Zizek in Tel Aviv

Slavoj Zizek was Invited by his friend Udi Aloni-who was also invited some months ago to Dor-a to a panel to comment a chapter on Ytzhak Benyamini's book "The discourse of Lacan"-. He repeated his mantra "Zionism is antisemitism". Besides of being a prete-a-porter , useful to spare him hard work on subjects he refuses to know, it is sold by the mewaper Haaretz as a sort of avant-garde. The journalist is hypnotized , seemingly, by the host. We have an encounter next month at The Third Ear for a conversation on "The Matrix". I read Zizek's comments and I found myself , not without joy, to agree this time with him. Excepting the fact that he completely ignores, as a good philosopher, the personal circumstances of Larry Wakowsky during the creation of the saga.

POPULAR UNIVERSITY JACQUES LACAN WORKSHOP IN TEL-AVIV

            The Popular University

                 “Jacques Lacan”

                founded in Paris by

               Jacques-Alain Miller

Announces

Israel workshop on the subject:

                Shoah, Zionism, and the “lacanian” extreme left

Organizers:   Marco Mauas, lacanian psychoanalyst, GIEP member, New Lacanian School member.

Prof Dennis Sharbit, Open University, Social Sciences Faculty.

Gil Caroz, lacanian psychoanalyst, New Lacanian School Member, World association of Psychoanalysis Secretary.

General Program

3 monthly encounters, beginning 24^th January

The workshop will be an effort to elucidate texts from so called “lacanian” extreme left intellectuals, beginning from Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou. They are very well known authors, even admired by some young students and circles, and whose texts “analyze” the Jewish  name and situation, the complex realities of Israel, and Middle East, including its relationship with the Shoah.

This effort of elucidation—3 workshop meetings-- will not be surely exhaustive, but it may be very well a sort of opening for future investigations.

Some brief examples of the problems –reading problems- the workshop  will propose to open:

Slavoj Zizek, in a short text [1] about Joseph Fritzl, the well known incestuous Austrian dungeon who kept his “two families” in it during 24 years, compares  Fritzl with the (function of) the father in “The sound of Music”:

First, as a kind of introduction:

What if, however, we read the duality of the “normal” father and the primordial father of the unlimited access to incestuous enjoyment not as a fact of the earliest history of humanity, but as a libidinal fact, a fact of “psychic reality,” which accompanies as an obscene shadow the “normal” paternal authority, prospering in the dark underground of unconscious fantasies? this obscene underground is discernible through its effects – in myths, dreams, slips of tongue, symptoms… and, sometimes, it enforces its direct perverse realization (Freud noted that perverts realize what hysterics only

fantasize about).

This is a not so easy   introduction to the problem-function of the father—and paternal authority-- in Freud and Lacan! Let’s continue.

After that, we read:

 With regard to Austria, instead of the miserable attempts to blame for Josef ’s terrible crime the Austrian Nazi past or the Austrian excessive sense of orderliness and respectability, one should rather link the figure of Fritzl to a much more respectful Austrian myth, that of the von Trapp family immortalized in The Sound of Music:

another family living in their secluded castle, under the father’s benevolent military authority which protects them from the evil Nazi outside, with generations strangely mixed (the Sister Maria, like Elisabeth, a generation between father and children…) e aspect of kitsch is relevant here: TheSound of Music is the ultimate kitsch phenomenon, and what Fritzl created in his basement also displays features of a kitsch family life realized: the happy family getting ready for diner, with the

father watching TV with children while mother is preparing the food… However, one should not forget that the kitsch imagery we are dealing with here are not Austrian but belong to Hollywood and, more generally, Western popular culture: Austria in The Sound of Music is not the Austrian’s Austria, but the mythic Hollywood image of Austria – the paradox is here that it is as if, in the last decades, Austrians themselves started to “play Austrians,” i.e., identified with the Hollywood image of their own country. This parallel can be extended to include the Fritzl-version of some of the most famous scenes from The Sound of Music. One can imagine the frightened children gathered around mother Elisabeth, in fear of the storm of the forthcoming father’s arrival, and mother calming them down by a song about some of “some of their favorite things” they should focus their minds on, from the toys brought by father to their most popular TV show… Or what about an upstairs reception in the Fritzl villa to

which the underground children were exceptionally invited, and then, when the time for bed comes, the children performing for the assembled guests the obscene song “Aufwiedersehen, Goodbye” and departing one after the other… Really, in the Fritzl house, the basement, if not the hills, was alive with the sound of music.

