#does that make sense? i think we can make possession even more metaphysical and overly complex and horrorific here. for fun.

[quietwingsinthesky]

actually wait i do have a fucked up millie fact to share for the night. her s4-5 timeline in my head have her becoming best friends with chuck (read: Millie keeps breaking into his house despite his constant protests for her to Stop Doing That. in her defense, the roadhouse burned down and if she goes to bobby’s, her brothers will know within the hour. she has decided this means they’re best friends, and chuck is kind of pathetic and weak and can’t stop her in any meaningful way.)

(in the endverse, millie and dean aren’t on speaking terms. they’ll fight together, millie will follow him most places, but whatever was there is broken beyond repair. that’s probably because she blames him for what happened to sam, and he blames her for blaming him, and it’s a whole cycle. but in the wake of that, she’s latched onto chuck to fill the void left by sam and dean, something that’s not working. but is also the reason that when future!dean says they’re striking out to kill samifer, intent on feeding everyone into the meat grinder to do so, past!dean catches millie and chuck preparing to run in the opposite direction and not look back. i don’t think he tries to stop them.)

the point of all that being that the s5 finale happens, and millie doesn’t see any of chuck’s half of the story. doesn’t get to know what happens to him.

she just finds an empty house. she assumes it got to be too much for him. she looks for a body, and she doesn’t get to have one. she leaves.

years later, his face is staring at her across the rooms of this place that’s supposed to be her home. and millie has spent these years running in the leagues of angels and demons and leviathans, and if she knows only one thing, it’s that that’s chuck’s face. but that’s not him. not anymore. what’s inside it was not her friend. no matter what it says.

[skinfeeler]

I watched Joker (2019) at the cinema last night. It induced in me a lot of thoughts about the film, but also about the nature of criticism and art in general. Because I respect people’s time and general sensibility, I’m putting the rest of this post under a cut. Content warnings surrounding discussion of (sexual) violence, and obviously a number of spoilers.

I left the room feeling uncertain how to interpret what I had just watched, and for this reason (and others) quite uncomfortable. As a narrative the film seemed disjointed and overly metaphorical, certainly as a movement of set-up, crescendo, climax, and denouement the film made no sense because the film for the most part utterly denied itself a clear and uninterrupted line in events. This was because of certain scenes in the film that can with certainty be said to not possibly have happened in the way they did on the screen, even with suspension of disbelief intact, but also in general the solipsism of the film— Arthur Fleck seemed like the only character in the film with everyone at most taking a rather symbolic, flat, role (Thomas Wayne) or only purposefully serving as a source of narrative unreliability and confusion (Penny Fleck). Most characters, however, were simply part of an unindividuated antagonistic bloc whose sole purpose seemed to truncate both its own humanity and Arthur's— perhaps this is what we could call 'society', or something.

It took me a moment of talking to friends to find a method through which this film perhaps not quite become intelligible, but at the very least that I could get something out of it. This method is one of doing away with the narrative and instead, trying to view it as a character study.

Certain parts of the film become immediately more palatable when viewed this way, or at least, easier to parse as meaning anything at all. For example, we don't have to accept the pop criticism analysis of that his relationship with his neighbor is something Arthur hallucinated and then realised he hallucinated. Instead, we can take each of the scenes in which she is present as something that tells us something about Arthur even if not extant in the ‘real narrative’— while he is truly and actually maligned by society, it can't be said that Arthur himself is particularly sensitive to the complicated humanity of those around him. For example, when it comes to Penny, he seems to have absolutely no regard for the simultaneous plight and guilt surrounding her character, that of a woman who, yes, let him be abused by her boyfriend but who herself was also being abused by him and presumably had her own troubled past.

Likewise, we can state that if his neighbor were to be present in the scenes in which she couldn't possibly have been (since it would defy all plausability of that relationship developing in that way), Arthur would actually have seen her as how she acted in those scenes: A symbol, at most. An anchor. Something without particular agency or drives or motives of her own, which she only reclaims in the final scene that she's in, where she is concerned with the safety of her daughter and Arthur leaving her apartment. The disparity between her as a an agent and the scenes in which her presence was imaginary (as opposed to unreal) tells us something about Arthur, even if it tells us nothing about the narrative.

