#copjec

[celtos]

When you encounter the gaze of the Other, you meet not a seeing eye but a blind one. The gaze is not clear or penetrating, not filled with knowledge or recognition; it is clouded over and turned back on itself, absorbed in its own enjoyment. The horrible truth … is that the gaze does not see you. … You are on your own; the gaze of the Other is not confirming, it will not validate you.

—Joan Copjec

[b42514782734181]

Lacan stares directly out at us, as he speaks in a voice that none would call smooth of "quelque chose, n'est-ce pas?" This "quelque chose" is, of course, never made specific, never revealed, and so it comes to stand for a fact or a system of facts that is known, but not by us. This image recalls the one presented to Tabard by the principal in Vigo's Zero for Conduct. It is the product of the childish, paranoid notion that all our private thoughts and actions are spied on by and visible within a public world represented by parental figures. In appearing to us, then, by means of the "mass media,"' Lacan seems to confirm what we may call our "televisual" fear-that we are perfectly, completely visible to a gaze that observes us from afar (tele meaning both "distant" and [from telos] "complete").

[grandpasessions]

The ramifications of this acceptance are significant. The privatization— and thus destruction—of the public world forces everyone to live in their own private world without reprieve—that is, without the reprieve from enjoyment that the public world provides.

In Read My Desire, Joan Copjec points out that the contemporary retreat into privacy “entail[s] the destruction of the civitas itself, of increasingly larger portions of our public space. We no longer attempt to safeguard the empty ‘private’ space [. . .] but to dwell within this space exclusively.”

The problem is that the destruction of the public world doesn’t represent a liberation into privacy; rather, privacy itself becomes publicized. As Copjec puts it, “from the moment the choice of private enjoyment over community is made, one’s privacy ceases to be something one supposes as veiled from prying eyes [. . .] and becomes instead something one visibly endures.” As the public world disappears, we lose the distance between public and private that allowed the public world to be a respite from the private one.

Though the public world bars us from our enjoyment, at the same time it protects us from it as well, offers us relief from its pressure.

When the private becomes public and the public loses its autonomy, we begin to suffocate.

The real horror is not, as so many contend today, our failure to protect privacy, but, on the contrary, our failure to protect the public from a private assault.

The increasing refusal to enter the public world has devastating effects— namely, breaking down our ability to believe in such a world. The public world is not a substantial world but exists only insofar as subjects believe in its existence—or, insofar as they believe that someone, the big Other, believes in it. If I see others refusing to enter into this world, remaining in a private world, I surmise that the big Other no longer believes in the fiction of a neutral public world. And when I can no longer believe that the big Other believes, I myself stop believing—and everyone stops believing in a similar way.

In this way, the breakdown of the public world gives rise to an incessant paranoia: without the prohibition of enjoyment that the public world demands, I am constantly confronted with the other’s enjoyment and must, at the same time, constantly fear that the other might steal my enjoyment. Even though the public world is just an illusion, it nonetheless has the effect of keeping the threat of enjoyment at bay.

The End of Dissatisfaction Todd McGowan

[hamnen]

Joan Copjec, Read My Desire

[neonrebels]

This is why the common belief that Victor Frankenstein invented the monster is in error. If the monster were, in fact, the product of a scientific invention, he would have awakened at the end of chapter four, but he does not; it is only at the very beginning of chapter five that the baleful yellow eye first opens. If Frankenstein had succeeded in his scientific project, this success would have been recorded as the climax of a series of steps and discoveries, as the end product of a causal chain of effort and effect. But at the end of the chapter in which these discoveries are recorded, the invention remains uninvented. That Frankenstein has failed is apparent in the opening of the following chapter where the thing that he strove to animate lies lifeless at his feet. It is only then and in the absence of any indication or sense of agency on Frankenstein's part-the inventor is described as a passive witness of the event-that the monster comes to life. There seems to be only one reading of this narrative pacing: Frankenstein's invention did not go awry, as the standard reading claims, it foiled. It is only insofar as it failed, only inasmuch as Frankenstein's scientific efforts fell short of their goal, that the monster appears, the embodiment of this failure. It is therefore misleading to call the creature "Frankenstein's monster," as though it were the hero's botched invention, rather than the botching of his invention, as though it were not precisely the lack of that "belong to me aspect so reminiscent of property" (in Lacan's phrase) that provided the creature with its essential definition and made him so uncanny.

