David Harvey again

From Marxism 2009 last year. Though I'd heard of him and his excellent work before, I only really started to read some of Harvey when I was writing on Raymond Williams (Harvey has the single best piece on Williams--in Spaces of Capital--thinking through Williams' problematic "militant particularism"). I'm liking him a lot. Again, if you haven't seen the Reading Capital course, check that out. It's a good way to get through that book, which is one of those no one ever reads all the way through unless it's assigned (not unlike anything by Hegel). That's not always a bad thing, of course (certainly in Hegel, though only reading the master-slave passage in the Phenomenology or the beginnings of the greater Logic and thinking the dialectic is "therefore" necessary to "overcome" is pushing this way too far). I'm planning on going all the way through Capital 2 and 3 shortly (I've only really gotten through the beginning of 2 and the end of 3), so it's a great refresher and a good way to pick up those parts of the first book (especially part 7) I never made it through. I never touched anything really after the chapter on the working day (except some pieces of the machinery chapter and the amazing part on primitive accumulation), even when I reread it for exams last summer: in literary studies, due to Derrida and his specters, the focus is still on the first three chapters on use and exchange value (though not confusing the labor theory of value with the value theory of labor has enough attendant complications), often to the detriment of the theory of surplus value as a whole.

One more thing. Harvey above (and in a recent paper) talks about a transition from capitalism to socialism--revolution--taking just about as long (or at least involving as much complexity and work) as the transformation from feudalism to capitalism. This is a welcome comment (obviously drawn from Marx's sense of things itself) when revolution has always had the connotation of radical, instantaneous breaks on the one hand, and on the other has been conceptually discredited by the theoretical left itself in the US for about forty years in favor of micropolitical models of change (or a a dour sort of pragmatism, which turns quickly into a fatalism, rightly thrust to the fore for critical inspection at Planomenology--though one should also point out Zizek too often trades in this pessimism). To this, I would also just add a pragmatic remark about the relation of revolution to violence by by Fredric Jameson:

What is always at the bottom of the quarrel about the term [revolution--MJ] is the conception of revolution as violent, as a matter of armed struggle, forceful overthrow, the clash of weapons wielded by people willing to shed blood. This conception explains in turn of what may be called demotic Trotskyism, that is, the insistence on adding the requirement of "armed struggle" to whatever socialist proviso is at issue: something that would seem both to substitute effect for cause and unnecessarily to rase the ante on salvation. Rather, this proposition needs to be argued the other way around: namely that the other side will resort to force when the system is threatened in genuinely basic or fundamental ways...
 -"Actually Existing Marxism," in Valences of the Dialectic, 388

Then I would follow that up with how he shows, pointing rightly at Allande's Chile, just how plausible the beginnings of such a long revolution (Raymond Williams' term) actually are:

Left electoral victories are neither hollow social-democratic exercises nor occasions in which power passes hands definitively: rather, they are signals for the gradual unfolding of democratic demands, that is to say, increasingly radical claims on a sympathetic government which must now, in obedience to that development, be radicalized in its turn, unless it sells out to the appeal for order. The revolutionary process in this sense is a new legal dispensation in which repressed popular groups slowly emerge from the silence of their subalternity and dare to speak out--an act which can range, as in Allende's revolutionary Chile, from the proposal of new kinds of laws to the seizure of farm lands [which right now we find in Venezuela--MJ]; democracy necessarily means that kind of speaking out, which can also be identified as the truest form of the production of new needs (as opposed to consumerism).
-"Actually Existing Marxism," in Valences of the Dialectic, 391

So new laws, new freedoms, new regulations, alongside the building of new economic infrastructures under the emerging new state:

The legislature was passing the laws of eco-economics [...] They directed co-ops [...] to help the newly independent metanat local subsidiaries to transform themselves into similar cooperative organizations. This process, called horizontalization, had very wide support, especially from the young natives , and so it was proceeding fairly smoothly. Every martian business now had to be owned by its employees only. No co-op could exceed one thousand people; larger enterprises had to be made of co-op associations, working together. For their internal structures most of the firms chose variants of the Bogdanovist models, which themselves were based on the cooperative Basque community of Mondragon, Spain. In these firms all employees were co-owners, and they bought into their positions by paying the equivalent of about a year's wages into the firm's equity fund, wages earned in the apprentice programs of various kinds at the end of schooling This buy-in fee became the starter of their share in the firm, which grew every year they stayed, until it was given back to them as pension or departure payment. Councils elected from the workforce hired management, usually from outside, and this management then had the power to make executive decisions, but was subject to yearly review by the councils.
-Kim Stanley Robinson, Blue Mars, 296-7

And one more thing: this sort of conception of revolution concretely situates any cultural or discursive struggle--struggle on that level is only of finite use, and takes place at that level. Cultural politics is only politics (often just politicization, often just micropolitics) unless it also hits at or ties into economic levels--as Jameson (who some might call a mere cultural Marxist) never gets tired of saying.

But then again it is also necessary to register (with Harvey--see this lecture of his for an elaboration of his point about Ch. 15, footnote 4 in the short piece above--and Jameson) that there are many levels of struggle, and that no one who seriously is engaged in cultural Marxism believes they can turn the world around just at that level. No, it's often a micropolitical model that believes that--along with people who dismiss cultural Marxism as a safe or partial form of commitment. The dismissive sense of that last word shows that its positive sense--that indeed, as applied, it is a piece in a larger situation--isn't available from this perspective, one that also believes with the micropolitics of Foucault especially (and tendencies in critical theory in general) that institutions (the "academy") are what is big and bad, and moreover are what determine and compromise the situation of cultural anti-capitalist critique (rather than capitalism, which is precisely much larger--and smaller--than any institution).