When it comes to Penny, perhaps it doesn't matter so much to Arthur whether she had her own complicated reality of pain and powerlessness. In the moment where Arthur killed her, he was simply reclaiming a kind of power he never had. Arthur has no social means to power, so he resorts to presocial means, or really just only ever one, which is murder. And not just any kind of murder, not the kind of violence of slowly strangling someone, or beating someone into a pulp until they pass away as a combination of factors such as lung failure, neural trauma, and internal bleeding, but the kind of violence with a huge power differential where the moment he decides someone dies, they're already dead, a wish spoken to remove someone from this world that one immediately grants oneself. A terminally ill woman can't defend herself against smothering, and even an able-bodied adult man stands no chance in the second between the revolver being unholstered and being shot in the head.

Hypnotising, really. In particular that moment where the third businessman who was first harassing a woman on the train and then beating Arthur up is now slowly limping away as Arthur casually follows him, you can see every aspect of his fear, the sheer realisation that the social dominion he enjoys means nothing when faced with a cartridge of sufficient caliber.

I feel that this is significant somehow, the fact that Arthur is both traumatised into being unable to parse the very intricate and individual drives of the people surrounding him, and the fact that he recognises that this is happening to him, constantly, and acts very purposefully to circumvent it through means which in turn allow no resistance in any sense whatsoever. All of this can, of course, be attributed to trauma as an aspect of the character study of the film, and for this reason I believe that the scenes-that-couldn't-possibly-have-happened and the very real violence he enacts are part of one and the same network of themes.

The fact that for most of the film Arthur is simultaneously treated by the narrative as the one person with humanity (but having this unrecognised by society) but Wayne and everyone else is portrayed as not possessing it (but at the very least conditionally having some of it bestowed upon them by those around them) is an important part of this conceit.

The inherent hypocrisy of Arthur’s character as maligned but having no qualm with truncating the subjectivities around him shows us both that the way he views things is disturbed and that he is legitimately cut off from others, that he genuinely cannot conceive of why he should not act as he does, but the harm he does is real. It’s obvious that we know Arthur did not have any choice in becoming the kind of person he ended up being, but also that he's not in particular a 'good person', if that means anything at all. One could possibly draw parallels to Brad in LISA: The Painful RPG, but to anyone who has played that game I shouldn't have to explicitly draw the links.

Furthermore, this baseline of the ineluctable unpleasantness of Arthur's character helps us differentiate between the parts of the film where he can meaningfully choose what to do, actions he undertakes without the force majeure of trauma and mental illness making any other options not even appear in his head. From here we could possibly draw a parallel to the utter meaninglessness of Alex’ actions in A Clockwork Orange post-Ludivico, a film in which this particular theme is much more explicit, although there’s a contrast of the ability to be compassionate being truncated as opposed to the ability to be cruel.

(To be clear, I'm working with the framework of "what could you reasonably expect from someone who has had their psyche malformed like that?" whether it is the lack of 'good' deeds from Arthur or the lack of 'evil' deeds from Alex as opposed to a blanket condemnation/sanctification of character.)

This is where directorial fiat starts meaning anything, or from a more in-universe perspective, what little agency Arthur himself has left— Watsonian or Doylist analysis, who gives a shit, you know what I mean.

There are a couple actions Arthur took that were completely unwarranted, which were neither reactions to imminent threats or reactions to people who had wronged him in the past. In particular, I am referring here to him sexually assaulting his neighbor — even if not a real scene within the narrative, it still tells us something about Arthur as within the aforementioned parameters — and later the woman on TV.

Were he not to have taken those actions, a meaningful moral judgement — a positive one but in particularly the negative ones — could not possibly have been ascribed to him, because all of his actions could have been conceivably reduced to simple learned traumatic behaviors and reactions to impending harm. The story of Arthur could have been one of a gun cocked by SOCIETY and then exploding in its own face.

However, since not all of his actions can be placed within this framework, we can say something about Arthur for certain that I don't feel we could unequivocally have before: He is not the hero of this story. There are actions of his to which morality meaningfully applies, and in a negative light— as opposed to not being a bad person, the 'not' here referring to the futility of trying to ascribe morality to the actions of those who have certain faculties truncated from their psyche. But why opt for this in the script?

