life, etc. Obscurantist "justice" corresponds to Stage 7, and represents everything Zizek is fundamentally opposed to. Stage 8 revolutionary justice starts from the standpoint of those left out by the system and potentially appeals to everyone.

To answer playfully, from you & Zizek. — Eee

The "community" you quoted me referring to consists of the subject inside Plato's Cave, the subject outside it and the "difference" between them. That is as far from ideal as you can possibly imagine. That "we" are the people who see each other as a monstrous Neighbor that pokes their psychic wounds.

This is not to say that all community is bad in Zizek's philosophy. The "good" community comes from comradeship in the same Cause of universal emancipation. As you might imagine, there is no perfection here either, virtual or otherwise.

Isn't it also latent in the Cause of emancipating others? — Eee

If you believe Zizek's theory, we love the Neighbor to save ourselves. Dedication to the Cause might lead to more physical pain, but everything else Hurts lots more in a spiritual way, as explicated by materialist psychoanalysis. That's the theory whose outlines I tried to explain above. I see three choices:

1. Die to uphold the Sinthome. Makes no sense if you don't believe it was created by God.

2. Try to fix the Sinthome by splitting people into finer and finer subdivisions. Won't work because yours is a spiritual sickness whose pain can only be dulled by freely choosing love.

3. Love the Neighbor in a spirit of comradeship.

Are you proposing a fourth?

The idea that race, gender, nationality is a merely surface is an expression of humanism. — Eee

Zizek would beg to differ. He doesn't want us to identify with the humanity of others. There is no comradeship in mere identification. He wants us to choose love despite our differences. Whether comrades are human, robot or alien, if they are on the side of liberating everyone, Zizek doesn't care.

This is what all the fighting about. It's the clash of groups with different notions of the ideal community. — Eee

Zizek thinks we should give up that notion entirely for all the reasons I've been going on about.

A person could also hate themselves in retrospect for 'wasting' their whole life trying. — Eee

The Cause is not tied to any future perfection we're trying to reach. We are fighting out of sheer desperation, because we have run out of options, and we must. Zizek doesn't believe in progress, only the fight itself. If anything comes of it, that's a bonus, though definitely contextual and probably a temporary one. In terms of pessimism, he's right up there with David Benatar.

They are also soldiers of emancipation & truth, in their own eyes. — Eee

I don't believe that they believe it. If they had faith in their Cause, they wouldn't be so consistently wrong about every single detail. But they clearly only care about winning arguments out of pure spite, not being authentic. There is no ideal theory that is specifically Leftist. They can all can be subverted into serving conservatism if people refuse to care enough.

If you want to know what I think of Trumpists, here's a video from a channel I recommend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZkFtTQjF5A I think they are all more or less guided by perverse motivations like that. I think so because I know a Trump supporter on the internet who is clearly aware of the truth about everything, but he still supports Trump because he identifies as a conservative and he's terrified that liberals are out to get him. Honestly, I admire him for having the courage to tell the truth like that.

The son gives up on the existence of the secret, and the false father gives up on his claim to possess it. — Eee

I'm no expert, but my understanding is that in Lacanian psychoanalysis, the analyst is a master who forces the subject to be free. He does this by pretending to be an oracle and letting the subject talk until until she speaks the fateful Word that he must repeat back to her. The analyst's job is identify that Word among all the things she says and keep bringing it up until it is forced to fall into her World and complete her subjectivation so that she can stop repeating her pathological behavior.

And all of this spiel is only bearable or sensible within the fraternity (or sorority if anyone prefers, since the human is not essentially sexed. Reason's only genital is the tongued mouth.) — Eee

I really should point out that according to Zizek, the subject inside Plato's Cave is essentially masculine and the subject outside it is essentially feminine regardless of biological sex. These are two different subjectivities.

The masculine subject is the one who keeps feeling confronted by worldly might that surpasses his, against which he sacrifices his sacrifices his material body to uphold the moral law. His foremost experience is the castration anxiety of being unable to perfectly fulfill the law and hence not being a real man. You see, Kant says you can never be sure whether or not you are truly upholding the law or being driven by pathological desires for worldly gain. But he ambiguously admits that some figures represent constitutive exceptions to the law, namely the moral principles themselves, feminine subjects and father figures.

The feminine subject is the one that feels confronted by massive barriers and sees no problem with sacrificing herself on the justification, incomprehensible to the masculine subject, that the barrier is not literally infinite in extent and it is therefore insignificant. All the while, she openly admits that all things are subject to the law without any exceptions.

It's the same contradiction with a slight shift in perspective. The manly man relies on others to tell him what to do and feels like a failure if he doesn't obey, but he chooses the people or ideas that he is determined to obey and switches these all the time based on what he himself wants. The feminine subject just does what she wants without going through all this rigmarole of manliness. She has left Plato's Cave.

Nevertheless, it is femininity that is shakier and based on a fundamental pretense of being feminine. Every non-pathological subject is "really" a Stage 4 primary subject regardless of sex, ridden with the guilt of failing to uphold the law. And yet, femininity is a pretense that we really cannot do without.

How this relates to my original post would require another massive rant all by itself. The material is endless, so I'm moving on.

To me the secret symbolizes an immediate access to truth, perfectly present to a perfectly distinct ego. — Eee

For once, Zizek actually agrees that immediacy is a myth. His formulation is something like, there is a void of ambiguity traversing the world of ideas, splitting each idea from within: "A rose that is not X is no rose at all, where X is the void of ambiguity in the heart of the ideal Rose," is the feminine formulation. "That is a rose and nothing else, where that nothing is a thing-like void," is the masculine formulation.

To understand the latter, recall Hegel's attempt to base becoming on being and nothing. Although I have to say, I don't think "a rose and nothing else" works. A better formulation would be "the rose that is not a rose" as a thing that blurs the boundaries of Roseness.

This void replaces the Kantian gap between the experiential and noumenal worlds, serves as the grounding for the Kantian antinomies, and therefore form the basis of dialectics.

I agree that the complexity is part of the fun. When you lose all hope, you spend your time giggling at word games of infinite complexity.

Doubting with Zizek the end of inquiry, I think instead we'll never know who we are. — Eee

I don't know if you'll read all this, but thanks again. Real life beckons once more.

I hope you're not tired of this debate because I finally found time for it. — absoluteaspiration

I love talking about this stuff. Your post was deep and ambitious. Just my kind of talk.

Zizek least of all. His motto is "Don't act. Just think!" The world can't be "fixed" by creating totalized utopias. — absoluteaspiration

Right. That's one of the complexities of Zizek. And yet what is the Cause but world-fixing? I'm not against the Cause. I just find it indeterminate.

Zizek doesn't believe in progress, only the fight itself. — absoluteaspiration

Belief in the fight itself seems to require that the world remain imperfect. Otherwise the identity dissolves with the antagonist upon success. I suspect that the wicked human heart will always find a new antagonist, a new injustice.

The "good" community comes from comradeship in the same Cause of universal emancipation. — absoluteaspiration

That's the ideal community I'm talking about. What is implied in any discussion of what we ought to do? And the notion of truth itself is tied up with unbiasedness, the absence of merely personal distortion. How does this apply to this very discussion? We are meeting 'in reason,' since we are both identified with articulating our positions in a way that assimilates criticism.