My point is that "the production of new needs" is what cultural criticism is about (finite, because representational, demands and Utopian possibilities), but is about this alongside other--indeed partial--sorts of activities and commitments that are by no means incapable of this sort of production (Jameson's phrasing here is precisely calculated to emphasize the fact that these needs can be and are produced at these other levels--even especially at economic ones). Significantly, it is precisely the cultural level (or the level of everyday life) that is most engaged by the recent statements of Zizek, Jameson, Harvey, Badiou and others to think hard about what communism might be, to imagine Utopias, to speak up out of subalternity and present alternative experiences of the world, and, indeed, to think about revolution: "carving out autonomous spaces," as Paul Ennis recently calls it, in various ways (he talks about what Badiou thinks is necessary, against Zizek, but I think Zizek too thinks this Utopian--and I use this word in an approving, Harveyian, Jamesonian sense that too few share--enclave-production occurs or is at least pragmatically necessary). And it is this cultural level that is most misunderstood by people unfamiliar with that level and what it involves (including the sacrifices that I don't think we can just say are nonexistent--unless we keep thinking all cultural Marxists are just "humanists" in a disturbing new sense). That, however, means education is necessary (both of yourself and the misinformed, as Harvey insists upon above: part of the problem is that this stuff isn't taught, or only gotten through someone like Zizek), and repeated reconnection of this level to others (an act that cultural criticism and recent ideology critique has learned to do in perhaps the most adept and tactical way).

And indeed, cultural Marxism is great at this too: what is culture but a way to reconnect while recognizing that separation of levels, rather than try and construct a one-off sort of immanent metaphysical level at which every microelement just is or is not political? I don't even think you can say cultural Marxism has gone too far--which is what the reactionary consensus in the US (indeed increasingly in literary studies) seems to be. We need more cultural studies, not less. As these studies make their way into departments dealing with urbanism, architecture, media theory and design--where some of the most radical Marxist work is now being done--I think they become more concrete and produce more connections and reconnections, perhaps, than they did when this study was done primarily in literature and film (or philosophy). But that's a development and transformation, which is also probably a shift made in accordance with changes in the system studied and the new forms reconnection to other levels is imagined to take.

Mimic the strata

You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn; and you have to keep small supplies of signifiance and subjectification, if only to turn them against their own systems when the circumstances demand it, when things, persons, even situations, force you to; and you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality. Mimic the strata. You don't reach the BwO, and its plane of consistency, by wildly destratifying. That is why we encountered the paradox of those emptied and dreary bodies at the very beginning: they had emptied themselves of their organs instead of looking for the point at which they could patiently and momentarily dismantle the organization of the organs we call the organism. There are, in fact, several ways of botching the BwO: either one fails to produce it, or one produces it more or less, but nothing is produced on it, intensities do not pass or are blocked. This is because the BwO is always swinging between the surfaces that stratify it and the plane that sets it free. If you free it with too violent an action, if you blow apart the strata without taking precautions, then instead of drawing the plane you will be killed, plunged into a black hole, or even dragged toward catastrophe. Staying stratified--organized, signified, subjected--is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever. This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO. Connect, conjugate, continue: a whole "diagram," as opposed to still signifying and subjective programs. We are in a social formation; first see how it is stratified for us and in us and at the place where we are; then descend from the strata to the deeper assemblage within which we are held; gently tip the assemblage, making it pass over to the side of the plane of consistency. It is only there that the BwO reveals itself for what it is: connection of desires, conjunction of flows, continuum of intensities. You have constructed your own little machine, ready when needed to be plugged into other collective machines.
 -A Thousand Plateaus, 160-161.

The great thing about Deleuze and Guattari is that they let you think that you're doing something in forming a concept... but without being an idealist (or a Badiouian--which is here, however, something even better to be, I think). Thus, the injunction to mimic the strata here, rather than wildly destratifying, is excellent, and commensurable with a provisional Derridian approach as well (though they're ultimately on different pages). In the end, it's wonderful that you can think that you botch things.

Bad theory

Almost forty years now of theory widely practiced in the US--and we only have a general sense of what theory is. It's a notorious problem that is actually its own solution: theory is one of the only fields where knowledge doesn't know what it has to be. So perhaps we shouldn't ever have to lock down what it is. Neverthless, it has assumed certain shapes. These too should not be avoided or combated in the name of preserving continual micro-self-differentiation etc., etc. Rather, bad elements (that is, bad procedures, bad ways of writing into which we slip--bad theorizing rather than bad theoretical positions or theories) should be identified, isolated, and clipped off or left alone to wither. Here then is what might constitute the "bad theory" (and it should be clear that by "bad" I mean something like "defunct" or "spoiled") that we might just hesitate before putting into service yet again, in another empty denunciation of... what have you:

Theory gone bad is theory that tries to assure the unqualified prolongation of theory. Theory should be finite--more than that, it should continually, with each use, project the point at which it might not be of use. Thus even if you want to say theory is immanent to thought itself, and therefore finite in that respect (when thought dies out theory will die out too), it would still be avoiding the issue: the issue is that the production of something different than theory cannot just be problematized from the outside.

Ethical theory is theory gone bad. There is too much talk of ethics and responsibility now, and this produces a lot of bad theory. This is because the use of ethical terms is the quickest way to build a bridge between politics and theory, or rather the politicization that takes place as theory (as I've outlined before) and the realm of society in all its diffuseness. Perhaps it is an attempt to thicken the overquick linkages to the political realm which early theory indeed made. But there's no reason this has to take the form of ethics--except possibly because this allows theory to sound more relevant, to issue more injunctions. At it's limit, this involves the dissolution of everything political about theory into philosophy, which has always been too comfortable with staying out of politics as it is: why ethics and responsibiliy are semi-proper philosophical subjects is because politics often comes to interrupt and situate philosophical speculation, embarrassing it. Theory that strives to be philosophical (or pseudo-philosophical) shouldn't go down the same road. In this respect I agree even with the extreme assertion of Zizek that, within the period under consideration (1933 and a little after), Heidegger's politicization of his philosophy is more valuable than his outlines of the structures of proper philosophizing (in his courses especially) that borders on an ethics--which is what in general I take away from his recent consideration of Heidegger's joining the Nazis (in In Defense of Lost Causes). That doesn't at all make what Heidegger did right--as Zizek would crudely hold, himself couching things in an overblown ethical language which supposes that the value of this could have been disclosed to him personally and guided his action at the same time as that action could represent a value attributed after the fact, which we perceive as the imposition of politics on the situation (this language--increasingly Badiouian--confuses things almost completely, as I've said before regarding Zizek on this fraught issue). But to attribute such value means (however crudely or confusedly) to recognize that politics imposes itself continually and is actively contained and bracketed by philosophies as well as other forms of knowledge. Theory normally attempts to trace what is thereby left out--but with an ethical turn (which was foreshadowed in the "deconstructivism" practiced at Yale by de Man, where people preached to no end about responsibility in reading), it loses its vocation and becomes increasingly irrelevant. At the same time, and insofar as this irrelevance suffuses theory, "the political" comes up more and more, leading us to the next form of bad theory:

Reifying concepts in order to protect them from reification. Such, at least, is the strategy I see behind such ugly invocations of "the political" or "the social." This form of parody only lends itself to a high seriousness that undoes the reason for adopting the parodic gesture in the first place.