If Arthur could possibly have had all of his actions justified or at least hypothetically justifiable, he would have been the hero of the story. And 'the hero of the story' implies 'story', it implies 'narrative', it would have meant a regression to the narrative structure that the film explicitly seemed to be avoiding, at least most of the time. Joker (2019) wouldn't have been a character study, it would've regressed to a relatively standard narrative with an antihero. Thus, I think it makes sense to insert these actions as a diversion of the baseline of things which could really not have been any different in any categorical way (the killings in self-defense, general acts of revenge, the general insensitivity to the humanity of all others).

All of this is very complicated and challenging, perhaps in particular to those who aren't familiar with the larger lines of the subjectivity that is Arthur: One of a kind of mental illness that not even provisional accommodation exists for, particular economic dependence and destitution, and a general sense of being cut off from the world soul or whatever metaphysical metaphor you would like to use.

(The reason I want to use a metaphysical metaphor is because the longer you are both stuck in and at odds with society, the more everything that happens feels like a presocial fact, something that is intrinsic to you, rather than something that is occuring for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with you. One could choose to draw a distinction between saying that all of it is absurd, that the very construction of value in a Marxist sense creates an impersonal system of domination upon us all, or that the reason why things are as they are is the result of the enforced interests of certain blocs, but this doesn't really matter here. The fact that this reality is rapidly occluded from those who are subjugated to it remains, and that education to circumvent this occlusion and being reminded of what one knows by oneself and others is necessary to not keep returning to a mindset where one feels like something is intrinsically wrong with oneself rather than with society or whatever.)

All art produced by humans, even mass-produced art, is the result of the labor of those who even if they have no particular personal creative input, still levy the aspects of the contexts they are embedded in within the film. No film about a truly alien universe is possible, if it were, it would intrinsically not be possible for humans to conceive of and portray on any medium. Thus we have to conclude that this film, too, says something about perhaps all of us, and those around us.

This is very difficult. The morality of the film is so contradictory as to be completely reprehensible to anyone with any worldview at all, and trying to view it as a character study protects us from being impacted by it. It's a film about Arthur, after all, not us, a twisted person who does not deserve our sympathy. This contradiction doesn’t matter if we abstract Arthur away from ourselves.

I would call this cowardice, or at least, a kind of fear. There is a difference between consuming art from a critical, analytic distance, and really engaging with it. This is of course scary to most people, and I think many of us, even or perhaps especially those who claim to be hardcore critics and analytics are often unwilling to do this. After all, if we really open our minds and hearts to the art we interact with, we don't know how we will end up on the other side.

Will we come to question our preconceptions about who deserves sympathy? Does anyone, even, does the concept retain meaning in a world in which we are all traumatised? Does everyone, perhaps, which may be much scarier to some of us? Why do people behave in the way they do? It would be so easy to assume that the people we hate are behaving either irrationally or from a position of malice, and the idea that everyone has reasons to do what they're doing is a difficult one when we have been hurt by others.

There are a lot of questions like these that pop up when we truly take art for what it is, and I think most of us just can't be bothered. Certainly I couldn't while watching this film, or immediately after it.

This is why I think why a lot of both professional critics and more casual consumers seem to have trouble taking this film in. As a narrative, this film is obnoxious, frustrating, incoherent. As a character study, however, it is still painful, but if you dare to see it that way, you will get way more out of the film than you otherwise would. However, I feel even this is still a layer of abstraction too far removed from the meaning that the film could potentially confer upon us, but it’s one that people seem to be consistently refusing, judging by the state of discourse surrounding this film.

There are certain areas where analysis and ideology fail, or even if they succeed at a totalising idea of how to organise communities and lives, they don't suffice to let us truly perceive ourselves and others. There are certain things that can only be conveyed through art in this way, and at times, even the methodical structures surrounding art can prevent us from getting out of it what we can from nowhere else.

If Joker (2019) fails at any point, I would say it fails here, the parts where it fails to commit to disemphasising the narrative, where they return to the frame of a monomyth with an antihero, where it pulls punches about Arthur and why he does what he does, where it is altogether too subtle about the fact that there are more commonalities between Arthur and everyone else in the film than there are differences. Its cowardice makes it too easy for its audience to, in turn, also hide and scurry away from feeling what they could potentially feel, from having their psyches touched in a particular way.

There is, however, an artist whose work I feel consistently successfully eschews structures and their intrinsic problems, and whose art is extremely impactful as a result.

Play Vesp, by Porpentine.

