Otherness

In Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (a question the answer to which seems to be yes, in fact, Zizek does in first few books), Zizek links together Habermas and Derrida. They both "presuppose an ethical demand or norm that precedes and sustains every concrete political intervention which is never able fully to live up to it". More specifically, "each articulates what the other has to presuppose and disavow to sustain his position." Derridean (and Levinasian) otherness is irrational without norms. That is, so long as it is unconstrained by norms or customs, the absoluteness of the Call of the Other becomes an irrational demand. Conversely, Habermasian normativity reduces the Otherness of the Other: the norms and suppositions of the communicative action constitutively exclude those who reject or fail to recognize them. In sum, each resists Otherness.

I think this is right as a reading of Habermas and Derrida. But, what sort of relation to Otherness is possible? Zizek's answer of course involves the Act: in the act I am the absolute Other, object. But, the Act is necessarily a disruptive internvention, a radical change. It's a relation to Otherness that completely, traumatically changes who I was and what we will be and become.

What seems clear, then, is that the relation to Otherness is not ongoing. In the aftermath of the Act, a new world or reality is installed. And, where is Otherness here?

If this line of inquiry has merit, then it might well be that Zizekian Otherness isn't exactly otherness: it functions more like negativity. If Otherness is conceived as negativity, are we in yet another Western, racist logic?

Comments

[David]

At the risk of repeating some of the comments on the previous post, I think Zizek is reusing Badiou here, again. In the B./Z. discussions I mentioned there (published as "Philosophie und Aktualität", not really recommended), he says about D. and H.: "We are dealing here, I believe, merely with two complementary versions [etc.] ... Against these supplementary positions it has been Badiou's great merit to have completely changed the field with his ethics. Not Otherness is the problem, but the Same."

Which is of course, undoubtedly, a reference to the well-known second chapter of Badiou's Ethics, "Does the Other Exist?" (short answer: no), where B. writes: "... genuine thought should affirm the following principles: since differences are what there is, and since every truth is the coming-to-be of that which is not yet, so differences are then precisely what truths depose, or render insignificant. No light is shed on any concrete situation by the 'recoognition of the other.'"

So I suspect that Zizek is drawing parallels between the lacanian Act and Badiou's Truth-Event, as a way to render "Otherness" insignificant (thereby adding a fourth item, after objet a, the symptom and the primal scene, to my growing collection of psychoanalytical notions that have been named as equivalents to Badiou's Event.)

(For another version of Badiou's thoughts on Otherness, see his remarks on the French headscarf ban:
http://www.islamonline.net/English/in_depth/hijab/2004-03/article_04.shtml
"The only problem regarding these 'cultural differences' and 'communities' is certainly not their social existence, habitat, work, family or school. It is that their names are vain when what is in question is a truth, whether it be of art, science, love or, especially, politics. That my life as a human animal is wrought with particularities is the law of things. That the categories of this particularity profess to be universal, thereby taking upon themselves the seriousness of the Subject, that’s when things regularly get disastrous.")

[Kenneth Rufo]

Are we to take Zizek seriously on his analogical conflation of Habermas and Derrida?

I'm asking in all seriousness, whatever that entails, as I'm really not sure how the two thinkers in question can be considered commensurable without either a tongue-in-cheek disingenuity or without a reduction so absurd it appears more comic than tragic.

So let me try to offer some thoughts on this conflation, before I even think about whether the act continues to tarry in a/with a negative that inherits a certain Western lineage that might be problematic, and let me see if I can simultaneously address the question of seriousness, because I feel to some extent that they're intertwined. Given the debate between Austin/Searle and Derrida in Limited, Inc., a debate largely about the ability to demarcate seriousness, and given the aesthetic gulf between Habermas and Derrida, with the first being rather, umm, rigid, and the second dancing so much around a particularly Derridean jouissance, seriousness (at least the possibility of seriousness) does seem to matter.

