左派 8 種立場總結---避掉真正的 politics
如果 capitalism 會自我革命,zizek 如何對抗 capitalism
Deleuze---logic of sense-- Zizek's paraphrase of it as an "effect" which exceeds
anything determined by its physical causes, and therefore as an expression of the
indeterminacy, or always-incomplete determinacy, or (in Zizek's retelling) of the
inevitable gap, in the realm of actuality; and hence as an opening to the Virtual, and
as an occasion for the emergence of the New.]
the notion, from The Logic of Sense, of the flow of sense as infertile, without a
proper causal power: Deleuzian reading does not move at the level of the actual
imbrication of causes and effects
on the one hand, the logic of sense, of the immaterial becoming as the sense-event,
as the EFFECT of bodily-material processes-causes, the logic of the radical gap
between generative process and its immaterial sense-effect: "multiplicities, being
incorporeal effects of material causes, are impassible or causally sterile entities. The
time of a pure becoming, always already passed and eternally yet to come, forms the
temporal dimension of this impassibility or sterility of multiplicities." [2] And is
cinema not the ultimate case of the sterile flow of surface becoming? The cinema
image is inherently sterile and impassive, the pure effect of corporeal causes,
although nonetheless acquiring its pseudo- autonomy. (quasi-cause, organs without
bodies)
Zizek---pseudo causes---quasi-causes
Event cannot be simply identified with the virtual field of Becoming which generates
the order of Being - quite the contrary, in The Logic of Sense, Event is emphatically
asserted as "sterile," capable only of pseudo-causality.
Here, we can discern in what precise sense Deleuze wants to be a materialist - one is
almost tempted to put it in classic Stalinist terms: in opposition to the mechanical
materialism which simply reduces the flow of sense to its material causes, dialectical
materialism is able to think this flow in its relative autonomy. That is to say, the
whole point of Deleuze is that, although sense is an impassive sterile effect of
material causes, it does have an autonomy and efficiency of its own.
while the basic premise of Deleuze's ontology is precisely that corporeal causality is
NOT complete: in the emergence of the New, something occurs which CANNOT be
properly described at the level of corporeal causes and effects. Quasi-cause is not the
illusory theatre of shadows, like a child who thinks he is magically making a toy run,
unaware of the mechanic causality which effectively does the work - on the contrary,
the quasi-cause fills in the gap of corporeal causality. In this strict sense, and insofar
as the Event is the Sense-Event, quasi-cause is non-sense as inherent to Sense
Nonsense is that which maintains the autonomy of the level of sense, of its surface
flow of pure becoming, with regard to the designated reality ("referent"). And, does
this not bring us back to the unfortunate "phallic signifier" as the "pure" signifier
without signified? Is the Lacanian phallus not precisely the point of non-sense
sustaining the flow of sense?
Negri--Absolute democracy
"absolute democracy" ("the rule of everyone by everyone, a democracy without
qualifiers, without ifs or buts
Zizek against Negri
How does this "politicization" of production, where production directly produces
(new) social relations, affect the very notion of politics? Is such an "administration of
people" (subordinated to the logic of profit) still politics, or is it the most radical sort
of depoliticization, the entry into "post-politics?"
As Hegel already knew, "absolute democracy" could only actualize itself in the guise
of its "oppositional determination," as terror. There is, thus, a choice to be made
here: do we accept democracy's structural, not just accidental, imperfection, or do
we also endorse its terrorist dimension?
Therein resides the ambiguity of the "postmodern" Leftist calls to abandon the
program of "taking power": do they imply that one should ignore the existing power
structure, or, rather, limit oneself to resisting it by way of constructing alternative
spaces outside the state power network (the Zapatista strategy in Mexico); or do they
imply that one should disintegrate, pull the ground of, the state power, so that the
state power will simply collapse, implode? In the second case, the poetic formulas
about the multitude immediately ruling itself do not suffice.