[deadsculs]

( » » tasks | 025 ; identity. )

“I am what happens when they turn good men into monsters.”

n a m e   m e a n i n g   —

Alexi

Rare romanization of Alexey. Alexey is a Russian and Bulgarian male first name deriving from the Greek Alexios (Αλέξιος), meaning "Defender", and thus of the same origin as the Latin Alexius.

Nikolayevich

Russian patronymic name, literal translation is “Son of Nikolai.” Nikolai is an East Slavic variant of the masculine name Nicholas, meaning "victory of the people."

Alexandrov

Alexandrov is a Slavic surname derived from the name Alexander and common in Bulgaria and Russia. The name Alexander is derived from the Greek Ἀλέξανδρος (Aléxandros), meaning "Defender of the people" or "Defending men" and also, "Protector of men", a compound of the verb ἀλέξειν alexein, "to ward off, to avert, to defend" and the noun ἀνήρ anēr, "man.”

a s t r o l o g i c a l   —

Birth date: April 10th, 1977

Star Sign: Aries

Element: Fire

Quality: Cardinal

Color: Red

Day: Tuesday

Ruler: Mars

Greatest compatibility: Leo, Sagittarius

Lucky Numbers: 1, 2, 8, 9

As the first sign in the zodiac, the presence of Aries almost always marks the beginning of something energetic and turbulent.They are continuously looking for dynamic, speed and competition. They are always first in everything - from work to social gatherings. Thanks to its ruling planet Mars, Aries is one of the most active zodiac signs. People born under the Aries sign, are meant to emphasize the search for answers to personal and metaphysical questions. This is the biggest feature of this incarnation.

Aries is a fire sign, just like Leo and Sagittarius. This means that it is in their nature to take action, sometimes before they think about it well. Their fiery ruler affects their excellent organizational skills, so you'll rarely meet an Aries who doesn't like to finish more things at once, often even before the lunch break! The challenges are increased when they are impatient, aggressive and vent anger on others.

Aries rules the head and leads with the head, often literally walking head first, leaning forwards for speed and focus. They are naturally brave and rarely afraid of trial and risk. They possess youthful strength and energy, regardless of age and they perform tasks in record time. By aligning with themselves they could achieve the best results.

Strengths: Courageous, determined, confident, enthusiastic, optimistic, honest, passionate

Weaknesses: Impatient, moody, short-tempered, impulsive, aggressive

Aries likes: Comfortable clothes, taking on leadership roles, physical challenges, individual sports

Aries dislikes: Inactivity, delays, work that does not use one's talents

Year of the Snake

In Chinese culture, the Snake is the most enigmatic animal among the twelve zodiac animals. People born in a year of the Snake are supposed to be the most intuitive.

Snakes tend to act according to their own judgments, even while remaining the most private and reticent. They are determined to accomplish their goals and hate to fail.

Snakes represent the symbol of wisdom. They are intelligent and wise. They are good at communication but say little. Snakes are usually regarded as great thinkers.

Snakes are materialistic and love keeping up with the Joneses. They love to posses the best of everything, but they have no patience for shopping.

Snake people prefer to work alone, therefore they are easily stressed. If they seem unusually stressed, it is best to allow them their own space and time to return to normal.

m y e r s   b r i g g s   —

“The Defender” ( ISFJ-T )

The Defender personality type is quite unique, as many of their qualities defy the definition of their individual traits. Though sensitive, Defenders have excellent analytical abilities; though reserved, they have well-developed people skills and robust social relationships; and though they are generally a conservative type, Defenders are often receptive to change and new ideas. As with so many things, people with the Defender personality type are more than the sum of their parts, and it is the way they use these strengths that defines who they are.

Defenders are true altruists, meeting kindness with kindness-in-excess and engaging the work and people they believe in with enthusiasm and generosity.

There’s hardly a better type to make up such a large proportion of the population, nearly 13%. Combining the best of tradition and the desire to do good, Defenders are found in lines of work with a sense of history behind them, such as medicine, academics and charitable social work.

e n n e g r a m   —

Type Six ( The Loyalist )

Until they can get in touch with their own inner guidance, Sixes are like a ping-pong ball that is constantly shuttling back and forth between whatever influence is hitting the hardest in any given moment. Because of this reactivity, no matter what we say about Sixes, the opposite is often also as true. They are both strong and weak, fearful and courageous, trusting and distrusting, defenders and provokers, sweet and sour, aggressive and passive, bullies and weaklings, on the defensive and on the offensive, thinkers and doers, group people and soloists, believers and doubters, cooperative and obstructionistic, tender and mean, generous and petty—and on and on. It is the contradictory picture that is the characteristic “fingerprint” of Sixes, the fact that they are a bundle of opposites.

