"You win and you win nothing..."

The beat goes on at Birkbeck, as on Tuesday Slavoj Zizek once again took to the podium wearing exactly the same shirt that he was wearing on Thursday. What does this mean? On Tuesday again, Zizek remained concerned with kremlinology, and the phenomenon of semantic saturation characteristic of Stalinism (and also acute mania) in which everything appears as a meaningful signal that the big Other is deliberately telegraphing for determinate purposes - from the weather on May Day, to the victims of fictional assassination plots.

In these terms, one wonders: what was Zizek trying to say with his shirt? One possibility is that this is the only shirt that he owns - or rather, that he owns a perhaps hundred different identical pairs of this very same shirt, for the reason that, in all of his varied experiences with differently patterned shirts, he has decided that it is this very one that he feels most comfortably wearing, that it is the green and white stripeyness of this one in particular that goes best with his skin tone and general demeanour.

The title card for Tuesday read "The Ethics of Psychoanalysis" - but Zizek began his talk by first of all going back over the story so far. Last episode, we learned that the big Other exists in language in the form of attributed speech. For instance: "the Nation demands loyalty!"

Zizek made clear that this phenomena is not confined to mere rhetoric alone, but rather embraces reality as such. But then, of course - as we all know - reality is structured like a language.

Furthermore - neither alienation nor authenticity is directly mandated by the big Other. This is to say, the true meaning of the dictum "the Nation demands loyalty!" is not that it is really me, myself who is demanding loyalty - but for rhetorical purposes I am cynically claiming that it is Nation that is demanding it. On the contrary - it is "really" the Nation which is issuing this demand - it is not me at all. Only - the Nation as such is an entirely imaginary construction. There is no authentic, concrete Nation which stands behind my invocation, that is actually issuing demands.

The major point here is the old materialist axiom that it is not that truth lies behind appearances, but rather, truth instead is directly to do with appearances, that truth lies in appearances. As Lacan put it, "truth has the structure of a fiction."

For instance, I live a double life - by day I am a puny weakling office worker, but by night I confidently rape and pillage my way through the virtual world of an online fantasy game. Neither of these two universes is really any more "real" than the other - rather instead, they are both just merely two different objective expressions of two different symbolic identities, that I have happened to construct for myself.

The only question is - why I have constructed precisely these two different identities? Why must I have constructed them in this precise way that I have? In fact, this formulation is misleading, since it is not really "me" who has constructed my identities, but is rather instead closer to the opposite - my identities have constructed me. This is the logic of symptom.

The ultimate manuevre that the big Other performs is really not: "I speak through the big Other" but is rather instead: "The big Other speaks through me." Or as Lacan put it: "I, the truth, am speaking."

The distinction here is between this first formula, and the second statement: "I am telling the truth," - in the first case we see a situation in which the subject of enunciation and the subject of the statement effectively form a single subject. In this second one, we come across them as seperate and distinct entities.

For this reason this first formula radically corresponds to the structure of an ethical act whereas this second one only ultimately amounts to what Lacan called a passage a l'acte - with this passage specifically in this telling.

To put it sharply, how exactly can one tell the truth? Is there not the suggestion to this formula that one is telling it something? As if it was somehow a subject itself? And what exactly would one, could one tell it - that it would be interested in learning?

There is one thing - desire. Hence the pathos involved in this kind of structure. Zizek alluded here to the libidinal economy of the conspiracy theory, underpinned as it tends to be the basic axiom: the truth is out there. Why is the truth out there? Because it isn't down there. For instance in the X-Files, where alien invasions, massive government cover-ups, etc, worked to keep unresolved sexual tension simmering between the agents week after week. And also (Zizek paused for effect at this point - we all knew what was coming) The Da Vinci Code!

"I bought from this Chinese woman yesterday the DVD for only four pounds, it is very good quality, and you know, everyone was saying, this movie was so terrible, but it is not so bad, and you know, pure Freudian displacement. I mean, this woman, she is virgin, she witnessed in her childhood something with her parents, it is the primal scene! And so you have, you know, this fantasy of god fucking, this massive cover-up..."

