Parallax View Short Circuits Slavoj Zˇizˇek, Editor

MD DALIM #850053 04/12/06 CYAN MAG YELO BLK The Parallax View Short Circuits Slavoj Zˇizˇek, editor The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, by Slavoj Zˇizˇek The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two, by Alenka Zupancˇicˇ Is Oedipus Online? Siting Freud after Freud, by Jerry Aline Flieger Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK, by Alexei Monroe The Parallax View, by Slavoj Zˇizˇek The Parallax View Slavoj Zˇizˇek The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England ©2006 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or me- chanical means (including photocopying,recording,or information storage and retrieval) with- out permission in writing from the publisher. MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promo- tional use. For information, please email [email protected] or write to Special Sales Department,The MIT Press, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, MA 02142. This book was set in Joanna and Copperplate by Graphic Composition, Inc. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Zˇizˇek, Slavoj. The parallax view / Slavoj Zˇizˇek. p. cm. — (Short circuits) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-262-24051-3 (alk. paper) 1. Philosophy. I.Title. II. Series. B4870.Z593P37 2006 199′.4973—dc22 2005051704 para Analia, el axioma de mi vida Contents Series Foreword ix INTRODUCTION:DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM AT THE GATES 2 I The Stellar Parallax: The Traps of Ontological Difference 15 1 THE SUBJECT,THIS “INWARDLY CIRCUMCISED JEW” 16 The Tickling Object • The Kantian Parallax • The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies • The Master-Signifier and Its Vicissitudes • Soave sia il vento... • The Parallax of the Critique of Political Economy • “. ce seul objet dont le Néant s’honore” 2 BUILDING BLOCKS FOR A MATERIALIST THEOLOGY 68 A Boy Meets the Lady • Kierkegaard as a Hegelian • Die Versagung • The Traps of Pure Sacrifice • The Difficulty of Being a Kantian • The Comedy of Incarnation • Odradek as a Political Category • Too Much Life! INTERLUDE 1: KATE’S CHOICE, OR,THE MATERIALISM OF HENRY JAMES 124 II The Solar Parallax: The Unbearable Lightness of Being No One 145 3 THE UNBEARABLE HEAVINESS OF BEING DIVINE SHIT 146 Burned by the Sun • Pick Up Your Cave! • Copernicus, Darwin, Freud... and Many Others • Toward a New Science of Appearances • Resistances to Disenchantment • When the God Comes Around • The Desublimated Object of Post-Ideology • Danger? What Danger? 4 THE LOOP OF FREEDOM 200 “Positing the Presuppositions” • A Cognitivist Hegel? • The False Opacity • Emotions Lie, or,Where Damasio Is Wrong • Hegel, Marx, Dennett • From Physics to Design? • The Unconscious Act of Freedom • The Language of Seduction, the Seduction of Language INTERLUDE 2: OBJET PETIT A IN SOCIAL LINKS, OR,THE IMPASSES OF ANTI-ANTI-SEMITISM 252 III The Lunar Parallax: Toward a Politics of Subtraction 271 5FROM SURPLUS-VALUE TO SURPLUS-POWER 272 Ontic Errance, Ontological Truth • Gelassenheit? No,Thanks! • Toward the Theory of the Stalinist Musical • The Biopolitical Parallax • The Historicity of the Four Discourses • Jouissance as a Political Category • Do We Still Live in a World? 6THE OBSCENE KNOT OF IDEOLOGY, AND HOW TO UNTIE IT 330 The Academic Rumspringa,or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance • Human Rights versus the Rights of the Inhuman • Violence Enframed • The Ignorance of the Chicken • Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Fundamentalism? • Over the Rainbow Coalition! • Robert Schumann as a Theorist of Ideology • Welcome to the Desert of the American Subculture • Of Eggs, Omelets, and Bartleby’s Smile Notes 387 Index 431 Series Foreword A short circuit occurs when there is a faulty connection in the network—faulty, of course, from the standpoint of the network’s smooth functioning. Is not the shock of short-circuiting, therefore, one of the best metaphors for a critical reading? Is not one of the most effective critical procedures to cross wires that do not usually touch: to take a major classic (text,author,notion),and read it in a short-circuiting way,through the lens of a “minor” author,text, or conceptual apparatus (“minor” should be under- stood here in Deleuze’s sense: not “of lesser quality,” but marginalized, disavowed by the hegemonic ideology,or dealing with a “lower,” less dignified topic)? If the minor reference is well chosen, such a procedure can lead to insights which completely shat- ter and undermine our common perceptions.This is what Marx, among others, did with philosophy and religion (short-circuiting philosophical speculation through the lens of political economy,that is to say,economic speculation); this