Basic Fear: Of being without support and guidance

Basic Desire: To have security and support

c h a r a c t e r   a l i g n m e n t   —

Neutral Good

Characters of neutral good alignment believe that there must be some regulation in combination with freedoms if the best is to be brought to the world--the most beneficial conditions for living things in general and intelligent people in particular. Characters of this alignment see the cosmos as a place where law and chaos are merely tools to use in bringing life, happiness, and prosperity to all deserving people. Order is not good unless it brings this to all; neither is randomness and total freedom desirable if it does not bring such good.

Neutral goods value both personal freedom and adherence to laws. They feel that too many laws may unnecessarily restrict the freedom of good beings. They also believe that too much freedom may not protect society as a whole and encourage counterproductive divisions and in-fighting. They promote governments which hold broad powers, but do not interfere in the day-to-day lives of their citizens.

These characters value life and freedom above all else, and despise those who would deprive others of them. Neutral good characters sometimes find themselves forced to work beyond the law, yet for the law, and the greater good of the people. They are not vicious or vindictive, but are people driven to right injustice. Neutral good characters always attempt to work within the law whenever possible, however.

To a neutral good person, life and the assurance of other people’s rights take precedence over all else. This is not to say that this character will have an aversion to taking another's life when faced with a choice between an attacker's and his own, however. Neither numbers nor individual concerns have any bearing on decisions regarding the needs and rights of any given peoples. In other words, in the view of a neutral good person, rarely will either the needs of the many or the personal desires of an individual outweigh the needs of any other person. All life is given even-handed treatment. As with all alignments neutral with respect to law and chaos, self-reliance is a cornerstone of a neutral good being's personality. In a crunch, neutral good characters trust in themselves and in no other individual or group. This doesn't mean they can't make friends and develop trusting relationships with others, however. Neutral good beings aren't normally as independent as chaotic good beings, and they can cooperate in groups. But they won't always trust a group to be more effective than they could be themselves.

A neutral good character will keep his word to those who are not evil and will lie only to evil-doers. He will never attack an unarmed foe and will never harm an innocent. He will not use torture to extract information or for pleasure. He will never kill for pleasure, only in self-defense or in the defense of others. A neutral good character will never use poison. He will help those in need and works well alone or in a group. He responds well to higher authority until that authority attempts to use the law to hamper his ability to do good. He is trustful of organizations as long as they serve his utilitarian purpose. He will follow the law unless more good can come from breaking the law. He will never betray a family member, comrade, or friend. Neutral good characters are indifferent to the concepts of self-discipline and honor, finding them useful only if they promote goodness.

t h e   f o u r   t e m p e r a m e n t s   —

Melancholic

Your temperament is melancholic. The melancholic temperament is fundamentally introverted and thoughtful. Melancholic people often were perceived as very (or overly) pondering and considerate, getting rather worried when they could not be on time for events. Melancholics can be highly creative in activities such as poetry and art - and can become preoccupied with the tragedy and cruelty in the world. Often they are perfectionists. They are self-reliant and independent; one negative part of being a melancholic is that they can get so involved in what they are doing they forget to think of others.

e x t r a s   —

Hogwarts house: None, attended Durmstrang. Might have been sorted as Gryffindor.

Ilvermony house: Unknown, possibly Wampus.

Divergent faction: Dauntless

Hunger Games district: District 2

French Republican Calendar: Judas Tree

[ruptureline]

Between Levinas and Lacan: Self, Other, Ethics - Mari Ruti

Preface

vii

This book charts the ethical terrain between Levinasian phenomenology and Lacanian psychoanalysis.

If Levinas views the other as a site of unconditional ethical accountability, Lacan is interested in the subject’s capacity to dissociate itself from the (often coercive) desire of the other— whether the big Other of symbolic law or more particular others who, for the subject, embody this law.

[W]hile Levinas laments our failure to adequately meet the ethical demand arising from the other, Lacan laments the consequences of our failure to adequately escape the normative forms this demand frequently takes.