Similarly, bad theory trades in commonplaces. These include the use of phrases like "identity politics," which are most of the time just codes for a reactive movement against queer or feminist impacts upon the humanities. But "western metaphysics" is also a commonplace. Eventually, this trade in commonplaces (a dissolution of the commons?) results in a prohibition on experience itself, as each of these are traded in for something supposedly known (and never described in detail)--or turned back into their reified pseudo-philosophical counterpart by the move we just mentioned.

This is related to the bad-theoretical overuse of alterity as a concept. The dynamics in which alterity engages us are ultimately reductive and need to be reopened back up into the contexts (experiential) from which they emerge. Even if the concept is used to precisely fight reduction, to insist on irreducibility, it has become an uncreative way to reorganize a wide array of phenomena along too-familiar lines.

This is also the way that bad theory ends up relying too much on "language," and makes it into a homogenous field through which everything has to pass. Language isn't that important to good theory. Or, rather, when it becomes a crutch, it isn't language.

Next, bad theory quickly displaces social dynamics too quickly into theoretical terms. An example would be the oft cited "subordination of feminism by Marxism." What and who are we actually talking about here? It is here where Foucault's "discourse" comes in to save the day: when in doubt, say discourse does it. Theories of ideology, in comparison, have infinitely more subtlety--and that's saying something. In Foucault himself, the notion is structured (in the Archaeology of Knowledge) to get him out of precisely the dilemma this question (what? who?) produces, as it is posed to him by people who rightly were wondering just how he was able to coordinate so much information concerning the rise of the human sciences. While it's right to insist that the stratifications of discourse, as well as its effectivity (and by means of such insistence, discourse thereby becomes a richer concept in Judith Butler and Edward Said), this might not be enough to rescue the concept from its reduction to an empty field producing too many of those effects. Discourse has to be used more carefully, with more structuralist concepts brought in to thicken the mix.

Bad theory thinks of itself as avant-garde. It has an easy relationship to its own history that sadly ends up mirroring the simplistic histories of ideas which it was supposed to displace. In general, it proceeds as an arrogant new humanism by thinking of itself as a progressive adventure.

Bad theory thinks it only includes by opening itself to multiplicities. While the focus on alterity is reductive, it'd be wrong to see multiplicity as an alternative, or something that does the job better--even if one conceives of it "rightly" (that is, itself fraught with difference or composed only of differences and dimensions, as in Deleuze rather than in Laclau and Mouffe). Multiplicity might not always be the right thing to which a situation must be opened up or in terms of which it should be conceived. Something like totalization can be mobilized against universality and even unity and oneness, as in Sartre or Adorno.

This touches on another aspect of bad theory: it's unwillingness to use more than one or two theories. Bad theory is usually only one or two theories, which gets stuck to or followed to the letter. It's not yet dogma, because it has so much functionality and can in general also be illuminating. But it seeks to eliminate other theories or foreclose their imposition--which occurs often, and as an annoying conceptual muddle--precisely by extending the one position (and flattening or restricting itself so they can be assimilated without reducing them--which would require changing the current stance). Good theory is polyglot and patchwork: it knows when to shut up in one system and shift to another (in other words, it shouldn't proceed by increasing the number of prohibitions upon itself--something nearly all bad theory does--and then get angry at those who misunderstand the minimalist language). Just because the concept itself--here multiplicity--is actually structured (rigorously) in order not to foreclose something, doesn't mean everyone should see how it doesn't exclude something. Everyone shouldn't have to get on your page (or be immanent to whatever) to be on the same page. Moreover, theory should actually open itself up to other things at the edge of theory, which theory isn't--thus I insisted at the beginning on the finitude of theory, which now is rethought spatially--indeed like literary theory and literary analysis. This leads into my last characterization:

Bad theory thinks it itself is politics: while theory represents the politicization (if only by oblique suggestion) of various other fields and their materials and procedures, it has to be interrupted by something from outside itself--or, as theory, has to go someplace other than the lecture hall--in order to actually become something like activism. Along these lines, one shouldn't think that because one's theory says it does not separate a particular conception and politics (like in theoretical Spinozism), introducing the concept into an arena is not political, nor does it link the politicization that might (and only might) thereby occur to actual politics. It's not that there is a gap which we can never bridge--it is simply that politicization and politics itself requires this lack of certainty as to whether it is, in any instance, traversed, as I think Judith Butler (for one) outlines quite well.

Critique and revolution

In what I won't hesitate to say is the single best essay I've read on Derrida, "Marx's Purloined Letter," Fredric Jameson says (I paraphrase) that Derrida committed himself early on to the idea that systemic change was the only change there could be, and yet that this change could itself not be brought about by any existing system. This makes his work resolutely political in a strange, irresolute way: it seems more about preserving the possibility for change than bringing about change itself, as if on the one hand he wanted to freeze in time that ("magic" I think Badiou recently called it) moment between 1960 and 1968, after the post-war philosophies and before the post-68 micropolitics, and on the other, constantly found new ways to unfreeze this possibility in surprisingly relevant ways even into the 21st century. His project is then extremely consistent because it focuses itself on a type of change that has that sort of afterlife within (or before?) its life. This also makes the sort of change it protects extremely (and, for many, frustratingly) hard to realize.

Zizek recently (in In Defense of Lost Causes) characterized current postmodernist discourse as the result of a crisis of Leninism. To me, he's beating a dead horse, more than surprising us with something we should have already known. At most, that is, he's bringing this crisis home to the most ignorant, those who have the most secret sympathies with postmodernism despite allegedly breaking with it long ago, and haven't realized this was true twenty years ago. Sometimes that's necessary of course. But it seems old to me because Derrida seems to see this from the get-go. Thus there is not only explicit resistance to the Leninism of his interviewers in Positions, but also a resistance to giving them any very stable alternative. The alternative is, indeed, that of "overturning and displacement," which he calls a strategy. What I'd like to suggest is that this move here, as well as that of founding an impossible science of grammatology (among other things) are indeed part of an effort to rethink revolution in a way that both resists the classical Leninist position, as well as the more populist-leaning plans one will find after '68, though Derrida has, I think, more sympathy with them. What people often called his resistance to Marxism was indeed a resistance to vanguardism--and, I'd say, to the way vanguardism can creep into postmodern attempts to bypass it.