Habermas and Derrida are linked because they both allegedly "presuppose an ethical demand or norm that precedes and sustains every concrete political intervention which is never able fully to live up to it." For this linkage to make sense, the terms that need to do all the operational work are the words "demand or norm" and the supplemental adjective "concrete." What might constitute a demand? How might one identify a norm? And what would be the other of a concrete intervention? Is there some form of abstract intervention, perhaps, that might somehow avoid a normative presupposition? Is there some anomie that becomes so without already situating itself alongside a norm, a demand, or some other conventional injunction? Certainly these questions have answers, but I think the answers themselves are more politically revealing than they would be heuristically valuable, as there needs to be a very careful threading to be able to run two very different needles through such a limited and targeted set of conceptualizations.

And all of that before we even begin to parse the Act itself, the naming of its experience, the nature and context that delimit its meaning, the rupture between the before and after through which the subject becomes the Object and opens up to a politics of otherness not predicated on an ethical injunction. I understand the dissatisfaction with what goes under the name of Ethics, and certainly Levinas has his own share of problems (anthropocentrism, an uncomplicated assessment of mediation, among others) no matter how singular is his intervention in the field of ethics and morality. But I suspect this dissatisfaction remains an insufficient basis from which to dismiss ethics, especially given the problems associated with discerning the Act. What is its context? How does one know it when one sees it? Most importantly, and following Derrida, how does the act escape and somehow open up iterability - the series of acts through which the singular act is identified as such - when the act conjures an absolute other who must, by necessity, never be strictly absolute to be identified as the other in the first place.

Here's Derrida, in Limited, Inc, identifying the problem of context for any speech act, and doing so in a way that I think extends to this discussion:

That is why there is a relative specificity, as Austin says, a “relative purity” of performatives. But this relative purity does not emerge in opposition to citationality or iterability, but in opposition to other kinds of iterations within a general iterability which constitutes a violation of the allegedly rigorous purity of every event of discourse or every speech act. Rather than oppose citation or iteration to the noniteration of an event, one ought to construct a differential typology of forms of iteration, assuming that such a project is tenable and can result in an exhaustive program, a question I hold in abeyance here. In such a typology, the category of intention will not disappear; it will have its place, but from that place it will no longer be able to govern the entire scene and system of utterance. Above all, at that point, we will be dealing with different kinds of marks or chains of iterable marks and not with an opposition between citational utterances, on the one hand, and singular and original event-utterances, on the other. The first consequence of this will be the following: given the structure of iteration, the intention animating the utterance will never be through and through present to itself and to its content.

Given this inaccessibility, how is it that one becomes other, becomes object, experiences the Act? Isn't the act always already circumscribed by a set of discourses (and thus a dynamics and even a juridicality) that encourages some experiences over others?

Anyway, enough with the act. My point there is pretty obvious, in that it seems to me that the touting of the act is more the touting of an elision by which ethics isn't so much advanced upon but rather swept under. And given at least the possibility of such an operation, I think it becomes sufficiently difficult to parse a norm or a demand, especially as they relate to any "concrete" form of intervention in a way that doesn't also implicate the possibility and realization of that thing that goes by the name Act.

As for the question of the ethical demand itself, especially as it relates to Derrida, Jodi writes: "Derridean (and Levinasian) otherness is irrational without norms. That is, so long as it is unconstrained by norms or customs, the absoluteness of the Call of the Other becomes an irrational demand." I find this a somewhat problematic gloss, in that the phrasing presupposes a split between rational and irrational even as the phrasing hints at a demand that remains free of normativity. So is the demand of the Other in Derrida to be understood normatively as irrational because of its absolute restriction of an a priori norm? In which case, this seems like more an interpretive trick than a genuine problem concerning Derrida's take on the other other. Especially since it's never as simple as an absolute anything for Derrida. In this case for example, the ethical injunction is already in operation even if it is denied since the injunction (as it is with Levinas) constitutes the possibility of a response, and thus the possibility of interpreting the call as a demand, a demand to be met or not. Here's Jeff Nealon, putting a pretty succinct point on it:

The ethical, Derrida suggests, rests not solely or even primarily in choosing or refusing to be responsive to this or that existing category of otherness. Those who turn or respond only to what they know “turn their eyes away when faced by the as yet unnamable.” But it is toward this wholly other, this “monstrosity,” that affirmation is deployed, and whether one “chooses” affirmation or denial, the “decision” is inexorably based on an affirmation, an otherness, an event that—like the decision that grows out of it—has future relays far beyond the control of the subject. Both affirmation and denial are acts that create effects, irreducibly affirmative acts, and something other—something monstrous—is necessarily born(e) in affirmation.