This explains why Lacan does not join Levinas in celebrating the inviolability of the other but instead seeks to rupture the unconscious fantasies that render us overly compliant with respect to the other’s desire; it explains why Lacanian ethics sometimes sounds like a mockery of everything that Levinas stands for.

viii

Undoubtedly, the Levinasian approach speaks more easily to our everyday notion of ethics in the sense that we are used to thinking that we should respect the other regardless of how confusing or repellent she may seem. This stance in fact —explicitly or implicitly— underpins many of the difference-based ethical paradigms of contemporary theory. And it has generated one of the most powerful ethical visions of the last decade: Judith Butler’s ethics of precarity as an ethics that posits shared human vulnerability—our primordial exposure to others—as an ontological foundation for global justice.

Žižek has theorized the so-called Lacanian “act” —a destructive or even suicidal act that allows the subject to sever its ties with the surrounding social fabric— as a countercultural intervention with potentially far-reaching ethical and political consequences. Badiou, in turn, has explained how the truth-event (a sudden revelation of a hitherto invisible truth) can compel the subject to revise its entire mode of being despite the potentially high social cost of doing so. In other words, if for Levinas and Butler, ethics is a matter of recognizing the primacy of the other, for Lacan, Žižek, and Badiou, it is a matter of a profound reconfiguration of subjectivity — of the kind of realignment of priorities that makes it impossible for the subject to stay on the path that it has, consciously or unconsciously, chosen for itself (and that others may expect it to follow).

However, this quest should not be confused with the attempt to revive the universalism of Western metaphysics, for if Levinas, Butler, Lacan, Žižek, and Badiou have one thing in common, it is their rejection of the sovereign Enlightenment subject, which means that the universalism they advocate cannot be based on principles such as rationality or autonomy but must, instead, seek alternative forms of legitimation. For Levinas and Butler, it is the subject’s relational ontology that offers such legitimation: insofar as the subject owes its very existence to the other, its responsibility to the other is non-negotiable and without exception. Žižek and Badiou, in turn, maintain that even though the act or the event always arises from a specific situation, and even though it annihilates the subject’s fantasies of rational self-mastery, the illumination it provides strikes the subject with the force of a universal truth (which is precisely why it cannot be ignored).

How do we meet the suffering of others without reducing them to objects of our pity? Does ethics arise from the vulnerable face of the other, as it does in Levinas?

X

Her ethics of precarity, I will illustrate, cannot work without a grounding in a generalizable ontology of human vulnerability, with the result that her efforts to downplay its universality ring false.

Simply put, I wish to ask why autonomy is such a red flag for Butler despite the fact that most of the world’s population is arguably not suffering from an excess of smug confidence. If, as Butler herself repeatedly reminds us, we are precarious and broken, why insist on breaking us more?

xi

At the same time, Levinas draws a clear distinction between ethics (where normative considerations have no place) and justice (which arbitrates between individuals on the basis of a priori norms of right and wrong), thereby suggesting that justice curtails our ethical accountability.

xii

Yet I also question Butler’s conviction that grief serves as a basis for ethical and political accountability, for it seems to me that grief could just as well have the opposite effect of paralyzing action. Even more insidiously, the emphasis on grief could make relatively privileged Western subjects feel like they are accomplishing something —working for social justice— when in fact nothing is changing in the world; the notion that there is something inherently “decent” about grief could make it too easy for Westerners to feel so good about their “virtuous” capacity to mourn the losses of the rest of the world that they (conveniently) cease to feel any urgency about doing anything else.

Essentially, Žižek and Badiou believe that when we choose to define the human being as a victim, we foreclose the possibility of the kinds of courageous acts (or events) that disturb the status quo of the hegemonic cultural order and that, potentially at least, allow new social configurations, including more just collective arrangements, to come into being.

Žižek and Badiou themselves advocate a more radical approach, arguing that it is only when the subject risks its ordinary way of being (including, perhaps, its grief) that it becomes a “real” subject— a subject with agency and thus the capacity for ethical and political action.

Chapter 3

The Lacanian rebuttal: Žižek, Badiou, and Revolutionary Politics

77

[Butler’s] last book, although it does not mention Badiou, is de facto a kind of anti-Badiou manifesto: hers is an ethics of finitude, of making a virtue out of our very weakness, in other words, of elevating into the highest ethical value the respect for our very inability to act with full responsibility.