As Zizek explained: "We invent mythology to explain our everyday reality." Furthermore, desire - the fundamental substance of this reality - is traumatic, disturbing and opposed to the pleasure principle. For this reason, we have to condense it into symbolic language, in order to have any hope of dealing with it at all.

At this point we enter effectively into the realm of morality, what Lacan called the realm of "the servicing of the goods." In a moral universe, the reigning logic is basically that I have my desires, you have your desires, let us all desire to the extent that our desires don't harm each other. In other words, do as you would be done. All very well, claimed Zizek, only the problem is that this universe suffers from a terrible theoretical lack - namely, resentment. As Gore Vidal put it, "It is not enough for me to win, the other guy has to lose." Zizek recited again one of his trademarks, "An angel comes down to a Slovenian peasant and says, "I will do to you whatever you want, only I will do it to your neighbour double." The peasant responds instantly, "Take one of my eyes."

The point here is the Kierkegaardian one: the only good neighbour is a dead neighbour. As Zizek understands it, the ethics of psychoanalysis must insist upon this point first of all (or else we end up with basically a hippy fantasy dancing free and happy in the meadows) but also go beyond it.

His example here was the problematic relationship that communism had with holocaust survivors - after the war many of them were actually put on trial for treason. Recounting here a conversation he had with an "old Slovenian communist" Zizek explained the logic to this madness. The universe of communism is a universe of struggle. In the strictures of this universe, it is impossible to concieve that there could ever be someone not able to struggle. Therefore, "Either they were traitors, or else my life has no meaning."

In this situation, Zizek suggested, the ethical choice has to be this second choice: my life has no meaning. "The ethics of psychoanalysis is the opposite of Pascal's wager," he claimed, "It is: you win and win nothing, you lose... and you lose everything."

"Whenever two or more of you are gathered in my name..."

What does one do about, how does one deal with - live with - the big Other? Is it even so simple as to say the big Other? Pace Deleuze, the question should be asked: one or many Other(s)?

K-punk inquires: "Is there a difference between the big Other and the ego-ideal?" This formulation puts the finger on the problem. On the one hand, the big Other stands as a figure corresponding to the totality of social relations. On the other hand, it stands as such as a figure - a fact which means that it cannot in actuality ever really embrace this totality.

Rather, the big Other as a symbol exists on a faultline - not just in speech, but also in terms of existence more generally - the big Other is always either saying too much, or else too little. It is always either calling me - ordering me - to do something highly specific, or else is simply standing anxiously opaque.

This is what Milan Kundera was referring to when, in his novel of the same name, he formulated the idea of "the unbearable lightness of being." It is also what Zizek was talking about on Thursday when he introduced into the formulation of the big Other as a legal order the split between on the one hand, the letter of the law, and on the other, the meta-rules. As Zizek understands it, it is this second set of indefinite, vague, and basically flexible understandings and habits that characterizes our relation to the law itself - that indeed, allows us to have a relation with the law at all.

The slide occurs when these meta-rules become mistaken for the law itself. When this happens, habits harden, and we lock ourselves into a state of unfreedom - what Deleuze characterized as monotonous repetitions of the same.

For Lacan, this step is equivalent to the step out of a law - in effect, the movement here is the replacement of the Name-of-the-Father (the rightful supersubjective gurantor of the symbolic order) with the Father-of-Enjoyment (the obscene phantasmatic gurantor of my own, subjectively particular, pathological tics and quirks) and as consequence results in perversion, and indeed, the loss of enjoyment - since one cannot really enjoy anything in particular, when one is being infinitely coerced to enjoy everything in general. As Brecht put it: "To live in a country without a sense of humour is unbearable, but it is even more unbearable in a country where you need a sense of humour."

From this, the following becomes clear: there are really two images of the big Other. First, the big Other of the Name-of-the-Father, which corresponds to the letter of the law. Second, the big Other of the Father-of-Enjoyment, which corresponds to the meta-rules which underpin, and in a certain sense, allow for the realization of the letter of law.