If you believe Zizek's theory, we love the Neighbor to save ourselves. — absoluteaspiration

Well I think there's wisdom in that. It's also just sophisticated Christianity. The notion of loving the neighbor is indeed profound. We meet 'in' reason or science or Christ by negating (falling out of love with) our own idiosyncracies. While one can stress forgiving/tolerating otherness, which is important, another thing to consider is our endless human vanity. We don't want the genius of others to penetrate us. We'd prefer that our personal limits be the limits of the species.

I think we save and/or sophisticating ourselves by letting ourselves die, by walking through the fire. We save our life by losing it. I am the neighbor and the neighbor is me. But this insight comes at a cost. And it's not obvious to me, anyway, how to get the right politics out of it.

Are you proposing a fourth? — absoluteaspiration

I think of what I'm doing an phenomenology. Mostly I want to point out what we already know without knowing that we know it. The stuff that is too close is farthest away. And the self-consciousness I have in mind actually dissolves that so-called self into embodied language. IMV, progress in philosophy is moral progress, though the morality is not one of innocence but rather the wisdom of the serpent. But all this metaphor is intended as metaphor. 'I' am one piece of the metaphysical-metaphorical species describing its own operation and nature.

Zizek thinks we should give up that notion entirely for all the reasons I've been going on about. — absoluteaspiration

I get that. But what of the gap between 'is and 'ought'? The philosopher sees through the noise and transcends trivial, local identities. At least relatively so. Others mostly don't. I'm not against shoulds, but I'm less interested in them than I used to be. All those people in groups are on fire with a clump of shoulds.

I don't believe that they believe it. If they had faith in their Cause, they wouldn't be so consistently wrong about every single detail. But they clearly only care about winning arguments out of pure spite, not being authentic. — absoluteaspiration

Some of them may secretly be self-conscious thugs muddying the water. Others are clearly sincere. I've explored them on reddit. And many choose Trump as a stand against something they perceive as a matriarchy, a culture of not of the guilty but the sick. I'm on the left, but I can see it from the outside, the parts of it I don't like. Anyway, the Trumpians are our neighbors. So what does that mean?

he's terrified that liberals are out to get him. — absoluteaspiration

Exactly, and liberals are (some of them) trying to install a new type of man. Clinton was viewed as a castrating witch?

I really should point out that according to Zizek, the subject inside Plato's Cave is essentially masculine and the subject outside it is essentially feminine regardless of biological sex. These are two different subjectivities. — absoluteaspiration

Perhaps you can say more about this. I recall Zizek writing that 'men' think they know who they are, whereas women know that they don't know who they. Also is Derrida's Spurs the 'man' (a mode of personality and not a biological sex) identifies his face with his mask. His mask is his face. The woman knows that she is faceless, that she is nothing but a system of masks concealing a void.

Often the thinkers I like take the side of the woman, the goddess. Her sons are the masks that think they are faces. The philosopher or analyst is like a woman who wears the right mask for the task at hand.

The manly man relies on others to tell him what to do and feels like a failure if he doesn't obey, but he chooses the people or ideas that he is determined to obey and switches these all the time based on what he himself wants. — absoluteaspiration

Interesting. There are lots of ways to use these symbols, but I tend to associate the father or the king with the role of masculinity. The penis is a crown. The maximally masculine position is something like the mad emperor who no longer bothers to justify his will in terms of the universal. The sublimated version of this is prophet who claims to be God on earth, or his primary representative. He disdains reason as an inferior faculty and claims direct access. Stirner is something like this, in that critical reason is ladder that reaches the end of ideological history, an awareness of the structure of the game of masters that allows for an ideal (and only ideal) mastery of mastery.

But the ironic master still craves recognition. The divine ego is actually 'only' a string of signs that an intrinsically public. The subject is only substantial in terms of something trans-subjective. The 'evil' path leads back to philosophy, science, and art. The father (direct access) is let go as a personal myth and possibly understood as the truth of humanism. That the species (or universal reason) has no god but itself.

For once, Zizek actually agrees that immediacy is a myth. His formulation is something like, there is a void of ambiguity traversing the world of ideas, splitting each idea from within: — absoluteaspiration

This reminds me of Derrida. Immediacy is a dream of eternity within the medium of time/concept. Or man is time trying to climb or slip out of itself. Static, eternal truth is a version of god. If we can get it, we participate in that frozen god. Our flesh is a vessel of that ideal chandelier.

But the incarnation myth is all about god being flesh and caught up in time. I read Derrida as one more thinker of the incarnation, just like the humanist Feuerbach.

When you lose all hope, you spend your time giggling at word games of infinite complexity. — absoluteaspiration

Losing all hope is like losing all fear. The 'all' is important here. As mortals living decent lives (at least I'm relatively lucky), I have all kinds of little, mortal hopes and fears.

But the philosophical self has the seriousness of a child at play. I guess I'm talking about an old conflict, that goes back to Marx versus Stirner. The serious political thinker must read the ironist as an irresponsible child. But the ironist can also read the serious political thinker as lost in the illusion that he has a face. The ironist can learn to parrot the politician, can write his part in a play, just as Shakespeare wrote both villians and heroes while therefore transcending both. So the ironist can mock himself and is not simply the ironist.

For the ironist, the 'religion as opiate' or 'infinite jest as opiate' is itself one more opiate, one more flight from our facelessness and complicity. We can also talk of thinkers who identity with the good and thinkers who experience themselves as neutral, as evil as they are good.

I don't know if you'll read all this, but thanks again. Real life beckons once more. — absoluteaspiration

It was a pleasure to read. Some of the stuff I didn't respond to, but only because I couldn't find my way into it. Feel free to elaborate or paraphrase and maybe I'll get at your meaning.

I don't have The Fragile Absolute, but I have thought about Marxism-meets-Christianity. What do you think of this review? I'll respond to it. We can get to understand one another over time, I think, by talking about intersections of our interest/understanding.

This is the reviewer paraphrasing Zizek, or claiming to.

First, it makes no sense to speak of a relative truth that doesn't apply universally. For a claim to be considered true, it must, by definition, be presumed to be universally valid for everyone. If others reject the validity of a claim that I believe to be true, that's because they are mistaken, not because they hold a different subject position or come from a different culture. Second, talk of respecting difference or otherness fetishizes empty abstractions and is effectively meaningless, mere grandstanding rhetoric. In practice, respecting another's belief or practice requires us to take it seriously enough to judge whether it is true or false, right or wrong. — review

That sounds right. I suspect there is contempt in the apparently compassionate tolerance of what is false to us. 'Some people aren't even worth arguing with.' This reminds of the ironist. 'Let the inferiors think they have faces & identities. They need training wheels. '

Žižek does contribute something new to Anglo-American debates about the status of belief in postmodern societies with his account of disavowed belief, which begins with a simple premise: "today, we believe more than ever" (6). The catch is that contemporary believers are confused and fail to recognize the extent or the nature of their beliefs, particularly when it comes to "religious matters" (5). Thus, to the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk's oft-cited formula of cynical reason - "I know what I am doing; nonetheless, I am doing it ... " - Žižek adds a final clause: " ... because I don't know what I believe" — review

This sounds right, too. And I'd add that humanists tend to ignore their own foundation in universal reason. It's the water they swim in. Finally there is perhaps no sharp line between the metaphorical and the literal. The quote above focuses on embodied beliefs that hide beneath a layer of conscious cynicism. 'Because I know that capitalism (or some other X) is bad and have the right bumper sticker, I can keep on playing my small role in perpetuating what I 'know' is bad. ' Zizek's work is itself one of the fun ways we can spend our free time, once we get home from our jobs. And his books are on sale next to The Power of Now or 12 Rules for Life. The product is identity, or ways of (consciously) being.

