Universal Truth I

Is philosophy a valid theoretical framework for the access to Universal truth?

Psychoanalysis is not the philosophy of human psyche for it tells us nothing about the truth that a philosopher would be interested in. Upon the couch, Freud has opened up the space for imagination, fantasy, lie and joke, but he has never required his patient to tell the truth.  Truth is not the imperative, for what psychoanalyst interests is the unconscious truth which may always be beyond the daily articulation.

But what could be the truth in psychoanalysis if it could not within the discourse of the patient. Lacan says the truth in psychoanalysis can only be found in jouissance, in lack, in the place where we are not present.  This truth is possible only within the larger framework of the Universal truth as lack.

Living in the world (in Heidegger’s sense) that we are trained to play the role as a subject or an object (master or slave) and we have no idea this only reflects what would be our misconception of the inwardly circumcised mediation (logics) of our status as an unified order. If the master/slave dialectics is put onto the larger background of a Universal truth, (i.e. the order of physical existence puts into interaction with the order of human existence, either in the form psycho-theological way or as a Kantian transcendental) the interface can only be the field of the freudian. The Freudian field opens up the internal world that enables the human psychoanalytic field interact, reflect, change, engage or restructure the substantiality of the Real.

Even when it is not only a matter of ontic experience, but of ontological understanding, the interpretation of being initially orients itself toward the being of innerworldly beings. Here the being of things initially at hand is passed over and beings are first conceived as a context of things (res) objectively present. Being acquires the meaning of reality. Substantiality becomes the basic of characteristic of being…. like other beings, Da-sein is also objectively present as real. (Heidegger, Being and Time I.vi 43)

This is what Heidegger taught us about the real and how it validates Da-sein as “objectively present”, as the basic of being.  And it also show us the importance of being “seen” or “discovered” as the basic of being/truth. Being as truth while it validates the connection between subject and object in discoveredness.

To say that a statement is true means that it discovers the beings in themselves. It asserts, it shows, it lets beings “be seen”in their discoveredness. The being true (truth) of the statement must be understood as discovering. Thus, truth by no means has the structure of an agreement between knowing and the object in the sense of a correspondence of one being (subject) to another (object). (Heidegger, Being and Time I vi 44)

Filed under: Derrida, Heidegger, Lacan, psychoanalysis, symbolic order, the Real , Being as being, Derrida, environmental issue, Heidegger, Lacan

Causality & Pure Word

What is at stake in this (Lacan’s) first shift from hermeneutics to structuralism, therefore, is precisely the question of cause. As we move from signification to its cause, signification is conceived of as the effect-of-sense: it is the imaginary experience-of-meaning whose inherent constituent is the misrecognition of its determining cause, the formal mechanism of the signifying structure itself. (Zizek 1994, 29)

Zizek is right to say that Lacan’s move from Freudian hermeneutics to structuralism is a major theoretical shift in psychoanalysis, but he may not be right to elaborate this shift as a problem of cauality. Zizek’s ideas about causality is basically from Hegel — the causality of telos (purpose), a highly difficulty concept. To Hegel, he has completely discarded the principle of the linear, mechanical causality (causa efficiens) in reality. What is at stake is the causality with meaning and purpose. This may be a transcendental intentionality in disguise. One may question about the purpose: who is behind the purpose of its causality. Buddhist causality (causation) explains the self-encirclement of enquiry, an inwardly circumcised meditation. Hegel’s causality is exactly a religious temptation if it has been disguised by the coverup of absolute negation. His principal of the Spirit as a continous, gradual, historical process with series of steps through which Spirit logically returns to itself as self-actualizing. This is religion. Causality is in some sense of religious sensation while structuralism is not.

Zizek is possibily right to stress the causality as the logic that constitutes the substantiality of sign, but he is not quite right to put the signified as an object. It may be related to Zizek’s Marxian Hegelian dilemma which makes him impossible to differentiate the Real object as a perfect objectification of substantial self – which is impossible without signification – from the Marxist socio-political agent as base structure. The Real object is the product of linguistic operation,  the interactive performance of the self.  Signification is the transformation that goes through the substantial body of the being and achieves what could be the mutation of spirit and self. The signification process is the work of WORD, the big word that will change the quality of the body, the immaculated self of pure existence. This inwardly diverted process precisely is what make an object as physical existence, pure objectification.

Filed under: Hegel, Lacan, Zizek, object a, psychoanalysis, the Real , Hegel, Lacan, object, objet a, substantiality, Zizek

History in its partiality

History does not cease to be an empirical science of “facts” because it has reformed its methods and techniques, or because it has substituted a comprehensive structuralism for causalism, atomism and naturalism, or because it has become more attentive to cultural totalities. Its pretension to founding normativity on a better understood factuality does not become more legitimate, but only increases its powers of philosophical seduction. A confusion of value and existence, and more generally, of all types of realities and all types of idealities is sheltered beneath the equivocal category of the historical. (Derrida, “Genesis and Structure” in Writing and Difference, p161)

The mechanics that authenticates history is not only simply a system binded by normativity in the veil of factivity. We do believe in history because history seems to be responsible for recording (technicality) fact through media, publication, memory, imaginary artifact. However it is not the fact or merely fact to make one believe in what is being recorded in history or the logics of history itself.  Paradoxically, I am thinking that it is the very idea of alibi in the contrary to being as witness which makes history “historical”. Historicity presupposes alibi in future perfect: one could have been there or one should have junction with its language or simply one who have escaped from being “part” of the history. History negates all possible validity of being- in-the-event: as a witness, victim, observer or simply as gaze-in-a-machine. This is precisely the scenario of an escaped assassinate in the plot: those who escaped is the only one who can speak the whole truth. Derrida says that is the seduction of factivity that validates history, but the problematic is that fact itself is not at the location, is always in fugitive. Even the most powerful media machine maintained by CNN can not matter all aspects of an event even thought they do intent to play the transparent part of reporting fact. History itself is partial, fragmentary and has to be retold retroactively. Paradoxically, those who have been to the event will not be regarded as a substantial object (it simply does not allow to exist) within the discourse of the history. Even though one was made part of it but he will never be the witness, for witness can only exist as an onmipresent gaze that is panoramic and pluripotential. Many years ago in China, lot of people have been to the very location of the history in the TAM Square, but no one is validated and no history is being retold in the way it is supposed to be.

The ontological link between history and its own validity, for some reasons we believe, lies on the being as being. Being in the site is at the core of the event which “is always extracted from a situation, always related back to a singular multiplicity, to its state, to the language connected to it, etc.” It is “a fragment of being” that makes history possible. (Badiou, “The Event as Trans-Being” in Theoretical Writing, p 98) If the philosophical seduction is a kind of paternal abuse in psychoanalytic sense, history has spatialized her desire upon the philosophical intrusion (seduction) and initiated the primal narcissism in philosophy thinking himself as the valid path to truth. It is philosophy himself trapped in the self indulgence of truth. Of course philosophy have never given up his inborn desire to seek support from his paternal relations with history, the domain that was supported by factivity of not being there.

Filed under: Badiou, Derrida, psychoanalysis, the Real , Deconstruction, History, philosophy

Rusty Existence in the Real – I

Materialism is not the direct assertion of my inclusion in objective reality (such an assertion presupposes that my position of enunciation is that of an external observer who can grasp the whole of reality); rather it resides in the reflexive twist by means of which I myself am included in the picture constituted by me — it is this reflexive short circuit, this necessary redoubling of myself as standing both outside and inside my picture, that bears witness to my “material existence.” (Parallax View 17)

Materialism exhibits what Zizekian project may intend to involve but may not want to be exposed in the Real. Talking about dialectic materialism in the situation when marxist logics has undergone serious interrogation may sound idiosyncratic. But materialism may go farther than marxist logics if we put it into the spectrum initiated by Lacan. Lacanian object opens up the access to the “object cause of desire” (Parallax View 18). Zizek is right to point out that “what is an ordinary object to you is to me the focus of my libidinal investment;” (Parallax View 18) however this objet petite a would neither be “transubstantiated” nor transformed into a Kantian “transcendental object.” For every singular subject, in contrary to Zizekian populist subjects, it seems unlikely that he will share his very private secret love to lost object within intrasubjective relations. It sounds logically and ontologically invalid for the very existence of objet petite a presupposes an individual process. This is also a relevant polemics if we have tried to find the photos of Ms. Zizek in our cyberworld. To share Zizek’s secret jouissance in a public accessible world seems inappropiate; for Zizek’s objet petite a is Zizek’s and it is neither Kant’s nor Lacan’s. Even though one tries to share it on the internet and what actually shared is not a populist cult, is still a privatized psychic reality. It is pointless to say there is transcendental objet petite a.

The substantiality of the psychoanalytic object is not relied on the minimal difference between the intrasubjective position in the parallax stance. For the minimal difference can only exhibit the infant’s play of coordination in the scenario of the Mirror Stage from which it is the subject itself entering into libidinal identification based on the imaginary reflection of his own existence in the Real with the change in partial bodily form rather than in the perspective of the subjective gaze. The pre-oedipal subjectivization is constituted from the framework of substantiality – an imago of the objectification in bodily coordination. Materialism shall be the existence of the Real “out there” which goes through the internalization of the imago and occupied the spatial preoccupation of human identification. Without this, the reflection of the imago, the identification process as well as the transaction of libidinal dynamism seems groundless.

Filed under: Lacan, Zizek, object a, the Real , imaginary order

Lust, Caution

Sorry to say it is not easy to view the award winning film from Ang Lee “Lust, Caution” as a romantic story as it is supposed to be (although someone may not agree). For us, lust is the language of Lacan – the jouissance of the impossible, the pleasure out of extreme painful experience. Sexual excitement may not be the only possibility of desire – as desire is someone one can not have or afraid of getting hold.

Desire is the alibi of the Other, the impulsive seeking of fulfillment which is impossible except with Death.  I do not see any lust in the movie although it is the dilemma of lust and caution putting into question.  Who’s lust? The Man’s or the Woman’s or no one at all.  I think this is basically a love story about scarification, socially unacceptable (barred) love and the secrecy of romance that both the Man and Woman do not aware.

What the girl seeking for in the plot against the enemy she sleeps with is nothing but negation -  against the father in absence, the coward schoolboy and at the end the miserable of life. Neither does she identify with the non professional spy group formed by her old schoolboys, nor does she need to be a patriot in whatever sense. She is indifferent, subtle and knows exactly her own demand, but she never shares the vision of being  an assassin. She may need the extreme kind of revenge against her schoolboy’s cowardice, against her father’s insufficiency, against the nation. Revenge at the end of existence is a kind of jouissance through which she identifies with the Thing that she may not have for life. The Thing could be, in face value, the marvelous diamond ring in question – the extravagance of existence, love or peacefulness.

But at the end, who cares where does the Thing drift. It ends up in void – the signification of the Thing dissolved as the substance of the Thing archived.

Filed under: Lacan, object a, psychoanalysis, symbolic order, the Real , The Thing, Lust, Caution, Chinese Film, Ang Lee,

Object of Psychoanalysis

The object of psychoanalysis is no other than what I have already proposed about the function played in analysis by object a. Is knowledge of object a thus the science of psychoanalysis?This is precisely the equation that must be avoided, since object a must be inserted, as we already know, into the division of the subject by which the psychoanalytic field is quite specifically structured — this is the point with which I resumed my seminar today. This is why it is was important to promote firstly, and as a fact to be distinguished from the question of knowing whether psychoanalysis is a science (that is, whether its field is scientific), the fact that its praxis implies no other subject than that of science. (“Science & Truth” in Ecrits)

Object a denotes the residual of symbolization through which the object a, as the reflective externality of inner most psychic reality splitting up into fragmentation, achieves its undeniable status in the psychoanalysis. It is the only that is created out of the symbolic order but exists in the realm of the Real. The real is the unspeakable, the realm that language can not pass through. It is also the case with the object a which is not a signifier or no longer at all. It is the only possible substance that is created out of symbolization. Similar to what cosmological black hole it can be, the internal tension of the object a is created out of the extensive reaction of symbolization. It is the residual of the signification, but in the meantime it is no longer within the realm of symbolic. As in the black hole, one says there is distortion of substance, speed or even time. The internal power to absorbing substance makes existence beyond it impossible. Object a is an agent already beyond the usual practice of understanding. It may have no meaning (as it is the residual) but it also in the same time the only substantial agent that have retained the trace of symbolization. The archic trace of sign that is exactly what Derrida mentioned in the scenario of the “Mythic Writing Pad.”
Object a is the only possible evidence of psychoanalysis as science. It is the Virgin Mary of existence that the holiness of the highest existence (i.e. language as God is existed) has passed through her body and makes her the only possible existence that evidence the very action of holy experience. The language operation again the object a is similar to the said holy action. It offers the prestigious status to the object a and makes it the key for understanding of psychoanalysis as science. That is the experience that even the son of man does not have, even though he is always regarded as immortal.