Spivak said once that Derrida wanted to write a book on Gramsci, but assembling the fragments was so demanding he never got around to it. I have a feeling that the book would indeed be about socialist strategy, but wouldn't quite resemble Laclau and Mouffe's writings. Gramsci indeed offers the alternative to revolution, but not so much by abandoning class, as they say. Acting as if purifying Marxism of class will be a major factor in overcoming the Leninist vanguardism--which Laclau and Mouffe don't entirely do, but which ends up being the postmodern position in general, often using their theses as justification--really only just keeps vanguardism rumbling underground. It is only dispersed into micropolitics of various sorts, pockets of local resistance which we can only add up, or agglomerate. And this only preserves the idea that in the end it is revolution that is the goal.

What Derrida does politically, from the beginning, is challenge any notion that revolution can occur through such local struggle. At the same time, he affirms that what we can see, what we can adequately deal with, will always be local struggle--or will manifest itself only in those terms. So this cuts off the additive connection, and makes us think always about that particular "short-circuit" (to use a Zizekian word) between the local and the totality (and the other way around--how total struggle strikes to form local contradictions). This doesn't exclude reform as a possibility (to pick up the old opposition). Rather, because his position makes reform something less subordinate to revolution, something different than the failed revolution or total change, his position encourages it. The point, though, is that we lose any notion of direction, of leading, and of the agglomeration of small groups of whatever sort that would ultimately end in an overturning of the present order.

Thus there is an intimate connection between revolution and globalization in Derrida: the revolution of the circle does not exclude, but rather encourages, the notion that if we expand our horizons (rigorously excluding what falls from above or rises from below, the Zufall), if we expand our world, we will all, ultimately, be connected and lead together through some great change. In this way, thinking globally and acting locally becomes indistinguishable, at a certain point, from thinking locally and acting globally. Both these propositions pass into each other, but what we find out is that at this moment, each has lost its meaning--as one can see in various aspects of the "go green" "movement" which Zizek (I think rightly) finds disgusting, along with the other perverse attempts act as if multinational capitalism can be fought through consumption itself (though one shouldn't entirely condemn reform--that follows from what I said above concerning separating it from revolution). Somewhere the system, the totality, has been missed. And this is why Derrida wants us to think revolution differently, in terms of something like strategy which opens onto total effects which it cannot anticipate on a horizon (what he calls the invention of the other).

Now, this also means intense reading of the local--that is, activities that are usually involved in something like critique. Derrida wishes to get beyond critique (thus deconstruction continually opposes itself to criticism), but he isn't against reading (as should be obvious). This, perhaps, hasn't actually been stressed enough: too quickly he was seen as precisely a critic (see Foucault's famous remarks on him at the end of History of Madness, which accuse him of justifying something like infinite explication in old philosophy classrooms--which are weirdly affirmed in the U.S. as what "saves the text" by Paul de Man), that somehow was against the normal way of reading. Everything about this view must be reversed. Meanwhile, one can wonder (with Zizek and many others) whether, at this point, it is actually at the other end of the spectrum that we should be working: thinking, that is, on the level of totalities. The only thing that Derrida did in this area is something Zizek thinks is particularly postmodern: he thought that the experience of thinking a totality had to be something like Benjaminian weak messianism. Perhaps this is indeed postmodern (approaching something like worship of a God without being). But if you tie it back into the thinking of revolution, and the rethinking of vanguardism, we see its origins, at least, are different. Zizek would rightly say that we don't need anything weak right now. But what I'd stress is that Derrida gives us a weakness that is, when perceived against this background, something more productive than what Zizek and various Lacanians have their sights set on (that postmodern religion and religiosity--which I agree can be interesting, but is a weird and suspicious turn for things to take). And what this means is that he offers us a way where elements of the local, which take over the interpretive aspects of the critical, can be retained to fight something like the crisis of Leninism--which indeed ends up in that precise fatalist sort of religiosity (our local struggles can't do anything, our thinking of the global can only be weak, so we just have to keep doing what we're doing, which is emptily criticizing both the local and the whole system at once). For too quickly the call to think new total systems sees itself as opposed to not only criticism, but the activities involved in criticism--like reading and interpretation. What I'd argue is that this can end up being just another form of criticism, now empty of all of its content. Derrida gives us a notion that we can pull away from criticism by modifying its elements, precisely by making the total system bear upon them. If we have now discovered this also means thinking the totality has a relationship to these elements (partially because, with Derrida, we have blinded ourselves to the inner dynamics of institutions, the possibilities of reform within them that are not ultimately directed towards revolution, and focused continually on their forms of founding violence--the other side of the naive recognition that they are, indeed, organized organizations), and perhaps a more important role than this strategic activity, this is perfect--we're not then really claiming that we're giving up all that reading that is involved in making visible, and rendering strategic, the local changes (in other words that the changes will have, for us, local effects). Don't get me wrong: it's not that interpretation and reading are something really great in themselves. But I just want to make clear that there is a danger in renouncing them. This would be to continually convey, in writing and through reading, that giving up writing and reading means we're going to immediately start thinking the totality. And this, I'd claim, might only be the other side of a certain postmodernism (which, people don't seem to remember, specifically militated against interpretation--i.e. Foucault and his historicists), and it tends to creep into certain discourses now that suspiciously lay all the blame on critique, on hermeneutics of suspicion.

Lacan against Derrida

I realize I've been pitting these two thinkers against each other here constantly, but only to, in the end, constantly elaborate the Derridian criticism of Lacan and not the other way around. This is not due to any prejudices I have against Lacan and in favor of Derrida (though I do have some against Lacanians) so much as it is my taking longer to come to grips with the scope of Derrida's project. But now, I think, I'm in a position to let Lacan have his word, if only because I feel that I can let his voice criticize Derrida without reducing Derrida to what he is not (as is so commonly and easily done).

For what does Derrida, in the end, despise in Lacan? If we look back at "Le Facteur de la Verité," we're liable to see that it is not Lacan's assumption that structure (language) is in the end determining (though this is a constant grievance of Derrida's and is constantly tried to be refuted by Lacanians--most notably Zizek), but that Lacan's interpretative method when reading Freud is in certain places so extremely powerful.