A failure to comprehend how belief externalizes itself in material practices led "Enlightenment critics [to] misread 'primitive' myths" (6). By imposing their model of "literal direct belief" on people from tribal cultures, these critics regarded the myths as simply ignorant or naïve (6) — review

I think this is also true, especially after reading The Masks of God. Even today's supposed believers in God and afterlife mostly live just like everyone else. Grand narrative beliefs are not like believing that the cat is on the mat. All kinds of profound myths have a quasi-philosophical content. Its just that relying more on imagery adds an often desirable ambiguity and suggestiveness.

Žižek, it's worth noting, frequently uses postmodern as a term of abuse. When he does so, typically, it's to signal his opposition to the postmodernists' tendency to place their directly held beliefs at a remove. And who might these postmodernists be? Žižek's examples include: Deconstructionists whose skepticism requires the positing of "an Other who 'really believes'"; ironists who incessantly place their remarks within scare quotes and (borrowing from Umberto Eco) self-conscious lovers who say things like, "As the poets would have put it, I love you" (6). Such phenomena, which Žižek treats as symptoms of disavowed, displaced, or suspended belief, are a major target of Žižek's analysis in The Puppet and the Dwarf. One of Žižek's signature critical moves is to make explicit the underlying presuppositions, the disavowed beliefs, and the obscene fantasies that secretly support our consciously held positions and intentional acts. Although the aforementioned postmodernists pride themselves on being self-reflexive, Žižek pinpoints their blind spot: an anti-foundationalism that resists positing a conceptual totality on the grounds that such thinking risks becoming totalitarian. As a result of their principled anti-foundationalism (which functions as a kind of disavowed foundationalism or, for more canny thinkers, foundationalism under erasure) the postmodernists neglect to take into account the consequences of their epistemological skepticism and self-conscious irony. One particularly detrimental consequence is the general undermining of truth claims in an intellectual climate in which directly asserted beliefs are too readily judged as equivalent forms of dogmatism. — review

This is fascinating, but it's also much like the grumpy, traditional response to pomo. It's not so far from Jordan Peterson. Those who are serious about ironic distance are failing at their own project, like Stirner in his weaker moments. The anti-foundationalism I've been exposed to is more about an awareness of the futility of forging an explicit foundation. And we don't need such a foundation, since our being-in-the-world and being-in-language already is our dark foundation. We are already intelligible to one another. The explicit foundationalist is often some version of the father, attempting to fix an image of reason and normalize a discourse in his own favor. If it's pomo to say so, then we're all pomo to the degree that we see the rationalizations of others take the form of reason. That's the ordinary madness of philosophers. Their 'delusions' are abstract.

But I run the risk like we all do of seeming deluded to others or to myself a moment later.

This culturalization of belief - the transformation of our beliefs into cultural lifestyles - has dire ideological consequences. It depoliticizes us, as we are conditioned to tolerate or respect other lifestyles rather than to disagree and debate with others who hold beliefs that we consider to be mistaken. As a result, most contemporary forms of spirituality are complicit with the exploitative socioeconomic status quo. — review

As cleverly as this is articulated, it basically complains about freedom. If church and state are separated, then religion is one more lifestyle choice. One might say that our living religion, the one we will kill and die for, is our attachment to individual liberty. Freedom leads to pluralism leads to it being difficult to achieve a politically effective consensus. And then the culture war obscures the class war. As far as complicity goes, most if not all people are complicit in the exploitative status quo. That doesn't mean I don't hope we'll do better. Or that I'm against the quote above. I just think we are attached to our freedom and to some vision of a better society that such freedom quietly opposes.

Right. That's one of the complexities of Zizek. And yet what is the Cause but world-fixing? I'm not against the Cause. I just find it indeterminate. — Eee

Creating temporary crutches so we don't get snuffed out?

Belief in the fight itself seems to require that the world remain imperfect. — Eee

Since no one fixes the world, perfection is never reached.

I suspect that the wicked human heart will always find a new antagonist, a new injustice. — Eee

A new constitutive trauma creates a new world with its own story, complete with mysteries to uncover.

We are meeting 'in reason,' since we are both identified with articulating our positions in a way that assimilates criticism. — Eee

Fair enough, though I suspect Zizek, with his Freudian leanings, believes in reason less than I do.

Well I think there's wisdom in that. It's also just sophisticated Christianity. — Eee

Zizek says he's a "Christian atheist"; that is to say, neither a Christian nor a proper Marxist. What he really believes in is the one thing that every side hates: the Christian messianic component of Marxism itself! Zizek says that with the modern church being what it is, only an atheist can be a religious Christian who loves the Truth as much as he does. After reviewing the links below, can you honestly say he's wrong? He goes as far as to say that God died with Christ on the cross. Therefore, he believes that Christ was God even more literally than Christians do. Who was Christ? Only the most sublime hysteric (Stage 6) and eradicator of hypocrisy. Definitely a God fit for Leftists.

And it's not obvious to me, anyway, how to get the right politics out of it. — Eee

Look into Alain Badiou's philosophy of the Event. My starting point was Frank Ruda's For Badiou: Idealism Without Idealism.

I think of what I'm doing an phenomenology. — Eee

Zizek has a complex relationship with phenomenology. He's not a fan of Husserl's bracketing method because he thinks it turns people into zombies. For example, he notes that Zen training where the warrior reflexively cuts off enemies that "appear" is based on theory that is very close to the phenomenological method. The only way to be a person and not a tool is to let yourself feel emotions. On the other hand, Zizek is a phenomenologist in the sense implied by Freud's "analysis of the transference". Identifying actions that appear emotionally "impossible" is an important part of Zizek's approach.

But what of the gap between 'is and 'ought'? — Eee

Zizek is what would by now be called an old school leftist in that he wants non-pathological subjects to refuse to compromise with what they truly desire. For example, he tries to show that Heidegger's Nazism doesn't come from emotionalism, but from not going far enough. Conservatism comes from people obscuring their true desires out of fear. Universalism is not a metaphysically truer position per se, but a more sublime, hysterical and admirable position, like Christ against the Pharisees in the Gospels. The problem with theology is not the figure at its center, its logical rigor or its desire for truth. These are all good things. What's wrong is its cowardice in not going far enough with all these qualities to the point of rejecting worldly injustice with the sublime master it claims to worship.

Some of them may secretly be self-conscious thugs muddying the water. Others are clearly sincere. — Eee

You can't possibly tell me they support Trump sincerely even now. He's more of a troll candidate than ever. Conservatives like the fact that he pisses off "libtards". I can't prove what Trumpists really think, but don't you think that if conservatives were genuinely politically engaged, then they would at least make an effort to find out whether Fox News talking points match the facts rather than judging them solely by the criterion of whether or not they piss off liberals? It's not hard to discover that this is the quality of reporting you get on Fox News: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vMK-p6-M5E Yes, there are complete patsies who are incapable of verifying the truth, but surely they are in a minority?

