The Return to Hegel:
A rambling lecture by Slavoj Zizek on Hegel and historicity (& Marxism &
Malebranche & Masturbation, etc.), with an emphasis on the
retroactive dimension of the historical process, which is what I'm
interested in:
"You can only discover a necessity retroactively". "Necessities only take place retroactively". "Once things happen, then they become necessary" (3rd video).Something unique happened in Hegel: post-Hegelian philosophy is an attempt to obliterate what Hegel did, in part by constructing a ridiculous image of Hegel—a kind of screen memory which conceals a (Lacanian) traumatic excess.
The beginnings of the anti-Idealist critique of Hegel in Schelling: the Idea is a secondary process, the natural process including the unconscious & the world's body so to speak is the primary process. (Of course one can argue that Hegel's perspectival focus on the idea is an axiomatic perspectival choice, a focus of attention).
Slavoj Zizek - The Return to Hegel. Video lecture, 2009. 1/16. Online at YouTube (egsvideo) 1 March 2012.*
2012
Kant: "Man is an animal who needs a master" to tame a certain excess of
non-natural instinct (what Freud calls the "death drive" or
immortality, something that insists beyond life and death). It's not
that culture breaks with nature, there is in between these instincts
which are no longer purely animal, the death drive, the sex drive...
We humans do many things which do not have a utilitarian value (Zizek seems to be looking for S.J. Gould's terms exaptation, spandrels, etc.—mixing it up a bit
with the concept of sexual selection). Pinker and the "chocolate fudge"
idea of the mind, exaptation gone wild. Our mind did not emerge to
understand itself, Pinker says, but to deal with practical purposes.
But we do bother about impossible tasks from the very beginning,
metaphysics, philosophy. All great inventions emerge from an
unusual logic of discovery: you invent something out of metaphysical
speculation, and later practical uses appear. It doesn't work the
Marxist way.
(And I suppose that's the beginning of a return to Hegel).
Humans internalize desire in an irrational way—not like
the apes' rational choice or partners— humans stick it out to the end,
in an irrational way. The other world, immortality, the Undead...
Freud's problem was to deal with that, that excess of desire.
What Zizek tries to do is to combine German idealism and
Freudianism—not in order to demean German idealism, but to raise Freud
to the category of a philosophical thinker.
For Hegel, Kant's recognition of an excess of negativity is not just a
starting point which then leads to perfect reconciliation. NO.
Hegel does not believe in the possibility of perfect reconciliation.
Radical negativity, excess, is everywhere, it explodes again and again.
It is neither nature nor culture— but it is the engine of the Hegelian
progress. Once you are in culture, you retroactively
de-naturalize nature. Culture becomes a suicidal, repetitive drive,
which needs to be reacted against. E.g. in sexuality—derived into
foreplay, denaturalization, masturbation, etc.; what is peripheral
tends to become central.
The example of Leader's psychoanalytical patient's slip of the tongue,
taking a woman to dinner, said to the waiter "bed for two"—Leader's
interpretation is that the slip of tongue is due to a defense against
enjoying too much the foreplay, a protest against the logic of the
deviation of desire so to speak.
Hegel's critique of concrete universality: he believes
that the concrete content of the world derives from the universal
notion. (I.e. his idealism). Zizek explains this via Deleuze's
anti-Hegelian concept of repetition. Deleuze claims that the new
emerges out of absolute repetition. (The example of a new melody
arising virtually out of the pure repetition of a melody by a virtuoso
pianist playing Augenmusik).
What changes is what you don't hear, what is written only for the eyes.
This is what Deleuze means by virtuality. In the same way, the
ideological revolution consists in changing the implicit rules, the
background, even if we say the same thing the virtual resonance is a
different one.
I suppose this radical change can be linked to what he says before
about historicity—it is not possible to think again the same after Hegel (or
composing the same way after Schoenberg, as Adorno said).
Another example of Deleuze's virtuality: a bad book by Doctorow adapted
by a bad film nonetheless gives rise to a virtual effect: through the
(bad) film we (retroactively) intuit the good book which should have
existed but didn't, except now, in a virtual state.
(One
might add here Benjamin's notion of the original modified by the
translation, or the deconstructive meanings identified by De Man I comment upon here. Later, Zizek brings up another example of virtuality from
Benjamin: the meanings of works of art which can arise only with
historical distance, as they are snapshots for which the developing
technique has not been yet invented).