Now, what do we mean by this? Let's revisit a famous lecture he gave at Johns Hopkins in 1966:

When I began to teach something about Psychoanalysis I lost some of my audience, because I had perceived long before then the simple fact that if you open a book of Freud, and particularly those books which are properly about the unconscious, you can be absolutely sure — it is not a probability but a certitude — to fall on a page where it is not only a question of words — naturally in a book there are always words many printed words — but words which are the object through which one seeks for a way to handle the unconscious. Not even the meaning of the words, but words in their flesh, in their material aspect (from Lacan.com).

Now, unlike so many other times in Lacan ("The best image to sum up the unconscious is Baltimore in the early morning"), I think this passage disarms with its straightforwardness, its simplicity, its ability to be verified. This would make sense, as it is precisely outlining the transition between a phenomenological approach to Freud and a structural one. In short, Lacan is pinpointing that fulcrum in Freud's work that he is constantly leaning on: the fact that Freud is using words to grasp at the unconscious not through their meaning, but through some of their relationships to each other. Look at the analysis of Irma's injection. What is important is not so much the deployment of Freud's ever amassing conceptual apparatus (condensation, displacement, etc.) in order to make sense of the dream, but how willing Freud is to let certain words in which he originally brought the dream to language ("...my friend Otto had given her an injection of a preparation of propyl, propyls . . .. propionic acid . . . trimethylamin...") work out the functioning of the dream of themselves, as it were. That is, Lacan sees that what is important is that Freud approaches the unconscious with certain formations or instances of structure that let him get a handle on its larger possible constitution, and do so much better than a sort of analysis by way of locating its operations by trying to apply a sort of network of explanatory concepts (repression, sublimation, etc.).

Lacan thus adopts this perspective towards the unconscious, and reads Freud for instances in which this perspective is apparent or lurking beneath the surface of his faculties. He too comes up with a network of explanatory concepts (object petit a, the Real, etc.), but notice that this is not what Derrida is angry at. This is not the case, because Derrida (like the best Lacanians) knows that these concepts themselves explain little. Thus it is just as futile for someone to read Lacan and think that they can map out the functioning of the subject by way of these terms as it is for someone to read Freud and merely look at when and where he is using "repression:" Alain Badiou is a supreme example of the bankruptcy of this approach as a communication of what Lacan is getting at, as well as Zizek and Bruce Fink, to a lesser extent. And in both Zizek and Badiou, this occasionally leads them to seriously fail to think a situation thoroughly: their way of talking about Lacan feeds back into the way they understand Lacan--being in the end closer to what we are calling Lacan and Freud's "perspective" than their statements allegedly explaining him. This is why Lacan's diagrams and mathemes don't pretend to explain anything wholly, and Lacan in his seminars always remains ironic towards them.

No, Derrida does not attack this aspect in Lacan. He attacks precisely that perspective which Lacan sees in Freud and adopts. He does so because he fundamentally thinks it does not remain as provisional or heuristic as it should. In other words, Derrida thinks that utilizing certain concepts as elements of a structure in order to "get a handle on the unconscious" is  doing more than "getting a handle on" something. This is his criticism of bricolage more generally.

Lacanians have defended Lacan against this charge, as we've already seen, by trying to turn Lacan's conceptual apparatus into something that can be shown to be anti-structuralist, and thus accommodating to Derrida's demands. In short, they seek to make Lacan's insight into something that is able to account for its provisionality, its heuristic character. Thus the turn towards Badiou and the fanaticism with which Lacanians demand that Lacan's thought have an "ontology." Thus Zizek's vanguardism when it comes to politics--and this is where things get dangerous on a Lacanian view of things--which prescribes the strategic and performative positioning of leaders in the role of the analyst, the "subject who is supposed to know," with respect to society.

But one might ask whether Derrida's demand--the demand that this utilization of concepts account for the possibility that it is doing more than getting a handle on whatever it is supposed to get a handle on--one might ask whether this demand is exactly applicable to what is most powerful and interesting and fundamental in Lacan (that is, what Derrida hates about Lacan!). I would argue that it might not. Indeed, it will absolutely apply in many (many!) cases with Lacan. But with what is most powerful and at the very heart of his readings of Freud and his analysis of the subject... this might be doubted.

Now, this is not because what Derrida asks is wrong. And it is absolutely, absolutely (I can't stress this enough) not because what Derrida asks isn't "practical," or is an impossible demand. Both of these views are held by Zizek and many other Lacanians, and this I think is what makes them particularly dangerous in some instances.

It is because Lacan's analysis by way of structures is not heuristic or provisional. Immediately, though, we must say (again against Lacanians) that this is not because it is universal, i.e. grounded in a universal ontology (even if this ontology itself is merely a procedure, merely provisional, like Badiou's). Rather it is merely because Derrida demands that something not be as heuristic as it is when, from the beginning, it does not function that way. Ultimately, this fundamental feature of Lacan's analysis, its core that constitutes its amazing power, works with structures that constitute more a density than a structure (that is, if structure is conceived as what operates provisionally, as bricolage). At least when Lacan is most powerful, most faithful to what we have seen him find in Freud. These structures are not provisional nor universal, then, but operational within certain conditions, when a certain situation has constellated itself just so. And this is why Lacan is best not when he is analyzing culture but when he is reading Freud. He is delimiting these densities or structures qua densities as they operate in Freud such that the entire Freudian project is not so much made commensurate conceptually with some sort of postmodernism (by being founded upon some secure postmodern ontological basis), but instead is made more robust as a mode of thinking and of analysis. Robust, in the sense that these densities are densities of possibility: Lacan explains the possibility of Freud thinking along a particular line and having certain thoughts available to him but only perhaps half-articulated or even not articulated at all--not because of the terms he uses and the connections between them, but precisely because of the structure or density that makes possible a particular nexus of thoughts in Freud's writing. Look at "The Economic Problem of Masochism:" to proceed through this essay as if Freud is merely dealing with his own terms and not reaching towards that point where he can conclude certain things by moving along the lines of a certain structure--a structure which Lacan can specify--would be unproductive. Why? Because, as Lacan understands, Freud is precisely moving in this other way, whether he wants to or not: he is trying to get a handle on the problem by means of certain other terms--terms that function within a certain structure with a certain density within the limits of his particular problematic. This is to say that Lacan reveals certain tendencies or functions in Freud's thought that locally determine (i.e. not provisionally, nor universally) the possibility of other thoughts either more or less developed falling into their places in his thinking. The task then for Lacan is to try and work out these structures a little more explicitly, while employing the same sort of approach.