I thought we already had a fairly good idea of why people support Trump. There are demographics in America that are losing their social status and falling back into the situation faced by the non-white poor. We know from empirical studies that losing what you have creates more fear than gaining more stuff brings satisfaction. We also know from terror management theory that people become more conservative and extremist when they are afraid. There have been extensive analyses of the structure of right-wing talking points commonly found on the internet: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJA_jUddXvY7v0VkYRbANnTnzkA_HMFtQ

Since I can't prove what they really think, all I can do is keep gesturing at the inconsistencies in this picture. I mean, we know that people active in politics tend to at least be aware of the facts themselves. Well, there are 200 women who are accusing Trump of sexual assault or rape. Are you seriously telling me that the women who support Trump now are rationally defending a different set of values? If that's possible, I can't honestly say I understand it. At least I'm not alone in seeing that something is off about these people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEpLKRkVFwU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMcAwqsk3eg

And many choose Trump as a stand against something they perceive as a matriarchy, a culture of not of the guilty but the sick. — Eee

This is just the thing. There is no matriarchy. Ergo, they hate the truth. They claim to love it, of course, but they are clearly lying.

Anyway, the Trumpians are our neighbors. So what does that mean? — Eee

Personally, I think conservatives are my Neighbors. We should be fighting for their interests too, at least insofar as these are universally emancipatory and not oppressive towards others, while mourning the fact that they are actively trying to screw us over for shits and giggles, but I can't say for sure that Zizek would agree. After all, they are not comrades.

Zizek has said many times that he loves reading intelligent conservative theorists, but I don't remember him addressing their place in the community. He keeps going on about how everyone fighting for universal causes should join one macro-rebellion, and how he sees the perfect figure of this dream in the alliance between Bernie and AOC, an old white guy (like Zizek) and a young colored woman joining forces for everyone's benefit.

Exactly, and liberals are (some of them) trying to install a new type of man. — Eee

Zizek doesn't stand for Leftism per se so much as breadth of vision. Leftism just happens to be closer to universal emancipation than conservatism.

Also is Derrida's Spurs the 'man' (a mode of personality and not a biological sex) identifies his face with his mask. His mask is his face. The woman knows that she is faceless, that she is nothing but a system of masks concealing a void. — Eee

That's exactly right. This is a deep issue.

To a masculine subject, his world consists of objects, though some of them are subjective projections. Some feminists protest against the objectification of women. While agreeing that objectification can be harmful, Zizek points out that objectification is not the primary patriarchal fantasy. The patriarchal fantasy is women enjoying giving pleasure to men. With his usual tact, he illustrates this with the example of porn, where the man is an objectified tool and the primary content is the woman's pleasure. It is this pleasure of the subordinate which titillates the exploiter. This is not objectification so much as a false (secondary) subjectification where the woman is not a monstrous Neighbor but a friendly subject somehow created by a perfect subdivision of society (Stage 7). Therefore, true freedom is the freedom to partially objectify yourself in whatever manner pleases you.

For Zizek, sexuality is a Hegelian triad. Masculinity is the substance, femininity is the void and "transgender" is loosely the real antinomy, the inability to commit to either of them. The rise in sublimity from masculinity to transgender is the radical negativity operative in the return of the repressed. Meanwhile, the desublimation from transgender to masculinity is a form of speciation, a move towards positive substance.

In general, this is how Hegelian triads are structured for Zizek, by the difference between the two voids. Contemporary philosophers have all but given up trying to find necessary and sufficient conditions for empirical objects. This is the ambiguity dividing the idea from what it's not, but this ambiguity is not identical with the other void, namely the negation of an idea. When a subject grasps an object, it follows conceptual categories down to the unit level, such as animal, mammal, human. But at the unit level, it finds the three stages of subjectivation, substance (Stage 3), void (Stage 2) and the ambiguity between them (Stage 1). Human is the substance, the "and nothing else" is the void and the ambiguity is the difference between these two. In line with Hegel, the substance is the thesis, the void is its negation, and the ambiguity is the negation of the negation. It's a bit abstruse, but an example of an really existing ambiguity could be a man created in a lab from scratch, only inspired by the real thing. Is he human or not? He is, as it were, a man who is not a man, in the flesh. This ambiguity is what Zizek calls the absolute Real.

A foundational antinomy or undecidability is the source of Zizek's metaphysics. Immanuel Kant says that Reason as understood by (primarily Leibnizian) idealism runs into antinomies or relativisms in trying to provide a complete description of the world. The dynamic antinomies say that Reason is unable to decide whether or not there are exceptions to the order of the world. Namely, whether or not there are "spontaneous" exceptions to deterministic causality (Bohmian mechanics versus the Copenhagen interpretation) and whether or not there is a necessary entity of some sort within the world or beyond it (theism versus atheism). These dynamic antinomies are a negative point of contact with the noumenal Sublime, of whose positive content we can have no knowledge. How does that work? The Rational Being is confronted by neighbors with immensely greater worldly might than his own, money, health, wealth, and so on, or he feels on the point of being blown away by a natural disaster like a storm. But with the dynamic antinomies in mind, he feels the supernatural weight of moral principles that transcend the order of the natural world. Thus he is enabled to think of natural might as insignificant and sacrifices his material body to uphold the moral law. In para-Freudian terms, a man acts as though the world is lawful (castration anxiety), but there is an exception to this rule whose existence is ambiguous (object small a).

According to Kant, the mathematical antinomies say that Reason is constitutionally unable to ascertain the extent of the world. Namely, whether or not the world is infinite in extent (multiverse theories) and whether or not the world is composed of elements of finite size (analytic philosophy calls the various possibilities junk, gunk and hunk: search plato.stanford.edu for these terms). Zizek argues that the mathematical antinomies are an alternative negative point of contact with the noumenal Sublime. The Rational Being is confronted with a mass of immense size that, for one's tiny material body, appears impossible to shift. However, Reason presents the mind with the idea of an object exactly like the one present before the senses, except literally infinite in extent. Comparing the immovable object with actual infinity, the Rational Being sizes up sensuous reality, responds, "Is that all?" and sacrifices oneself rather than bending before natural might. The feminine subject thus has an opening to reject boundaries placed on her by Master figures in the form of social roles or biological natures. This coincides with the aims of feminism by supporting women in their quest to lose their traditional chains along with the benefits it may have compensated them with according to Chesterton. In para-Freudian terms, a woman acts as though not everything is subject to finitude (non-all), while at the same time ambiguously admitting that nothing is free from subjection to the law (castration anxiety).

Because femininity locates the transcendence of nature in the terms supplied by the world, not as moral principles insisting from beyond it, femininity is pure subjectivity that does not rely on the perception of external objects such as "principles". Because castration anxiety is experienced as ambient noise in femininity while it constitutes the foremost experience of masculinity, masculinity is a paper tiger that has been contingently cut out from the radicalism immanent in the feminine subject. Since we can never actually access the noumenal, men are constitutionally terrified of being "unmanned" somehow.

Moreover, there is no noumenal world. Kant produces his conclusions by analyzing the gap between the empirical world and noumenal reality. The Ljubljana school says that there is a void immanent to the world of ideas dividing them from within. The void of undecidability is what functions as the "gap" in place of the boundary between the two worlds. Kant says we can know nothing positive about the noumenal and his philosophy positively depends on us being ignorant of what these are, so we lose nothing by doing away with them altogether.