The demand isn't then something that requires response, it is the engendering of response itself, of the capacity to respond or even recognize a demand. This is what, for Derrida, opens up the possibility of the event, which for Derrida is always prompted by the call of the Other. The event, which is as close as Derrida will come to Zizek or Badiou on the act, is certainly tied to the other, to the monstrous, to the specter, to the guest, rather than to the experience itself, but that is because the language through which one recognizes something like an event already presupposes a multiplicity of selves generated by a near-infinite multiplicity of others. Zizek can certainly take issue with this formulation, but it doesn't seem at odds with the basic Lacanian definition of the unconscious as the language/discouse of the other. But even then, even if we follow Zizek here, it does not follow for any reason that an a priori ethical demand that cannot be fulfilled leads to a state of irrationality. Were we to accept Derrida's premise about the debt owed to the other is infinite, were we to follow Levinas in his rethinking of ontology and the explosion of the subject, were we to find common ground with Nancy in his Being-Singular-Plural, we would have every "reason" to believe that our constitutive debt cannot be excised through payment, which is to say, that our ethics would remain (if one wished it to be so, though none of those three do) rational, assuming (of course) certain definitional agreements.

One other quote, I think, before returning to the question of seriousness. This one from Politics of Friendship:

The aporia of the event intersects with, but also capitalizes or overdetermines, the aporia of decision with regard to the perhaps. There is no event, to be sure, that is not precded and followed by its own perhaps, and that is not as unique, singular, and irreplaceable as the decision with which it is frequently associated... A theory of the subject is incapable of accounting for the slightest decision.

In this we see two things worth noting: a displacement of the event or at least an economy by which the event is made subservient to the decision, and the introduction of the perhaps, which in Politics of Friendship is the sign under which the question of temporality is introduced. I'd like to say more on this temporality, as I think it has much to do with Derrida's negotiation of politics and his thinking of the political, but it probably falls outside this particular comment. And it's been written about at length elsewhere, and probably doesn't need more than a mention here anyway.

So if we begin this all with the belief that we should be taking Zizek seriously, that Habermas and Derrida are related by their opposition to each other, a relationship more homological than demonstrable, what then do we do with analyzing his claims for the Act? Doesn't it become clear that the seriousness with which Zizek displaces the two poles between which or against which he would like to position his own thought is, in fact, more serious than his thought itself? Zizek's Act is, at least in his writing, more theatrical (with all the trappings of a well choreographed scene change) than it is rigorous.

But that's hardly surprising, eh? Those who have been following Zizek all these years know that the parody and sense of wit that inflected his earlier work have come to dominate and command his more recent writings, and rigor no longer satisfies as the soup du jour. It thus seems prefectly "rational" for us to come to a solution in which we do not take Zizek seriously at all, to treat his work and this particular displacement (of Habermas/Derrida) as a scene, and to spend the time trying to discern if this staging is drama, tragedy, or - more likely - comedy. In which case, the interpretive act, like the vaunted "Act" itself, seems like more than and less than a truth-event, and more a demonstration of its own profanity. Which isn't a bad thing, of course, just a different thing, a different call, a call of the other that "demands," you guessed it, a decision and its perhaps.

[Kenneth Rufo]

I forgot LS doesn't allow blockquote formatting. Hopefully the quoted sections stand out as such, even in the absence of the appropriate lexical marks.

[Shem Shiverovsky]