Yet another example: Bergson's fascination with the fact that a war
(the 1st World War) could actually emerge, from a collective idea, only an idea,
to an actual reality—reality as a shock in its actual efficiency. What
was thought but seemed impossible, suddenly becomes possible and
necessary, in a retroactive way. (Like Zizek's military service:
actually being there and its
naturalization). Bergson's beautiful formula: not a standard
linear logic of a possibility among many becoming actualized, but
rather...
... something that we considered (symbolically) impossible actually happens, (—Let us say, the independence of Catalonia, just imagining—) and then, when it happens, it becomes possible.
This is the best definition of what Lacan calls an act:
something which seems impossible when it happens, but retroactively
creates its own conditions of possibility. E.g. Nixon's
visit to China.
Bergson's formulation: a reality inserts itself into the past as a
possibility, farther and farther, it inserts itself as having been
possible all the time, but only when it emerges it begins to "always
already have been" (Two Sources of
Morality and Religion).
The example of being in love: your previous life is structured as if
waiting for this moment. Jean-Pierre Dupuy's notion on the theory of
confronting catastrophes: one must accept them as inevitable and change
the very past, working retroactively. (Muy en línea con mi
propia teoría de las catástrofes).
Hegel too: in development a thing becomes what it already was. (Well,
that's a way of reading him—perhaps he's actually failing to articulate
the retroactive argument, but he says it NOW, in a way, you know,
retroactively...).
(And now Zizek goes on to quote T. S.
Eliot, and Borges, etc.—pity David Lodge didn't get credit for
that! or myself, since we're at it, with Borges & Kafka & the rest.
Really we're treading the same ground, only I "been there, done that"
in the 1990s...)
"Tradition and the Individual Talent" as read by Zizek: radical change restructures not just the
present but the past as well. Any
radical event radically recreates its own possibility. Hegel's
historical idealism means not only that you are influenced by the past:
you change the past, not the real past, but the past as it exists now.
The properly Hegelian interpretation of the relationship between
necessity and contingency. Not "reality is necessary but it realizes
itself in contingent ways" i.e. "a necessity of contingency"—this is a
vulgar Marxist interpretation, e.g. Napoleon as a contingent historical
figure which embodies a historical necessity. Instead, the deeper
Hegelian insight is the contingency
of necessity. Things become
necessary in a way which is ultimately contingent. The
necessity emerges retroactively.
"Judith Butler's" question: Is Zizek retroactively creating the Hegel
he needs? (Listen to the solution,
between the lines:)
If you come too close to things, reality blurs. Both in video games and
in reality. Some aspects of reality have been left "unprogrammed". The
best argument against reductionism, is that you cannot reduce
indefinitely, things get blurry. If there's a lesson in Heisenberg etc.
it's the incompleteness of reality itself. And this is the basic
recognition of Hegel's, his basic operation: our epistemological
limitation; we solve the
problem not by solving it, but by showing how the
problem itself is its own
solution.
Let's leave it there.
But the lessons go on, slowly petering
out...:
Adorno claims that you cannot find a global unifying theory which takes
either global mechanisms or actual phenomena as the ultimate
reality—neither Hegel nor the phenomenologists so to speak, taking the
other way round, going from phenomena and authentic experience to its
sedimentation. (From a Lacanian point of view there is not basic
authentic experience). Adorno's solution: it's wrong to try to develop
a global theory, because what we misperceive as a lack in our
understanding of reality is itself the actual experience of
reality.
Zizek's critique of "alternate modernity" and alternative capitalisms:
they want capitalism without paying the price. There was already an
experiment in that line: Fascism. The Hegelian interpretation of the
relationship between universal and particular here is close to Deleuze:
the universal is a question, and the particulars are the answers. This
is the way Marxists should assess capitalism: not responding to
capitalism in general, but to specific modes of capitalism. The
struggle is not between the particulars, the struggle is between the
particulars and the universal, the particulars are possible answers to
the deadlock caused by the general. This is what Hegel means by
concrete universality—a struggle between universality and its
particular content.
This lecture is followed by another one on The Interaction with the Other in
Hegel (and in lots of parentethical digressions as well I guess).
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