I might elaborate on this more later, when I myself can express or communicate it better. But it seems to me this is what Derrida can't quite attack fully in his reading of Lacan, and thus what constitutes the limits of the Derridian project also. This project thus sometimes makes impossible demands in the wrong places--and it is not that it is wrong to impossibly demand (on the contrary, this is necessary), nor that one can't actually do anything when the project makes this demand in some place, but that one can't do anything with his thought when it is in the wrong place. In the end it is not a failing of the impossibility of the demand itself that Derrida puts to Lacan, but one of the fact that Derrida, to paraphrase an apt yet only tangentially related phrase of Foucault, cannot isolate that element of Lacan that he would attack by reducing all other elements to the relatively undifferentiated category of "the excluded" (cf. The Archaeology of Knowledge, 9). So Derrida attacks Lacan, but not that crucial Lacan which falls short of his demand. And this is not because the attack is wrong in principle, but because Derrida cannot see that the Lacan excluded from his critique can be a differentiated category, itself perhaps containing crucial elements. It is in this space that the really crucial Lacan lies--the place of the powerful Lacan. This is that Lacan that can profitably extend and work out the structures that make possible certain aspects of Freudian thought--and not to establish these structures as universal, or claim to use them only provisionally, but in order to more thoroughly develop particular possibilities out of the density of a structure in directions that Freud went and in others that he did not.

Zizek and truth

I just think this is such a badass poster, and wanted to have it here for you all to see:

That said, maybe some remarks are in order on some interesting things I keep returning to that Zizek has written. Throughout The Sublime Object of Ideology, Zizek I think puts things absolutely well with regard to deconstruction conceived as some sort of simple logical maneuver theoretical tool (in the sense of a tool which does not itself question and disrupt or interrupt its own functioning), which many of its deployments indeed affirm, if not overtly then at least when we interrogate them as to their most basic thrusts. But one can always and must always contend that this is only one side of deconstruction, if any side at all. But enough talk, let's quote him:

The problem with deconstruction, then, is not that it renounces a strict theoretical formulation and yields to a flabby poeticism. On the contrary, it is that its position is too "theoretical" (in the sense of a theory which excludes the truth-dimension; that is, that which does not affect the place from which we speak).

-The Sublime Object of Ideology, 155

The reason why this only hits at one side of deconstruction is that deconstruction always has a truth dimension. For good reasons with respect to his own amazing view of things, Zizek thinks that deconstruction is an attempt to remain external to any process of founding a truth, of bringing one into existence (this assumption is what will lead Badiou to come up with the absurdity of his version of a truth function). But this is what it does in each case. Deconstruction always says, at the end of its functioning, "truth is this." However, it always, in order to deconstruct, places the "is" in question. Thus we always get truth is this, but only as truth "is" this. Which precisely leaves us with an imperative--if we can look at it that way: "truth this!" "Make this truth!" "Bring it into being as truth!" ("But precisely by questioning, again, whether it is and whether there is being!")

So deconstruction is not some attempt to try and be as responsible to the object of investigation that one proceeds by attempting to wholly eliminate the subject position or place from which we speak. It is not trying to find some ultimate neutral ground with regard to the critique of its object. Like psychoanalysis, deconstruction asserts its interest in the object by folding itself back into its critique. But unlike (especially Lacanian) psychoanalysis, deconstruction asserts its irreducible interest with respect to the object at the limits at which, indeed, only the one true objectivity about it would be possible. Zizek does not see this, and thus can conceive it only as a one-sided effort to bring the object into relief as much as possible. In short, he re-dialectizes what was never (and yet always can be) dialectical.

Thus the opposition here Zizek is making--to try (nobly, as always) to bridge a bitter gap between deconstruction and psychoanalysis of the Lacanian type by denying that deconstruction is just hot air--really does not oppose anything at all. Perhaps we might also affirm that in this example, deconstruction is and should be flabby poeticism, if Zizek thinks from his perspective that deconstruction is, in reality, not flabby poeticism but an excess of theorizing. If it is therefore a mere theoretical tool, it is not by any means a simple tool that just functions as it is (like that psychoanalytic tool which would fold the critic back into the critique, leaving its subject position--even though it is a fantasy--always in tact), but remains the most complex and problematic tool (because it always--and yet without guarantee--fails to function as what it is).