The terms Otherness and the "Other" are often noted in the PoMo types of discussion. Those of us who endured some Sartrean "mauvaise foi" at point were also introduced to the topic. Although it would seemingly be difficult to confirm exactly what is occuring when the individual shapes or forms its own self in relation to the Other (and other people), Otherness may be a useful concept; but I do not think one could specify what this entire process consists of regardless of Lacan or Sartre's or now the PoMo's attempts to categorize and systematize it. Someone such as Dr. Laing would claim (and Sartre may have agreed), that the individual's relation to other people, and how he or may sort of react and create him/herself can not really be specified; in a sense, it's the traditional problem of other minds. At least Sartre noted the subjectivity of this process: that the Self's choices and personality "construction" were not something that either Freudian or behaviorist systems could accurately chart. One might infer how this takes place, or as Laing did, carefully observe schizophrenics and realize their "madness" was often sort of a reasoned response to various threatening situations; but lacking some mechanical or biochemical routine for correlating mental states, or language, or emotions, to neurology it seems any sort of analysis of how the Self constructs itself in relation to the Other would be mostly misguided. A black gangster in LA most likely has developed a strong animosity to the white Other but how that takes place is not simply determined with a few hours of counseling: the Self's relation to environmental factors must be accounted for, as should heredity, however quotitian that all may seem to PoMo psychoanalytic types.

[Patrick J. Mullins]

Shem--is that you? If so, we've got things to discuss, at your leisure. You're writing in a very proper mode today, so you may not have appeared.

[Jodi]

Kenneth,

Crucial to Zizek's account of the Act is the idea that the act redefines the context in which it intervenes. The Act, then, changes the very ethics by which it will be assessed. Here it is like Badiou's Event. By 'object' here, Zizek has in mind the way that one's subjective determination is not enough to produce the Act; rather, one retroactively accounts for the decision in light of the outcomes of the Act. So, rather than being circumscribed by circumstances, the act is precisely that which overcomes the circumstances.

For Zizek, the status of the Event or Act is ontological in the sense that Being is non-all; we can't get from a set of effects alone, say, to their cause, without a gap or jump. So, the sameness of iterability is already disrupted; the act doesn't conjure another, then, in the sense you describe; rather, in the Act, one becomes other (to oneself, or the other one once was in the preceding order).

On the linking of Habermas and Derrida, the reading of them as supplementary: I find this useful. It is also useful, say, to read Kant and Hegel together, Kant and Nietzsche, Kant and Sade. So, I don't see why Zizek's approach should be dismissed here as necessarily unserious.

I should, though, expand my little summary and gloss: the criticisms of Derrida and of Habermas are those that would be made by supporters of the other; so, Habermasians reject Derrida for the reasons I suggested in my post and vice versa. For Habermasians, the call of the Other becomes irrational without norms. For Derrideans the constrains on speech reduce the Other of her otherness.

What seems interesting to me in the matrix, or account of supplementary of these two positions, is the difficulty in coming up with a solution or answer that would satisfy opponents: would a Derridean answer satify the Habermasians? And, would a Habermasian answer satisfy the Derrideans? Zizek suggests what he thinks of as a radically different move, one that rejects 'respect for Otherness.'

And, Zizek's suggestion is a notion where instead of responding to or integrating the Other, one becomes Other, through the Act.

[Kenneth Rufo]

Then I suspect that the difference between Zizek's act and Derrida's decision is much the genetic difference between the chicken and the egg, and I'm not sure there's a means to resolve that difference other than by a sort of intuition.

Still, two minor responses. First, iterability is always disrupted for Derrida as well, but this disruption is itself iterable, constrained by genres that overdetermine its interpretation. Second, it's not that the linking of Habermas and Derrida isn't useful; rather, it's precisely the high utility of that particular conjoining, of that staging, that makes me call out its theatricality. It seems to me to be a pairing that enables a reduction and caricature of both thinkers, in order to rhetorically enable a radical break with both. And as you note with Kant and friends, there are many pairings from which to choose.

I wonder if a different, perhaps more productive way for me to approach this might be to ask: first, under what conditions does recognition of an Act occur? And second, is there a political intervention that wouldn't be concrete?

[Kenneth Rufo]

Jason, if all of what you label PoMo is really just an odd, dogmatic incarnation of Hegel, are your responses, as tired and as predictable as they are, examples of tarrying with the negative?

How about, and I know this is a novel idea, if the basic concepts of "Act, Truth Event, Otherness--are easily undercut by some basic analysis," why don't you attempt said basic analysis rather than its parenthetical presence?

I understand a preference for existential philosophy, but a preference and a refrain gets you out on the dance floor, it doesn't offer up much of an aesthetically pleasant display or even the promise of transitory partners. So consider this an invitation to line-dance (you strike me as a country/folk kind of yahoo), after which, I'm sad to say, I won't have much to offer you.