At the same time, I have expressed my reservations about the masochistic, disempowering tendencies of both Levinasian and Butlerian ethics, and these reservations are what steer me to the more rebellious Marxist-Lacanian ethical paradigms of Žižek and Badiou.

79

What I mean by this will become clear as my discussion progresses, but let me say right away that this basic Lacanian stance manifests itself in the theories of Žižek and Badiou as the conviction that the point of ethics is not to fixate on our entrapment in hegemonic power but, rather, to make the impossible possible. In other words, if Butler tends to underscore the impossibility of breaking our psychic attachment to wounding forms of social power, Žižek and Badiou insist on our ability to do precisely this.

81

While there may be some truth to this claim, it also overstates the issue because, as I explained in Chapter 1, Levinas does not actually depict the face as a locus of straightforward identification. Rather, he describes it as “a being beyond all attributes” (EN 33), as what escapes the kinds of conceptual and perceptual categories that would allow us to reduce it to what is familiar to us. The face is a site of utter singularity, of utter self-sameness, which means that it by definition defeats our attempts to classify it. Consequently, far from facilitating immediate empathy, the face alerts us to the limits of empathetic affinity, which is exactly why it elicits unqualified responsibility — why, in Levinasian terms, we are supposed to protect the other regardless of how this other appears to us, regardless of whether or not we experience the other’s face as benevolent.

[L]ike Badiou, Žižek wishes to demonstrate that multiculturalism works only as long as the other is someone with whom we can identify (and let us not forget that Butler’s ethics of precarity calls for exactly this type of identificatory capacity); Žižek reminds us that multiculturalism makes sense as long as the other possesses qualities, ideals, or values we can relate to but that matters become complicated when the other no longer makes any sense to us, when the other is, say, a suicide bomber who does not hesitate to kill random civilians for the sake of his or her cause.

82

We have in fact had to confront the problematic Badiou highlights, namely that despite our rhetoric of respecting differences, it is difficult for us to respect those who refuse to respect differences.

Are there not situations where the Levinasian respect for the face is overrated and it would be better to heed Žižek’s call to smash the other’s face (N 142)?

This is why the Butlerian solution is to humanize those faces that have been deprived of their human resonance by both global and more local structures of power. Žižek’s strategy is the exact opposite in the sense that justice, in his opinion, calls for a radical dehumanization of the subject—a move away from the face.

83

In other words, justice begins when I recall the distant multitude that eludes my relational grasp.

Along related lines, Badiou asserts that it is not respect for differences but rather a kind of studied indifference to them that founds ethics.

What we have here is a clash between the Levinasians and the Lacanians, the defenders of the face and those who see the aesthetics of the face as a decoy that distracts us from impartial justice.

84

But what most interests me is that, despite their obvious disagreements, both sides of the clash, in this particular instance at least, seem to be on a quest for a universal foundation for ethics.[BÖ1]  After all, whether we are looking to make every face count equally, or to studiously ignore every face, we are striving for a general principle that levels distinctions between individuals; we are trying, in our divergent ways, to say that either everyone matters or no one does.

86

My main point is that the post-metaphysical critics I have chosen to analyze in detail are all, in one way or another, willingly or not, attracted to the idea that there might be a way to theorize a universalist ethics even in the absence of the sovereign humanist subject[BÖ2] . However, where they diverge is in how they conceptualize the relationship between the singular and the universal.

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Žižek and Badiou, in contrast, see no contradiction between singularity and universality; as their statements about the “coldness” of justice (Žižek) and the “indifference” of ethics (Badiou) indicate, they believe that the universal can, potentially at least, accommodate a multitude of singularities.

Žižek and Badiou take it for granted that every singularity can claim an immediate membership in the universal.[BÖ3] 

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In practice, this means that women have always had trouble transcending their coding as female first, human second; blacks have always had trouble transcending their coding as “colored” first, human second; gays have always had trouble transcending their coding as “deviants” first, human second; non-Westerners have always had trouble transcending their coding as “other” first, human second, and so on. This is the dynamic that Žižek and Badiou ignore in their wholesale rejection of all “identitarian,” group-based political movements, such as feminism, antiracism, queer solidarity, and anticolonial struggles.[BÖ4] 