Both of these images are equally "true" and each one necessarily implies the other. As such, the problem is not: "Which one should be discarded?" but instead, "How can we maintain a line of ambivilance between them?" or, "How can we position themselves between them?"

The major point here is that we are at once always dealing with a static, pre-existing big Other that seems to stand above us (e.g. the Law) and creating for ourselves our own personal big Others (e.g. the meta-rules) that effectively works to subvert this first figure of Other whether we want it to or not.

On what basis, with reference to what criteria, can we establish a fragile connection between these figures, can we take control of the process by which they are establishing connections between themselves? In a certain sense, the "theological" turn in the work of Zizek and Badiou has revolved around this question - which is at root the question of critical praxis, pure and simple.

Schematically, and for the time being, it is possible to say this: crucify the Other.

Mr. Zizek comes to London

Introducing the great man, the behorned Costas Douzinas declared: "Slavoj Zizek is a radical public intellectual, but this formulation is a tautology."

At this, the cynic in me wanted to sneer: do you mean oxymoron? Though perhaps Douzinas is right - if the idea of a public intellectual means anything at all, surely it does mean a radical public intellectual: a radical public intellectual, as opposed to a Sunday supplement doxosopher.

However - does a public intellectual mean anything at all? Yesterday, in the first of the series of his lectures at Birkbeck, Zizek addressed the topic of the Lacanian Big Other, and this question was in the background.

In the background, behind me, before the talk started, in my ears from the mouths of two witless academic as they went about conducting a witless and resentful conversation about politics - I still have no idea what they were saying, I could only make out the general sneering tone. In the background, during the talk itself, as one graduate student after another stood up, in a series of successive suicide missions devoted ostensibly to asking Zizek questions, but really to proving how clever they were by means of jargon (somebody kept asking something about Heidegger that made no sense whatsoever). And then finally, in the background after the talk, as on the strange square lawns of Birkbeck, I wondered in my stupid way about how to begin to engage in the conversation the stranger sitting next to me, who was reading the Logic of Sense.

Is Slavoj Zizek the Don Corleone of philosophy? Increasingly, there is seems about him a certain suggestion to his demeanor, a suggestion that he means business. Hinting at the start of his talk to an organization he is setting-up - "with my American friends" - called the Society for Materialist Theology, he went on to say that two of the major figures he will be addressing - indeed, defending - over the course of his lectures to come will be Heidegger and Foucault. Heidegger vis-à-vis the Nazis, Foucault vis-à-vis the Iranian Revolution.

This will be worth seeing - but it would be productive also to see him more carefully address Bataille - when Zizek introduced the idea of the Society of Materialist Theology, I thought of Bataille, the College of Sociology, and the Acephale. Interestingly, Zizek came out against Bataille here when asked - specifically, against the transgressor in him. But I wondered at the time whether this characterization was perhaps unfair - was not Bataille's critique of Surrealism precisely the critique directed at the transgressor in Breton - the critique directed against the idea of running amok as the simplest surrealist act?

"The big Other at its purest is legal order," Zizek said, and thence proceeded to developed this idea from two directions. First, he introduced the theme of habit, of meta-rules, of laws not intended to be taken seriously - in other words - as Lacan would have it, law is non-all, and one is still able to maneuver subversively within it - even as one follows it to letter. Zizek supported this with his own example of the late-edition "Communists look to still retain power" newspaper headline from his NSK days. In other words, to be a revolutionary, it is not immediately necessary to be a criminal.

Second, Zizek developed a critique of the pure based upon the idea profanation, asserting that the profane comes before the sacred, and furthermore opposes the idea of the secular as well. The major conception involved here was the idea of repetition, and the idea that profanation in some sense empties the gesture of meaning by making it sticky, indeed undead, by catching it within the machinery of language. His major example here was poetry - poetry as language taken out of context.

