THE ROLE OF COLLECTIVE ORGANIZATIONIN THE CRITIQUE OF IDEOLOGY

Zizek and Politics Agon Hamza

Desire as a fact of ReasonYuan Yao

L’École Freudienne de Paris as a political model

Srdjan Cvjeticanin

Idea and Ideology in the Proposition of 9th of October of 1967

Gabriel Tupinambá

THE ROLE OF COLLECTIVE ORGANIZATIONIN THE CRITIQUE OF IDEOLOGY

13.30 Introduction13.40 Agon Hamza (skype): “Repeating Zizek: Zizek and Politics”14.00 Yuan Yao: “Desire as a Fact of Reason”

14.20 Q&A14.30 Srdjan Cvjeticanin: “L’École Freudienne de Paris as a political model”

15.00 Q&A15.10 Gabriel Tupinambá: “Idea and Ideology in the Proposition of 9th of October

15.40 Q&A

SCHEDULE

1. Pensée

website: www.scilicet.com

2. Circle of Studies of Idea and Ideology

website: www.ideaandideology.com // www.ideiaeideologia.com

3. The Proposition of 9th of October of 1967 on the Analyst of the School

Lacan’s excommunication (1963)The Founding Act (1964)The Proposition of 9th of October (1967) The Letter of Dissolution (1980)

INTRODUCTION

Agon Hamza

ZIZEK AND POLITICS

Žižekian politics, first and foremost, means a politics which is not so much a politics as a procedure of identifying and solving real and concrete (actual) problems. The preliminary task of constructing a politics based on the premises of what the Žižekian philosophy is: politics is the name of the problem, rather than the name of the solution.

There is ‘a doing nothing’ which is an activity, an act that marks a negativity, and there is a ‘doing nothing’ which means simply not doing anything and thereby recognising that nothing in fact took place. By occupying this political position, that is, by refusing to participate in a struggle which at its best will be carried out under the terms determined by the present, we engage in a much more difficult process: that of thinking.

We should leave Politics for thinking and in this way we will be able to be more realistic about what politics can in fact accomplish. This does not mean that we shouldn’t do it, but it means that though pragmatism today is in line with the inherently corrupted and dirty work of politics, we should have no illusions there. It is part of a true political act to distinguish between Politics and politics, and to show that ‘corruption’ is not a true political category, but a particular way of structuring the relation between the law and the lawful transgression of a situation. The difference between Politics and politics is not that of Event and non-event.

1) Fidelity to the Idea and the real antagonisms

2) The notion of the libidinal proletariat

3) Communist State

4) The question of the Master

The Idea of communism

Yuan Yao

DESIRE AS A FACT OF REASON

“The Ecole Freudienne cannot fall into the humourless tough-guy attitude of a psychoanalyst whom I met on my most recent trip to the U.S.A. ‘The reason I will never attack the established forms’, he told me, ‘is that they provide me with a routine with no problems, and this makes me comfortable.’”

(Lacan, Proposition of 9th of October)

The problem can be formulated in this way: if undergoing psychoanalysis allows us to see past those identifications which are fundamental for the formation of a group, how could we sustain a social form of engagement with it after the fact? Or, to put it more bluntly, why should well-analyzed individuals strive to belong to the group of psychoanalysts when they know full well that groups are based on an illusory idealization of a leader?

It seems to us, rather, that the disappearance of collective political will is not only linked to the increasingly autonomous nature of Capital, but also to the loss of individual will taken in its classical (enlightenment) sense. We define this latter sense of individual will by its capacity to suspend the teleological question “what is this good for?” while nevertheless retaining the desire that this question elicits.

Psychoanalysis attests to this knowledge that we don’t want to know, but nevertheless shapes us. It is important to examine individuality from the perspective of this question - which we are here calling the utility of utility. The patient by definition brings to his or her analysis certain expectations regarding its utility - but it is up to the analyst to refuse these expectations, creating a space for their re-articulation.

But what if our demands are not inherent to ourselves, but rather a way for us to make sense of “self” in general? That is, what if the self-recognition that our demands bring is ultimately more important than their particular objects?

Marx tells us that the key to Capital’s self-development lies in its continual inversion of the relation between labor and commodity. Labor produces commodities, but it is itself also a commodity. The split between its use (what it produces) and its exchange (what a worker is paid) is what allows for surplus value to emerge, which is then re-invested into capital. Therefore, though it appears at first that commodities are given their shape by concrete labor, it is in fact labor which is determined by the commodity-form. This results in alienated labor - labor which is dictated by the needs of Capital rather than the self-direction of the individual.