Derridian dialectic

...what would it be? Could it still be called dialectic? L'economie generale, yes. But this is precisely what is not dialectic in a Hegelian sense (l'economie restreinte).
Or is it? After reading him, one is surprised how much Derrida writes on Hegel. On: that is, not necessarily about, nor simply against Hegel. One is suprised how much Derrida writes not against the dialectic simply, but on it, on top of it, like graffiti, writing over it, lifted above it (Aufgehoben, relevé). One is surprised precisely because Derrida does not seem like the generation that wrote most about or against Hegel in France: the generation of Sartre, Lacan, Bataille, Kojeve, Hyppolite, even Althusser--the "existential" generation (in the sense that they react to existentialism in some way, or, better, to Heidegger). In a way he lifts himself above the fray of those thinkers, bogged down in critiquing dialectical reason, in writing against or about it, and thinks the trace and différance. But that he thinks this trace to lift Hegel above being merely written against or about--this is what one does not expect.
Those interested in Derrida need to think hard about this: Derrida does not write about Hegel (or) to critique him. Deconstruction, if it was the name for those writings about the trace and différance, was precisely what allowed him to write on Hegel and not just simply about Hegel or in such a way as to only critique Hegel.
If this was the case, it means that Derrida was not undoing the dialectic, but precisely lifting it above being written against or written about.
One has to think of this "lifting" if one wants to think what this means for the possibility of a Derridian dialectic. As much as it might mean rescuing or saving, "lifting" can also mean to steal, to pilfer. It is a transgression that precisely does not move into the sphere of a beyond, where something can be written about, comprehended, or written against, definitely opposed. The play on raising up out of the fray of "existential" Hegelianism and also stealing this Hegelianism from the "existential" age is precisely what characterizes the Derridian dialectic. It is what is suppressed and elevated by those Derridians who simply think Hegel exists to be critiqued in the texts of Derrida.
In Derrida's time, this play was also what was being suppressed and elevated--precisely not lifted--by Lacanians. And today, their suppression and elevation is the most tempting way to do away with the lifted Hegelianism of Derrida. Zizek, Badiou: they don't lift Hegel, they comprehend him, they are relieved that they are done with Hegel, that he is over with, that he has been finally made to be commensurate with a postmodernism so he can be used ethically against the old Hegelianism, capitalism. Thanks to Derrida--these Lacanians say--we are able to relieved of Hegel without having the guilt of lifting (relevé) him: thanks to Derrida we can now use him against himself when we write about him. But what--they continue--is all this writing on Hegel in Derrida, this talk about lifting, about relève? We can be relieved of Hegel without lifting him! Stupid Derrida! You do not see how against Hegel you can be in writing about him.
What is dangerous and disgusting about this is that it is a refusal to think about how being relieved of Hegel is precisely lifting him--how relieving (relève) is precisely just another translation of lifting (relève).
What is the Derridian dialectic, then? Can we specify this stolen trace, this trace of a trace? Provisionally: the plunge back into the transgression that Hegelian dialectic effectuates in its negations, but tarrying with this transgression as such, with its negativity just at the point (and time) it negates, so as to make it negate only indeterminately, generally, and yet without reserve. All this means is that the Derridian dialectic is seeing the impossibility of writing against Hegel, and why it could and should always only amount to a lifting of Hegel, a subscription (writing under, which for Derrida is the same as writing on) to the labor of the dialectic. The Derridian dialectic, then, is always a writing on Hegel, a writing that shows how Hegel can never be overcome or elevated (like it is said to be in Zizek, or in Heidegger), never be suppressed.
But what would this dialectic look like? Again, another provisional specification: it would look like "NOUS" (the French word for "we," and, despite or perhaps because of this, also the Greek word for knowing) written on a wall in the Centre Pompidou, traced by Brassaï. A graffiti that writes on something in order to engage what it can't overcome, what it can't write about or against, a dialectic of what can never be suppressed. That is, an infinite lifting, a stealing of what steals, over and over again without reserve.
I'll write on this more in another post. Sketching the relationship to a Hegelianism that seeks to overcome Hegel, and showing that this is precisely not what Derrida does--that he does not want to be relieved of Hegel without lifting Hegel--is all that is crucial here.

Pleasure and the two Freuds (Derrida's, Lacan's)

Perhaps the most fundamental contribution of psychoanalysis to metaphysics is that it argues that pleasure is always a deferred pleasure. In other words, pleasure is never the experience of a moment, of a present. This is seen most clearly when Freud describes orgasm: it is precisely in order to point out that the highest experience of pleasure we know is already a function of a system that constitutes pleasure as the releasing of tension--that is, is a function of an economy of pleasure that is larger, wider, of a greater span (the pleasure principle) and thus cannot be reduced to that point (present) of experience.
This might back up a little what I was saying in my post on Heidegger, Zizek and Nazism (below). For at its base, this is a Derridian thesis which cannot be reduced to a Lacanian framework. Why? Because as soon as we think of this realm of non-present pleasure (the unconscious) as anything less than a movement of deferring itself; as soon as we say that it is a similar point on the other side of presence, i.e. a non-presence, we lose the deferring structure that is crucial for this deferral to be thought. The whole point is that this wider economy of pleasure exceeds not just the present, but also the non-present (as a present thought negatively). In simpler terms, Derrida simply thinks that Freud is a thinker who focuses on the movement from the presence of pleasure (consciousness) back to the deferred pleasure (the unconscious), while Lacan (for Derrida) is a thinker who tries to structure the (unconscious) realm of deferred pleasure (i.e. remove and reify that which defers into things like "the symbolic," "the real," etc.) such that it can explain the present. I'm not saying that this Derridian understanding is right compared to the Lacanian one, but Zizek often makes it seem sometimes as if he is integrating a Derridian reading of Freud into his Lacanian understanding of things: perhaps one should push against him and insist on a distinction and a difference between these two Freuds.
Let me be clear in a postscript to this: what is at stake here is an interpretation of consciousness as 1) merely the effect of alterity, an alterity that can be structured so as to account for the present, or, 2) consciousness as inseperable from an alterity, within a relationship to alterity that demands that the relationship of the present to alterity be thought more rigorously. The first interpretation of consciousness is Lacanian, the second is Derridian. Alterity becomes formulatable with Lacan--if only because alterity itself is not as much of a concern as living with alterity--or able to be rendered commensurate with an economy (or symbolism, or, if this is Badiou, an ontology). Alterity for Derrida still remains a problem, irreducible to this (or any "restricted") economy. Zizek (like Badiou, though more cautiously, thank God--and this shows that whatever anyone says of him he is an immensely more rigorous thinker) claims that 1 is the same as 2. This I think is wrong.
How can we account for the appearance of two different focuses in the writings of Derrida and Lacan on Freud--that is, two different Freuds? Only by attempting to think this difference--never by covering it over. The Freud of Lacan works out problems of desire, drive, the symbolic, the letter, the real, the Other. The Freud of Derrida works out problems of Besetzung, investment, economy, writing, pleasure principles, alterity. To claim that the symbolic in Lacan and writing in Derrida function the same way--as many teachers of Lacan do , and Zizek seems to constantly be suggesting in his writings, is to cover over an immense difference. This is what lies behind many statements on Lacan by Derrida, like this one from Writing and Difference:

If the Freudian breakthrough has an historical originality, this originality is no due to its peaceful coexistence of theoretical complicity with... linguistics, at least in its congenital phonologism.
-"Freud and the Scene of Writing" in Writing and Difference, 199.

Freud for Derrida is not original in how the symbolic functions like language, the object of linguistics--because language functions like writing for Derrida. In other words, we can't simply say that Derrida is not just opposing Lacan here, asserting that Lacan is wrong. We must understand this comment presupposes a totally different Freud for Derrida and Lacan, and a functioning of language and writing that is completely different. What I am claiming here is that questions of presence and alterity function in the same way with respect to this difference: if they are asserted to be effectively the same in Derrida and Lacan, or if one is said to incorporate the Freud of the other (isn't this the presupposition that makes Badiou's work possible in the first place?), something is really being covered up. We should be suspicious--especially in the American academy, where "the other" is nearly always seen as the same thing in both Derrida and Lacan.

What Zizek forgets, or, Zizek on Heidegger continued, continued

I said that the key to Heidegger is to realize that while the ontological veils itself, that does not mean it is indeterminate. The ontic veils the ontological, but this does not mean that the ontological is as indeterminate as the Kantian noumenal, the a priori. I also said Zizek knows this. But he is unwilling to stridently suggest that this determinacy of the ontological is the positive possibility of perceiving and grasping the ontological. Instead, he is completely willing to make this determinacy into something that only serves to provoke a futile search within the ontic for a way to get past it to the ontological. He thereby makes the ontic/ontological distinction seem Kantian. It is as if the determinacy of the ontological and its resistance to being something Kantian only further chastizes those who cannot get beyond the ontic--and thus makes it seem all the more Kantian. Thus he roundly declares the following as if it were not just true of the Heideggerians in Yugoslavia in the later parts of of the twentieth century but also of all Heideggerians to come: "Heideggerians are ... eternally in search for a positive ontic political system that would come closest to the epochal ontological truth, a strategy that inevitably ends in error" (The Ticklish Subject, 13). The determinacy for Zizek only works one way. Zizek forgets his own finding, that point where the perversity of Heideggerian philosophy might lie.
Now, the first thing to note is that this is not a new view of Heidegger, nor is it a wrong one. Heidegger does have a tendency to use the determinacy of the ontological as a way to chastize those who continue to interpret phenomena only ontically. But it should be obvious that this is only because he sees the power of grasping the ontological: what is Being and Time itself, like the Phenomenology of Spirit with regard to the power of thinking with regard to the Begriff, but a demonstration of that power? In terms of this not being a new view, one can cite an immensely critical article of Hannah Arendt from 1946 that says the following:

Heidegger's ontological appoach hides a rigid functionalism in which Man appears only as a conglomerate of modes of Being, which is in principle arbitrary, since no concept of Man determines the modes of his Being.
-"Existenz Philosophy," from the Partisan Review, included in The Phenomenology Reader, p. 355.

In essence this says the same thing as the quote from Being and Time that we cited earlier: the ontological approach risks a rigid functionalism in having to go "behind" the ontic without any ontical conception of the ontological to guide it. Arendt, like Zizek, thinks this cannot easily occur, and, unlike Zizek, implies that it is not the business of philosophy to move beyond the ontic without a prior ontic conception that could handily characterize the ontological. What by now should be obvious is that this too overlooks the determinacy that is just as constitutive for the ontological as well as the ontic, and thus that determining Man ontologically does not mean that one has to have any ontic conception of him to start with--in fact, if conceived rightly, any ontic conception will seem wrong once the ontological is grasped. The whole problem, however is how this grasping is to take place. But it is only a problem insofar as we conceed that it proceeds from the determinacy of the ontological and not any supposed indeterminacy: this is what Zizek stops short of investigating, though he knows it well enough as a Heideggerian, and this is why his rigorous analysis ends up seeming like the genuine distortion of Heidegger that Arendt actively engages in throughout her article (the article, it should be mentioned, is a horrible and, it seems to me, deliberate misreading of Heidegger to make him seem inferior to Jaspers).
Why does this all occur? And where does the "real perversity" lie? Essentially because, like all but the most rigorous of Heideggerians--Derrida, Badiou, Foucault, Gadamer, Dreyfus, to name a few of this exceptional group--Zizek believes Heidegger first and foremost devoted his philosophy to the concept of Being. What rigorous Heideggerians realize--and Gadamer and Derrida were the first to really point this out--was that Heidegger essentially is a philosopher of truth, and that the question of Being remains an equally important phenomenon only because it is connected with the essence of truth (in fact, is this essence). This is not to say that Heidegger's later thought past the "turn" it took after Being and Time was more reflective of the essential nature of his thinking than Being and Time itself, but rather, and more profoundly, that from the beginning Hedegger focused solely on the issue of truth and focused on Being because of this focus. Indeed, this seems odd, but one has to understand the profundity of the assertion Heidegger made even before Being and Time and of course even throughout it, that truth is unconcealment and not the mimetic correspondence of an object with its conception. Alain Badiou continually says that this assertion alone is the condition for all of modern philosophy (and thus penetrates deeper than Lacoue-Labarthe whom he cites, and who is merely developing theses of Derrida's):

Our epoch is most certainly that of a rupture with all that Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe has shown to depend on the motif of mimesis. One of the forms of this motif, which explicitly attaches truth to imitation, is the conception of truth as a relation; a relation of appropriateness between the intellect and the thing intellected; a relation of adequation, which always supposes, as Heidegger very well perceived, that truth be localizable in the form of a proposition. Modern philosophy is a criticism of truth as adequation.
-Infinite Thought, "Philosophy and Truth," 45.

Heidegger crystallizes and formalizes how this truth that is not adequation should be conceived, and it is this that not only makes all modern philosphy a criticism of truth as adequation, but also makes it an elaboration of the concept of Being. It is this fundamental insight, that truth, if it is not to be adequation, must be related to the unveiling of Being, that makes the perception of the ontological and not the ontic of such importance. In other words, it is this fact, and not merely the fact that Heidegger is obsessed with the question of Being, that makes him from the beginning (that is, even before his "turn" to the question of truth and being and away from "Dasein" after Being and Time) introduce the distinction between the ontological and the ontic that Zizek criticizes.
Furthermore, it is this that makes the ontological so very determinate. The ontological is the revealing of truth as Being and not as adequation. That is, as soon as we understand Heidegger as the philosopher of truth and not of Being, like all the best Heideggerians, we suddenly understand that the ontological could never be something that is indeterminate. That is, we understand both its opposition to the ontic as that which is merely that sphere of truth that is still determined by adequation while the ontological remains that which possesses a relationship to truth as alethia or the unveiling or unconcelment of Being, and we understand that this opposition is only a function of the nature of the ontological being absolutely determinate within the sphere of truth that it inhabits. In short, we understand both the opposition and its necessity in the inescapable determinacy of the ontological.
It is this point that we will elaborate in hopefully one more post, to be completed later. But for now it is enough to merely indicate it as the fundamental thing that Zizek, as a Heideggerian, should have remembered.