— Joan Copjec, Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety, 1994

[alephskoteinos]

A dark seed

There's a few throughlines from Gregory Shaw's "Hellenic Tantra" that I feel like laying out here. I figured it'd be easier to lay them out simultaneously here rather than on a Twitter thread or even multiple threads. Where I'mg going concerns eroticism, to some extent coming back to Georges Bataille, and that starts from Shaw's presentation of Tantra (and theurgy) as a way of seeing the material senses as a path to divine incarnation, but also the extent to which individual particularity, and thereby the self, is also considered divine.

If the sensate experience and the world of passion are pathways of enlightenment, this would naturally mean that eroticism is a vehicle of liberation and divine realisation in life, thus liberation while alive/embodied (jivanmukta). But this has its own inextricable dark side. The premise I just presented would also mean open ways to liberation and divine realisation that are linked to the suffering and pain of the world, or can be felt in what we call sin, or even those which seem to bring us close to death, at least in the sense that Bataille communicated.

Shaw presents a connection between eroticism and sex on one hand and divine possession on the other through the concept of samāveśa. Samāveśa is a term used a state of possession voluntarily induced by two sexual partners, representing Shiva and Shakti. This is in contrest to āveśa, which is simply divine possession or spirit possession by itself, and which can be wilder, "more transgressive", more spontaneous, perhaps to some extent less agentic on our end. But possession, whether samāveśa or just āveśa, attains an erotic import in a very Bataillean sense, and this comes back to the theme of divinity as continuity: for the self to attain continuity, it must collapse the boundaries between itself and continuity, as possession does.

Sex is in some ways central to that idea, and the union implied by samāveśa has to be active, consensual between the partners, and also basically ritual. Because of this, and the fact that sex and ritual eroticism allows the individual to descend into its own re-definition. As Lorilai Biernacki said in her book Renowed Goddess of Desire:

Sex is key because it emphasizes the contingency that is the body, and at the same time affords a space where the solipsistic subject loses itself, even becoming the object of another’s pleasure, or situated outside the subjective experience of pleasure that one sees the other experiencing. In this sense, as Joan Copjec notes, the act of sex functions to ‘‘shatter the ego’s boundaries,’’ opening a space for a new construction of identity.

Thus eroticism is what Shaw calls the “dark seed” of Tantra, implied by the original “hardcore” sexual rites practiced by Tantric sects such as Kaula (and the central, indivisible Tantric divinity is "light"). Mystical interpreations of eroticism and kink could easily follow.

But then there's the divinity of the self, a somewhat different matter, but which also takes to the "dark seed" Shaw was talking about.

For much of Tantric Hinduism, and Shaiva Hinduism, the goal was to attain direct identification between the yogi and the divine. For these Hindu sects, there is ultimately no fundamental difference between the individual self and the divine or universal identity. The point is that they are really the same, observed from different angles. If the self is already part of the universe or part of the divine, then to conform oneself to the universe is surely a useless exercise, but the point is not to conform oneself to God (as if to imply a dualist premise) or dissolve oneself totally. It is more about destroying the barriers between ourselves and the world of divine identity (continuity), destroying the mundane dualistic consciousness by which we frequently seem to abide, through ritualisation of course.

Much of the thrust on the whole nondualist divinity of the self is more pronounced from Shaw's discussion of theurgy rather than Tantra, though the Tantric philosophy and phenomenology aids this discourse considerably, even if it does mean monism of a sort, and even if theurgy favours an indirect identification with the divine rather than the direct identification proposed by Tantra. The point that Shaw introduces regarding theurgy and the self is that our mortal embodiment, and therefore individualised embodiment, is itself an aspect of divine activity, as much as the universal itself is divine. In many ways, this makes the self divine. For Shaw of course it comes down to the idea that this realisation only comes about because we are particularised animals, and that only by fully accepting our mortality may we become a conduit for the gods. We are fully human/animal and fully divine, but the latter is only because of the former, homeward bound only because of our fall. Only ritual or revelation can engage with that paradox. Reason is unable to grapple with it. That also means you must confirm the divinity of oneself through ritual experience, not discursive thought, argument, or even philosophy in the sense that we usually understand it. The practice of attaining apotheosis is in some ways precisely this.