Often the thinkers I like take the side of the woman, the goddess. Her sons are the masks that think they are faces. The philosopher or analyst is like a woman who wears the right mask for the task at hand. — Eee

Zizek would say that men who promote "feminine"-centrism are often disseminating patriarchal ideas by putting women on a pedestal. Have you noticed how often chauvinists argue that women were truly free in traditional society, which lets them be women, cooking and cleaning to their heart's content? Have you noticed how many neopagans, people who, claim to worship goddesses, are Nazis? The founder of Armenian neopaganism was himself a radical ultranationalist. Many forms of traditional paganism are also unfriendly to women's liberation. The danger of conceptualizing femininity as a positive substance is that our very idea of what femininity is has been shaped by traditional gender roles. Truly freeing women means letting them be as "manly" as they want to be (though no more).

Also, if I can be a straight male chauvinist for a moment, there is nothing hotter than a woman doing manly things. Just watch the video of the Primal Father in contemporary media that I will link somewhere. Sometimes I wonder whether the men who want women to be women are all gay. Since when do boys actually want girls to do girly shit? That's just surreal!

There are lots of ways to use these symbols — Eee

Here we return to the foundational antinomy.

The maximally masculine position is something like the mad emperor who no longer bothers to justify his will in terms of the universal. — Eee

I believe this is called the figure of the Primal Father. Surprisingly, Lacanians classify him as a feminine figure. Here's an example from contemporary media: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPE0n8mtD_Q Classical examples include Pan and Dionysus in The Bacchae. In early modernity, Casanova and Don Juan were salient. In the 20th century, there was Dr. Frank-N-Furter. The most popular version outside the West is probably Krishna's Rasa Lila: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJLzaCSZQyI https://vedabase.io/en/library/sb/10/29/ https://vedabase.io/en/library/sb/10/33/

Zizek says perversity is the necessary dark shadow of the injunction to obey the law. I would elaborate, but this is what he talks about half the time. He also says God is the figure of the ultimate criminal. It would be very Hegelian to say that femininity is nothing but maximal masculinity. As you bring each form of consciousness to its limit, you enter the next.

This reminds me of Derrida. — Eee

Zizek probably thinks Derrida is too feminine. Femininity is a necessary limit of masculinity, but the ordinary subject is masculine, and that's what interests Zizek. "The day after the revolution..."

The serious political thinker must read the ironist as an irresponsible child. But the ironist can also read the serious political thinker as lost in the illusion that he has a face. — Eee

Zizek is the philosopher of our inability to commit to either. Neurosis is freedom.

First, it makes no sense to speak of a relative truth that doesn't apply universally. — review

I will go through the reviews later, but I just want to note that this reviewer doesn't understand what Zizek is saying at all. Zizek is an absolute believer in the hard facts of external reality. What he says is that external reality is shaped by our subjective beliefs when we act on them. If we go extinct because of climate change, that would be because of our power to ignore the facts of external reality. These beliefs are experienced in the form of two subjective positions, masculine and feminine. In masculinity, we take subjectively projected objects seriously. In femininity, we pretend we are above it all. Beyond that is the inability to commit to either position. Zizek is not what anti-postmodernists call a "relativist". Not even a little bit. He just likes to joke around and people who don't pay attention think he's saying everything is a joke.

Feel free to elaborate or paraphrase and maybe I'll get at your meaning. — Eee

Apropos of nothing, I really should have clarified that Lacanians understand pathology a little differently from standard psychoanalysts. For Lacan, the goal is to get the patient to "enjoy his symptom" by completing his subjectivation, not to change his behavior to fit social norms.

He goes as far as to say that God died with Christ on the cross. Therefore, he believes that Christ was God even more literally than Christians do. — absoluteaspiration

Yes, I relate to that view. An atheistic humanity believes seriously in the incarnation. The shift from theism to humanism 'is' the incarnation.

What's wrong is its cowardice in not going far enough with all these qualities to the point of rejecting worldly injustice with the sublime master it claims to worship. — absoluteaspiration

Have you ever looked in Kojeve? His interpretation of the master/slave dialectic is great. The basic idea is that many famous philosophical positions are just rationalizations of cowardice. We are afraid to challenge the worldly master, so we invent theoretical freedoms and/or theological masters of those masters.

Conservatives like the fact that he pisses off "libtards" — absoluteaspiration

This seems like the motive of many. It's even on the bumper stickers.

I can't prove what Trumpists really think, but don't you think that if conservatives were genuinely politically engaged, then they would at least make an effort to find out whether Fox News talking points match the facts rather than judging them solely by the criterion of whether or not they piss off liberals? — absoluteaspiration

I think you give people too much credit here. People only abandon their basic myths when they are forced too. Those identified with reason, like us, are an elitist minority. Tribal thinking solves the short-term problem of 'who are we?' for otherwise mentally slothful people. And the outgroup is as important as the ingroup for identity.

We should consider why people would want to piss off liberals. I think there is a matriarchal vibe, even if it's massively exaggerated.

This is just the thing. There is no matriarchy. Ergo, they hate the truth. They claim to love it, of course, but they are clearly lying. — absoluteaspiration

I think they are more deceived than lying. Tho some of the thought leaders are probably self-conscious sophists who cynically manage their dupes. At the same time I think there are people who call themselves leftist who also have bumper-sticker simplemindedness. We just grow up around certain prejudices and take them for granted until, for various reasons, we are willing to face the complexities.

The patriarchal fantasy is women enjoying giving pleasure to men. With his usual tact, he illustrates this with the example of porn, where the man is an objectified tool and the primary content is the woman's pleasure. It is this pleasure of the subordinate which titillates the exploiter. — absoluteaspiration

I think this is right. At least it corresponds to my intuition. The 'woman' takes pleasure in worship or service. As a pet theory, I suggest that maybe this is connected to the egoistic man projecting his repressed desire to submit and believe on the woman. If we think of the man as self-assertion, endlessly critical and unmasking, then the fantasized woman has the ecstasy that the man qua man denies himself. In Sartrean terms, the woman is man's disavowed flight from his own freedom.

But I think this connects to being possessed by the Cause. If the 'male' fantasy is autonomy and self-definition, it is also being dominated by female beauty. The beautiful woman is a 'phallus,' the mystical object. To be in love or dominated by the beauty of a woman is OK because she is of a different order than a rival, male ego. Something like that.

Masculinity is the substance, femininity is the void and "transgender" is loosely the real antinomy, the inability to commit to either of them. The rise in sublimity from masculinity to transgender is the radical negativity operative in the return of the repressed. Meanwhile, the desublimation from transgender to masculinity is a form of speciation, a move towards positive substance. — absoluteaspiration

This sounds right to me, and echos what I meant by the tongued mouth.

The Rational Being is confronted by neighbors with immensely greater worldly might than his own, money, health, wealth, and so on, or he feels on the point of being blown away by a natural disaster like a storm. But with the dynamic antinomies in mind, he feels the supernatural weight of moral principles that transcend the order of the natural world. Thus he is enabled to think of natural might as insignificant and sacrifices his material body to uphold the moral law. In para-Freudian terms, a man acts as though the world is lawful (castration anxiety), but there is an exception to this rule whose existence is ambiguous. — absoluteaspiration

This is different way of saying the kind of thing I find in Kojeve's Hegel and something I mostly agree with. We can talk about a symbolic reality that has enough weight or force that man can risk his life for it, perhaps to impose it on the world or just to sacrifice his life as a gesture.