One can therefore conceive of self-interest today as a replacement for true freedom - by defining the zero-level of economics as composed of only individual consumers and laborers, the global problems which we face (unemployment, austerity, the “becoming-rent of profit”, and so on) become local problems. The first step to break from this deadlock is to de-naturalize self-interest.

What is then the relation between our value as laborers and our appetites as consumers? We argue that these are two sides of the same coin. The more our appetites can be intensified and rarified, the more difficult it becomes to see ourselves as part of a common space. When we fail to grasp this, we see in every failure to collectivize a manifestation of a social fact.

Our thesis is therefore that selfishness is a contradictory notion which serves a specific ideological function today. Just as for Wittgenstein there is no private language, we posit that there is no such thing as a private interest. Self-interest must always be mediated by what in psychoanalysis is called the Other, and this ultimately means that its source is not individual. Each individual must instead learn to be self-interested, and our question becomes that of the politicization of that process.

“The touchstone of whatever can be decided upon as law for a people lies in the question: whether a people could impose such a law upon itself. Now this might indeed be possible for a determinate short time, in expectation as it were of a better one, in order to introduce a certain order; during that time each citizen, particularly a clergyman, would be left free, in his capacity as a scholar, to make his remarks publicly, that is, through writings, about defects in the present institution; meanwhile, the order introduced would last until public insight into the nature of these things had become so widespread and confirmed that by the union of their voices (even if not all of them) it could submit a proposal to the crown, to take under its protection those congregations that have, perhaps in accordance w ith their concepts of better insight, agreed to an altered religious institution, but without hindering those that wanted to acquiesce in the old one. But it is absolutely impermissible to agree, even for a single lifetime, to a permanent religious constitution not to be doubted publicly by anyone and thereby, as it were, to nullify a period of time in the progress of humanity toward improvement and make it fruitlessand hence detrimental to posterity. One can indeed, for his own person and even then only for some time, postpone enlightenment in what it is incumbent upon him to know; but to renounce enlightenment, whether for his own person or even more so for posterity, is to violate the sacred right of humanity and trample it underfoot. But what a people may never decide upon for itself, a monarch may still less decide upon for a people;, for his legislative authority rests precisely on this, that he unites in his will the collective will of the people. As long as he sees to it that any true or supposed improvement is consistent with civil order, he can for the rest leave it to his subjects to do what they find it necessary to do for the sake of their salvation;2 that is no concern of his, but it is indeed his concern to prevent any one of them from forcibly hindering others from working to the best of their ability to determine and promote their salvation. It even infringes upon his majesty if he meddles in these affairs by honoring with governmental inspection the writings in which his subjects attempt to clarify their insight, as well as if he does this from his own supreme insight, in which case he exposes himself to the reproach Caesar non est super grammaticos, [Caesar is not above the grammarians] but much more so if he demeans his supreme authority so far as to support the spiritual despotism of a few tyrants within his state against the rest of his subjects.”

(Kant, What is Enlightenment?)

Individuals

MonarchPeople

Acquiring the form of the law

Self-interest

ReasonFreedom

Private Space

Market

Moral Law

Democracy

Public Space

Elections

Srdjan Cvjeticanin

L’ÉCOLE FREUDIENNE DE PARISAS A POLITICAL MODEL

Imaginary class: organized around pre-existing identificatory trait, i.e.

imaginary identification;

Symbolic class: based on mechanisms of interpolation, i.e. symbolic

identification;

Real or paradoxical class: reduced to two possibilities: dispersion of the group

or imaginary terror.

Milner’s theory of classes

Universalization of a Particularity

(Fundamentalism)

Particularization of the Universal

(Globalization)

True Universality(Communism)

International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA)

L’Ecole Freudienne de Paris (EFP)

Subject supposed to know (SSTK)

Desire of the Analyst (DoA)

Analyst Member of the School (AMS)

Analyst of the School (AS)

x

x

x

Hierarchy vs. Gradus

Analyst of the School

1. Testifies to the crucial problem of psychoanalysis, from within one’s own analysis;

2. Articulate his desire to be an analyst, as opposed to mere recognition of accomplished requirements.

AS < AMS

Unconscious – SSTK

1. The unconscious is the material marker that there is no whole – but its addressee is the subject supposed to know, which guarantees the whole.

2. The unconscious distorts itself in the very moment of revealing itself - the moment it speaks it is confused for what is said.

3. The subjet supposed to know – the addressee of the unconscious – is antithetical to the unconscious: either the unconscious or the subject supposed to know exists.