Agamben
Hardt and Negri conform here a sort of triad whose other two terms are Ernesto
Laclau and Giorgio Agamben. The ultimate difference between Laclau and Agamben
concerns the structural inconsistency of power: while they both insist on this
inconsistency, their position towards it is exactly opposite. Agamben's focusing on
the vicious circle of the link between legal power (the rule of Law) and violence is
sustained by the messianic utopian hope that it is possible to radically break this
circle and step out of it (in an act of the Benjaminian "divine violence").
Negri—determinate negation
Agamben---abstract negation
The difference between Agamben and Negri and Hardt could be best apprehended
by means of the good old Hegelian distinction between abstract and determinate
negation: although Negri and Hardt are even more anti-Hegelian than Agamben,
their revolutionary LEAP remains an act of "determinate negation," the gesture of
formal reversal, of merely setting free the potentials developed in global capitalism
which already is a kind of "Communism-in-itself"; in contrast to them, Agamben - and,
again, paradoxically, in spite of his animosity to Adorno - outlines the contours of
something which is much closer to the utopian longing for the ganz Andere (wholly
Other) in late Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, to a redemptive leap into a
non-mediated Otherness.
The Mistake of Marx
Marx's fundamental mistake was to conclude, from these insights, that a new, higher
social order (Communism) is possible, an order that would not only maintain, but
even raise to a higher degree and effectively fully release the potential of the
self-increasing spiral of productivity which, in capitalism, on account of its inherent
obstacle ("contradiction"), is again and again thwarted by socially destructive
economic crises. In short, what Marx overlooked is that, to put it in the standard
Derridean terms, this inherent obstacle/antagonism as the "condition of
impossibility" of the full deployment of the productive forces is simultaneously its
"condition of possibility": if we abolish the obstacle, the inherent contradiction of
capitalism, we do not get the fully unleashed drive to productivity finally delivered of
its impediment, but we lose precisely this productivity that seemed to be generated
and simultaneously thwarted by capitalism - if we take away the obstacle, the very
potential thwarted by this obstacle dissipates... (Therein would reside a possible
Lacanian critique of Marx, focusing on the ambiguous overlapping between
surplus-value and surplus-jouissance).
Zizek—Marx—object a
So where, precisely, did Marx go wrong with regard to the surplus-value? One is
tempted to search for an answer in the key Lacanian distinction between the object
of desire and the surplus-enjoyment as its cause.
So there is always a gap between the object of desire itself and its cause, the
mediating feature or element that makes this object desirable. And, back to Marx:
what if his mistake was also to assume that the object of desire (the unconstrained
expanding productivity) would remain even when deprived of the cause that propels
it (the surplus-value)?
And, as is the case with Marx, it is Deleuze's failure to take into account this
object-cause that sustains the illusory vision of unconstrained productivity of desire or, in the case of Hardt and Negri, the illusory vision of multitude ruling itself, no
longer constrained by any totalizing One.
Objet a as Inherent Limit to Capitalism –
Because it is focused on the surplus of objet petit a, capitalism is no longer the
domain of the Master.
Zizzek—parallax view--capitalism
The very tension between the processes of production and circulation is thus once
again that of a parallax. Yes, value is created in the production process; however, it is
created there as it were only potentially, since it is only actualized as value when the
produced commodity is sold and the circle m-c-m is thus completed. The temporal
gap between the production of value and its realization is crucial here: even if value
is created in production, without the successful completion of the process of
circulation, there stricto sensu is no value—the temporality is here that of the futur
antérieur, i.e., value ‘is’ not immediately, it only ‘will have been’. It is retroactively
actualized, performatively enacted. In production, value is generated ‘in itself’, while
only through the completed circulation process does it become ‘for itself’. This is how
Karatani resolves the Kantian antinomy of value which is and is not generated in the
process of production. It is because of this gap between in- and for-itself that
capitalism needs formal democracy and equality:
The basic idea of the parallax view is thus that bracketing itself produces its object.
‘Democracy’ as a form emerges only when one brackets the texture of economic
relations as well as the inherent logic of the political state apparatus—both have to
be abstracted, for people who are effectively embedded in economic processes and
subjected to state apparatuses to be reduced to individual electoral agents.
Zizek—parallax view—objet a
WHICH is this object? The answer is: the parallax object.
