Eleanor Kaufman

Why the Family is Beautiful (Lacan Against Badiou)

The theory of ethics that can be distilled from the work of Jacques Lacan and Alain Badiou bears no resemblance to many commonly received notions of the ethical, especially any that would link ethics to a system of morality. In fact, ethics is not necessarily the central concept in their work, even in Lacan’s The Ethics of Psychoanalysis or Badiou’s recent Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. If anything, it is defined vicariously and in relation to other more central concepts, such as the workings of desire for Lacan and the fidelity to an event—or truth-process—for Badiou. Nonetheless, an examination of the network of concepts held together under the umbrella of the ethical allows for a sharp distinction between the work of Lacan and Badiou, one that Badiou—himself avowedly indebted to Lacan—is hesitant to make. Where Lacan elevates the beautiful over the good in his reading of Sophocles’s Antigone, Badiou elevates the truth-process over the evil betrayal of such an event, drawing on examples ranging from National Socialism to the love relation between two people. A truth-process is a situation-specific adherence, or fidelity, to the revolutionary potential of an event that may take place in one of the four realms of politics, art, science, and love. Perhaps Badiou’s best example of a truth-process—what I will also refer to as fidelity to an event—is one not described in the text under consideration here: the apostle Paul’s proclamation of and fierce loyalty to the event of Christ’s resurrection. It is in the particular form in which the ethical fidelity to a truth-process may be hard to distinguish from evil that I will take issue with Badiou, for both his political examples and his evocation of love as one of four conduits to a truth-process reflect a difficult inflexibility in his extraordinarily lucid and provocative system. Lacan, on the other hand, uses Antigone’s strange family values to suggest a more flexible model of ethics, one that is focused on the encounter with the inhuman and the fragile boundary between life and death. Lacan’s most sustained discussion of ethics occurs in his seminal Seminar Seven from 1959–60, entitled The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Not only does this seminar register a gradual shift from an earlier emphasis on desire to a later focus on the real and the drive, but it is also a crucial articulation of what might seem for some to be an oxymoronic conjunction—psychoanalysis and ethics. Such a conjunction, as opposed to a Sartrean or Levinasian model that would situate ethics in relation to the Other, takes as its

Klossowski, Deleuze, and Orthodoxy

Among the many strange and wonderful things to be found there, Pierre Klossowskis oeuvre is a preeminent illustration of what divides univocity and equivocity and therefore serves as one of the twentieth centurys most instructive models for thinking the complexity of the dialectic. Univocity and equivocity are significant both in their roots in Scholastic philosophy, as the idea that Being is expressed in either one or several senses, and as belonging to a longstanding framework that helps demarcate the differences, nuanced yet significant, among members of the extraordinary generation of French intellectuals of which Klossowski was a part. Thus, these terms, apart from their theological and philosophical import, will serve as a heuristic for renarrating points of filiation and divergence among a series of prominent French thinkers, primarily Bataille, Klossowski, and Deleuze, but also extending backward to Sartre and forward to Badiou to frame the series. I will approach this in segmented fashion, first opposing Batailles dialectic of transgression to Klossowskis more univocal method of disjunctive synthesis. When juxtaposed with Deleuzes Spinozist affirmation of univocity, however, Klossowski would seem to be more on the side of the equivocal. Whereas Deleuze criticizes the realm between the univocal and the equivocal as the lukewarm space of the analogical, my contention is that this middle realm allows for a space of movement and reversal that escapes the pitfalls Deleuze locates in the dialectic, and does so without a strict adherence to Spinozist univocity. Whereas Bataille and Deleuze remain closer to Klossowski in the tenor of their thought, I will nonetheless suggest in conclusion that Sartre and Badiou are actually closer to Klossowski on a formal level, in that each poses a similarly analogical challenge to the thought of the dialectic. For many reasons Bataille and Klossowski can be paired together. They were contemporaries, both born around the turn of the century, both writing in a variety of literary and philosophical genres, including pornographic or semi-pornographic fiction, and working outside the academy. Both wrote studies of Nietzsche, of Sade, and radical economic treatises. They were friends and fellow members in the late 1930s of the College of Sociology, which was modeled after a secret society, the members taking great interest in such topics as sacrifice and headlessness. Bataille and Klossowski wrote about each other. Both were at different points obsessed with Roman Catholicism, both at different points prepared to enter monastic orders, both in different fashions fell away. As might easily be imagined, their fiction is an outrageous mixture of the sacred and the profane, including sexual encounters and other desecrations staged at church alters and the like. Both work in that realm where pornography and theology come together. Yet while the more familiar Bataille uses pornography toward transgressive aims, the lesser-known Klossowski uses a more nuanced and interesting mechanism of boredom to elaborate an intrinsically disjunctive structure. Even boredom, for Bataille, partakes of the transgressive. In his novella The Story of the Eye, the narrator describes offhandedly how he and his companion Simone have just found their friend Marcelles body. She has hung herself. The narrator and Simone