is what Freud and Nietzsche did with morality (short-circuiting the highest ethical notions through the lens of the unconscious libidinal economy). What such a reading achieves is not a simple “desublimation,”a reduction of the higher intellectual content to its lower economic or libidinal cause; the aim of such an approach is, rather, the inherent decen- tering of the interpreted text, which brings to light its “unthought,” its disavowed presuppositions and consequences. And this is what “Short Circuits” wants to do, again and again. The underlying premise of the series is that Lacanian psychoanalysis is a privileged instrument of such an approach, whose purpose is to illuminate a standard text or ideological formation, making it readable in a totally new way—the long history of Lacanian interventions in philosophy,religion, the arts (from the visual arts to the cinema, music, and litera- ture), ideology, and politics justifies this premise. This, then, is not a new series of books on psychoanalysis, but a series of “connections in the Freudian field”—of short Lacanian interventions in art, philosophy,theology,and ideology. “Short Circuits”intends to revive a practice of reading which confronts a classic text, author, or notion with its own hidden presuppositions, and thus reveals its disavowed ix truth.The basic criterion for the texts that will be published is that they effectuate such a theoretical short circuit. After reading a book in this series, the reader should not simply have learned something new: the point is, rather, to make him or her aware of another—disturbing—side of something he or she knew all the time. Slavoj Zˇizˇek series foreword The Parallax View introduction Dialectical Materialism at the Gates Two remarkable stories were reported in the media in 2003. A Spanish art historian uncovered the first use of modern art as a deliberate form of torture: Kandinsky and Klee, as well Buñuel and Dalí, were the inspiration behind a series of secret cells and torture centers built in Barcelona in 1938, the work of a French anarchist,Alphonse Laurencˇicˇ (a Slovene family name!), who invented a form of “psychotechnic” torture: he created his so-called “colored cells” as a contribution to the fight against Franco’s forces.1 The cells were as inspired by ideas of geometric ab- straction and surrealism as they were by avant-garde art theories on the psychological properties of colors. Beds were placed at a 20-degree angle, making them near- impossible to sleep on, and the floors of the 6-foot-by-3-foot cells were strewn with bricks and other geometric blocks to prevent the prisoners from walking backward and forward.The only option left to them was staring at the walls, which were curved and covered with mind-altering patterns of cubes, squares, straight lines, and spirals which utilized tricks of color, perspective, and scale to cause mental confusion and distress.Lighting effects gave the impression that the dizzying patterns on the wall were moving. Laurencˇicˇ preferred to use the color green because, according to his theory of the psychological effects of various colors, it produced melancholy and sadness. The second story:Walter Benjamin did not kill himself in a Spanish border village in 1940 out of fear that he would be returned to France, and thus to Nazi agents—he was killed there by Stalin’s agents.2 A few months before he died, Benjamin wrote “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” his short but devastating analysis of the failure of Marxism; he died at a time when many former Soviet loyalists were becoming dis- illusioned with Moscow because of the Hitler-Stalin pact. In response, one of the “killerati”(Stalinist agents recruited from socialist intellectuals who were carrying out assassinations) killed him.The ultimate cause of his murder was that, as Benjamin fled through the mountains from France toward Spain, he was hugging a manuscript— the masterwork on which he had been working in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the elaboration of the “Theses.” The briefcase containing this manuscript was en- trusted to a fellow refugee who conveniently lost it on a train from Barcelona to Madrid. In short, Stalin read Benjamin’s “Theses,” he knew about the new book proj- ect based on the “Theses,” and he wanted to prevent its publication at any cost.... What these two stories share is not just the surprising link between high culture (fine art and theory) and base brutal politics (murder, torture). At this level, the link is not even as unexpected as it may appear: is it not one of the most vulgar common- sense opinions that viewing abstract art (like listening to atonal music) is torture (along the same lines, we can easily envisage a prison

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