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Earthlings and Spacemen: Life-and-Death Struggle
Manifesto: Commonism Now!
Voyeurism and Exhibitionism on the Internet: The Libidinal Economy of the Spectacle of Instanternity
Too Late?
The (Un)Touchable Touch of Pyramus and Thisbe: Doubt and Desire
The Category of the (Un)Touchable in Haptolinguistics: Touch, Repetition, and Language
The Paradoxes of Repetition and the Limping Cause in Kierkegaard, Hegel and Lacan
The (Un)touchable Touch:
Doubt and Desire
The Naturalization of Politics and the Dangerous Mind
The (Un)touchable Value:
Capital and Repetition
The Four Matrices of Repetition:
Deflation, Reformation, Inflation, Production
Repetition between Reproduction and Variation:
Deleuze, Hegel, Kierkegaard
Brute Repetition:
Deleuze and Freud
On Repetition and Theatricality:
A Dialogue with Samuel Weber’s Thought
(Through Kierkegaard, Freud, Lacan and Deleuze)
Authentic Emotion and Body-subject:
Are these Tears Real?
Antihumanism and Theatre or who has a Human Face
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Manifesto: Commonism Now!
book chapter
Edited By Nicol A. Barria-Asenjo, Brian Willems, Slavoj Žižek
Routledge 2023
LINK
Bringing together over forty original short essays, some academic, others more creative in nature, this collection responds to the political, historical, social, and economic situation in which we find ourselves today.
The editors argue that we are living in a repetition that must be stopped – if our goal is that the signifier "humanity" remains in the following centuries, the time has come to work in the present. The objective is not to deliver precise or quick answers, but to gather varied voices from different continents, bringing together different languages, ideas, practices, theories, thoughts, and desires. In the words of Yanis Varoufakis, "urging us to become agents of a future that ends unnecessary mass suffering and inspire humanity to realise its potential for authentic freedom." To leave the concept of a manifesto open, the contradictory aspects of the chapters are a subject of the manifesto itself. This is a manifesto of contradictions that reflects our reality as well as our struggles and our aspirations.
This unique anthology will appeal to students and scholars across the humanities and social sciences interested in critical theory and social change.
Voyeurism and Exhibitionism on the Internet:
The Libidinal Economy of the Spectacle of Instanternity
Filozofski vestnik, Vol. 43 No. 3 (2022): Reconfigurations of Limits, Varieties of Perversion
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Today, in the situation that we call the instanternity of the digital age, the visual aspect of the social (and power) relations is ever more important. The majority of human interactions on the Internet are happening in the field of vision. In this field, human desire follows the scopic drive, which is, according to Freud, expressed in the ambivalence of voyeurism and exhibitionism. This means that voyeurism and exhibitionism are the fundamental mechanisms operating in, and structuring, the digital virtual. This topic, in a broader sense, tackles the inscription of the subject within the digital virtual spectacle, which deals with the relation between the individual’s imaginary and symbolic identification, that is, between the ideal ego and the ego ideal. To a certain extent, this also relates to what has been marked as a »pathological narcissism«. Even if the changes brought about by the digital virtual, as far as the subject is concerned, are not ontological, i.e. they do not concern its relation to being, they do concern its entry into the field of the Other, and can, because they are systemic changes, fundamentally restructure the social fabric. The bet of this article is therefore not only to try to understand the mechanisms driving the formation of subjectivity within the digital virtual, but also to trace their transformative potential.
Is it Too Late?
Problemi International: Hegel 250: Too Late?
Vol. 4, 2020, Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis
In this paper, I address the increasingly topical issue of too-lateness as
present in the political, environmental, and other public discourses of
our time from the perspective of Hegel’s onto-logic, focusing especially
on his conception of the relationship between finitude and infinity in
the section on ”Existence [Dasein]” from the Science of Logic. Given
the general change of perspective after the 2008 global financial crisis,
which—this is the initial hypothesis—ended the so-called post-historical
era (1968–2008), I argue that although this change appears to be radical,
it is actually only a minor shift, which has not changed the prevailing
neo-liberal state of affairs, but protects and maintains it. My line of
argument leans on Hegel’s critique of the qualitative differentiation of
being and nothing, and subsequently also of finitude and infinity, which
understanding (and the history of philosophy) clings to in a variety of
falsifications [Verfälschungen], the most adamant of them being the
idea of the eternal being of perishing. Raising the question of the end of
capitalism and its supposed infinity, which has been ever more advo-
cated recently, I claim that capitalism cannot end not because the end
is not inscribed in its very structure, as some critics of Marx’s utopian-
ism would argue, it very much is, but because the end is inscribed in its structure in such a way that finitude and infinity are held apart in a
falsification that, supported by the ideology of neo-liberal conservatism,
deeply represses their fundamental intertwinement. The problem (and
the prosperity) of capitalism is therefore not in its infinity but, just the
opposite, in its finitude. It is a morbid practice, which cannot escape
the vicious circle of finitude because it clings to the falsification that
perishing is the eternal being of finitude. Similarly, both the posture of
the post-historical era and the recent atmosphere of the expectation of
a catastrophe keep on holding finitude and infinity apart, and thereby
maintain the existent state of affairs. If we are to change the devastating
effects of capitalism, it is of crucial importance not only to re-evaluate
our utopias and deal with our fantasies, but to re-constitute, both func-
tionally and ideologically, our relation towards finitude and infinity.