Provocative as this comparison may be, it is a problem: can it be based in the function of father as Lacan formulated it for clinical psychoanalysis? Is this reading a reading within all the possible readings of Freud and Lacan?

There will be a fourth encounter, this time with a special guest from Paris: Yves-Charles  Zarka.

1^st: Marco Mauas, Opening, remarks on chapter 20 of Jacques Lacan, Seminar 11 . ½ hour. An hour and a half of discussion and work will follow. We will add a text from Zizek or Badiou for this first meeting also.

The participants will be invited to work previously on the text and to bring references connected to their previous work.

2^nd; Prof Dennis Sharbit: remarks on the reading of Alain Badiou’s text “On the uses of the name “Jew” “.

3^rd; A text by Slavoj Zizek will be read. Name of the text and the lecturer will be announced.

---

[1] Slavoj Zizek: “My Own Private Austria”, http://aaaaarg.org/files/textz/3781-my_own_private_austria.pdf

The subject is not "the subjective' (French)

De Dieu, ou comment

« le réel peut tromper, et le sujet n’est pas le subjectif. »

Auersperg et Sprockhoff ont démontré (1935) que, si l’on montre a l’œil une série de points lumineux qui passent rapidement, on peut, tout en fonction du mouvement de l’œil, choisir décomposer la ligne dans ses points constitutifs, ou bien la maintenir comme un tout jusqu'à l’inclure dans le champ de la nouvelle direction du regard. L’œil, donc, fait les deux taches a la fois : on voit le surprise de ce qui est actuel, (les points comme points séparés) tout aussi comme on attend, en rétablissant l’image de fusion des point lumineux comme une droite. (Cité par Victor Weizsaecker, « Gestaltkreis »). Il y a donc, conclut Weizsaecker, une figure prévue et une figure imprévue.

Dans une autre expérience, on demande a des sujets dessiner un cercle de différent grandeur sur la table. La figure est dessinée toujours environ dans le même temps. Il s’agit aussi d’une sorte d’anticipation. La figure tracée par la main n’est pas l’ellipse des planètes. Tout ca se passe de manière complètement inaperçue. Il n’ya pas d’intention possible, mais on doit admettre une sorte d’anticipation. On voudrait séparer le subjectif de l’objectif dans les deux cas, mais ca en raison du principe selon lequel la nature ne peut pas nous tromper, ou se contredire, ou se tromper elle-même.

Voila que nous arrivons au Dieu. Lacan fait recours a la tradition judéo-chrétienne, plutôt au judaïsme-- a l’occasion de se demander qu’est-ce que ne trompe pas pour nous, qui est a la base de la fondation de la science moderne. Le caprice de Dieu, créateur de l’univers et des lois, est la pour soutenir cet acte de foi qu’est l’existence de la science en tant que telle.

Le plus étrange : le cognitivisme est pseudoscience en cela qu’il parait rejeter cet acte de foi, en postulant l’homme-machine.

Antonio Damasio's error

Antonio Damasio writes that Descartes's error (this is the title of his book) is that first we are, (we have a body, we are biological beings) and only then we think. According to Damasio, Descartes error was also that he thought he could radically separate mind from body.

But Descartes was very cautious, more than Damasio. Descartes--as we can see thanks to the reading line by line by Marcial Gueroult--believed that

"La connaissance de mon existence ne pouvant être que strictement intellectuelle, il en résulte que ma nature ne peut être conçue que comme pure intelligence et, par conséquence, comme pur esprit." (Marcial Gueroult, "Descartes selon l'ordre des raisons", t 1, p. 65).