[Jodi]

Kenneth,

A couple of things, first a side note--my reading of Derrida is really limited, so I can't engage your points well on that score. I would guess that there are ways to see the convergences between some of Derrida's and some of Zizek's ideas and that Zizek may well overstate the divergences; I'm starting to see this better with respect to Deleuze, primarily through the work of a few readers of Deleuze who bring out Lacanian suppositions that continue to guide the arguments (even as the text is against psychoanalysis) of Anti-Oedipus.

Second, on the technical description of the Act. An Act is Real. I'm not sure if this is the same as what you mean by concrete. So, (and I hope I have the details right, I haven't been looking at this specific stuff recently), St. Paul's conversion is Real--necessary for his working/production of the Truth of Christianity. Is that concrete? I'm not sure. The October Revolution was Real and I would say concrete--but only in light of what followed it (so, it wasn't put down immediately and depicted/treated as a coup). What these examples should suggest is that recognition of an Act is always retroactive, subsequent, to the Event of the Act. There can be all sorts of misses, political interventions that try and miss. This is part of the risk of an act. There are also pseudo acts and acting outs, upheavals and outbreaks that are symptomatic but do not lead to a radical restructuring of the situation out of which they emerged.

Is there a political intervention that wouldn't be concrete? If concrete is Real, then Zizek would say no (thereby rendering most of what we think of politics in everyday life as post political management, hysterical provocation, and the empty resistance of Beautiful Souls). But maybe you have something else in mind?

On the theatricality: I agree with you completely on its function in the text. Do you think this is a problem or somehow illegitimate? Is it not a rather conventional mode of positioning? I think this is an interesting question, not least because many readers (or former readers) of Zizek emphasize his style, his gestures, his setting, rather than his arguments (I'm not saying that you are doing this, by the way; rather, I'm interested in the larger questions you raise about seriousness and theatricality).

[Patrick J. Mullins]

I didn't know that! If he's directing, it's bound to be a thousand times better than 'LA Confidential.' Didn't know anything about this movie. I hope he gets it cast right.

Got 'Hollywood Babylon' out of library--it's beautiful, couldn't believe he starts with the 'Intolerance' set which was left to decay over several years in that short period of time they still made movies in geographical Hollywood. I think they put up a fake version of it at that tacky Kodak Theatre. Also, book has pic of Graumann's when 'Hollywood Revue of 1929' was playing there. There's a 2nd volume that I'll get soon. Good stuff. Thanks.

[EA]

'THere's no World Spirit, no historical or dialectical Telos, however much the PoMo dreams of one existing'

Au contraire, this is precisely what is contested by 'Postmodernism'. Sometimes it's a good thing to have no sense of intellectual embarrassment, but in your case it's becoming rather tedious.

[Steven Shaviro]

For me, the problem is with negativity, rather than with Otherness. That is to say: when Jodi writes "If Otherness is conceived as negativity, are we in yet another Western, racist logic?", I would say that we do not need to invoke a Levinasian Otherness in order to find negativity problematic. The question is whether an Act, or disruption, or mutation, or rupture, or the traumatic encounter with the Real, needs to be coded as a Hegelian "labor of the negative," or whether this coding is itself a recuperation of something more radical. Levinas' Otherness is an attempt to avoid or reject the recuperative moment of "recognition" that seems to follow any movement of negativity; but there are other ways to affirm that difference is more basic (or primordial, or pre-originary) than negativity. Deleuze, for one, argues this in Difference & Repetition, even as he rejects Levinasian Otherness as strongly as Badiou & Zizek do. Somewhat differently, the early Foucault, drawing on both Bataille and Kant, speaks of "contestation" or "nonpositive affirmation" as an alternative to -- and as being more radical and fundamental than -- Hegelian negativity. I've only started reading Karatani, but it seems to me that (in spite of how Zizek describes him) he is making a similar move in privileging Kant's notion of the Antinomy: Kant's "Transcendental Dialectic" instead of Hegelian dialectic.
OK, I'm giving a few citations, rather than an argument -- but I think these citations might help to change the shape of the argument.