Comparing the immovable object with actual infinity, the Rational Being sizes up sensuous reality, responds, "Is that all?" and sacrifices oneself rather than bending before natural might. — absoluteaspiration

This is good stuff.

The feminine subject thus has an opening to reject boundaries placed on her by Master figures in the form of social roles or biological natures. — absoluteaspiration

This 'feminine subject' is of fundamental importance. I connect 'her' to Kojeve's / Hegel's skeptic.

But this skepticism also troubles the revolutionary project. If the practical world doesn't determine my value, I don't have to risk my life to prove myself. I can be the king queen of my theoretical realm. And I can even question whether the practical realm has some fixed nature or center.

Because femininity locates the transcendence of nature in the terms supplied by the world, not as moral principles insisting from beyond it, femininity is pure subjectivity that does not rely on the perception of external objects such as "principles". — absoluteaspiration

Men are the dreamers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Defense_of_Women

Because castration anxiety is experienced as ambient noise in femininity while it constitutes the foremost experience of masculinity, masculinity is a paper tiger that has been contingently cut out from the radicalism immanent in the feminine subject. Since we can never actually access the noumenal, men are constitutionally terrified of being "unmanned" somehow. — absoluteaspiration

It's as if masculinity just is fear of castration and a certain ecstasy that comes from the feeling of 'direct access.' Is there a masculine mystique? I think so. Zizek, Lacan,the thinkers I like,...all project it. It's like a violence that cuts through illusion and pettiness. How do intellectuals earn their place in the canon? Their ideas are potent, of course, but there is also a swagger and style at times. We often judge the art in the context of the lifestyle of the artist.

Zizek would say that men who promote "feminine"-centrism are often disseminating patriarchal ideas by putting women on a pedestal. — absoluteaspiration

I agree. But it's complex. Sometimes philosophers are singing about a bearded witch. The ironist is a queen of kings. By accepting castration (no solid identity), 'she' has no sacred principle to protect. What was Stirner? A clown, yes, but a fascinating clown. And Marx was troubled by Stirner, while Engels was initially seduced. The king is seriousness and (from one perspective) ultimately worships War as god.

Also, if I can be a straight male chauvinist for a moment, there is nothing hotter than a woman doing manly things. Just watch the video of the Primal Father in contemporary media that I will link somewhere. Sometimes I wonder whether the men who want women to be women are all gay. Since when do boys actually want girls to do girly shit? That's just surreal! — absoluteaspiration

This is a deep issue. I speculate that on some deep level that everyone is bisexual. And then our conscious sexuality surfaces in various ways. I can imagine a straight man being attracted to girls being girly as simply a disavowed enjoyment of those girly things. The straight man can be a tourist in that world without sacrificing a certain fantasy of himself that he sees as his central or core self. Personally I'm identified with the masculine role, which I also connect to the role of the philosopher or truth-teller. A man faces reality. A man fights the monsters. I can take some intellectual distance from that, but that distance doesn't free me from a gut-level sense of what it means to be a (straight) man. It may be that a certain kind of sublimated homoeroticism is tied up with a person's performance of masculinity. What do they strive to find when they look in the mirror? And don't people fight duels or their modern equivalent to live up to that beloved image?

He also says God is the figure of the ultimate criminal. — absoluteaspiration

This is also in Stirner. The institution of the Law is the greatest and most perfect of crimes. That's why the philosopher, seer of the deepest structures, is a patriarch. Yet being constrained by a universal reason (and not just killing whoever disagrees) leads to a patricidal fraternity. Each brother has that evil father as his shadow, and he must sacrifice that shadow to participate in a community that exceeds him. In Feuerbachian terms, we must endure the painful truth that the limits of the individual are not the limits of the species. Moreover the self-defined anarchist father depends on a language that is not his own. He cannot be his own foundation. He was a cyborg from birth.

Zizek probably thinks Derrida is too feminine. — absoluteaspiration

I've mostly wrestled with early Derrida, and I find him patricidal. The purple velvet sportcoat is the costume of an assassin. It does make sense that anyone who insists on action will read the ironist or anyone who muddies the water as passive. And the ironist can read Mr. Action as cutting the knot in impatience. I don't come down on either side, but maybe that's me coming down on a side after all.

Zizek is the philosopher of our inability to commit to either. Neurosis is freedom. — absoluteaspiration

Well then I guess I agree with him there. I've read a fair amount of Zizek & always liked him. But I've also read his critics, who are sometimes right and sometimes just nasty and intentionally blind. I also think his live performance is great. He's an artist. He's just so lovably human.

I think we share some insights. At the same time we are coming from different favorite influences. Which is interesting. So thanks for the conversation so far, and I look forward to more.

Here's a nice piece of Hegel.

In Scepticism, the entire unessentiality and unsubstantiality of this “other” becomes a reality for consciousness. Thought becomes thinking which wholly annihilates the being of the world with its manifold determinateness, and the negativity of free self-consciousness becomes aware of attaining, in these manifold forms which life assumes, real negativity.
...
By means of this self-conscious negation, self-consciousness procures for itself the certainty of its own freedom, brings about the experience of that freedom, and thereby raises it into the truth. What vanishes is what is determinate, the difference which, no matter what its nature or whence it comes, sets up to be fixed and unchangeable. The difference has nothing permanent in it, and must vanish before thought because to be differentiated just means not to have being in itself, but to have its essential nature solely in an other. Thinking, however, is the insight into this character of what is differentiated; it is the negative function in its simple, ultimate form.
...
It finds its freedom, at one time, in the form of elevation above all the whirling complexity and all the contingency of mere existence, and again, at another time, likewise confesses to falling back upon what is unessential, and to being taken up with that. ... It proclaims the nothingness of essential ethical principles, and makes those very truths the sinews of its own conduct. Its deeds and its words belie each other continually; and itself, too, has the doubled contradictory consciousness of immutability and sameness, and of utter contingency and non-identity with itself.... Its talk, in fact, is like a squabble among self-willed children, one of whom says A when the other says B, and again B, when the other says A, and who, through being in contradiction with themselves, procure the joy of remaining in contradiction with one another.
...
In Scepticism consciousness gets, in truth, to know itself as a consciousness containing contradiction within itself. From the experience of this proceeds a new attitude which brings together the two thoughts which Scepticism holds apart. The want of intelligence which Scepticism manifests regarding itself is bound to vanish, because it is in fact one consciousness which possesses these two modes within it. This new attitude consequently is one which is aware of being the double consciousness of itself as self-liberating, unalterable, self-identical, and as utterly self-confounding, self-perverting; and this new attitude is the consciousness of this contradiction within itself. — Hegel

In his lectures on fine art, he offers the related position of Irony.