Thus we were moved to arrive at the question: how does one make oneself a big Other. In a certain sense, and in a Deleuzian way - how does one make oneself a big Other without organs - perhaps one could say that this was really the major problematic of the lecture (interestingly, Zizek seems to be moving closer and closer to Deleuze with every day that passes, on the basis of the surely double-edged (for Zizek) syllogism Deleuze = Hegel + Lacan).

The big Other - this strange ontological figure that at once is always there, and yet at the same time does not exist. In the audience, K-punk invoked the name of Highsmith (Zizek: "For me, she is the one, the One!") in order to pose the question of the relation between Ripley and the Big Other. As he put it, for Ripley it is something like only the big Other exists - there are no concrete, particular others. Indeed - one could say - not even "Ripley" himself - hence his protean, shape-shifting nature. Pursuing this line, we eventually arrive back at the figure of Sade and the perverse executioner.

Only the big Other exist - as opposed to the big Other, but more than that, the making of that Other. It is not enough for one to know that the big other exists. One also must be aware that one is oneself is some sense actively producing the big Other too. And this is the argument between idealism and materialism - idealism in which the example is never adequate, materialism in which it is always more than adequate. Thus, the Emperor is naked - says the child - and yet the Emperor remains in power. The point here is that - strictly speaking - the Emperor is not naked. Far from it: he clothes himself in our collective unbelief - indeed, it is in our very shouts of "nakedness" that he is most fully dressed.

Jack and Jill play games

Jack and Jill play games. Jack turns to Jill and asks her: Do you like control? They are both naked lying in his bed, they have just fucked, Jill says: Yes, I like control. Do you like control? And Jack says: Yes, I like control. I like control, I need to have control. Do you want to play a game? A game that is all about control? And Jill says: Yes, I want to play, I want to play a game about control, teach me the game, how do you play? And Jack says: It is very simple. It is very simple, Jill, all you have to do, all you have to do, you just have to try and trap me. Try and trap you, Jack? Yes, Jill, try and trap me. How do I do that? You just have to learn. You have to learn, you have to learn my weaknesses. My weaknesses - like I have to learn yours. And then we will be in love.

Bono reveals Product Red-Three Green Stars and the slogan "God is Great" in Stylized Arabic Kufic Script on a White Background-Black!

"More than 6,500 people die every month in Iraq as a direct consequence of Western Imperialist agression. There are billions of people in the world who believed at the time that the Iraqi war was deeply unethical - even criminal - and whom actually believe this even more strongly today - but yet who do not know what they can really do to help the Iraqi people drive the neo-fascoid American militarist state, and its quisling British poodle allies from their country. For this reason, myself and Bob Geldof have launched "Product Red-Three Green Stars and the slogan "God is Great" in Stylized Arabic Kufic Script on a White Background-Black".

Now, every time you buy a product manufactured by one of our corporate partners, ten percent of what you pay will be spent directly on weapons which will then be promptly delivered to a real Iraqi resistance group, engaged in actual daily combat against the goons who occupy their land. Start supporting "Product Red-Three Green Stars and the slogan "God is Great" in Stylized Arabic Kufic Script on a White Background-Black" today - and hopefully we will all yet live to see the defeat of the London-Washington fascist axis!"

T.

T.

I receive a message on my telephone from a number I do not have saved. It is from T. She has gotten my new number from Z. “How are you?” The message reads. “I would love to see you.”

I ignore this message. The next day, my phone rings and I answer it – it is T. “How are you?” She says. We converse for fifteen minutes. By the time that we hang up, we have agreed to meet at eight the following evening for a drink.

Eight, the following evening. I go to the place we have agreed to meet. T. is not there. I call her. She does not answer her phone. I wait for fifty minutes, and then leave.

I send T. a text message. In it, I suggest to her that it is perhaps perverse to go to the trouble of getting the new phone number of someone whom one has not seen or heard from for some time, then contact that someone and tell them that one would love to see them - talk to them and arrange a time to meet them - and then, simply not meet them. She texts back. She says that her cousin died today, and that as a consequence she did not feel like coming out. She says, she will phone me on Monday.

