Big Ideas

Dedicated to listing out in brief (or maybe not so brief…) ideas from interesting texts. Arranged in no particular order. Subject to frequent update.

Sex and the Failed Absolute, Slavoj Zizek

• What is the Absolute? It is the unconditional, the totalizing, the thing which completely disrupts and really underlies the production of the normal. Zizek suggests that we might find the Absolute in the sexual.
• Rather than asserting the real as the noumenal in-and-of-itself which is phenomenally inaccessible to us (Kant’s position), we should make a properly Hegelian move and transpose the untraversable gap between us and the noumenal as a key feature of the noumenal, the Absolute, the Real. The crack in understanding is a property of reality rather than of our failed epistemic bounds. Why make this move? Well, I will have to re-read to understand…
• Many claim that a rise of fake news has killed truth. Some historicist relativists claim there is no objective truth at all. The acknowledgement of different standpoints in ideological historicity is not relativist. There is a true understanding of social totality. On the other hand, the notion that truth has died suggests that truth was somehow alive and that its demise was recent. This is in fact the effect of ideological hegemony; its death (polarization) is the true dialectic, the immanent antagonism, which always underlied it all along. Those who decry polarization and the death of Truth are really decrying the Unifying Narrative, the Great Story. How can we return to truth? To make it subjectively engaged in universal emancipation.
  • There are true and false facts, but there are also true and false subjective positions.
  • Universality and partiality do not exclude each other; in fact, they need each other. Marx - truth comes from a subjectively engaged position.
• The parallax effect - when we change our perspective and the object appears differently, it is not merely our epistemic limitation but a change in the ontological status of the object itself.
• The only way for us to break out of the ‘parallax gap’ is through a psychoanalytic understanding of sexuality in which the means become more of an end than the end itself, and allows us to reach the Absolute, the Real.
• Abstraction is immanent to material reality, rather than an idealist leveling. It is abstraction which animates and gives live to cold, dead matter. For instance, it is Marx’s theory of commodity exchange which animates the distribution of products, commodities, money, and capital - rather than atoms moving other atoms around.
• Behind every ethnic cleansing is a poet.

Absolute Recoil, Slavoj Zizek

• The standard liberal line is that a universality of rights allows for peaceful coexistence of different perspectives. The reproach of the colonized is that universality dissolves without residue into hegemony. The liberal works towards universality without wounds. But from a dialectical perspective, we should look towards the liberatory potential of the wound. The transformation to the new epoch radically shifts our perspectives and faculties of knowing. Hegel: Spirit is the wound it tries to heal; the wound is self-inflicted.
• The subject is the power of negativity: the introduction of a critical gap, cut, split into the unity; the power of differentiation and tearing apart, abstraction.
• There is no self which precedes self-alienation.
• Translation: the gap between the original and the translation is transposed back onto the original; the original was never complete; the original is itself a broken fragment which must be supplemented and made closer towards whole unity by the translation.
• The modification is not in opposition to the original; rather, the original is a fragment of a totality, the totality being the combinatory matrix of permutations. The objective of the analysis is not to reconstruct the full matrix, but rather to identify the traumatic core, the immanet antagonism which holds together the structure of the matrix, the aleatoric of the aleatoric matrix.
• Truth in the quantum superposition of waves: truth not in each one nor in the mere totality, but rather in the way in which treuth interacts with each other, inthe self-attention matrix, the permutation calculation.
• Absolute Recoil - from Hegel’s absoluter Gegenstoss: a withdrawal that creates what it withdraws from.

Of Grammatology, Derrida.

• Does the translation ‘ruin’ the original? In fact the translation holds together the originality. Butler: “the derivative is the conditin of possibility of the original.”
• Trace - the double movement and retroactive constitution of symbolic imposition. Formulating a new symbolic reality suggests that it was in fact there all along; that it was always already existent. Our thinking about origins is always eclipsed. “There is nothing outside the trace.”
• Differance - marks the excess irreducible to any synthesis or expression of the symbolic. “The (pure) trace is differance.” DIfferance “permits the articulation of signs among themselves.” It is the undissolved, irresolving, unsynthesized excess, that which escapes the dialectical unity.
• A deconstruction can help us understand the excess which lies beyond present/past, speech/writing, mind/body.
• “The supplement is neither a presence nor an absence. No ontology can think its operation”. There is no reference, there can be no reference, to this outside differance.
• Onto-theology - a framework of divine trace in which divine speech \(\to\) divine word \(\to\) the world \(\to\) divine speech; circularity and self-justification.
• The concept of writing must exceed the comprehension of language.
• The necessity of the trace is irreducible. Hegel was the philosopher of irreducibility; he was already caught up in the game of symbolic catch-outs and -ups.
• The positive sciences must repress abstract self-reflexive inquiry to pursue positive construction and expansion. The science of science is no longer logical but rather grammatological.
• Sin is the inversion of the natural relationship between the mind and the body. In this way the first step of the deconstructive double gesture is sin, and a sin Saussure attempts to eliminate.
• The terms of formulation prefigure the outcome, in text and in argumentation, because all is textual in origin, in the origin of origins.
• Psychology cannot account for the absence of the signifier, and certainly not the absence of the signified; writing is the name for both of these absences.
• Principal to Saussure’s thesis is the arbitrariness of the sign. This suggests a naturalization of the phonic and places wriitng as a durable institution. Yet we must challenge writing as ‘image’, and the derived arbitrariness of the image/sign. Yet Saussure does this himself: he has to work with incomplete ideas of the status of writing as an image or representation of the spoken language.