Damasio's error : we cannot point to an Error in Descartes without speaking to him.

Because Descartes posed by his own words --as Lacan precisely says--"cogito sum". Descartes perhaps forgot he first of all-- said. Descartes had to say this.

So, in the same line, only speaking with Descartes it would be possible to "knot" Descartes's error.

Daniel Cohen, economist, and Aldo schiavone, Roman Law professor

Daniel Cohen has written some remarquable books. The last one (2009) is "La prosperite du vice" (Albin Michel, Paris). It is a sober description, a sort of history of economy, beginning with the invention of agriculture, till today, when we are in the global era, the era of "virtual capitalism", when the capital is in research and developpement, publicity, fashion, and finances. Rich countries have their hand firmly grasping immaterial production.

Among his references: Aldo Schiavone's "The end of the past" (1996), Harvard translation (2000), a history of the fall of the Roman Empire. for Schiavone--cf http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldo_Schiavone- the Roman Empire fell because it gradually transformed its economy, from a purely agriculture-based one, where aristocracy has its roots, its legitimacy and its legend, to a slave-labor economy, where the bulk of wealth is produced by slaves, ruining the small landowners, forcing them to enroll in the army, the conquering machine which produced more prisoners, more slaves, till this cycle is broken when the war stops to be a conquering war and begins to be oinly defensive.

The most striking about the excelent Schiavone is that he fails to grasp, even remotely, the relationship between philosophy and slavery, so precisely pointed by Lacan: philosophy is the appropiation, in a certain moment of history, by the master of the craft and artisanal know how of the slave.

Te all of dialectics and its stop

The all of dialectics and its stop

I have been trying some years to understand the effort of Slavoj Zizek to capture the problem of the Arab-Israeli conflict using Hegelian dialectics. (See for example, perhaps still in this site: “Dialectics as superstition”).
This includes of course the core: the Shoah of European Jewry. I must confess that every time has been impossible. This conflict and its core is somewhat resistant to Hegelian-Marxist dialectics.
Karl Marx , who lived in 19th century, did not see this black hole of history, Auswichtz. So, it was not part, it could not be a part, of his work on the “Jewish question”, not even as a distant shadow. Sigmund Freud wrote a line when his books were burned by the Nazis—“There is some progress, in other times they would have burned me”—. He didn’t see the Shoah, but it was present, he smelt the danger. Heidegger saw it and did as it was nothing important, he continued with his metaphysics. Jacques Lacan not only saw it, he lived it. He listened. He wrote that there is no chance to understand it with dialectics. Dialectics, that means we can make the contraries meet by some sublime magic. We can for example say “the Palestinian question”, and it sounds as “the Jewish question.” It is a sound, a resonance.
We may also write, as Zizek, “the Germans tried to kill all the Jews”. But this does not stand as a definite description for “Shoah”. Jean-Claude Milner, quoted by Zizek, uses another, different word: “annihilation”. This word is a non-dialectical word. No chance for Hegel of even dreaming of something like this. Hegel saw everything when he saw Napoleon, his “aleph”. He didn’t see the scientific annihilation. Not Absolute Knowledge, but Absolute Annihilation.
By the way, Zizek uses the “obliteration” (soft reminder of the more sincere “erase of the map”) word when he points to the most radical anti-Zionist Arabs calling for the “obliteration of the state of Israel”. Israel as a state, not its citizens, stands supporting as an object the non-dialectical verb and its consequences.
Analogous problem we face with the expression “West Bank free of Palestinians”. The Nazis coined the term “Judenrein”, to specify their purpose of purify all of Europe, and so to give a solution to their problem, “the Jewish problem”. In Israel, it is not so uncommon the use of Nazi language resonances for public dialectics and discourse. There is a sign of stop, however, waiting in every corner for this rhetoric, a sign addressed to the rhetorician, more than to his audience or his readers.