[Jodi]

Interesting, Steven, thanks. Just so I understand, you are suggesting that the Act and/or the Real are 'more radical' than negativity and that negativity recuperates them. And, I guess that the recuperation occurs in the formation of a new Symbolic, or the moment that follows only to be disrupted again? So 'more radical' means not recuperated? I can see this in the Real, but then one is left in a kind of structural bind; the movement of negativity, if I've understood, is how Zizek gets around (or tries to get around)this. Can you give a sense of this 'more radical' 'difference' that you have in mind?

[Shem Shiverovsky]

The above post serves as another example of what we might term the general postmodernist tendency towards anti-inductivism. Beginning perhaps with Sartre (under the influence of Heidegger, phenomenology, the "unconscious") continental philosophy shifted to a conceptualism at odds with the methods of both physical and social sciences, as well as opposed to the logical rigor of "analytical philosophy." Perhaps it is felt that those methods--either induction or analysis--were limited and that some sort of alternative, subjective type of investigation was necessary. Obviously from Sartre to Derrida and the rest is quite a development; nonetheless the Heideggerian influence remains, as does the marxist and psychoanaltic.

It is my contention that however interesting or provocative that blending of phenomenology and psychoanalysis and tidbits of marxism may be, it is incapable of addressing the most pressing concerns of modern political and economic issues, in the US or Europe. Postmod might have relevance to people engaged in aesthetics--literature or the arts--but in no way constitutes some "Weltanschauung" which would replace or even significantly challenge a scientific materialist viewpoint. That is not to say that the Big Science of universities or the corporate world which relies on research and development--in technology, engineering, pharmaceuticals--should not be criticized: but that Postmodernism lacks the ammunition so to speak to deal with the social and economic inequities that might be endemic to the IT corridor of the "Silicon Valley" area of California, or to other real, specifiable problems with free-market economics. The anti-inductive tendency of Postmod puts it alongside other aesthetic programs, and indeed alongside say existentialism: and research and empiricism are considered anathema to the sort of assumed conceptual "integrity" of these subjective systems. Thus postmod is also quite out of keeping with traditional empirical leftism--at least the theory of marxism (the history of marxism of course most would agree is a dismal and bloody failure for the most part) being very factually oriented, empirical to a high degree. The writing of both Marx and Engels features a great deal of historical and economic data, and I think it is fair to assume that the ideology and economic program was not at all metaphysical or instrospective but predicated on inferences drawn from material and economic states of affairs (say the problem of the rentiers)--and that is also one of its weaknesses, since some economic data might show situations where workers were not exploited by management/capitalists, or not to the extent Marx foresaw. That sort of empiricism which Marx and Engels both thought necessary to their system is still needed: taking on the real absurdities of finance, or speculation, or the oil and agriculture markets, or corporate America will not happen by way of avant-garde psychoanalysis or phenomenological introspection.

[Hegel]

Shem, I think you are generally correct about "theory" approaches to socio-economic/political issus: they tend to ignore or be largely uninterested in empirical data. But where I think you are wrong is regarding Marx' approach - Hegel's influence did not disappear in his later, more "empirical" works - the Hegelian dialectic is still applied but in a more polemical methodology. From your comments I imagine that you see this as a weakness in Marx, or even what lead to the bloody application of his philosophy. This is a subject that could provide a fruitful discussion but is largely tangential to the current one. So while it is true Derrida is silent on the results of social science (at least since Levi-Straus) this can not be said of Habermas or even Zizek. Certainly Habermas (and to a lesser degree Zizek) takes the results of empirical investigation seriously and incorporates their results into his larger project. You might not agree with his approach, or his results, but why bother engaging with it at all? What influence do most of those you call "Postmodern" have on anything, outside of the context of academia and the culture wars? You make an excellent point about certain theorists who tend to ignore the results of science (to their own detriment), but beyond that it seems you are caught up in ad homonym attacks for some unknown reason. Why bother?