This means raising human self-awareness to a new level, which would
no longer celebrate infinity while silently practicing finitude, killing,
and mortality, but would celebrate finitude and practice infinity within
finitude itself. This, precisely, is the idea of too-lateness.
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The Category of the (Un)Touchable in Haptolinguistics
Edited by Mirt Komel, Blumsbury, 2019
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The Paradoxes of Repetition and the Limping Cause in Kierkegaard, Hegel and Lacan
Article in S Journal, Vol. 11: Lost Cause
November 2018
The paper proceeds from the thesis that in Kierkegaard's famous book on repetition, a certain double paradox of repetition can be traced by which Kierkegaard, on the one hand, delineates a new theory of the subject and its temporality and, on the other hand, legitimises a certain logic of failure, which Lacan posits as the constitutive moment of repetition in terms of the movement of the signifying structure, in which the subject emerges through the mechanism of alienation. Kierkegaard’s double paradox of repetition carries out a surprising tour de force that determines the modern subject: it is precisely the fundamental, structural impossibility of repetition that is the only condition of its possibility. Kierkegaard thereby delineates a subversive ontology that departs from the classical ontology of being: there is no strict delimitation of the area of being and the area of non-being, rather, they mutually condition each other and structurally belong to one another. Because the ontology of being builds on a strict delimitation of identity and non-identity, it can understand repetition only as a reproduction of identical elements and difference only in the form of variation, as a specific difference that establishes variety within the very identity of being. It is herein that lies the fundamental argument of this paper: what is essential both for the constitution of the modern subject and the modern understanding of the historical moment is that repetition is structured in the conceptual departure both from the idea of reproduction as pure formal repetition of the same, on the one hand, and the idea of variation as a substantive articulation of difference, on the other. The critique of repetition as reproduction and difference as variation, which, as the paper shows, can be found in Kierkegaard, Hegel and Lacan, delineates the theory of the subject that, on the one hand, turns away from every teleology or the theory of pre-given origin established by the classical ontology of being, while, on the other hand, it also moves away from the postmodern theory of non-being, pure substitutivity, simulacra, the absence of origin. By moving away from the idea of telos and the origin, Kierkegaard's double paradox of repetition doesn't abolish causality as such but rather establishes a new causality, which, so to say, accounts with a certain slip, with a leap of a cause that is inscribed in its very structure. And, as paper shows, this leap of causality is exactly what structures the psychoanalytic subject and what Lacan calls an unconscious cause, a limping cause: it is a lost cause, but not a cause that was lost – precisely as lost it is essentially at work.
The (un)touchable Touch:
Doubt and Desire
Contribution at the workshop A Touch of Doubt - On Haptic Scepticism. March 27-28, 2018. Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies. University of Hamburg
LINK
The two walls of impossibility between which touch is ultimately caught install the category of the (un)touchable that draws the unconceivable line between the never yet executed and the always already ran over event of touch. Through the category of the (un)touchable, touch engages the function of desire. What empowers one's desire is precisely the structural impossibility to grasp its object: what we eventually touch is never that which we desired. But at the same time, this is the only way we can ever touch it, because the inherent impossibility of touch is its very condition of possibility. The category of the (un)touchable sets the mechanism of forced choice: either we touch it in a way that we cannot touch it or we don't touch it at all. And what is structurally (un)touchable within the mechanism of forced choice is not only the elusive object of touch, but also the touch itself as the impossible borderline between distance and proximity.
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The Naturalisation of Politics and the Dangerous Mind
Paper at the simposium Truth and Politics. CAS SEE, Rijeka
June 2017
The (Un)Touchable Value: Capital and Repetition
Paper at the Historical Materialism Conference Beirut, AUB, Mar 2017
The paper analyses Marx's theory of value through the four matrices of repetition in relation to the question of touch and tactility. It initially presents the theory of the four matrices of repetition: deflation, reformation, inflation and production. The paper then goes on to elaborate on the question of repetition in relation to Marx's theory of value, through the perspective of the four matrices of repetition. At the same time, it focuses on the aspect of touch and tactility, elaborating on the notion of the (un)touchable value.