Let’s take the book of Norman Finkelstein “The Holocaust Industry”. He essentially points to Israel and some Israel politicians as using the Holocaust to obtain political gains. It is a book that certainly has caused many waves, and it may have a point: from the moment the Shoah enters public discourse, it enters the field of truth and the “surplus value of truth”. There is a use value and an exchange value. The silence of the Shoah survivors, a known phenomenon—silence that may persist till their last days– is surely not without relation to the social echo, even to the remembering of its horrors. But this “surplus value of the Holocaust” has its limit in its own excess, and it is exemplified by Norman Finkelstein’s “boomerang achievement”: he himself has been also named by his detractors or disputers as another “Holocaust Industry” producer, but now his own, private industry, Norman’s Finkelstein “Holocaust Industry”. Such is the field of dialectics. You sell-say a truth, and this very truth includes your personal truth price tag.
And this is why I find very difficult for me to understand the attempt of dialectization of the Arab-Israeli conflict, its transformation in a intellectual field, a competition in the “truth market”. In this sense, I find some points of silence in Jean-Claude Milner’s argumentations more close to the “intractable” nature of the conflict. It may even be that the so-called “the Jewish name” by Milner is a sort of name of the intractable (and so, more akin to Francois Regnault’s “notre petit a”, than to Zizek’s “fetish”). The humorist Biderman put it very precisely in a caricature in “Haaretz”, the day that the so called “Judas Gospel” surfaced somewhere in the sands of Egypt. Here was the Pope, very concerned, looking at the newspaper with one of the Cardinals at his side. A little sentence read: “These Jews, they are making trouble once more”. Some years before, James Baker, the former American Secretary of State, called the Arab-Israeli conflict “the most intractable of all conflicts”. Being himself a man of the south, he probably knows something about this. Dialectics, very probably, turns intractable problems even more difficult: it obscures them.

Short comment of "The uses of the word 'Jew', " by Alain Badiou

Alain Badiou proposes a “global” or “reboot” solution for the Middle East conflict. The living body is not included in this perspective.
I will say, firstly, that I feel deeply touched by Badiou’s statements and conclusions regarding the abolition of identity predicates, among them, as he writes, “Jew” and “French” as means of establishing national and political boundaries, because they are prone to not desirable consequences. I thank him personally. I also agree. It is surely desirable to reach this advanced phase. I’m also afraid it is too advanced for a species with a body, an enjoying body, to live with.
It is a fact—a discourse fact– that the state of Israel, founded in 1948, if it is supposed to be the consequence of Zionism as political ideology and movement, undoubtedly was a de facto consequence of what I shall call, yes, the Shoah—because that is the name most convenient subjectively for survivors, if we believe some testimonies—and there is no reason not to believe them. Survivors feel, in my experience, less persecuted when they use “Shoah”–. Survivors lost their entire families by the industrial massacre orchestrated by the Nazis, with the inestimable, precious help of European democracies and governments. Without the precious European help, it is perhaps difficult to imagine such perfection in economy, means, timing, transports, information, data recollection, statistics, etc. etc.
Those economies and democratic states are very civilized nations today, that after great and moving efforts of many years have reached an agreement to slowly form an entity, political and economical, called in the meantime the EU, that puts aside as a sort of temporary “semblant”, some of the many national characteristics of the people living there, as Badiou says, in Europe. But they still live and call themselves with generic names, attributive suppositions of identity.
It is also undoubtedly a great achievement for the United Nations to have reached to the conclusion that helped to create the state of Israel, a home for those bearing the danger of believing too intensely to have something to do with the “Jew predicate”. It alliviated many more continued forms of persecution for these people. If you strogly believe you “are” something “called X”, and you are persecuted by people who coincide with your identity delusion… Well, it is rather urgent for you to find a place where you may feel that this “identity predicate” has some chances of being included in discourse, kept away from persecution, to give you some time to bear your own definition of it, to reach a sort of a pact with it, etc. You will need time, and a place to live.
It is also a sort of paradox that it is asked—as Badiou does– precisely from Israel, as a state, to “cross the fantasy” of collective predicate– to cross it collectively. It sounds as if Badiou is asking Israel “to be the light to Nations” once more. To achieve as a community precisely what so many nations only touch as a very far “semblant” (make-believe).

