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)

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.

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.

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.