The discourse of the analyst

“truth is structured like a fiction”

Democracy is the Ideal that all should belong to the same autonomous space and it is a regulative Ideal, a point that can never be reached and communism, on the other hand, is the concrete Idea we determine in the construction of our own determination, it is the true form of freedom.

Gabriel Tupinambá

IDEA AND IDEOLOGY IN THE PROPOSITION OF 9TH OF OCTOBER OF 1967

covariance: a change in one of the components leads to changes in the other ones.

homogeneity: the site of intervention and the intervening action must be of the same matter.

What is a clinic?

semiology diagnostic

therapeuticsetiology

formal principles of the clinic:

What strata will we take as indications of a disease? How must we position ourselves in

order to make these indications legible?

What are the invariances at play in the multiple determinations of the clinical phenomena? How do we decide which recurrences to to privilege and which not to?

What is our theory of causation? What sort of entailment we suppose

between causes and effects?

How, where and when should we intervene? What is the criteria of a successful cure?

Periodization of Zizek’s work

radical democracy (1989 - 1997)

communist hypothesis(1997 - )

Millerian reading of Lacan (act as consistent interruption/openness)

Critique of Miller (the problem of the day after)

Ernesto Laclau (theory of social antagonism)

Alain Badiou (theory of fidelity)

critique of ideology ≣ critique of religion critique of ideology ≢ critique of religion

political act ≠ its re-inscription political act ↔ political organization

analysand (analyst)

passers jury

passant

Institutional circuit of the passe

traversal of fantasy

transmission

testim

ony

nomination

logic of symptom (sequence)

logic of traversal (limit)

logic of exemplification (sequence-limit)

logic of transmission(limit-sequence)

The Idea of the passe

impasse

passe

analysand/analyst

passa

nt/pas

ser

passer/jury

logical steps

supplementation

speculative identity

logic of symptom (sequence)

logic of traversal (limit)

logic of exemplification (sequence-limit)

logic of transmission(limit-sequence)

The Idea of the passe

impasse

passe

analysand/analyst

passa

nt/pas

ser

passer/jury

from individual to analysand

(1) displacement of symptoms(2) repetition of failure (impasse as obstacle)(3) subject supposed to know (demand of sense)(4) transferential interpretation: from imaginary to symbolic identification

negative determination: rule of free association → Other

suffering

logic of symptom (sequence)

logic of traversal (limit)

logic of exemplification (sequence-limit)

logic of transmission(limit-sequence)

The Idea of the passe

impasse

passe

analysand/analyst

passa

nt/pas

ser

passer/jury

from analysand to analyst

(1) figuration of failure (construction of fantasy)(2) traversal of fantasy (impasse as object)(3) liquidation of transference (separation of cause from Other)(4) psychoanalytic act: from symbolic identification to subjective destitution

negative determination: Other → barred Other

logic of symptom (sequence)

logic of traversal (limit)

logic of exemplification (sequence-limit)

logic of transmission(limit-sequence)

The Idea of the passe

impasse

passe

analysand/analyst

passa

nt/pas

ser

passer/jury

from passant to passers [the singular ≠ the ineffable]

(1) return to the trajectory of analysis (separation as alienation)(2) the fiction of the testimony (alienation as separation)(3) transference to psychoanalysis (life as example of Freud)(4) “self-erasing event”: producing one’s own causation

* relation between symptomal logic (sequence) and examplification (sequence-limit)

*

logic of symptom (sequence)

logic of traversal (limit)

logic of exemplification (sequence-limit)

logic of transmission(limit-sequence)

The Idea of the passe

impasse

passe

analysand/analyst

passa

nt/pas

ser

passer/jury

from passers to jury [the singular ≠ the position of enunciation]

(1) from speech to thought: what is the example thinking?(2) dividing “integral transmission”: as sinthome, as matheme, as joke(3) from individual transference to collective fidelity:

- conceptual problems (new universality) - institutional problems (new belonging) - clinical problems (new interpretation)

* relation between logic of traversal (limit) and logic of transmission (limit-sequence)** from the School back to the clinic: the collective support of psychoanalytic critique

***

Someone else is laughing at you...

(sequence)...and you get the joke.

(limit)

Telling an anecdote to others(sequence-limit)

Creation of an anonymous joke(limit-sequence)

The Joke as a model for the passe

impasse

passe

logical steps

supplementation

speculative identity

Covariance and homogeneity

semiology diagnostics

therapeuticsetiology

logic of symptom (sequence)

logic of traversal (limit)

logic of exemplification (sequence-limit)

logic of transmission(limit-sequence)

desire of the analyst

desire of the Other

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