The four matrices of Repetition:
Deflation, Reformation, Inflation, Production
Article in Problemi 9-10/2016
Paper at the International conference REPETITION/S: Performance and Philosophy in Ljubljana at the University of Ljubljana, September 2016.
The paper initially presents the theory of the four matrices of repetition: deflation, reformation, inflation and production. The basic presupposition of this theory is that repetition does not imply a multiplying singularity but a fundamental duality, a relation between two things determined by their difference. The seriality at work in repetition is not the seriality of individual units, but the seriality of this duality, of the relation between the two determined by their difference. The notation of the basic scheme of repetition is repeated | repeated. From this basic scheme, four matrices of repetition are derived according to two fundamental relations: firstly, according to the relation between both objects (or events, moments) of repetition, so according to the difference between them, and secondly, according to the relation of the fundamental scheme of repetition (which is repeated | repeated) to the movement of repetition itself, so according to the difference between both objects (or events) of repetition and the structure or system in which they are inscribed and which they thereby also determine. The four matrices of repetition are further elaborated according to two criteria: the criterion of the exclusion or inclusion of the difference and the criterion of wholeness or unwholeness of the structure. Further on, the paper presents the thesis that the four matrices of repetition can be thought of as four basic ontological perspectives. From this point of view, particular ontological conceptions can be read through the prism of repetition, whether the conceptualisation of repetition is explicitly expounded within the related philosophy or not. From this perspective, we give a couple of examples (Plato, Kierkegaard, Hegel, Deleuze, Lacan) but focus mainly on the question of the difference between Lacanian and Hegelian ontology. Lacanian theory of repetition belongs to the matrix of production - and the main question here is: can we think Hegel's dialectics within this matrix as well or shall we rather claim that it realizes the matrix of reformation?
The fourth matrix of repetition says: it is not true that all there is is just a multiplication of copies. The original exists, but not as the starting point but rather as the product of repetition. Together with the copy, repetition also produced the model, the split between them is the condition of possibility of repetition, but is at the same time also a condition produced by repetition itself. The copy refers to the original, which has always already been produced by this reference of its copy.
What is crucial in this matrix is that it does not involve merely retroactivity, something being confirmed, legitimised retroactively, something obtaining its existence within the signifying network. It does not involve merely the consequence being established as the cause of a cause, but rather the shift of legitimisation itself. Within retroactive logics, a certain orientation towards the future is simultaneously established, which does not create (retroactively) merely the origin itself (as its own condition of possibility), but also keeps shifting (in advance) the return to it itself. This is the fourth matrix of repetition – the matrix of production.
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Repetition between
Reproduction and Variation:
Deleuze, Hegel, Kierkegaard
Article in Filozofski Vestnik, Vol. 36/3, Dec 2015
The paper departs from the thesis that the problematic relationship between Deleuze’s, Hegel’s, and Kierkegaard’s concept of repetition, which at the same time represents the ontological starting point of their philosophies, can be illuminated through the elaboration of the concepts of reproduction and variation as specific aspects of the very idea of repetition. With the help of the hypothesis that Kierkegaard’s concept of repetition can be read through a double paradox that separates repetition from reproduction, on one hand,
and variation, on the other, we show that this double paradox is also at work in Hegel’s dialectics. The consequence of this is that, in the final analysis, Hegel’s dialectics is nothing but repetition par excellence – repetition that conceptually moves away from the idea of reproduction as well as from the idea of variation. In the final part of the paper, we first note that, in Deleuze, Kierkegaard’s double paradox does not work, which is further backed up by the ascertainment that in Difference and Repetition variation and reproduction represent a specific functional aspect of repetition. The conclusion brings the surprising finding – insofar as, besides Nietzsche, Kierkegaard is a flagship of Deleuze’s theory of repetition – that Kierkegaard’s conception of repetition is in fact much closer to Hegel’s dialectics than to Deleuze’s project. For, from the very start, Deleuze overlooks that Kierkegaard’s conception of paradox, which is the fundamental platform of his theory of knowledge, does not concern the transcendental field of thinking as the outer limit of thought, but the internal discord of the very possibility of thought, the fundamental impossibility of thought that is inscribed in its register as lack, negation, but is as such nevertheless – and this is crucial – the condition of possibility of thinking as positive production and affirmation.
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Brute Repetition:
Deleuze and Freud
Article in Problemi 1-2/2015
April 2015
We follow Deleuze’s critique of Freud in Difference and Repetition, which, insofar as it concerns the fundamental questions of the compulsion to repeat and the function of the unconscious, reveals the essential points of Deleuze’s complex relation to Freud’s psychoanalysis: on the one hand, Freud’s concept of the unconscious serves as Deleuze’s fundamental conceptual footing on which he bases the idea of the virtual as the being of the pure past and which he uses in his elaboration of the theory of repetition to further develop the Bergsonian conception of time, while on the other hand, he reproaches Freud (through his triple reproach of realism, materialism and subjectivism) with a commitment to traditional dogmatism and teleology. By unfolding the moments in which Deleuze turns away from Freud, we show the aporias of Deleuze’s own conception and suggest a different reading that does not defend Freud in the sense of exonerating him from the blame of realism, materialism and subjectivism, but rather shows that it is precisely the standpoints of realism, materialism and subjectivism that distinguish Freud’s psychoanalysis from any kind of teleology, idealism and dogmatism.
