Sex and the Failed Absolute QUOTES

1 " Especially important are the political implications of the idea that the new possibilities opened by a certain act are part of its content - this is the reason why, to the consternation of many of my friends (who, of course, are no longer my friends), I claimed apropos the US 2016 presidential elections that Trump's victory would be better than Clinton's for the future of progressive forces. Trump is highly dubious, of course, but his election may open possibilities and move the liberal-Left pole to a new more radical position. I was surprised to learn that David Lynch adopted the same position: in an interview in June 2018, Lynch (who voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary) said that Trump 'could go down as one of the greatest presidents in history because he has disrupted the thing so much. No one is able to counter this guy in an intelligent way.' While Trump may not be doing a good job himself, Lynch thinks, he is opening up a space where other outsiders might. 'Our so-called leaders can't take the country forward, can't get anything done. Like children, they are. Trump has shown all this. "

― Slavoj Žižek , Sex and the Failed Absolute

2 " And, insofar as the Freudian name for this radical negativity is the death drive, Schuster is right to point out how, paradoxically, what Sade misses in his celebration of the ultimate Crime of radical destruction of all life is, precisely, the death drive:

“for all its wantonness and havoc, the Sadeian will-to-extinction is premised on a fetishistic denial of the death drive. The sadist makes himself into the servant of universal extinction precisely in order to avoid the deadlock of subjectivity, the “virtual extinction” that splits the life of the subject from within. The Sadeian libertine expels this negativity outside himself in order to be able to slavishly devote himself to it; the apocalyptic vision of an absolute Crime thus functions as a screen against a more intractable internal split. What the florid imagination of the sadist masks is the fact that the Other is barred, inconsistent, lacking, that it cannot be served for it presents no law to obey, not even the wild law of its accelerating auto-destruction. There is no nature to be followed, rivalled or outdone, and it is this void or lack, the non-existence of the Other, that is incomparably more violent than even the most destructive fantasm of the death drive. Or as Lacan argues, Sade is right if we just turn around his evil thought: subjectivity is the catastrophe it fantasizes about, the death beyond death, the “second death.” While the sadist dreams of violently forcing a cataclysm that will wipe the slate clean, what he does not want to know is that this unprecedented calamity has already taken place. Every subject is the end of the world, or rather this impossibly explosive end that is equally a “fresh start,” the unabolishable chance of the dice throw.”[6]

Kant characterized the free autonomous act as an act that cannot be accounted for in the terms of natural causality, of the texture of causes and effects: a free act occurs as its own cause, it opens up a new causal chain from its zero-point. So, insofar as “second death” is the interruption of the natural life-cycle of generation and corruption, no radical annihilation of the entire natural order is needed for this—an autonomous free act already suspends natural causality, and the subject as such is already this cut in the natural circuit, the self-sabotage of natural goals. The mystical name for this end of the world is “the night of the world,” while the philosophical name is “radical negativity” as the core of subjectivity. And, to quote Mallarmé, a throw of the dice will never abolish the hazard, i.e., the abyss of negativity remains forever the unsublatable background of subjective creativity. We may even risk here an ironic version of Gandhi’s famous motto “be the change you want to see in the world”: the subject is itself the catastrophe it fears and tries to avoid. "

― Slavoj Žižek , Sex and the Failed Absolute

3 " In this vision, the worlds is conceived as multiple and performative, i.e. shaped through practices, as different from a single pre-existing reality. This is why, for Bruno Latour, politics should become material, a Dingpolitik revolving around things and issues of concern, rather than around values and beliefs. Stem cells, mobile phones, genetically modified organisms, pathogens, new infrastructure and new reproductive technologies brings concerned publics into being that create diverse forms of knowledge about these matters and diverse forms of action - beyond institutions, political interests or ideologies that delimit the traditional domain of politics. Whether it is called ontological politics, Dingpolitik or cosmopolitics, this form of politics recognizes the vital role of nom-humans, in concrete situations, co-creating diverse forms of knowledge that need to be acknowledged and incorporated rather than silenced. Particular attention has gone to that most central organization of all for political geographers: the state. Instead of conceiving the state as a unified actor, it should be approached as an assemblage, which makes heterogenous points of order - geographic, ethnic, linguistic, moral, economic, technological particularities - resonate together. As such, the state is an effect rather than the origin of power, and one should focus on reconstructing the socio-material basis of its functioning. The concept of assemblage questions the naturalization of hegemonic assemblages and renders them open to political challenge by exposing their contingency. "

― Slavoj Žižek , Sex and the Failed Absolute

4 " Trump's twisted 'greatness' is that he effectively acts - he is not afraid to break the unwritten (and written) rules to impose his decisions. As we learned (not only) from Hegel, our life is regulated by a thick web of written and unwritten rules, rules which teach us how to practice the explicit (written) rules. While Trump (more or less) sticks to explicit legal regulations, he tends to ignore the unwritten silent pacts which determine how we should practice these rules - the way he dealt with Kavanaugh was just one example of it. Instead of just blaming Trump, the Left should learn from him and do the same. When a situation demands it, we should shamelessly do the impossible and break the unwritten rules. Unfortunately, today's Left is in advance terrified of any radical acts - even when it is in power, it worries all the time:'If we do this, how will the worlds react? Will our acts cause panic?' Ultimately, this fear means: 'Will our enemies be mad and react?' In order to act in politics, one has to overcome this fear and assume the risk, make a step into the unknown. "

― Slavoj Žižek , Sex and the Failed Absolute

5 " In the domain of telling stories, a gesture homologous to translation would be a change in the plot of the original narrative which makes us think 'it is only now that we really understand what the story is about.' This is how we should approach numerous recent attempts to stage some classical opera by not only transposing its action into a different (most often contemporary) era, but also by changing some basic facts of the narrative itself. There is no a priori abstract criterion which would allow us to judge its success of failure: each such intervention is a risky act and must be judged by its own immanent standards. Such experiments often ridiculously misfire - however, not always, and there is no way to tell in advance, so one has to take the risk. Only one thing is certain: the only way to be faithful to a classic work is to take such as risk - avoiding it, sticking to the the traditional letter, is the safest way to betray the spirit of the classic. In other words, the only way to keep a classical work alive is to treat it as 'open', pointing towards the future, or, to use the metaphor evoked by Walter Benjamin, to act as if the classic work is a film for which the appropriate chemical liquid to develop was invented only later, so that it is only today that we can get the full picture. In both these cases, that of translation and that of (re)telling stories, the result is thus the same: instead of the original and its translation (or re-telling), both versions are conceived as fragmentary variations of an impossible Idea which can only be discerned by way of bringing out all its variations. "

― Slavoj Žižek , Sex and the Failed Absolute