[Bob Slocum]

Jodi, I think that much of what you have said about "the Act" is problematic. It is hard to see how my action toward another or in a political/ethical situation can be so radically divorced from my existing motivations, self-conception, and the like or even, if we want to put an externalist/objectivist gloss on it, my current situation, that the kind of retrospective justification you mention can be seen as rational or reasonable.
I am very skeptical that the Saul/Paul conversion should be seen as exemplarly in the context of our theorising of action. Perhaps this means that I would deny that the Act (a categorization that I am perhaps skeptical of to begin with) is an instance of "the Real."
Caveat: I am, despite my respectful and admiring readings of the Three Hs--Hegel, Heidegger, and Habermas--as well as the Big F and the Super D, basically an analytic philosopher. Anything you say in response will just be a furtherance of my education. Unlike others of my ilk I do not mistake MY incomprehension of what you say for your foolishness.

[Shannon]

Wow, how refreshing.

[Jodi]

Bob,

Thanks for your comment. The basic idea of the Act is that of an effect that exceeds its causes.

One might say that to an extent consciousness itself suggests the possibility of such an act insofar as there is a gap between it and neural processes.

From another direction, one might say that falling in love is something like an act insofar as one cannot add up a bunch of factors and say, yes, that equals love. Love is in excess of these factors. In fact, it's what coheres to these factors to make them seem like aspects of the same thing.

Another approach: when we find that we cannot but do something; 'here I stand, I can do no other.' We may find ourselves taking some sort of stand, doing something that we would have previously thought to be impossible.

One more: when we refuse to accept the terms of a false choice and break through the given contours of a situation.

So, the idea is that our self conception and motivations are never fully complete enough to account for everything. Exceptions arise. There are changes. The unexpected occurs. Likewise, a political situation is not complete; we might experience it as complete; a prevailing ideology might depict it in ways that seem total, inescapable; yet, often with great cost and difficulty, we may find that we can escape these parameters, into something new.

Differently put, our existing motivations may well be tied into a particular understanding of a situation; sometimes, to break through the situation, we have to let go of our motivations, our motivation are tying us to a specific sense of the situation. This description, I think, gives us a sense of the psychoanalytic underpinnings of Zizek's thinking about the Act.

(As you can tell, I decided to start with the Act and see if that would go anywhere. "Real" is a Lacanian term of art, as you probably know, so I decided not to go in that direction.)

[Matt]

May I just say: I'm glad Kenneth was here earlier to defend Derrida; well done Kenneth!

Jodi, as you probably know I tend to snark when the choice is between Zizek's 'Act!' and Derrida's 'decision,' as the former seems--to me at least--to owe much if not everything to the latter (the nuance of which--that is to say, primarily, the patient nuance of Derrida's reading of Kierkegaard, he who declares the decision a moment of madness--is nevertheless lost by Zizek's account pretty much entirely (I can't speak to Badiou)...and maybe there are certain reasons for this (for Z not desiring to make the necessary effort to appropriate/redeem K) but having never heard them from the horse's mouth, I'm simply not convinced they add up). Sorry, that's a bit of a long-winded, hyper-parenthetical bloggent sentence; hopefully the syntax sort of holds up.

Anyway it would seem we've come full circle.

http://pasaudela.blogspot.com/2005/03/act-zizek-par-excellence.html

For my part, I look forward to attempting a better reply sometime, maybe in a post, but for the moment here are some further links that may be relevant. The unique sense of 'negotiation' that D. wishes to retain, without ruling out a kind of madness, is I think paramount.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/d/derrida.htm#SH5a

http://tinyurl.com/dx6jb

Finally, Kenneth quotes a bit, so in lieu of G.O.D. (ii) for the moment so will I, genuinely curious how it might mash up with your reading of Zizek (this is supremely unfair, to pit the two of you against each other, I know, but nevertheless). Reading Patocka and Kierkegaard together, JD writes:

"Absolute responsibility is not a responsibility, at least it is not general responsibility or repsonsibility in general. IT needs to be exceptional or extraordinary, and it needs to be that absolutely and par excellence: it is as if absolute responsibility could not be derived from a *concept* of responsibility and therefore, in order for it to be what it must be it must remain inconceivable, indeed unthinkable: it must therefore be irresponsible in order to be absolutely responsible. 'Abraham *cannot* speak, because he cannot say that which would explain everything...that it is an ordeal such that, please note, the ethical is the temptation' (115)

"The ethical can therefore end up making us irresponsible. It is a temptation, a tendency, or a facility that would sometimes have to be refused in the name of responsibility that doesn't keep account or give account, neither to man, to humans, to society, to one's fellows, or to one's own. Such a responsibility keeps its secret, it cannot and need not present itself. Tyranically, jealously, it refuses to present itself before the violence that consists of asking for accounts and justifications, summonses to appear before the law of men. It declines the autobiography that is always auto-justification, *egodicy*...