True, in the eyes of others the appearance which I present to them may be regarded seriously, in that they take me to be really concerned with the matter in hand, but in that case they are simply deceived, poor limited creatures, without the faculty and ability to apprehend and reach the loftiness of my standpoint. Therefore this shows me that not everyone is so free (i.e. formally free)[52] as to see in everything which otherwise has value, dignity, and sanctity for mankind just a product of his own power of caprice, whereby he is at liberty either to grant validity to such things, to determine himself and fill his life by means of them, or the reverse. Moreover this virtuosity of an ironical artistic life apprehends itself as a divine creative genius for which anything and everything is only an unsubstantial creature, to which the creator, knowing himself to be disengaged and free from everything, is not bound, because he is just as able to destroy it as to create it. In that case, he who has reached this standpoint of divine genius looks down from his high rank on all other men, for they are pronounced dull and limited, inasmuch as law, morals, etc., still count for them as fixed, essential, and obligatory. So then the individual, who lives in this way as an artist, does give himself relations to others: he lives with friends, mistresses, etc; but, by his being a genius, this relation to his own specific reality, his particular actions, as well as to what is absolute and universal, is at the same time null; his attitude to it all is ironical. — Hegel

He continues with another portrait of the skeptic's/ironist's problem.

The next form of this negativity of irony is, on the one hand, the vanity of everything factual, moral, and of intrinsic worth, the nullity of everything objective and absolutely valid. If the ego remains at this standpoint, everything appears to it as null and vain, except its own subjectivity which therefore becomes hollow and empty and itself mere vanity.[53] But, on the other hand, the ego may, contrariwise, fail to find satisfaction in this self-enjoyment and instead become inadequate to itself, so that it now feels a craving for the solid and the substantial, for specific and essential interests. Out of this comes misfortune, and the contradiction that, on the one hand, the subject does want to penetrate into truth and longs for objectivity, but, on the other hand, cannot renounce his isolation and withdrawal into himself or tear himself free from this unsatisfied abstract inwardness. — Hegel

To me 'the solid and the substantial' is not only worldly recognition but also recognition by the rational community. The essence of the private ego is public. The substance of the 'individual' is language, intrinsically opened outward toward the ideal other. I add this to clarify what I mean by the ideal community. Humanism, reason, fraternity. The proud ego has to trade in false infinities for the genuine infinity of the species essence, though this species essence is itself mortal. But all of this is perhaps necessarily vague, and that's the problem. There are 10,000 humanisms.

For Kojève, the necessity of revolutionary violence follows from the ineffectiveness of persuasive speech. Already in his analysis of Bayle’s Encyclopedia (to which he indirectly refers in this letter to Strauss), Kojève demonstrates that the philosopher cannot overcome the plurality of particular opinions by means of persuasive speech alone – by the speech that pretends to be ‘true’ speech. [17] Indeed, throughout its history philosophy tried to operate by persuasion. It measured its effectiveness by the influence that it exercised on listeners or readers. But there is no evidence that is evident enough to compel readers to abandon their own opinions and begin to accept ‘evident speech’ as ‘true speech’. The hope that motivated philosophy for centuries – the hope to produce such an intense light of evidence that it would be impossible for anybody to reject this evidence, to turn one’s back to this light, to remain unpersuaded – this hope demonstrated itself as futile and ruinous for philosophy. As a result philosophy degenerated into literature; philosophy began to reproduce the plurality of opinions instead of overcoming it. — Groy

https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/romantic-bureaucracy-2

The failure of persuasion brings us back to the pre-rational or post-rational evil patriarch --or possibly a fraternity that brutally fixes its doctrine. Is the judge in Blood Meridian still a philosopher? Or a post-philosophical prophet?

Is the judge in Blood Meridian still a philosopher? Or a post-philosophical prophet? — Eee

both/and, Fella - (But) must be we choose? :smirk:

:clap: :down:

Both/and - (but) must be we choose? :smirk: — 180 Proof

I'd enjoy any elaboration. I find some dark truth in 'war is god.' Yet the judge is also a madman, however articulate. He's a blood mystic, who can only understand the mind as a weapon. And that's sexy but also terrible.

I act in the real world like everyone with partial knowledge of consequences and a host of perspectives that can't be synthesized. I expect to die in sin and confusion, and I'm OK with that. The rose and the fire are one, or so speaks one mood.

I think this fits the thread (180 Proof led me to google Metzinger).

Being No One helps to explain why the traditional reliance on philosophical intuition has illuminated this subject so little. Human intuitions about consciousness and the self are shaped by consciousness and the self-model, as they are experienced by normal human adults. Both consciousness and the self-model are products of evolution, a natural process which favours gene reproduction. Evolution has no fundamental bias towards the truth. Although it is often adaptive for organisms to form accurate models of reality, it is by no means always so. Robert Trivers has shown that self-deception can be adaptive (because it helps us to deceive others) (Trivers, 2000); and so can ego-boosting misperceptions such as superiority bias. Another highly adaptive evolutionary product is what Metzinger calls the Phenomenal Self-Model (PSM). It has conferred such great advantages on our species, that Metzinger describes it as not only a tool, but (acknowledging Andy Clark for the metaphor):

…a weapon, developed in a cognitive arms race. Conscious selves are like instruments or abstract organs, invented and constantly optimized by biological systems. (Metzinger, 2004, p. 273)

To describe the model as effective is not to say that it is accurate. In fact, it is inaccurate in important respects. We are not the sort of beings that, influenced by our own self-models, we intuitively think we are. Discipline is required to overcome our biases, to arrive at truths about ourselves that are scientifically justified. — link

First, I agree that the self is a fiction. I think this is an old idea, but it's a good one. I wanted to quote this because of its connection to 'war is god' and the idea of the mask as weapon. I'm not afraid of the idea of this fictional self being the weapon of otherwise blind goo for passing on genes. It's fine. It's beautiful.

And there is talk of 'accurate' models of reality. What is this accuracy? Why not just say that some genes get themselves replicated, and their fictions (sacred truths) were part of that? But 'discipline is required for us to overcome our biases.' Why not imagine science as meme/weapon in the hands of the communities that embrace it? 'It's the right approach because with it we can outfeed, outbreed, and outright annihilate the 'superstitious.' I think @Wayfarer sees the same problem with this ground for truth (Truth?), though he has different motivations perhaps.

I mention this problem in order to half-justify or explain a kind of ironism (not Rorty's but Schlegel's) or skepticism with respect to the cause of emancipation...or even the respectability of science as more than a weapon, a tool. At the same time I think we want 'substance,' connection to something beyond our illusory private selves. The mask is carved with all the words that point beyond the petty ego. Science, religion, politics, philosophy. What I see (among many other things) is a game of masks (selves, positions, weapons, communities), projecting themselves as desirable possibilities for emulation, including this one of course.

Robert Trivers has shown that self-deception can be adaptive (because it helps us to deceive others) (Trivers, 2000); and so can ego-boosting misperceptions such as superiority bias. — link

Relative to what is the ego-boosted self deceived? His community's shared self-deceptions? And I like various master thinkers (Lacan), but they too are masks, weapons, fellow mortals who dream of gazing on community-independent truth. Cult leaders all. And I dream that dream like maybe all of us do.

Just want to say this is strange and strangely interesting thread. Keep it going :)

You ought to jump in. But thanks!

[EDIT]
Might as well add this before I go to bed. Another old thought. As soon as we think of truth as a tool (an army of metaphors) that isn't really true but only 'successful' (in terms of replication of genes or memes), then the theory of truth as tool becomes one more tool, one more delusion. Maybe a thoroughly radical pragmatist could just enjoy the replication of the truth-as-lying-tool meme as a success. But he meant to speak the truth. And this idea of truth seems pre-theoretical, like some ordinary language tacit know-how with the word and some vague intuition that things are really like that, without really-exactly knowing what it really means for something to really be like something.