The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1. Michel Foucault.

• It may seem upon immediate appearance that discourse on sexuality and sexual practice has been repressed into silence recently. However, we see instead a great explosino of discourse on sexuality - but such discourse has been molded differently, in ways in which we may not even recognize as sexual discursivity. The arrangement of bathrooms, families, education, and such are all sexual matters. That we would believe the former is itself an interesting ideological-epistemological-perceptory problem.
• The liberal myth is knowledge is power. Foucault: power is knowledge, control over the productions of knowledge, self-identification with the production of knowledge.

Simulacra & Simulation, Jean Baudrillard.

• “the liquidation of referentials”
• Simulacra - a representation without a copy. The existence of a simulacra ruptures our dichotomy of real and false. Ideological institutions primarily have a vested interest in maintaining the dichotomy between real and false; thus the ‘toxic excrement’ of a hyperreal civilization is that irony, parody, excess, and drama become productive institutions.
• There are four stages of the image:
  1. It is the reflection of a profound reality;
  2. It masks and denatures a profound reality;
  3. It masks the absence of a profound reality;
  4. It has no relation to any reality whatsoever - it becomes its ‘own’ pure simulacrum
• The great irony of the crisis of nuclear war is that the crisis is illegitimate, a farse, a ploy, but a narrative whose failure to recognize its illegitimacy is what makes it successful. In this way the tactics of deterrence are sexuated in the Lacanian sense - completeness is accomplished by a thwarting, a subversiveness.
• Indeed the map has overtaken the territory. But what is the territory? It is not some relationship between a subject and the space it inhabits, like a region of enclosed private property, not an environmental biome in which needs are encompassed, nor is it a spatial arrangement. Rather, the territory is the negation of the repressed unconscious: the territory is open, circumscribed, the place in which production and reproduction occurs in a closed cycle without a cycle and without the exception. There is no cycle, and everything is subject to circulation. In this respect the territory is the circulation of the commodity: ultimate free sexuality, intercourse, birth, production, reproduction.
  • Does ‘surplus-value’ appear in the territory?
  • The territory is decentered from the subject.
• The animal is silent. But us humans manage to make them talk to us in their silence: we perform experiments on them to make their biology speak, we slaughter them to make their flesh speak; they are engaged in compulsory discourse. Thus the negativity of silence forces our utterly positive excessive disursivity to fall into a void which it must fill by its singular formula - excess. Thus we perform projection to fill the silence, to make the animals speak. What is the territory of the animal?
• What is the opposite of the remainder (the Hegelian irreducible, the excess, the suprlus, the exception)? What occurs when we attempt to subtract the remainder? Our only way to articulate this is that we obtain the remainder of the remainder. No other dialectical opposition can be expressed as the doubling of a single term; left of left is not right, masculine of masculine is not feminine. The concept of the remainder is a signifier which contains its opposition within itself, like a Godel sentence. Before, the excess was the weakened; but now it is the remainder which is the privileged, the remainder which is universal, and therefore the remainder which can no longer exist. Baudrillard’s analysis in “The Remainder” is a Derridean deconstruction of a Godelian self-reflexive term which demonstrates, in Marxist and Zizekian fashion, that there is no universality without particularity and no particularity without universality.
• The simulacrum of death, the self-reproduction through absorption of all possible negativity.
• God is not dead; he has become hyperreal.
• Nihilism emerges not through active destruction but rather through simulation and deterrence, passivity. From Romanticism, to Surrealism, to the nihilism of transparency: no longer aesthetic or political, but of fascination and disappearance, melancholy. First the destruction of appearances (modernity), then the destruction of meaning (postmodernity). The story is no longer of production but one of dissappearance, implosion.
  • (“On Nihilism” is perhaps the most polemic of Baudrillard’s writings in Simulacra and Simulation, a text which is already very polemic.)
• The dialectic is no more; its charm has expired. But some nostalgia remains.
• Melancholia is the fundamental tonality of the hyperreal.

Das Kapital, Marx.

• Value is not somehow inherent or natural to a product. Rather, it is a product of human labor-power.
• Commodity fetishism - the introduction of money as a universal equivalent to all products enables a chain of exchange which obfuscates the origin of value; that is, in labor.
• Capital is not simply money, but rather money which begets money.
• If the profit gained by a manufacturer was ‘fair’, the manufacturer would only be compensated the value of their own labor input - which is negliglbe compared to that of the laborer. Therefore, classical political economists which attempt to understand profit solely in terms of labor fail to understand and explain capital concentration. Instead, the manufacturer compensates the laborer for their necessary labor, but the laborer produces labor-power, which provides surplus-labor. It is from the failure to compensate surplus-labor that manufacturers can reap high profits.
• The machine is constant capital; it cannot produce value. If it could produce surplus-value, the laborer’s toil would be lightened; but in fact the introduction of machines increases the burden of the laborer. Moreover, mechanization decreases specialization and homogenizes labor to unspecialized raw labor input to machines. This input may occur lower down the line; the machine can distribute value over a larger number of products, but value still remains the product of the laborer.
• The capitalist becomes subordinated to capital; he has no right to historical existence. Rather it is the cycles of production and reproduction, the circulation of capital, which is the instigating force: and from this the capitalist may take some to enrich his life and to satisfy his pleasure cravings; but this is the representation, the surface, of a more sinister and powerful current.