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On Repetition and Theatricality:
A Dialogue with Samuel Weber’s Thought
(Through Kierkegaard, Freud, Lacan and Deleuze)
Paper at the International conference Theatre, Performance, Philosophy at the University of Paris-Sorbonne
June 2014
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Through Kierkegaard's concept of Gjentagelsen, the concept of productive repetition was delineated and its fundamental connection to theatricality shown. This was done in dialogue with Samuel Weber's reading of Kierkegaard's Repetition, An Essay in Experimental Psychology, which can be found in his discussion with Terry Smith titled Repetition: Kierkegaard, Artaud, Pollock and the Theatre of the Image. In addition to the above, the philosophical distinction between recollecting and repeating, which Weber and Smith touch upon in their discussion, was examined and analyzed in view of the difference between anamnesis and mneme and by comparing Kierkegaard’s and Freud’s understanding of the relationship between recollection and repetition. There are two ancient Greek concepts that denote memory - anamnesis and mneme. The proposed thesis was that in order to understand Kierkegaard’s differentiation between the (ancient Greek) concept of remembering and the (modern) concept of repetition which is the basis of his theory of repetition, one first needs to precisely analyse which of the two Greek concepts of memory Kierkegaard refers to. The results of the analysis were presented: Kierkegaard refers to the concept of memory as anamnesis, but it is precisely mneme – and this is crucial – that offers the tool to interpret Kierkegaard’d conception of repetition as a contemporary category opposed to memory as anamnesis.
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Authentic Emotion and
Body-subject:
Are these tears real?
Article by Bara Kolenc published in Maska (Performing Arts Journal) vol. XXIX, No. 161–162
spring 2014
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The article discusses the phenomenon of aversion to exaggerated emotionality, characteristic of contemporary art. At the backdrop of historical subjectivity from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day, defined by the dissolution of the authenticity of the Self and the emergence of a deconstructed, mediated subject, the author addresses the causes and conditions of this phenomenon. She tackles the questions of representation and the unrepresentable, which she traces through the aesthetic of realism and its demand for authentic emotions, modernism and its denial of indication and postmodern artistic practices, which are paradoxically defined not only by a general scepticism toward the authentic, but also toward the absolute inauthenticity of the raw mediation of signs and stand-in structures.
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Antihumanism and Theatre or who has a Human Face
Article in Problemi 8-9/07
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We opposed the concept of the face and the concept of the visage. The latter is linked to the classical metaphysical scheme, the foundation of which is an immanent undecidable connection between man and God, whereas the first is linked to the modern understanding of man as an independent, contingent, flowing event, oscillating into different structures. The visage is always associated with the idea of man advocated by humanism, by both classical metaphysical humanism, which, since the birth of the modern subject, started slowly losing its content related to the concept of the sacred, as well as the radical humanism of some of the philosophical currents of the 20th century, attempting to place man on the empty divine throne (hermeneutics, existentialism), and, last but not least, also contemporary humanitarian humanism intensively crawling through numerous para-theoretical media political channels.
In opposition to the visage, the face is essentially the face without the man. It is a face of a non-human as a superhuman, the one arising from emptiness, not founding itself in anything, that is a pure coincidence and uncertainty, indefiniteness and unpredictability, but at the same time self-creation, self-truth and self-certainty that retroactively arises through its own movement. The face is a field extending in the world without God, a field that is, in its foundation, connected to the stance of anti-humanism, a thought that does not centralise and privilege man as a natural (and divine) givenness, but establishes him as a flowing and, at times, arising factor of broader thought, social, and historical structures.
As some kind of a bastard, the face stands against the concept of life, asking philosophy: who am I?
The face does not say what it is or what it knows. The face is in possession of a certain knowledge of which it will not or cannot speak. The face is silent. But during this silence, the face keeps talking.
Inhuman is that which in a certain way sticks out of the human, that does not fit or suit a human. On the other hand, the inhuman is necessarily connected to the human – as that certain something it has to exceed, surpass or remain from. Inhuman is something that evidently steps out of that apology of man which is, in the broadest sense, captured under the common concept of humanism. This stepping out can occur in an uncovered or a covered way: as a clearly expressed antihumanism or as a menacing back side of humanism that we can, nowadays, in the time of the reign of democratic humanitarian humanism, observe as its obscene side product.