"In the end secrecy is as intolerable for ethics as it is for philosophy or for dialectics in general, from Plato to Hegel..." (Gift of Death, 61-62)

Obviously, he's touching on a lot of themes here (themes important to him, in particular), and yes we're also sort of backing into a discussion (it seems to me anyway) of your own book on Habermas, publicity, techno-culture and secrecy. But JD is here attempting to read into the mysterium tremendum, the sacred or the 'secret' something more Kierkegaardian/Patockan than Kierkegaard or Patocka himself would have ever allowed; that is, attempting to affirm them as strongly as possible and move on at once. Patocka has opposed the secret to responsibility and ethics. JD, it seems to me, is trying to wrest the secret back, to insist on the necessity of the secret *in a certain sense* for the future of responsibility and ethics.

So but in any case, the 'madness' of the decision consists in its inevitable re-arranging of the coordinates, yes, and in ways impossible to fully predict (and so impossible to repeat as well, as if mechanically or with pristine perfection), but the moment of decision--the act itself--is also implicated in this madness; it has never rested on certain ground to begin with. But now I am just repeating what Ken has already said so I'll stop.

Is there an implication for self-consciousness in Z's rendition (or, can the Act be conscious for-itself?) Must an Act be self-conscious (or at least conscious of this tension, having truly gone through the ordeal of the decision and weighed with equal seriousness every option) in order to be "concrete?" (Or is it only the witness who ever recognizes, affirms/co-signs and renders it so?)

Such would be a response very harmlessly and obscurely riffing (rest assured) on Derrida, in any case.

As a sort of side note, Z. does seem to rather consistently misunderestimate Derrida's insistence on the 'strong sense' of certain crucial words and themes, namely by imposing a somewhat pat "in-itself, for-itself" there where the latter would prefer to see something altogether more radical, a stronger aporia resisting dialectical closure (such as it is), etc. (http://www.geocities.com/pasaudela2004/Panurge-Pantagruel/Auto911/index.html )

[Jodi]

Matt,
Really interesting. As you know, I have only read a little Derrida, so I am learning from you and Ken. That Z would 'misunderestimate' Derrida seems unsurprising. I'll mention just two things. First, self-consciousness is not necessary for the Act. The Act makes the actor into an object; or, in the Act I am an object. Second, the witness: it isn't clear to me how 'self' conscious the witness must be. Since all lacanian subjects are split (and subject proper refers to a lack), to attribute much efficacy or weight to self-consciousness is a mistake. In witnessing or interpreting or narrating and in that sense (re)producing an Event, one may not be saying, 'oh gee, if I say that X was Y then I am constituting an event!' But, one is offering a new Truth of the situation.

On secrecy. As you know, I'm interested in this. I am surprised, though, that Derrida included Plato in his list of those who found secrecy intolerable. This doesn't seem to fit with The Republic.

[Matt]

Jodi, thanks for the response. Agreed about self-consciousness. Still, Z. does seem to impose this rather formulaic dialecticism at times, one that somewhat misses the point (at least I might agree, shockingly, along with D. that it does). Anyway, should probably be noted that D. is going on to quote Patocka extensively just there, so it's one of those not infrequent moments when you have to suspend your totemic 'belief' in his statements temporarily, unsure whether (or rather how exactly) they belong to (as YH aptly puts it) the "sympathetic exposition" part or the "exposing the hidden presuppositions" part (or maybe something else entirely). Anyway, maybe someone else has a better answer handy to your justified suprise; I would be tempted off the cuff to think it's a very particular, 'strong' sense of 'secrecy' that D. is describing in that sentence.

"...in the Act I am an object"

Forgive the perhaps naive question, but how is this possible exactly? (How is it ever possible to write such a thing?)