Midnight, or the Inertia of Being

There is hardly a more consistent thinker than Maurice Blanchot. His work is disarming in its weave of fiction and philosophy, in its timeless anonymity, its undoing of the dialectic, and the affirmation of worklessness and the community of those who have nothing in common. Though in a sense elusive, this work is also infinitely substitutable. Almost any paragraph of Blanchot’s is quintessentially Blanchotian. It is daunting, then, if not impossible, to suggest and delineate a fissure that runs through Blanchot’s oeuvre, a fissure between the liminal, atemporal, fleeting instant and the more weighty inertia of presentness, the inertia of being. It is this fissure that also marks a profound yet barely palpable divide between the thought of Blanchot and Deleuze, especially with regard to the realms of temporality and ontology. While Blanchot’s notion of Midnight resonates most strongly with a Deleuzian insistence on temporal becoming (as opposed to present being), it also gestures to a state that is beyond becoming in that it is too unworkable, too inert. It is my claim that this inertia, rather than marking a lesser or pathological state, may point to a new path for ontology.

'To Cut Too Deeply and Not Enough': Violence and the Incorporeal

When terror would seem to be all around us, terror equated with the threat of physical violence, it is all the more imperative to articulate what it is that makes violence violent. On a certain level, it is obvious: when there is bodily injury or destruction, there is violence; but beyond that, there is the abstract and less overtly corporeal violence of a state or a multinational class that dominates those who are less powerful. This, too, is violence, but a violence less predicated on the immediately physical. It is not unlike Michel Foucault’s distinction between pre-modern sovereign societies, in which a monarch held the power of life or death over his subjects, and modern disciplinary societies where subjects are kept in line less by the direct threat of death than by a disciplinary structure such as the prison or school where those in power have visual if not physical sovereignty over those they govern.1 The point is not to show that one system is better or worse, but that they are different mechanisms of organizing power – each relying on violence of a particular sort. Rather than elaborate this distinction between immediate corporeal violence and more systemic, structural and incorporeal violence, I wish instead to examine the incorporeal attributes that lie at the heart of the most destructive corporeal actions. This will entail a turn to both an ontology and a phenomenology of non-human objects.

LIVING VIRTUALLY IN A CLUTTERED HOUSE

proposes a new field of investigation or perception, one that would be attuned, like psychoanalysis, to inner psychological states, yet also attuned to the way architecture and space affect those states. He terms such a field “topoanalysis” and defines it as “the systematic study of the sites of our intimate lives.”1 Central to a topoanalytic approach is an attentiveness to the nuances and registers of the space of the house. Bachelard focuses on the intimate and solitary relation of the home dweller to the space of the house:

Nancy, Agamben, and the Weakness of the World

This essay seeks to examine Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of “world”—alongside the one developed less explicitly by Giorgio Agamben—as an engagement with Christianity that is not simply “deconstructive” but so heretical as to exceed most recognized heretical positions. Nancy’s stylistic intermingling of prepositional and ontological formulations tends to obscure a doctrinal confrontation with Christianity on three related and foundational points: world, creator-creation, and eternity-time. In this regard, the claim to be “deconstructing” Christianity is a rather self-disarming softening of some otherwise exceptionally contentious claims. Whereas Nancy’s collapsing of the major Christian interpretations of world, creation, and eternity into something resembling their opposite makes his work on Christianity difficult to situate within established heretical traditions, Agamben’s persistent attention precisely to the split between the divine and the worldly, even if it is to show the points at which such a division is inoperative, places his thought much more squarely into the domain of dualistic heresies.

Extreme Formality: sadism, the death instinct, and the world without others

G illes Deleuze’s essay ‘‘Coldness and Cruelty’’ was revised for inclusion in a 1967 work devoted to Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and featuring Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs. It was translated into English under the title Masochism and, needless to say, in this context the rubric of masochism overshadows that of sadism. What I hope to draw attention to here is the curious fact that, in a work that must necessarily speak to the question of masochism, Deleuze brings a particular, and particularly acute, attention to outlining the structure of sadism. Of course it might be argued that such an attention is critical to the understanding of masochism, and to some extent this is the case; but if the two forms do not rely on each other for their definition, why is it that Deleuze keeps returning to the question of sadism in his exposition of masochism? It will be claimed that the structure of sadism, above and beyond that of masochism, is in strong resonance with a series of terms that traverse, in subterranean fashion, Deleuze’s work from the late 1960s. It is such a tracing that this essay seeks to develop, with the claim that the structures of sadism, the world without others, the third synthesis of time, and the death instinct all mirror each other and reveal not only an extreme formalism but an extreme state of stasis and non-becoming at the heart of Deleuze’s early work. I have argued previously that Deleuze has a somewhat fraught relation to the question of movement. Although he, and he and Félix Guattari, are always careful to argue that there need not be actual physical movement for flights or becomings or nomad thought to take place, there is nonetheless a privilege accorded to becoming and the implicit movement it entails, so that a certain dialectic of movement and stasis tends to result, with movement being the favored term. This might be mapped onto Deleuze’s privileging of the time of Aion in The Logic of Sense, which is that of the past–future conjunction that he opposes to Chronos, the time of the present. In his discussion of the event, we see an implicit premium placed on the movement of becoming: