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

Zizekian Twist

It is by the famous intellectual star Slavoj Zizek that parallax is the observed difference, displacement of object. The parallax [Greek: parallassein = shift] is the minimal shift in object in contrary to nano-difference in space and time of the gazing subjects. It connotes the partial blindness, the intentional and deviant swap of gaze with or without the affirmative of a unique subjectivity.

The philosophical twist ….. is not simply “subjective” due to the fact that the same object which exist “out there” is seen from two different stances or point of view. (Parallax View 17)

It seems that the Lacanian gaze is radically twisted like a mobius stripe and there is no longer a verification of the very subjectivity of the Subject, or what exist is simply but the pluralistic twist of subjectivity. If there is more than a subject or the subject itself presupposes a close approximation that could be an apparent resemblance, a friend of politics, a dialectics of twins, the nano-difference between the twos could be the impossible of distance which can only be understood as a dialectics in topological twist.

Lacanian subject presupposes a subjectivity within the clinical field of psychoanalysis which Zizek may not agree with. The intrasubjectivity within our clinical experience is unlikely a reference for us to understand Zizek: it may connote that social reflectivity within the clinical session may become equivocal as it comes to contextual and worldly environs. The pluralist twist from a clinical subject to consolidated subjects radicalizes and opens up what could be the impossible volition, violation toward a dialectical revision of Lacan’s prima. The parallax view assumes the view from partial blindness, intentional acceptance of the partial truth. It is not unusual among the Chinese, especially from those with authority or extreme authority, making approval, justification, testimonial, licensing, validation with one eye opens and one eye closes. There is parallax shift only when we act with one eye opens and one eye closes. The shift itself is preoccupied with ideological blindness that is known and accepted among the members of the environs. The Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) has a famous scene of spying over a tiny holes. It is not usual among man who enjoys the jouissance of spying over woman that one see with same eye all the time. The parallax view will never be an access to jouissance as jouissance itself comes mainly from a unique pleasure of an imaginary unique of one’s desire. The gaze itself may never be a parallax gaze.

The gaze can also be prohibited, not to go into parallax stance, if one has search “Analia Hounie” in google picture, one will find it really difficult for one to have a gaze of our Zizekian Idol.

Filed under: Gaze, Lacan, Zizek, symbolic order , Analia Hounie, Gaze, Lacan, Parallax View, Renata Salecl, Zizek

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