The reason they want to go directly from the singular to the universal[BÖ5]  is that they see the identitarian focus on particular identity categories such as race, gender, sexuality, religion, and nationality as a “reactionary” political stance (PP 75 ) — one that at best traps individuals in narrow and self-serving preoccupations, and at worst leads to the extreme violence of nationalist uprisings, ethnic cleansings, and religious fundamentalisms. However, Žižek and Badiou do not adequately distinguish between different identitarian movements, so it becomes difficult to see the difference between the Civil Rights movement and National Socialism.[BÖ6] 

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By this I do not mean to suggest that feminism is more important than class politics —not at all— for what most bothers me about the approach of Žižek and Badiou is precisely that they engage in such a counterproductive ranking of political causes. And, unfortunately, their efforts to elevate the class struggle over all other political struggles[BÖ7]  give the impression that what is, in the final analysis, at stake for them is an old-fashioned Marxism that seeks “universal” emancipation for white men while being entirely willing to leave everyone else behind.

Interestingly, this is exactly the complaint leveled against Žižek by Laclau, who notes the same problem I have just outlined, namely that the idea that the class struggle is somehow more intrinsically universal than other political struggles, such as multiculturalism, is based on a spurious ranking of political causes.

In Laclau’s opinion, not only is it possible to demonstrate the potentially universalist appeal of the causes that Žižek labels “identitarian,” or “particularist,” but it is also possible to show that the class struggle is no less identitarian than any other struggle, centered as it is on the worker’s self-understanding of himself as having a particular identity—an identity that can be undermined in various ways. The class struggle, on this view, arises when the worker feels that his identity is somehow threatened, for instance, when he fears that below a certain level of wages, he cannot live a decent life. As a result, Laclau declares that his “answer to Žižek’s dichotomy between class struggle and identity politics is that class struggle is just one species of identity politics, and one which is becoming less and less important in the world in which we live.”[BÖ8] 

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Žižek’s dismissal of the ways in which the particularity of subject positions continues to matter cannot be divorced from his resistance to defining the human being as a victim — a resistance that he shares with Badiou. In other words, what creates a chasm between Butler in the Levinasian camp on the one hand and Žižek and Badiou in the Lacanian camp on the other is the latter’s rejection of the premise of constitutive precariousness, the very premise that is central to Butlerian ethics.

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[T]hrough Badiou’s argument that to equate the human with the victim —to reduce the human being to the fragility of his constitution— is to deny the rights of the “immortal.”

Perhaps most important, the truth-event represents an ethical opportunity that allows the subject to pierce the canvas of the established order of things so as to identify what Badiou calls “the void” of the situation.

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In unveiling the void of a given situation, the truth-event creates an ethical opening, an opportunity to see and do things differently.

In Lacanian terms, Nazism did not disturb “the fundamental fantasy” of a world without social antagonisms but merely avoided confrontation with such antagonisms by displacing them onto the figure of the Jew, which it, then, sought to destroy in order to eradicate the specter of collective rifts as such.

As Žižek specifies, the inauthentic event “legitimizes itself through reference to the point of substantial fullness of a given constellation (on the political terrain: Race, True Religion, Nation . . .): it aims precisely at obliterating the last traces of the ‘symptomal torsion’ which disturbs the balance of that constellation” (“CS” 125).

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Badiou believes that when we categorize the human as a victim, we effectively shut down the possibility of authentic events: we make it impossible for new ways of interpreting things to enter the world. We, as it were, sacrifice the rights of the immortal for those of the mortal, denying that it is only as something “other than a victim,” something “other” than a mortal being, that man accedes to the status of ethical subjectivity. This is why Badiou concludes that defining man as a victim only ensures that he will “be held in contempt” (E 12). Badiou further asserts that the victim, in the Western imagination, tends to be associated with the disempowered postcolonial subject, so that behind the Levinasian outlook that underscores our responsibility for the (suffering) other hides “the good-Man, the white-Man” (E 13).

What is awkward about Badiou’s formulation is its implication that victimization is something that can be avoided or rejected at will. It may be that Badiou does not mean to vilify the victimized themselves but merely ethical models —such as that of Levinas— centered around the notion of victimization. But this distinction is not always easy to uphold, with the result that Badiou at times sounds as if he thought that some people “allow” themselves to be victimized, whereas others (those capable of truth-events, those we admire rather than hold in contempt) are heroic enough to resist it.

The problem is akin to the one I noted above with regard to Badiou and Žižek’s assumption that every singularity has equal access to the universal.