The common definition of parallax is: the apparent displacement of an object (the
shift of its position against a background), caused by a change in observational
position that provides a new line of sight. The philosophical twist to be added, of
course, is that the observed difference is not simply "subjective," due to the fact that
the same object which exists "out there" is seen from two different stations, or
points of view. It is rather that, as Hegel would have put it, subject and object are
inherently "mediated," so that an "epistemological" shift in the subject's point of
view always reflects an "ontological" shift in the object itself. Or, to put it in Lacanese,
the subject's gaze is always-already inscribed into the perceived object itself, in the
guise of its "blind spot," that which is "in the object more than object itself," the
point from which the object itself returns the gaze. "Sure, the picture is in my eye,
but me, I am also in the picture": 2
Nowhere is this structure clearer than in the case of Lacan's objet petit a, the
object-cause of desire. The same object can all of a sudden be "transubstantiated"
into the object of my desire: what is to you just an ordinary object, is for me the
focus of my libidinal investment, and this shift is caused by some unfathomable x, a
je ne sais quoi in the object which cannot ever be pinned down to any of its
particular properties. Objet a is therefore close to the Kantian transcendental object,
since it stands for the unknown x, the noumenal core of the object beyond
appearances, for what is "in you more than yourself." L'objet petit a can thus be
defined as a pure parallax object: it is not only that its contours change with the shift
of the subject; it only exists - its presence can only be discerned - when the landscape
is viewed from a certain perspective. More precisely, the object a is the very CAUSE
of the parallax gap, that unfathomable X which forever eludes the symbolic grasp and
thus causes the multiplicity of symbolic perspectives. The paradox is here a very
precise one: it is at the very point at which a pure difference emerges - a difference
which is no longer a difference between two positively existing objects, but a
minimal difference which divides one and the same object from itself - that this
difference "as such" immediately coincides with an unfathomable object: in contrast
to a mere difference between objects, the pure difference is itself an object. Another
name for the parallax gap is therefore minimal difference, a "pure" difference which
cannot be grounded in positive substantial properties.
Until now, the idea that a poor country such as Russia, with a large peasant
population, could proceed directly to a workers’ revolution, was the property of a
very small minority, best represented by Trotsky. Lenin had the courage to abandon
his old theories, come over to the substance of Trotsky’s position (without, however,
ever formally saying so), laying the ground for Trotsky and his followers (the
Inter-District Committee – in Russian, Mezhrayontsi or Mezhrayonka) to fuse with
Lenin’s Bolsheviks in the summer of 1917.[iv] From that point on, until the rise of
Stalin, the Russian Revolution was pre-eminently identified with Lenin and Trotsky as
an inseparable team.
How to fight capitalism
What if the problem of capitalism is not this solipsistic mad dance but precisely the
opposite, that it continues to disavow its gap with "reality," that it presents itself as
serving the real needs of real people? The originality of Marx is that he played both
cards simultaneously: the origin of capitalist crises is the gap between use- and
exchange-value, and capitalism constrains the free deployment of productivity. (A
plea for Leninist Intolerance)
Marx—General Intellect
Is this not the most radical expression of Marx's notion of a general intellect
regulating all social life in a transparent way, of a postpolitical world in which the
administration of people is supplanted by the administration of things?
Utopia
In a proper revolutionary breakthrough, the utopian future is neither simply fully
realized, present, nor simply evoked as a distant promise that justifies present
violence. It is rather as if, in a unique suspension of temporality, in the short circuit
between the present and the future, we are-as if by Grace-for a brief time allowed to
act as if the utopian future were (not yet fully here, but) already at hand, just there
to be grabbed. Revolution is not experienced as a present hardship we have to
endure for the happiness and freedom of the future generations but as the present
hardship over which this future happiness and freedom already cast their shadow-in
it, we already are free while fighting for freedom, we already are happy while fighting
for happiness, no matter how difficult the circumstances. Revolution is not a
Merleau-Pontyan wager, an act suspended in the futur anterieur, to be legitimized or
delegitimized by the long term outcome of the present acts; it is as it were its own
ontological proof, an immediate index of its own truth.