I reflect. Should I - do I, have a right to feel aggrieved? Did I want to feel aggrevied? I was contemplating the question – this means that I did – but what followed from that? I had to assume that T. was telling the truth – but she still could have at least have let me know. Or was that I was supposed to think that her grief had struck her dumb.

I think – what do I actually want from this person? I suppose to myself, probably not so much. Did I want to speak to her on Monday? On balance, probably not so much. What, then, to do when she phones? Nothing – anything: it really doesn’t matter either way.

Face to face with copper wires

There are other points of view - there are only other points of view. I am already composite - you are copper wires. You keep talking back, and I get so mad. What gives you the right to speak to me? You do not even have a body. It makes me want to rip you limb from limb.

Yesterday, as I was shooting up with ink, you called me from the Green Zone. The frayed cable still around my arm, I put down my syringe and asked you how the weather was. Fine, you said, but rather hot, and I am all out of sunscreen. Can you send me some? I suppose so. Get it from Amazon - if you spend more than ten thousand dollars they will deliver it for free. Alright, I said. Anything else? Yes, you said. The new issue of Queercore World. And cake mix.

An explosion in the distance vibrates down the line. I have to run, you said, they are shelling the hotel again. Okay, be careful. I will, darling.

I hang up. Staring at my syringe, emblazoned with the faces of the Germany World Cup squad, suddenly, I no longer feel like it. I put my hands over my face and start to cry. I do this for about thirty minutes, and then get bored of it. I consider killing myself, but decide against it. I turn on the radio. Alex Turner from the Artic Monkeys is giving a lecture on Radio Four about the Marxist theory of surplus value. In his own work, he says, he leans heavily on the Post-Althusserian theory of the subject, as developed especially by Jacques Ranciere and Alain Badiou.

La femme n'existe pas

"The fact that 'Woman does not exist' is not a result of the oppressive character of patriarchal society; on the contrary, it is patriarchal society (with its oppression of women) which is a 'result' of the fact that 'Woman does not exist', a vast attempt to deal with and 'overcome' this fact, to make it pass unnoticed."

[Alenka Zupancic, Ethics of the Real, p.132]

Wanted: Expert Mathematician/Programmer

If ontology is mathematics, then it follows that the simplest and clearest means of presenting being is with computer language. This could be done through the writing of a computer program wired with the laws of set theory. This program would be concerned with providing a mathmatical account of a given set of elements. This account would terminate with the production of a synthetic logic defining a particular problem, leading the user back to the dialectical line of ambivilance that is life.

Servoze

Do you know what your fellow citizens are thinking? Keeping your ear to ground is no longer sufficient. You must as well beware of the servoze. They sidle up to you. They have been programmed to. Charged with - teeth in their veins. And electric sex between their legs. Always double. Each dressed the same way as the other. Only the details different - different shades. Shades of the same. The same name: real cool - and they talk. In tongues, except their lips don't move: certain points. Certain major points. To bear in mind - for you to consider: take your time. In subway stations. Supermarket aisles.

Of late I have experienced the greatness of a product and I am very, very interested in letting everybody know it.

Coffee shops, dog tracks, trendy bars - sometimes they will even let you take them home. Sometimes they do not even have to speak. Only intimate - they can read lips. They all know how to program - the most sophisticated know how to trace lines of flight. Out of thin air: they excite the atoms. An anxious fact - because it happens, that because of it, now I do not know if I am one of them, or us at all: they say that they can even bleed.

Theory of an honest woman

She opened the book on page one hundred. For some time, she had been reading it, and now she looked at one sentence, and then she looked at the next. And then suddenly - as if someone had punched her in the stomach, she asked herself - who was this man? Who was this man, she thought - to tell her how she was supposed to think.

Theory of an honest man

On the one hundreth page, the man stopped reading, and instead started to daydream. Noticing himself doing this, he paused and reflected on it. Some time passed, and then he realized - he had been reading in a very strange way. He had underlined so many passages, and he did not know why.