We must simply remove the barriers between our divine self and the divine world, and then the self, far from being dissolved, attains supra-individual cosmic life as the divinised individual self. What else could follow from the notion that particularity and the universal are really the same thing from different standpoints? The self must gain knowledge of its divinity through ritual precisely so that it can assert itself as its own divine presence, as part of a pagan multiplicity of gods! That the self should be divine is a logical consequence of the non-dualism that Shaw is trying to talk about, and in some ways it also connects us once again to the hongaku thought presented by Tendai Buddhism. Perhaps this is a place from which we can explore the comparison between Japanese esoteric Buddhism and Tantric Hinduism once again. I suspect something like what I'm saying is implicit in the way some people talked about Crowley's Aeon of Horus. As either John Balance or Peter Christopherson of Coil said of that Aeon: "During this time, the true self of man would dominate. God would be within us rather than a separate external entity. The only allegiance would be to ourselves.".

But, of course, the whole argument has a flipside, and from there we return to the dark side.

If the self is part of divine activity, there is no reason why everything else isn’t to some degree or another. Desire, passion, sin, eroticism, magic, sadism, masochism, violence, demons, inferno, horror, conflict, the unconscious struggle for the survival of life, even death itself. The true scope of divine activity is in some ways unimaginable, at least for the human mind, but if your non-dualist metaphysics really is “fully inclusive”, then why shouldn’t divine activity consist of even the things we think it shouldn’t? I argue that this is one of the secrets of the Left Hand Path, if not the ultimate secret. Satan himself must be divine.

In some sense Shaw is correct about dualism, in that throughout human history, it really has only been some species of dualism or another that has given us the promise, or rather the pretence, that we can divide between “the light” and “the darkness” of the divine: that we can define divine activity as basically just a hypostasis of everything good about ourselves and the world, and exclude whatever seems to be problematic. But the dualism that makes this sort of promise is weak, even the most elaborate dualist schemes are still nothing more than bad philosophy by another name, and in the end such schemes really have more to say about human hopes, prejudices, expectations, fears, desires, or perhaps even our own identity than they could ever reveal about the true nature of divine activity.

But from there we again come back to a "dark seed", an erotic premise, because of what I said earlier about the link between this form of realisation and eroticism, and therefore, to a degree, the Bataillean continuity of pain and pleasure, sex and death, kinky as it is. Both the Iamblichean and Plotinian camps of Platonism acknowledge the material world as full of suffering and passion, but propose different responses to it, and thence comes a question that should be asked more often. You can almost think of it as another version of Nietzsche's demon questioning you about eternal return. Suppose that some of the Gnostics were correct and that the universe is ruled and created an evil power or principle, a devil who begets devils and demons, and populated with even more demons to keep its wheels turning, would you still take this world as the basis of any liberation, as the Tantric Hindus seem to have done, instead of retreating from it as many Gnostics did? Or would you look at Sade’s Nature with a similar view? In my opinion, Zosimos of Panopolis already had some idea to a similar effect. If your answer to my question is yes, you have the determination and conviction needed for Satanism, for you have embraced life in a way that can only be classed as Satanic (except perhaps also as “sadomasochistic” in a somewhat loose sense), and thus it is in this Satanism that you have taken the logic that Shaw claims for both Tantra and theurgy to the zenith of its emancipatory principle, or at least its most defiantly "perverse".

In other words, if you want to truly embrace the embodied liberation that Shaw is talking about, I would say that Satanism is the highest expression of that liberation. After all, Satanism is a religion whose answer is, of course, "you are a god and I have never heard anything more divine".

[1892]

the terrible L queer studies has taken in accepting judith butler's formulation of gender. so sad. get joan copjec-ed. like a boss 😎

[borderepisteme]

Joan Copjec

[dustedandsocial]

Joan Copjec tying together Freud, Lacan, Walter Benjamin, and Fritz Lang via desire in capitalism. From "Lacan꞉ The Silent Partners"

[whileiamdying]

Cogut Institute presents Iranian film ‘The Cow’ as part of Film-Thinking series

The film screening was followed by a panel discussion with Brown and RISD faculty.

Masht Hassan embodies behaviors of a cow following the death of his bovine companion. “The Cow” directed by Dariush Mehrjui (1969)

By Ayana Ahuja Senior Staff Writer  October 30, 2024 | 10:02pm EDT

The University’s Cogut Institute for the Humanities screened the late Dariush Mehrjui’s critically acclaimed 1969 film “The Cow” on Monday. 