Perhaps. There are many courageous people in Israel—Badiou dixit—who are already ready for this, at least in declaration. This sort of change takes more than exhortations or desires. In psychoanalysis, it takes the one-by-one crossing of the “identity attributions”. “Identity attributions” include the body, the living body of each one.
To reach the point where you agree to separate from some attribution of identity, (a signifier of the Other, a S1 as Lacan writes it) you will need to do it with some distance from the attribution of the Other who, starting to say you are effectively “X”, you must depart from “the territory for X”, or perhaps to turn “the territory for X”, into “the territory for X, Y, and Z”, and so to help solve “a problem”” that your erroneous solution of identity has somehow fixated in a way incompatible to enlightened Europeans/Americans. I use the plural. But I don’t know what sort of plural is this. We are in a complete imaginary field. Testimonies are one by one.

The problem with Badiou’s solution (a “global” or “reboot the system” solution)
The problem with Badiou’s proposed solution for the Middle East conflict is built-in the solution itself. The solution is a sort of generalized proposal: “You should undo the collective identification that defines you as “Jewish state”, and then proceed to define the new situation as ‘Israeli is who is situated here’”.
This is a sort of “reboot the system” proposal. The only problem with this global solution is that the identification of “Jews” as “ Israelis” was made necessary and urgent by the fact of the Shoah, which in turn was a “final solution” of the Nazis for the “Jewish problem”. It became evident that the Nazis caught even those enlightened ones for the only reason they had ancestors who called themselves “Jew”. Thn they reduced their bodies to ashes or soap. Now Badiou asks for the undoing of the state as a “Jewish state”. May I remind, by the way, here that the title of Hertzl’s seminal book is “Judenstaat” (“A state for/of the Jewish”).

Spinoza refused to accept the idea of “the chosen people”, except for: (PTT, Ch 3)
Lastly, if any one wishes to maintain that the Jews, from this or from any other cause, have been chosen by God for ever, I will not gainsay him if he will admit that this choice, whether temporary or eternal, has no regard, in so far as it is peculiar to the Jews, to aught but dominion and physical advantages [imperium et corporis commoditates](for by such alone can one nation be distinguished from another), whereas in regard to intellect and true virtue, every nation is on a par with the rest, and God has not in these respects chosen one people rather than another.

But Spinoza is inimitable. He separated himself from “the chosen” position by his singular invention—as Borges writes, Spinoza created God. From there he could examine what is the function of “chosen” positions. This is something that only can be made-through “one by one”.
This is partially the reason for which Lacan preferred Kant to Spinoza. Kant includes Shylock. Shylock is an “anti-reboot” character. Spinoza, with all its lovable beauty, rejects the body, even if he writes “imperium et corporis commoditates”.
After a subject arrives to a little separation from “the Other’s attribution”, he still may decide to continue using this “attribution”. I don’t see how it is only by “force of the Other” that the use of “Jew” exists as such.
This distance, we need a name for it. Perhaps is more precisely a sort of “moment to understand”. Perhaps it is “subjective time”. It took Freud many years to reach his “Acropolis conclusion” that put him a little step forward from one particular use—Freud’s use– of the “name of the father”. Is there a chance of a collective pluralisation , something like “the names of the Father” as a basis for a new collective discourse?
Israel is “archaic” as a state in the same sense that to “have a body” today is “archaic”.

Finally, in these times where the best 50 internet sites of the World as “chosen” by “Time inc” are sites where you may have the sensation that nothing is lacking there, that “everything is there” and it is a sort of surfing experiment in anxiety, may I say that I read Badiou’s sentence about the state of Israel as “archaic” in this sense: to attach such an importance of a state and the definition of its citizens— among other, circumcised in general – is archaic in the same sense as today it is more and more difficult to say you have a body.