On Belief

[Dave Monroe]

>From Slavoj Zizek, On Belief (London and New York:
Routledge, 2001),Ch. 1, 'Against the Digital Heresy,"
pp. 6-55 ...

"What about the magic moments when, all of a sudden,
people are no longer afraid, when they become aware
that, ultimately, to quote the well-known words, they
have nothing to fear but the fear itself, that the
hypnotizing authority of their masters is the
'reflexive determination' (Hegel) of their own
submissive attitude towards them?
   "It was Pascal who pointed out that poeple do not
treat a certain person as a king because he is a
king--it is rtaher that this certian person appears as
a king because people treat him as one. 
Psychoanalysis doesn't seem to allow for such magic
ruptures which momentarily break the inexorable chain
of tragic necessity: within its scope, every rebellion
against authority is ultimately self-defeating; it
ends up in the return of the repressed authority in
the guise of guilt or self-destructive impulses.  On
the other hand, psychoanalysts rightly focus on the
catastrophic consequences of the radical evolutionary
endeavors: the overthrowing of the ancien regime
brought about even harsher forms of totlitarian
domination....  It's the old story of the
revolutionary fools versus the conservative knaves.
[ellipses in text]
   'So where does all this leave us? ...." (pp. 16-7)

"(3) Seminar XVII (1969-1970) on the four discourses
is ALacan's response to the events of 1968 [...]. 
Lacan's interest is focused on the passages from teh
discourse of the Master to the discourse of University
as the hegemonic discourse in contemporary society. 
No wonder that teh revolt was located in the
universities: as such, it merely signalled the shift
to the new forms of domination in which the scientific
discourse serves to legitimize the relations of
domination.  Lacn's underlying premise is thus again
skeptically conservative--Lacan's diagnosis is best
captures by his famous retort to the student
revolutionaries: 'As hysterics, you demand a new
master.  You will, get it!

"(4) Finally, Seminar XX provides the libidinal
economy of today's postmodern, post-revoluutionary,
'society of consumption' ..."

[...]

"the logic of this succession is thus clear enough: we
start with the stable symbolic Order; we proceed to
the heroic suicidal attempts to break out of it; when
the Order itself seems threatened, we provide the
matrix of permutations which accounts for how the
revolt itself is just the operator of the passage from
one to another form of the social link; finally, we
confront the society in which the revolt itslef is
rendered eaningless, since, in it, transgression
itself is not only recuperated, but directly solicited
by the sytem as the evry form of its reporoduction. 
To put it in hegel's terms, the 'truth' of the
student's transgressive revolt against the
Establishment is the emergence of a new establishment
in which transgression is part of teh game, solicited
by the gadgets which organize our life as the
permanent dealing with excesses.
   "Is, then, Lacan's ultimate result a conservative
resignation, a kind of cloure, or does this approach
allow for a radical social change?  The first thing to
take note of is that the preceding paradigms do not
simply disappear in those which follow--they persist,
casting a shadow on them...." (pp. 30-1)

"The media constantly bombards us with the need to
abandon the 'old paradigms': if we are to survive, we
have to change our most fundamental notions of what
constitutes personal identity, society, environment,
etc.  New Age wisdom claims that we are entering a new
'post-human' era; postmodern political thought tells
us that we are entering post-industrial societies
[...].  The Third Way ideology and political practice
is effectively THE model of this defeatof this
inability to recognize how the New is here to enable
the Old to survive.  Against this temptaion, one
should rather follow the unsurpassed model of Pascal
and ask the difficult question: how are we to remain
faithful to the Old in the new conditions?  ONLY in
this way can we generate something effectively
new...." (pp. 32-3)

Let me know ...

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