The event, which followed a panel discussion at the List Arts Center, was the first installment of the Cogut’s Film-Thinking series for fall 2024, which discusses the politics and intellectuality of cinema.

The screening of “The Cow” was chosen by Michelle Quay, a lecturer in language studies. Postdoctoral Research Associate in Iranian Studies Mehrdad Babadi, Rhode Island School of Design Associate Professor of Art of the Islamic World Foad Torshizi, Professor of Modern Culture and Media Joan Copjec and Professor of English and Humanities Timothy Bewes joined Quay on the panel. 

“The Cow” follows the relationship between Iranian villager Masht Hassan (Ezzatolah Entezami) and his treasured cow — a relationship which preoccupies the impoverished, superstitious and tight-knit village.

When Hassan briefly leaves the village, his wife (Mahin Shahabi) finds the cow dead in the barn. The villagers, fearful of his reaction, try to cover up evidence of the cow’s death and devise a plan to convince Hassan that the cow simply ran away. 

But, upon his return, Hassan refuses to believe that his cow would ever abandon him and struggles to cope with the loss of his beloved animal. Hassan gradually goes insane, as he begins to act like his cow — eating hay, living in the barn, adopting cow-like mannerisms and speaking from the cow’s perspective. 

The villagers and Hassan’s wife desperately try to restore Hassan’s sanity, but ultimately realize that he has descended into madness. When everything else fails, the group beats Hassan like an animal, ties him up and drags him to the nearest hospital against his will. Hassan eventually breaks free in a rainstorm, but ends up falling to his death. 

Quay explained that in choosing the film, she thought back to the murder of director Mehrjui and his wife in their home. It inspired her to “to think of Mehrjui as a theme, as a retrospective, to sort of start appreciating his work,” she said.  

According to Bewes, “The Cow” can be read as a political allegory, considering that the Shah of Iran had banned it at the time of its initial release. The film is especially relevant “one week before a highly consequential U.S. presidential election,” Bewes said.  

“I don't think the Shah appreciated this image of Iran being broadcast, especially abroad — this very impoverished, almost backwards, superstitious village or culture,” Quay said. According to her, the film discusses class conflict and investigates mysticism in Iranian culture. 

Babadi offered insight into the Persian and Islamic influences on the narrative of “The Cow,” specifically through the symbolic depiction of  “the fusion of the lover with the beloved” through Hassan’s embodiment of his cow. 

“Mehrjui is a very central figure in Iranian cinema because, contrary to some of the other members of this movement, he was very good at combining some energy of the commercial popular cinema with the artistic elements,” Babadi said. 

As founder of the Film-Thinking series, Bewes hoped that “The Cow” screening would encourage readers to consider the “political and philosophical implications” of the film beyond their initial impressions.  

“Cinema is still one of the most important tools that a culture has for thinking about our world, especially thinking collectively,” he said. 

[dipnotski]

Slavoj Žižek – Cinsellik ve Başarısız Mutlak (2023)

Slavoj Žižek, felsefi sisteminin bugüne kadarki en titiz çalışmasında, diyalektik materyalizmin yeni bir tanımını sunuyor. Bu kitabında, Alain Badiou, Robert Brandom, Joan Copjec, Quentin Meillassoux ve Julia Kristeva gibi isimlerin eserlerini yorumlamakla sınırlı kalmıyor; popüler bilimden kuantum mekaniğine, cinsel farktan analitik felsefeye uzanan bir macera vadediyor. Žižek Möbius şeridini,…

[jouissanceangel]

joan copjec on the affect of shame, psychoanalytically understood

[monasticcellphone]

Political opposition to bio-power must take the form, therefore, not of liberating suppressed sexual identities but of liberating oneself from them, freeing oneself from classification by their categories.

J. Copjec, “The Sexual Compact”

[saberesinsurrectos]

[ourladyofperpetualnaptime]

joan copjec, from “the sexual compact”

[1892]

an anon asked me about copjec's conception of gender and i want to answer it but i accidentally didn't finish the ask and published it anyway (thinking i was drafting it) so it was two majorly unfinished but packed paragraphs that barely get at her point. omfg im so embarrassed like guys i prommy i have more to say! i will post my gender theory thoughts soon but i want to fully organize my points and such.