Anti-realism is a might tradition. Philosophy would be a bore or nothing at all without it, perhaps. And yet it seems to depend on gut-level realism that perhaps can't be theoretically justified clarified. One reads enough philosophy, is half-seduced by enough positions, so that one's own aphorisms or paragraphs never get it right, never say the inexhaustible. Sometimes we reread ourselves (our fusion of stolen ideas) and smile.Other times it's freaky experience. Not even disagreement but a sense of non-self-recognition. But the letter I write to you functions beyond both of our deaths. Or it wouldn't be a letter.

Just want to say this is strange and strangely interesting thread. Keep it going :) — I like sushi

Sorry, my university applications are in the way.

My goal in starting this thread was to identify mistakes in my understanding of Zizek, and I may have found one. Shame it's a bit esoteric. I said substance is split by the void of ambiguity. I don't think that's what Zizek is saying. I think his reasoning goes more like this: Each substance is an element of multiple categories. What makes a man is being a mammal, being an intelligent being, a potential citizen, etc. This is why it difficult to find necessary and sufficient conditions for manhood. A given being might satisfy some, but not all of them. Where this line is to be drawn is not fully specified by external reality, and this is the ideal form minimally imposed by consciousness. The substance here is the common symbol "man" occurring as an element of multiple categories. So what splits this substance (Stage 3) is the conceptual matrix (Stage 2) itself. The ambiguity (Stage 1) is only the result of this spllitting, not the agent responsible for it. In the other direction, Stage 1 is also the primordial ambivalence out of which the later stages coagulate.

Zizek also says what separates me from God separates God from himself. Reading the Hegelian structure into this, I want to say that the matrix not only splits substance, but also splits itself into ambiguity. Or it could be that the tension separating the subject from the foundational ambivalence is the tension sepaparating the elements between which it is an ambivalence. I need to think about these things before I can be sure of what Zizek is saying.

Have you ever looked in Kojeve? His interpretation of the master/slave dialectic is great. The basic idea is that many famous philosophical positions are just rationalizations of cowardice. We are afraid to challenge the worldly master, so we invent theoretical freedoms and/or theological masters of those masters. — Eee

Not yet, but that sounds interesting.

I think there is a matriarchal vibe, even if it's massively exaggerated. — Eee

Where is it in lived reality, outside libraries of controversial thinkers? Even inside the libraries, I've seen multiple feminists complaining about the people who will probably turn conservative when they get older making a nuisance of themselves trying to prove how pro-woman they are (obsessional neurosis). The tragedy is that these "radicals" occasionally get more grassroots support than serious theorists. The only way I know of to fight this problem is to dismantle the myth of progress. Turns out the supporters of these "radicals" often think that "progress" wins out in the long run, and if they hold the most "progressive" position, then their insanity will be vindicated when they turn out to be on the "right side of history". They don't understand that, eg, second wave feminism was a movement of TERFs. Whatever actually happens is branded "progressive" after the fact. The real future is physically necessary, but semantically contingent. Fighting for it bears little relation to how "progressive" you think you are being. Zizek argues that communist atrocities were carried out with the same hope for historical vindication. He says we should refuse to hold back on our desire without any hope of justification.

Tho some of the thought leaders are probably self-conscious sophists who cynically manage their dupes. — Eee

Alright, how do these exhibits square with your theory? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSILkDZI7jk http://verduria.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=37&p=20949#p20949 (written by a conservative)

It seems to me that the most charitable interpretation is that Trumpists don't "think" anything insofar as their actions are caused by primal impulses originating from underneath their subjectivity. Namely, the impulse to surrender to the silverback. This sounds condescending, but facts don't care about the feelings of conservatives.

As a pet theory, I suggest that maybe this is connected to the egoistic man projecting his repressed desire to submit and believe on the woman. If we think of the man as self-assertion, endlessly critical and unmasking, then the fantasized woman has the ecstasy that the man qua man denies himself. In Sartrean terms, the woman is man's disavowed flight from his own freedom. — Eee

I like this. Although, strictly speaking, the original point probably mentions "enjoyment" in the Lacanian sense, not pleasure. This means repetitively circling the object of desire without attaining it. This could be pleasurable, but it may not be. So it may be that it strokes their ego to imagine women endlessly desiring them. This is probably also a projection. According to Lacanian theory, this is how men behave towards women. Moreover, I have noticed how, in porn, the female orgasm commonly reflects male orgasm in reality. The whole thought form is a projection.

If the 'male' fantasy is autonomy and self-definition, it is also being dominated by female beauty. The beautiful woman is a 'phallus,' the mystical object. To be in love or dominated by the beauty of a woman is OK because she is of a different order than a rival, male ego. Something like that. — Eee

Checks out, but I need to think about it.

Zizek says that a man chooses a woman who happened to be in line with what interested him to begin with. But then, maybe the woman gets to define what being a man means for her lover, and the same goes for Causes?

This is different way of saying the kind of thing I find in Kojeve's Hegel and something I mostly agree with. We can talk about a symbolic reality that has enough weight or force that man can risk his life for it, perhaps to impose it on the world or just to sacrifice his life as a gesture. — Eee

I really need to read this Kojeve. However, caveats are in order about these narratives of self-sacrifice:

Firstly, it is possible to sacrifice yourself without tossing your life into the bargain. It need not be total.

Secondly, these are fantasies of glory. It feels as though you were happy in the past, a happiness "they" (the monstrous Neighbor) took away. You could get a taste of that primordial joy if you could, depending on how worked up you are, sacrifice yourself for your principles or just to stand up to the Man. It doesn't follow that you will actually go through with it, only that this is one impulse contributing to your neurotic ambivalence. The compromise between your conflicting impulses (called the symptom) may be reached in a number of ways. Also, even if you actually follow through (and live to tell the tale), there's no telling how brief your sense of satisfaction will be before reality sets in. It could be that you are unconsciously aware of this, and you are sacrificing your life as a coward's way out of having to live with the consequences of your actions.

Is there a masculine mystique? I think so. Zizek, Lacan,the thinkers I like,...all project it. It's like a violence that cuts through illusion and pettiness. — Eee

Nice. Could you please recommend the thinkers you like best? Maybe also some goddess-centric ones if you still don't think they are patriarchal.

I speculate that on some deep level that everyone is bisexual. — Eee

Thank you for completing my train of thought. I usually just shy away from it.

I've mostly wrestled with early Derrida, and I find him patricidal. The purple velvet sportcoat is the costume of an assassin. It does make sense that anyone who insists on action will read the ironist or anyone who muddies the water as passive. And the ironist can read Mr. Action as cutting the knot in impatience. I don't come down on either side, but maybe that's me coming down on a side after all. — Eee

Zizek probably also thinks Derrida should have been more irrational. And yes, Christian theology should have been more rational. Every theory should follow its guiding genius to the end of its desire. They will then turn into the points of reference between which the foundational ambivalence is unable to commit. And this ambivalence is not even a goal worth reaching. Rather, existential tension arises between this ambivalence and its speciations, i.e. Freudian symptomal compromise formations. It's only after reaching this tension that Zizek is focused on masculinity, the absolute fucking madman.

Is the judge in Blood Meridian still a philosopher? Or a post-philosophical prophet? — Eee

I haven't read it. My excuse is that I'm from outside the Anglosphere. I will read it and write back.

Before I leave, I found a subtitled version of part of that Krishna video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liCn0u093B0