Filed under: object a, symbolic order, the Real , christian, Derrida, imaginary order, mythic writing pad, object a, symbolic order, the Real, virgin mary

Jouissance in subversion

The intrusion into politics can only be made by recognising that there is discourse, and not just the analytic discourse, only of jouissance, at least when one hopes for the work of truth from it. The characterisation of the discourse of the master as comprising a hidden truth does not mean that this discourse is hidden…..this mean that there is something that is compressed, that is like a superimposition, something that needs to be unfolded in order to legible. It is clean that its truth is hidden from it, and a certain Hegel articulated that it is delivered to him through the work of the slave. Only there you have it, it is a discourse of the master…..which rests on the substitution of the State for the master through the long pathway of culture, in order to end up at absolute knowledge. (Lacan, Seminar XVII Chapter 5)

In the field of politics, there is no such a thing as absolute knowledge while the only possible position is the position of the master. It is the discourse of the master which bridges the inconsistent, incoherent flow  from imaginary (libido force to dominate) to the Real. The master signifier demands, regulates and tries every possible rhetorical mechanism to defend its own validity. But it is clear, as Lacan points out, paradoxically that the validity of the master is unfold only through the work of the slave. The suppression of the slave will call out the truth of the master and let him out of his own compressed self knowledge. The position of the master is void itself; its emptiness is realized by his very impossibility to access to absolute knowledge which the acting out the the slave does help to revitalize its very existence. It is through the discontent of the slave and only through which that the discourse of master is delivered and made relevant. The pain of the slave illustrates the master’s jouissance registered in the Real. It is by the pathway of the master’s discourse that the imaginary of the master can access to the Real (painful existence of the slave) in a controllable manner.

In the election that activates the participation of the ex-chief secretary Anson Chan joining the run in Hong Kong. The master’s discourse of universal suffrage makes it possible for her imaginary (libido for power) access the Real (control and monitoring within the system). Of course, every participants enjoy the same logic of jouissance; although it is the subversion of jouissance that arouses the interest of Anson Chan’s counterpart, Regina Ip, even though she also claimed to support universal suffrage as well.

Even though the master has tried to arouse the popular attention, but without the acting out of a slave, the hidden and compressed truth of the master will never be uncovered. This is unaware even in the level of the master herself.

Filed under: symbolic order, the Real , Anson Chan, election, Hong Kong, imaginary order, jouissance, Master's discourse, psychoanalysis, Regina Ip

Le point de capiton

Point de Capiton or “quilting point” “anchoring point” is the interaction of the signifier and the signified which they are knotted together, fixed and stablized. In the daily symbolic world of discours, the continuous unstable sliding of the signifier is separated from that of the signified. If not with the point de caption, there would not be a fixed position to situate the dissemination of meanings. On those quilting points, the meaning is distributed, disseminated and stablized just like an upholstery button stitching on the material.

“It’s the point of convergence that enables everything that happens in this discourse to be situated retroactively and prospectively.” (Lacan, Seminar III, 267-8)

Lacan has a strong resistance to be categorized as structuralist in the sense that psychoanalysis, although it has stressed on signification process, is not only a problem of linguistic operation. Point de Capiton illustrates a possible materiality of the signifier
that its meaning is resistant to symbolic process. This point can be a signifier entering into the realm of the Real.

Zizek has used the point de capiton to illustrate the operation of ideology. Any particular signifier such as “democracy” or “freedom” could mean very different depended on the situation it is being pinned down. The meanings are disseminated, radicalized or doubled and means more than it should have. A signifier acts more than the function of that signifier but becomes a kind of icon. He argues that freedom can mean free action and non interference of economic decision in right wing while the same signifer may mean the freedom from control of capitalism to the right wing.

It seems that Zizek has used Lacan’s concept to build a political interpretation creatively, but at least we understand that to Lacan this Point is validated by its own materiality. In Hong Kong, the highly sensitive discussion about upcoming election with Anson Chan,
ex-chief secretary joining the run with pro-Beijing Regina Ip, the discussion about election has pinned down our fixed but contradictory meaning of democracy. The discussion of democracy raised a never ending dissemination of the meanings. Its meanings are nothing more than the operation of the master discours, not the signifier itself.

There is no point to keep finding the meaning of the signifier within, but to the encirclement of the externalities of the situation that the signifier is being used and positioned.

Filed under: the Real , Anson Chan, election, Hong Kong, Lacan, Le point de capiton, Point de Capiton, Regina Ip, Zizek